The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Oh, shit, he’s going to talk,” Ginger says.

  Cameramen are wiping the drizzle from their lenses and focusing. Max seems to be waiting for them to be ready. His glasses are misting over, too, but he doesn’t clear them.

  “Does he know anything?” Betts asks Ginger. She turns to me. “You didn’t—”

  “Of course not!”

  “Good afternoon,” Max calls out. The sound guys all flinch, and adjust. “Occurred to me some of you folks might like to catch a ride with me before your equipment gets soaked. I figure I have just enough time to cross the bay and get back with some champagne a friend of mine needs. Anyone wants a ride, you’re welcome.”

  The journalists laugh but eye the clouds uneasily and wipe their lenses again.

  I say, “They won’t leave the island, it’s too hard to get back here. If it starts raining, they’ll figure they can find a hotel in town.”

  “Only the one little inn,” Ginger says.

  Outside, Max says, “Tide’s coming up, too. It’s already crested the break and headed up the walkway at the inn.” He eyes the pier. “ ’Course this ground is a little higher. Probably won’t come much above the third step here, I don’t think.”

  The cameramen frown at their equipment.

  “The inn is closed for the weekend,” Max continues. “Even if you don’t mind the long walk in the pouring rain, there aren’t rooms. Restaurant’s closed, too. They’re having a little party for the innkeepers’ anniversary. Everyone in town will be there, ’less they have to cancel on account of the weather. The owner of Brophy’s and the barmaid, too.”

  He offers this little bit with such conviction that I’m pretty sure the whole thing is untrue, although the champagne is a nice touch. A flurry of questions from the press follows. They, too, are skeptical.

  “Suit yourself,” Max says. “Not sure there’s room enough for everyone, but first come first served. Arthur and I have got to get going, or we’ll be late for the party. He’s promised he’ll return to the mainland to fetch you tomorrow morning if you like, though. Island hospitality.”

  Arthur nods, a man of few words.

  “Hate for anyone to catch pneumonia out here in the rain all night,” Max says.

  The rain starts coming harder then.

  “Like he’s planned the downpour,” I say gleefully.

  “Anyone who grew up on the island can read the weather without the need of news channel satellite data,” Ginger says. “Every choice people make here is governed by the weather.”

  “The bit about the tide on the Pointway Inn walkway is a little over the top,” Betts says.

  “That, actually,” Ginger says, “is one of the few things he said that’s probably true.”

  Arthur heads below and fires up the engine. Max takes the line, preparing to leave. We watch as reporters start loading on like Max is Noah sent by God to collect them. The only holdout is Fran Halpern, whose carefully casual coif is protected by an attractive hat, her makeup still perfect. I make a mental note to get a hat like that.

  Her camera crew motions her to join them on the boat. We can’t hear what they’re saying over the rain now, but Max clearly says something to her before he squats down to the near cleat and takes the line in his hand. Her body language is all protest, but he stands and says something more, then extends his hand. She looks from him to her crew, her lips forming angry words: not the f-word, but that’s the idea.

  Ignoring his hand and that of her cameraman offered from the boat, she steps from the pier unassisted. Max tosses the line aboard, releases the other line, and hops aboard himself.

  As the boat clears the pier and heads out into the bay, Ginger says softly, “ ‘As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, / His guardian sea-god to commemorate’ …”

  She backs away from the window and heads toward the shelves with the miniature books.

  “It’s one of the sonnets,” she says.

  “From the peacock volume, Ginge?” I ask.

  Ginger pulls the tiny book from a shelf and opens it, reads the whole sonnet aloud. Laney doesn’t turn from the window, but she is listening intently, as if Ginger has written the poem herself. Betts, too, remains with her back to the room, watching the rain wash away the last glimpse of the ferry, as if those journalists are taking her last hope of being appointed to the Supreme Court away with them.

  “What does it mean?” Betts asks when Ginger finishes reading, asking about the poem or the fact that we’re alone here at Chawterley again, or both.

