The Four Ms. Bradwells Read online

  We emerged from the winding marsh stream to see Ginger’s boat disappearing into another channel at the other end of a more open marsh. Trey cranked the engine higher and we shot across the reedy water. I wondered how deep it was. How likely we were to run aground. How forcefully I would pitch forward. How much it would hurt when my arm broke against the prow.

  “Ginger tells me you’re headed to D.C., to clerk for a year,” Beau said. To me, of course, because Mia was heading to San Francisco with Andy.

  “I’m in Chicago for a few more months,” he said, almost shouting now to be heard over the engine. “But I present my dissertation at the end of the summer, and then I’m in D.C., too.”

  “Doing?” I shouted back too loudly, the adrenaline rush of this faster speed finding release in the single word.

  “Working on international development policy with the IMF.”

  “A lightweight job, I guess,” Mia said.

  Trey’s hand was covering hers on the engine doohickey. Guiding her. Her expression positively gleeful. Like a three-year-old sitting on her father’s lap thinking that because her hands are the ones touching the steering wheel she controls the car.

  “Beau worked for our uncle there when he was getting his master’s,” Trey said exactly loud enough to be heard and no louder.

  “From the Georgetown Public Policy Institute,” Beau said.

  “And you’re at University of Chicago now?” Mia said. “I thought everyone in Chicago’s economics program washed out.”

  Beau’s round shoulders rose toward his shaggy-adorable face.

  “You know,” Trey said, “this is a really weird conversation to be having while racing around like lunatic adolescents in little boats in the middle of the night.”

  “You know, we’re pretty weird girls,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Mia said.

  She was just being flip. Still I was left wanting to point out that the hand Trey was touching was the one with her engagement ring. “This is racing?” Beau said.

  Trey’s hand remained over Mia’s as he opened up the throttle. We sped into a relatively straight channel through the reeds, spray dampening my face in the darkness, the conversation giving way to engine noise. The lighthouse was behind us now. I could see what I was pretty sure were the lights of Chawterley in front of it to the left. We could see Ginger’s boat again, too. Not far ahead.

  When we slowed to take another winding passage, Beau said, “I get that, too, that I’m a weird guy. Mostly from girls who don’t understand that I can’t take them to dinner and a movie when I have to work.”

  “Like Tessie McKee?” Mia said.

  Trey laughed. “Don’t you girls go believing anything Ginger tells you about Tessie McKee. That girl is a lunatic.”

  “And your version is …?” Mia prodded. Pretty gutsy since we’d never heard Ginger’s version of the story despite what they thought.

  His hand nudged hers just a touch to the left to follow a tighter bend in the water. “We’re only here for summers; what do we know? But the rumor was she slept with half the—”

  “Tess was a nice girl,” Beau insisted.

  Trey tapped Mia’s hand away and took over the steering. Ginger’s boat had appeared up ahead. “Okay, here we go,” he said.

  “She had a scholarship to Vassar,” Beau said.

  “She was smart enough,” Trey conceded, “but she was just a slutty little island girl. I bet half the boys on the island had her right here in her brother’s boat.”

  He gunned the engine to bring us around the next bend. Right up behind Ginger. Everyone trash-talked each other across the water as we tried again and again to pass. The two boats nearly plowed into each other more than once. But Trey always gave way when Ginger stood her ground. In the excitement of that, the shock of Trey’s answer, “she was just a slutty little island girl,” was left behind. But it was the same answer Ginger gave us the next day. “Tessie McKee?” she said. “Who brought her up again? Trey? Shit. He needs to leave Beau alone about Tessie McKee. She’s just a slutty little island girl everyone seems to think popped Beau’s cherry. So maybe she did. I mean, she screwed just about every guy on the island that summer. And she was too shitbrained to use birth control. Or that was the rumor, anyway, that she got preggers. I heard she screwed two guys at once, like at the same time in the same bed. So if she really was preggers—and how should we know? we were never here except for the summers—the father could have been anyone.”

