The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  OUR SECOND NIGHT at Chawterley that spring break—Sunday night—we were skinny-dipping off the pier again, giggling and splashing in the bright moonlight when a spotlight fixed on us. It came out of nowhere, from out on the water where nobody ought to have been.

  “Shit, we have company,” Ginger said with laughter in her voice. “No one else was supposed to be here before Tuesday!”

  The spotlight flashed twice before fixing on us again.

  “Shit, it’s Frankie and Beau.”

  “Your brothers?” Laney said. “How do you know?”

  “Sorry guys,” she said, “but we can climb naked from the water now, while they’re close enough to see but far enough away for plausible deniability, or we can wait until they pull up to the pier, at which point we’re screwed.” She was laughing: this was a joke she’d had played on her before, or that she’d played on her brothers; the difference wasn’t quite clear.

  She climbed from the water into the spotlight and grabbed the top towel from the stack we’d been smart enough to have handy this time. Suits, no, but towels, yes.

  Wolf whistles sounded from the boat.

  “Shit, it’s freezing,” she said, pulling the towel around her and directing us to swim over behind the Row v. Wade, where we’d be at least partially hidden as we climbed from the water, and where she would cover us each in a towel as we emerged.

  “Shit,” she laughed. “Those bastards.” She called out as loudly as she could, “You bastards!”

  The sound of male laughter arose from beyond the light—more than two voices—and the light went off and on again, as if winking at us, or trying to catch us dropping our towels to dress in the momentary dark. She grabbed my hand, saying, “Come on!” and pulled me along behind her up the path, all of us laughing now.

  We bolted into the house and through the Sun Room to the kitchen, then up the narrow servants’ stairs to our third-floor, no-name room. We dressed quickly, Ginger hurrying us as we pulled on jeans and the sweaters we’d worn in the car, the only sweaters Laney and Betts and I had brought. Despite Ginger’s warnings, we’d imagined a tropical island right up until the moment we jumped into the cold Chesapeake.

  We shared the single comb Ginger handed us—she was the fastest to dress—and followed her as she bolted back down the servants’ stairs, through the Dining Hall and the Front Parlor and across the front foyer to the Captain’s Library. There, she flipped Betts a deck of cards, saying, “Sit! Deal!” When we didn’t sit, she pointed to a round table in the center of the room. “Sit, you dipshits!” She grabbed a canister of long matches from the fireplace mantel.

  “What are we playing?” Betts asked.

  “Just deal something!” Ginger struck a match and set it to the paper and kindling and logs already on the grate. She plopped down in the last chair, her back to the door, and took the cards from Betts. She gave a few to each of us, not dealing so much as handing out random numbers of cards. “Mia, do you have any threes?” she asked before she’d even looked at her cards.

  “Go fish?” I said.

  She hopped up and ran out into the foyer, where she peeked around the corner and down the hall to the back door and the pier beyond it. “Shit, they came in Trey’s boat.” She hurried back to her seat and picked up her cards again. “We can’t imagine who might have been skinny-dipping off the pier but it certainly wasn’t us. That’s the party line.”

  “Even though our hair is still dripping?” Betts asked.

  “With this gang, it’s all about the bluff,” Ginger insisted. “Your turn, Mi.”

  Four voices singing in harmony—lovely music, actually—sounded from somewhere between us and the bay. Again, Ginger hopped up and peeked down the hallway.

  “Dougie is with them.” She plopped down in her chair again. “Dougie is a holy asshole, but he’s been Trey’s best friend since before my uncle died. He keeps Trey from getting morbid. And he sure has a beautiful voice. Don’t let him sing to you. I swear to God, you’ll want to screw him just because of his voice.”

  The door in the back foyer opened a moment later, a song I couldn’t quite place sounding in four-part harmony: “She’s so cold cold cold like an ice cream cone!” A barbershop quartet version of the Rolling Stones? We sat listening as the music made its way into the Music Room, then across the back foyer again and through the Sun Room. In the kitchen, the banging of cabinet doors joined their voices.

  “Voilà!” one of them said as the others continued singing. A moment later the singers made their way through the Dining Hall and the Front Parlor, into the foyer where we could be spotted through the open library door.

