The Four Ms. Bradwells Page 22

  And yet how can I ask for a place on the Court without laying the truth of what happened at Cook Island out in the open? This you must remember, Elsbieta: to be leader you must lead, even when it will harm you. To be leader, you must always do what is right.

  Laney

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Summer 1987: Helen (“Laney”) Weils (JD ’82) married William Robeson on July 3 in Atlanta, Georgia. The bride will keep her name and, after considerable negotiation, the groom will, too.

  AFTER TWO WILD nights of gut-running and stargazing and falling asleep after dawn, we went to bed with the chickens the night Faith and Mr. Conrad arrived at Chawterley. We set the alarm for 5:15 a.m., an hour before the sun would show itself, not to please Faith but to have one more opportunity to see Mercury rise. We didn’t precisely leap from bed when it went off, but we did dress and make our way to the lighthouse by the light of a not quite full moon. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.

  This time, I insisted on having the last turn at the telescope, and we all did see Mercury there at the horizon, or we all said we did. It was as close as we were going to get to seeing all the planets on the same night.

  We spent the rest of Friday helping unload the boats each time Trey and Ginger or Frank and Beau returned with guests, carrying luggage and pouring iced tea and lemonade and, later in the afternoon, cocktails. We ought to have been beat by the time dinner was served Friday evening, a buffet catered by the Pointway Inn so guests could eat whenever they arrived. But we were so young then, and the house so chock-full of the older Conrads’ friends that we jumped at Mr. Conrad’s suggestion that we “kids” go for a swim. We put on our bikinis and Frank dug sweatshirts from the dresser in the Captain’s Office—his bedroom he’d turned over to guests for the weekend—not wanting us to freeze our fannies off again, he said.

  We weren’t in the icy water a quick minute before Ginger shed her suit. We’d been sipping cocktails all evening, and Ginger always did get wild when she drank. Beau mentioned that Mia and Betts and I might be uncomfortable skinny-dipping with a bunch of fellas we’d hardly been introduced to, but Ginger insisted we “were cool,” and Trey was already adding his suit to Ginger’s on the pier, telling Beau not to be a “sissy-assed prude.” Even Mia was untying her top in the moonlight.

  The sun was long set and the moon not yet risen, at least there was that. I tried to shrug off my discomfort as we splashed each other, as we raced to the buoy and back, working up a little warmth, our own laughter mixing with that spilling from the house. Breathless from the race, we tilted our heads back to see the stars, and we talked about people all over the world seeing the same sky, and what might be up there, and whether there was life anywhere else in the universe. I was starting to shiver in a serious way when I had the sense someone was missing. Had Mia and Beau swum off somewhere? But then Beau directed us all to observe the moon rising big and bright at the horizon, the light soft on the gentle waves.

  “Does the moon rise as quickly as the sun sets?” Mia asked. Two minutes and eight seconds. Don’t blink.

  When no one answered, I knew Trey was the one missing.

  I climbed Fool’s Hill in a hurry searching for my suit again. I tried to stay low in the water, but I couldn’t sort through the pile on the pier without my breasts peeking up into the moonlight. Only Mia’s face was turned toward me, though, so I pulled myself partway out of the water, pressed myself against the waterlogged wood, and dug. I had half a mind to put on whichever bottom I came to first, if only mine might’ve fit anyone else. But I had to stand twice in the same place to cast a good shadow back in those days.

  Everyone was getting out then, Ginger saying, “Shit, it’s cold.” That’s when I saw Trey still in the water, floating alone on the far side of the pier.

  IN THE WARMTH of the fire at the Lightkeeper’s Cottage, we all had a good laugh over my bikini bottoms being inside out under my borrowed sweatshirt. By the time I’d rectified that particular situation in the lightkeeper’s primitive bathroom, the others were sitting around a Risk game map of the world with a newly opened bottle of scotch and glasses all around.

  “You sit here, Lane,” Ginger said, patting the floor between her and Doug. “You’re purple.”

  “A world domination color,” Frank joked, and he handed me a glass of scotch I didn’t much want.

  “You have to change more quickly if you want a say in what color you are,” Ginger said.

