The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Was it a blessing? Would we have done things differently if we hadn’t had the night to think over what to do before we could go to the police? Would our lives have been better in the long run, or worse?

  The doorbell rings. Rings again. And again. We don’t even think about answering.

  “The nerve,” I say.

  We all laugh as we hurry upstairs.

  We duck into the first bedroom. The Captain’s Bedchamber, which was Faith’s room. The double bed with a massive mahogany German-grandfather-clock-look-alike headboard must be where she died. Where Max found her. I’m not sure about this, though. Ginger never shared the details with us.

  A white terry-cloth robe hangs on a hook on the closet door. A crystal decanter of what is probably bourbon sits beside an empty ashtray on the nightstand. An open pack of Virginia Slims. A bitten pencil. A pleading clip. This was Faith’s life until it wasn’t anymore. She died with her activist boots firmly on her feet.

  I think it was a disappointment to Faith that I never took up the banner of gender issues directly myself. I used the excuse of Catharine MacKinnon being more expert than I ever could be. I focused on immigration issues instead. I think Faith understood but was disappointed nonetheless.

  One closet door and the bottom drawer of a mahogany dresser are slightly ajar. Was it only yesterday that Ginger came in here looking for clothes? She stares at the crystal decanter and the pleading clip as if her mother might emerge, white-robed, from the shower to ask if we’ve written our congressman about the Equal Rights Amendment this month. It’s Saturday. The day she always called to remind us. Carter and Ford both support the amendment. I can almost hear her voice. More than eighty percent of Americans, after they’ve actually read the ERA, support it. It fell three states short of ratification that June, though. Seventy-five percent of women state legislators in the four key states voted to ratify, but only forty-six percent of the men did. I’d been in D.C. clerking for Judge Ginsburg when the time for ratification expired. Laney and I mourned it together by phone instead of at the apartment we’d planned to share.

  I wonder, sometimes, if Faith was happier in her last years than she had ever been. Living alone here. Accomplishing what she meant to accomplish. With no distractions. No children to raise. No husband who needed a weekend-long birthday party thrown in his honor.

  Is that selfish, living like that, or is it selfless? Is it foolish, or is it wise?

  “There’ll be as good a view from Emma’s Peek as there is from here,” Mia suggests.

  “Or the Captain’s Office,” Laney says.

  Ginger walks to the window. Peers out. Laney joins her as I remember that story Beau told about Ginger hauling a skiff from the mud with a broken arm.

  The first boat has cleared the pier now. A second boat has taken its place. A second gang of journalists is unloading.

  “WJLA?” Laney says.

  Mia answers, “The D.C. affiliate for ABC.”

  I step behind Laney. Finger a ringlet of dark hair. She turns to meet my look. Raises a hand to her neck and rubs it. Aging skin to aging skin. Though there is still so much youth in her face.

  “If I had ever imagined this would get so much attention,” I say, “I would have said no when they offered me the Court.”

  Something in her dark eyes leaves me thinking she doesn’t believe me. Leaves me wondering if I believe myself. I did imagine someone might ask about Trey’s death; I armed myself with an answer. Did I never imagine this would blow up into such a public mess? That Laney, too, would be dragged into it? Or did I want the nomination too badly to admit to the sight of it in my path?

  Laney takes my hand. Her fingers interweave darkly with mine. “I knew it might happen when I decided to run for office,” she says. Taking onto herself the burden I should bear.

  Betts

  THE CAPTAIN’S BEDCHAMBER, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  “I THOUGHT THE Ben thing might come out in the confirmation hearings,” I say. I hesitate. There is a brief I-could-make-something-up-and-present-it-as-truth moment. An I-can-protect-myself-as-I’ve-been-doing-all-these-years chance. But I let it pass. I take a peek through the curtains: Yes, this is really happening. I sit in a chair beside Faith’s empty fireplace. I slip off my shoes and pull my feet up into half lotus. And I tell them about my affair with Ben.

