The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “I told her the day after Laney … I couldn’t believe we should just do nothing about it all, you know?” Betts explains.

  “You told Mother about Laney?”

  “The day of your father’s birthday party, while you were out hunting. I went to her office and I told her.” “About Laney,” I whisper.

  She pulls her top leg more tightly toward her hip, reminding me of Justice Bradwell, the contortionist gargoyle in the Law Quad, where we used to meet. “About everything,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t have, it wasn’t my place to do it, but I thought she would help, I thought she would know what to do.” She looks up at me. “And then she didn’t. She just told me not to say anything to anyone. Even to you.”

  “You told my mother,” I repeat, trying to absorb this. “She didn’t know, and you told her?”

  The morning of the day Trey shot himself.

  “I … I just assumed she knew,” Betts stutters. “But she didn’t. I’m sorry, Ginge.”

  “She didn’t know,” I repeat dumbly, trying to make sense of it, thinking Mother didn’t know then, Mother didn’t allow it to go on. Maybe she should have known but she didn’t, she just didn’t know.

  And then she did?

  “Her reaction …” Betts looks from my face to the pearls, the book, the letter. “It was more than just … you know. Concern that I knew. She didn’t know.”

  “Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus,” Laney says.

  Betts stands and moves to Laney’s bed, then, sits next to me and picks up the book. She sets aside the photograph and examines the sealed note: For Margaret, should the time come.

  “She wouldn’t have let it go on if she’d known,” she says. She turns the envelope over to the sealed triangle, Mother’s signature sprawling across the joined edges. “Your mother? She wouldn’t have let it go on, Ginge. You must see that.”

  I wipe my eyes with the tissue again, and I say I do see, even though I don’t see, I don’t understand anything except that I need to stop Betts from saying anything more until I’ve sorted this out. “I do see,” I say again, to prevent a silence she might need to fill, trying to imagine Betts telling Mother, and Mother hearing. How do you tell a mother she’s failed to protect her daughter for years? How can a mother bear to hear that?

  I climb from Laney’s bed, trying to imagine Mother telling Daddy. Would she have? Or even telling Margaret. There is the sealed envelope and there is the photo and there is the poem “Briar Rose.” But that can’t be Mother speaking from the grave, to tell Margaret about a relationship her daughter had thirty years ago. That doesn’t make sense either.

  I walk to the window, look out into the rain. The drapes are open; Mia or Laney must have opened them this afternoon. To hell with the press if they come back.

  When I turn back to the room, Betts is still studying me, watching my hands, which, I come to realize, are worrying the pearls Mother gave me, that we all have worn. She stands and comes to me, rests her hands on my shoulders, her face close to mine, her hair gray where it was such a pretty red, her face lined and marked but still freckled, her eyes through the bifocals still the same intelligent blue gold green.

  “Your mother loved you, Ginge,” she says. “Surely you must know that by now.”

  I look down at the manicured nails of hands that look more and more like my father’s, fingering these pearls that have been mine for nearly as long as I can remember. Mother’s favorite pearls, which she gave to me years ago, when she still wore them. Betts is trying to tell me something without saying it. I don’t know if I am trying to hear her or trying not to, but all I can think of is the way Mother and Daddy came in from a walk around the island the night Mother gave me the pearls. She came in to the Sun Room to find Frankie and Beau and me all huddled around the Risk board. Trey was there, too, I remember, because I was sitting on the couch and he was sitting next to me but not touching me, and I wanted him to touch me like he sometimes touched the island girls when we were all hanging out together, and since he wouldn’t I was being merciless, about to wipe him out. I was acting all gleeful about it, but I wasn’t feeling gleeful. And then Mother and Daddy came in, laughing. I remember thinking they were laughing at me, although I couldn’t say why. Maybe because I felt Trey laughing at me, and my brothers, too. And then Mother was standing behind me, setting her pearls around my neck, lifting my hair to fix the clasp and then gently turning the necklace so that the clasp would sit at the base of my throat, like it did on her. She didn’t even say anything. She just latched them there and kissed the top of my head and said good night, and when I turned to see her, she and Daddy were headed up the stairs, holding hands.

