The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  We hadn’t made beds here that spring break; Faith had arranged for our every comfort. With her gone now, I’m the only one of us whose mother is left, I realize. And what’s left of my mother isn’t much.

  THE LAST TIME I saw Faith was over dinner in D.C., the night I met Doug Pemberley again. We were in the bar, waiting for a table, and Faith was advising me on a point my editor was quite opposed to seeing in print. Her suggestion: start a blog to say the things that really needed to be said.

  “Blogs don’t often pay the bills, Faith,” I said.

  “Just do it anonymously, dear, and never admit a thing,” she insisted with such delight in her voice that I was quite sure, suddenly, that she’d had a hand in that whole naked women in gorilla masks thing, and almost certainly additional body parts as well.

  I imagined taking her advice. Starting a blog. Going naked where I’ve always been edited, an anonymous moniker as my gorilla mask. No more fighting to hold on to the things I felt were important to say. No more defending my words against the onslaught of largely male editors and their frustrating certainty that they know best what readers of both genders want to read. No money in a blog, true, but the other rewards might be worth it. That’s what I was thinking as a tall, well-dressed man with graying, wavy dark hair leaned down to kiss Faith’s cheek.

  “Mia, you remember Doug Pemberley?” Faith said.

  “Of course she doesn’t remember me, Faith. It’s been thirty years since we met, and I was tall and geeky and soft to her smart and beautiful,” he protested, and at the sound of his voice I instantly did remember, and wondered if he could still sing. “But I do remember you, Mia,” he said. “From Cook Island, when you were in law school and I was still suffering the delusion I could support myself by writing. Like you do so well now. I watch for your byline. And will plead guilty to insisting Faith include me in this dinner when she told me about it this afternoon.”

  “You’ve come a long way since safari jackets and blue jeans,” I said. “I don’t suppose you carry a flask of scotch in the pocket of that fancy suit, do you?”

  “Not half as far as you’ve come, Miss Just-Won-the-Women’s-Media-Courage-Award,” he said, his grin accentuating the slight imbalance in his face.

  “The International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award,” Faith said.

  “Faith does love bragging on you girls,” he said. “She tells me your friend Betsy is on the short list for the Supreme Court, should the need to replace one of the current nine arise.”

  Chief Justice Zoo, I thought, remembering Professor Jarrett getting Betts’s name wrong that first day in law school, Betts saying he was close enough that she’d answer to that.

  The maître d’ took us to our table, where we settled into fine steaks and fine conversation about the state of things in Washington. Doug, it came out, had been a lobbyist for most of the years between Cook Island and that dinner. He’d just retired, and he wanted to go back to writing now that he didn’t need to make a living. That was why he was so interested in meeting me again, he admitted with refreshing honesty.

  When dinner was over, Doug offered to walk me back to my hotel, and we had another drink together in the hotel lobby—scotch straight up, for old times’ sake. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, and I suppose I assumed Faith wouldn’t have invited him to dinner if he was married, though why I assumed Faith was putting us together as anything more than friends I can’t now imagine. So maybe I simply didn’t want to know whether he was married or not.

  He was going to be in London at the same time I was, a week later. And when I left London he went with me. I knew he was married by then. I knew he and his wife were still together. I knew how disappointed Faith would have been in us both. But his children were off at college, and I wasn’t thinking he would mean to leave his family for me. That didn’t occur to me until months later, when he and I returned to Cook Island. Until I awoke that first morning at the Pointway Inn to the sound of Doug singing outside the sliding glass doors to the beach, “Morning Has Broken,” like that morning at the lighthouse, watching the dawn.

  I walked out onto the balcony to see him writing huge letters in the sand: MARRY ME, MIA! inside a big heart. I believe I laughed, actually. I believe I said something about him having spent too much time in Arab countries, that harems weren’t legal here.

  He didn’t laugh back, though. He stood there, holding tight to his lopsided grin.

  “I’ve told Sharon she can have everything,” he said. “The house. The money. I don’t care. I want the kids to know she’s taken care of. I don’t want them to think their dad is a schmuck.

