The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The way they dig into a Supreme Court nominee’s past, though, surely someone would question her being there that night Trey Humphrey was said to have shot himself. I couldn’t help wondering what they might ask her and what she might say, whether she would be under oath if the questions came and if it would matter if she wasn’t. The planets were gathering the way they had that week on Cook Island, lining up against me with Mercury about to rise.

  And so I told the boys first. Willie J and Manny were home from college for the summer, so I told them together with Little Joe. I told them in a different way than I would tell Gemmy, but it gave me a little practice at the children reacting. I said this happened to me, and I wanted them to know in case it came out in the press. I said I wasn’t at fault, that bad things happen to good people, that I wasn’t ashamed. I told them if it did come out, that was what I would say: I’m not ashamed. And being boys, their reaction was less complicated; boys do get raped, but they never imagine they will. My sons’ reactions focused on me, on what it meant about me, and it was enough for them to know that it was a long time ago, before I’d even met their daddy, and that the fella was dead. I expect they heard it as much as anything as a caution to be gentle with girls, to make sure they weren’t pushing anyone. The boys didn’t ask too many questions, and at the first pause Manny wondered if Little Joe was getting enough practice at the hoop in the off season, and the three of them took a ball to the high school nets. They might have talked among themselves there, but I expect they did not.

  That left me alone to talk with Gemmy, in the quiet of the house that had been the only home she’d ever known. I found her in her bedroom, leaning back against her pink pillows, the matching comforter on the floor in the company of yesterday’s underwear and socks. I believe I smiled when I saw them. I believe I thought how very young an eighteen-year-old girl is. I believe I wondered how I could ever let her go away to college in September, and how my own mama had let me—her only child—go.

  But what I said was, “Gemmy.” And then I repeated her name, “Gem,” remembering that a gem was a good thing, beautiful and strong. I sat at the end of her bed, on the sheet where the comforter wasn’t, and I set my hand on her long, skinny, bare foot, and said, “Gemmy, can I tell you about something that happened to me a long time ago?”

  THE COOL OF the window glass against my shoulders soothes me, as do Betts’s gentle fingers on my hair. Poor Ginger, I think. She’s standing there at her dead mama’s desk watching Mia wipe dust from Faith’s framed copy of her African women piece, one of the few things Faith kept in this room other than her books. How many times over the years have I listened to Ginger carry on about her mama framing that thing? Nearly as many times as the two of us talked about getting our daughters to tell us things we surely never told our mamas when we were their age.

  I think of the way Izzy gave Betts what-for this morning when Betts was poking around about this new fella of hers. Annie and Gem never sass Ginger or me the way Izzy has sassed Betts her whole life. I believe we’ve privately welcomed that as evidence that we’re the better mamas. But it strikes me now that Izzy does tell Betts everything, and I wonder if there aren’t things my daughter doesn’t tell me.

  “Gemmy already knows about what happened, Ginge,” I say quietly. “I don’t have to tell her over the telephone. I told her this summer.” I hesitate, but then I do ask, “Does Annie know?”

  In the silence that follows we all know the answer. Ginger has never told another soul about her and Trey. Our reaction back then had shown her what she surely knew on some level but likely couldn’t face and maybe still can’t: that her relationship with Trey would be considered sick. His sickness, but she didn’t see that, she saw it as her own.

  Ginger sinks down into one of the guest chairs, fingering the back of her head where all that long hair I used to so envy no longer is. “If you say anything, Lane, they’ll find out everything there is to find out about me, too. That I slept with him. That I found him and maybe he was dead or maybe I left him to die instead of going for help. That maybe I killed him.”

  “But the Lord’s truth is he shot himself,” I insist. “It was an accident.”

  “And whether there are other truths that did or didn’t happen around that truth isn’t the point,” Betts agrees. “I think we need to back up here. No one is asking if Trey Humphrey did anything to anyone Friday night.”

  “No one has the rape,” Mia says.

  “And how will they get it if none of us talks?” Betts says. “Talking about it just muddies the truth.”