  “You got any threes, Betts?” Ginger asked.

  Betts pulled a three of hearts out and tossed it to Ginger, who tucked it into her hand, ignoring the foursome now singing in the doorway. The smell of sea air and aftershave and scotch and cigarettes came with them: four men in blue jeans and hunter-cum-sailing duds, the least cocky in a down vest while the others wore unbelted tan safari jackets, all those empty pockets. With the bottle of scotch in Down Vest’s hand and the highball glasses each carried, they might have sailed in on the wind without need of a sail. Even the down-vested one had that air of confidence that comes from always having been one of the cool guys.

  I recognized the tallest of the four from a photo Ginger kept in her bedroom: her older brother Frank. A clean-shaven face and hair the color of whiskey—shortish for the time, meaning not much below his ears. He had Ginger’s wide mouth and her overbite which, on his profile, accentuated a too-sharp nose. He had thin lips and thin brows, but there was no lack of confidence in his blue, blue eyes. He didn’t look to me like the kind of guy who would be “tasting flavors” just to be tasting, but what did I know about what men did and didn’t like when it came to sex? He was the kind of guy who would have plenty of flavor choices if he wanted them.

  The cute one in the down vest looked familiar, too. His long, thick hair reminded me of Professor Jarrett, although Jarrett was always clean shaven, while this guy had a mountain-man beard and mustache, and eyes the polished green of sea glass, with straight-across brows and long lashes and such a nice-guy expression focused on Ginger that I liked him at once. I looked down at my cards—I did have a three among the disorganized mess of hearts and spades and … I ran the fingers of my right hand over my left behind the cards, over my diamond engagement ring. Down Vest grinned as the foursome finished their song, a smile as wide as Ginger’s and Frank’s emerging from all the thick mess of facial hair. Beau! Ginger’s brother. The face buried under the beard was an older version of the one in Ginger’s other photo: Beau sitting on the bench in a basketball uniform, his chin bare and baby-soft.

  One of the others, a taller, softish guy with wavy dark hair, a slightly crooked face, and an amazing singing voice, said, “You’re forgetting your manners, Ginge?”

  Only then did Ginger look to them. “What kind of shit do you morons have for brains, sailing in at night?”

  “Thank you!” Beau said. “That was my point, too, but Trey—fine, it’s his boat, but—”

  “Let it go, Beau,” the taller guy suggested in an unthreatening voice that was melodic even when he wasn’t singing. “We’re here. Let it go.”

  Ginger stood then and, tugging affectionately on Beau’s down vest, said, “This is my brother Beau, who likes always to be prepared for a snowstorm.”

  “I did come from Chicago,” he protested.

  “I don’t know about this, Beau,” she said, touching his beard.

  “And this is Dougie,” she said of the guy with the voice. Was it the angle, or was his face really crooked? Not just his nose, but his whole face just a little off symmetrical?

  “We pretend Dougie is family because he’s been running around with Frankie for as long as I’ve been able to say ‘Dougie,’ and we all feel sorry for him having to put up with such a sad excuse for a friend.”

  “I believe Trey was Doug’s sad excuse for a friend lo
ng before I was,” Frank said.

  Ginger amended, “We feel sorry for him having to put up with two such sad excuses for friends: Frankie and Trey,” indicating the shorter, slighter guy, whose intense eyes drew you to him even as you tried to look away. “Trey who doesn’t have the sense to wait until dawn to set sail.”

  “Bright moon,” Trey said. “And I did bring the spotlight.”

  He extended his hand to Laney, saying, “Helen,” his voice as deep and strong as his eyes.

  Laney shook his hand.

  “I was hoping Ginger would bring you along,” Trey said, sounding like so many of the jerks I’d worked for the prior summer. But that was just the edge of New York in it, I decided as he said, “Very nice to see you again.”

  “Mr. Humphrey,” Laney said.

  “Trey.”

  Laney looked down to where the red Oriental rug fringed into the wood floor. “Trey.”

  “And she’s Laney,” Ginger insisted, bristling at Trey’s overruling her introduction by calling Laney Helen even though that is her name.