  Ginger sets the book on her mother’s desk, next to a volume titled Transformations. “I’m not really sure,” she says. “Maybe that’s why Mother left the volume to Aunt Margaret, because I had it all those years and still I don’t understand half the poems.”

  Her hand as she picks up the larger volume looks old, suddenly, despite her expensive creams. We’re all growing old and worn like so many of the books surrounding us—old and worn and misunderstood.

  “Mother left this one to Aunt Margaret, too,” Ginger says. “Her favorite book of poetry, and I’m the poet, but she leaves it to a fucking friend.”

  She flips open the book. The pages split at a point where something has been inserted, a foggy old photograph. She stares at it for a long moment before moving it aside to reveal a small cream-colored envelope underneath.

  Laney turns from the window to us as Ginger stares at the writing on the envelope.

  “What is it, Ginge?” I ask.

  Betts

  FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

  “YOU SAW HIM, Ginge?” Laney whispers. She hasn’t said a word since the Max-entering-press-exiting-poem-reading began. A fact I realize only as she speaks. Her dark cheeks and dark eyes are sunken. Her tone leaves no doubt that she’s had the image of Trey dead in the chair in mind ever since Ginger said she saw him. That her initial rush to comfort Ginger has given way to something else.

  “Lordy, why didn’t you tell us?” she asks.

  Ginger sets the envelope back in the poetry book and closes it. Stands staring at her mother’s desktop. Not the desktop from the Captain’s Library where Faith sat talking with me that Saturday morning after the rape. But similar. A large expanse of wood inlaid with leather. It’s bare but for the tiny peacock book where that earlier desktop was covered with papers. Whoever cleared her kitchen has tidied her life here, too.

  “Ginge, we all know you didn’t …” Laney says. “None of us … How could any of us have done something like that and not told the rest of us?”

  I finger a drawer pull on the desk as if I might slide it open to find a chewed pencil. Chewed reading glasses, too. “If I’d killed Trey, I wouldn’t have told you,” I say. “It would make you guys accessories after the fact. It would be asking you to go to jail for me.”

  Was that what I’d made Faith by seeking her help? Or what she’d chosen to become?

  Laney’s frown leaves me searching for the words of that poem Ginger mentioned. Something about silence and restraint.

  “You think you were that calculating when you were twenty-five, Betts?” Laney says. “And isn’t that what y’all did for me, anyway? Make yourselves accessories after the fact by agreeing to keep quiet for my sake?”

  “We made that decision together,” Mia says. “And we weren’t protecting you from the legal consequences of anything you did, Lane.”

  “She didn’t tell us about being pregnant,” Ginger says. “Betts didn’t.” She thinks I’m plenty calculating. That’s what she’s saying. Or she means to offend us all in one easy weekend. Or both.

  Mia picks up the framed “Curse of the Naked Women.” To get Ginger’s attention. To piss her off. If this foursome cracks in two, Mia is on my side.

  “The only person protected by us remaining quiet was Trey Humphrey,” she says.

  Which isn’t exactly true. Or I’m not exactly sure it is.

  “Trey, who was already dead,” Ginger
says.

  “We didn’t know that,” I say. “Not when we made that decision.” And he wasn’t dead when we decided to bury the rape. That decision was made in the sometime-after-midnight hours of Friday. Trey didn’t die until late Saturday night. Or in the dark early hours of Sunday.

  “We thought we were protecting each other,” Mia says. “Not just your reputation, Laney. All of our reputations. That’s why we kept quiet about what happened. Not to protect Trey. Not even just to protect you. To protect ourselves.”

  “From something none of us did!” Ginger insists. “We aren’t guilty of anything.”

  Mia studies the poetry book in Ginger’s hand as if there might be some answer in the title. Transformations. “Any one of us might have slipped out and killed Trey and slipped back in while the rest of us slept,” she says. “It only takes a minute to shoot someone.”

  “You don’t believe that, Mi,” Ginger says.

