The Four Ms. Bradwells (10 page)

Do we want our children to be heroes, or to be safe? As a mother now, I see Mama’s answer would have been “Both A and B above” if that answer had been available. But I don’t expect it ever is.

Even after Mama had her stroke, when she looked up at me from that hospital bed and wept like she had at that funeral for those little girls who died in the church bombing, I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me. It wasn’t until she died the next night, until I was on the telephone telling Ginger she was gone, that I heard what Mama had been trying to tell me my whole long life, what Maynard had been trying to tell me and Faith still was. It’s a different thing, though, when your own mama is trying to do the talking with a final breath she doesn’t have.

So what am I doing now? I should be standing up and shouting out the truth, saying This is what I did and the consequence belongs to me or to folks long dead or perhaps to us all, to every one of us
except
Betts. But
I’m standing idle, saying nothing. Even in my campaign, I’ve been clinging to caution. I’m running for office, but I’m running a safe race. I take pains to offend no one. I’m as white as a black woman can be.

A
T THE
C
HAWTERLEY
door, Ginger rattles the key in the knob furiously, but still the thing won’t open. “Shit shit
shit
,” she says.

“Let me,” Max insists.
Let me do this for you, this one small thing
.

Ginger surprises me by stepping aside to allow Max her place at the door. He works the lock without any fuss at all, and opens the door just a crack before handing Ginger back the key.

The door creaks wide at Ginger’s touch: to the dim interior, to a back foyer wider than William’s and my bedroom in Decatur, with twin staircases rising high to the second floor. What strikes me first is the musty, slightly moldy odor of an old house closed against the damp for months but unable to keep it out. I taste it deep in my throat, and I turn back to the bay as if it’s one more glance at the view I’m after, and not the pier and the boat and the possibility of escape. This is the best alternative we have, I understand that, I do. And I suppose Ginger never did say the lighthouse was gone, she only said a new lighthouse had been built closer to town and that if we didn’t get here before sunset the approach to the house would be awfully dark. I’ve only imagined that they tore the lighthouse down, that no one could ever again turn off the lantern and lean out over that rail.

White sheets cover the upholstered chairs in the back foyer, the rattan furniture in the Sun Room to the left, the grand piano in the Music Room to the right. The thin white fabric floats above the floors like ghosts moving in, taking over, claiming this as their home.

Ginger is trying to look sturdy, but she’s more spooked by the ghostly furniture than I am. Poor Ginge. She’s forever bluffing without so much as a pair of twos in her hand. We need Betts to say something to make us laugh, but she just stares into the Music Room as if the ghost of Mrs. Z is settled in the chair by the fireplace, her zhaleika to her lips.

It’s colder in the house than outside: cold stretch of marble floor, cold expanse of high white ceiling, cold empty stone hearths in every room.

Max settles our bags and places a gentle hand on the small of Ginger’s back. “Wish I’d known you were coming,” he says. “I could at least have uncovered the sofas.”

Betts thunks down her swanky little black leather briefcase like she might mean to crack right through the cold marble, which maybe she doesn’t intend to do or maybe she does. A disturbance is just what we do need, though. When we all startle at the noise, she makes a face that is Betts at her silliest, and everyone smiles.

“Well, I’ll leave you to yourselves then,” Max says. “I’m just down the road if you need anything.” He gives Ginger a friendly peck on the cheek and then, on a second thought, wraps his arms around her and holds her for a long moment. She closes her eyes, her lashes moist, unblinking.

“Neighbor,” he says, the single word loaded heavy with fondness, with the kind of love that comes with being friends as children and ever since. “Really, if you need anything at all.” It might be his attention lingers on Mia just before he closes the door quietly, or it might be it doesn’t. It might be I just want to think it does.

Ginger gathers up what she hopes looks like courage. I half expect her to say something like “The thing I hate most is waking up next to a fella whose name I don’t know.” Except that here her bluff would be something more like “The thing I hate most is returning to the home of a dead mama I understood so very well.” My face flushes with the guilty memory of Faith’s gravelly rough voice over the telephone, conversations Faith would have liked to have with Ginger rather than with Betts or Mia or me, but Ginger and Faith never could talk. Which was true of Mama and me, too, I suppose. It’s the weight of the dreams, the feeling you’re meant to do what your mama and daddy couldn’t do, that the path you choose will complete their lives, or not.

