The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  GINGER, AFTER HUGGING both the girls, asks Max how he knew to get them. I can’t decide if she’s oblivious to her daughter’s trauma at being run over by the press, or if she is handling it by letting her get over it quietly in a way her own mother never would have allowed her to do.

  “I called him.” Annie takes in the empty ashtray, the pleading clip, the robe that perhaps Faith wore when she drank her morning coffee. “I used to call him a lot when Grammie was alive, just to make sure she was okay.”

  I don’t know which surprises me more, hearing Faith called “Grammie” or the idea of a teenage girl who worries about her grandmother, who calls a neighbor to check up on her. Maybe Faith found the relationship she’d always wanted to have with her daughter in her granddaughter instead.

  The girls are famished; they’ve been traveling without stopping to eat. I offer to fix something for dinner, and Max again starts making excuses to leave.

  “You’ll be hounded by the press, Maxie,” Ginger says. “You’re bound to say something stupid. Just about anyone with a microphone thrust in his face manages to sound stupid. Besides, Mia can’t cook worth shit.”

  “I can cook,” I say, but Laney and Betts agree: I can’t cook worth shit.

  Max says he’ll stay if I’ll sous-chef for him and, honestly, I’m happy for the excuse to get away from the other Ms. Bradwells. I’m still stinging from Ginger’s words, even if I do deserve them: So that leaves either you or me, Mia. Me and my ‘sordid sexual history,’ right? I’m going to be publicizing that, for sure. I can’t imagine how Max isn’t stinging from the charge that he’ll be stupid in front of a microphone—which I say once we’re settled in the kitchen.

  “Ginger never will get past thinking of me as an island boy,” he says. “You end up with a warped perspective when a place like Chawterley is your summerhouse. But she has such a big heart, even if she isn’t always quite as socially graceful as she might be. She’s like her mother that way. It’s easy to forgive them both, because they have so much bigger hearts than they recognize.”

  Ginger startles us by appearing at the bottom of the servants’ stairs. If she’s heard us, she pretends not to have. “We’ve decided to dine in the Tea Parlor,” she says, and she heads across the kitchen and out through the Ladies’ Salon. The others follow her into one of the few rooms downstairs that has no window to the outside.

  “Set a place for Faith’s Ghost,” Betts whispers as she brings up the rear.

  Max puts me to dicing onions, then takes the knife back. “Maybe you can just be the soundtrack to my cooking?” he suggests.

  “I can sing better than Betts, but that isn’t saying much.”

  “Better than you dice?” He grins his nerdy-glasses grin. “Think talk radio.”

  And then we’re talking easily, like we’ve known each other forever. At some point in the conversation, I remember my Holga, and I frame him in the viewfinder. He has a whole mess of things cooking together in the pan, and he’s boiled a pot of pasta he’s now dumping into a colander. I click the shutter, catching the steam and the falling pasta and Max’s age-stained hands, remembering for some reason the rearview mirror of my mother’s car. Am I looking backward still, or am I looking ahead?

  He dumps the drained pasta into the pan of things he’s been cooking, then cracks a few eggs in and stirs it all around. I want to tell him that I wasn’t the blogger but that it was my fault, that I told someone I wasn’t so sure that Trey shot himself. It would compound my sin to tell Max this, though, sharing my doubts with yet another non–Ms. Bradwell. So I lower the camera and hold the wide, flat serving bowl while he dumps the pasta mixture in.

  “Ginger tells me …,” I start, and I almost say “that your wife left you.” But I remember how I reclaimed my name, quit my job, left San Francisco, and headed as far away from Andy as I could get, far away from everyone who might see how I’d failed him. “… that you’re divorced,” I say. “That must have been hard, with kids and all.”

  He looks at me like he has no clue where this is going, and I sure don’t either, but I kiss him anyway. Not a long kiss, just a tentative one. He tastes like the pasta smells, all olive-oil buttery and herby.

  He looks at me through his goofy glasses, and he says, “Pasta’s getting cold.”

  I nod, thinking, Well, it serves you right, blowing off what any idiot ought to have seen were his advances.

  “They think I’m the blogger,” I say.

