The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “About me and Trey, too. But I have to explain it to Annie first.”

  We both look to Laney and Betts making their way up the stone path toward the warmth inside the house.

  “How do I explain it to Annie, Mi?” she says.

  We stand watching as a boat heads out from Max’s pier, the ferry taking him across to collect the journalists again, as he’d promised; Max is a man of his word. I don’t have an answer for her. I don’t think she expects one.

  “I’d like to stand beside you when you speak to the press, Ginge,” I say.

  “I can do that part. No point in more than one of us exposing ourselves.” She smiles slightly, adjusting the hand that holds her towel. “No pun intended.”

  “I’d like to,” I say. “I have my own penance to pay.” I wasn’t the blogger, but I may as well have been. “I thought I loved him. Doug Pemberley. I thought he loved me.” I reached out and lifted her wet hair from her neck. “I wasn’t the one who was raped, but somehow it’s always felt like I was violated back then, too.”

  “We all were, weren’t we?” Ginger says. “Yes, we all were.”

  She’s right, of course. We were all different people when we got back into Mrs. Z’s dented-bumper Ford at the yacht club than we had been when we’d arrived.

  “I’d like to stand beside you, Ginge,” I repeat. “Everything is easier with a friend.”

  Ginger doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t object again either. She says, “I warned you not to let Doug Pemberley sing to you, you know.” Then, “I’m thinking right here. What do you think?”

  “On this pier?” I look down at the wood under my feet, at Laney and Betts now standing in the Chawterley doorway, looking back at us.

  “Where it began,” Ginger says.

  I want to object, to say the fact that we skinny-dipped with her brothers and Doug and Trey didn’t set the whole thing off, no matter what people might think when they hear the details. But I see in the way she studies the wood planks herself—not the water glittering with sunlight now, but the worn wood planks—that her beginning starts long before mine does.

  “There will be TV, you know,” I say.

  The corners of her wide mouth turn upward again, just barely. “I guess I hope so, right?”

  She looks up the path at Laney and Betts and, beyond them, to Faith’s Library and its impenetrable glass.

  “There’s got to be a book to write about this little adventure we’re having, don’t you think, Mi?” she says. “Wouldn’t you like to write a book someday? And there’s a very nice library here to write it in.”

  “It would be a very nice library from which to write a book of poems, Ginge,” I say.

  At the horizon, the full circle of the sun sits fat on the edge of the world now. It won’t be long before a boat shows up, before the press are upon us again and this all begins.

  “I have other things to do,” Ginger says. “I have Mother’s affairs to sort out. I have to put her work in good hands.”

  I say, “I’ve always liked your hands, Ginge.”

  “I hate my hands,” she says.

  “Good, strong hands,” I say. “So maybe this is the start of a new career for you?”

  A little more upturn. “Maybe it is,” she says, and although I was joking, she repeats the words with a knot of surprise in her voice: “Maybe it is.”

  The realization of what she’s saying hits her then. Can she fill her mother’s shoes? Could any of us?

  “You need a partner?” I ask.

  Her pale gray-blue eyes look almost as pleased as they do when she looks at her daughter. “I think I do, in fact,” she says. “Someone with press contacts would be ideal.”

  “I don’t suppose I can lose ten pounds off my hips before this plays out,” I say. “I’m sorry to say that the camera really does add ten pounds.”

  Ginger tips her head to the side a little and studies me. “You have beautiful hips, Mia,” she says finally.

  “Well, we can hope for camera blur,” I say.

  She laughs out loud, a wonderful sound that draws Laney and Betts back outside. She sounds like her mother in that moment. I half expect her to pull out a menthol cigarette and light it up and say, Humor is a much more effective way to get press coverage for something you care about than is rage.

  “You guys coming?” Betts calls.

  “I think we can hope for camera blur,” Ginger says as we head up the pier together. “In fact, I’d bet on that if I were you, if I were a betting kind of gal. But that’s not the kind of help I need today, Mi.”

