The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  GINGER WIPES HER eyes, I can feel her hand moving to her face on my shoulder, but I just keep staring out at the not-endless sea, at the sunlight sharp in my eyes.

  “I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” she says.

  An anger I thought I let go of that night talking to William rises up in me, the long familiar tightening in my throat and my spine and my fists. What kind of fool is she, thinking she can just apologize thirty years after the fact and have everything be fine? She was the only person in this whole world I could have talked to, and she pushed me away without even trying to hide her disgust.

  When we parted after graduation, I walked away from that friendship just as surely as I walked away from everything else. I called Maynard and told him I’d like to work in the mayor’s office after all. I called Tyler & McCoy and told them I’d been offered a political appointment, and they deferred me for a year, and the year came and went and I stayed in Atlanta. I chose an apartment that was more expensive than I could afford but had a security desk and cameras monitoring all the public spaces. I didn’t realize until I moved in that what I’d like about the security desk was that the security guard who’d been there when I signed the lease was a confident, heavyset older woman named Mildred, who would have been no defense against anyone with a weapon but who seemed likely to interrogate any fella coming in with me so aggressively that he wouldn’t stay. She wasn’t there when I moved in; her role that morning was played by a younger fella I never did find comforting. But Mildred turned out to be the evening shift, and was for a long time the closest thing I had to an Atlanta friend.

  I didn’t date that first year. I didn’t go out at night. I didn’t even want a roommate. Roommates were only good for betraying you when you most needed them. I bought a used exercise bicycle, and I came home at night and locked myself in my secure apartment, and I bicycled off to nowhere, and watched television and read and slept not all that well. I was depressed, I see that now, but maybe only because I know the statistics: rape victims suffer from depression ten times more often than others do. I was depressed but I had this notion that I was just fine, that I was moving on with my life.

  So many times, I thought about telling Mama. I would start conversations in my mind: Mama, can I tell you about something that happened to me? But telling my parents only would have caused them pain; they’d have felt they should have protected me even though no one could have protected me. That’s what I told myself. I started conversations with Faith, too. I thought I might tell Faith. But she, as much as my parents, would have taken the guilt on herself: it was her home, her nephew.

  And there was the shame of it, too. I see that now. The shame that if I was raped it was my fault. The shame simply of being able to be taken, of not being strong enough or in control enough, or pure enough. Cogi qui potest nescit mori. She who can be forced does not know how to die.

  I never told my parents that I slept with Carl either, or anything else I did sexually when I was young. All of it would have made them think less of me, I was so sure of that. It never occurred to me that they ever might have felt the same things. What is it about parents that makes you think they never do live life?

  Years later, when I first met William, I didn’t want what had happened to be part of the way he thought of me, I just wanted to leave it behind. I knew what happened wasn’t my fault. I knew that. But knowing a thing is not the same as believing it. And maybe I didn’t even want to believe it.

  My silence left me lonely, and angry at Ginger but also, in the little eddies where the anger ebbed, understanding better why Ginger was so messed up when it came to men. How do you get over being seduced when you’re just a child? When you think what is happening is love and then, when you begin to realize at some level, probably not even consciously, that it isn’t love, you try so hard to make it become love? And how can you possibly make love out of something that is at best a young man’s sickness? Poor Ginge.

  You feel at fault. You know you were meaning for this man to like you. You know the way you’ve always gotten men to like you is by being attractive to them. That’s what men like: pretty gals who flirt with them. And I was flirting with Trey that night. I was. There it is. Maybe I was flirting with him that day at the firm, before he kissed me in the elevator. Maybe I don’t know how to talk to a man and not flirt a little bit. It’s not even sexual, exactly. It’s more that Southern hostess thing, the compulsion to make sure everyone is having a good time. Mama always flirted with Daddy’s friends, and Daddy with Mama’s, and I don’t imagine either of them ever went home with anyone else.

  You feel at fault because in retrospect everything you did looks like something different than just trying to be a nice girl. It looks like the opposite of trying to be a nice girl.

  Or maybe it isn’t that at all. Maybe you want it to be your fault. The thing about it being your fault is that it means you have some control over it, that you have some ability to keep it from happening again. Maybe you’d rather be a slut who can control your world than a victim who can’t.

  Ginger called me a few days after I moved to Atlanta, just after I’d started my bar review course. “Hey, I was just calling to see how you’re settling in,” she said. “Is your apartment nice? Have you met anyone yet?” And then, without giving me a chance to answer, she said, “I miss you, Lane. I wish we’d all gone to the same city. I miss everyone, but especially you.”

  And I remembered then the feel of her arms wrapped around me in bed the night Trey Humphrey died, her quiet weeping, and I saw that I’d forgiven her already. I saw that she was sorry even if she’d never said the words, that she’d seen the truth that night on Cook Island but just couldn’t admit it, even to herself. That she probably never would.

