The Four Ms. Bradwells (34 page)

“Shit, it’s the press,” Ginger says. She points. “That boat. It’s heading straight for Chawterley.”

Laney lets go of my hand. Raises it to shade her eyes. “It might be the girls,” she says. But she doesn’t believe that, really. And Ginger doesn’t recognize the boat.

“We should head back to the house, anyway,” Ginger says. “It’s probably neither, but Mia will be wondering what happened to us.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “She’s with Max.”

Ginger frowns. Which ticks me off. After all these years you’d think Ginger would be able to let go of the need to have every man within sight want her. It’s pathetic, really. She’s not happy in Cleveland either. I’ve visited her enough over the years to see that. She’s fifty-two years old and she still doesn’t know what she wants. Even Mia, who never knew what she wanted when we were young, has settled into a life that suits her.

“I think there’s pretty definitely something starting there,” I say.

“Then you’d best wave goodbye to Mia,” she snaps. “Max’s boat is heading out. And, shit, isn’t that another one coming in? Another two?”

She’s right. A boat is just heading out from down island. Near Max’s house. Two others loom at the horizon. I slip back inside the lantern
room. Away from the cameras. We’re almost certainly too far away to be caught on film. But who knows?

I try to imagine what I’m going to say to the press as Ginger leads us down the winding steps. I’m the one who is going to have to say whatever is said. I’m the one they’ll look to for explanations. I’m the one being considered for the Court. And I’m the one—the only one—who knows the facts. The only one who has kept silent. I only meant to protect Laney. Not to bury a crime I wasn’t even sure was a crime. But that won’t be the way it’s seen.

So what do I do here? Do I stick to the story we’ve been telling all these years? The story we’ve been declining to tell, pretending there isn’t any story. Do I stick to a story I know isn’t quite true?

I remember what Faith said that Saturday in the Captain’s Library:
The press can make a nice girl into a slut without even trying
. I’d thought she was talking about Laney. But she was talking about Ginger, too. She was talking about us all. How much it must have angered her that it was still true thirty years later.

M
IA IS JUST
heading out the Chawterley door to find us when we return from the lighthouse. That silly plastic camera in her hands. We duck back inside. Scatter to close drapes. Lock windows and doors. We peek through the blinds in the Sun Room to see four boats drawing closer.

“So what’s the plan?” I ask.

“If we’ve learned anything from politicians lately,” Ginger says, “it’s that if you keep repeating even the most ridiculous statements over and over, people eventually believe they’re true.”

It is what is better in this country, Elsbieta: the rules apply to all the peoples
.

So much of life is guided by chance. Outside our control. There are so many things we can’t stop or can’t see that we should change. Laney’s rape. Zack’s death. Mia’s marriage to Andy. Ginger’s relationship with Trey. We’re all scarred by every one of those things because they happened to us or they happened to someone we love. I suppose it’s those scars that make us refuse to step back and allow things we
don’t
want to happen to take their course just because the law requires it. Which is an untenable position for a judge to hold, of course. I do see that.

Is that what we were doing that spring break? Putting ourselves above the law? We didn’t see it that way. We thought we were putting our reputations
before our rights in a way that had nothing to do with anyone else. Making choices that hurt no one. That saved us from hurt. The facts had changed, though. Trey had turned up dead. A different set of facts we never stopped to consider.

The first boat arrives. A wiry guy jumps onto the pier and secures a large powerboat across from the
Row v. Wade
as a string of eight or ten more boats streams toward us. A heavyset guy hands a TV camera up. A perfectly coiffed blonde emerges from the cabin.

“ ‘We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde / who comes on at five.’ ” I sing off-tune. Even Matka would tell you that.

“That’s no bubblehead.” Mia raises her wreck of a camera and eyes me through the viewfinder. She doesn’t take the shot. “That’s Fran Halpern.”

Fran looks a bit sick to her stomach. I take some small pleasure in that.