  “Helen did some work for me this summer,” Trey explained to the rest of his quartet. “We’re lucky to have her returning to Tyler and McCoy after she takes the bar, Frankie.” Then to Betts and me, “I’m Ginger’s cousin.”

  He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, shook one forward, and offered the pack toward Laney. She waved her hand slightly, declining, and he offered it to Betts, then to me. I had half a mind to take the offered cigarette even though I hated merely the smell of cigarette smoke. He seemed to expect it.

  Ginger, to my amazement, did take one. Trey pulled out a monogrammed silver Zippo and flicked the wheel. She took a half step back as if needing more space, but leaned forward to dip the end of her cigarette into the yellow-white flame.

  “So there were some ladies skinny-dipping off the pier as we approached,” Trey said. He snapped the lighter shut and returned it to his blue jeans pocket, the look in his eyes easier now without, somehow, being any less intense. He took a drag on his cigarette while reaching with his free hand to touch a strand of Ginger’s damp hair, just where the pattern around the neck of her Fair Isle sweater brushed her breast.

  “ ‘Ladies?’ Were there really?” Ginger’s words emerged in soft puffs of smoke as her hair fell from Trey’s fingers. She turned to Doug. “Maybe you called Tessie McKee to let her know you were coming, Dougie?”

  Frankie and Trey laughed the way guy friends laugh at each other. Betts and Laney and I shared an uncomfortable glance; none of us had grown up as the lone girl in a pack of brothers and boy cousins, as Ginger had.

  “Tessie?” Doug said. “I seem to remember Tessie being Beau’s particular favorite, Ginge. And I sure don’t remember her ever having such attractive friends.”

  “You saw so much, obviously,” Ginger said.

  “It takes a certain amount of persuasion to get an island girl skinny-dipping this early in the year,” Doug said. “Doesn’t it, Beau?”

  “Not that any of us would know anything about that,” Beau said, trying, I thought, to spare us all embarrassment, but I was left with no doubt that they all did, in fact, know exactly how much persuasion an island girl might need to shed her suit.

  Trey was a bastion of manners after that, though, directing Frank to be a good host and fetch four more glasses, pouring scotch for each of us, straight up, all the while asking solicitous questions about what we were doing after graduation, applauding how well we must be doing in law school to land the positions we had.

  “Belt and Bayliss? That’s a great San Francisco firm,” he said to me. “Were you law review?” Then to Ginger, “All three of your friends here on law review, Skunky, but not you?”

  Ginger looked to Laney, who said, “Just Mia and Betts.”

  “Oh?” Trey was quick to mask his surprise. “Well, you and my cousin here are the smart ones, then, aren’t you, Helen? Law review is an unreasonable amount of work for anyone who doesn’t get their jollies out of telling prominent professors their commas are in the wrong places. Isn’t it, Betts?”

  Betts, startled, looked to Trey, then stole a hopeful glance back at Beau, whom she’d been staring at as fantasy-romance moonily as she and I both used to stare at Professor Jarrett. “Sure. Right. Commas.”

  “So we’re going gut-running, Ginger,” Doug said. “You and your friends in?”

  Ginger pulled the curtain back from one of the windows: darkness. The clock on the mantel showed almost one a.m. “All of us in one skiff?”

  “Just as far as the McKees’ dock,” Doug said. “We can borrow Max’s skiff.”

  “I thought Max was at Columbia,” Ginger said. “In architecture school.”

  “So he won’t be needing his boat, now, will he?” Frank said.

  Ginger considered this for a moment. “It’s high tide?” she asked.

  The guys all laughed, and Doug said, “What? Are you afraid of getting a little mud on the bottom of your boat?” and they all laughed again.

  Frank’s idea was that all eight of us would pile into the skiff and go together to “borrow” a second one, which we could return before anyone knew it was gone.

  “I personally don’t mean to be found at the bottom of Fog’s Ghost Gut in a boat that sank in the middle of the night because eight foolish souls overloaded it,” Trey said. “Dougie, you and the brothers amuse Ginger’s friends here. Play Go Fish. Ginger and I will nab Maxie’s boat. That way if we’re caught we can claim to be out spooning, right Ginge?”

  “I gave up spooning for Lent,” Ginger said.

