The Four Ms. Bradwells (35 page)

Laney, sitting closest to me, reaches a hand across the gap between the couch and my chair. Rests it on mine. “Did y’all know Justice Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan?” she asks, seeing I need to move on to something else. “Everyone in Alabama knew it,” she says. “It’s how he got elected to the Senate, with the Klan’s support. Then
he’s
the one to insist separate can never be equal.”

“Making up for past wrongs?” I suggest.

She removes her hand from mine. Fingers her neck again. Her expression is somewhere between angry and sad. I can’t imagine what I’ve said.

“So you’re suggesting that’s what I need to do here, Betts?” she demands. “Make up for my past wrongs?”

“Of course not! I was talking about Justice Black, Lane!”

“Not reporting it wasn’t wrong, Laney,” Mia says gently. “No one is obligated to report an assault on themselves. It was a reasonable decision, to choose not to subject yourself to … to all that.”

“Except then Trey ended up dead,” Laney says.

Outside: the sounds of boat horns and people calling to each other. Journalists, cameras, and equipment continue to come ashore. The pier, jutting out over the water, is public property. Theoretically we could stop them from coming above the high tide line. But as my students would say, good luck with that.

I wonder if the press will go away if we hole up here long enough. What do they have to wait for? They don’t have a stick of evidence suggesting Trey’s death was anything but an accident. They just have the suggestion of one blogger who won’t even step up to identify him or herself. They don’t even have Laney’s rape.

“I’m thinking maybe it’s time I just say what happened,” Laney says. “I’m thinking part of what I was looking for in this campaign was to put this behind me once and for all, to go ahead and live my life. So maybe this is it, maybe this is what I’ve got to do now.”

But it’s not just you
. A selfish thought. If she confesses the rape now the press will have a field day speculating about which of us might have killed Trey. Which of us might have known about it. Might have helped cover up a murder.

“But it’s not just you, Laney,” Ginger says, reading my mind. “And it would be terrible timing for you and Betts both.” With a judgmental glance at Mia she continues, “Great timing for the anonymous blogger who surfaced this, though.”

Connections and timing. You girls are going to have both
. How many times did I hear Faith say that? Every time I came to D.C. she introduced me to everyone she could: To Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To Justice Stevens, for whom I also clerked. To Hillary when it looked like she’d be the nominee. To the president when he came through Michigan on the campaign and again after he was elected, when he was making his list of potential Court nominees.

The way Ginger looks at Mia. Oh hell, she’s going to accuse Mia about this blogger thing with the press outside waiting to hear us when the shouting starts.

“Ginger,” I say. Trying to reel the thread back onto the bobbin.

Ginger shoots me an overbitey-and-annoyed look. “I’m just saying that whoever this blogger is has just set herself up for some nice advertising revenues, which is what I might do if I were a recently unemployed journalist. Wouldn’t you, Mi?”

Mia fixes her paper-bag brown eyes on Ginger. She doesn’t blink even once. “I don’t know, Ginge,” she says evenly. “If I were that blogger, I’d figure there was some good juicy stuff to be had in the story of the daughter of a prominent feminist lawyer who is so concerned about the disclosure of her own sordid sexual history that she does everything she can to convince a dear friend who has been sexually assaulted to let it go.”

“No one but the four of us knows about this,” Ginger shoots back. “And Betts and Laney have everything to lose here. So that leaves either you or me, Mia. Me and my ‘sordid sexual history,’ right? You can imagine how excited I am to announce to the whole world what a fucking slut I was.”

Laney and I share a glance. Mia has never let go of feeling we ought to have gone to the police. Feeling she was right and we were wrong and we ought to have listened to her. But Ginger had been insistent that
going to the police or even just to her mother would have made things worse. Laney hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone either. And I’d come back from talking to Faith with my mind changed.

But there has never been any point in getting between Ginger and Mia when their tempers fly.

Mia doesn’t say anything, though. She smiles a little sadly. Lifts her goofy toy camera. Focuses on Ginger’s wide feet wedged between her legs and the worn fabric of her mother’s chair. A single cheap plastic
snap
interrupts the silence.

She stands and goes to the window. Peeks through the curtain. “Fox,” she says. “CBS and, damn, is that Judy Woodruff? We’ve moved from scandal to legitimate story if the
NewsHour
is here.” She turns and looks at the three of us sitting around Faith’s cold fireplace. “You suppose that’s the good news, or the bad?”

Mia

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

W
E’VE BEEN SITTING
in the Captain’s Bedchamber for hours—all of us taking surreptitious peeks out the window while I’ve been taking surreptitious peeks inside myself—when Betts spots yet another boat headed for the Chawterley pier. “There aren’t enough journalists squashing the flowers already?” she asks. As Laney rises to have a look, too, I stuff down the urge to defend the press, to defend myself.

“Not many flowers on that side of the house,” I say.

“You think there aren’t reporters and photographers on every side of this house?” Ginger says. “But the flowers are all dying, anyway.” She, too, goes to the window, leaving me alone to wonder how many times Faith sat here by the fireplace, with no one to share the night.

“It’s Max!” Ginger says. “That’s Max’s boat. And, shit, that’s Annie helping him dock. Annie and Iz.”

I join them at the window just in time to see the horde of journalists swarm the pier as the boat approaches, already clicking photos and shouting questions. They have no idea who they’re photographing, but they don’t want to miss the shot, just in case. In this digital age, they waste nothing but the time it will take to delete what they don’t use.

Betts moves toward the door, but Ginger grabs her sleeve before she gets very far.

“Max will get Izzy in, Betts,” she says. “Believe me, Max will get Izzy and Annie both into the house unharmed. If we go out there, especially if
you
go out there, it’s just worse for them. Trust me this once: let Max get them in the house.”