  “Who does?”

  “Ginger.”

  It feels like she has been beating me up over whether I’m the anonymous blogger for about a hundred years now. It was just a suspicion when she first suggested it … this morning? yesterday? She said it with a rise in her voice at the end, the only way you can ever tell when Ginger doubts herself, because Lord knows she never admits to doubting anything. But she’s convinced herself she’s right now, that this is my fault. And of course it is my fault.

  “Ah, Ginger,” Max says. “Ginger is wrong about so many people. Always has been, even when she was a kid. It’s her Achilles’ heel.”

  “I thought it was only men she was always wrong about,” I say.

  He shoots me what Betts would call a raised-brows-behind-the-lenses-surely-you-can’t-be-serious look before taking the pasta bowl in one hand and a stack of smaller bowls, napkins, and forks in the other. He nods toward the jelly glasses and wine bottle on the counter. I pick them up and follow him through the Ladies’ Salon.

  The reporters outside have settled in to keeping a looser kind of vigil. They might see us hurrying across the hall and into the Tea Parlor, or they might be too busy sharing shots from flasks like the ones we drank from that night we went gut-running. They’re huddling closer together against the wind that rattles the windowpanes, that any minute now will hoot down the chimney in the Captain’s Library, sending the low moan of the Captain’s Ghost through the house.

  I hope they have no blankets or flashlights or food. It’s a long walk to town from here, and I didn’t see them unloading a car or even a bicycle from those boats they came over on, boats which are long gone. I hope the Pointway Inn is already full, although of course it won’t be in October. Still, I can hope. I can hope they have no choice but to sleep uneasily on the pier, in danger of rolling into the bay and joining Beau’s lost sleeping bag. I can hope the wind whips Fran Halpern’s perfect coif into a rat’s nest that even her wonderful hair and makeup crew can’t tame. I can hope the skies will open up and a downpour will wash their damned cameras into the Chesapeake, that the sunrise will find them floating like crab-pot markers strung across the bay: MSNBC, FOX, CBS, APTN.

  DINNER IS SURPRISINGLY relaxing. We linger in the skirted chairs circling the round wooden tea table, forgetting about the cameras outside, or at least pretending to. One of the delights of having Baby Bradwells around is that the focus turns inevitably to them. They’re walking, talking yellow-triangle caution signs: yield to the concerns of this young person; it will do you a world of good.

  Annie is planning to study archaeology at Princeton, and the girls on her hall seem nice. Her classes aren’t too tough and everyone brings their laptops to class, not just her. “It’s like I’m just regular,” she says. “Normal.” It makes my heart break for all those years she was the little girl weighed down with a backpack containing a computer nearly as heavy as she was, before students brought laptops to college classes, much less to the fourth grade. It makes me wonder about Ginger, too: how much did her schooling suffer because her handwriting was so difficult to read? Would she have made law review if she’d grown up in a world where everyone learned to keyboard, or even just without a feminist mother who forbade her learning to type?

  Isabelle tells us she’s interviewing for jobs for after she graduates. The high-paying law firms all want her, but the low-paying public interest jobs she wants are ironically harder to come by. She does have a paid position at a legal clinic in New Haven for the school year, which helps cover her ex
penses. And she’s seeing a guy.

  “You are?” Betts’s gaze behind her lenses is both hopeful and apprehensive.

  Izzy’s dark eyes—her father’s eyes in her mother’s freckled face—don’t blink. “He’s from Tennessee originally,” she says. “He’s a business school guy.”

  Betts crosses her yoga-toned arms. “The business school,” she repeats, and although she tries to hide it, you can hear the vision of rich, Southern, country-club bigot she is imaging in the words.

  “He’s specializes in micro-investment. He’s putting together a program in Appalachia, like people have been doing in Africa with some success. That’s where he’s from, originally, a little town in Appalachia.”

  Betts uncrosses her arms, lifts her fork, and twirls a length of pasta and julienned vegetables, then sets it back down.

  “He sounds wonderful, Iz,” I say. “What’s his name?”