  Trey lit a cigarette, grabbed a cheap tin ashtray from a table, and said, “Purple. The pope’s color.”

  “Laney the Good Girl,” Mia said.

  “She’s not Roman Catholic any more than you are,” Betts said with an edge in her voice that was all about how close Mia sat to Beau.

  “I’m sorry to say, you also pick last, Lane,” Ginger said. “I rolled the die for you, fair and square.”

  Everyone else had set colored blocks of wood on the board: armies, Doug explained when it was clear I had no idea how to play this game. At his suggestion, I set my first block on Brazil, and settled in.

  I was playing well enough with Doug’s help—never you mind all Ginger’s protests that he was guiding me to attack everyone but him—when Trey picked up the bottle and started refilling glasses. I alone needed no refill.

  “Sadly, gentlemen, our scotch does not meet with Miss Weils’s standards,” he said.

  I protested and took a polite sip.

  “Like this, Lane.” Ginger drained her refilled glass and held it out to Trey again.

  “Cheers,” Beau said, and lifted his glass and did the same, perhaps with a sideways glance at Mia. Which was probably why Betts, without hesitating, drained her glass. And Mia never will be outdone by Betts. I was left the last Ms. Bradwell standing, too self-conscious not to drain my glass.

  Ginger cleared Trey out of Australia on the next turn, gaining additional armies by possessing that whole continent.

  “You unfriendly slut,” Trey said, joking, yes, and Ginger laughed and held her glass out for more scotch, but still the word left me uneasy. Trey dutifully refilled her glass, then went around the group, playing host. When he got to my still full glass, he tapped the edge of the bottle against its side. I hoped I didn’t look as stupid as I felt. Why was I like that, feeling as dumb as dirty dishwater just because I didn’t like to get drunk? I wasn’t much used to folks noticing, was the thing.

  I lifted my glass and I said, “Meus calix inebriat me!” and took a substantial slug of scotch.

  Ginger had a no-Latin finger cross up faster than any half-drunk Risk player ought to have managed, and Betts and Mia followed suit.

  “An inside joke,” I told the fellas.

  “Clearly our cups are making us all drunk,” Trey said. “Not just you.”

  And somehow that comment left me feeling all right. Maybe it was the fact that he’d understood the Latin, or that he was still sober enough to translate, or that he wasn’t embarrassed that he could. If Ginger hadn’t been between us, I might have leaned a head on his shoulder affectionately, as she sometimes did. I might have done it before it occurred to me I shouldn’t, that it might not be appropriate to be that comfortable with someone I would work with, someone who’d told everyone at the office who would listen how brilliant he thought I was. Who’d taken the liberty of kissing me, yes, but only that once.

  Beau was the first to lose all his armies, followed quickly by Mia; if they were throwing the game so they could go off alone together, they had the good sense to lose their countries to Ginger. As Mia tossed her last army back into its little box, Beau asked her if she’d like to take another peek at the sky. Mia hopped up and brushed off the seat of her bikini, and off they headed to the lighthouse. Betts, across the board from me, rolled her eyes.

  Ginger established a second line of attack on the Risk board, in North America, but that was later, after Trey had been eliminated and I’d been reduced to a few insupportable armies. Doug eliminate
d me altogether by attacking my South American holdings through Africa. “To establish a bulkhead against Ginger’s North American flank,” he explained with no hint of real regret. “The battle for world domination is serious stuff.”

  Trey stubbed a half-smoked cigarette out in the now-full tin ashtray and said this gang could be playing for some time yet, and would I like to join Mia and Beau?

  THE LIGHTHOUSE LANTERN had been flashing when we went into the cottage, but it was off by the time Trey and I emerged. Who knew what Mia and Beau were doing up there? I challenged Trey to a race to the top, calling out, “First one to the watch room,” already sprinting off ahead of him, intent on making enough noise that Mia would hear us coming. I thought I could stall at the watch room on the excuse of catching my breath to buy Mia just a little more time to, say, put her panties back on.

  I made the most unprofessional ruckus racing up the stairs, whooping and calling out taunts to Trey. By the time I got to the watch room I truly did need to catch my breath. Trey would have won our little race if I’d given him a chance to get by me on the narrow stairs.

