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A Bridge

Summary: A Bridge

This story happens in 1973 and follows a fifteen-year-old as she runs away from home to the big city of Fargo by bus, with only a bundle of clothes and no money. After sitting at the bus station for hours and then cleaning up in the restroom, she notices a man in an army jacket who looks like he might be Chippewa. Not knowing why, she follows him into the busy strip of Northern Pacific Avenue. He notices her and thinks that she is taller than most Vietnamese people. He had been a POW and only home for three weeks. The young girl’s bundle reminds him of people he’d seen in Vietnam, so he crosses the street to meet her.

They soon realize that they know each other’s families. She is Albertine Kashpaw, and he is Henry Lamartine Junior. They go to bars, drink, and Henry shows her a trick where he builds a bridge over two glasses with interlocking knives. They go to a hotel where Henry pays a fat clerk $10 for a room. Henry realizes that he’s much drunker than Albertine. Albertine goes into the bathroom, and Henry totters, mutters incoherently, and drinks more alcohol. Beginning to be out of his mind with drunkenness, he goes into the bathroom where the girl crouches on the floor, reminding him again of experiences in Vietnam. He asks her to fetch his cigarettes and she does, worried that she is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He smokes one after another, just watching her. Henry Junior asks Albertine to go to bed with him, just to sleep, and she agrees. Once there, she makes an advance, but he is too drunk to respond well, so she turns away. Suddenly he feels sober, and they have sex and then sleep. In the morning, Albertine barely remembers what has happened but feels pain between her legs. When she touches Henry Junior who is still asleep, he explodes and shrieks, which frightens her out of bed to the floor. When he meets her there, he is crying. 

Analysis: A Bridge

Written by a third-person narrator, this story couples two characters who have appeared in the novel before. Albertine appeared in Part 2 of “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” as a young medical student who goes home, and Henry appeared as the seven-year-old child in “Lulu’s Boys.” Using an omniscient point of view allows Erdrich to explore the inner thoughts and feelings of both characters as they face their fears and fumble and find parts of themselves. Henry Junior confronts some of his demons from the Vietnam War. Albertine loses her virginity and overcomes some fears. The quite literal intertwining and interlocking of characters are one of the defining patterns of Love Medicine. Their encounter also shows how interconnected the Chippewa families of North Dakota were and are.

Albertine is young and naïve. Erdrich does not explain why she has run off to the city, but “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” suggests that she and her mother, Zelda, did not get along while she was young. At first, Henry Junior seems like a predator, but Erdrich creates sympathy for him when she reveals who he is and what he has been through. Henry is described as having “shrapnel” inside him, and this shrapnel represents the irreparable damage that the war has done to him. The psychological damage may never work its way out. This example of how the past defines the present reinforces a major theme of the novel: past traumas create deep problems in the present.

Again, the story is fueled and driven by alcohol. Albertine stops drinking earlier in the evening than Henry Junior probably because of her inexperience with it. In contrast, Henry Junior has clearly been drunk before and uses alcohol to escape his own demons and to enhance his sexuality. As in Part 1 of “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” two lonely people find each other and drink to excess, to no good end. Albertine ends terrified, her arms crossed over her head to protect herself. Henry ends weeping, perhaps ashamed of not only how he has taken advantage of this young girl but also of his actions during the war. “Mea culpa, mea culpa” he repeats, and in his drunken delirium, Albertine and the Vietnamese woman he saw die from a bayonet wound in the past become one. Even the women’s eyes are similar. As the Vietnamese woman died, she pointed to her eyes and his. He calls them “the Asian, folded eyes of some Chippewas.”

Henry Junior suffers from PTSD. He is afraid to sleep without the light on and sees a dying Vietnamese woman when he looks at Albertine in the bathroom. When he is startled awake by her touch at the end of the story, he freaks out, a common symptom of the deep psychological wounds he suffers. Henry Junior’s weeping at the end reveals his vulnerability and his confusion. Like so many characters in the novel, Henry Junior carries the pain of his past with him, a pain that bursts out when he is emotionally shaken. As the story ends, Albertine is more the adult than Henry Junior, as he reverts to crying like a child, in need of comfort and peace.

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