The Four Ms. Bradwells
“Don’t doubt yourself, Ms. Professor Drug-Lord-Bradwell,” Ginger says to Betts. “Wanting to find your father isn’t why you’ve led the life you’ve led, any more than Laney’s mother’s dreams are the reason Laney is running for office. Don’t talk yourself into thinking what you’re doing isn’t real. Would your mother be proud of you now? You know she would. Just like Laney’s mother would be proud of her. And your daddy would be proud of you, too. Just like you busted your damned chest open when Izzy was accepted at Yale, this little girl of yours who was making her own way in the world. It’s important to you because of who you are. Because you’re kind and thoughtful. Because you’re generous with your talents. Because you care.”
I look from Ginger to the window, realizing Max is right about Ginger’s heart being bigger than she knows.
The red tips of two cigarettes move toward the end of the pier, the way Ginger’s and Trey’s had that first night when they left to steal Max’s skiff, the path Beau and I took toward his mother’s boat that Friday night.
“And what about you, then, Ginger?” Laney asks. “If we’ve made our choices for ourselves, then haven’t you, too?”
“Who the hell have I chosen to become?” Ginger says. “A ‘wet brown bag of a woman / who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia.’ ”
“Georgia?” Knocked off center by my mother’s lover’s name.
“A poet,” a soft voice says from the direction of the arched doorway.
How long has Annie stood there? How much has she overheard?
“It’s from a poem, Aunt Mia,” she says. Then to Ginger, “You’re a poet, Mom. You are.”
As Ginger looks away to the rolltop desk and the little door behind it, connecting this room to Emma’s Peek, it strikes me that Annie calls Ginger “Mom,” where Ginger always called Faith “Mother.” It strikes me that Izzy calls Betts “Mom,” too, where Betts always called Mrs. Z “Matka,” which means “Mother,” not “Mom.” It strikes me how different Faith and Mrs. Z were, and yet how similar. How different Ginger’s and Betts’s relationships with their mothers were, and how similar, too. Were Laney and I luckier, to have mothers who wanted for us but didn’t expect? Wanted us to have whatever we wanted, to be happy. Even my mom’s idea that I should go to law school was rooted in her believing she would have been happier if she had, and so maybe I would be.
“If literature and art can’t change the world, then we’re all lost, aren’t we?” Annie says.
She smiles sleepily, looking so like a twelve-year-old that it leaves me reconsidering her words, thinking how untrite they are when they come from someone so young and lacking in cynicism, thinking that she’s right, that the arts can expose the truth sometimes in ways that make people notice, that move people beyond what a headline and a few columns of newspaper print ever can.
“I can’t sleep,” she says. “I just keep thinking about that guy shooting himself in the lighthouse. I mean, I’ve heard about Trey Humphrey’s Ghost from the island kids, but I never thought he was a real guy. Have you seen the blog they’re talking about?”
They, meaning pretty much everyone.
“We haven’t, honey,” Ginger says. “We came straight here.”
I don’t contradict her.
Annie sits beside me and hugs me as if she sees the guilt on my face and wants to wash it away. She smells of soap and salt air and just the faintest trace of sweat, and she leaves me thinking this is why I sometimes imagine I want children, for the hugs.
“Grammie has an Internet connection,” she says. “She couldn’t get cable or DSL out here, but she has dial-up.”
The sounds of the journalists and the sea again fill the silence.
“Not anymore,” Betts says gently.
“Well, the blog doesn’t really say anything,” Annie says. “I get how you could think after you read it that maybe Uncle Frank or Uncle Beau or Mom killed this guy, but it doesn’t even mention you.” She twists her long neck toward Betts. “Like you would ever hurt anyone, Aunt Betts, much less kill someone.”
Ginger says, “I, on the other hand …”
“Oh!” Annie laughs. “I didn’t mean that, Mom.”
“It was an accident,” Ginger says. “He was cleaning his gun.”
“After he’d been drinking,” Annie says.
“After he’d been drinking,” Ginger agrees.