  “That’s not the point, what we believe,” I say. “The point is that’s the way it plays in the press. There’s a … a rape, right?” Even when the word was there on the Scrabble board none of us said it aloud. Not in Laney’s presence. “And then just coincidentally the guy turns up dead the very next night. The facts start coming out. Maybe Laney was in the room all night. But you two were—”

  “But I wasn’t,” Laney says quietly. “I put the book back.”

  “The book?” Mia runs her fingers through her hair at her cowlick.

  “The peacock book,” Laney says. She nods at the miniature book on Faith’s desktop. “I slipped it into the Captain’s Library during the party.”

  “Oh, shit,” Ginger says.

  “But the doctor said it was all an accident,” Laney says. “Trey was drunk and he was cleaning his gun.”

  “The doctor who was the best man at my parents’ damn wedding,” Ginger says. “Who was Daddy’s best friend from before they started lower school. Everyone already thinks Trey committed suicide. Everyone already assumes Dr. Pilgrim lied. It’s no great leap to conclude he lied to hide a murder rather than a suicide.”

  “Well, maybe a little bit of a leap?” I suggest.

  “But you’re off the hook, Betts,” Laney says. “You and Mia both. Why would y’all have shot Trey Humphrey?” She fingers a small turquoise button at the fitted waist of her blouse. “If I admit what happened, that clears your name, clears your way to the Court.”

  “But what about Gemmy, Lane?” Ginger asks quietly. “How does a mom tell a daughter she’s been … been raped?” She gulps the word. Giving voice to the same thing I’ve been struggling with.

  “None of us can keep ourselves safe all the time, Ginge,” I say.

  Laney leans against the window as if to steady herself. “I could have, though,” she says. “That’s the thing. I chose to go drinking with Trey Humphrey. I chose to go skinny-dipping. I chose to go to the lighthouse.”

  I touch her hair. The curls she’s finally set free. “You thought Mia was there,” I say. “It’s where Beau and Mia said they were going. Really, no one can fault you, Lane.”

  “But they will,” Ginger says. “They will fault Laney. And now what does she do? Let Gemmy learn about it from the headlines? Tell her over a damned long-distance phone?”

  Laney

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Spring 1992: Ms. Helen Weils (JD ’82) and her husband, Will Robeson, are happy to announce the birth of their third child, Ginger Elsbieta Mary Robeson, a.k.a. Ms. Gem Robeson-Bradwell.

  RAPE, FROM THE Latin rapere, meaning to seize, a term used in Roman law for crimes of theft. Theft of a fella’s property, women being the property of men under Roman law. If it had been anyone but William with me when I hung up the phone from talking with Mia that night she called to ask about marrying again, I might have begun the conversation about what happened on Cook Island with that Latin, if I’d begun it at all. I might have held the rape away from me, wrapped it up in a single word in a dead language that I could explain.

  In retrospect, I see so many ways I might have reached out for help in the aftermath of Cook Island. There was rape counseling available in Ann Arbor. There was a twenty-four-hour peer counseling hotline, 76-GUIDE, I could have called; I could have been a nameless gal helped by a faceless voice over an anonymous telephone line. But I wasn’t behaving in a particularly rational way in the aftermath of Cook Island. How could I act sensibly in a world that no longer made sense? And what would I have told the voice that answered the telephone anyway? That I’d gone skinny-dipping with Trey Humphrey. That I’d gotten drunk with him. That when he asked me to leave everyone else in that cottage behind and go to the lighthouse with him, I had gone.

  It got no easier to talk after I moved to Atlanta, either, after I started working in the mayor’s office. Once I was part of Maynard’s team, my behavior reflected on him, whether it should have or not. A story about a sex scandal involving a young female aid to the mayor and a dead Washington lawyer was no longer just about me. And there was that, too, of course: Trey was dead. I couldn’t talk to anyone without raising questions about that.

  Whenever I start in on the Latin, though, William gives me a look that says I can’t hide from him. Maybe he gave me that look even before I’d finished assuring him the kids were fine that night, that the caller had been Mia. Or maybe I finally asked myself why I couldn’t I tell this man who loved me about something I ought not to be ashamed of, something that wasn’t my fault. I’d never have forgiven myself if he learned about what happened to me the way, a few weeks later, I would learn that Betts was nominated for the Court: by reading it in the news.