  GINGER

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Summer 1990: Virginia (“Ginger”) Cook Conrad (JD ’82) has moved with her family to Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she is enjoying retirement almost as much as is her nine iron, which was retired into the pond on the third hole of the Canterbury Country Club, in full view of the clubhouse. Visitors to the city should contact her for sailboat tours of the lakefront. Golfers should contact her husband, Ted.

  I’M NOT SURE I can say to this day exactly what happened after I won that late-night Risk game, and in celebration had another shot of scotch, or maybe two. But I do remember Mia saying we should call the police. “Evidence of rape needs to be collected as soon as possible,” she insisted. She had no idea what the hell she was talking about, though, how awful it is to go to the police as a rape victim. It’s like being violated all over again, that’s what Mother always said. “The largely male police force collecting evidence doesn’t often have the good sense to treat a rape victim’s body better than any other crime scene they secure.”

  Not long before Mother died, she forwarded to pretty much everyone she knew a link to a New York Times column that described how rape victims have to undress over paper so every speck of anything on you can be collected: a strand of your husband’s hair from his morning goodbye kiss, the little bit of ash from the cigarette you snuck after he left, a crumb from the cookie your daughter ate in your lap at the park, which you finished when she’d had enough. They examine every pore of your body with sterile swabs and ultraviolet light, and they photograph the details. God forbid you should have had sex, or masturbated, or taken a fucking bubble bath. Then the rape kit more often than not sits untested for months or even years while the rapist runs free. All those poor women (or girls; half of rape victims are minors) going through all that humiliation for nothing.

  When Mother forwarded that column, I wondered if she had an inkling of what had happened that spring break. But the prosecution of domestic violence and sexual assault cases had been high on her agenda for years by then. She’d been involved in the passage of the Violence Against Women Act and in the unsuccessful defense of its civil provisions in the Morrison case. She’d pushed for the Debbie Smith Act in 2004, then fumed when the $500 million it provided to p
rocess rape kits was funneled elsewhere. She’d made sure everyone she knew heard that New York City’s efforts to process rape kits resulted in a doubling of arrests for reported rapes. She’d spent countless hours on a case in Pennsylvania where ten women testified that the accused had drugged and raped them. Ten women. And that wasn’t enough for a jury to convict that dickhead. He actually kept a “Yearly Calendar of Women” and lied about who he was, but the jury chose to believe he was a playboy rather than a rapist because his victims had each had a drink with him. The jury chose to believe all those women lied under oath, that they all wanted what they got.

  The idea that women want to be taken by force is deeply imbedded in our culture: Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon all raped with shocking frequency and enthusiasm, their victims emerging unharmed and with the blessing of a godly child. Revered authors like Updike write “as a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed” and “You know what a rape usually is? It’s a woman who changed her mind afterward.” He knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted. Not that men are the only ones to beat that drum. Perhaps the worst offender is Ayn Rand, whose character Dominique in The Fountainhead thinks, after having a week to contemplate the fact of her rape, “I’ve been raped … Through the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure she had felt in his arms.” How do you fight that deeply imbedded idea that at some level any woman can be charged with “wanting it”?

  And yet I can imagine Mother analyzing Laney’s story, deciding whether to try to take it to a jury. “You were skinny-dipping with him just hours before the alleged rape? You’d drunk how many glasses of scotch? Drank it straight up, not even with a little ice?” She would walk through the details, then: Laney’s first sexual experience with Carl, who’d been sleeping with another girl at the time and Laney knew that, but she was head over heels for him. In a bout of anger and hurt in the aftermath of their breakup, she’d gone down on a business student at Michigan, a guy she’d just met at a party that night. A white guy, like Trey, which shouldn’t matter, but would. And Laney’s words as we’d played Risk in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage, “Meus calix inebriat me,” and her raising her glass to our no-Latin finger crosses, laughing when Trey said he thought our cups were making us all drunk, not just her. A flirtatious laugh? I couldn’t swear under oath that it wasn’t.

  Trey had returned Laney’s look, too. Even I, who didn’t want to see Trey wanting anyone but me, saw that Trey wanted Laney. I remember thinking I shouldn’t make anything of it, that she was like the island girls he flirted with when he was up, but when he was down he always came back to me.

  Were we wrong not to tell anyone? The “broad distaste for rape cases as murky, ambiguous and difficult to prosecute, particularly when they involve (as they so often do) alcohol or acquaintance rape,” as that New York Times column Mother sent around had put it, leaves juries reluctant to convict even today. Instead, they find victims who have been, say, so “promiscuous” as to have a glass of scotch with a rapist around a Risk board in a room full of friends to have consented even if those victims have said no. And even when a rapist is found guilty, the victim is left stained. There are always people who question what she wanted, or asked for, or deserved.

  “There isn’t anything we can do tonight,” I’d insisted that Friday night. “The island has no police force. We’d have to cross the bay, and none of us is in any shape to take out a boat even if it weren’t dark as hell out there.”

  That was when Betts suggested dragging Mother into it.

