The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Betts

  EMMA’S PEEK, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  I EMERGE FROM a dream under unfamiliar covers. It’s about the eight thousandth time I’ve woken since turning in last night. Each time to a forlorn silence. No low bass note of a garbage truck dumper. No ding-ding-ding-striking-triangle bell as the truck moves backward. No car wheels on wet pavement. No airplanes. No voices passing on the walk outside. Just the devastation that I will soon be an ex–Supreme Court nominee.

  Can Laney and Mia and Ginge really want me to stick with the story after all this time? Can they really want me to be appointed to the Court with this untruth swamping us? But the one truth that I’m sure of, the truth of the rape, isn’t mine to tell. And my other “truth,” the one about Trey’s death, isn’t really truth at all.

  Why should I imagine I know more than anyone else? Something I pieced together from nothing, really. Just from something Ginger said that might not even be fact, it might be Ginger claiming things for reasons she alone could understand. And from that conversation with Faith, something that looked like one thing at the time coming into better focus in retrospect.

  I turn to see the time. The small clock on the marble-topped nightstand is a windup that has wound down in the months Chawterley has sat waiting for whatever future it will have in the wake of Faith’s death.

  Were mornings here this quiet that spring break? Was it as hushed as this in the Captain’s Library when I went to Faith the morning after the rape? Papers scattered all over the huge expanse of green leather inset that was the desktop. Faith looking up over her tortoiseshell reading glasses. Her eyes flashing annoyance at the interruption before she raised one index finger. The eternal wait as she scratched with an eraserless yellow Ticonderoga. The empty metal eraser-holder bitten flat. Not once as I stood there did the pencil go to her mouth.

  I had this idea of Faith back then that was formed from things I’d read. That article in The New York Times that Laney (the only dedicated newspaper reader among us) had pointed out: Faith quoted in connection with congressional hearings praising the White House Office of Personnel’s directive prohibiting sexual harassment. I’d have traded my own toilet-scrubbing-ex-doctor mom for Ginger’s quote-giving one in an instant before that Saturday in the Captain’s Library. And even after. Yes, after, too, I still might have traded Matka in for Faith.

  The two stories of floor-to-ceiling books loomed darkly around me. The nonstop shelving was relieved only by a few windows, a large fireplace, and two narrow, railed walkways circling above me to allow the books to be reached. As I waited I started to see why Ginger balked at going to her mother with this thing. I stared down at the swirl of Oriental carpet. Glanced up occasionally to see Faith still writing. Had what I’d taken as a just-one-second gesture really meant Don’t you dare interrupt?

  Standing there deciding I couldn’t possibly tell this cold fish anything. Trying to decide whether to apologize for bothering her and excuse myself or just slip out without another word. Then Faith set her pencil down and took off her reading glasses. One arm as chewed as the pencil.

  “What is it, Betts?” she asked. Not unkindly or impatiently. Then with concerned alarm in her voice, “What’s wrong?”

  Her eyes pooled as I told her. As I stood on the thin layer of stiff carpet and dumped the burden at her feet. She listened intently. Spoke only when I’d finished. “Good Lord.” But without shock or judgment or even that much surprise.

  “Was it you, Betts?” Spoken even more gently. “Is that what you’re trying to say, that he did this to you?”

  I didn’t trust my voice.

  Faith sighed. Rubbed at her forehead. “You’re sure it was Trey?”

  I nodded, trying to make sense of her reaction. No suggestion that Trey would never do this. Just the question whether I was sure.

  “Trey and who?” she asked. “You have to tell me, Betts. I can’t help if I don’t know the facts.”

  I managed to say, “She doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  Faith dipped her head. Ran both hands through her hair and then left them there. “One of you? Not an island girl? One of you.” She traced the join where the leather inset met the wood of the desktop. “She’s okay?”

  She looked up, then. The intensity in her green eyes startled me. Evoked Trey’s darker eyes.

  “Physically, I mean?” she asked.

