The Four Ms. Bradwells (48 page)

The newscaster is laying out the details. My confirmation for the Supreme Court appointment had been expected to be swift until questions arose at Friday’s hearing “about a death in Professor Zhukovski’s past that may or may not have been accidental.” Emphasis on “may not.” They won’t come out and say it but they’re hoping I killed him. Wouldn’t their ratings soar on that news.

“Professor Zhukovski has reportedly been holed up with friends all weekend at a remote summer home on Cook Island …” the newsman is saying.

“ ‘Professor,’ ” I say. “At least they’re giving me that.”

“… with, among others, Helen Robeson-Weils, who is in a tight race for the Georgia state senate.”

“My campaign manager is throwing things at the TV now,” Laney says, “having conniptions.”

“What exactly
are
conniptions?” I ask.

Mia, ignoring me, says, “Name recognition, Laney. Most voters will remember your name but not why they know it.”

Laney rolls her eyes.

“Most voters,” Mia repeats without conviction.

And then there is Ginger on the television screen. The microphones are being thrust at her so aggressively that she takes a step back.

“She’s definitely wearing a towel,” Izzy says.

The camera focuses tightly on Ginger’s face. She is clearly about to speak when a startled murmur arises from the journalist crowd. A gasp, really.

We turn back to the windows as Ginger’s steady voice comes over the television: “I have a note from my mother, Faith Cook Conrad, which I believe may have some bearing on the death of Trey Humphrey on this island thirty years ago.”

She is standing naked on the pier.

“Shit!” Laney and I say together. She takes my hand in hers. Mia’s in her other hand.

“What in the good Lord’s name is she doing?” Laney says. “What is she saying? Why is she talking about Faith?”

I squeeze her hand as Isabelle takes my arm. Her shoulder presses reassuringly against mine.

“If she doesn’t talk about Faith,” Izzy says, “you lose your election, Aunt Laney. And Mom doesn’t get confirmed.”

“Or probably even if she does,” I say.

Izzy shrugs. “Some chance is better than none, Mom.”

“We’re both long shots anyway,” Laney says quietly.

“But you always have been, Aunt Laney,” Izzy says. “You and Mom both, and look how far you’ve come.”

My daughter’s words overwhelm me for a moment. She sounds as proud of me as I am of her.

“But what the hell is she doing with no clothes on?” I say.

“You didn’t clear this particular wardrobe choice with the president, I’m guessing,” my daughter says.

Annie smiles: her mother’s wide mouth under her grandmother’s patrician nose. “That’s the way Grammie would have done it,” she says. “ ‘If
you want to draw attention to an issue, you have to be willing to draw attention to yourself.’ ”

“What better way to draw attention to the issue of how female sexuality is bungled by our society than by stripping down naked?” Mia says.

Annie is laughing now, actually laughing. Her mother is standing naked in front of the world and she is completely unfazed. There is a hint of her grandmother behind her quiet façade after all. “Grammie would be so proud of Mom now,” she says. And she is right.

I remember Matka talking about watching me play the zhaleika onstage by myself that first time. Wanting to go with me and knowing it was time for me to play alone.
One person plays alone, it is one thing, but two plays together is so much more
. I suppose I always knew she was proud of me. I suppose this is something Ginger wanted that I always took for granted: a mother who was proud of me. Who I knew was proud of me.
Even though you miss half the notes, I am so very proud. I am always be proud
.

Laney steps closer to the television. “So the good news is all those folks are only focusing on Ginger’s face.”

Annie points the remote and clicks through a few stations. And there is Ginger standing on the pier. Her breasts and her crotch are blurred, but there is no doubt that she is standing in the altogether. Standing confidently despite the sag of her breasts. The cellulite on her slender legs, which aren’t blurred.

Ginger begins to describe in detail what happened. The rape. Her own insistence that we not reveal it for fear of what it would do to Laney’s professional reputation to bring rape charges against an important young partner in her law firm. The improbability of those charges being believed. The history of Ginger’s own relationship with Trey.

“Aunt Laney?” I hear Izzy say.

Laney has skinned her shoes off and shed her slacks and underwear all at once. She is already heading from Faith’s Library into the Ballroom Salon. Toward the back foyer. She pulls her top over her head as she hurries without quite seeming to hurry. No trace of the gawky girl she once was.
Festina lente
, I remember her saying. Hurry slowly. A phrase Laney often used to describe the way Ginger slipped into class without interrupting whenever she was late. As she so often was.

Laney moves smoothly. With incredible grace. She makes fifty-something look awfully good.

“Laney, you can’t,” Mia calls out.

Laney glances back at us and shrugs.
“Veritas omnia vincit,”
she calls to me. “Truth defeats all things.” She keeps walking, her long, dark body moving toward the door and the press and the certainty, finally, that the things that happened to her only happened
to
her. Not
because
of her. Not because she deserved anything but the best from this world. Her mother would be so proud of her, I think as I skin off my shoes. And so would Faith.

This you must remember, Elsbieta: To be a leader, you must always do what is right
.

On the television Ginger is talking about me having gone to Faith for advice on what we should do even though Ginger herself had directed me not to. “Betts never does follow directions she doesn’t agree with,” she says. “And she always has had the good judgment to solicit opinions from people she respects. Both of which are just some of the reasons why she’s so well suited for the Supreme Court, an institution that expects each justice to consider the wisdom of the justices sitting alongside him or her as well as those whose shoes they try to fill. Some of the current justices who put themselves above
stare decisis
might learn quite a lot from Betts.”

Ginger. Ms. Decisis-Bradwell.

“Oh—” Ginger’s lips are clearly forming “shit” but it’s bleeped out. She is looking beyond the cameras. Toward the house. She’s just spotted Laney at the back door.