  How odd I’d felt with those pearls around my neck. Confused. Like I was playing dress up. Like Mother was dressing me up, making me her. The weight of the dark pearls where I rarely wore more than a thin silver chain. Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress / bids me wear them, warm them. But they came to my skin already warm.

  None of the boys said anything, but they ganged up on me then; I’d been about to wipe Trey off the board before Mother and Daddy came in, and Frankie and Beau were all for it, and then they weren’t and I lost, and the funny thing was I didn’t really care.

  After they wiped me out, Trey said he didn’t want to play anymore, he thought we should all go gut-running, Frankie and Beau against him and me. I remember not wanting to go out in the skiff with Trey, and going anyway. I must have been fourteen, because I’d already been out to Fog’s Ghost Cove with him, and not just that summer. I remember thinking I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore, and not knowing how to say no, and going with him even though I didn’t want to, knowing that we would lose Frankie and Beau somewhere in the darkness of Tizzie’s Ditch or Rock Creek or Midden Gut. And then we would have sex out in the skiff, quick sex on the little wooden centerboard, or more often with me lying down on the smelly hull and Trey over me. But maybe that memory isn’t even real. Maybe I didn’t hesitate that night any more than I had any other night. Maybe that’s just gauze I’ve overlaid in the intervening years, wanting to be someone other than the girl I was.

  I don’t know how long I waited for Mother to ask for the pearls back, dreaded her asking for them back and dreaded her not doing so. That whole summer, I think. And it was only after I came downstairs in a new dress I’d picked out especially for our annual end-of-summer party that she mentioned them again. I was at the top of the front stairs and she was greeting someone at the door. Daddy’s partner, Mr. Johns, I remember, because he whistled up at me like he thought I looked hot, then looked as surprised as I felt. I’d giggled, and he’d laughed, and Mother had said, “Why don’t you wear your black pearls tonight, sweetheart? They’ll look beautiful with that dress.” And I did wear them, and I suppose they did look beautiful, but I never could get used to wearing them, I never could come to think of them as anything other than Mother’s pearls.

  Mother, whom Betts had told. Who’d learned about Trey and me the day before I watched Trey bleed to death.

  I reach up and hold the pearls at Betts’s throat. I don’t even know why. These pearls I so love to loan, but never wear. They seem to belong on Betts as surely as they ever belonged on Mother, even though Betts looks nothing like Mother, even though the pearls are a different thing against her skin than they are in my memory of my mom.

  “They’ve never looked better than they did around your neck in the hearing,” I say.

  “They bring out the gray-blue of your eyes,” Mother had said when I’d reappeared at that end-of-the-summer party. No, what she’d said was, “They pick up the gray-blue of your eyes.” Not them bestowing beauty on me but me bringing my beauty to them.

  I loop the pearls around Betts’s too thin neck, under the edge of her driftwood hair. I fasten the clasp at her throat just as Mother did when she gave them to me, except that I am facing Betts, she can see my face.

  “They’ll look stunning with your black robes,” I say.
r />   Betts smiles wryly. “My orange prison garb, you mean.”

  I touch the clasp that nestles into the dip between her collar bones, the pearls on either side. “Mother would be so pleased to know her pearls adorn the neck of a Supreme Court justice,” I say. “I want her to have that.”

  Betts, fingering the pearls herself now, starts to protest.

  “I want her to have that,” I repeat, “and you want her to have it, too.”

  “I can’t accept your mother’s pearls,” Betts says.

  A circle of unmatched black pearls, each one bringing something different to the connected whole.

  “You’ll no doubt feel them spontaneously strangling you if you even think about overturning Roe v. Wade,” I say.

  “I can’t accept your mother’s pearls, Ginge,” Betts insists.

  “They’re not Mother’s pearls,” I say. “They’re my pearls, that Mother gave me. And now I’m giving them to you.”