  “William,” I said, “can I tell you about something that happened to me a long time ago? A long time before I even met you. I don’t know why I never told you before.”

  He didn’t answer exactly, but William has a way of letting you know he’s with you without saying a word. And he listened, and he held me, and when I was finished he just kept on holding me. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. It was as if he always did know.

  “I think I need to tell the children about it,” I said finally. “But how do I tell Gemmy?”

  William took my hand then. Wrapped both my bony hands in his beautiful ones.

  “How do I tell Gemmy this happened to her own mama?” I asked him. “How do I say that in a way that doesn’t leave her forever worrying about herself?”

  THE MORNING GEMMY was born, late morning after a sleepless night in labor, I looked at her long skinny feet and her long skinny fingers, her perfect little nails, and I wondered if there ever was a more beautiful girl in the world. “Beautiful” was the word I used, but I didn’t mean it in a physical sense, I meant it as a reflection of the way she makes me feel every time I look at her.

  Okay, not every time. Not at 7:45 in the morning her senior year in high school, when first bell was just minutes away and her not yet dressed. Maybe not during those annual September ordeals when I dragged her around to every store in Atlanta in search of new school shoes only to have her decide, invariably, on the first pair she’d tried on at the first store we’d left hours before. But most every time.

  I had two sons before I had Gemmy, and then the surprise of Little Joe after her. I don’t love her more or less than them, or even differently. But it’s special, having a daughter, even when she’s thirteen and doesn’t much want a mama.

  It was William’s idea to name her after the Ms. Bradwells: Virginia Elsbieta Mary, that was his thought. But she was born such a willowy little thing, and those names all seemed so stocky. We considered Libby or Beth, but that didn’t seem right, either. It was the whole of us we wanted to capture the spirit of, anyway. That’s what I told Mia when she called from wherever in the world she was after Ginger called her with my news.

  “Gem,” Mia said. “Ginger Elsbieta Mary. Or you could do Elizabeth if Elsbieta is too much.”

  I said I never really thought of Betts as an Elizabeth, and William said, “Gemmy.” And she h
as been ever thus.

  There is so much in a name, I told myself as the days grew into weeks after I’d told William about being raped and still I hadn’t told the children. I began to rationalize that I didn’t need to tell them, I wasn’t going to get the nomination, never you mind the polls moving in my direction. And even if I did, how would anyone find out about what had happened? No one knew except the Ms. Bradwells and now William, and none of us would ever tell.

  Then I did get the Democratic nomination. I remember watching the primary results come in on the Internet, the spread widening until finally the last of my opponents called to concede. I remember Gemmy hugging me like she didn’t often do in her teenage years. My daughter calling me “Senator Mama” and looking so proud, like she might want to be more me than Mia after all. Gemmy asking if she could call her friend Tara to tell her, forgetting it was the middle of the night. I resolved then that I would tell her about what happened to me on Cook Island, that I wasn’t ashamed and I didn’t want her to think she should ever be. I was about to go up against a Republican opponent who wouldn’t hesitate to smear me the way someone in my own party would, and I wouldn’t leave any of my children emotionally unarmed for this.

  But in the bright light of the next morning, I was less sure. Knowing her mother was raped would change my daughter’s sense of security in the world in a way I just couldn’t bear. And she never would be raped. She was smarter than I was. More cautious. And I would never allow it. As if it were something I could control.

  Then Betts was nominated for the Court.

  Ginger called me the minute she heard; she couldn’t understand why Betts hadn’t told us before it was made public, why Betts didn’t trust us with her secret. But I didn’t think it had anything to do with not trusting us with secrets, and I still don’t, even now that I know about her affair with that partner fella in New York. I thought it had to do with her fearing I would ask her not to accept the nomination. But I wouldn’t have. I’d have told her she ought to. I’d have told her the Court needed her.