  “Which is that Trey fucking shot himself,” Ginger says.

  “But how can we be sure they don’t have it?” I ask. “How can we be sure this blogger fella doesn’t have everything that happened that night?”

  Mia rubs her temple at her cowlick. She looks like she needs air, like the extra weight she’s picked up is stressing her poor heart.

  Ginger crosses her arms, hugging the Transformations to her chest. I silently will her not to say what I know she thinks, that Mia is the blogger. If Mia is the blogger, let her say so herself.

  What Mia says, though, is, “I didn’t tell him anything about what Trey did. Honestly. I might have told Beau the night after it happened, I don’t know, I was so upset I’m not sure what I said. But I never told Doug a thing about the rape.”

  Mia

  FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

  “I WANTED TO marry Doug,” I say to Laney, trying to make her understand I never meant to hurt her. “I thought I would marry him. I know you didn’t want me to but I thought … I thought maybe with time. And I wanted to start it right, not like with Andy, not with secrets. I thought … I don’t know. I thought I wanted to marry him, but maybe I didn’t even really want that. Maybe I was just going to make the same mistake I made with Andy, marrying someone I liked well enough because I wanted to be married. Because I wanted to be part of a family and if I didn’t marry him, who would I ever marry? I wasn’t trying to tell him anything about Trey, I was trying to explain about Beau. Because they were friends. I wanted him to know about Beau.”

  Laney doesn’t move from the rain-streaked window. She just stares at me, as does Betts, standing beside her, and Ginger, in the chair by Faith’s desk. It’s so quiet you can hear the blowing of pressurized air, Faith’s careful measures to protect these books she also drenched in tobacco smoke. The things we are willing to give up, and the things we can’t.

  Was that what I was doing, trying to tell Doug about Beau? Or was I trying to break it off with him in a way that allowed me to hold on to the idea that I did love him, that I wasn’t so selfish as to destroy a twenty-five-year marriage for a thing that had never even been love?

  “Doug Pemberley wrote the blog, everything about it is his style,” I say. It has my almost-fiancé’s fingerprints all over it: the overuse of the word “probable,” the lack of commas, the short, clipped sentences that so remind me of Betts.

  “He knows everyone in D.C. from his years as a lobbyist.”

  Ginger pulls the damned book she’s holding even more tightly to her chest, as if to shield her heart. “He wanted to be a writer when we were kids,” she says, the doubt in her voice falling away with each successive word. “He tried to be a writer, but he couldn’t make enough money.”

  I try to imagine again how Doug could have done this to us. He’s hurt, sure. I hurt him. I left him months ago, but he didn’t really understand it was over until I refused to have dinner with him in D.C. this week. If I were him, I’d want to hurt me back, too. Like I’d wanted to hurt Andy. Which is, I suppose, why I fled after our breakup, to put some distance between us. Why I suppose my mom left my dad every summer: trying to avoid hurting him. But that doesn’t justify Doug’s dragging this out now. If he wanted to stir up a scandal to kill my chances of finding another job, fine. But coldly ignoring the collateral damage to Betts, which he must have anticipated—that’s inexcu
sable.

  Except that Doug isn’t like that. It’s not just his singing voice that’s sweet. I think that’s why I couldn’t believe the post was his when I first saw it in the airport, even though I’d been following the blog for a few weeks by then, even though I was pretty sure it was Doug’s. It wasn’t until I read the post at Max’s, until I reread it carefully, that I was sure. And even then, not sure enough to tell Ginger and Laney and Betts.

  So maybe it’s something more forgivable than bitterness? Maybe he thinks no one should be considered for the Supreme Court without all the facts? You couldn’t exactly fault him for that. You might even find him honorable—a good guy, really, who maybe has never gotten over finding his best friend dead in a pool of blood when they were both young men. You might think it’s high time he be allowed to understand the truth about what happened to his friend. You might even think he would have been a great husband, if only you could have figured out a way to save your own dear friend the hurt your marrying him might have caused her. You might hurt as much as he does, even knowing you made the right choice. You might think you’ve become your mother, or even something less. All those summer friends, but she gave them up for Bobby and me. Could I do that? I’m not the giving-up type. I’m better with borrowed children, Baby Bradwells I can love when it’s convenient, who don’t have to rely on my love.

