The Four Ms. Bradwells (22 page)

Standing there deciding I couldn’t possibly tell this cold fish anything. Trying to decide whether to apologize for bothering her and excuse myself or just slip out without another word. Then Faith set her pencil down and took off her reading glasses. One arm as chewed as the pencil.

“What is it, Betts?” she asked. Not unkindly or impatiently. Then with concerned alarm in her voice, “What’s wrong?”

Her eyes pooled as I told her. As I stood on the thin layer of stiff carpet and dumped the burden at her feet. She listened intently. Spoke only when I’d finished. “Good Lord.” But without shock or judgment or even that much surprise.

“Was it you, Betts?” Spoken even more gently. “Is that what you’re trying to say, that he did this to you?”

I didn’t trust my voice.

Faith sighed. Rubbed at her forehead. “You’re sure it was Trey?”

I nodded, trying to make sense of her reaction. No suggestion that Trey would never do this. Just the question whether I was sure.

“Trey and who?” she asked. “You have to tell me, Betts. I can’t help if I don’t know the facts.”

I managed to say, “She doesn’t want anyone to know.”

Faith dipped her head. Ran both hands through her hair and then left them there. “One of you? Not an island girl? One of you.” She traced the join where the leather inset met the wood of the desktop. “She’s okay?”

She looked up, then. The intensity in her green eyes startled me. Evoked Trey’s darker eyes.

“Physically, I mean?” she asked.

“Bruises, but …”

“She needs to see a doctor. This is when we need a doctor in the family.”

“She doesn’t want to see a doctor.” Thinking Matka was a doctor and that hadn’t helped anything.

“Does she want to go home?”

“I don’t think she wants her parents to know. I don’t think she can bear for her parents to know.”

Faith studied me for a long moment. “And there’s no question that it was … Did she say no? Did she say no and
mean
it?”

I wanted to turn away from her. To run for the locker room the way I always had when I dove poorly. Head to a stall in the john where no one would see the tears of frustration I never could hold back. I couldn’t let myself, though. I couldn’t risk the possibility that Faith would take averted eyes as a sign that I wasn’t sure.

“It wasn’t
voluntary.
” The word bitter. The tears spilling. If Faith could think Laney had wanted to have sex with Trey, it would be assumed by everyone else.

“I don’t like it any more than you do, Betts, but it’s a question that has to be asked, that will be asked by the police and by the press and by a jury, if it comes to that. Which it won’t, probably. It’s a total crock, I know, but even rapes that
are
reported—only one in ten to start with—rarely
get
to a jury. And so few of the ones that do ever result in convictions.” She shook her head. “Christ, it doesn’t even matter if she said no, no one was there to hear it. And the defense would just trot out that damned Schulhofer survey that forty percent of girls admit to saying no when they mean yes. They don’t want to seem promiscuous, for God’s sake. They don’t want to seem
promiscuous
? God knows men never worry about that.

“The defense will just say sure they had sex but it was consensual. Every two minutes a girl is raped and eighty-five percent of them know the rapist, and it never gets to court.”

I don’t know what I’d expected her to suggest that we Ms. Bradwells
hadn’t already decided together: that rape victims couldn’t win, that if we wanted to be taken seriously as a lawyers we had to just bury this.

“What
aren’t
you telling me, Betts?” Again in the gentle voice. “You’ve come to me. You were right to come to me. But now that you have, you may as well tell me everything.”

When I hesitated, she said, “Ginger?”

Matka, too, had assumed Ginger was the bad girl among us. She’d thought Ginger needed an abortion when it was me. But
my
mother had assumed it
wasn’t
me. Matka had assumed it was someone else.

“But it has to do with Ginger?” Faith said. “It has something to do with Ginger?”

My bare feet on the carpet looked pale and insubstantial. I wished I’d worn shoes.

“Ginger and Trey?” she said with a caution in her voice that made me nervous. That made it clear she didn’t know. I realized then that I’d hoped she would know. That I’d come to her hoping she would know enough already. That I wouldn’t have to explain. But how could she have known her daughter was sleeping with her too-old-for-her cousin and just let it be?

“Lord.” She fingered the pencil. Distractedly picked it up. Worried it until she snapped it in two. The crack startled her even more than me.

“For God’s sake, sit
down
, Betts.”

I glanced to the door.

“We’re talking about your clerkship with Ruth,” she said more gently. “If anyone comes in, you’re telling me about that.”

She set the two halves of the broken Ticonderoga on the desktop. I sat in the leather chair across the desk from her.

“For how long?” she asked. She stood and turned to the bookshelf the same way Ginger had in Faith’s Library last night when she hadn’t wanted us to see her face. She ran a hand along the small vertical seam where the bookshelf hid the door into the ballroom. Then in a measured voice, saying it so I couldn’t deny it, or maybe so I would: “How long has Ginger been sleeping with Trey?”

She came and sat in the chair next to mine. “You can tell me this in confidence, Betts,” she said. “Ginger won’t ever know that I know, much less that you’re the one who told me.”

My hands in my lap dry and useless.

“You must know by now how terribly Ginger blunders with men,” she said.

I licked my lips. Continued to stare at my hands.
Ginger blunders with “men.”
Matka would have called them “boys.” How bizarre it must be to have a mother who isn’t appalled that her daughter has sex.

She took my chin in her hands and turned my face to hers. “A year?” she asked.

The press of her fingers on my chin.

“Less?” she said.

I blinked. Blinked again.

“Longer.” She sank back into the chair. “How much longer, Betts? Since she was …” She cleared her throat, said weakly, “Seventeen?”