Another boat is not far behind them. Someone shouting from the bow. One of the crew in the first boat yells back, “We’re unloading as fast as we can!” But the last of the crew is dawdling. Checking around to make sure all the gear has been unloaded. Which it has. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose by stalling. Their camera is already rolling on Ms. Halpern. As long as their boat is tied up to the pier there isn’t room for another to dock.

“Imagine how well exclusive footage of a still house front plays on television,” I say.

Ginger points out that it’s actually the back of the house.

“Saturday is a slow news day,” Mia says. “You’d be surprised what they’ll run.”

I hesitate as we head toward the servants’ stairs. I have half a mind to stick my head out the door and tell these bastards they’re trespassing on private property. But they would take my photograph before I got a word out. And who knows how they’d twist anything I might say. What
would
I say, anyway? That if they didn’t leave I’d call the police? There are no police on Cook Island. A blessing in 1982 coming back to bite us.

Was it a blessing? Would we have done things differently if we hadn’t had the night to think over what to do before we could go to the police? Would our lives have been better in the long run, or worse?

The doorbell rings. Rings again. And again. We don’t even think about answering.

“The nerve,” I say.

We all laugh as we hurry upstairs.

We duck into the first bedroom. The Captain’s Bedchamber, which was Faith’s room. The double bed with a massive mahogany German-grandfather-clock-look-alike headboard must be where she died. Where Max found her. I’m not sure about this, though. Ginger never shared the details with us.

A white terry-cloth robe hangs on a hook on the closet door. A crystal decanter of what is probably bourbon sits beside an empty ashtray on the nightstand. An open pack of Virginia Slims. A bitten pencil. A pleading clip. This was Faith’s life until it wasn’t anymore. She died with her activist boots firmly on her feet.

I think it was a disappointment to Faith that I never took up the banner of gender issues directly myself. I used the excuse of Catharine MacKinnon being more expert than I ever could be. I focused on immigration issues instead. I think Faith understood but was disappointed nonetheless.

One closet door and the bottom drawer of a mahogany dresser are slightly ajar. Was it only yesterday that Ginger came in here looking for clothes? She stares at the crystal decanter and the pleading clip as if her mother might emerge, white-robed, from the shower to ask if we’ve written our congressman about the Equal Rights Amendment this month. It’s Saturday. The day she always called to remind us.
Carter and Ford both support the amendment
. I can almost hear her voice.
More than eighty percent of Americans, after they’ve actually read the ERA, support it
. It fell three states short of ratification that June, though. Seventy-five percent of women state legislators in the four key states voted to ratify, but only forty-six percent of the men did. I’d been in D.C. clerking for Judge Ginsburg when the time for ratification expired. Laney and I mourned it together by phone instead of at the apartment we’d planned to share.

I wonder, sometimes, if Faith was happier in her last years than she had ever been. Living alone here. Accomplishing what she meant to accomplish. With no distractions. No children to raise. No husband who needed a weekend-long birthday party thrown in his honor.

Is that selfish, living like that, or is it selfless? Is it foolish, or is it wise?

“There’ll be as good a view from Emma’s Peek as there is from here,” Mia suggests.

“Or the Captain’s Office,” Laney says.

Ginger walks to the window. Peers out. Laney joins her as I remember that story Beau told about Ginger hauling a skiff from the mud with a broken arm.

The first boat has cleared the pier now. A second boat has taken its place. A second gang of journalists is unloading.

“WJLA?” Laney says.

Mia answers, “The D.C. affiliate for ABC.”

I step behind Laney. Finger a ringlet of dark hair. She turns to meet my look. Raises a hand to her neck and rubs it. Aging skin to aging skin. Though there is still so much youth in her face.

“If I had ever imagined this would get so much attention,” I say, “I would have said no when they offered me the Court.”

Something in her dark eyes leaves me thinking she doesn’t believe me. Leaves me wondering if I believe myself. I did imagine someone might ask about Trey’s death; I armed myself with an answer. Did I never imagine this would blow up into such a public mess? That Laney, too, would be dragged into it? Or did I want the nomination too badly to admit to the sight of it in my path?