  “You want to tell my mother?” I turned to Laney and I said (God help me, I did, I said), “Let’s say for a minute that this awful thing you’re accusing him of really did happen through no fault of yours. You tell Mother, you become the headline in every paper. Every paper, Lane. It has all the makings of great tabloid coverage: a wealthy, successful, and dare I say handsome alleged rapist no one in this world is going to believe needs to force himself on any girl. A white-on-black rape, which always titillates. A well-known feminist lawyer defending the accused, if it comes to that, because you can’t imagine Mother won’t defend Trey. Trey is the son Mother always wanted, the one she took under her wing when none of her real children were quite good enough.”

  I think I actually believed I was trying to protect Laney from herself. I was so sure that Trey wasn’t like she was suggesting. That he didn’t go after girls. That if he didn’t always turn them away when they offered themselves to him, well, neither did Frankie or Doug, and maybe even Beau.

  “Can you even begin to imagine how much press coverage this would get?” I demanded. “Mother—who made headlines trying to stop President Reagan from denying funding for abortions for rape and incest victims—taking the other side for a rich white nephew accused of raping a drunk, skinny-dipping young black law student? It would be the end of your career and hers, Laney. You must know that. It would sink you before you started. Shit, do you think anyone at Tyler & McCoy would believe their young superstar partner is a predator?”

  It would sink her anywhere if she spoke up and wasn’t believed, and why would she be? It would sink the rest of us, too; we’d be dragged through the mud with her.

  Betts grabbed my arm and pulled me into the hall, then, blasting me the way only Betts ever has. “Ginger, can you not see the bruise on the back of her neck? Can you not see that she can barely move her arm?” All in a hushed but forceful tone, because we were standing in a hall in a house overflowing with guests.

  “Maybe she likes it kinky,” I whispered. “What do you know about what Laney likes?”

  I still remember Betts’s unblinking gaze, crystal cold where Mother’s eyes were a grittier green, but still they had the same look of disappointment in them, of disgust.

  “Christ, Ginge—”

  “Be quiet, Betts. Do you want everyone in this whole fucking house to hear you rant? You think that’s going to help Laney?”

  It was Mia who raised the possibility that Laney might end up pregnant, or with a sexually transmitted disease. (Not AIDS, we didn’t know about AIDS yet.) This was after Laney was asleep, when Mia and Betts and I were back in the room, speaking in hushed tones. This was when I came to Trey’s defense, when I told them Trey and I had made love almost every night since he’d arrived at Chawterley.

  I could see the doubt creep into Mia’s brown eyes as she began to grill me: exactly how long had we been lovers? I wasn’t sure what she was beginning to doubt: what I was telling her, or whether Trey had so much as touched Laney, whether this wasn’t all some bizarre domination fantasy Laney had concocted because even still, after a year, she couldn’t get over Carl.

  “Jesus, Ginge, that’s statutory rape,” Mia said.

  Which was when I called her a complete fucking fool. If Trey and I loved each other, how would that be rape?

  “Maybe we just need to get Laney out of here,” Betts said. “Maybe we just need to pack up and head back to Ann Arbor first thing in the morning, before anyone else is up.”

  “Everyone will be up long before dawn to go hunting,” I said. “And it sure won’t help keep this quiet if we disappear on the morning of the party we came here to attend.”

  So in the end we left it that I would go duck hunting and they would stay with Laney, and whatever she wanted to do when I got back, we would do.

  I didn’t sleep at all the few hours left in that night. I lay in the bottom bunk while Laney slept in the bunk above me. I listened to the breaths of my friends, and watched the shadows of the branches outside the window shifting with the slowly moving moon. I got up before dawn, brushed my teeth, washed my face, took another two aspirin, drank two glasses of water, put on my hunting gear, and got my gun.

  “You and me in the Triangle Blind,” I said to Trey.

  He shot well that morning, and I shot poorly, and he was giving me grief about it when I lowered my gun and made myself look straight at him.

  “Did you fuck Laney?” I asked.


  His eyes looked the gray-black of the moon through the telescope, the gray-black of craters cut into dust.

  “Did you fuck her, Trey?” I insisted. “She says you did.”

  “Shit, Ginge,” he said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  And maybe I believed him that morning and maybe I didn’t. I don’t even know anymore, if I ever did. So often, I’ve come to understand, I choose to believe what I want to believe, instead of what I see.

  Mia

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Winter 2010: Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) won an International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Reporting Award for her article “Acid Girls,” about the gritty determination with which Afghan girls who were splashed with acid on their way to school returned to their classes. Even her Law School roommate, Professor Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82), can find nothing funny in this.

  TO BE HONEST, Betts and I were glad Ginger went hunting that Saturday morning, we were relieved to be rid of her for a bit. “She was thirteen?” we whispered to each other after she left, while Laney slept. What twenty-year-old man seducing a thirteen-year-old was well intentioned? What decent person thought that wasn’t sick? Young children were so often vulnerable, so eager to please, and you could see that in Ginger, in the way she adored her big brothers, breaking her arm in a boat and not blinking at the pain because she wanted to keep up with them, she wanted to belong.