I looked down, shocked at her quick leap from an affair that might have lasted only a few weeks to one that had lasted years. She took it as a gesture with meaning.

“Sixteen?” she said with more doubt. She stared at me without seeming to see me. As if she might be trying to remember this thing she hadn’t known. As if she would see in retrospect something she’d missed at the time.

“That summer that …” She blinked, her dark green eyes uncharacteristically uncertain. “Jesus, she was
thirteen
that summer.”

She stood. Went to the bookshelves. Pulled the hidden door open, whispering to herself, “She was thirteen years old, she was a
child
,” as she disappeared into the ballroom.

Thirteen. Ginger hadn’t said that the night before. But Mia and I had done the math. Ginger was thirteen the summer she lost her virginity to Trey Humphrey. And Trey was twenty. Ginger hadn’t seemed at all troubled by that, though. She continued to have sex with him again and again over the years. She had sex with him the night the guys arrived, when she and Trey went off to “borrow” a second skiff so we could all go gut-running.

Faith reappeared a few minutes later with a full glass of bourbon in her hand. No ice. She took the seat next to me again. Studied me. Took a sip of the drink. She stared into the glass for a moment before starting the inquisition: Where had the rape occurred? At what time? That late? (“Shit,” she said, the way Ginger would have, but it startled me to hear her use the word.) Had she gone with Trey voluntarily? Had she and Trey
had sexual contact before? What about flirting? And did the girl have a sexual history?

Girl
. Even with Faith, males were men and females were girls. Or was she still thinking of her daughter, who had been only thirteen?

“She had a boyfriend in college,” I said. “But I don’t think she’s … you know … with anyone else.”

“Not something less than sexual intercourse. Oral sex?”

I said I didn’t know, although I did.

“Trey has a history, too, of course,” Faith said. “But his dozens of one-night stands wouldn’t be held against him even if they were admissible, while even that single serious lover she no doubt thought she would marry will bring charges of rape into question.”

She took another sip of the drink, then drained it. Studied the empty bottom as if the glass might magnify the way out of this mess. I could almost see her measuring how damning it would be for Trey if it came out in court that he had seduced his thirteen-year-old cousin. But even a past rape conviction wasn’t admissible if Trey didn’t take the stand.

“Okay, you don’t tell anyone, Betts,” she said finally. “None of you do. Do you understand that? You have to understand that and you have to make Ginger understand that, too. Ginger and Laney and Mia. You know that, right? Having this made public … It will tarnish everyone.”

I nodded dumbly, understanding in the same way I understood I could never have gone to Ben about the baby, that I’d have ended up splattered with a mess he would deny. Men can deny truths women are saddled with. And do. I like to think I wouldn’t be like that if I were a man. But I suppose I might be. I suppose some would say I am. And maybe I would have to agree.

“You don’t even let the girls know I know,” Faith said. “You just explain to them that allegations of rape, true or not, provable or not, will hurt every one of you. You don’t make her feel bad. You make it clear you know it’s not her fault. But still there isn’t anything to be done.”

I blinked back tears.

“I know it’s not right,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. The press can make a nice girl into a slut without even trying.”

At the slap of the word “slut” my tears spilled in earnest.

Faith went behind the desk and pulled a small plastic packet of tissues from a drawer. She handed them to me. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

“A good lawyer would have a jury wondering from the opening argument if she isn’t a call girl. You have to take my word on this. You have to promise me you won’t say a word to anyone, Betts.”

I nodded.

“You get them to promise, too, okay? You get Ginger to promise. You make her understand.”

I nodded.

“Ginger will listen to you, Betts,” she said. “She’ll rush out to do the opposite of anything I tell her, but she’ll listen to you.”

Ginger
wasn’t
listening to me, though. I thought we should tell someone and so did Mia. But Ginger insisted we couldn’t say a word. We had to let this go. That’s why I’d come to Faith. Looking for a way to hold Trey accountable for what he’d done.

I
STARE UP
through the bare frame of the Merchant Ivory bed in Emma’s Peek. Remember now the quiet of Cook Island that morning Trey was found dead. I woke long before dawn to the moonlight across my face on the bottom bunk. The bunk across from me empty. When I got up to lower the window shade I half expected to see Ginger swimming off the pier. But the bay was as still as if it knew Trey was dead even if the rest of the world didn’t yet. And when I’d turned back to the beds I’d seen Ginger. Her long body was wrapped around Laney’s in the upper bunk.

A moment of this morning’s dream comes back to me. Me wrapped around someone in bed. Was it Zack in my dream-bed? I was definitely in London in the dream. In that funky floor-that-slanted-so-much-it-left-me-motion-sick hotel room just off Soho Square. Where people in publishing liked to stay but high-priced New York lawyers did not. But Zack and I never went to London together. We never went much of anywhere. We clerked together and we got married and he got sick, leaving Izzy as fatherless as the never-child I’d carried those few months in law school would have been.

Betts

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Winter 1993:
Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) and Virginia (“Ginger”) Cook Conrad (JD ’82) completed the Cleveland Marathon together this fall, raising $40,000 for the Leukemia Society through Team in Training and making them the first Marathon Bradwells. Friends Helen (“Laney”) Weils (JD ’82) and Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) cheered from the sidelines, having chosen the quick pain of opening their pocketbooks over the extended pain of running ridiculous numbers of miles. Thanks to all the many law school alums, students, and staff who supported the run!

I
PICKED UP
the receiver to call Ben a hundred times that fall of our third year at Michigan Law. I knew Ben would give me money. But I didn’t know if he would give me more than that. If he would give my child the father I never had. I thought I didn’t even want him to. Rejecting something I knew I couldn’t have. I’m more like Ginger than I like to think I am.