The Four Ms. Bradwells (28 page)

Sometimes the sun never does set.

“The world land speed record for sunset is two minutes and eight seconds,” Trey said as the cocktail waitress brought a fresh round of drinks.
“Here—we’re at about thirty-eight degrees latitude—the range will be from about two minutes and forty-five seconds to about three and a quarter minutes.”

“That’s all?” Betts asked.

“Don’t blink.”

Laney asked—in what Betts would call her best I’m-working-with-this-guy-next-fall-so-why-not-flatter-him voice—why the atmosphere made a difference.

“It doesn’t much,” Trey conceded. “Refraction by the atmosphere lifts things a little near the horizon, so they look higher in the sky than they are, but that works at both the top and bottom.”

“Both instants are delayed by the same amount so their difference remains the same,” I said.

The sole of Beau’s foot pressed gently over the laces of mine.

“Exactly,” Trey said.

“Unless conditions in the atmosphere change as the sun is setting.”

“Exactly,” Trey said again.

“Here it goes,” Doug said, and we all looked to see the sun kiss the horizon. We watched quietly as the bottom arc flattened, and then Doug began to sing softly: “Is this the little girl I carried?”

Beau’s hand settled quietly on my upper thigh as he joined Frank and Trey and Doug for the chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset,” the four of them singing in such melancholy tones that the song seemed to bubble up through me as I listened, as I sat mutely watching the sun sink under the darkening bruise of sky.

We ate early-season crabs in the inn’s cozy dining room, and drank a delicious French chardonnay, and we talked, and we laughed, and we flirted. It felt right, as though we Ms. Bradwells were completed by this guy gang, as though they were just what we should have been looking for had we known we needed to look. Laney was a little quiet, and she didn’t eat much, but maybe she wasn’t much for crab, or maybe it was weird for her to be the only black person in the room, although I didn’t think that was it. Laney’s family had been the only black family in her neighborhood in Denver when she was a kid.

“Dessert is a required course tonight,” Trey insisted. “Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cake.” Eight thin layers of yellow cake interspersed with chocolate icing, brought over by boat from Ewell on Smith Island, which we ate with a slender bottle of dessert wine. And then it was dark, dark,
dark. “Time to see this syzygy,” Trey said, and no one objected, no one pointed out that Venus and Mercury wouldn’t rise until almost dawn, that if we started now we would be there all night. We wanted to be there all night.

B
ACK AT THE
lighthouse, Doug ducked into the Lightkeeper’s Cottage to grab a bottle of scotch while the rest of us headed up the winding stairs. I don’t know what I’d expected Trey’s telescope to look like—something small and precise, scientific, I suppose—but the one in the middle of the watch room was a fat red tube that even today’s supersized me would easily have fit inside. It looked like it should be too heavy to move, but Trey took the bottom end and Frank the top, and they carried it easily up the winding stairs to the lantern deck.

“It’s just an empty light bucket,” Trey said to Laney. “It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but you’re going to love the view, Miss Weils.”

Ms
. Weils. But Ginger didn’t correct him.

“First up: the Roman war god’s very own Mars,” Trey said.

He used binoculars to scan the sky, then pointed the telescope and looked through an eyepiece near the top of the scope. After a moment, he said, “There she is.”

Ginger moved toward the telescope, but Trey said, “How about you first, Mia?”

I hesitated, but Ginger didn’t move, so I put my eye to the viewfinder. A reddish bowling ball of a planet loomed big enough that you could see a deep tear in the swirly-patterned fabric of its surface.

“Valles Marineris,” Trey said.

“Mariner’s Valleys,” Laney said.

Trey looked her up and down carefully, like she was a racehorse he might like to bet on. “You know Mars?”

“Just Latin,” Ginger answered for Laney, a little dismissively, I thought.

“Greek, too?” Trey asked.

When Laney allowed that she didn’t know Greek, he told us the canyon we were looking at was also called Agathadaemon, “the sanctuary of the good spirit.” It was ten times as long and three and a half times as deep as the Grand Canyon, he said, on a planet with a radius half that of Earth.

“An eighth the size,” I said.

The looks I got …

“The volume of a sphere?” I said. “Four-thirds pi times the radius cubed?”

“Mia, the fucking Savant,” Ginger said.

We spent the whole night taking turns looking through the telescope and talking about what we saw. Jupiter and Saturn were in fairly straight alignment with Mars so that when Trey showed us where to look—“near that really bright star, which is Spica”—we could identify three starlike dots in a line of not-stars without the telescope. Laney, the first to step up to the telescope to see Saturn, said in an astonished voice, “Saturn looks just exactly like you expect it to—which is so unexpected!” Its rings looked like the ones on the plastic solar system model Bobby had when we were kids, oddly unreal.

In no time at all, it was nearly dawn and we’d seen Uranus and Neptune and Pluto—still a planet in those days—leaving only Venus and Mercury.

“Prepare yourself for the end of the world!” Betts warned, and as always, she was the first to laugh.

It was so easy to laugh back then at doomsday predictions: the earth pulling off its axis, out of its orbit, away from the only warmth we knew. We couldn’t imagine our lives could be changed so dramatically in a single moment. When Laney asked Trey, seriously, if scientists expected anything unusual, Ginger offered to make her doomsday placards, help her grow a beard, and feature her in a
New Yorker
cartoon.

