The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Ginger begins to describe in detail what happened. The rape. Her own insistence that we not reveal it for fear of what it would do to Laney’s professional reputation to bring rape charges against an important young partner in her law firm. The improbability of those charges being believed. The history of Ginger’s own relationship with Trey.

  “Aunt Laney?” I hear Izzy say.

  Laney has skinned her shoes off and shed her slacks and underwear all at once. She is already heading from Faith’s Library into the Ballroom Salon. Toward the back foyer. She pulls her top over her head as she hurries without quite seeming to hurry. No trace of the gawky girl she once was. Festina lente, I remember her saying. Hurry slowly. A phrase Laney often used to describe the way Ginger slipped into class without interrupting whenever she was late. As she so often was.

  Laney moves smoothly. With incredible grace. She makes fifty-something look awfully good.

  “Laney, you can’t,” Mia calls out.

  Laney glances back at us and shrugs. “Veritas omnia vincit,” she calls to me. “Truth defeats all things.” She keeps walking, her long, dark body moving toward the door and the press and the certainty, finally, that the things that happened to her only happened to her. Not because of her. Not because she deserved anything but the best from this world. Her mother would be so proud of her, I think as I skin off my shoes. And so would Faith.

  This you must remember, Elsbieta: To be a leader, you must always do what is right.

  On the television Ginger is talking about me having gone to Faith for advice on what we should do even though Ginger herself had directed me not to. “Betts never does follow directions she doesn’t agree with,” she says. “And she always has had the good judgment to solicit opinions from people she respects. Both of which are just some of the reasons why she’s so well suited for the Supreme Court, an institution that expects each justice to consider the wisdom of the justices sitting alongside him or her as well as those whose shoes they try to fill. Some of the current justices who put themselves above stare decisis might learn quite a lot from Betts.”

  Ginger. Ms. Decisis-Bradwell.

  “Oh—” Ginger’s lips are clearly forming “shit” but it’s bleeped out. She is looking beyond the cameras. Toward the house. She’s just spotted Laney at the back door.

  But Mia is already there. Her arm is on Laney’s arm. She has already pulled Laney back inside.

  The reporters and the cameras turn just in time to catch the door clicking shut again as Mia hurries Laney away from the leaded-glass windows. Too bad for them. A naked political candidate would have been news ratings paradise.

  “You can’t either, Betts,” Mia calls to me.

  I’ve unzipped my slacks but I’m still more or less respectable. I’m still in Faith’s library.

  “It’s too much to expect the voting public to accept a Supreme Court justice who has appeared naked in public, Betts,” Mia says as she bursts back into Faith’s Library, a strand of hair at her cowlick flipping in the blow of the pressurized air. “You simply can’t.”

  “Fortunately, it’s not an elected position,” I say as I drop my slacks. “So it doesn’t matter quite as much what the folks watching on the TV will or will not accept.”

  “But it does still matter,” Mia insists, and Iz and Annie chime in to support her.

  “Really, Aunt Betts,” Annie insists. “Mom is doing this to eliminate the questions. Mom is doing this so you end up on the Court.”

  “Your mom is doing this because it’s the right thing to do,” I say to Annie. “This is what matters. This is what’s important. That we say what happened, finally. That we say we are not ashamed.” I slip off my underwear. This feels even more awkward than I would have imagined in front of my daughter.

  “How will it look that I lacked the guts Ginger has?” I ask as I pull my shirt over my head and unhook my bra. “No one wants a coward on the Supreme Court. Besides, I think that ‘Curse of the Naked Women’ thing Mia wrote about draws strength in numbers.

  “In manus tuas, Domine,” I say. Putting myself in the hands of a god who is my own mother and Ginger’s. The god who must have been watching over those Nigerian women who’d bared themselves to gain a healthier world for their children.

  It’s Mia’s hand that is tight on my arm, though. Not God’s. And she is not letting go.

  “You can’t, Betts,” she says. “You can’t and Laney can’t and I can’t.”