  Betts

  FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

  WE WAKE ANNIE and Iz not long after we’ve dried off and dressed. We make pancakes with Faith’s flour and we sit in the Sun Room with the drapes open. We tell them the story of what happened that spring break.

  We say we made some choices that look pretty bad in retrospect. Drinking and skinny-dipping. Details we’ve never shared. We say the consequences of telling anyone had seemed worse than the consequences of not telling. Maybe we were right and maybe we were wrong, we say. But now it’s time to admit the truth.

  “I’m as much to blame as anyone,” Ginger says. “I … I had a relationship with Trey when I was a young girl.”

  Her daughter’s eyes the practical green Faith’s were.

  “A sexual relationship that started when I thought I was old enough to understand, but I wasn’t,” Ginger says. “I’m going to have to speak about that, too, Annie. So I wanted you to know first.”

  “Laney feels she needs to tell the truth now,” I explain. “It’s important for her to say this happened to her. To make the world see that it isn’t the victim’s fault.”

  When we finish explaining, the girls are silent for a long time.

  “It will cost you the Court, Mom,” Izzy finally says.

  I say nothing. She is probably right.

  “Have you told … who do you tell this to?” my ever-practical daughter asks. In her expression I see the same little girl who insisted on making her own peanut butter sandwiches to take to school. God, how she loved peanut butter.

  “The president?” she asks. We all laugh. It seems so improbable. But there it is.

  “I’ll go into town when we’re done with breakfast,” I say. “But we wanted to tell you girls first.”

  “You’re going to, like, call the president of the United States from a pay phone on some street corner?” Izzy says.

  “Outside the market,” Annie says.

  “Sometimes we have to make do with the resources we have,” I say.

  “You could call from Max’s phone,” Annie suggests. But Max is out on the ferry collecting the press.

  “This will cost you the Court, Mom,” Isabelle repeats. “It will be a scandal. A woman who was wild like that now up for the Court?”

  “A woman,” Ginger says. “Would you feel differently if we were talking about a man?”

  Izzy looks like her father in that moment. She wants to say no, but can’t. She would feel differently. Even her generation holds to the imbedded double standard. Boys sow oats, with all the implications of something positive and sustaining growing from their youthful indiscretions, while girls are loose. Or sluts. Or asking for it.

  Asking for what? I wonder as Ginger and I make our way to town in the little skiff not much later; I have no idea how to steer a boat much less how to find my way through the island guts.

  Asking for what? I think as Ginger ties the skiff up at the public pier.

  A fishing boat unloads an odiferous pile of crabs beside us, the season not quite over.

  We walk across the road to an old-fashioned phone booth with an accordion door. Ginger smiles at me through the dirty glass as I close it. She continues to watch me as I dial the number. As I wait on hold. As I say my piece. And listen. And insist that, yes, this is something that simply has to be said. It ought to bother me to be watched in this mo
ment. But Ginger’s presence leaves me comforted.

  I tender the withdrawal of my name for the Court. It’s taken from me and bantered about a room increasingly full of advisers. I cover the receiver with a hand and push the phone booth door open. The guys on the dock across the road are having a big time. I don’t suppose they would quiet down if I told them I had the president on the phone. I suppose they’d be quite sure I was pulling their sturdy legs. Or perhaps the blue-tinged crab legs they are still offloading from their boats.

  “Imagine Matka looking down from the mother-heaven,” I whisper to Ginger. “Saying, ‘Look at my Betsy. She’s stirred up a whole lot of excitement, hasn’t she?’ ”

  “Mother is sitting beside her,” Ginger says, “saying, ‘I always knew that daughter of yours would go far, Mrs. Z. I figured if she could make it halfway across the country in that wreck of a car you loaned them, she could get anywhere she ever wanted to go.’ ”

  “You drove the last leg, Ginge,” I say. “You’re the one who got us here. And got us home, too.”