  Betts

  THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE, CHAWTERLEY

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

  “I NEVER THOUGHT I would be like Matka. I thought I would be like your mother, Ginge,” I say. Because I have to say something. Some thank you for her gift of these pearls. And I’m not ready to say what I know I need to say here. Which has nothing and everything to do with the gift.

  “And here I am,” I say. “Exactly like Matka. And Izzy is turning out the same way.”

  I dip my chin but of course I can’t see my own neck. Then catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass. A dim outline against the darkness outside.

  “ ‘A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing,’ ” Ginger says.

  She denies the credit Laney wants to give her for the line; it’s from Anne Sexton’s “Housewife.”

  I wonder if it’s true. Is Ginger her mother? Would she do the things Faith has done?

  “ ‘A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing,’ ” Laney repeats as if saying penance for blasting Ginger about her poetry last night.

  “I never thought I’d be my mom either,” Mia says. “All the friends she met on those summer trips? I thought I’d marry Andy and never have another lover. I thought I’d be loyal and chaste. Then I blew it even before the wedding, and now the only difference between Mom and me is that I prefer men.”

  “And you’re not married,” Laney says.

  “Rub it in, Lane,” Mia says.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Laney says. “I mean you’re not betraying a single soul.”

  “And you live a life that makes you happy,” Ginger says. She settles again on Laney’s bed.

  I feel awkward standing here by myself. Still wanting to make Ginger take the pearls back. But it seems that moment has passed.

  Outside the rain has slowed. It spits against the glass. The last little cough of the dying storm.

  “You’re doing something you love to do, Mia,” Ginger says as I settle back on the end of Mia’s bed. “Don’t underrate that.”

  “Except I’m unemployed now,” Mia says.

  “Me, too,” Laney says. “Or as good as unemployed. I have no job, and the odds of my gaining the one I’ve set my sights for are looking slim to none, with the smart money betting on none. You at least might write a book about this whole fiasco to make a dollar or two. And seriously, I didn’t mean to swipe at you for not having a man. I just meant you’re not living through your daughter, like your mama did.”

  “I don’t have a daughter to live through,” Mia says.

  “But you’re living a life you chose, Mi. Living choices your mama didn’t have, or didn’t think she did. Even if you did have a Gemmy or an Izzy or an Anne, you wouldn’t be living your life through her. None of the rest of us is.”

  “Well, I might be just a little,” I say. “I practically strung Izzy’s Phi Beta Kappa key from a chain and wore it around my neck.”

  “There wasn’t a soul at the club in Cleveland who didn’t get a chance to congratulate me on Annie getting into Princeton,” Ginger says.

  “That’s not living vicariously,” Laney says. “That’s delight at your children’s success. Or at worst, maybe a little competitive parenting, gloating over the notion that since your baby is looking more successful than your friends’, y’all must be the better mamas.”

  Mia says, “On that basis, I’m the best mom here since I claim all the Baby Bradwells as mine.”

  Ginger pulls Laney’s sheet over her bare legs. “It’s not too late to have a child if you want to, Mi,” she says gently. “You could adopt. These days you could probably even still have a baby. Some woman in India gave birth to twins when she was seventy.”

  Mia laughs. “I’m not even thinking of running around after a two-year-old when I’m seventy.” Her eyes lack their usual confidence, though.

  I wonder if she isn’t.

  She says, “If I wanted to raise a child, wouldn’t I have figured out a way to make that happen by now? But I feel like that makes me a bad person, not to want to parent.”

  I set a hand on her foot under the covers. It’s as bare as Ginger’s have been all weekend.

  Ginger says, “A bad woman? How many of the men you work with don’t have children and don’t want them, and no one thinks to frown on them.”

  “The happy bachelor,” I say. “The old maid.”

  “You’ll just have to let me keep borrowing your kids,” Mia says. She says “borrow” but she means love.

  Laney says, “I sometimes think I’m becoming my daddy. Like I’m running for office because I was starting to look at my daddy in the mirror every morning, taking the safe path, living my life to keep my children out of danger.”

  “We can’t keep our children out of danger,” Ginger says. “We can’t even keep them out of the press.”

  “I suppose Max will be along with the morning papers any minute now,” I say.