Annie yawns, then turns to Max. “Will you make something good for breakfast, Max? I haven’t eaten anything half as good as that pasta since I left for school.”
“Cinnamon apple crêpes or eggs Benedict?” Max asks. “Eggs Benedict without the meat, I’m afraid.”
“Eggs Benedict,” Ginger answers just as her daughter says, “Cinnamon apple crêpes.”
“Eggs Benedict is your favorite,” Ginger says to Annie.
“How about both?” Max says. “Tomorrow is Sunday. What kind of Sunday brunch doesn’t offer a choice of what to eat?”
The clock in the front foyer begins to chime, twelve calm gongs.
Annie kisses first me and then her mother, then heads back to bed, leaving us no further along on deciding a course of action than we had been before. We should talk, but we decide instead to play Scrabble, and Max fetches the game from the Sun Room for us before saying he thinks he’ll catch some shut-eye himself. That’s the way he says it, “catch some shut-eye.” The cliché seems to go with his goofy glasses and baggy jeans, if not with the fancy pasta and eggs Benedict and crêpes.
“Don’t concern yourselves too much about those reporters: they won’t be staying overlong,” he says as he hands Ginger the Scrabble box. “Isn’t a soul on this whole island who’ll rent them a room. Rose down to the café will burn their toast and tell them she’s out of breakfast meat, and when old Mr. Dodie comes in for his usual two eggs over easy and six pieces of bacon, she’ll fry it up and insist that’s all she’s got. ‘I cain’t be givin’ Mr. Dodie’s bacon to a bunch of mainlanders,’ she’ll tell them, ‘much less a slimy bunch of lie-spewing reporters.’ ” Max laughs, then. He has a lovely laugh. “Rose, she doesn’t ever mince her words,” he says. “Well, g’night.”
He leaves, and we huddle around the Scrabble board in the Captain’s Office, and we draw tiles. Laney, who draws an X and so gets to play first, looks at her tiles and then up at us. “The truth,” she says, and as I’m trying to make sense of this—is she asking how to spell the word?—she says, “It’s time I tell the truth. I need to tell the truth.”
“What is the truth, exactly?” Betts asks. “Do we even know anymore?”
“Did we ever?” I ask.
Ginger says, “ ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’ ”
“Stop it, Ginger!” Laney insists. “For the Good Lord’s sake, stop with the poetry. Stop shoving all the bad things you feel into someone else’s words and disowning them. Or don’t. I don’t care. But quit disposing of my hurt along with yours. What happened to me happened to me and I’m sorry it dug up your own mess but what I say about it is my decision, not yours. I’ll say what I need to say in my own words.”
I’m not sure which surprises me more: Laney lashing out at Ginger, or the fact that our friendship has survived so many years of this boiling under the surface, all this second-guessing about the choices we never did really agree upon.
“You’re not a failure just because a group of fellas who have never invited a woman lawyer to join their silly little club didn’t invite you, Ginge,” Laney continues. “Though why you were so hell-bent on helping rich old misers add money to their already overfull pockets, I don’t know. That’s not you any more than that Ginny character that playwright fella wrote was you.”
Her words are followed by a sharp silence. The journalists are looking up toward our window; if we can hear their outbursts, they can hear ours. Although they’re closer to the lapping water, which should help wash over the sounds of us.
I try to shush us, but Ginger won’t be shushed.
“You
what? Went to see that asshole’s play?” she demands.
We did, although Laney doesn’t admit this. Laney and I went on a whim one time we both happened to be in London while it was playing, but we’ve never told Ginger that.
“Lordy, sometimes I think you still wonder if the whole world doesn’t see you that way,” Laney says. “As the unloved and unlovable Ginny that idiot wrote into his play.”
In Ginger’s pale eyes: devastation on top of devastation. First she fails at her career and then her best friends betray her in the worst way she can imagine, we pay money to that asshole to see the shit he’d written about her. And now we’re grinding the grit of it into her. Her face is thick with the awful thought: But that is me, Laney. That Ginny character, she is me.