  “They’re going to love you, Mia. My daughter Jane especially. She’s going to love you. She already loves the things you write.”

  How could I decline the engagement ring in the velvet box he’d dropped right after the exclamation mark drawn in the sand, then? What choice did I have but to be the happiest woman in the world? Faith had died just a few weeks before; I didn’t even have the disappointment she would feel in us as an excuse. Her death was the reason I’d wanted to return to Cook Island, to say my goodbyes to her.

  “I … God, I just …” I walked down the steps and onto the beach, the sand creeping warm around my toes. “I’m fifty-four years old, Doug. I’m … I don’t know if I’m fit to marry anyone at this point.”

  He smiled the way I remember all four of the guys smiling in the Captain’s Library that first night they arrived on Cook Island: like the world would always bend their way. He put his arms around me and lifted my chin, and kissed me, his talent for kissing nearly as amazing as his voice. He picked up the ring and he put it in my hand, closed my fingers around it. “Think about it,” he said. “If I can’t convince you to marry me before this week is up, I don’t deserve you anyway.”

  And so I spent most of the rest of that week settling into the idea of hearing Doug Pemberley’s lovely voice singing in the shower every morning of the rest of my life. I would take the ring out from the box on the dresser as he bathed and sang, and I’d slide it onto my finger for just a moment, one he couldn’t see. How many other men would likely be willing to follow me to the places I needed to go: to Brighton, England, to write about 200 naked cyclists with “Burn Fat, Not Oil” written on their skin; to Copenhagen in December; to a remote reserve in Madagascar just to hear a lemur mating call? A man who proposed in the sand, who serenaded me with Cat Stevens songs sung as well as Stevens himself.

  To be honest, I felt a flip of hope every time Doug started singing that week. So much hope that, late one night while Doug was fast asleep, I climbed from bed and slipped on the ring, went downstairs and outside to call Laney from the public phone by Haddy’s Market, to ask her if she could bear it if I married Doug.

  Betts

  CHAWTERLEY HOUSE, COOK ISLAND

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  AFTER WE’VE CHANGED our clothes Mia and Laney and I wait forever just outside the Sissies’ Square. Mercifully, neither of them mentions the Supreme Court or the press. We stare through the small room’s door to windowless walls and built-in-side-rail beds meant to keep toddlers from falls small and large. The bed rails remind me of the ones Matka helped me install in Isabelle’s room in Ann Arbor after I’d taken a job teaching back at Michigan Law. I still remember how fraudulent I’d felt standing to lecture in the same room I’d taken exams in just a few years before. But teaching seemed the job best suited to my daughter’s needs. We try so hard to make our children safe. But we never know where the dangers lie.

  Yet you have to wonder who tried to take care of whom at Chawterley. Sissies’ Square and Baby’s Room and the Nursery are all here on the guest side of the house. Far from the family wing from which Ginger emerges, finally.

  She’s dressed in khakis and a white oxford shirt like her mother wore everywhere. Her feet are bare. The wide expanse of her manicured toes presses against the dark wood floor.

  “Well,” she says. “Food? And then
maybe a game of Scrabble?” Scrabble: a game Ginger used to play to the death.

  The front doorbell rings. The same can-the-press-have-found-us-already surprise registers on each of our faces. Ginger slinks barefooted toward the back stairs. Mia, Laney, and I slip off our shoes and skulk along behind her. We cross the sheathed-furniture Sun Room. The kitchen. The serving pantry. The outside end of the Dining Hall.

  The damask drapes of the Front Parlor are drawn. Ginger peeks through the center gap. “Shit!” she says in a tone that renders obvious the absence of reporter-wolves at our door.

  She hurries to the front foyer. Throws open the door. Calls loudly, “Max!”

  An electric car slips soundlessly onto the one-lane road. A red fireball of setting sun takes its place at the end of the drive.

  Three tan reusable grocery sacks with a tree-and-mountain logo sit outside the door. A substantial pile of firewood is topped with a note that there is more outside Faith’s Library. I choke up as I realize this is the way the new library will be forever known. Faith’s Library.