“It’s locked,” Betts says. “All the doors are locked.”

“I’ll get the door,” I say, heading out into the hall before anyone can object.

“Max is such a nice guy,” I hear Laney say as I’m leaving. “Why do you suppose his wife left him?” Her words register in my pathetic little brain only as my feet hit the marble of the back foyer: Max and his wife have split? But there is no time for that now.

I peek through the backdoor sidelights, my hand on the doorknob as Max barrels through the press, one arm around each girl. Tiny Isabelle is practically buried in the crook of his arm, where the photographers can’t get much of a shot of her, but Annie, at six feet, is all there for everyone to see. I silently will her to reach up and release the clip holding her hair back, to let the veil of blond loose to cover her face. And I see in Annie how Ginger, too, must have been as a girl: taller by a margin than all the middle-school boys, gawky tall until she got used to her height, everyone-turning-to-look tall, and beanpole thin. It’s the last pin clicking into place, why Ginger never has seen herself as beautiful: she was a gawky virgin, and then Trey seduced her without falling in love with her, and she became a gawky slut. How many years does it take to get over the burden of the teenage girls we were?

I throw the lock and open the door. “You are not even thinking about using tape of a minor, or stepping on this porch,” I announce loudly to the cameras still pointed at the arriving threesome. “You’re all from reputable news sources, Fran,” I say, picking Fran off from the pack to personalize this. “You have standards of conduct.” Which maybe they would all remember without my help, but there is no percentage in testing that.

My words have the intended effect: everyone turns to me, their cameras rolling, their shutters snapping, but no one steps beyond the path as Max and the girls break free of them and hurry inside.

Annie has just had a birthday, I remember as I close the door and throw the lock again. She’s eighteen now, not a minor. An honest mistake on my part, though, and it will take them some time to figure it out.

Annie isn’t the story here, anyway, and now they have a clip of me.

I’m glad I put on makeup in the little moment before I headed to Max’s house this morning—a vain thought, I admit it, but my squishy fairness looks bad enough in photos
with
makeup.

I kiss first Annie, then Iz, telling them they look beautiful, which they do. Gawky, almost grown-up beautiful in Annie’s case, and dark hair and
pale skin intelligent beautiful in Izzy’s. “Hollywood agents are going to be knocking on your doors based on just that little bit of film,” I say, trying to keep this light.

Max hikes up the sagging butt of his jeans, bracing himself for the plunge back outside. The thought of his boxers showing in the TV footage makes me oddly fonder of him. I tell the girls their moms are up in the Captain’s Bedchamber, and suggest Max come say hello. He demurs: he’s already intruded on us once today.

“You brought us the
newspaper
,” I say. “That isn’t intruding, that’s doing a favor. And now you’ve brought us the girls, which is exactly what we need. At least come upstairs and let everyone thank you for that.”

G
INGER, AFTER HUGGING
both the girls, asks Max how he knew to get them. I can’t decide if she’s oblivious to her daughter’s trauma at being run over by the press, or if she is handling it by letting her get over it quietly in a way her own mother never would have allowed her to do.

“I called him.” Annie takes in the empty ashtray, the pleading clip, the robe that perhaps Faith wore when she drank her morning coffee. “I used to call him a lot when Grammie was alive, just to make sure she was okay.”

I don’t know which surprises me more, hearing Faith called “Grammie” or the idea of a teenage girl who worries about her grandmother, who calls a neighbor to check up on her. Maybe Faith found the relationship she’d always wanted to have with her daughter in her granddaughter instead.

The girls are famished; they’ve been traveling without stopping to eat. I offer to fix something for dinner, and Max again starts making excuses to leave.

“You’ll be hounded by the press, Maxie,” Ginger says. “You’re bound to say something stupid. Just about anyone with a microphone thrust in his face manages to sound stupid. Besides, Mia can’t cook worth shit.”

“I can cook,” I say, but Laney and Betts agree: I can’t cook worth shit.

Max says he’ll stay if I’ll sous-chef for him and, honestly, I’m happy for the excuse to get away from the other Ms. Bradwells. I’m still stinging from Ginger’s words, even if I do deserve them:
So that leaves either you or me, Mia. Me and my ‘sordid sexual history,’ right? I’m going to be publicizing that, for sure
. I can’t imagine how Max isn’t stinging from the
charge that he’ll be stupid in front of a microphone—which I say once we’re settled in the kitchen.

“Ginger never will get past thinking of me as an island boy,” he says. “You end up with a warped perspective when a place like Chawterley is your summerhouse. But she has such a big heart, even if she isn’t always quite as socially graceful as she might be. She’s like her mother that way. It’s easy to forgive them both, because they have so much bigger hearts than they recognize.”

Ginger startles us by appearing at the bottom of the servants’ stairs. If she’s heard us, she pretends not to have. “We’ve decided to dine in the Tea Parlor,” she says, and she heads across the kitchen and out through the Ladies’ Salon. The others follow her into one of the few rooms downstairs that has no window to the outside.

“Set a place for Faith’s Ghost,” Betts whispers as she brings up the rear.

Max puts me to dicing onions, then takes the knife back. “Maybe you can just be the soundtrack to my cooking?” he suggests.

“I can sing better than Betts, but that isn’t saying much.”

“Better than you dice?” He grins his nerdy-glasses grin. “Think talk radio.”

And then we’re talking easily, like we’ve known each other forever. At some point in the conversation, I remember my Holga, and I frame him in the viewfinder. He has a whole mess of things cooking together in the pan, and he’s boiled a pot of pasta he’s now dumping into a colander. I click the shutter, catching the steam and the falling pasta and Max’s age-stained hands, remembering for some reason the rearview mirror of my mother’s car. Am I looking backward still, or am I looking ahead?