  “Bruises, but …”

  “She needs to see a doctor. This is when we need a doctor in the family.”

  “She doesn’t want to see a doctor.” Thinking Matka was a doctor and that hadn’t helped anything.

  “Does she want to go home?”

  “I don’t think she wants her parents to know. I don’t think she can bear for her parents to know.”

  Faith studied me for a long moment. “And there’s no question that it was … Did she say no? Did she say no and mean it?”

  I wanted to turn away from her. To run for the locker room the way I always had when I dove poorly. Head to a stall in the john where no one would see the tears of frustration I never could hold back. I couldn’t let myself, though. I couldn’t risk the possibility that Faith would take averted eyes as a sign that I wasn’t sure.

  “It wasn’t voluntary.” The word bitter. The tears spilling. If Faith could think Laney had wanted to have sex with Trey, it would be assumed by everyone else.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do, Betts, but it’s a question that has to be asked, that will be asked by the police and by the press and by a jury, if it comes to that. Which it won’t, probably. It’s a total crock, I know, but even rapes that are reported—only one in ten to start with—rarely get to a jury. And so few of the ones that do ever result in convictions.” She shook her head. “Christ, it doesn’t even matter if she said no, no one was there to hear it. And the defense would just trot out that damned Schulhofer survey that forty percent of girls admit to saying no when they mean yes. They don’t want to seem promiscuous, for God’s sake. They don’t want to seem promiscuous? God knows men never worry about that.

  “The defense will just say sure they had sex but it was consensual. Every two minutes a girl is raped and eighty-five percent of them know the rapist, and it never gets to court.”

  I don’t know what I’d expected her to suggest that we Ms. Bradwells hadn’t already decided together: that rape victims couldn’t win, that if we wanted to be taken seriously as a lawyers we had to just bury this.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Betts?” Again in the gentle voice. “You’ve come to me. You were right to come to me. But now that you have, you may as well tell me everything.”

  When I hesitated, she said, “Ginger?”

  Matka, too, had assumed Ginger was the bad girl among us. She’d thought Ginger needed an abortion when it was me. But my mother had assumed it wasn’t me. Matka had assumed it was someone else.

  “But it has to do with Ginger?” Faith said. “It has something to do with Ginger?”

  My bare feet on the carpet looked pale and insubstantial. I wished I’d worn shoes.

  “Ginger and Trey?” she said with a caution in her voice that made me nervous. That made it clear she didn’t know. I realized then that I’d hoped she would know. That I’d come to her hoping she would know enough already. That I wouldn’t have to explain. But how could she have known her daughter was sleeping with her too-old-for-her cousin and just let it be?

  “Lord.” She fingered the pencil. Distractedly picked it up. Worried it until she snapped it in two. The crack startled her even more than me.

  “For God’s sake, sit down, Betts.”

  I glanced to the door.

  “We’re talking about your clerkship with Ruth,” she said more gently. “If anyone comes in, you’re telling me about that.”

  She set the two halves of the broken Ticonderoga on the desktop. I sat in the leather chair across the desk from her.

  “For how long?” she asked.
She stood and turned to the bookshelf the same way Ginger had in Faith’s Library last night when she hadn’t wanted us to see her face. She ran a hand along the small vertical seam where the bookshelf hid the door into the ballroom. Then in a measured voice, saying it so I couldn’t deny it, or maybe so I would: “How long has Ginger been sleeping with Trey?”

  She came and sat in the chair next to mine. “You can tell me this in confidence, Betts,” she said. “Ginger won’t ever know that I know, much less that you’re the one who told me.”

  My hands in my lap dry and useless.

  “You must know by now how terribly Ginger blunders with men,” she said.

  I licked my lips. Continued to stare at my hands. Ginger blunders with “men.” Matka would have called them “boys.” How bizarre it must be to have a mother who isn’t appalled that her daughter has sex.

  She took my chin in her hands and turned my face to hers. “A year?” she asked.

  The press of her fingers on my chin.