  “I don’t know why he wrote it,” I say. “I’ve tried to understand why he wrote it, and to be honest I think maybe he just thought it was the right thing to do, that if there are questions about Trey’s death they ought to be answered.”

  Betts frowns. “Then why didn’t he name me?”

  I focus on the rain on the window, the tree branches and stone steps and pier distorted through the wet glass. “Because he doesn’t really believe you’re involved?” I suggest. “But he isn’t sure? He’s not sure enough about anything to name names, but he’s been carrying the guilt of Trey’s suicide his whole life, and he wants to set it down.”

  I recognize the truth of this as I say it. Doug just meant to set his own hurt down, finally. If he’d meant to hurt me, he would have welcomed tossing my name toward scandal in pursuit of the truth. He would have justified naming me on the excuse of my knowing something I haven’t admitted, to give the questioners a place to start. But the only name he gave them was Trey’s name and the mention of the Conrad summer home. A home more than a few friends from Washington had visited over the years. Faith Cook Conrad’s house. Faith, whose protégée, Elsbieta Zhukovski, was now the nominee for the Supreme Court—people would know that because Faith introduced us Ms. Bradwells to everyone she could. Connections and timing, that’s what she thought it took for women to succeed, and she shared every connection she could with us.

  Elsbieta Zhukovski, who’d been a law school friend of Faith’s wild daughter, someone would have remembered—after which any of the party guests might recall that the daughter had had her law school roommates with her that weekend, hadn’t she? Half the guests and probably a few people who hadn’t even attended would have remembered meeting Betts at Mr. Conrad’s birthday party then, because who doesn’t want to have known a Supreme Court justice since she was a girl? And any single one of them wondering aloud whether Betts had known the dead nephew would have fired up the rumor mill. The public loves a scandal. We always have.

  “Doug doesn’t know anything,” I insist. “All he knows is that I had doubts about Trey’s death.”

  “But how can you be sure?” Betts asks quietly.

  “I just said I—”

  The thought registers then: we aren’t the only ones who knew what happened. Trey knew what happened, too. Trey knew what he had done for a whole day before he blew his guts out. Or before someone else did it for him. All this time we’ve been thinking we could control this, but who knows what Trey himself might have told someone? Not rape, probably. But he might have talked about Laney without calling it rape.

  “That’s why you made me rehearse that line over and over,” Betts says. “You knew this was going to surface—”

  “I didn’t, Betts. I swear I didn’t have any idea. I was as shocked by the WOWD blog as you were. When I saw it in the airport—”

  “You saw it in the airport? Before the hearing?”

  “You were already at the microphone, Betts. By the time I got off the plane, the afternoon session had already begun.”

  “And you had no idea it was coming? You just happened to check one single blog at the airport and it happened to be this one?”

  “It wasn’t like that, Betts. I swear it wasn’t like that. I’ve been reading his blog for weeks. I … He’s a nice guy, Betts, and he just wanted to have dinner while I was in town, he was just trying to understand what he did wrong and he didn’t do anything wrong, I was a schmuck, I just—How could I—”

  Laney won’t even look at me now. She stares at the gray-black television screen over the fireplace.

  “There just was no way to make that relationship work,” I say.

  “You made me practice that line a million times, Mi,” Betts insists. “ ‘I have nothing to add to the public record on that.’ Like you knew it was coming.”

  “But Mia has always been like that, Betts,” Ginger says. She sets the book in her lap and settles her manicured hands over the title, Transformations. “She always knows without knowing she knows. Mia, the Savant.”

  “Mia, the asked,” I say. “You asked me, Betts. That first phone call, when I was in Madagascar, you asked me. ‘What do I say if someone asks about Cook Island?’ I thought maybe you knew it was coming. I thought maybe you somehow knew something none of the rest of us did.”