  Ginger grins her double-wide grin. “Your mother up in the mother-heaven is saying, ‘Betsy, honey, that’s the president of the United States on the telephone. Stop talking to your friend and pay attention, for heaven’s sake.’ ”

  The room full of advisers is beginning to talk about the language. What exactly should be said about why exactly I don’t want to be a Supreme Court justice after all, thank you very much. The secretary of state pipes up, then. This isn’t her bailiwick of course. But she happened to be meeting with the president when I called and no one has asked her to leave.

  “Gentlemen,” she says, “I don’t want to be a naysayer here or intrude where I don’t belong.” This draws a chuckle from the whole room. “But isn’t anyone concerned about how this is going to look? We’ve staked a claim on this whole gender agenda thing, we’ve been telling the world how important women’s issues are to us, and here we are with a chance to show we mean it and instead we’re slipping out the back door?”

  There’s a long silence at the other end. Then the conversation comes right around the bend, turning to the details of exactly how this all should be presented to the press. I mention Ginger and everyone leaps on that idea. A non-official breaking the news. If it doesn’t go over well we can rewrite the script and deny anything Ginger has said, the idea seems to be.

  “I think you better hear this, Ginge,” I say.

  She crowds into the narrow booth with me to listen on the same receiver. Our heads press together. People go in and out of the grocery store. Onto the dock just yards away, fishermen unload the last of the season’s crabs.

  Betts

  FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

  ASKING FOR WHAT? I wonder again as the six of us, the Ms. Bradwells and Izzy and Anne, stand looking out the windows in Faith’s Library. The returning ferry is on the horizon. We take a silent, collective gulp.

  Asking to be accepted. Asking to be loved.

  Ginger squares her shoulders. “Okay, then,” she says. “Game on.”

  Mia says, “We’re sure about this, right?”

  We all turn to Laney. She nods slowly. “I am.”

  “We’re sure,” Ginger says. She looks at me. “If you are, Betts.”

  “I’m not going to be the one to call the president again if we’re changing our minds,” I say.

  The rest of us stand by the window as Ginger heads down the path. “Don’t worry, Lane,” she calls back to us, “the press won’t even be facing the house, they’ll be focused on me.” She crosses the rough wood of the pier. Walking the plank. And disappears below deck of the Row v. Wade.

  Izzy asks if we should close the drapes. Annie moves to do so but Laney says no. “I think we ought to leave them open,” she says. “I think Ginger deserves that, at least.”

  We watch the ferry creep toward the pier. The journalists are all out on deck. Cameras point toward the house. I take a step back. But the tree branches and the tinted low-e glass would make it hard to see in under any circumstances. And it’s bright out and dim inside. They can’t see us watching them. We can hold on to the illusion we’re being brave while remaining invisible.

  “We should turn on the television,” Laney says. “I want to hear what Ginger says.”

  Down on the pier Arthur jumps from the ferry to secure it.

  “They won’t run it live,” I say.

  Annie finds the remote in a lower cabinet of her grandmother’s library. Clicks the television on to a commercial. CBS. “Grammie liked Katie Couric,” she says. “Katie and the NewsHour.”

  “I’d have thought she would have preferred Diane Sawyer,” Mia says.

  Annie shrugs. “Grammie didn’t like to be predictable.”

  The reporters climb from the boat. They look fresher and considerably drier. Hungry for news. It’s Monday. I have to be back in the capital tomorrow. Within twenty-four hours they’ll get their shot at me and they know that. They’re willing to get wet today if need be. Although the sky has cleared now. It’s a bright, sunny, unseasonably warm October morning. One last glimpse back at summer before winter sets in.

  We all stand watching as Ginger steps from the Row v. Wade onto the pier.

  “What is Aunt Ginger wearing?” Izzy asks.

  “A towel?” Laney says.

  “Maybe she’s trying to look like she just happened to be out for a swim?” I suggest uncertainly. “Was that the plan?”

  Mia smiles slightly. Laney frowns.