  We laughed at that, at the idea of Ginger letting go of the armor of her sexuality for a day, much less a full six weeks. Everyone but her brother Beau laughed. Beau stuck his hands in the pockets of his down vest and studied his Top-Siders, toeing his right shoe against the oriental carpet.

  “I’ll go with you, Trey,” he volunteered. “Ginger will want to stay here with her pals.”

  I imagined him kicking a friend’s face in if he took advantage of his little sister. I imagined how many faces he might actually have kicked in over the years. But Trey had already thrown an easy arm around Ginger’s shoulder. He was laughing and saying, “No spooning then. If we’re caught, we’re reclaiming the boat in the name of Jesus Christ our Lenten Lord.” And then Ginger was calling back over her shoulder, directing Beau to gag Doug if he started to sing again before she returned, and she and Trey disappeared down the hallway and out the door, two fresh cigarettes glowing red toward the pier.

  Betts

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Summer 2005: Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) has just returned to the law school after a six-month sabbatical carrying state secrets to the governments of Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries, including Poland, where she was born.

  “BEAU, YOU AND I better take the two law review ladies,” Trey suggested after he and Ginger finally returned with the second skiff. “They’ll have had too much boredom already this year to be made to put up with Frank and Dougie on their spring break.” We were out on the pier by then. All eight of us. Ginger not even protesting being called a “lady.” And Trey’s hand on the center of my back. A gentleman dancer escorting his partner onto the starlit-bay-water floor.

  “Hey, Skunky!” he called out to Ginger. She was already climbing into the other boat. “You protect Laney there, you hear me? Don’t you let Dougie start singing to her.”

  My spirits lifted as our laughter rang out into the insect thrum of the starry night. Trey was guiding me into his boat. He’d chosen me over Ginger and Laney. Who were, let’s be honest, the passengers I would have chosen if I were a guy.

  Before that summer in New York and the trip to London maybe I would have thought these guys were too old for us. Too old to bring home to Matka. They were grown-ups with jobs and responsibilities. Or all of them but Beau were. Beau was twenty-six. Laney’s age. Three years older than Ginger. And there were no closer friends than Laney and Ginger.

&nbs
p; Trey had just made partner in the same D.C. firm Laney planned to join that summer, but even he wasn’t yet thirty. He’d already managed to work into the conversation that he’d graduated from Harvard at nineteen and from Harvard Law at twenty-two. He’d been accelerated to become the youngest partner ever at Tyler & McCoy.

  But we Ms. Bradwells were only weeks away from jobs and responsibilities ourselves. And one thing I’d learned that summer I’d worked in New York was that no one ever really feels like a grown-up.

  It was such an odd time for me, law school was. I no longer fit in back home in Hamtramck, if I ever had. I knew how to pray over the paczki and I could stand in the line stretching from the New Palace Bakery before sunrise as long as anyone. But I didn’t dare tell my unemployed friends that my summer job at Caruthers, Smythe & Morgan paid more each week than my mother’s monthly take-home at the industrial cleaning job she worked. They already imagined me enjoying some cushy student life that didn’t exist. No one saw the long hours I spent bleary-eyed over casebooks. The pressure I felt to validate Matka’s leaving my missing father behind in Poland for my sake, if my father was even still alive. And no one in law school was anything like me, either. They’d never had to decide between going to the doctor and paying the electric bill. Even the Ms. Bradwells were nothing like me, although I did feel I belonged with them. That long late-night drive east from Ann Arbor to the Chesapeake. Stopping only for gas and potato chips and cans of Tab. As I listened to Mia babble on about Andy being unenthusiastic in bed, I thought I might even tell them about Ben. The only person I’d ever tried to tell about Ben, though, was Matka. And she’d refused to hear.

  November first. I remember the day exactly because we’d all dressed as the appropriate Ms. Bradwells for a Halloween party the night before. Laney Cicero-Bradwell in a toga. Ginger in judicial robes. Mia in military garb. Me in a very attractive hooded sweatshirt, the pockets stuffed with “nickel bags” of herbs. I’d washed off the makeup I’d used to make myself drug-addict-looking, but there were still dark circles under my eyes when I arrived in Hamtramck.