  They settle into the sitting area with me as I talk. Ginger and Laney on the couch facing the fireplace. Mia in the chair on the other side of it. Mia and Laney skin off their shoes as I have and pull their feet up under them. Ginger wears no shoes.

  “Jesus, Betts,” Ginger says. “Even I never slept with a married man.”

  Mia’s spine straightens. Her one foot is still up on the seat but the other moves flat to the floor. “How would you know, Ginger?” she says. “You’re the one who always hated waking up next to men whose names you didn’t know. So you ask marital status but not names?”

  I quash the urge to shush her. To suggest Faith can hear us. That her spirit is here. Anger presses into Ginger’s wide lips. But then her overbite disappears into an apologetic almost-smile.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” she says. “That I know of.”

  Mia confesses to having slept with a married man once. It surprises me how grateful I am for this disclosure. It crosses my mind that it might not even be true. Mia might be confessing to a sin she never committed just so I won’t feel alone.

  “What a sorry bunch of hussies we turn out to be,” I say.

  “You never told us,” Laney says to me.

  I shrug. I don’t want to admit my distrust of them any more clearly.

  “Ambition makes lonely bedfellows,” Ginger says. A simple statement that makes me ache with loneliness even as I set the loneliness aside. As I hand it over to Laney and Mia and Ginge.

  “Justice William O. Douglas plowed through four wives while he was on the bench, each one younger and blonder than the gal before,” Laney says. “Are you thinking he never started seeing one before he left the other?”

  “That’s no doubt why he found a right to privacy in the bill of rights,” I say. I’m the first to laugh but they laugh with me. Gallows humor. What is there to do but laugh?

  “Clarence Thomas,” Mia says. “Long Dong Silver and pubic hairs in Coke. Why would Anita Hill volunteer to have her name dragged through that mud if that wasn’t true?”

  “But women are held to higher standards,” Ginger says. “In all that ImClone insider trading mess, who was the only one who ended up serving time? Martha fucking Stewart. Who took the fall for employing an illegal immigrant nanny? Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood because of course we can’t have an attorney general who breaks the law, never mind that our very male secretary of the treasury had $34,000 of unpaid taxes on an illegal nanny before he was confirmed. Do you think there’s a double standard?”

  I smile despite the situation. We’ll have to arrange an exorcism here. The ghost of Faith Cook Conrad has clearly taken up residence in her daughter’s wide mouth.

  “A double standard we perhaps impose on ourselves,” I say. “Giving up the Supreme Court to care for a husband who doesn’t even know who we are anymore. Only to have him die and leave us with nothing to do but watch as the justice who replaced us undoes half the good we’ve done.”

  “Betts,” Mia says gently. Not Sandra Day O’Connor’s name, but mine. In the gentleness of her voice I see that it isn’t the demands of working another life around my ambitions that I’ve avoided all these years. It’s the demands of another dying. Not just the grief of losing someone I love, but the care it takes to see them through the process of dying. I might love again if I were guaranteed I would be the first of us to die, or even if I just knew my new lover would die the way Matka did: in her sleep one Sunday night. After we’d spent the weekend together in Chicago. She’d moved there years earlier for a job as a medical researcher, work she loved. “We had such a nice weekend, didn’t we, Betsy?” Tho
se were her last words.

  Laney, sitting closest to me, reaches a hand across the gap between the couch and my chair. Rests it on mine. “Did y’all know Justice Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan?” she asks, seeing I need to move on to something else. “Everyone in Alabama knew it,” she says. “It’s how he got elected to the Senate, with the Klan’s support. Then he’s the one to insist separate can never be equal.”

  “Making up for past wrongs?” I suggest.

  She removes her hand from mine. Fingers her neck again. Her expression is somewhere between angry and sad. I can’t imagine what I’ve said.

  “So you’re suggesting that’s what I need to do here, Betts?” she demands. “Make up for my past wrongs?”

  “Of course not! I was talking about Justice Black, Lane!”

