Well I thought that I was getting the client mode under control, but I was wrong. In particular, using the public interface I was able to get the client mode functioning partially. Things worked fine outside of my LAN, but pinging inside the LAN and trying to open the ASUS page from across the wireless bridge did not work. There must be 2-to-the-N ways to try, and I tried many of them. Finally, I gave up.
I executed the following well publicized commands
wl ap 0
wl wet 1
wl scan
wl scanresults
wl join falcon11 (falcon11 = my ssid)
and everything worked perfectly.
When I executed
brctl showmacs br0
it all made sense.