  Is it possible she’s just gotten even smaller? I wish I could withdraw the question. It’s just a name, and she doesn’t have to take it on herself. It’s too much to risk, anyway, giving up your name.

  “His name is Zack,” she says. “Zack Bloom.”

  Betts’s breath deepens as if she’s entering a meditative state. To her credit, she doesn’t flinch at the fact that her daughter is dating a man who shares the name of the father she never knew.

  “He’s a student?” she asks, and in the question I see that she’s right: he isn’t.

  Izzy folds her hands together as if meaning to say grace. “A professor, Mom. He’s thirty-nine. Divorced. Two kids, a twelve-year-old son named Pete and a ten-year-old daughter, Rebecca.” Laying all the unacceptable cards out on the polished and polite tea-table top in a way I doubt any of us Ms. Bradwells ever could have done. Is this a generational thing?

  Betts nods, knowing she needs to respond but unwilling to approve. Maybe she’s thinking of her married man from that summer at Caruthers. Maybe she’s hoping, like I am, that this romance started only after this Professor Zack split with Mrs. Bloom, so Izzy will never have to fault herself the way I did when Doug left Sharon. Or maybe Betts is thinking about Izzy’s father, maybe she’s awash in a moment of missing him. Maybe what I take for disapproval is only Betts’s unwillingness to let her daughter see her pain.

  “Rebecca. That’s a great name,” Max says, as if that has anything to do with anything.

  Betts wraps a hand around her jelly glass of chardonnay. At least Max didn’t say Zack was a great name, too.

  Izzy gets up from the tea table and slips away, into the Music Room. She doesn’t turn on the lights there, and the drapes are drawn. A minute later, over the soft tinkle of piano keys, Izzy begins to sing.

  She sings beautifully. It’s one of the miracles of mixing genes that Betts and Zack, neither of whom could carry a tune, produced a child with such a lovely voice. The tune is familiar, yet not, and the words are foreign, guttural. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a song Betts used to play on her zhaleika, a Polish folk song.

  “You taught her this one,” I say to Betts. The only Polish she ever learned was the words of songs.

  Betts is listening to her daughter play. Maybe she’s heard me, or maybe she hasn’t. She takes a sip of her wine. She hasn’t eaten a bite of her dinner. She hasn’t had a single dessert this weekend despite my resolve back in the Hart Building hearing room. Her eyes are moist.

  “Betts?” I say into the silence after the song ends.

  “Matka taught it to her just before she died,” Betts says. “They did it as a surprise for me. To make me happy.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Laney says softly. “Happy beautiful, not sad.”

  In the Music Room, Izzy starts playing another piece.

  Betts pushes her still-full plate away, sits back in her flowered chair, stares up at the four-candle chandelier. “Matka taught it to Izzy,” she says, “so I would have someone to play music with after she was gone.”

  Mia

  THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  THERE IS NO moon outside, no stars, and the wind continues to blow, but the rain I’m hoping for still hasn’t come when Laney, Ginger, Betts, Max, and I settle into the sitting area in the Captain’s Office. The girls are already sharing the twin beds in Hamlet’s Retreat, and the rest of us are comfortably settled on the settee and chairs, our backs to the twin beds, the armoire, the Captain’s rolltop desk and the secret doorway into Emma’s Peek. We’ve turned out the lights and opened the curtains, tired of being so closed in. Below us, the journalists huddle together in small groups, sharing cigarettes and flasks and old war stories that have long ago grown past mythical and on to stale.

  “She wants a family. That’s what this is about,” Betts says. “Instant family. Add Izzy and stir.”

  We kick that around for a while. Max and I seem to be the only ones who can imagine Izzy might actually love this guy, that not all first love comes in a virgin package. Betts can’t get over the idea that this Zack—a name she never says—is a father replacement like she’s decided the Caruthers partner she had her affair with was, although she doesn’t say that either, not with Max here.

  “It took me years to shrug off the embarrassment of having no father,” she says. “Of having a mother who spoke a language no one could understand even when she was speaking English. The crappy little apartment over the dry cleaners I never wanted you guys to see. The fact that I was nowhere if I lost my scholarships. I was back in the crappy little apartment over the dry cleaners with Matka.”

