The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  She shrugs. “Who wants to be a journalist, anyway? I’d like to ask the audience, Meredith. Is the only way to keep your job: (1) to sleep with an editor who has the worst beer gut in the city; (2) to cover Hollywood gossip instead of women’s rights or the envir—”

  “You didn’t tell us you were cut, Mi!” Even I can hear the irritation in my voice. As if her unwillingness to trust us is worse than losing her job. But isn’t it?

  “Canned,” Mia says. “I preferred ‘canned’ to ‘cut.’ It sounds so much more … in the tin!”

  “In the soup?” Ginger says.

  “It sounds less bloody,” Mia says.

  “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei,” Laney says. “For this is the chalice of my blood.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Mia says. “Just budget cuts.”

  “You could start a blog,” Ginger suggests. “You can make a fortune blogging these days.”

  “You can start with, say, a scandal involving your ex-roommate Supreme Court nominee!” I suggest. Recalling Jonathan’s words over the phone: How does the senator have the nerve to try to derail a Supreme Court nomination on the basis of an anonymous post?

  “Mia didn’t want to spoil your moment,” Laney says to me. Her tone says, hush. Her tone says, why are you being so nasty to Mia?

  I bury my uneasiness in a chirpy voice. “And such a moment it’s turned out to be! You and me, Mia. We can be mates for life. Who else would want us with our luck?”

  “I would,” Ginger says.

  Laney says, “I would, too.” She raises her glass and says, “To friendship.”

  “To friendship,” we all say.

  We clink our glasses and we throw back whatever is left. Mia opens the bottle again. Refills us all. I think I shouldn’t. I should keep my wits about me. But I’ve just been through a week of Senate hearings ending in disaster. I have no wits left to keep.

  “Shoot, I need to call Izzy,” I say. “Can I use the phone, Ginge? I get no cell reception here.”

  Ginger folds one empty Sierra Club bag before she answers, “I left a message for Annie not to come to New York. I asked her to call Iz and let her know.”

  “But I’d still like to—”

  “I had the phone disconnected.” Ginger reaches into another Sierra Club grocery bag, ignoring the now hot cast-iron pan. “Frank and Beau gave me endless shit for it: the family would still come here, we still needed to have a phone. But …” She sets aside a can of black bean chili. “But I couldn’t bear dialing this number and having someone who wasn’t Mother answer, any more than I could bear the phone ringing and ringing without answer in the silence of this goddamned house.” She blinks back tears. Pulls a head of lettuce from the bag. “Shit,” she says, “who’d’ve guessed I’d be as able to wallow in my own feelings at fifty-one as I was at twenty?”

  “Fifty-two, Ginge,” I say. I don’t know why I know this will make her laugh, but it does.

  Ginger pitches the head of lettuce good-naturedly at Mia, saying, “Still, I’ll always be younger than all of you!”

  Mia groans as she catches the lettuce. She has always hated making the salad. And we all laugh. This is such familiar territory, making a meal together. You can almost see the tension begin to seep away.

  In a few minutes we have a green onion and goat cheese omelet. Toast with blueberry jam Ginger found in the cupboard. We grab the Scrabble board and tiles from the Captain’s Library. Set the game and the food up in the Sun Room. Pull sheets off the furniture before Ginger says, “Let’s do the library instead.” Without explanation, she turns the music and the lights off. A small nod to Max’s efforts for a greener world. She leads us through the Music Room, the Tea Parlor, the Ballroom Salon. We’re headed the back way to that funky hidden door from the Ballroom into the Captain’s Library. A door hidden behind a bookshelf on the library side and behind a large painting on the Ballroom side.

  But she goes instead to a door I’m pretty sure used to be a window. Stares at the brass knob. The wood floor. The door into Faith’s Library. A room hidden in the trees outside. It will be considerably harder for anyone approaching Chawterley to see us in the new library than in the brightly lit Sun Room.

  Laney touches her elbow. “Those lines you were saying at the front door, Ginge, about the folded sunset, did you write them?”