“That fella delivered the worst of you, exaggerated and untempered by your strengths, Ginge,” Laney says more gently. “He delivered the surface of you without tilling up the good earth underneath.”
Her intelligence; that jerk left out how smart Ginger is. And her generosity, too, her preference for the comfort of others over her own.
“That fella is the selfish one, Ginger, not you. You aren’t as selfish as that character he wrote. You aren’t that spoiled and you aren’t that pathetic. You only think you are. You need to stop looking for a sad little pair of twos long enough to see you’re holding a flush.”
Ginger stares at her for a moment, then flips the Scrabble board. The tiles scatter in angry clicks all over the room. “Fuck you, Laney,” she says. “Fuck you. I’m not half as selfish as you are. And if you think I’m pathetic, take a look in the mirror at yourself.”
Laney and Betts and I watch as her bare heels stomp across the center hallway and disappear into the family wing. She’s long gone before Laney says angrily, “I didn’t say she was pathetic. I said she wasn’t pathetic.”
Not that pathetic. Not that selfish. Not that spoiled.
We set about gathering up the game pieces together, my knees aching against the wood floor long before I find a final N under the Captain’s desk, up against the secret passageway into Emma’s Peek. Ginger still hasn’t returned. Laney secures the lid on the box with a firmness that suggests she has no intention of going after her.
Betts, staring at Laney’s long, dark fingers on the taped-up game box top, says, “I’ll … head to bed, I guess.”
I slip out a minute later, on the excuse of looking for something to read, and wait in the hallway for Betts.
“I knocked, but she won’t answer,” she says when she emerges from the family wing. Yes, Ginger’s door is locked.
Perhaps she just needs some time alone, to cool off, we decide.
“She’s cooling off with my contact lens solution,” Betts says.
I tell her she can borrow mine.
“You don’t think she’ll hurt herself, do you?” Betts says.
The two of us stand in the hallway, whispering. We decide, finally, that she won’t, that Ginger’s weapon of choice for hurting herself is men, and the only man here—Max—appears to have no sharp edges on which she might cut herself.
IT ISN’T UNTIL Laney and I are in bed with the lights out that I ask, “What about your political campaign, Lane? What if you just wait until after the election?”
Her words float up in the darkness, quiet and unsure: “If the good voters of the Georgia Forty-second want to hold against me something that was no fault of my own, they don’t deserve my representation anyway.”
I lie awake wondering if she really believes what happened was no fault of her own. She should, but I wonder if she does. Her sentence sounds as rehearsed as Betts’s did when she said she didn’t have anything to add to the public record on Trey’s death. And her words ring equally untrue.
Mia
THE PAINTER’S STUDIO, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10
THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK is striking three in the morning when I slip out from under the sheets in the bedroom Laney and I share; she’s not snoring her light snore, so maybe she’s only pretending sleep. I head down the dark stairway into the dark kitchen, and pour wine from the bottle we didn’t finish at dinner into the first glass my fingers find, a coffee cup. In the Painter’s Studio, the blinds are open to a huddle of journalists in the electric light of film equipment outside, but that isn’t what stops me in the doorway. The shadow of a man sits at the window inside, where I posed when Beau sketched me, when the light made my eyes laugh, or that’s what he’d claimed. For a moment, I’m sure it’s Ginger’s brother there again even though it can’t be, of course: Beau is in Chicago with Laura, his wife of twenty-some years.
“They’re not sleeping, but they look like they want to.” It’s Max’s whisper, of course. “It’s too dark for them to see inside.” He pats the window seat. “Come enjoy the show. They’re sharing now, at least there’s that.”
He means the light: the journalists are dealing cards under a single filming light, taking turns providing the light so no one runs out of juice to film us in the unlikely event we should emerge to make a statement in the middle of the night. I watch Fran Halpern for a moment. She manages to stay professional even around a journalists’ film-light campfire in the middle of the night. She’s one of my favorite television journalists, actually. A stand-up person who stays after the truth when others settle for the cheap headline and move on. If it were only Fran out there, I might open the door and invite her in.