  “I can,” I insist. “If Massachusetts can elect a male senator who posed naked for a centerfold—”

  “Men are studs, women are sluts,” Annie interrupts.

  “You can’t, Mia?” I demand. Thinking this is about Mia being a coward. Mia not wanting her ample thighs out there for the world to see. “Why can’t you?”

  “I can’t,” she insists.

  I see in her paper-bag-brown eyes then that I am wrong about her. That she knew Ginger was going to do this. That she has already offered to join Ginger.

  “But she’s all alone out there,” Laney says.

  “She’s all alone out there,” I repeat.

  “She’s not,” Mia says. “She’s no more alone than you were sitting at that table in front of the Judiciary Committee, Betts.”

  I see then that Mia is right. That Ginger knows Mia and Laney and I have her back now. Just as I knew they had mine. That she knows her mother has always had her back, too, just as Matka has had mine. That her mother loves her and always has.

  I turn and watch Ginger on the television. I think of her that night in the hot tub, her breasts pale where Laney’s were dark. She looks comfortable with her body in a way that she didn’t back then. That she never has before.

  “Besides,” Mia says, “Ginger has a better body than any of us.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Laney says.

  “Me either,” I say.

  Mia gives us a you-must-be-joking look.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” I say. “I can admit it now. Ginger has a better body than I do.”

  We turn back to watch her through the window again. Listen to her clear voice on the television.

  “And more courage, too,” I say.

  Because that’s what Mia is saying. Mia is saying that if I step out that door I will only be riding on Ginger’s courage. I will only diminish what Ginger has done in stepping out there herself.

  “ ‘A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing,’ ” Laney says. She’s remembering that line of poetry Ginger said in the Captain’s Office after she gave me her mother’s pearls.

  “Except more so; she declined my offer to find her a gorilla mask.” Mia smiles that wry smile that somehow makes us all feel good about ourselves. “She wouldn’t even let me borrow your black pearls for her, Betts.”

  I stand looking out from the safety of Chawterley. Watching as Ginger continues on with her one small thing she is doing for Laney and for herself and for us all. She is speaking as well as any of us ever has. Even that first day in law school Ginger was good on her feet.

  “I hope we have a better getaway plan than we had Friday,” I say.

  “I hope so, too,” Mia says.

  Mia

  THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE, we’ll call it for lack of a better name, ends when Ginger tells all those eager journalists that she means to open the envelope Faith left only after she returns to the mainland. Then she climbs aboard the Row v. Wade. She’s awfully certain she knows what she’s promising, what the note will say. When the journalists move to follow her she says, “You won’t even be thinking about stepping onto this boat, which is private property.” She fires up the engine. “But I’m guessing the ferry will take you across the bay if you’re quick about getting on,” she calls out.

  The stampede onto the ferry would make wonderful footage, but not a single one of those turkeys stays to film it. Sadly, my Holga is upstairs in the Captain’s
Office, and the boats are already heading out.

  The ferry follows the Row v. Wade, the press snapping photos again, the TV cameras filming from the unsteady boat. A naked woman stretching up to hoist the sail on a boat called the Row v. Wade—that will make good press.

  Ginger never does hoist that sail, though. Not far out into the bay, she cranks one of the two big white wheels, as if she means to turn right into Boat Scrape Gut. While Max and the ferry continue alone toward the mainland, she keeps turning, heading back to the pier and to Chawterley, her house that was her mother’s house.

  IT’S GINGER’S IDEA, when she returns, to have lunch with the girls before we sail back across and return to D.C. The press can wait. After all these years, what difference can an hour possibly make? And having decided we can wait an hour, it isn’t any great stretch to conclude that we can wait until morning, we can have a whole afternoon and evening with Isabelle and Anne.

  “I guess we’re going to let it be interesting at the Capitol in the morning?” I ask over lunch in the sunroom, with the drapes wide open to the day.

  “I guess we are,” Betts agrees. “What better forum than the place where all those laws we don’t trust to be enforced are made?”