  “Not reporting it wasn’t wrong, Laney,” Mia says gently. “No one is obligated to report an assault on themselves. It was a reasonable decision, to choose not to subject yourself to … to all that.”

  “Except then Trey ended up dead,” Laney says.

  Outside: the sounds of boat horns and people calling to each other. Journalists, cameras, and equipment continue to come ashore. The pier, jutting out over the water, is public property. Theoretically we could stop them from coming above the high tide line. But as my students would say, good luck with that.

  I wonder if the press will go away if we hole up here long enough. What do they have to wait for? They don’t have a stick of evidence suggesting Trey’s death was anything but an accident. They just have the suggestion of one blogger who won’t even step up to identify him or herself. They don’t even have Laney’s rape.

  “I’m thinking maybe it’s time I just say what happened,” Laney says. “I’m thinking part of what I was looking for in this campaign was to put this behind me once and for all, to go ahead and live my life. So maybe this is it, maybe this is what I’ve got to do now.”

  But it’s not just you. A selfish thought. If she confesses the rape now the press will have a field day speculating about which of us might have killed Trey. Which of us might have known about it. Might have helped cover up a murder.

  “But it’s not just you, Laney,” Ginger says, reading my mind. “And it would be terrible timing for you and Betts both.” With a judgmental glance at Mia she continues, “Great timing for the anonymous blogger who surfaced this, though.”

  Connections and timing. You girls are going to have both. How many times did I hear Faith say that? Every time I came to D.C. she introduced me to everyone she could: To Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To Justice Stevens, for whom I also clerked. To Hillary when it looked like she’d be the nominee. To the president when he came through Michigan on the campaign and again after he was elected, when he was making his list of potential Court nominees.

  The way Ginger looks at Mia. Oh hell, she’s going to accuse Mia about this blogger thing with the press outside waiting to hear us when the shouting starts.

  “Ginger,” I say. Trying to reel the thread back onto the bobbin.

  Ginger shoots me an overbitey-and-annoyed look. “I’m just saying that whoever this blogger is has just set herself up for some nice advertising revenues, which is what I might do if I were a recently unemployed journalist. Wouldn’t you, Mi?”

  Mia fixes her paper-bag brown eyes on Ginger. She doesn’t blink even once. “I don’t know, Ginge,” she says evenly. “If I were that blogger, I’d figure there was some good juicy stuff to be had in the story of the daughter of a prominent feminist lawyer who is so concerned about the disclosure of her own sordid sexual history that she does everything she can to convince a dear friend who has been sexually assaulted to let it go.”

  “No one but the four of us knows about this,” Ginger shoots back. “And Betts and Laney have everything to lose here. So that leaves either you or me, Mia. Me and my ‘sordid sexual history,’ right? You can imagine how excited I am to announce to the whole world what a fucking slut I was.”

  Laney and I share a glance. Mia has never let go of feeling we ought to have gone to the police. Feeling she was right and we were wrong and we ought to have listened to her. But Ginger had been insistent that going to the police or even just to her mother would have made things worse. Laney hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone either. And I’d come back from talking to Faith with my mind changed.

  But there has never been any point in getting between Ginger and Mia when their tempers fly.

  Mia doesn’t say anything, though. She smiles a little sadly. Lifts her goofy toy camera. Focuses on Ginger’s wide feet wedged between her legs and the worn fabric of her mother’s chair. A single cheap plastic snap interrupts the silence.

  She stands and goes to the window. Peeks through the curtain. “Fox,” she says. “CBS and, damn, is that Judy Woodruff? We’ve moved from scandal to legitimate story if the NewsHour is here.” She turns and looks at the three of us sitting around Faith’s cold fireplace. “You suppose that’s the good news, or the bad?”

  Mia

  THE CAPTAIN’S BEDCHAMBER, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  WE’VE BEEN SITTING in the Captain’s Bedchamber for hours—all of us taking surreptitious peeks out the window while I’ve been taking surreptitious peeks inside myself—when Betts spots yet another boat headed for the Chawterley pier. “There aren’t enough journalists squashing the flowers already?” she asks. As Laney rises to have a look, too, I stuff down the urge to defend the press, to defend myself.