  Annie flips through the morning talk shows until she finds CNN. The newscaster is saying they are about to go live to Cook Island in the Chesapeake Bay. They’ve just received word that some announcement is about to be made by Elsbieta Zhukovski, the nominee for the Supreme Court.

  “Not me,” I say. “I’m the coward here.”

  The newscaster is laying out the details. My confirmation for the Supreme Court appointment had been expected to be swift until questions arose at Friday’s hearing “about a death in Professor Zhukovski’s past that may or may not have been accidental.” Emphasis on “may not.” They won’t come out and say it but they’re hoping I killed him. Wouldn’t their ratings soar on that news.

  “Professor Zhukovski has reportedly been holed up with friends all weekend at a remote summer home on Cook Island …” the newsman is saying.

  “ ‘Professor,’ ” I say. “At least they’re giving me that.”

  “… with, among others, Helen Robeson-Weils, who is in a tight race for the Georgia state senate.”

  “My campaign manager is throwing things at the TV now,” Laney says, “having conniptions.”

  “What exactly are conniptions?” I ask.

  Mia, ignoring me, says, “Name recognition, Laney. Most voters will remember your name but not why they know it.”

  Laney rolls her eyes.

  “Most voters,” Mia repeats without conviction.

  And then there is Ginger on the television screen. The microphones are being thrust at her so aggressively that she takes a step back.

  “She’s definitely wearing a towel,” Izzy says.

  The camera focuses tightly on Ginger’s face. She is clearly about to speak when a startled murmur arises from the journalist crowd. A gasp, really.

  We turn back to the windows as Ginger’s steady voice comes over the television: “I have a note from my mother, Faith Cook Conrad, which I believe may have some bearing on the death of Trey Humphrey on this island thirty years ago.”

  She is standing naked on the pier.

  “Shit!” Laney and I say together. She takes my hand in hers. Mia’s in her other hand.

  “What in the good Lord’s name is she doing?” Laney says. “What is she saying? Why is she talking about Faith?”

  I squeeze her hand as Isabelle takes my arm. Her shoulder presses reassuringly against mine.

  “If she doesn’t talk about Faith,” Izzy says, “you lose your election,
Aunt Laney. And Mom doesn’t get confirmed.”

  “Or probably even if she does,” I say.

  Izzy shrugs. “Some chance is better than none, Mom.”

  “We’re both long shots anyway,” Laney says quietly.

  “But you always have been, Aunt Laney,” Izzy says. “You and Mom both, and look how far you’ve come.”

  My daughter’s words overwhelm me for a moment. She sounds as proud of me as I am of her.

  “But what the hell is she doing with no clothes on?” I say.

  “You didn’t clear this particular wardrobe choice with the president, I’m guessing,” my daughter says.

  Annie smiles: her mother’s wide mouth under her grandmother’s patrician nose. “That’s the way Grammie would have done it,” she says. “ ‘If you want to draw attention to an issue, you have to be willing to draw attention to yourself.’ ”

  “What better way to draw attention to the issue of how female sexuality is bungled by our society than by stripping down naked?” Mia says.

  Annie is laughing now, actually laughing. Her mother is standing naked in front of the world and she is completely unfazed. There is a hint of her grandmother behind her quiet façade after all. “Grammie would be so proud of Mom now,” she says. And she is right.

  I remember Matka talking about watching me play the zhaleika onstage by myself that first time. Wanting to go with me and knowing it was time for me to play alone. One person plays alone, it is one thing, but two plays together is so much more. I suppose I always knew she was proud of me. I suppose this is something Ginger wanted that I always took for granted: a mother who was proud of me. Who I knew was proud of me. Even though you miss half the notes, I am so very proud. I am always be proud.

  Laney steps closer to the television. “So the good news is all those folks are only focusing on Ginger’s face.”

  Annie points the remote and clicks through a few stations. And there is Ginger standing on the pier. Her breasts and her crotch are blurred, but there is no doubt that she is standing in the altogether. Standing confidently despite the sag of her breasts. The cellulite on her slender legs, which aren’t blurred.