  What follows is a long negotiation about who, exactly, will stand on the Capitol steps. Betts and Ginger are sure Isabelle and Annie will need to get back to school for classes, but their daughters don’t quite see it that way.

  “I want to stand with you, Mom,” Isabelle says to Betts.

  “I want to stand with you, Mom,” Annie tells her mom.

  We talk for a good hour about the press and the cameras, the publicity. Laney tries to broker a compromise between Ginger’s and Betts’s rising unwillingness to include their daughters and Iz’s and Annie’s refusal to be prohibited.

  “How about we let Izzy and Anne come with us to Washington,” she proposes, “but they wait inside while you open the envelope on the Capitol steps, Ginge, and then Betts addresses the press. That adviser fella could arrange to stow them somewhere, couldn’t he?”

  “Aunt Mia says we both look great on film,” Annie replies. Not I disagree, but the more effective Have you considered this?

  Ginger looks like she’s about to throttle me.

  “When they had to make their way through all the reporters here Saturday,” I admit.

  “You’ll have microphones thrust in your face, Annie,” Ginger insists. “You’ll say something idiotic. Everyone does.”

  Annie is so young, just eighteen. And she has always been so eager to follow after Isabelle, even when she’s not ready.

  “You two don’t need to be out there,” Ginger says, tamping back her exasperation. “You don’t need to expose yourselves.”

  For a minute, I think Izzy is going to agree to Laney’s compromise. Before she can, though, Annie fixes a gaze the caper green of her grandmother’s on Ginger and says, “Neither of us said anything idiotic to the press Saturday, Mom. And we had plenty of microphones. Besides, you yourself said, ‘If change is needed and it doesn’t start with us, then where the hell does it start?’ ”

  “If change doesn’t continue with us,” Izzy says.

  To Ginger’s credit, she manages to fall back from an argument she sees she’s lost. “You don’t say one word to the press, Annie,” she says. “Not one word.” Then to Laney, “Next time you and Gemmy disagree on something, I get to mediate.”

  Betts says to Isabelle, “You don’t say a word even to the janitors. Are we clear on that?”

  Izzy grins back at her mother and says, “ ‘I have nothing to add to the public record on that.’ ”

  IT’S LATE AFTERNOON when Laney and Betts and Ginger and I retire to Faith’s Library, where Ginger pulls open the middle drawer to her mother’s desk and pulls out blank paper and a chewed pencil.

  “You write, Mi,” she says. She hands me the pencil, and we settle in on the floor by the fireplace to lay out together the things we want to say.

  Mia

  IN FRONT OF THE COLUMBUS DOORS

  AT THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12

  BY THE TIME we stand with Betts on the Capitol steps, the heavy bronze Columbus doors looming behind us and Isabelle and Anne at our sides, we’ve begun to come to terms with the idea that Faith shot Trey, that she figured, as we all had, that there was not another way to protect Laney and Ginger, that the cost to them would be too high. When Ginger opens the envelope and reads the note, though—in front of a crowd of witnesses and with cameras rolling—it’s simpler and far less dramatic than any of us expect: a single line from Trey Humphrey, saying he was sorry, that he didn’t deserve the love of the Conrad family, that he would never cause them pain again. With it is a short note from Faith, explaining that Trey was bipolar—manic-depressive, it was called at the time—and that she’d concealed the note, wanting to spare her sister, Grace, the pain of feeling she’d failed her son as surely as she felt she’d failed Trey’s father when he’d killed himself.

  Ginger stares into the roar of questions and then down at her mother’s handwriting again, her pale eyes filled with relief at not having to blacken her mother’s name. That first response is quickly washed away by something stronger, though, an emotion I initially read as grief: just as she’s embracing the idea that Faith would have done anything for her, that version of her mother slips through her fingers, reverting back to the one who loved her nephew more than anyone else. But then I’m less certain. There is something in her expression that reminds me of the way she looks at Annie, that looks almost like pride.

