The Four Ms. Bradwells (12 page)

And we all laugh. Humor is a much more effective way to get your point across than rage. One of the many things Faith taught us all.

Mia lifts her glass of tequila. “You know what I was doing that day you called me in Madagascar, Betts? I traveled halfway around the world to drive forever in a bumpy jeep to hear the song of an endangered Indri lemur, a furry little animal that sings for maybe three minutes. This is my
life
?”

Laney puts an arm around her. I’m not sure exactly why.

“Spill, Mia,” she says.

“It’s actually two Indri calling together, they sing together. They sing more during mating season, too. And they mate for life. I know all this because I’m a good journalist,” Mia says with a tiny crack in her voice. “Because I do my research before I go.”

I’m thinking I see where this is going. This is about the fact that Mia can’t seem to find anyone to take Andy’s place. To be honest this particular record has gotten a little old. Could she stop to think of Ginger for a moment? Could she stop to think about the direct hit I just took? Or the glancing blow Laney will take in her campaign?

“You could write such an amazing poem about the Indri, Ginge,” she says. “The name of the reserve—the Analamazoatra—is a poem all by itself.”

Leaving me embarrassed at my quiet indignation. She
is
thinking of Ginger.

“Spill, Mia,” Ginger says. “Spill.”

Mia protests: there isn’t anything
to
spill. She starts telling us some
myth about two Indri brothers who live together in the forest until one of them decides to leave and cultivate the land. He becomes the first human, while the other sends out this mourning cry for his brother who went astray.

“Don’t read my piece this weekend,” she says. “It’s too heavy-handed. As if the reader can’t figure out himself that the human brother from the myth is now destroying the rain forests the lemur brother lives in, destroying his kin. God, my writing sucks.”

We all just look at her.

She shrugs. “Who wants to be a journalist, anyway? I’d like to ask the audience, Meredith. Is the only way to keep your job: (1) to sleep with an editor who has the worst beer gut in the city; (2) to cover Hollywood gossip instead of women’s rights or the envir—”

“You didn’t tell us you were cut, Mi!” Even I can hear the irritation in my voice. As if her unwillingness to trust us is worse than losing her job. But isn’t it?

“Canned,” Mia says. “I preferred ‘canned’ to ‘cut.’ It sounds so much more … in the tin!”

“In the soup?” Ginger says.

“It sounds less bloody,” Mia says.

“Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei,”
Laney says. “For this is the chalice of my blood.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Mia says. “Just budget cuts.”

“You could start a blog,” Ginger suggests. “You can make a fortune blogging these days.”

“You can start with, say, a scandal involving your ex-roommate Supreme Court nominee!” I suggest. Recalling Jonathan’s words over the phone:
How does the senator have the nerve to try to derail a Supreme Court nomination on the basis of an anonymous post?

“Mia didn’t want to spoil your moment,” Laney says to me. Her tone says,
hush
. Her tone says,
why are you being so nasty to Mia?

I bury my uneasiness in a chirpy voice. “And such a moment it’s turned out to be! You and me, Mia. We can be mates for life. Who else would want us with our luck?”

“I would,” Ginger says.

Laney says, “I would, too.” She raises her glass and says, “To friendship.”

“To friendship,” we all say.

We clink our glasses and we throw back whatever is left. Mia opens the bottle again. Refills us all. I think I shouldn’t. I should keep my wits about me. But I’ve just been through a week of Senate hearings ending in disaster. I have no wits left to keep.

“Shoot, I need to call Izzy,” I say. “Can I use the phone, Ginge? I get no cell reception here.”

Ginger folds one empty Sierra Club bag before she answers, “I left a message for Annie not to come to New York. I asked her to call Iz and let her know.”