  “Less?” she said.

  I blinked. Blinked again.

  “Longer.” She sank back into the chair. “How much longer, Betts? Since she was …” She cleared her throat, said weakly, “Seventeen?”

  I looked down, shocked at her quick leap from an affair that might have lasted only a few weeks to one that had lasted years. She took it as a gesture with meaning.

  “Sixteen?” she said with more doubt. She stared at me without seeming to see me. As if she might be trying to remember this thing she hadn’t known. As if she would see in retrospect something she’d missed at the time.

  “That summer that …” She blinked, her dark green eyes uncharacteristically uncertain. “Jesus, she was thirteen that summer.”

  She stood. Went to the bookshelves. Pulled the hidden door open, whispering to herself, “She was thirteen years old, she was a child,” as she disappeared into the ballroom.

  Thirteen. Ginger hadn’t said that the night before. But Mia and I had done the math. Ginger was thirteen the summer she lost her virginity to Trey Humphrey. And Trey was twenty. Ginger hadn’t seemed at all troubled by that, though. She continued to have sex with him again and again over the years. She had sex with him the night the guys arrived, when she and Trey went off to “borrow” a second skiff so we could all go gut-running.

  Faith reappeared a few minutes later with a full glass of bourbon in her hand. No ice. She took the seat next to me again. Studied me. Took a sip of the drink. She stared into the glass for a moment before starting the inquisition: Where had the rape occurred? At what time? That late? (“Shit,” she said, the way Ginger would have, but it startled me to hear her use the word.) Had she gone with Trey voluntarily? Had she and Trey had sexual contact before? What about flirting? And did the girl have a sexual history?

  Girl. Even with Faith, males were men and females were girls. Or was she still thinking of her daughter, who had been only thirteen?

  “She had a boyfriend in college,” I said. “But I don’t think she’s … you know … with anyone else.”

  “Not something less than sexual intercourse. Oral sex?”

  I said I didn’t know, although I did.

  “Trey has a history, too, of course,” Faith said. “But his dozens of one-night stands wouldn’t be held against him even if they were admissible, while even that single serious lover she no doubt thought she would marry will bring charges of rape into question.”

  She took another sip of the drink, then drained it. Studied the empty bottom as if the glass might magnify the way out of this mess. I could almost see her measuring how damning it would be for Trey if it came out in court that he had seduced his thirteen-year-old cousin. But even a past rape conviction wasn’t admissible if Trey didn’t take the stand.

  “Okay, you don’t tell anyone, Betts,” she said finally. “None of you do. Do you understand that? You have to understand that and you have to make Ginger understand that, too. Ginger and Laney and Mia. You know that, right? Having this made public … It will tarnish everyone.”

  I nodded dumbly, understanding in the same way I understood I could never have gone to Ben about the baby, that I’d have ended up splattered with a mess he would deny. Men can deny truths women are saddled with. And do. I like to think I wouldn’t be like that if I were a man. But I suppose I might be. I suppose some would say I am. And maybe I would have to agree.

  “You don’t even let the girls know I know,” Faith said. “You just explain to them that allegations of rape, true or not, provable or not, will hurt every one of you. You don’t make her feel bad. You make it clear you know it’s not her fault. But still there isn’t anything to be done.”

  I blinked back tears.

  “I know it’s not right,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. The press can make a nice girl into a slut without even trying.”

  At the slap of the word “slut” my tears spilled in earnest.

  Faith went behind the desk and pulled a small plastic packet of tissues from a drawer. She handed them to me. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

  “A good lawyer would have a jury wondering from the opening argument if she isn’t a call girl. You have to take my word on this. You have to promise me you won’t say a word to anyone, Betts.”

  I nodded.

  “You get them to promise, too, okay? You get Ginger to promise. You make her understand.”

  I nodded.

  “Ginger will listen to you, Betts,” she said. “She’ll rush out to do the opposite of anything I tell her, but she’ll listen to you.”