  I wonder if any of us ever imagined that Hamlet actually slept at some little boy’s feet. That he was a puppy. A young dog. An old and faithful companion. An emptiness at the end of a bed.

  I think of Matka as we watch the sun set. I still sometimes pick up the phone to call her about some song I’ve worked out on the zhaleika. I imagine Izzy hunched over a casebook at Yale. As sure of herself as Faith ever was.

  The last blink of sunlight sinks into the water. A rainbow swirl of color graces the horizon.

  “Diem perdidi,” Laney says. “I have lost the day.”

  “ ‘And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?’ ” Ginger’s wide mouth registers a hint of self-satisfaction as she picks up a grocery sack. Does she think she’s just one-upped Laney? Like that night in the hot tub when she’d answered Laney’s Latin with the Dracula quote. Latin that was literary, too. I see this so often with my students: the need to be the smartest. But I’ve always imagined Laney and Ginger are closer than that. I thought after they both failed to make law review they’d settled into a more intimate friendship. Left the competition to Mia and me. For years I’ve envied a closeness that perhaps never was.

  Laney and I lift the two other sacks as Mia stares out the door with her hopeful-toddler look. Eyes the brown of a paper bag but not so plain. Surely Max reminds Mia of Andy. He seems so like Mia’s ex to me. Like the kind of guy who might understand her weird mix of confidence and insecurity. Her fear that anyone she loves will leave the way her mother left her father again and again. Without ever letting him go.

  Mia wants to follow Max. But she just stands there. She watches in the rearview mirror as everything she wants slips away.

  There is no room for romance this weekend anyway. We’re in a tight spot. And Mia is the one who more often than not leads us out of tight spots.

  Back in the kitchen, Ginger flips on the lights. Opens the refrigerator. Stares, pale-eyed and taken aback. The refrigerator is spotless inside. Completely empty. If Ginger didn’t do this then who came in to wash the bourbon glass Faith drank from the night she died? Who threw away the half carton of milk and the tin of coffee? The brie. The last few eggs. Whatever else Faith might have eaten if she’d wakened that morning three months ago. All those things Isabelle helped me do after Matka died.

  Ginger fingers the clip that holds back her still-windblown-from-sailing hair before she starts unpacking the Sierra Club bags. She pulls out a half loaf of bread. Hummus and bananas. Goat cheese. Green onions. Butter. Whole wheat fettuccine. There are nine brown eggs in a cardboard carton. Three slots empty. Locally farmed.

  “Have you ever met anyone sweeter than Max?” she says. “Too bad he’s vegetarian. I sure could use a hamburger.” She means this to temper Mia’s attraction to Max. Mia likes her meat pretty much just short of a moo.

  Ginger disappears into the Sun Room. Flips on a light. Van Morrison sounds at high volume. Her hips swing as she returns. But the courage she’s marshaled is leaking out from under her mom’s khaki slacks and white shirt. She thinks she’s fooling us.

  She’s all wide mouth and straight bleached teeth as she resumes unpacking groceries. “Ah, here we go! Sipping tequila. Thank you, Max!” She looks at Mia. “You can see why even his own kids adore him. The man doesn’t miss a thing.”

  Mia is unwilling to risk making a fool of herself by voicing the question: Max is married?

  Ginger hands the bottle to Mia, saying, “Pour.”

  Mia finds four small jelly glasses. Spills a generous shot into each. We lift them. There’s an awkward pause. What the hell is there to toast?

  “Ad fundum!” Laney says.

  Mia and Ginger and I smack our glasses down on the counter. Thrust finger crucifixes at Laney. Shout, “In manners, too, dominate!”

  In manners, too, dominate. A phrase no one but a Ms. Bradwell would laugh at. But ever since that night in the hot tub it’s been the way we laugh together at ourselves: at Laney for relying on Latin to make her seem smart; at Ginger for forever needing to one-up us; at Mia and me both for steadfastly rejecting the possibility that someone else might know something worth knowing that we still need to learn.

  It feels so good to laugh.

  The first sip hits sharp on my tongue. I let it sit in my mouth. Savor it for a moment. It burns its way down my throat as “Crazy Love” gives way to “Caravan.”