  Laney

  THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  IT’S PLENTY EARLY, the thick red of sunrise glowing out the window, and I’m too old to be staying up with the hoot owls like we did last night. I feel it in my creaking joints. But Mia’s bed is already empty, the spread neatly in place, the pillow fluffed. So I dig a pair of trousers and a sweater from my suitcase. I don’t bother with panties or a brassiere or stockings. If I find myself dead in a car crash between here and the kitchen coffeepot, Mama will toss in her grave.

  In the mirror over the dresser, the easy curls that looked back at me as I climbed into my pjs last night are flapjack flat in places, wild in others. I’m ugly as a mud fence this morning, no doubt about that. But it’s only the Ms. Bradwells here, and they all saw me that night Carl telephoned to tell me he’d proposed to that medical student of his I thought was just a fling. I was ugly as a whole village of mud fences back then, for weeks and weeks.

  I get as far as the landing overlooking the back foyer before I see Mia outside, sitting where the path steps down toward the pier. With a fella? The two of them are looking awfully comfortable together on that step, and most everyone Mia is cozy with these days is a reporter. I’m not offering up bed hair for some tree frog to write about in the morning papers. No thank you, ma’am.

  I map out a plan: a one-minute shower and a little hair gel—I’ve come a long way from the hours I used to spend wielding a straightening iron—and thirty seconds with the toothbrush. I stand there staring down at Mia and the fella, thinking screw it. But my campaign manager will kill me if I let a journalist catch me with bed hair.

  Through the open door I can just make out Mia saying something about Madagascar. The fella seems more interested than I would be, or considerably more polite. He sets something that was under his arm on the walkway beside him: a newspaper.

  My smeller registers coffee, which I need even more sorely than I need to see what that newspaper says. But I just stand there unmoving, like the absolute fool I am.

  “We stole your skiff,” I hear Mia say, and I look to the pier, where a little boat is tied up next to the Row v. Wade. Now that’s an idea. I’m playing it forward: we steal the boats the reporters arrive in so they’re stuck here with no cellphone reception. But it isn’t like there aren’t landlines in town.

  “Last night?” the fella says.

  “Thirty years ago, Max,” Mia says. “We went … gut-running, that’s what it’s called, right? A group of us. Too many for one boat.”

  Max. Ginger’s friend who’d dropped whatever he was doing to bring the Row v. Wade across the bay. The reason we’re not already chin-deep in press-wielded microphones, or starving half to death.

  “You couldn’t invite me along?” he asks with a playfulness in his voice only Mia could miss.

  “You were away at school, I think.”

  “Ah. Well, I didn’t need my skiff then, did I?”

  I finger my unruly curls, run a tongue over my teeth, wait for Mia to spill all our collective guts to this fella she doesn’t even know, like I surely want to do. I just want to get it out and be done with it.

  “Did you have fun without me?” Max asks, still with the flirt in his voice. The fella is pretty shameless for a vegetarian man with children.

  “We did, actually,” Mia says.

  I ponder this. Did we? Mia was in the other boat that night, but she’s right: we had a fine time chasing each other through all thos
e winding streams.

  “I’d be happy to take you myself sometime,” Max is offering when I hear feet shifting or someone breathing below me, or both.

  Ginger peers up from the first floor, a steaming mug of coffee in hand. She’s wearing eyeglasses like she used to on the hardest mornings in law school; it’s too early for contact lenses. “Love blossoms,” she whispers with a finger to her wide mouth.

  I creep down the stairs to join her, and she thrusts her coffee into my hands. “Drink this, will you? I gulped down a whole second cup to have an excuse to leave them alone. If I have a third cup I’ll be on such a high buzz you’ll have to peel me from the balcony rails.”

  “I thought he was married.”

  “Divorced.”

  “You told Mia that?”

  This isn’t the first time Ginger has done something like this: introduced Mia to a divorced fella and then talked about his kids, leaving us all the impression he’s still married. She always says afterwards, when Mia is halfway around the world again, that she doesn’t know why Mia never likes the men she introduces her to. But there is no shortage of men in Mia’s life, so I do what I so often do with Ginger: I let it go. If I call her on it, she’ll only claim to have no notion whatsoever what I could be talking about. And it’s possible that she really doesn’t. Ginger never has been any better at understanding herself than she is at sharing her friends.

