The Four Ms. Bradwells (16 page)

Ginger pulled off the tape sealing the baggie and extracted what we could all see now was a beautiful miniature book.

“Sonnets from the Portuguese?”
Mia took the book from Ginger and opened it. “ ‘The face of all the world is changed, I think.’ ”

“It certainly is!” Betts said. “Or at least it will be when we’re through with it. Us in our navy blue skirt suits and high-cut blouses. But really, Ginger, even
you
don’t jump up from a warm fire to run naked in the cold without a reason.”

“You’re forgetting the hot tub party, Betts,” I said.

“Let me rephrase, your honor: even you, Ginger, don’t jump up from a warm fire to run naked in the cold without a reason unless you’re drunk.”

I lifted one of the empty champagne bottles, pointed it at the cold ashes and the sad remains of a half-burnt log.

As Betts reloaded the fireplace, I said, “It’s your mama’s book, Ginge?”

“Why would you think
that
?” Ginger shot back, the astonished expression in her gray-blue eyes confirming the book’s ownership.

I pulled my soft white towel more securely, huddling lower, wishing we all had on clothes.

“I stole it,” Ginger said, plucking the book back. “Laney’s right, it’s Mother’s. I lifted it from her library and no one missed it for so long that it was impossible to track when it had disappeared or who might have taken it, and I’ve had it ever since.” Her smile not real but rather
what Betts calls her the-thing-I-hate-most-is-waking-up-next-to-a-man-whose-name-I-don’t-know smile.

“And you just”—Betts waved a hand toward the book or the growing fire or both, inexplicably annoyed—“carry it around with you wherever you go? That’s why you happen to have it with you? Why you sprinted in a panic to the boat when you realized—”

“What exactly is a sonnet?” Mia interrupted. Betts never could begin to understand back then that the stolen
Sonnets
volume was about more than a silly book. That the fact of Ginger’s family owning this big old house and another in Virginia while Betts grew up in a tiny apartment in Hamtramck didn’t mean Ginger grew up with the kind of ubiquitous happiness Betts thought she did.

Ginger touched a hand to her still-damp hair, flipping it over the back of the couch. “Fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ A pentameter is five feet.”

Betts glanced at her toes, the nails bare like Mia’s where Ginger and I had painted ours red before we left Ann Arbor.

“Five two-syllable pairs. Iambs, so the second syllable is stressed,” Ginger said.

“Now is the spring break of our wildness spent,” Mia chimed in, and we all smiled.

“Except that has a trochee at the beginning,” Ginger said. “An inverted foot.” She stretched out her own leg and twisted it so her toes were nearly pointing to the floor.

“Is
now
the spring break of our young wildness spent?” Betts amended.

“Is now the spring of our dreams yet unmet?” Ginger proposed. “And that’s eleven syllables, Betts.”

“Did y’all know the word ‘verse’ comes from Latin that means something like a plow at the end of a furrow turning around to begin again?”

They threw couch pillows at me, calling me “Ms. Cicero-Showoff-Bradwell.”

Ginger ran a hand over the cover, the lovely peacock, as the fire crackled, the room warming again. “I didn’t even read poetry when I was thirteen,” she said. “I had no idea what a sonnet was, much less anything about Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Then after another moment, “She grew up on an estate in England. Hope End.”

“There’ll be a million people here for your dad’s party, Ginge,” Mia said. “You could just leave it here somewhere after everyone has arrived and no one will ever know who took it. You could leave it in the library here, or maybe not, maybe leave it where it will be
sure
to be noticed after the party, so it’s clear any of the party guests who’d ever been to your house in Virginia could be the thief.”

“
I
might could leave it somewhere here,” I offered. “If I was to be caught carrying that little book, I’d just say I found it somewhere. No one would expect
I
was the thief since it disappeared years before you and I met.”

And we left it at that, no one saying another word about that book, but it was clear we’d made a plan.

Mia

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Winter 1985:
Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) is now on staff as a foreign correspondent at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. She has no intention of accounting for the eight months after she left Belt & Bayliss, so please don’t ask.

O
UR SECOND NIGHT
at Chawterley that spring break—Sunday night—we were skinny-dipping off the pier again, giggling and splashing in the bright moonlight when a spotlight fixed on us. It came out of nowhere, from out on the water where nobody ought to have been.

“Shit, we have company,” Ginger said with laughter in her voice. “No one else was supposed to be here before Tuesday!”

The spotlight flashed twice before fixing on us again.

“Shit, it’s Frankie and Beau.”

“Your brothers?” Laney said. “How do you know?”

“Sorry guys,” she said, “but we can climb naked from the water now, while they’re close enough to see but far enough away for plausible deniability, or we can wait until they pull up to the pier, at which point we’re screwed.” She was laughing: this was a joke she’d had played on her before, or that she’d played on her brothers; the difference wasn’t quite clear.

She climbed from the water into the spotlight and grabbed the top towel from the stack we’d been smart enough to have handy this time. Suits, no, but towels, yes.

Wolf whistles sounded from the boat.

“Shit, it’s freezing,” she said, pulling the towel around her and directing us to swim over behind the
Row v. Wade
, where we’d be at least partially hidden as we climbed from the water, and where she would cover us each in a towel as we emerged.

“Shit,” she laughed. “Those bastards.” She called out as loudly as she could, “You bastards!”

The sound of male laughter arose from beyond the light—more than two voices—and the light went off and on again, as if winking at us, or trying to catch us dropping our towels to dress in the momentary dark. She grabbed my hand, saying, “Come on!” and pulled me along behind her up the path, all of us laughing now.

