The Four Ms. Bradwells Page 17

  Midway through “Hey Jude” I couldn’t blow another note. I coughed. Coughed again. A dry hack that wasn’t a cough at all, that was only cover for the sudden realization that I wasn’t waiting for anyone to perform with anymore. That the baby might have been a daughter. That I’d never play music with her.

  “You are okay, Elsbieta?” Matka asked.

  I nodded and picked up my zhaleika again. “Just something caught in my throat,” I said. I coughed again.

  And it was true in a way. Something was caught in my throat. The thought of another family having dinner around a table on Long Island. Ben and his wife. His son. His two daughters, one of whom was almost my age.

  I told myself I’d done the right thing for everyone if I’d done anything at all. Which probably I had not. Ben had a family. He couldn’t be a father to my child without leaving three children behind.

  It wasn’t until Matka was dropping me back at the Division Street house that she asked again about my friend. “She make decision?”

  I gathered my things. Focused on the door handle. The breath-fogged window. The empty house just a few steps up the hard cement path. “It was a false alarm,” I said. “She’s fine. She wasn’t pregnant after all.” I pulled the handle and pushed the car door out into the chilled night. Climbed from the rusty old Ford. Looked up at the empty house. The dark windows. The ratty couch on the front porch, where the bulb we always left on had burned out.

  I made myself turn and lean in through the open car door. Meet Matka’s eyes. “She went home for Thanksgiving,” I said. “She’s fine.”

  I wonder sometimes what my life would be like if I’d had that baby. If I would still have met Zack. If he would have taken on a child as well as a spouse. If Izzy would have been a happier child if she’d had a big sister. If three of us would have felt more like a family than like Matka and me all over again.

  I don’t know how I’d have borne Zack’s death without Isabelle sucking at my breast. The little coos she made and the milky smell of her all those lonely nights. I didn’t want Matka there. I couldn’t share the middle of the night with anyone but Iz. Which was selfish. I see that now. If Izzy was a widowed young mother I couldn’t bear for her grief to hold me away.

  Izzy had kept me company all those long nights after Zack died. That whole first year. And when I’d moved her into her own room in Ann Arbor, I’d moved myself into a twin bed, too. No empty space in a twin bed. No unused pillow. No space for anyone else; I see that now. But there it is. I’d been so focused on Isabelle. I would wake up to the garbage-truck quiet and bolt into her room to find her sleeping. Or, later, reading in bed.

  I remember talking to Laney once about what a quiet child my daughter was. Laney saying she wished it were ever quiet at her house. Laney pausing. Perhaps sensing I was imagining a whole house full of family laughter two lonely voices can’t duplicate. “Battery-operated chaos, that’s the Robeson household,” Laney had said then. The Robeson household. She’d kept her name just as I had. But neither of us passed our names on to our children.

  I suppose that first child if I’d had her would have been a Zhukovski. Named after a grandfather she never knew. A man I never knew myself. A man who for all I know might have abandoned my pregnant mother. Or never known about me. For all the time I spent on my “sabbatical,” traipsing all over Poland in search of him, I never did find my father. I suppose at this point I’ll only ever know him through the memories my mother shared. The same way Isabelle will ever know Zack.

  Laney

  THE TEA PARLOR, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  BETTS HAS JOINED us; we’re sitting beneath the six-candle chandelier in the Tea Parlor, finishing the last bit of griddle cakes made with flour from the canister in the kitchen, with syrup from the same cabinet in which we found the jam last night. Dead woman’s syrup, but I don’t say that. We’ve poured dead woman’s syrup over dead woman’s flour pancakes, in a dead woman’s breakfast room where I’m relieved my campaign manager can’t reach me to pronounce the death of my political career. Cogi qui potest nescit mori. She who can be forced does not know how to die. Whatever that means.

  I expect every house that’s been around for any time at all has belonged to someone who has passed. I suppose I live in a dead woman’s house, since old Mrs. Davidson, who sold it to William and me, died last year. That’s the silly kind of thing I’m thinking while I’m pretending to listen to Ginger and Betts.