  One of the journalists yells, “But you yourself thought Faith Cook Conrad shot Trey Humphrey,” and I can see my ex-editor jumping at that headline: DAUGHTER BELIEVED PROMINENT FEMINIST LAWYER FAITH COOK CONRAD MURDERED NEPHEW. It Isn’t PROMINENT FEMINIST LAWYER FAITH COOK CONRAD MURDERED NEPHEW, but it’s not bad.

  I shout over the fray, “That is not what anyone has ever said here!” And when I have their attention: “You have the footage. I’m quite sure it will show what Ms. Conrad said yesterday was that she had a note she believed ‘may have some bearing on the death of Trey Humphrey.’ Ms. Conrad has never suggested her mother was guilty of any wrongdoing.”

  The press turn their disappointed attention to Betts, still in search of a headline.

  “Mrs. Zhukovski,” one calls out, “what do you think this might do to your prospects of being confirmed?” Leaving behind the question of what might have driven Trey Humphrey to kill himself.

  “Ms. Zhukovski,” Ginger insists.

  “Pardon?”

  “Ms. Zhukovski,” Ginger repeats. “Not ‘Mrs.’ The idea that a woman should be identified by her marital status is demeaning.”

  “And it’s Professor Zhukovski, actually,” Laney says. Then under her breath, “Y’all know that, you mealy-mouthed toads. You’re just trying to yank her chain.”

  “Professor Drug-Lord-Bradwell,” I whisper, pushing back the thoughts crowding in: the image of Trey with his eye to the telescope, searching the sky; that photo of Ginger as a young girl with her dad and brothers, all holding guns; Faith’s careful signature over the seal of the envelope; the sound of her rough voice urging me to write about the curse of the naked women. “Imagine what a difference it would make in this world if more of us were willing to take risks like that,” she’d said. “I wish I had the courage those women do. I wish I was willing to risk like that.” Words that left me wondering when in her life Faith had ever lacked courage.

  What might have driven Trey to kill himself? Remorse for what he did to Laney? He might have regretted it afterward. He might have carried his gun and the things to clean it up all those steps to the watch room, meaning to kill himself.

  The alternative: That Faith collected Trey’s gun and the cleaning gear and took them up to the watch room herself? That she loaded the gun and then brought Trey up there, where no one would hear them, insisting they needed to talk? That she made him wr
ite … what? “I’m sorry. I don’t deserve the love of the Conrad family. I will never cause you pain again.”

  An apology that might look like a suicide note if the writer were to be found shot dead.

  Would a mother do that? And live with it the whole rest of her life? Never telling a soul? Or perhaps telling only the one friend she knew would understand. A smart friend, who knew the law. Who could help support the conclusion that Trey Humphrey killed himself if his death was questioned after Faith died, or claim not to have known of the sham suicide note if evidence that Trey’s gunshot wound had not been self-inflicted ever came to light. A friend who could save Faith’s reputation if it needed saving, or give it up for the sake of Ginger or Laney or Betts or me, or anyone else who might ever be suspected of having shot Trey.

  As we watch the crowd pepper Betts with questions, I wonder if Ginger, too, is questioning the “truth” of this note from Trey, or if she’s content to settle back into the belief that Trey Humphrey, in a fit of remorse and depression, climbed 136 stairs to shoot himself just when we wanted him dead. I suppose if I were her, I would choose that easier reality. Something in the soft set of her overbite leaves me thinking she has. But maybe that’s my imagining Ginger is more like me than she is. For all my journalistic searching for the truth, I still think of all those women my mother met over all those summers as her “friends.” Ginger is the Rebel, though, with all the courage that nickname implies. And if there was ever any thought that she lacked courage, she put that to bed out on the pier yesterday.

  “Thanks for saving me there, Mi,” she whispers.

  “Anytime,” I reply, realizing that whatever Ginger or I believe happened, Trey Humphrey’s death occurred thirty years ago, under circumstances so murky that the truth will never be known.

  “Consider it the first official act of the firm of Porter and Conrad, Ginge,” I whisper. “And by the way, you’ll need to turn the phone and Internet back on.”