  As we stood collecting ourselves, Trey reached a hand to the back of my neck and pulled me to him, and kissed me. I closed my lips to the stale cigarette and scotch taste of his mouth, and after a moment he took the hint, stepping back and turning away from me.

  “Beau!” he called out as he sprinted up the last flight of stairs from the watch room to the lantern room. “You better be handling that telescope as lovingly as you handle your own little friend.”

  I did hesitate then. I know I did. I felt a jolt of unease. But he’d seemed embarrassed when I didn’t kiss him back, and maybe he meant Mia rather than the part of Beau’s anatomy I was imagining he meant. He’d been drinking, and so had I, and he’d just followed my bikini-covered fanny up more than a hundred stairs. Not everything was as clear as it should have been. Nothing seemed clear except that Mia would be up on the lantern deck, and when we Ms. Bradwells stuck together, we were always just fine.

  Trey was already at the telescope when I emerged from the lantern room. I don’t expect I realized he was alone until I was beside him, until he reached out and took my arm and said, “Look, you have to see this.” And so I put my eye to the telescope.

  He put his arms around me again, began kissing my neck. I stiffened. I said no. I’m sure I must have said no.

  “Yes,” he said gently.

  And when I resisted, he said, “You like that game? I can play that game.” And before I knew what was happening, it was happening. I was up against the railing, looking out over the wave-crashing darkness, with my arm twisted behind my back. Pressed so hard against the rail that I was sure I was going to plummet all that way to the hard earth. He was stripping my bikini bottom down to my knees with his other hand. He was pressing his body against mine, the heat and scotch of his breath on my ear. I started to scream into the crash of waves below, but he slapped a hand over my mouth.

  “Careful,” he said. “I like that, I do, and probably no one can hear you, but we don’t really want a crowd.

  “You know how the crabs do it?” he said, his breath hot and stale in my ear as he stripped my suit the rest of the way down with his foot. “The she-crab pisses a scent that sends the jimmy all into a lather. Do you do that, Laney? Do you piss like that?”

  I tried to bite his hand and he drew back, but in a way that left me feeling I would surely fall over the rail. And then he was stuffing my bikini bottom into my mouth, laughing, pressing me up against that high, high rail again.

  “A month from now, bobbing corks will scatter across all the water you can see from here, each attached to a caged jimmy crab who wants to fuck all the ladies he can,” he said, his voice in my ear again as he stripped off his own suit. “The silly sooks swim right into his cage, wanting him to fuck them. They crowd into the cages until there are fifty or a hundred or more ladies all wanting the one jimmy to fuck them. Do you think they get hot then, all those slutty ladies panting after the same man?” His fingers squeezing my breast so hard. “He fucks as many as he can before the crabber pulls the pot up. And then you know what happens?” He shoved himself into me, then, my insides ripping so that I screamed in pain, choking on the cloth. “The slutty ladies go to the boiling pot while the jimmy goes back into the water, to a whole new slew of lady crabs climbing into his cage.”

  Laney

  THE LANTERN DECK, COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  THE DOOR FROM the lantern room scrapes open behind me, and the sound of Ginger’s rushed breath mixes with the lap of the bay below and the smell of wet cement, the awful aftertaste of remembering Trey.

  “He called me a slut,” I say, wanting suddenly to hand it all over to her, to have her lift it from me. But I don’t turn to her, I can’t face her.

  She doesn’t move on the lantern deck behind me. She just stands dumbly, not even approaching the rail. She didn’t believe me then and she doesn’t believe me now. She’ll never alter her notion of what happened that night. How could she if she’d been sleeping with Trey for years by then? It’s why I’ve never told the awful details even to her, my closest friend. Because she can’t bear to hear them. She can’t bear to face what it means about who she is, what she thinks it means about who she is.

  What kind of woman loves a man who rapes?

  I keep staring out at the bay that had been dark that night, until the door from the lantern room opens again, Betts joining us.

  “A nigger slut, that’s what he called me,” I say, throwing the bitter words at Ginger. A whole new bunch of lady crabs present their backsides to him, little nigger sluts like you wanting to skip the kissing and romance and go straight to the fuck.