  Betts

  FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

  “I THINK WE should go for a walk,” Laney says. Just like that. As if I’m not about to bludgeon Mia. As if we’re only discussing whether the storm has passed enough to go outside.

  “It would be a nice thing to do with the girls,” she says.

  Ginger looks as astonished as I feel. But she sets the book with the photo and envelope beside the miniature peacock book. She says Annie would like that. In her response I see what she sees: Laney has hit a wall. She can’t talk about this anymore. She can’t listen anymore.

  Ginger prods Mia to call the girls. They’ll come for her, she says. “They all think you hung the fucking moon.”

  A minute later, the girls tumble down the center stairs like three-year-olds just offered a ride on a merry-go-round.

  “Umbrellas in the mudroom,” Ginger says.

  But she hesitates when we get to the mudroom. Her bare feet sit wide and long across a join of tile. “You guys go,” she says. “I think I’ll stay here and start going through Mother’s things.”

  Annie bends her long, thin neck to study the mudroom floor. Ginger must see how much her daughter wants her to come. Still, she doesn’t move to put on shoes.

  “Do you still keep those boot things you wear duck hunting, Ginge?” I ask. “Seems like a perfect day for them.”

  Ginger stares at me the way she did the night in the hot tub when she claimed to hate waking up next to a guy she doesn’t know. I hold her gaze as steadily as I did then. This time it’s for her rather than for me. It’s okay, I try to say with my eyes. I’ve been sleeping in Zack’s old shirts for almost thirty years now, and I couldn’t wear my mother’s shoes either. I want to tell her that she has no idea how very much her mother loved her. That Faith loved her as much as she herself loves Annie. I want to tell her that Annie needs her just as much as she needed her own mother. That all this indifference is just an act, a way of defending herself from the fear of being rejected by rejecting her mother first.

  Give her a few years and she’ll come back to you, I want to say. But I can’t say it. I can’t say any of it. Not with our daughters here and probably not even if they weren’t. So I just keep meeting her gaze.

  She opens a closet door and pulls out a
pair of waders. “Anyone who wants them is welcome to them,” she says.

  We all decline.

  “I’m sure I couldn’t walk any distance in boots like that,” Mia says with a note of challenge shaded in her plain brown eyes: Go ahead, Ginge. Show everyone you can outdo me.

  Maybe Ginger sees Mia is trying to play her or maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t, because she pulls the heavy boots on and leads the way out the door.

  GINGER

  COOK ISLAND

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

  WHAT VOYAGE THIS, little girl? The damned “Briar Rose” line echoes through my mind as my old hunting boots (which have always been as comfortable as a second skin) rub at my bare heels. We’re walking along the bay, my own little girl forgoing Mia’s proffered umbrella to share mine. It’s hard to say why this makes me want to cry, but it does, as surely as seeing that photo of Trey and me stuck in the pages of that damned poem has.

  I look younger in that photo than Annie does now. Still with braces on my teeth. Trey and I standing together after a morning of duck hunting, me wearing these very same boots. Had we fucked in the Triangle Blind the morning it was taken? Fucked. It’s such a brutal word, and yet there it is. I thought what Trey and I did back then was making love, those quick takings in a skiff late at night, or in the Triangle Blind while everyone else was focused on shooting the damned ducks, or up in the fucking lighthouse that sits abandoned ahead of us, its darkness inviting ships to crash onto Misty Vista Rock.

  We haven’t intentionally headed toward the island’s end, but we seem irresistibly drawn toward the lighthouse. There is no direction I can go on this island without facing something, though. The other direction leads to the Triangle Blind.

  Trey liked the Triangle Blind best, the nearness of my father and my brothers. Quick, frantic sex that he came to already hard. Sometimes I could see his anticipation even as he was putting on his boots in the mudroom, as he was first loading his gun. How very long I hung on to the idea that that first time at Fog’s Ghost Cove was the beginning of love.