The Four Ms. Bradwells (40 page)

Arthur heads below and fires up the engine. Max takes the line, preparing to leave. We watch as reporters start loading on like Max is Noah sent by God to collect them. The only holdout is Fran Halpern, whose carefully casual coif is protected by an attractive hat, her makeup still perfect. I make a mental note to get a hat like that.

Her camera crew motions her to join them on the boat. We can’t hear what they’re saying over the rain now, but Max clearly says something to her before he squats down to the near cleat and takes the line in his hand. Her body language is all protest, but he stands and says something more, then extends his hand. She looks from him to her crew, her lips forming angry words: not the f-word, but that’s the idea.

Ignoring his hand and that of her cameraman offered from the boat, she steps from the pier unassisted. Max tosses the line aboard, releases the other line, and hops aboard himself.

As the boat clears the pier and heads out into the bay, Ginger says softly, “ ‘As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, / His guardian sea-god to commemorate’ …”

She backs away from the window and heads toward the shelves with the miniature books.

“It’s one of the sonnets,” she says.

“From the peacock volume, Ginge?” I ask.

Ginger pulls the tiny book from a shelf and opens it, reads the whole sonnet aloud. Laney doesn’t turn from the window, but she is listening intently, as if Ginger has written the poem herself. Betts, too, remains with her back to the room, watching the rain wash away the last glimpse of the ferry, as if those journalists are taking her last hope of being appointed to the Supreme Court away with them.

“What does it mean?” Betts asks when Ginger finishes reading, asking about the poem or the fact that we’re alone here at Chawterley again, or both.

Ginger sets the book on her mother’s desk, next to a volume titled
Transformations
. “I’m not really sure,” she says. “Maybe that’s why Mother left the volume to Aunt Margaret, because I had it all those years and still I don’t understand half the poems.”

Her hand as she picks up the larger volume looks old, suddenly, despite her expensive creams. We’re all growing old and worn like so many of the books surrounding us—old and worn and misunderstood.

“Mother left this one to Aunt Margaret, too,” Ginger says. “Her favorite book of poetry, and I’m the poet, but she leaves it to a fucking friend.”

She flips open the book. The pages split at a point where something has been inserted, a foggy old photograph. She stares at it for a long moment before moving it aside to reveal a small cream-colored envelope underneath.

Laney turns from the window to us as Ginger stares at the writing on the envelope.

“What is it, Ginge?” I ask.

Betts

FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

“Y
OU
SAW
HIM
, Ginge?” Laney whispers. She hasn’t said a word since the Max-entering-press-exiting-poem-reading began. A fact I realize only as she speaks. Her dark cheeks and dark eyes are sunken. Her tone leaves no doubt that she’s had the image of Trey dead in the chair in mind ever since Ginger said she saw him. That her initial rush to comfort Ginger has given way to something else.

“Lordy, why didn’t you tell us?” she asks.

Ginger sets the envelope back in the poetry book and closes it. Stands staring at her mother’s desktop. Not the desktop from the Captain’s Library where Faith sat talking with me that Saturday morning after the rape. But similar. A large expanse of wood inlaid with leather. It’s bare but for the tiny peacock book where that earlier desktop was covered with papers. Whoever cleared her kitchen has tidied her life here, too.

“Ginge, we all know you didn’t …” Laney says. “None of us … How could any of us have done something like that and not told the rest of us?”

I finger a drawer pull on the desk as if I might slide it open to find a chewed pencil. Chewed reading glasses, too. “If I’d killed Trey, I wouldn’t have told you,” I say. “It would make you guys accessories after the fact. It would be asking you to go to jail for me.”

Was that what I’d made Faith by seeking her help? Or what she’d chosen to become?

Laney’s frown leaves me searching for the words of that poem Ginger mentioned. Something about silence and restraint.

“You think you were that calculating when you were twenty-five, Betts?” Laney says. “And isn’t that what y’all did for me, anyway? Make
yourselves accessories after the fact by agreeing to keep quiet for my sake?”

“We made that decision together,” Mia says. “And we weren’t protecting you from the legal consequences of anything you did, Lane.”

“She didn’t tell us about being pregnant,” Ginger says. “Betts didn’t.” She thinks I’m plenty calculating. That’s what she’s saying. Or she means to offend us all in one easy weekend. Or both.

Mia picks up the framed “Curse of the Naked Women.” To get Ginger’s attention. To piss her off. If this foursome cracks in two, Mia is on my side.

“The only person protected by us remaining quiet was Trey Humphrey,” she says.

Which isn’t exactly true. Or I’m not exactly sure it is.

“Trey, who was already dead,” Ginger says.

“We didn’t know that,” I say. “Not when we made that decision.” And he
wasn’t
dead when we decided to bury the rape. That decision was made in the sometime-after-midnight hours of Friday. Trey didn’t die until late Saturday night. Or in the dark early hours of Sunday.

“We thought we were protecting each other,” Mia says. “Not just your reputation, Laney. All of our reputations. That’s why we kept quiet about what happened. Not to protect Trey. Not even just to protect you. To protect
ourselves.
”

“From something none of us did!” Ginger insists. “We aren’t guilty of anything.”

Mia studies the poetry book in Ginger’s hand as if there might be some answer in the title.
Transformations
. “Any one of us might have slipped out and killed Trey and slipped back in while the rest of us slept,” she says. “It only takes a minute to shoot someone.”