“But I’d still like to—”

“I had the phone disconnected.” Ginger reaches into another Sierra Club grocery bag, ignoring the now hot cast-iron pan. “Frank and Beau gave me endless shit for it: the family would still come here, we still needed to have a phone. But …” She sets aside a can of black bean chili. “But I couldn’t bear dialing this number and having someone who wasn’t Mother answer, any more than I could bear the phone ringing and ringing without answer in the silence of this goddamned house.” She blinks back tears. Pulls a head of lettuce from the bag. “Shit,” she says, “who’d’ve guessed I’d be as able to wallow in my own feelings at fifty-one as I was at twenty?”

“Fifty-two, Ginge,” I say. I don’t know why I know this will make her laugh, but it does.

Ginger pitches the head of lettuce good-naturedly at Mia, saying, “Still, I’ll always be younger than all of
you
!”

Mia groans as she catches the lettuce. She has always hated making the salad. And we all laugh. This is such familiar territory, making a meal together. You can almost see the tension begin to seep away.

In a few minutes we have a green onion and goat cheese omelet. Toast with blueberry jam Ginger found in the cupboard. We grab the Scrabble board and tiles from the Captain’s Library. Set the game and the food up in the Sun Room. Pull sheets off the furniture before Ginger says, “Let’s do the library instead.” Without explanation, she turns the music and the lights off. A small nod to Max’s efforts for a greener world. She leads us through the Music Room, the Tea Parlor, the Ballroom Salon. We’re headed the back way to that funky hidden door from the Ballroom into the Captain’s Library. A door hidden behind a bookshelf on the library side and behind a large painting on the Ballroom side.

But she goes instead to a door I’m pretty sure used to be a window.
Stares at the brass knob. The wood floor. The door into Faith’s Library. A room hidden in the trees outside. It will be considerably harder for anyone approaching Chawterley to see us in the new library than in the brightly lit Sun Room.

Laney touches her elbow. “Those lines you were saying at the front door, Ginge, about the folded sunset, did you write them?”

Ginger grasps the handle finally. Stares at the door as if meaning to bring it down with her look and nothing else. “Elizabeth Bishop,” she says. “From ‘Questions of Travel.’ ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?’ ”

GINGER

FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

T
HE DOOR TO
Mother’s library sucks open, the seal ceding its job of protecting the room’s contents to the positive pressure. The subtle blow of air from inside brings traces of Chanel, menthol cigarettes, the mustiness of old books. You can almost see Mother sitting in a chair by the fire, reviewing a legal brief or an opinion, looking up, saying, “Ginger, do close that door before the mold spores follow you in.” Never mind how bad her cigarette smoke was for her goddamned books. For her goddamned self.

Someone is dead. / Even the trees know it
.

Max’s note about the firewood comes to mind as clearly as if it were in my hands, his careless scrawl: “Faith’s Library.” I fight the sudden longing to pull every book one by one from the shelves. Touch them. Open them. The
Sonnets
, too? Maybe. Maybe I’ll read the poems one last time before boxing them up, sending them insured mail to … to whom? Mother’s will included a specific bequest of the
Sonnets
and a volume of Sexton poems to her friend Margaret Traurig from law school, but Margaret died the day before Mother did. Aunt Margaret, who’d been the only other woman in Mother’s class at Michigan Law. “We weren’t allowed to eat in the Lawyers Club and we couldn’t room there either, and our classmates weren’t always welcoming,” Margaret once told me, “so your mother’s and my choice was to learn to like each other’s company, or learn to love being alone.”

There’s a part of me that wants to steal the book again, to send some other more valuable volume in place of the
Sonnets
to whatever heir of Margaret’s is entitled to them, with a note that the long-ago missing
Sonnets
have again disappeared but I’m sure Mother would want … But
what would Mother want? Mother wanted Aunt Margaret to have the
Sonnets
just so that I wouldn’t.