  Betts and Ginger close ranks, one on either side of me, and I want Ginger to just go away, and I don’t. The three of us stare out at the sea, at the faraway spit of mainland and the little dot on the water at the horizon. Betts’s hand covers mine.

  When Ginger gently fingers my hair, I’m back in the bunkroom, with Ginger climbing into bed with me that next night, wrapping herself around me, protecting me. Would things have been different if I’d told them this then?

  I expect there was only so much I could say, though, not just because Ginger didn’t want to hear it, but because I couldn’t bear to believe it myself.

  “I didn’t worry about getting pregnant,” I say. “It wasn’t that way.”

  Betts’s hand tightens over mine, and Ginger leans her head on my shoulder. They don’t look at me. I expect they know this is hard to admit even without having to face them, without them being able to see the shame in my eyes.

  Why does it shame me, this thing I had no control over? But there it is, even after all these years. Maybe I ought to be thankful that he took me in a way that wouldn’t leave me pregnant, but it only makes the shame worse, even with the Ms. Bradwells, even now that I’m trying to get past it, now that I’m running for office and thinking I’ve decided my past be damned, it wasn’t my fault.

  I don’t know if I would ever have told even William if it wasn’t for a midnight call from Mia a few months ago, not very long after Faith passed. My telephone ringing off the hook in the middle of the night, an East Coast number I’m sure it was because I thought it was Faith’s number, I had that moment of thinking Faith? I hope she’s okay as I picked up the receiver, before remembering Faith wasn’t okay at all, Faith was dead. It was Mia saying she was thinking of getting married again, ringing me in the middle of the night like she needed my approval or my permission or maybe just my advice before she could accept a fella’s ring.

  “Well, do you love him, Mi?” I asked. Not terribly original, but I wasn’t half awake.

  “He sings beautifully, Lane,” she answered.

  The sun could have risen and set again in the time I tried to make sense of that one, before I decided she must mean it as a euphemism. For as much sex as Mia has, her reluctance to talk about it is a thing
to behold.

  “Mi,” I said. “A good voice is certainly an important thing to look for in a husband. A good voice does go a long way.”

  She said, “Remember Doug Pemberley from Cook Island?”

  Just a name, not even Trey’s name, but I sat in my bed in the darkness, William asleep beside me, the shame catching me by surprise.

  I think I stammered something like, “Well, I do suppose if he sings that well …”

  She seemed as at loss for words as I was, which is very un-Mia.

  “The ring is gorgeous,” she said finally, in a way that made me wonder if this ring was such an ugly thing that it made her doubt her choice of this fella, whoever he was. Made me think this was more difficult somehow than I imagined it was for her. Made me set aside my own feelings and try to attend to hers.

  “But do you love him, Mi?” I insisted.

  Her answer to that question was even odder than the thing about the singing: “I want to, Lane. Maybe I even do. Maybe I do love him. But I don’t think I should. I don’t think any of us would be happy, do you?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Any of us? And when I didn’t say anything she thanked me for always being there to listen and she told me she loved me and said goodbye and hung up before I could say another thing. I rang her right back on the number she’d called from, but there was no answer, just an endless ringing at the end of the line. And when I rang her cell, I got the message on the first ring, her phone turned off. William was awake by then, asking who it was, if the children were all right, and so I let go of thinking about Mia to assure my husband our children were fine.

  I couldn’t reach Mia that next morning, but that never did worry me much; so often she’s in remote places where cellphones simply don’t work. I did call Betts, though. I told her about the call, and she said maybe Mia was seeing someone new, but then when wasn’t she? And when I finally heard from Mia again she clearly wasn’t meaning to marry anybody anytime soon. She’s not wearing a ring now, anyway, and when I mentioned that I guessed she’d decided not to marry the fella with the ugly ring, she looked confused for a moment, and then said she’d decided I was right, that she didn’t love him. Which I hadn’t said at all. But if Mia wants to lay the responsibility of her remaining single on my shoulders, it’s all right by me. Lord knows she’s done enough kindnesses for me over the years that I’m glad of the chance to pay a small kindness back.