  Ginger has her contacts in now, having borrowed lens solution from Betts, so she doesn’t have the excuse of something on her glasses that she used for the three boats she was sure she saw while we were out on the back steps. She does have a limited view now, though, since there are no windows in the Tea Parlor. She’s peering through the doorway to the Music Room windows. And it does look like what she thinks she sees might actually be a boat this time.

  As it takes shape, Max indicates an industrial smokestack-y thing toward the back. “Looks like a trawler,” he says.

  The tension ebbs from Ginger’s shoulders: not the press. “Watermen setting crab pots,” she says.

  The sound of the word “crab” makes me puny even after all these years, but I try to look like I’m just fine. I do feel better than Betts looks. She hasn’t said but about three words since she finished reading the article in the newspaper, which still sits beside her nearly untouched plate. We’re all wanting to believe the front page piece is all the press coverage we’ll get, that there are not journalists and photographers working their way across the bay this very minute. But it won’t have taken all that much time for them to identify Cook Island as the location of the Conrads’ Maryland summer home.

  “I’m thinking I’ll go for a walk after breakfast.” Working hard to keep my voice even: just a stroll to listen to the birds, watch the waves, get my feet muddy along the edge of the marsh.

  “You’ll need the key,” Ginger says.

  When I try to look like I have no idea in this world what she’s talking about, she says, “The lighthouse is kept locked. Too many teenagers and tourists looking for ghosts. You want company?”

  Betts says she needs some exercise, too, she’s been sitting at conference room tables for weeks getting ready for the hearings. But Mia hesitates, leaving me wondering how different her life might have been if she hadn’t already been engaged to Andy that spring break.

  “I hope Annie got your message, Ginge,” Betts says. “I hope she called Iz.”

  Ginger says she’s sure Annie has called Isabelle. She’s sure Isabelle is settling in with her law books, Annie with her non-law ones. They would have called to say so, but they can’t call, she reminds Betts. “But if you’re nervous, maybe Mia could go see Max’s place, and call the girls while she’s there. If you and I tell them not to come, they’ll find a helicopter to get here within the hour, just to defy us.”

  She glances in my direction. She can’t help herself; she wants to make sure I see how hard she’s trying here to share her friend Max with Mia. Part of me wants to scold her for needing applause and for letting Mia off the hook, but I don’t quite trust Mia to come with us anyway. So a few minutes later, Mia climbs into Max’s skiff, while Ginger and Betts and I head up the well-worn path toward the lighthouse. Ad Pharum. Parate pessimo, I hope. Although Ginger’s bare toes on the dirt path leave me sure we aren’t, in fact, prepared for a single thing.

  As we step through the tunnel-like doorway into the lighthouse a few minutes later, I brace myself against the damp cement smell I remember from that spring break trip. What I register, though, is something more like the house smell, musty and closed up but not dank. The same black and white marble floor tiles are still lined with the same cracks (from lightkeepers’ tools inadvertently dropping from above, I remember Beau explaining). The counterweights suspended from the top like the works of a giant grandfather clock are as immobile. The spiral of stairs as geometrically exact. But everything seems cleaner, and more still. The
iron railings around the counterweight well and along the stairs are pure black where I remember more a tint of rusted-metal orange. The ocean outside more completely silenced by the thick cement walls. Is that the layering of emotion onto memory? I’m so sure I remember the cold scratch of metal on my palm as I climbed these stairs.

  “The Lightkeeper’s Cottage is gone?” I ask, just realizing I don’t remember seeing it as we walked. The Lightkeeper’s Cottage, where the fellas stayed that week, where I ought to have stayed myself that night. Et hic sunt dracones. And here are the dragons.

  WE’D ALL GONE to the Lightkeeper’s Cottage after we had our fill of gut-running that first night the fellas had arrived on Cook Island. Doug had carried on forever in the skiff about seeing the sunrise from the lighthouse, leaving me about split half in two between wanting to rush right up to the top so as not to miss it and wanting to fetch canvas and paints from Chawterley first. But Beau suggested we warm up in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage. “It’ll be cold up on the lantern deck, and Mia is already shivering,” he said.

  “You get that Mia is engaged, right, Beau?” Ginger responded.