I put Mia and Betts to setting up the Scrabble board while Laney and I bring in firewood. The particles wood fires emit make a mockery of the air controls, but Mother wouldn’t have gas logs. “You think these books have never been exposed to wood fires, Max?” she’d insisted. “If Ginger values the preservation of my books over her enjoyment of them after I’m gone, she can put in those awful fake things, or never light the damned fire.” It was the first I’d realized she meant to leave her books to me. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed, I might have realized she meant to leave me this library, too, and Chawterley itself. I might have realized that, being Mother, she would leave me all the books except one worthless Sexton volume and the
Sonnets
, just to make sure I realized she’d always known I’d stolen it, that she’d never forgiven me the theft.

Betts and Laney and Mia all rejected this interpretation. “When I die, I expect I’ll leave something for each of you,” Mia had reply-emailed. “I can’t imagine
not
leaving something for each of you.” Which sent Laney and Betts into a silly frenzy about the special things of Mia’s they wanted her to leave them. “Can I have the hat from that photo of you by the dead tree in that cemetery? The one that looks like you stole it off a refugee?” Betts wrote, and Laney claimed a pair of plastic teeth she’d once seen on Mia’s desk in Andy’s and her San Francisco apartment, in the days when Mia had a desk, or an apartment for that matter. They were doing what we always do for each other, making me laugh when I would otherwise fucking cry.

The wind picks up as Laney and I go out for more wood, whipping my hair into my eyes.
Up above the sea grass / flew like a woman’s hair in labor
. The moon is setting already, following the sun into the bay to the west. It seems a bad omen, somehow, to have the only thing lighting the darkness disappear just as the long night begins.

Back inside, Mia and Betts look a little pale. You’d think they’d had some bad omen, too. When the wind howls through the chimney in the Captain’s Library, Betts demands, “What
is
that?”

“It’s just the Captain’s Ghost,” I say. “Don’t worry. He’s …”
He’s partial to virgins
, a long line of Cook men have claimed, my grandfathers, my uncles, my brother Frank among them.
He’s partial to virgins, so he’s no threat to anyone here
, Trey used to joke.

“He’s just the wind in the chimney,” I say.

but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh / Upon the glass and listen for reply

The islanders will tell you the Captain’s Ghost never leaves Chawterley, that it’s Mr. Humphrey’s Ghost who ventures out to the marshes during duck hunting season, felling birds no one else claims to have shot. It’s his reflection they see in the mirror over the bar at Brophy’s, bellying up for a shot of the single malt scotch they keep on hand, superstitiously, for Trey. His chin is still square in these sightings, his smile
GQ
white. His eyes, dark espresso against blue-white china, always laugh behind the long lashes. His hair falls to his shoulders as he’d let it grow after he made partner at Tyler & McCoy. And when ghost hunters claim to hear him running the guts, the laughter they describe is that of the young man they see at the bar. Trey manages to stay young and tragic in everyone’s memory while those of us left behind fight sagging asses and wobbly arms, age spots and jowls.

His favorite haunt, of course, is the lighthouse. The lantern goes on and off when no one is there, the islanders insist, and no amount of assurance that it hasn’t been operational for years does a bit of good. I guess if you believe in ghosts who drink high-priced scotch and shoot ducks, a broken lamp isn’t much of an impediment to providing light.

“Mr. Humphrey’s Ghost, he’s restless, restless,” they say, even the islanders who played kick the can with us according Trey the honorific “Mr.”—a courtesy always extended to the occupants of Chawterley except when we were playing games as kids. Even Max, who wouldn’t hesitate to call me “Ginger, you fucking moron” when I dropped a pass in a game of touch football out on Sheep Neck North, called me “Miss Conrad” when he delivered groceries to the door. Or “Miss Cook.” More often than not, islanders called me “Miss Cook.” I guess the strangest thing about that was that it never seemed strange to me. It’s a rare person who sees things that have always been as even the least bit odd.

“Mr. Humphrey’s Ghost,” they call Trey—as if he deserved anyone’s respect, as if any god that might exist wouldn’t send him straight on to hell.