  Ginger wasn’t listening to me, though. I thought we should tell someone and so did Mia. But Ginger insisted we couldn’t say a word. We had to let this go. That’s why I’d come to Faith. Looking for a way to hold Trey accountable for what he’d done.

  I STARE UP through the bare frame of the Merchant Ivory bed in Emma’s Peek. Remember now the quiet of Cook Island that morning Trey was found dead. I woke long before dawn to the moonlight across my face on the bottom bunk. The bunk across from me empty. When I got up to lower the window shade I half expected to see Ginger swimming off the pier. But the bay was as still as if it knew Trey was dead even if the rest of the world didn’t yet. And when I’d turned back to the beds I’d seen Ginger. Her long body was wrapped around Laney’s in the upper bunk.

  A moment of this morning’s dream comes back to me. Me wrapped around someone in bed. Was it Zack in my dream-bed? I was definitely in London in the dream. In that funky floor-that-slanted-so-much-it-left-me-motion-sick hotel room just off Soho Square. Where people in publishing liked to stay but high-priced New York lawyers did not. But Zack and I never went to London together. We never went much of anywhere. We clerked together and we got married and he got sick, leaving Izzy as fatherless as the never-child I’d carried those few months in law school would have been.

  Betts

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Winter 1993: Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) and Virginia (“Ginger”) Cook Conrad (JD ’82) completed the Cleveland Marathon together this fall, raising $40,000 for the Leukemia Society through Team in Training and making them the first Marathon Bradwells. Friends Helen (“Laney”) Weils (JD ’82) and Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) cheered from the sidelines, having chosen the quick pain of opening their pocketbooks over the extended pain of running ridiculous numbers of miles. Thanks to all the many law school alums, students, and staff who supported the run!

  I PICKED UP the receiver to call Ben a hundred times that fall of our third year at Michigan Law. I knew Ben would give me money. But I didn’t know if he would give me more than that. If he would give my child the father I never had. I thought I didn’t even want him to. Rejecting something I knew I couldn’t have. I’m more like Ginger than I like to think I am.

  Ben would have had every reason to keep it quiet. But people do inexplicably tell secrets you never imagine they will. That was the thing I couldn’t get past. That he might tell someone.
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  What I did instead: I stopped eating more than a few pieces of dry toast a day. I started swimming and diving again. Hours of laps followed by dives that landed me on my back and my belly. Dives that left me breathless and hurting. I told myself I was getting back in shape. I was just trying to get back in shape.

  I told Matka I couldn’t come home for Thanksgiving. There was so much to do with the Law Review. With finals just weeks away. No, not even for Thanksgiving dinner. Not even if she came to Ann Arbor to fix dinner at the dump of a house on Division Street.

  Then a bright red spot appeared in my underwear the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. After Mia and Ginger and Laney were already headed home. My insides began bleeding out. My stomach cramped. A frightening gush of painful red poured into the toilet.

  I would have driven to health services and given myself up if I’d had a car. The other Ms. Bradwells would have made me go if they’d been there. But I didn’t and they weren’t. And if I was dying that seemed a better solution than having Matka know. Not that any young person actually believes they can die.

  I kept telling myself I could call an ambulance. If it got worse I would call an ambulance. And it did get worse. And still I didn’t call. I just kept telling myself I could call if it got worse.

  Then the cramping ended and the bleeding lessened. By mid-morning on Thanksgiving Day the worst was over. I was let free. That was the way I felt then. So thankful for everything that Thanksgiving. So relieved.

  I called Matka just after noon. Told her I’d changed my mind. I couldn’t bear to miss Thanksgiving dinner with her. “Just for the rest of the day, though. I need to come home tonight.”

  She drove down to Ann Arbor and took me back to Hamtramck. We had a small turkey breast together. Just the two of us. We played music for hours: Polish folk songs; church music; and three songs I’d improbably adapted for our zhaleikas, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” because my singing along to that record had caused more groans in our house than anything else, and “Your Song” and “Hey Jude.”