  A ghostlike sound answers, startling me although it’s not unexpected.

  “It’s just the Captain’s Ghost,” Ginger assures us.

  We listen as the sound repeats: the wind whistling across the chimney top, this time in a higher register, Faith’s Ghost joining the Captain on his late-night haunt.

  “I wonder if we all feel a little like we don’t belong, even in our own families,” Ginger says. “I got along well enough with Daddy and my brothers, but I was never quite one of them because I was a girl.”

  “Even though you could shoot better than any of them,” Max says.

  “Even though,” Ginger agrees. “And Mother—sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life trying to impress her.”

  “We all wanted to impress your mom, Ginge,” I say.

  When I’d realized Doug was married, my thought hadn’t been that I should break it off, it had been that I didn’t want Faith to know I was seeing him.

  Laney tells us about always hurrying from work the summer she spent in D.C. so she wouldn’t arrive late for dinner with Faith. “Faith meant to see great things from us and she made not a single sorry bone about it,” she says. “She was so sure we could better the world if we set our minds to the task.”

  “I’m pretty sure she expected the world to help us out a little more here,” Betts says. “I don’t think her crystal ball contemplated that forty years after the second wave women would still comprise only … what, seventeen of the country’s one hundred senators? Thank God for California and Maine. Twenty percent of the federal bench. And maybe two CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies.”

  “It killed her that Hillary didn’t get the nomination,” Max says. He adjusts his glasses as what he’s said dawns on him. “Not literally,” he says, and he grins goofily.

  Even Ginger laughs.

  “But your mama was like that, too, Betts,” Laney says. “She believed in us, too.”

  “It was different, though,” Betts says. “Matka believed. But Faith led.”

  “The way your father led?” Laney asks Betts.

  We all know the story of Betts’s father helping lead a resistance against the Soviet government in Poland, and disappearing; Mrs. Z escaping to the States with Baby Betts.

  “I expect I should be pleased my mama and daddy weren’t civil rights activists,” Laney says, “watching the way you and Ginger think you never can accomplish half of what your pare
nts did.”

  “I still imagine I’ll find him,” Betts says. “I can’t say, honestly, that it isn’t that little bit of hope that persuaded me to keep my name. This idea that someday I’d be …” She shrugs.

  “Nominated for the Supreme Court,” Ginger says, flashing her wide grin.

  Betts smiles back at Ginger, the little fatty deposit disappearing into the fold of her smile line, her eyes flashing in a way that makes me think she doesn’t mind being caught out in this unlikely, middle-aged dream of finding her father.

  “My dad will hear my name on the evening news while he’s cooking a sausage for dinner,” she says. “Maybe while he’s cooking for a whole other family. I wouldn’t even mind that. I think I’d like to know I had siblings somewhere. He’ll hear ‘Elsbieta Zhukovski.’ He’ll focus on the television screen. He’ll see my face. He’ll say to my brother or sister or both, ‘That’s my daughter. Sweet Lord, that’s my daughter. She looks just like her matka.’ And then somehow we’ll be reconnected. Izzy will have a grandfather. I’ll have a dad. We’ll be a family. Instead of just the two of us.”

  Outside, a journalist swears. They, too, are getting tired and cranky. At least we’re comfortable and warm.

  “Two is family,” I say quietly, though I’m embarrassed to say it with Max here. A family of two is what my brother, Bobby, and I are going to be soon, with my dad failing physically, my mom disappearing into Alzheimer’s. A family of two who don’t even see each other much. I’m not unlike Izzy, I realize, or not unlike how Betts thinks Izzy is: part of my attraction to Doug was the fact that he had kids. I know so many women who don’t like children, but I’m not one of them.

  “Two is family,” Max agrees, and something in his voice makes me imagine he must understand what I’m feeling, the longing I feel every time I see the Baby Bradwells. I’ve thought about adopting a child, raising her on my own like Mrs. Z raised Betts. But I’m not Mrs. Z. I’m not settled. I can’t imagine myself with a lawn, much less a fence and a swing set. How could I give up the life I have for a life I might forever long to flee, the way my mother had?