  How different that spring break would have been if we’d scraped together the money and gone to Cancún. If we’d settled on the white sand of a Mexican beach where there was no one to share any tequila we might have bought. So much depends on which turn you take. And you never know which one is best until the reasonable, responsible path leads you to places you spent your whole life avoiding. Without even realizing you had.

  Van encourages us to turn up the radio. Ginger turns the knob on the stove and sets a cast-iron skillet on the burner. Tosses Laney the green onions. “Chop.”

  Laney takes a sip of tequila. Pulls knives from the block on the counter. Finds just the right one.

  Ginger tosses the half loaf of bread to me. “You’re toast.”

  “Any senator in that room today could tell you that,” I say. They all stare at me for a second. Then burst out laughing. What else are we going to do?

  “Who wants to be a judge, anyway?” I say. I launch into a riff on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “I’d like to phone a friend, Meredith,” I say. I do my best phone ring, the old-fashioned kind that was all we had in the days before cellphones and ring tones. Bbbrrrring. Bbbrrrring. “Mia! Thank God you’re … where are you? How did they find you? Well, never mind. There’s no time for that. So here’s the situation. This woman, Lilly Ledbetter, discovers as she’s retiring that the Goodyear Tire Company has been paying her less than the men she’s worked beside for nineteen years. She sues. Her victory is appealed to my Supreme Court. Will we (1) Decline to reconsider the case, leaving a very sensible decision to grant Ms. Ledbetter actual and punitive damages intact? (2) Uphold the decision, giving it authority as Supreme Court precedent? (3) Throw out the punitive damages but leave Ms. Ledbetter with nineteen years of back pay? or (4)—”

  “Or (4)”—Mia grins—“Make the improbable and ill-considered decision that Congress—which can’t agree to delete a comma without a month of deliberation and a compromise that makes no sense—meant to give Ms. Ledbetter the right to sue for discrimination but intended to limit her damages to six measly months of back pay so the good people at Goodyear will know discrimination is fine for as long as you can get away with it?!”

  I do miss Mia. Most of the time.

  In my best Mia rhythm and Chicago O I say, “So let me get this straight, Betts.” I add the ccccckkkkkcccc of an overseas line. “You’re calling me in Madagascar? Madagascar, Betts. That’s off the coast of Africa, you know that, right? To hold your hand while you answer a question there isn’t a shred of doubt you know the answer
to?”

  And we all laugh. Humor is a much more effective way to get your point across than rage. One of the many things Faith taught us all.

  Mia lifts her glass of tequila. “You know what I was doing that day you called me in Madagascar, Betts? I traveled halfway around the world to drive forever in a bumpy jeep to hear the song of an endangered Indri lemur, a furry little animal that sings for maybe three minutes. This is my life?”

  Laney puts an arm around her. I’m not sure exactly why.

  “Spill, Mia,” she says.

  “It’s actually two Indri calling together, they sing together. They sing more during mating season, too. And they mate for life. I know all this because I’m a good journalist,” Mia says with a tiny crack in her voice. “Because I do my research before I go.”

  I’m thinking I see where this is going. This is about the fact that Mia can’t seem to find anyone to take Andy’s place. To be honest this particular record has gotten a little old. Could she stop to think of Ginger for a moment? Could she stop to think about the direct hit I just took? Or the glancing blow Laney will take in her campaign?

  “You could write such an amazing poem about the Indri, Ginge,” she says. “The name of the reserve—the Analamazoatra—is a poem all by itself.”

  Leaving me embarrassed at my quiet indignation. She is thinking of Ginger.

  “Spill, Mia,” Ginger says. “Spill.”

  Mia protests: there isn’t anything to spill. She starts telling us some myth about two Indri brothers who live together in the forest until one of them decides to leave and cultivate the land. He becomes the first human, while the other sends out this mourning cry for his brother who went astray.

  “Don’t read my piece this weekend,” she says. “It’s too heavy-handed. As if the reader can’t figure out himself that the human brother from the myth is now destroying the rain forests the lemur brother lives in, destroying his kin. God, my writing sucks.”

  We all just look at her.