The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Mother must have known all along. Why else would she leave our photo stuck into “Briar Rose,” a poem about incest, as if she might actually have approved? Her thirteen-year-old daughter and the golden boy. Golden man.

  I take Annie’s arm, handing her the umbrella, ceding that little bit of control to her. If any man had so much as touched her when she was thirteen, I’d have had him in jail for eternity.

  She’s eighteen now. No longer a minor. No more actionable than I was when I took off with Scratch. If she decided to run off to South Africa with a sleazy playwright, what could I do? Seethe, like Betts is doing now over Izzy and her divorced business school professor, to be sure. But is that it?

  Izzy is walking with Mia, ignoring her mother, leaving Betts to share an umbrella with Laney, with no idea that the two of them have convinced themselves that their futures are behind them, that there will be no Drug-Lord Bradwell Supreme Court justice, no Cicero-Bradwell state senator to represent the Georgia Forty-second or anyplace else. Which is the problem I should be solving, but it’s impossible to focus on any problem other than my daughter’s with her walking beside me. Sweet eighteen and never been kissed, which I would choose for her over what I chose for myself. I would choose it for myself if I could choose again, over not-so-sweet thirteen and already fucked. Still, I worry that Annie is lonely. Still I think the solution to loneliness is a boy.

  I was lonely when I first met the Ms. Bradwells, despite all the boys, or maybe because of them. Laney was lonely, and Mia and Betts, too, I think. We all had friends, family, relationships, but we none of us ever quite fit in anywhere until we met each other. Sometimes I think I want that kind of friendship for Annie even more than I want her to find romance: a friend who will stand by her the way we stood by Laney. The way, I see now, Mia and Laney and Betts all stood by me. It isn’t that our friendship has saved me from loneliness or anything else, really. But our friendship makes it all easier to bear. Our friendship leaves us with someone to call when we need to. Friends we know love us even when it seems no one else does. Friends who are sometimes lonely, too.

  It must be menopause, all this wanting to cry I’ve got going on here. Bring the bloody bloodless change on and be done with it.

  What voyage this, little girl?

  Mother must have known, that must be what she is telling me, leaving a photo of Trey and me wedged into “Briar Rose” with a note for Margaret. For Margaret, should the time come. Whatever the hell that means. Should Mother be the first of them to die, I guess. But Aunt Margaret is dead, too. The time has come and gone.

  It’s impossible that Mother would have approved of me having sex with Trey when I was thirteen, though. Even with the golden boy. Which means what? That she knew and disapproved, but did nothing to stop me? Could she not get past the idea of the publicity it would stir if the word got out that the thirteen-year-old daughter of a prominent feminist lawyer was promiscuous, and with an older cousin, no less? Mother loved publicity when it promoted one of her causes, and hated it when it intruded into her personal life. I remember the calls from Beau when I was living in South Africa with Scratch: “Mother would haul you back here by your long hair if she could. But you’re not a minor anymore so there’s nothing she can do, and it would only fuel the press.”

  Fuel the press. Those words had stung so, although I’d pretended they didn’t. I’d pretended I was too busy living the life of the darling muse of the soon-to-be-famous playwright to care what Mother thought. Pattie Boyd to Scratch’s Eric Clapton, a relationship that ended badly, too.

  Shit, I would shoot Annie if she ran off with someone like Scratch. I would get on a plane and fly to South Africa and shoot them both.

  Annie adjusts the angle of the umbrella as the rain blows sideways, soaking us despite her efforts. Iz turns to Annie and sings the first few silly doo-doo-doo-doo notes of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Mia warns Izzy good-humoredly. “If you’re gonna dance here, you just leave the umbrella with me.”

  She and Laney and Betts are already laughing as Izzy grins just the way Betts used to do in law school, and sometimes still does. I wonder if humor is hereditary or learned. Betts, the Funny One; me, the Rebel; Laney, the Good Girl; and Mia, the Savant. That’s what I’m thinking as Izzy pirouettes away from Mia, taking the umbrella with her, swirling it around her as if she’s Gene Kelly, the start of a routine our three girls have done in pairs or all together so many times over the years, and yet still I never tire of it.