  “Not many flowers on that side of the house,” I say.

  “You think there aren’t reporters and photographers on every side of this house?” Ginger says. “But the flowers are all dying, anyway.” She, too, goes to the window, leaving me alone to wonder how many times Faith sat here by the fireplace, with no one to share the night.

  “It’s Max!” Ginger says. “That’s Max’s boat. And, shit, that’s Annie helping him dock. Annie and Iz.”

  I join them at the window just in time to see the horde of journalists swarm the pier as the boat approaches, already clicking photos and shouting questions. They have no idea who they’re photographing, but they don’t want to miss the shot, just in case. In this digital age, they waste nothing but the time it will take to delete what they don’t use.

  Betts moves toward the door, but Ginger grabs her sleeve before she gets very far.

  “Max will get Izzy in, Betts,” she says. “Believe me, Max will get Izzy and Annie both into the house unharmed. If we go out there, especially if you go out there, it’s just worse for them. Trust me this once: let Max get them in the house.”

  “It’s locked,” Betts says. “All the doors are locked.”

  “I’ll get the door,” I say, heading out into the hall before anyone can object.

  “Max is such a nice guy,” I hear Laney say as I’m leaving. “Why do you suppose his wife left him?” Her words register in my pathetic little brain only as my feet hit the marble of the back foyer: Max and his wife have split? But there is no time for that now.

  I peek through the backdoor sidelights, my hand on the doorknob as Max barrels through the press, one arm around each girl. Tiny Isabelle is practically buried in the crook of his arm, where the photographers can’t get much of a shot of her, but Annie, at six feet, is all there for everyone to see. I silently will her to reach up and release the clip holding her hair back, to let the veil of blond loose to cover her face. And I see in Annie how Ginger, too, must have been as a girl: taller by a margin than all the middle-school boys, gawky tall until she got used to her height, everyone-turning-to-look tall, and beanpole thin. It’s the last pin clicking into place, why Ginger never has seen herself as beautiful: she was a gawky virgin, and then Trey seduced her without falling in love with her, and she became a gawky slut. How many years does it take to get over the burden of the teenage girls we were?

  I throw the lock and open the door. “You are not even thinking about using tape of a minor, or stepping o
n this porch,” I announce loudly to the cameras still pointed at the arriving threesome. “You’re all from reputable news sources, Fran,” I say, picking Fran off from the pack to personalize this. “You have standards of conduct.” Which maybe they would all remember without my help, but there is no percentage in testing that.

  My words have the intended effect: everyone turns to me, their cameras rolling, their shutters snapping, but no one steps beyond the path as Max and the girls break free of them and hurry inside.

  Annie has just had a birthday, I remember as I close the door and throw the lock again. She’s eighteen now, not a minor. An honest mistake on my part, though, and it will take them some time to figure it out.

  Annie isn’t the story here, anyway, and now they have a clip of me.

  I’m glad I put on makeup in the little moment before I headed to Max’s house this morning—a vain thought, I admit it, but my squishy fairness looks bad enough in photos with makeup.

  I kiss first Annie, then Iz, telling them they look beautiful, which they do. Gawky, almost grown-up beautiful in Annie’s case, and dark hair and pale skin intelligent beautiful in Izzy’s. “Hollywood agents are going to be knocking on your doors based on just that little bit of film,” I say, trying to keep this light.

  Max hikes up the sagging butt of his jeans, bracing himself for the plunge back outside. The thought of his boxers showing in the TV footage makes me oddly fonder of him. I tell the girls their moms are up in the Captain’s Bedchamber, and suggest Max come say hello. He demurs: he’s already intruded on us once today.

  “You brought us the newspaper,” I say. “That isn’t intruding, that’s doing a favor. And now you’ve brought us the girls, which is exactly what we need. At least come upstairs and let everyone thank you for that.”