  “I suppose Max will be along with the press themselves,” Mia says. “It’s stopped raining.”

  We all look to the dark windows.

  Ginger says, “I would have killed Trey if I were my mother.”

  She says it casually. As if she doesn’t mean it. As if she’s saying she’ll kill her son if she has to remind him to take out the garbage again. She looks to the window as she says it. Ginger never likes anyone to see her pain.

  So there it is, finally. The thing I’ve wondered since the morning Trey Humphrey turned up dead in the lighthouse. Would Faith have killed her nephew? I dismissed it at the time as my own hysterical imaginings. But I wasn’t yet a mother then.

  I think of Matka for a moment. I never told her it was me, not Ginger, who couldn’t afford an abortion. I thought it was because I didn’t want her to feel my shame. But now I wonder. Maybe I didn’t tell her because I knew she would have done what I asked. That she’d have gone against her every principle for my sake.

  I wonder sometimes if she can see all my life from heaven, where she must be now. But would that be heaven? To know all there is to know about the people you loved most in life? Or would that be hell?

  “I think it’s time for a swim,” Ginger says, still looking to the darkness outside the window. “If we go now, we can get in a quick dip before the sun rises and the press arrive.”

  “So would I have, Ginge,” I say quietly.

  When Ginger turns to me I plunge ahead before I lose my nerve. “I would have killed Trey if it had been Isabelle. I wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing him walk free. But I couldn’t have borne for Isabelle to have endured what it would take to put him away.”

  “God, you’re not serious,” Mia whispers.

  The long silence is brutal. No wind. No rain. No hint of early morning life. Not even the sound of a heater kicking in or a daughter stirring elsewhere in the house. Only our own breathing as we sit here on the two beds much as we sat on the lower mattresses in the bunkroom all those years ago. I don’t think Ginger even breathes.

  The silence is broken finally by a fresh gu
st of wind blowing across the chimney top. The plaintive howl of the Captain’s Ghost. Or Faith’s Ghost. Or perhaps Trey’s.

  “I think it’s time for a swim,” Ginger says again.

  Laney’s bony, spotted hands stroke the edge of the sheet. “We don’t have swimsuits.”

  The sad blinking of Mia’s plain brown eyes suggests she’s working her way toward the same conclusion I did years ago. That it’s impossible. And that it’s probably true.

  It has always seemed such a coincidence that Trey turned up dead that morning. I think Mia has always sensed that. Mia, the Savant. But her choice before tonight has always been to think it was one of us who killed him. And how could she believe it was one of us?

  I was the only one who knew that Faith knew about the rape. Who knew that Faith had just learned about Trey’s seducing Ginger when she was a girl. I was the only one with facts that might have led the way to whatever the truth was about what happened all those years ago, when justice might have been served.

  I’ve thought about it so many times since. I’ve thought that I should say something. But to whom? And what? I didn’t know anything at all, really. I had only fantastical suspicions that flew in the face of all the evidence doctors and policemen assured me was something else. And what kind of justice would it have been to punish a mother for protecting a child against the failures of a legal system anyway? Against the failures of a whole society.

  “When have we ever swum in suits?” Ginger says. “Not even at that first hot tub party did we keep our suits on.”

  It isn’t true. Or that isn’t my memory anyway. I kept my suit on at that hot tub party and so did Mia. The first time we all bared ourselves in so many ways was here on Cook Island. But I don’t say that. I don’t do anything but remember how close we’d been that first night, swimming together in the star-thick night.

  We’ve seen one another regularly over the years since then. Vacations. Reunions. Weekends. But we’ve never again shed our clothes together. We let Trey Humphrey steal that reckless abandon from our friendship. That complete trust in each other that we were just gaining. That trust that is so impossible to find in friends, but there it was in our grasp. We’ve all of us let what one man did make us ashamed of who we are. Because he hurt one of us. Because none of us stopped it. We hadn’t recognized what was happening. We hadn’t known anything needed to be stopped until it was too late. But that hasn’t saved us from feeling that failure. From feeling our friendship wasn’t enough.