“So often as a kid I hoped to be asked to a sleepover at the big house,” Max says. “Used to watch Ginger and Trey steal my skiff, and I’d let them. Didn’t want to be a snitch, just wanted to be invited to the parties here. Even after I was down to New York for architecture school, old enough to know better, still I sat watching out the window while they took my skiff.”
I smile at the funny syntax: down to New York. This island has a language all its own.
“Who knew it would be the last time?” He says, and he stares out at the journalists, who are laughing. “So now here I am—in Governor Waller’s Room, no less—and I can’t sleep a wink.”
“The week Trey Humphrey died?” I say, the journalist in me.
“Can’t tell you how many islanders breathed a sigh of relief when that asshole shot himself.” He blinks back at me through his geeky glasses. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” A small note of alarm, quickly reined in. “We weren’t glad he was dead, just glad it was by his own hand. Enough folks around here didn’t care too much for Trey Humphrey.”
He’s talking about himself or I haven’t been a journalist for twenty-some years. That “asshole”? Maybe he knows what they said about his sister, Tessie McKee.
I sit next to him, wanting to kiss him as surely as I wanted to kiss Beau the first time I sat in this room. Am I drawn to him because he hates Trey Humphrey as much as I do? How sick a reason would that be to fall for a guy? But no, I already made the first move earlier, kissing Max in the kitchen. And I’ve never been one to make the first move, really. It’s one of the many ways I cling to the good girl I once was, the girl I left behind long ago.
Where was the turning point, the moment I crossed the line? Was it when I slept with Beau when I was engaged to Andy? When I lied to Andy afterward? When I told Andy the truth—or some version of the truth—after our marriage was through? Was it that first one-night stand in the chaos of my divorce? The first time I woke in the bed of a man whose name I didn’t know? The moment I told Doug Pemberley more than I should have in an effort to shake off my past mistakes?
The night after I called Laney from the Cook Island pay phone, Doug and I sat on our balcony at the Pointway Inn, overlooking the sand he’d proposed in and sipping champagne even though the engagement ring still sat in its little velvet box. Not our first bottle that night, and still we’d just poured the last of it, drinking champagne in abundance as if I might still say yes, I’d marry Doug.
He’d married Sharon six months after Trey died, he was telling me. “When Trey w
as no longer around to tell me I was making a mistake.” He smiled a little, his crooked smile in his charmingly crooked face. “Sometimes I still can’t believe he’s gone.
“Frankie was my best man. Frankie stood where Trey should have,” he said. “I think I won’t have a best man this time. I think I’ll stand by myself, knowing Trey is beside me.”
He set his hand on mine, caressing my ringless finger. “Not that I’m taking anything for granted. Not that I’m trying to pressure you.”
He touched my forehead, my cowlick. “Trey would have approved of my marrying you. Even he was taken with the four Ms. Bradwells.”
“Taken,” I said, thinking Trey was a taker, and flashing rage and disgust and grief at all he’d taken from us. Thinking even if I could marry Doug—even if Laney could bear that—I couldn’t bear the thought of Trey standing beside my happily-ever-after-to-be.
“Trey made me uncomfortable,” I said. “I thought he wasn’t … that maybe he wasn’t who he seemed to be.”
“He wasn’t,” Doug agreed. “He acted the hardass, but he was a nice guy, really. It was just that everyone always expected so much of him. And there was his dad killing himself over some woman, some black woman. I don’t think he ever got over that.”
I looked away, to the light sweeping across the water, the new lighthouse.
“That was weird, wasn’t it,” he said. “His attraction to your black friend? Do you think they slept together?”
“No.” The one word all I could manage.
“I think they did,” Doug said almost gleefully. “Not that he ever said that. Trey was nothing if not a gentleman.”
“No!” I said. “I’m sure Laney never—”
“Hey, hey. I didn’t mean to … I liked her. Helen. Laney. I didn’t mean to disparage her. I just thought Trey was …” He laughed. “Well, I thought maybe you and Beau, too, but that was ridiculous, you were engaged to some guy back at school, right?”