  And then the rain is pouring down on me, and Annie is spinning away into the unlit grayness with her umbrella lowered, too. Our umbrella lowered. Our umbrella that is doing me not one bit of good. Only my bare feet in the heavy boots are dry.

  Mia and I scurry to join Laney and Betts, our faces leaning close as we try to squeeze in under the single umbrella. All four of our asses hang out in the rain, getting soaked. We watch the two girls dancing and singing, stomping in puddles and kicking up muddy water, intentionally splashing us.

  We breathed in rain, I think. A line I would like to have written.

  I guess Laney is right about how I hide my feelings away in other people’s poems. I’m afraid to put them in my own poems, for fear they might be seen.

  “They need a lamppost,” Betts says. “What kind of establishment do you run here, Ginger, that you don’t even provide a lamppost?”

  The girls have closed the umbrellas now and are strumming them like guitars. They open them again, and flip them; and I remember the first time they actually caught the umbrellas, so surprised to succeed that they’d dissolved into laughter and never finished the routine. Now, they move right into what Betts calls the big-swirling-with-umbrellas part, and then the part where Gene Kelly goes up and down on the curb. There’s no curb here, but the granite rocks that edge the path serve well enough.

  “Do you think they even imagine harm can ever come to them?” Laney asks.

  Mia crosses her arms like the cop who comes in at the end of the scene in the movie, a role the girls persuaded her to play years ago.

  “Do we want them to?” she asks.

  “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo,” Laney begins singing, the wind-down. I join her, “Doo doo doo doo.” Fortunately for all of us, Betts doesn’t sing.

  GINGER

  NANA’S ROOM, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

  THE SEXTON VOLUME with the photo and the note were already in Nana’s Room when I climbed into my childhood bed; I had slipped away from dinner on the excuse of going to the bathroom and hidden them here. I want to open the note, and I don’t want to; I want to tear the photo into pieces, and I don’t want that either. I guess mostly I don’t want anyone else to connect this photo and this poem, although I can’t even say why. The Ms. Bradwells know I slept with Trey, and I can’t imagine Izzy or Annie would make anything of the photo wedged into these particular pages. Perhaps I’m mortified by the idea of the Ms. Bradwells knowing that Mother knew about Trey and me. It makes no sense: why should I care? But I could feel it in the way I slipped into the library to fetch the book on the pretext of finding Band-Aids for the heel blisters I hadn’t, quite frankly, even felt until Betts pointed them out.

  I’m like a child waking from a nightmare, afraid to climb from the bed for fear that the monster will come out to get me. Holding the blanket to my chin and imagining if I lie still enough I won’t be seen. I want to climb from this bed and pull on my boots again, walk out into the dark by myself, damn the blisters. A possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night. I’m not brave, though. I dread what haunts the black air everywhere on this island.

  All night I am laying / poems away in a long box. But my box is empty, it has none of Sexton’s “starving windows.” No skinless / trees … / in shapes of agony. No and what of the dead? They lie without shoes / in their stone boats.

  My poems are no sadder than the years’ worth of words I wasted chasing partnership at Caruth
ers, though, Laney is right about that. Wanting to be a permanent female cog in a tired old male wheel that would never change anything except perhaps which few hands held a lot of dollars. How foolish was I, really, to think anything about that would bring me immortality? Mother had tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. All I could hear were the echoes of her anthem for my teenage years, her voice all those mornings shouting, “It’s nearly noon, Ginger! Get up and make something of yourself, for God’s sake.”