Laney takes my hand. Her fingers interweave darkly with mine. “I knew it might happen when I decided to run for office,” she says. Taking onto herself the burden I should bear.

Betts

THE CAPTAIN’S BEDCHAMBER, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

“I
THOUGHT THE
Ben thing might come out in the confirmation hearings,” I say. I hesitate. There is a brief I-could-make-something-up-and-present-it-as-truth moment. An I-can-protect-myself-as-I’ve-been-doing-all-these-years chance. But I let it pass. I take a peek through the curtains: Yes, this is really happening. I sit in a chair beside Faith’s empty fireplace. I slip off my shoes and pull my feet up into half lotus. And I tell them about my affair with Ben.

They settle into the sitting area with me as I talk. Ginger and Laney on the couch facing the fireplace. Mia in the chair on the other side of it. Mia and Laney skin off their shoes as I have and pull their feet up under them. Ginger wears no shoes.

“Jesus, Betts,” Ginger says. “Even I never slept with a married man.”

Mia’s spine straightens. Her one foot is still up on the seat but the other moves flat to the floor. “How would you
know
, Ginger?” she says. “You’re the one who always hated waking up next to men whose names you didn’t know. So you ask marital status but not names?”

I quash the urge to shush her. To suggest Faith can hear us. That her spirit is here. Anger presses into Ginger’s wide lips. But then her overbite disappears into an apologetic almost-smile.

“You’re right, you’re right,” she says. “That I know of.”

Mia confesses to having slept with a married man once. It surprises me how grateful I am for this disclosure. It crosses my mind that it might not even be true. Mia might be confessing to a sin she never committed just so I won’t feel alone.

“What a sorry bunch of hussies we turn out to be,” I say.

“You never told us,” Laney says to me.

I shrug. I don’t want to admit my distrust of them any more clearly.

“Ambition makes lonely bedfellows,” Ginger says. A simple statement that makes me ache with loneliness even as I set the loneliness aside. As I hand it over to Laney and Mia and Ginge.

“Justice William O. Douglas plowed through four wives while he was on the bench, each one younger and blonder than the gal before,” Laney says. “Are you thinking he never started seeing one before he left the other?”

“That’s no doubt why he found a right to privacy in the bill of rights,” I say. I’m the first to laugh but they laugh with me. Gallows humor. What is there to do but laugh?

“Clarence Thomas,” Mia says. “Long Dong Silver and pubic hairs in Coke. Why would Anita Hill volunteer to have her name dragged through that mud if that wasn’t true?”

“But women are held to higher standards,” Ginger says. “In all that ImClone insider trading mess, who was the only one who ended up serving time? Martha fucking Stewart. Who took the fall for employing an illegal immigrant nanny? Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood because of course we can’t have an attorney general who breaks the law, never mind that our very male secretary of the treasury had $34,000 of unpaid taxes on an illegal nanny before he was confirmed. Do you think there’s a double standard?”

I smile despite the situation. We’ll have to arrange an exorcism here. The ghost of Faith Cook Conrad has clearly taken up residence in her daughter’s wide mouth.

“A double standard we perhaps impose on ourselves,” I say. “Giving up the Supreme Court to care for a husband who doesn’t even know who we are anymore. Only to have him die and leave us with nothing to do but watch as the justice who replaced us undoes half the good we’ve done.”

“Betts,” Mia says gently. Not Sandra Day O’Connor’s name, but mine. In the gentleness of her voice I see that it isn’t the demands of working another life around my ambitions that I’ve avoided all these years. It’s the demands of another dying. Not just the grief of losing someone I love, but the care it takes to see them through the process of
dying. I might love again if I were guaranteed I would be the first of us to die, or even if I just knew my new lover would die the way Matka did: in her sleep one Sunday night. After we’d spent the weekend together in Chicago. She’d moved there years earlier for a job as a medical researcher, work she loved. “We had such a nice weekend, didn’t we, Betsy?” Those were her last words.