  Ginger grasps the handle finally. Stares at the door as if meaning to bring it down with her look and nothing else. “Elizabeth Bishop,” she says. “From ‘Questions of Travel.’ ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?’ ”

  GINGER

  FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  THE DOOR TO Mother’s library sucks open, the seal ceding its job of protecting the room’s contents to the positive pressure. The subtle blow of air from inside brings traces of Chanel, menthol cigarettes, the mustiness of old books. You can almost see Mother sitting in a chair by the fire, reviewing a legal brief or an opinion, looking up, saying, “Ginger, do close that door before the mold spores follow you in.” Never mind how bad her cigarette smoke was for her goddamned books. For her goddamned self.

  Someone is dead. / Even the trees know it.

  Max’s note about the firewood comes to mind as clearly as if it were in my hands, his careless scrawl: “Faith’s Library.” I fight the sudden longing to pull every book one by one from the shelves. Touch them. Open them. The Sonnets, too? Maybe. Maybe I’ll read the poems one last time before boxing them up, sending them insured mail to … to whom? Mother’s will included a specific bequest of the Sonnets and a volume of Sexton poems to her friend Margaret Traurig from law school, but Margaret died the day before Mother did. Aunt Margaret, who’d been the only other woman in Mother’s class at Michigan Law. “We weren’t allowed to eat in the Lawyers Club and we couldn’t room there either, and our classmates weren’t always welcoming,” Margaret once told me, “so your mother’s and my choice was to learn to like each other’s company, or learn to love being alone.”

  There’s a part of me that wants to steal the book again, to send some other more valuable volume in place of the Sonnets to whatever heir of Margaret’s is entitled to them, with a note that the long-ago missing Sonnets have again disappeared but I’m sure Mother would want … But what would Mother want? Mother wanted Aunt Margaret to have the Sonnets just so that I wouldn’t.

  I put Mia and Betts to setting up the Scrabble board while Laney and I bring in firewood. The particles wood fires emit make a mockery of the air controls, but Mother wouldn’t have gas logs. “You think these books have never been exposed to wood fires, Max?” she’d insisted. “If Ginger values the preservation of my books over her enjoyment of them after I’m gone, she can put in those awful fake things, or never light the damned fire.” It was the first I’d realized she meant to leave her books to me. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed, I might have realized she meant to leave me this library, too, and Chawterley itself. I might have realized that, being Mother, she would leave me all the books except one worthless Sexton volume and the Sonnets, just to make sure I realized she’d always known I’d stolen it, that she’d never forgiven me the theft.

  Betts and Laney and Mia all rejected this interpretation. “When I die, I expect I’ll leave something for each of you,” Mia had reply-emailed. “I can’t imagine not leaving something for each of you.” Which sent Laney and Betts into a silly frenzy about the special things of Mia’s they wanted her to leave them. “Can I have the hat from that photo of you by the dead tree in that cemetery? The one that looks like you stole it off a refugee?” Betts wrote, and Laney claimed a pair of plastic teeth she’d once seen on Mia’s desk in Andy’s and her San Francisco apartment, in the days when Mia had a desk, or an apartment for that matter. They were doing what we always do for each other, making me laugh when I would otherwise fucking cry.

  The wind picks up as Laney and I go out for more wood, whipping my hair into my eyes. U
p above the sea grass / flew like a woman’s hair in labor. The moon is setting already, following the sun into the bay to the west. It seems a bad omen, somehow, to have the only thing lighting the darkness disappear just as the long night begins.

  Back inside, Mia and Betts look a little pale. You’d think they’d had some bad omen, too. When the wind howls through the chimney in the Captain’s Library, Betts demands, “What is that?”

  “It’s just the Captain’s Ghost,” I say. “Don’t worry. He’s …” He’s partial to virgins, a long line of Cook men have claimed, my grandfathers, my uncles, my brother Frank among them. He’s partial to virgins, so he’s no threat to anyone here, Trey used to joke.