  The coffee is black, and I’m milk and sugar, but I take a sip anyway, and we stand observing them. The conversation has faltered; neither seems to know what to say next. I hesitate, thinking I should shower and dress properly for when the press do show, which they will, likely this morning. But what does it matter?

  “To the rescue?” I whisper.

  Ginger pushes out the door as if it’s her idea to help keep them talking. I can’t but wonder what she would do if I weren’t here. Would she sit and watch Mia and Max run out of conversation? Would she watch them part ways and then say, a month from now, that she doesn’t understand why Mia didn’t like her friend Max? But I am here, and she’s fixin’ to join them, calling out, “No sign of the press yet?”

  “NO SIGN OF Andy yet?” Ginger had whispered as I’d slipped into her bedroom in our Law Quad suite to tell her to hurry, her date to the Crease Ball was knocking on our door. It was our first year, the year Ginger and I enjoyed a lucky stumble into rooming together in a two-bedroom suite with a fireplace and bay windows overlooking the Quad. Ginger had finagled a change in room assignments, giving up the single room with fireplace she may well have been given because her great-great-granddaddy or granduncle or whoever it was built the Law Quad. Fidus Achates.

  Betts and I were attending that dance with classmates who had girls back home. Betts wasn’t even particularly attracted to her date, but the fella I was going with, André, was an All-American football player who was both the nicest fella in the whole law school and also the studliest. Serious about his girl back home, though. And I was still in love with Carl in those days, or I thought we were in love.

  Mia, though, was going on a first date with Andy, an evening engineered by Ginger that was to start with wine by the fire in our suite, the four of us and our dates. Ginger had left a Crease Ball invitation in Andy’s mailbox, a silly thing made to look like a legal summons, “The Crease Court in and for the County of Nocturnal Enjoyment, State of Rapture” at its top in fancy script. She’d penned “Mia Porter” on the “in re” line and, for good measure, written N-32, Mia’s and Betts’s room, on the “docket number” blank, in the event there might be some other Mia Porter Andy might know. She left the “complainant” line blank, though, so he’d think Mia was inviting him to ask her, rather than being so bold as to ask him. The only hint Ginger gave of her own involvement in this little deception was the name she’d filled in on the “clerk” line: Justice Joseph P. Bradley, the justice in Bradwell v. Illinois who wrote the bit about the mission of woman being to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother rather than arguing the law. Mia would never in a month of Sundays have asked Andy out herself. Despite all our conversations about wanting our relationships to be something different from what our parents had, we were pretty well stuck waiting for the phone to ring the same way our mamas had.

  Ginger mushed her lips together to spread her lipstick, checked for color on her teeth, pulled her dress from the hanger, and slid it over her head. “Am I rubbed?” she asked. She slipped her bare feet into strappy sandals and stuck dangly rhinestone earrings into her ears, having lent her pretty black pearls to Mia that night. I’m not sure Ginger ever wore those pearls herself, she was always so busy loaning them out.

  I smudged the line at the side of her face where her blush wasn’t quite blended. “You look way better than this toad deserves,” I said, “and you’ve already kissed him, so you know he won’t turn prince.” I’d suggested she go for Andy herself, but bad as Ginger was at sharing friends, she was loyal to the ones she wouldn’t share. If one of us Ms. Bradwells expressed interest in a fella, he was moved to the “just friends” column for her.

  Ginger’s date to the Crease Ball was another in a long string of Ginger’s bad choices: a string that had started with a fella who’d graduated from Michigan just before we’d started, who’d stayed in Ann Arbor to study for the New York bar with friends. Ginger had gone to see him in New York twice that fall, both times on fly-backs for interviews with firms, and it looked like the romance was lasting through the separation. But he never did respond to the messages she left before she flew out the third time, and when she showed up at his door, he was entertaining—at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, in boxers and a T-shirt, so it wasn’t like Ginger could pretend that was anything other than what it was. She’d fallen back on pretending she didn’t care, and she went through a whole mess of overnight gentlemen guests that winter before Steven’s brother, a second-year, asked her to the Crease Ball. When it comes to men, Ginger doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.