But Mia is already there. Her arm is on Laney’s arm. She has already pulled Laney back inside.

The reporters and the cameras turn just in time to catch the door clicking shut again as Mia hurries Laney away from the leaded-glass windows. Too bad for them. A naked political candidate would have been news ratings paradise.

“You can’t either, Betts,” Mia calls to me.

I’ve unzipped my slacks but I’m still more or less respectable. I’m still in Faith’s library.

“It’s too much to expect the voting public to accept a Supreme Court justice who has appeared naked in public, Betts,” Mia says as she bursts back into Faith’s Library, a strand of hair at her cowlick flipping in the blow of the pressurized air. “You simply can’t.”

“Fortunately, it’s not an elected position,” I say as I drop my slacks. “So it doesn’t matter quite as much what the folks watching on the TV will or will not accept.”

“But it
does
still matter,” Mia insists, and Iz and Annie chime in to support her.

“Really, Aunt Betts,” Annie insists. “Mom is doing this to eliminate the questions. Mom is doing this so you end up on the Court.”

“Your mom is doing this because it’s the right thing to do,” I say to Annie. “This is what matters. This is what’s important. That we say what happened, finally. That we say we are not ashamed.” I slip off my underwear. This feels even more awkward than I would have imagined in front of my daughter.

“How will it look that I lacked the guts Ginger has?” I ask as I pull my shirt over my head and unhook my bra. “No one wants a coward on the Supreme Court. Besides, I think that ‘Curse of the Naked Women’ thing Mia wrote about draws strength in numbers.

“In manus tuas, Domine,”
I say. Putting myself in the hands of a god who is my own mother and Ginger’s. The god who must have been watching over those Nigerian women who’d bared themselves to gain a healthier world for their children.

It’s Mia’s hand that is tight on my arm, though. Not God’s. And she is not letting go.

“You can’t, Betts,” she says. “You can’t and Laney can’t and I can’t.”

“I
can
,” I insist. “If Massachusetts can elect a male senator who posed naked for a centerfold—”

“Men are studs, women are sluts,” Annie interrupts.

“
You
can’t, Mia?” I demand. Thinking this is about Mia being a coward. Mia not wanting her ample thighs out there for the world to see. “Why can’t
you
?”

“I can’t,”
she insists.

I see in her paper-bag-brown eyes then that I am wrong about her. That she knew Ginger was going to do this. That she has already offered to join Ginger.

“But she’s all alone out there,” Laney says.

“She’s all alone out there,” I repeat.

“She’s not,” Mia says. “She’s no more alone than you were sitting at that table in front of the Judiciary Committee, Betts.”

I see then that Mia is right. That Ginger knows Mia and Laney and I have her back now. Just as I knew they had mine. That she knows her mother has always had her back, too, just as Matka has had mine. That her mother loves her and always has.

I turn and watch Ginger on the television. I think of her that night in the hot tub, her breasts pale where Laney’s were dark. She looks comfortable with her body in a way that she didn’t back then. That she never has before.

“Besides,” Mia says, “Ginger has a better body than any of us.”

“I wouldn’t go
that
far,” Laney says.

“Me either,” I say.

Mia gives us a you-must-be-joking look.

“You’re right, you’re right,” I say. “I can admit it now. Ginger has a better body than I do.”

We turn back to watch her through the window again. Listen to her clear voice on the television.

“And more courage, too,” I say.

Because that’s what Mia is saying. Mia is saying that if I step out that door I will only be riding on Ginger’s courage. I will only diminish what Ginger has done in stepping out there herself.

“ ‘A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing,’ ” Laney says. She’s remembering that line of poetry Ginger said in the Captain’s Office after she gave me her mother’s pearls.

“Except more so; she declined my offer to find her a gorilla mask.” Mia smiles that wry smile that somehow makes us all feel good about ourselves. “She wouldn’t even let me borrow
your
black pearls for her, Betts.”

I stand looking out from the safety of Chawterley. Watching as Ginger continues on with her one small thing she is doing for Laney and for herself and for us all. She is speaking as well as any of us ever has. Even that first day in law school Ginger was good on her feet.

“I hope we have a better getaway plan than we had Friday,” I say.

“I hope so, too,” Mia says.

Mia

THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

T
HE PRESS CONFERENCE
, we’ll call it for lack of a better name, ends when Ginger tells all those eager journalists that she means to open the envelope Faith left only after she returns to the mainland. Then she climbs aboard the
Row v. Wade
. She’s awfully certain she knows what she’s promising, what the note will say. When the journalists move to follow her she says, “You won’t even be thinking about stepping onto this boat, which is private property.” She fires up the engine. “But I’m guessing the ferry will take you across the bay if you’re quick about getting on,” she calls out.

The stampede onto the ferry would make wonderful footage, but not a single one of those turkeys stays to film it. Sadly, my Holga is upstairs in the Captain’s Office, and the boats are already heading out.

The ferry follows the
Row v. Wade
, the press snapping photos again, the TV cameras filming from the unsteady boat. A naked woman stretching up to hoist the sail on a boat called the
Row v. Wade
—that will make good press.

Ginger never does hoist that sail, though. Not far out into the bay, she cranks one of the two big white wheels, as if she means to turn right into Boat Scrape Gut. While Max and the ferry continue alone toward the mainland, she keeps turning, heading back to the pier and to Chawterley, her house that was her mother’s house.

I
T’S
G
INGER’S IDEA
, when she returns, to have lunch with the girls before we sail back across and return to D.C. The press can wait. After all
these years, what difference can an hour possibly make? And having decided we can wait an hour, it isn’t any great stretch to conclude that we can wait until morning, we can have a whole afternoon and evening with Isabelle and Anne.