  “Jesus, Ginge,” Beau said.

  And poor Betts. As Trey began rubbing Ginger’s shoulders from behind like a boxing coach readying his fighter to return to the ring, you could see Betts thinking Mia already had a fiancé, what did she want with Beau?

  “How do we see any little thing at all with that beacon light on?” I asked, jumping in before Betts could poke at Mia. Those two sure have at each other sometimes, even still, and Ginger never can resist joining in on a brawl. “Won’t the light wash out the sunrise?” I asked.

  Frank said he had the secret code to turn it off, and Trey said if the Coast Guard caught us I’d have to be the one to take the rap.

  “Shit, look at the moon,” he said. And there it was, hanging soft with haze and nearly full. “Ex luna scientia,” he said, words that surely ought to have provoked a finger cross from the Ms. Bradwells, but didn’t. “ ‘From the moon, knowledge,’ ” he continued. “That was the motto of Apollo 13. Can you imagine being up there, looking back at Earth, thinking you might never return?”

  “Getting morbid, Trey,” Doug said, cuffing him on the shoulder. He echoed Beau about getting warm, and we headed to the Lightkeeper’s Cottage, a ramshackle little house where, in the days when someone had to make sure the beacon flame didn’t go out, the keeper lived.

  As we walked, Doug suggested Trey tell us all about the syzygy that was supposed to occur Wednesday night.

  Frank, in mock horror, said, “No, not that again!” but Trey, ignoring Frank, launched right on into the kind of interminable Trey Humphrey monologue the young associates at Tyler knew all too well. This one was about how all the planets would be aligned on our side of the Sun for the last time in our lifetimes. The next syzygy, which wouldn’t include Pluto, would not occur until May 19, 2161. “But beware,” he said. “This syzygy may exert a collective gravitational tug that will cause huge tides on the Sun’s surface. The resulting sunspots could change Earth’s rotation.”

  “No kidding?” Mia said.

  Trey laughed. “Actually, it’s all nonsense. It comes from The Jupiter Effect, but even the two astrophysicists who wrote the novel admit there’s nothing to it. Still, people will believe what they want to believe.”

  “Trey isn’t the only earthling who likes to imagine doom,” Frank said as he unlocked the door to the cottage. He flipped a switch, lighting a dead bug burial ground in the frosted-glass ceiling lamp.

  Spiders had set up house in just about every corner of the small sitting room. The lace curtains and the Oriental rug, the settee and the upholstered rocking chair were all faded to match the dust.

  “I suppose Mother already had the wood laid in the fireplaces for you, Ginge,” Beau said. Then to the other fellas, “And to think, I begged Mother for years to let me stay out here with you ‘big boys’ on party weekends, before she finally decided I was old enough.”

  He headed off to the single bedroom for blankets while Trey and Doug set to lighting the cast-iron woodstove. Frank announced that these accommodations called for a drink and quickly accepted my offer of help, leaving me following him into a dreary kitchen with an icebox that fell off the ugly tree and a pump-handle faucet that ran surprisingly clear from the start.

  “So you’re the famous Hell on Wheels,” he said, but in a fond way.

  “Thank you, Ginger, for sharing my beloved nickname with every soul you meet.”

  “It came from Trey, actually. But he means it with great respect. Trey likes a woman with spunk.”

  Back in the sitting room, our glasses filled with scotch from flasks in the fellas’ pockets, Frank said to Doug, “So this is home for the week, I’m afraid. Not exactly watertight.” They proceeded to discuss whether the roof would last the week, and the merits of dragging mattresses up to the lighthouse watch room.

  “One hundred thirty-six steps,” Beau pointed out. “And those mattresses aren’t light.”

  Doug said, “The keepers used to carry fifty-pound drums of lamp oil up those steps.”

  “I think I’ll take my chances here,” Beau said.

  “Only two mattresses,” Doug observed, at which point the fellas all looked at each other and burst into laughter. “I guess your mother doesn’t mean for us to sleep much this week, unless it’s in someone else’s bed.”

  “Don’t even be thinking about singing to my friends, Dougie,” Ginger said. “We’ve already got four in the waitstaff’s bunkroom. We don’t need your company.”