Mia

CHAWTERLEY HOUSE, COOK ISLAND
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

“F
IRST, WE CHANGE
into something more comfortable,” Ginger says, and you can see the thought register through the continuing bluff: she doesn’t have a stitch of clothing to change into. It’s there in the careful stillness of her eyes, the tightening in the tendons of her lotion-smoothed neck, the stiff shoulders under the soft white jacket. She pushes on, though, cranking up the thermostat, grabbing my bag, and heading up the right side of the double staircase, the tromp of our feet as we follow her intruding on the house’s silence.

The second-floor rooms here at Chawterley bear the names of people who are long dead: Old Aunt Betsy’s, Betsy being the first wife of the father of Ginger’s great-great-uncle William Cook, who built the Michigan Law Quad (although one wonders how old she could have been if after she died Uncle Willy remarried and had a dozen more kids); Chauncey’s Room and Governor Waller’s; Hamlet’s Retreat, named for a dog who slept at the foot of the bed of a child whose place in history has been ceded to his beloved mutt. The third-floor rooms above us, referred to in the aggregate as the no-name rooms, do in fact have names, too: the cook’s room, the upstairs maid’s, the waitstaff’s bunkroom where we slept that spring break.

Ginger throws open the first door we come to, saying, “The Captain’s Office,” the Captain being the ancestor who built Chawterley; there is a Captain’s Bedchamber that was Faith’s bedroom, too, and a Captain’s Library downstairs. Perhaps the Captain used this room as the office its name suggests, but it’s a bedroom now, with twin four-poster beds, more
maritime paintings than reasonable, and a fireplace—which every room here has, Chawterley having been built before the island had electricity.

“Of course, the Captain only ever captained his business, unless you count a dinky sailboat he took out with no crew,” Ginger says. “I don’t even know why he’s called the Captain.”

As she tells me I can take this room, she realizes what I, too, am just realizing. “And you too, Laney?” she says. “You guys want to share?” She takes charge, pulling a sheet away to reveal a love seat upholstered in dark green pencil-striped chintz. She opens a heavy wooden armoire, and says, “You can hang your things in here.” She sets my bag beside it, leaving neither Laney nor me an opening to say we’d prefer to bunk alone.

The chair at the business Captain’s rolltop desk swivels to a fine view of the Chesapeake: seawater all the way to the mainland shore, where, on a clear night, you can glimpse the faraway lights of a village. A bird lands on the broad windowsill, cocks his head and peers into the glass as if puzzled by his own reflection there, or by us.

“Rara avis,”
Laney says. “Rare bird.”

“ ‘Words for birds and their Latin names, too,’ ” Ginger recites.

Outside, the light is deepening to red, the sky a swirl of deep magenta and pink tingeing what’s left of the blue, all of it reflected again in the water of the bay. From the rooms on the front of the house, the sunset must be gorgeous; this northern end of the island is narrow enough that Chawterley has a view of the sunrise out its backside and the sunset out the front.

Ginger settles Betts in Emma’s Peek, a room with a bed that belongs in a Merchant Ivory film, although it’s missing its bed curtains. “Guess who Emma was,” she says as she starts pulling sheets off a sitting area by the fireplace: Queen Anne chairs and a tapestry couch clustered around a white marble-topped coffee table.

Betts, standing tall and breathing deeply as if about to touch her palms over her head, foot folded up against thigh in that yoga pose I call Flamingo, says, “The sister to the queen of England! Third in line for the throne.”

As we laugh, I wonder why we never heard the stories behind these rooms when we were here in law school. How full of ourselves we were back then. How uninterested in stories that didn’t revolve around us.

“Mrs. Everett Whitman, a society ‘lady’ who was the Captain’s wife’s
best friend and the Captain’s mistress.” Ginger grins her wide grin. “Emma spent whole summers here doing the Captain behind her best friend’s back while her poor sod of a husband worked in New York. Or so the story goes. The family would never admit to any scandal, of course, but check this out.” She opens an armoire, squashes aside the bed curtains hanging there, and points to a section missing from its back panel. “See?” She kneels and opens a small square door cut into the wall there, just large enough to crawl through. “Where do you think this goes?”

Betts grins. “It’s a passageway to the venting system so the thieves can steal the crown jewels!”

It hits me where it must go—“The space under the big rolltop desk in the Captain’s Office?”—although I can’t imagine why.

“Gives new meaning to the pleasures of working at one’s desk, doesn’t it?” Ginger says.

No wonder Faith became a feminist
, I think as I realize she’s talking about Emma and the Captain and oral sex, perhaps with the office door open and Mrs. Captain passing by in the hall.

Ginger closes the door and stands again. “We’ll have to make the beds ourselves, I’m afraid, but let’s change and eat something first.”

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.

T
HE 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.