  “He’s just the wind in the chimney,” I say.

  but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh / Upon the glass and listen for reply

  The islanders will tell you the Captain’s Ghost never leaves Chawterley, that it’s Mr. Humphrey’s Ghost who ventures out to the marshes during duck hunting season, felling birds no one else claims to have shot. It’s his reflection they see in the mirror over the bar at Brophy’s, bellying up for a shot of the single malt scotch they keep on hand, superstitiously, for Trey. His chin is still square in these sightings, his smile GQ white. His eyes, dark espresso against blue-white china, always laugh behind the long lashes. His hair falls to his shoulders as he’d let it grow after he made partner at Tyler & McCoy. And when ghost hunters claim to hear him running the guts, the laughter they describe is that of the young man they see at the bar. Trey manages to stay young and tragic in everyone’s memory while those of us left behind fight sagging asses and wobbly arms, age spots and jowls.

  His favorite haunt, of course, is the lighthouse. The lantern goes on and off when no one is there, the islanders insist, and no amount of assurance that it hasn’t been operational for years does a bit of good. I guess if you believe in ghosts who drink high-priced scotch and shoot ducks, a broken lamp isn’t much of an impediment to providing light.

  “Mr. Humphrey’s Ghost, he’s restless, restless,” they say, even the islanders who played kick the can with us according Trey the honorific “Mr.”—a courtesy always extended to the occupants of Chawterley except when we were playing games as kids. Even Max, who wouldn’t hesitate to call me “Ginger, you fucking moron” when I dropped a pass in a game of touch football out on Sheep Neck North, called me “Miss Conrad” when he delivered groceries to the door. Or “Miss Cook.” More often than not, islanders called me “Miss Cook.” I guess the strangest thing about that was that it never seemed strange to me. It’s a rare person who sees things that have always been as even the least bit odd.

  “Mr. Humphrey’s Ghost,” they call Trey—as if he deserved anyone’s respect, as if any god that might exist wouldn’t send him straight on to hell.

  Damn. How am I ever going to sleep here without my pills?

  Betts asks about the flat screen television hanging over the mantel just as Laney says, “Look, Mia. Faith has that first news piece you wrote.” She’s picked up a small black frame from a shelf by the miniature books: Mia’s damned “The Curse of the Naked Women.” After she and Andy split, Mia took off in her car for South America and who knows where else before somehow snagging a visa to visit her brother, a geologist working for an American oil company in Nigeria. There, she saw a group of African protesters, and called Mother, and the next thing we knew Mia had a byline and a job as a foreign correspondent, and Mother had herself a brand fucking new pseudo-child. Six paragraphs that didn’t even run in a major paper, but Mother has kept a framed copy ever since.

  Mia takes the frame, smiling slightly, doubling her chin.

  Betts reads over her shoulder, mock-dramatically:

  “Early dawn, the entire womenfolk of Ogharefe, Nigeria, have laid siege to the offices of the United States multinational oil company Pan Ocean. Their mission: payment for lands seized and for damage to health and property caused by pollution. These women want only a very few basic things—reliable drinking water, and perhaps electricity—from a foreign corporation selling millions of dollars worth of crude oil extracted cost-free from oilfields here.”

  Betts says, “You do a great job of describing it, Mi: the dawn light and the shine of the women’s breasts, the dancelike quality of their protest. It’s just … thousands of women stripping naked to make a point?”

  “Their well water was laced with heavy metal, and the ash from the natural gas flares dissolved their corrugated iron roofs,” Mia says. “Their kids were getting sick. Wouldn’t you do anything to stop something from making Izzy sick?”

  “Turns out all they had to do was take off their clothes,” I say dismissively.

  “Exactly!” Mia says, undismissed. “And honestly, it was one of the most moving sights I’ve ever seen, all those …” Christ, she’s tearing up.

  “… all those women standing naked together, saying this is who we are at our very cores, and we are powerful, too.”

  “And we are powerful, too,” Betts repeats, rolling the phrase around in her own voice, admiring it.

  “Why do you think the piece didn’t get more exposure?” I ask.

  Laney shoots me a look; she thinks that’s my way of digging at Mia, saying the article was not very widely read. Which, okay, it is. I turn my back to them all, setting about finding the Sexton Transformations that Mother left for Aunt Margaret. The book, when I find it, falls open to an envelope and a photograph stuck in the pages, Trey and me in hunting gear.