We bolted into the house and through the Sun Room to the kitchen, then up the narrow servants’ stairs to our third-floor, no-name room. We dressed quickly, Ginger hurrying us as we pulled on jeans and the sweaters we’d worn in the car, the only sweaters Laney and Betts and I had brought. Despite Ginger’s warnings, we’d imagined a tropical island right up until the moment we jumped into the cold Chesapeake.

We shared the single comb Ginger handed us—she was the fastest to dress—and followed her as she bolted back down the servants’ stairs, through the Dining Hall and the Front Parlor and across the front foyer to the Captain’s Library. There, she flipped Betts a deck of cards, saying, “Sit! Deal!” When we didn’t sit, she pointed to a round table in the center of the room. “Sit, you dipshits!” She grabbed a canister of long matches from the fireplace mantel.

“What are we playing?” Betts asked.

“Just deal something!” Ginger struck a match and set it to the paper and kindling and logs already on the grate. She plopped down in the last chair, her back to the door, and took the cards from Betts. She gave a few to each of us, not dealing so much as handing out random numbers of cards. “Mia, do you have any threes?” she asked before she’d even looked at her cards.

“Go fish?” I said.

She hopped up and ran out into the foyer, where she peeked around the corner and down the hall to the back door and the pier beyond it. “Shit, they came in Trey’s boat.” She hurried back to her seat and picked up her cards again. “We can’t imagine who might have been skinny-dipping off the pier but it certainly wasn’t us. That’s the party line.”

“Even though our hair is still dripping?” Betts asked.

“With this gang, it’s all about the bluff,” Ginger insisted. “Your turn, Mi.”

Four voices singing in harmony—lovely music, actually—sounded
from somewhere between us and the bay. Again, Ginger hopped up and peeked down the hallway.

“Dougie is with them.” She plopped down in her chair again. “Dougie is a holy asshole, but he’s been Trey’s best friend since before my uncle died. He keeps Trey from getting morbid. And he sure has a beautiful voice. Don’t let him sing to you. I swear to God, you’ll want to screw him just because of his voice.”

The door in the back foyer opened a moment later, a song I couldn’t quite place sounding in four-part harmony: “She’s so cold cold cold like an ice cream cone!” A barbershop quartet version of the Rolling Stones? We sat listening as the music made its way into the Music Room, then across the back foyer again and through the Sun Room. In the kitchen, the banging of cabinet doors joined their voices.

“Voilà!”
one of them said as the others continued singing. A moment later the singers made their way through the Dining Hall and the Front Parlor, into the foyer where we could be spotted through the open library door.

“You got any threes, Betts?” Ginger asked.

Betts pulled a three of hearts out and tossed it to Ginger, who tucked it into her hand, ignoring the foursome now singing in the doorway. The smell of sea air and aftershave and scotch and cigarettes came with them: four men in blue jeans and hunter-cum-sailing duds, the least cocky in a down vest while the others wore unbelted tan safari jackets, all those empty pockets. With the bottle of scotch in Down Vest’s hand and the highball glasses each carried, they might have sailed in on the wind without need of a sail. Even the down-vested one had that air of confidence that comes from always having been one of the cool guys.

I recognized the tallest of the four from a photo Ginger kept in her bedroom: her older brother Frank. A clean-shaven face and hair the color of whiskey—shortish for the time, meaning not much below his ears. He had Ginger’s wide mouth and her overbite which, on his profile, accentuated a too-sharp nose. He had thin lips and thin brows, but there was no lack of confidence in his blue, blue eyes. He didn’t look to me like the kind of guy who would be “tasting flavors” just to be tasting, but what did I know about what men did and didn’t like when it came to sex? He was the kind of guy who would have plenty of flavor choices if he wanted them.

The cute one in the down vest looked familiar, too. His long, thick
hair reminded me of Professor Jarrett, although Jarrett was always clean shaven, while this guy had a mountain-man beard and mustache, and eyes the polished green of sea glass, with straight-across brows and long lashes and such a nice-guy expression focused on Ginger that I liked him at once. I looked down at my cards—I
did
have a three among the disorganized mess of hearts and spades and … I ran the fingers of my right hand over my left behind the cards, over my diamond engagement ring. Down Vest grinned as the foursome finished their song, a smile as wide as Ginger’s and Frank’s emerging from all the thick mess of facial hair.
Beau!
Ginger’s brother. The face buried under the beard was an older version of the one in Ginger’s other photo: Beau sitting on the bench in a basketball uniform, his chin bare and baby-soft.

One of the others, a taller, softish guy with wavy dark hair, a slightly crooked face, and an amazing singing voice, said, “You’re forgetting your manners, Ginge?”

Only then did Ginger look to them. “What kind of shit do you morons have for brains, sailing in at night?”

“Thank you!” Beau said. “That was my point, too, but Trey—fine, it’s his boat, but—”

“Let it go, Beau,” the taller guy suggested in an unthreatening voice that was melodic even when he wasn’t singing. “We’re here. Let it go.”

Ginger stood then and, tugging affectionately on Beau’s down vest, said, “This is my brother Beau, who likes always to be prepared for a snowstorm.”

“I
did
come from Chicago,” he protested.

“I don’t know about this, Beau,” she said, touching his beard.

“And this is Dougie,” she said of the guy with the voice. Was it the angle, or was his face really crooked? Not just his nose, but his whole face just a little off symmetrical?

“We pretend Dougie is family because he’s been running around with Frankie for as long as I’ve been able to say ‘Dougie,’ and we all feel sorry for him having to put up with such a sad excuse for a friend.”

“I believe Trey was Doug’s sad excuse for a friend long before I was,” Frank said.

Ginger amended, “We feel sorry for him having to put up with
two
such sad excuses for friends: Frankie and
Trey
,” indicating the shorter, slighter guy, whose intense eyes drew you to him even as you tried to look away. “Trey who doesn’t have the sense to wait until dawn to set sail.”