  Ginger and the fellas started sharing stories of past visits to the island, then: earlier parties where Chawterley beds were in high demand. There was the time ten-year-old Ginger, not meaning to be excluded, had snuck out here to spend the night with the boys, causing a flood of panic in the big house when she was missed. There was the time an even younger Beau, sleeping on the pier under the stars with the other fellas, rolled over and landed in the water, sleeping bag and all.

  “That bag is still sleeping with the fishes,” Frank said with a Godfather accent, brushing the back of his hand against his cheek. “It’ll come up in a crab net some day.”

  And then they were talking about crabbing season, and whether there would be crabs for the party. It was early for crabs, but with the warm weather you never knew.

  “You know how crab fishing works?” Trey asked Mia and Betts and me.

  The others groaned.

  “No one but you thinks this is interesting, Trey,” Frank warned. “You and maybe Ginger, but that’s only because she was young and impressionable the first time she heard it, and you were the older, much-adored cousin who could still beat up Beau and me.”

  Trey plunged ahead anyway, explaining how the shallow waters around the island were ideal for crabbing, how by mid-May millions of blue crabs would be digging their way up from their muddy-bottom winter homes and shedding their skins so they could grow.

  Doug, in a heavy New York accent meant to imitate Trey’s more subtle one, said, “A crab sheds its shell some twenty times in its short life.”

  “That’s how it grows,” Frank added in a similarly bad imitation of Trey. “It can’t grow without shedding first, leaving its little claws naked and exposed.”

  “Its crimson claws,” Doug corrected him. “Crimson and cerulean.”

  “ ‘Cerulean’: a word you’ve never heard before and will never hear again, but trust us, Trey means blue,” Ginger said. “He thinks he means a particular shade of blue, but really he just means to impress you with the range of his vocabulary.”

  From the Latin word caeruleus, meaning dark blue or blue-green, which in turn derives from caelulum, diminutive of caelum, meaning … “Heaven,” I said, “or sky.”

  Everyone looked at me. I shrugged. “Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. Those who cross the sea change the sky, not their spirits.”

  “In manners, too, dominate!” Mia and Gi
nger and Betts all said, flashing finger crosses without missing a beat.

  “And she’s not law review?” Frank said to Trey. “Good thing we got into the firm when the competition wasn’t so stiff.”

  “I think I’m the only one of us actually in the firm,” Trey said. “I believe I’ll be voting on whether or not you’ll be made partner, m’ boy, so you’d best be awfully nice to me.”

  “Meaning don’t interrupt his story,” Ginger advised her brother.

  Frank grinned, and said (again in the fake Trey accent), “So it’s the final shed …”

  “… that makes a she-crab a sook,” Doug said.

  “What good learners you gentlemen are,” Trey said. Then to us, “And a sook’s abdominal apron, her vaginal covering—”

  “—takes on a triangular shape,” Doug interrupted, “which resembles nothing so much as … all together, boys.”

  “The U.S. Capitol!” Frank and Doug and Beau shouted, although Beau seemed less enthusiastic about it than the others, and less drunk, too.

  “The jimmy crab—that’s the male crab,” Doug continued. “His genital covering looks like …”

  “The Washington Monument!” The words again delivered in synchrony, at which point Frank and Doug applauded themselves.

  Trey, looking mightily peeved and trying not to, said, “Slender and phallic-shaped, like the Washington Monument. If you’re going to steal my story, at least get it right. You’re making it sound so unromantic.” He caught me in the harsh beacon of his gaze. “It’s really one of the most touching mating rituals you’ll ever see,” he insisted. “The jimmy cradles his girlfriend for as much as a week, and then he stands guard over her, literally makes a protective cage for her with his walking legs while she molts. He’s a patient sort. Her striptease can take two or three hours, but he just stands over her, protecting her. When she’s done, when she’s all vulnerable and shiny, he gently helps her onto her back before he takes her. She extends her abdomen so that it folds around him, and they couple like that for as long as twelve hours. Afterward, he hangs around to protect her until her shell regenerates. He carries her around until she can protect herself again.”