“But seriously,” Laney repeated.

“Seriously,” Trey said, “they expect all the planets to be aligned on the same side of the sun, an event that won’t repeat for almost two hundred years. Isn’t that unusual enough?”

We all took turns stepping up to the telescope as Venus rose. Then Mercury rose, too, and the world didn’t end as near as we could tell. The eight of us—oddly energized despite the glow of light at the horizon—peered eastward as if we might see this final planet without need of the telescope. Trey scanned the horizon with the binoculars, and fiddled with the telescope again, and peered for a long moment before saying quietly, reverently, “There she is.”

“Laney,” he said as he stepped away from the eyepiece, and she didn’t have to be asked twice to take his place.

“Just at the horizon?” she said uncertainly.

Trey motioned Beau to step forward next, but he said no, we ought to let the girls go first, and I felt the warmth of his hand on my back, moving me forward.

I pressed my eye to the glass, but I could see nothing but horizon and lightening sky. Maybe the light still had been dim enough for Trey to see the planet, but it had changed now. Maybe the atmosphere was changing so fast that by the time even Laney put her eye to the viewfinder it had disappeared into the wash of dawn. I don’t know. I remember feeling oddly embarrassed, though, as if I’d lost Mercury in something I’d done wrong and my failure would deprive the others of the last chance in our lifetime to glimpse a syzygy.

Trey looked through the eyepiece himself again and adjusted the scope, then peered and adjusted again. “Too much sunlight,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Leaving me remembering again that last night at that cabin in Alaska, with Miss Georgia: I’d stumbled forward, probably nodding off to sleep as I’d spied on Mom and her friend, and the noise had attracted their attention. “Oh hell, Ellen,” Miss Georgia had said, and she stood and walked to her car.
“Georgia,”
my mom called softly, but she only stood watching from the porch as Miss Georgia closed the car door and drove away. I remember thinking if I’d known it would be that easy I’d have let Bobby loose with his hunting vest and binoculars and camera the day we’d arrived. But then I’d looked to my mother, seen her expression as she watched the car disappear down the road. I understood even then, I think, that she was in love with Miss Georgia, and that she’d never see her again.

Betts

THE WATCH ROOM, COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

L
ANEY HAS DISAPPEARED
up the steps to the lantern room and the deck outside it. I hate to leave her there by herself. But I hate to leave Ginger alone here in the watch room. Maybe what happened to Laney is worse than losing your mother or maybe it isn’t. It’s an ugly scar. No doubt about that. A healed-over-in-a-long-thick-psychological-gash scar. But Laney’s scar is hardened and white now. Ginger’s is new and raw.

“Ginge?” I say gently.

She looks lost as she turns to me. It’s such a not-Ginger thing to do, to appear vulnerable, that I link my arm in hers. A not-me thing to do.

As we stare through the glass to the gray-churning bay, I imagine Ginger having a bonfire out on the waterfront. Sending her mom’s books heavenward to Faith in a rising plume of flame and smoke and ash.

“She was an amazing person, your mom was,” I say.

Ginger unlinks our arms. Her wide lips press together. “That’s a total crock of shit,” she says. She’s going for light and funny. It was one of Faith’s favorite phrases, “a total crock.” But “shit” is Ginger’s own addition. Her voice betrays the hurt she’s trying to hide. It makes me think of that miniature book with the peacock cover she stole.

“Ginge,” I say gently. I want to do the your-mother-loved-you-really-she-did thing. But Ginger would see my needing to say it as doubt. Doubt and, worse, pity. Ginger can stand anything but pity.

“It would have been worse if we’d gone to Mother about it,” she insists. “I know you don’t think so, but it would have been.”

I should tell her the truth: that I did go to her mother. But I don’t know how to begin that conversation.

“Laney wouldn’t have been able to bear the public humiliation,” she insists, taking my silence as disagreement. “You know that. You fucking knew it at the time.”

You
fucking knew it, or thought you did. That’s the sudden anger I almost spit out. You fucking knew it and wouldn’t listen to anyone else. And here we are now. Here I am now. About to be the one bearing the public humiliation. Having to withdraw my name from consideration for the Court under a cloud that will hang over me the rest of my life. Doomed to have the mention of my name in the press forever followed by “whose nomination for the Supreme Court was withdrawn when questions arose about a death on Cook Island in 1982.” And I will never be appointed to any bench, much less the Supreme Court.

You fucking never listen, I almost say. You never listen, and look where it’s gotten you. Passed over for partner. Let out to pasture. Doing nothing at all with your life.

The bitterness in Ginger’s voice stops me, though. Not just because she might be right about Laney. Not just because she might be right about what I thought. But because of the certainty revealed in her tone: she believes her mother went to her grave thinking Trey was the golden boy. The child Ginger herself could never be. And I never told her differently. I let this misunderstanding separate them when I might have brought Ginger closer to her mom. And now it’s too late.

Mia

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Winter 2002:
Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) is delighted to report that her goddaughter Isabelle Johnson took second place in the high school division of the national chess championships held in Memphis this winter. Ms. Johnson’s mother, Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) can claim no role in her daughter’s accomplishment, as, despite her Eastern European heritage and years of Ms. Porter’s tutoring, she can’t grasp the concept that “the horsey-guy” can jump over even a king.