“You don’t believe that, Mi,” Ginger says.

“That’s not the point, what we believe,” I say. “The point is that’s the way it plays in the press. There’s a … a rape, right?” Even when the word was there on the Scrabble board none of us said it aloud. Not in Laney’s presence. “And then just coincidentally the guy turns up dead the very next night. The facts start coming out. Maybe Laney was in the room all night. But you two were—”

“But I wasn’t,” Laney says quietly. “I put the book back.”

“The book?” Mia runs her fingers through her hair at her cowlick.

“The peacock book,” Laney says. She nods at the miniature book on Faith’s desktop. “I slipped it into the Captain’s Library during the party.”

“Oh, shit,” Ginger says.

“But the doctor said it was all an accident,” Laney says. “Trey was drunk and he was cleaning his gun.”

“The doctor who was the best man at my parents’ damn wedding,” Ginger says. “Who was Daddy’s best friend from before they started lower school. Everyone already thinks Trey committed suicide. Everyone already assumes Dr. Pilgrim lied. It’s no great leap to conclude he lied to hide a murder rather than a suicide.”

“Well, maybe a little bit of a leap?” I suggest.

“But you’re off the hook, Betts,” Laney says. “You and Mia both. Why would y’all have shot Trey Humphrey?” She fingers a small turquoise button at the fitted waist of her blouse. “If I admit what happened, that clears your name, clears your way to the Court.”

“But what about Gemmy, Lane?” Ginger asks quietly. “How does a mom tell a daughter she’s been … been raped?” She gulps the word. Giving voice to the same thing I’ve been struggling with.

“None of us can keep ourselves safe all the time, Ginge,” I say.

Laney leans against the window as if to steady herself. “I could have, though,” she says. “That’s the thing. I
chose
to go drinking with Trey Humphrey. I
chose
to go skinny-dipping. I
chose
to go to the lighthouse.”

I touch her hair. The curls she’s finally set free. “You thought Mia was there,” I say. “It’s where Beau and Mia
said
they were going. Really, no one can fault you, Lane.”

“But they will,” Ginger says. “They will fault Laney. And now what does she do? Let Gemmy learn about it from the headlines? Tell her over a damned long-distance phone?”

Laney

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Spring 1992:
Ms. Helen Weils (JD ’82) and her husband, Will Robeson, are happy to announce the birth of their third child, Ginger Elsbieta Mary Robeson, a.k.a. Ms. Gem Robeson-Bradwell.

R
APE, FROM THE
Latin
rapere
, meaning to seize, a term used in Roman law for crimes of theft. Theft of a fella’s property, women being the property of men under Roman law. If it had been anyone but William with me when I hung up the phone from talking with Mia that night she called to ask about marrying again, I might have begun the conversation about what happened on Cook Island with that Latin, if I’d begun it at all. I might have held the rape away from me, wrapped it up in a single word in a dead language that I could explain.

In retrospect, I see so many ways I might have reached out for help in the aftermath of Cook Island. There was rape counseling available in Ann Arbor. There was a twenty-four-hour peer counseling hotline, 76-GUIDE, I could have called; I could have been a nameless gal helped by a faceless voice over an anonymous telephone line. But I wasn’t behaving in a particularly rational way in the aftermath of Cook Island. How could I act sensibly in a world that no longer made sense? And what would I have told the voice that answered the telephone anyway? That I’d gone skinny-dipping with Trey Humphrey. That I’d gotten drunk with him. That when he asked me to leave everyone else in that cottage behind and go to the lighthouse with him, I had gone.

It got no easier to talk after I moved to Atlanta, either, after I started working in the mayor’s office. Once I was part of Maynard’s team, my behavior reflected on him, whether it should have or not. A story about a sex scandal involving a young female aid to the mayor and a dead Washington lawyer was no longer just about me. And there was that, too, of
course: Trey was dead. I couldn’t talk to anyone without raising questions about that.

Whenever I start in on the Latin, though, William gives me a look that says I can’t hide from him. Maybe he gave me that look even before I’d finished assuring him the kids were fine that night, that the caller had been Mia. Or maybe I finally asked myself
why
I couldn’t I tell this man who loved me about something I ought not to be ashamed of, something that wasn’t my fault. I’d never have forgiven myself if he learned about what happened to me the way, a few weeks later, I would learn that Betts was nominated for the Court: by reading it in the news.

“William,” I said, “can I tell you about something that happened to me a long time ago? A long time before I even met you. I don’t know why I never told you before.”

He didn’t answer exactly, but William has a way of letting you know he’s with you without saying a word. And he listened, and he held me, and when I was finished he just kept on holding me. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. It was as if he always did know.

“I think I need to tell the children about it,” I said finally. “But how do I tell Gemmy?”

William took my hand then. Wrapped both my bony hands in his beautiful ones.

“How do I tell Gemmy this happened to her own mama?” I asked him. “How do I say that in a way that doesn’t leave her forever worrying about herself?”

T
HE MORNING
G
EMMY
was born, late morning after a sleepless night in labor, I looked at her long skinny feet and her long skinny fingers, her perfect little nails, and I wondered if there ever was a more beautiful girl in the world. “Beautiful” was the word I used, but I didn’t mean it in a physical sense, I meant it as a reflection of the way she makes me feel every time I look at her.