  It’s nowhere near noon; it’s an hour or two before daybreak, but I heed Mother’s long-stale advice, and I get out of bed, thinking of the two books Mother left to Aunt Margaret, and the blisters on my heels, and the dreadful journal pages filled with my poems. I take the book I brought to read on the train from New York, John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth?, to the chair by the fireplace, and I open it and read what he has to say about the biblical litany of Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come.” I consider skipping to the next chapter; I’m not much for God or the Bible. But since he calls the poem “as fine as it gets in our time” I read to see what he means:

  Let the light of late afternoon

  shine through chinks in the barn, moving

  up the bales as the sun moves down.

  Let the crickets take up chafing

  as a woman takes up her needles

  and her yarn. Let evening come.

  Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

  in long grass. Let the stars appear

  and the moon disclose her silver horn.

  Let the fox go back to his sandy den.

  Let the wind die down. Let the shed

  go black inside. Let evening come.

  To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

  in the oats, to the air in the lung

  let evening come.

  Let it come, as it will, and don’t

  be afraid. God does not leave us

  comfortless, so let evening come.

  I am weeping as I read the last line: for the loss of Mother, for all the things we never said to each other, everything we never shared. For the pain she must have felt at being unable to protect me. Could I have borne it if Annie did what I did and refused to listen to me? I weep for Laney, for everything she endured without my support. For what I went through myself without any idea how to make sense of it. For what Betts is going through now, and Laney, too, and even Mia, who must feel this is her fault. It’s all so awful, and yet it’s brought me to this place where Mother died; it has brought me here not alone, as I’ve dreaded coming, but in the company of my dearest friends. It’s brought us all together when we need each others’ comfort as much as we ever have.

  RAINDROPS TICK AGAINST the windows as I slip into the Captain’s Office, with the book and the photo and the note. Before I can even whisper Laney’s name, a bedside light clicks on, and Mia says, “Ginger! God, you scared me to death.”

  As I blink against the brightness, Laney, too, sits up in bed.

  Mia reaches for her eyeglasses on the nightstand. “I thought you were … I don’t know. Hamlet’s ghost or something.”

  My mother’s ghost. Faith Cook Conrad’s Ghost.

  I’m wearing the underwear and blouse I wore to the Judiciary Committee hearing, the same thing I’ve slept in each night since we’ve been here.

  “Ginge,” Mia says. “You okay?”

  “I thought you were with Max,” I say, I don’t even know why. “I thought you were, you know, slipping out to screw him like you did with Beau.”

  “Ginge,” Laney says, soothing and scolding all at once.

  Some part of me knows I should take the words back. I hate myself for saying them. I don’t have any idea why I’m saying them. They aren’t even true. Max is sleeping in his own bed in his own house tonight, and even I haven’t imagined Mia would slip out of Chawterley and make her way through the unfamiliar darkness of Cook Island to Max’s house even if he’s left the light on like he did for Mother.

  “What’s wrong, Ginger?” Mia says. “What’s wrong?”

  In the soft tone of her voice, I hear how perfectly ridiculous it is for me to hold Mia’s sleeping with my brother against her after all this time. Still, I don’t take the words back. I push my glasses into place and look to the rain outside.

  The empty swivel chair at the Captain’s rolltop desk inexplicably moves, as if the Captain’s Ghost is pushing back from his after-death work. My heart is whacking against my fucking chest before I hear Betts’s voice from under the center drawer say, “Other than the fact that half the world thinks one of us shot Trey Humphrey?”

  “Lordy, Betts! You scared me half to death!” Laney says as Betts emerges like some fantastic sea creature arising from the waves.

  “I couldn’t sleep when we went to bed,” Betts explains, “so I opened the connecting door.” She shrugs her square diver’s shoulders. “I could hear Laney’s little snore, which is oddly comforting.”

  “I don’t snore,” Laney protests.

  Mia rolls her eyes.

  “Well, glad I could help you sleep,” Laney says.

  “Oh, you didn’t,” Betts says. “But I did feel less alone as I lay awake.”

  They all turn to me standing there in just my underwear and blouse.

  “Trey Humphrey’s Ghost,” Mia says. “I didn’t think you were Hamlet’s ghost, Ginge. I thought you were Trey Humphrey’s Ghost.”