  Did Ginger’s good luck pearls work well for Mia and Andy? Let’s just say Betts returned to her room to find them hung over the doorknob more discreetly than Andy’s tie would have been. André and I were ready to call it a night by then anyway, so Betts and I shared the last of the wine back in Ginger’s and my sitting room, where the embers had long since gone cold, and she settled in on our sofa. And if it was a little awkward when Ginger’s date woke Betts with that awful fluorescent overhead as he left at four in the morning, well, he didn’t seem to much mind. That toad would have laughed for days about finding Betts on that couch—so he could advertise that he’d taken his big brother’s place in Ginger’s bed without saying so—except that Ginger, to her credit, dumped him before noon that same day, saving herself the humiliation of his dumping her now that she’d slept with him.

  FAITH, IN ANN ARBOR on business the next night, fetched us all for dinner at the nicest place in town. She showed up precisely when she told Ginger she would, talking about how nice it was that spring had finally arrived, polite conversation that seemed to irritate Ginger, never mind that Faith seemed more interested in making us feel welcome than in talking about herself. Even the things she said about herself at that dinner were in the context of Betts’s admitting her hope to clerk for the Supreme Court. No women were Supreme Court clerks back in Faith’s day, she told us. Yes, Lucile Lomen had clerked for Justice Douglas in 1944, but there wasn’t a second female Supreme Court clerk until 1966.

  “Connections and timing,” she said. “Lucile Lomen’s story is a lesson in the importance of connections and timing. Ms. Lomen graduated from Whitman College, so I suppose you can guess who else was a Whitman alum? And how many qualified gentlemen law students do you suppose were applying for Supreme Court clerkships when there was a war to be won?

  “Connections and timing,” she said. “You girls are going to have both.”

  I felt so approved of during that dinner, basking in Faith’s certainty that we would all have lives even more i
nteresting than hers. But the moment we’d climbed from the car and she’d driven off to her hotel, Ginger said, “ ‘You can sure tell it’s spring, can’t you?’ ” in a voice mocking Faith. “She’s such a bitch, criticizing how white my legs are like that.”

  Her legs? Mia mouthed to me behind Ginger’s back.

  “She’s always criticizing me,” Ginger said.

  We all looked down at our legs in the glow of the streetlight: Betts’s and Mia’s intemperate shades of hosiery tan, mine dark, and Ginger’s, it was true, nearly albino white.

  “Your mama doesn’t expect us all to be appointed to the Supreme Court, Ginger,” I said finally. “She was just saying some gals of our generation have a real possibility of important court appointments and partnerships in firms that have been historically male.”

  “Yes, well, you’re not her daughter,” Ginger said.

  AT THE SOUND of Ginger’s voice calling out “No sign of the press yet?” and the Chawterley back door banging shut behind us, Mia and Max crane around to have a look at us. Max picks up the newspaper, and Ginger plops down on the hard, hackberry-splattered stone next to him without a thought of the stains she’ll get on her khaki slacks. Her mama’s khaki slacks.

  I eye the gooey step, my back to Chawterley, the water of the Chesapeake stretched out before me as far as I can see.

  Ginger bumps her shoulder against Max’s, a suggestion that he should move on over a little to give us more room. He closes the gap between Mia and him which is, I expect, what Ginger has in mind. It strikes me that Ginger did get Mia and Andy together, that maybe the failure of their marriage has something to do with the way Ginger introduces Mia to fellas now.

  The stone is cold on my feet. I, too, am barefooted this morning. My feet look veiny and callused. My nails would benefit from a pedicure, but where would I find time to sit still long enough for that? I campaign in conservative, closed-toed pumps that will offend no one. How my feet look is not a priority.