  “It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that thousands of naked women protesting you is a public relations fiasco,” Betts says. “The oil company wasn’t stupid. They caved immediately to keep it from becoming a story.”

  In the awkward silence, I suppose we’re all thinking the same thing: we should have caved immediately at the Hart Building this afternoon. Is it too late to cave?

  Betts takes the frame from Mia and continues theatrically:

  “A woman’s exposure of her body in this society is believed to cast a lifetime curse on those to whom the nakedness is directed, a curse related to productivity and fertility. This curse, used by women in South Africa, Kenya, and elsewhere, is one no local man would dare provoke. Any foreigner upon whom the curse is believed to be cast—and any corporation with which he is affiliated—would find his ability to transact business in the Nigerian oilfields severely compromised. So the sight of thousands of naked women did the trick: the local officials and police all fled to avoid the curse, leaving the company with little option but to—”

  “A little sensationalist, I know,” Mia interrupts. She takes the frame from Betts and sets it back on the shelf. “We could turn on the news, Betts,” she says.

  “Or not.” Betts’s tone evoking Katie Couric’s voice as she might begin this story: In what was expected to be a quiet final day of Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elsbieta Zhukovski … “Unless you want to, Laney?”

  “Or not,” Laney agrees.

  “Music,” I suggest. I set the Sexton volume on Mother’s desk, find the iPod I gave her last Christmas plugged into the Bose cube speakers I also gave her. It’s surprising how much it touches me to know that she used them, that she hasn’t, as she so often does, regifted them to some women’s shelter. When I hit the play button, an almost unbelievably gentle piano piece begins, a few notes that call to mind the bay at sunrise, the Law Quad in moonlight after a new snow, Mother reading by the fire just before she realizes I’m there. When Mia asks what the music is, I realize I don’t know. Ted is the one who puts together the playlists. This music I like to think I chose for Mother is in truth music Ted chose for me, that I copied for her.

  “That’s a long way from the Bee Gees, Ginge,” Betts says. “Gymnopédie Number One by Erik Satie. It was inspired by a poem: ‘Les Antiques.’ ”

  “ ‘The Ancients,’ ” Laney says.

  “I don’t remember the poem exactly, but there was something about a
fire in it,” Betts says.

  Fire longs to meet itself / flaring, longing wants a multiplicity of faces. Not the lines that inspired the music, but from Mark Doty’s “Fire to Fire.” The book it’s from, School of the Arts, is the kind of book Mother ought to have collected, but Mother never had much use for new books, or for the kind of desire Doty explores. Most of what she read was the news, actually, with a preference for the kind of things Mia writes, pieces about crazy people doing crazy things to try to change the world in whatever crazy way they think it needs to be changed.

  Mia and Betts and Laney and I sit on the floor around the Scrabble board, the way we used to in Laney’s and my suite in the Law Quad and in the living room of the Division Street house.

  “Why did you call my mother, Mia?” I ask.

  Taking her time / she looks the bus over, / grandly, otherworldly, like Bishop’s moose.

  “With the naked women thing,” I say.

  “The women made me think of her,” she says, as if it’s just that simple.

  “Those women didn’t bare their asses to draw attention.”

  Mia shrugs. “Didn’t they? Anyway, it seemed so like something your mom would do.”

  The way she glances at Betts leaves me sure they’ve talked about this in a way that has something to do with me. Leaves me imagining Mother’s hands wrapped around the telephone as she talked not to me but to Mia or Laney or Betts.

  My mother’s hands are cool and fair, / They can do anything.

  “I didn’t expect everything that came after, Ginge,” Mia says gently. “You can’t possibly think that when I called her I meant for her to write it down and send it to her newspaper contacts.”

  “Have her secretary write it down.”

  Mia flips a Scrabble tile from inside the cardboard lid: a one-point E. She won’t be going first.

  “She liked the part about the curse,” she says. “She said she was going to use the idea of the curse sometime and get naked for a cause.”