  Laney scoots over and thumps her hand on the bed. “It’s cold in here,” she says, an invitation to climb in next to her, under the covers of the twin that I still think of as Frankie’s bed although he and his succession of wives sleep in Emma’s Peek these days. Laney hands the extra pillow to me, and I snuggle under the covers next to her, feeling the weight of the Sexton volume pressing the soft cotton sheet against the skin of my bare thighs. The last time I climbed into bed with Laney was after finding Trey in the watch room, dead or almost dead.

  Betts sits on the end of Mia’s bed, her legs falling as if by memory into that yoga pose she does with both soles facing upward, like she’s about to start chanting a mantra. She untucks the bedspread from around one of the end posts and pulls it up over her legs.

  “That’s one of the books your mom didn’t leave you,” she says. The way she says it doesn’t make me feel bad, though. It leaves me thinking maybe Mrs. Z left her favorite zhaleika to a friend.

  “The Sexton poems,” Laney says. “Like the poems you write.”

  “I wish,” I say. I smooth my hand over the front cover of the book, as if smoothing the wrinkles from the sheet underneath. And then I’m spilling it all, about the photograph and the note for Aunt Margaret stuck into a poem about incest. “I don’t even know why I care that Mother knew about Trey and me,” I say. “But I hate the idea of her thinking of it. I hate the idea of her agonizing with Aunt Margaret about whether the press will get hold of the scandal of her promiscuous thirteen-year-old.”

  “Ginge.” Betts runs a hand along the smooth wood of the bedpost, shaking her head as if she disapproves of me as much as Mother ever did.

  “You should have been her daughter, Betts,” I say. “She would have liked that: perfect little virgin Betts who will go on to be appointed to the fucking Supreme Court.” I feel the tears begin to stream down my cheeks, but I will not acknowledge them.

  “Ginge,” Laney says, and she puts her arm around my shoulders.

  Let the wind die down. Let the shed / go black inside.

  Mia gets up and looks for a tissue but can’t find one. Betts says she has some in her briefcase, which is just in the closet. She climbs under the desk on her hands and knees so that her skinny little yoga-toned butt sticks out under the drawer, then reemerges with her swanky black leather briefcase. She climbs back onto the bed and sits cross-legged again, zips open the briefcase, and looks inside.

  What she pulls out is not a tissue but rather the strand of black pearls she wore at the hearing. Mother’s pearls. She sets them aside and pulls out a sma
ll plastic packet of tissues, which she tosses to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean any of that. I don’t know why I say things like that.”

  I take a tissue from the package and blow my nose.

  “So you’re absconding with my mother’s pearls?” I say, trying to sound lighter than I feel.

  Betts holds them out across the gap between the beds. “Guess I won’t be needing them anymore.”

  The gold clasp is cool against my palm, but it warms as I close my fingers over it, remembering the smell of Mother’s perfume on evenings when she and Daddy were going out, the luster of the blue/green/purple-gray pearls around the matte skin of her graceful neck. Remembering Daddy’s expression as he turned to see Mother descend the stairs, the tendons of his neck (as thick and ungraceful as mine) straining just before he stepped to the bottom of the stairs to take her in his arms. He always kissed her, then, and told her she looked stunning. Not just beautiful, but stunning. I never could understand why he loved her. They were so different, and I was like him.

  I lean back against the headboard. “What kind of mother lets her thirteen-year-old-daughter sleep with her twenty-year-old cousin?” I pull another tissue from the pack. “What kind of mother doesn’t at least try to put a stop to that?”

  “She couldn’t have known, Ginge,” Laney says quietly.

  “She left our photo in a … in a fucking poem about incest.”

  What voyage this, little girl?

  Betts worries her bare big toe, sliding her fingers over a callus. “She didn’t know before I told her,” she says quietly, “and then Trey was dead.”

  A rush of wind crushes tiny raindrops against the windows in a gust, the panes rattling with the force of nothing more than condensed mist.