The Four Ms. Bradwells (44 page)

Betts holds them out across the gap between the beds. “Guess I won’t be needing them anymore.”

The gold clasp is cool against my palm, but it warms as I close my fingers over it, remembering the smell of Mother’s perfume on evenings when she and Daddy were going out, the luster of the blue/green/purple-gray pearls around the matte skin of her graceful neck. Remembering Daddy’s expression as he turned to see Mother descend the stairs, the
tendons of his neck (as thick and ungraceful as mine) straining just before he stepped to the bottom of the stairs to take her in his arms. He always kissed her, then, and told her she looked stunning. Not just beautiful, but stunning. I never could understand why he loved her. They were so different, and I was like him.

I lean back against the headboard. “What kind of mother lets her thirteen-year-old-daughter sleep with her twenty-year-old cousin?” I pull another tissue from the pack. “What kind of mother doesn’t at least try to put a stop to that?”

“She couldn’t have known, Ginge,” Laney says quietly.

“She left our photo in a … in a fucking poem about incest.”

What voyage this, little girl?

Betts worries her bare big toe, sliding her fingers over a callus. “She didn’t know before I told her,” she says quietly, “and then Trey was dead.”

A rush of wind crushes tiny raindrops against the windows in a gust, the panes rattling with the force of nothing more than condensed mist.

“I told her the day after Laney … I couldn’t believe we should just do nothing about it all, you know?” Betts explains.

“You told Mother about Laney?”

“The day of your father’s birthday party, while you were out hunting. I went to her office and I told her.” “About Laney,” I whisper.

She pulls her top leg more tightly toward her hip, reminding me of Justice Bradwell, the contortionist gargoyle in the Law Quad, where we used to meet. “About everything,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t have, it wasn’t my place to do it, but I thought she would help, I thought she would know what to do.” She looks up at me. “And then she didn’t. She just told me not to say anything to anyone. Even to you.”

“You told my mother,” I repeat, trying to absorb this. “She didn’t know, and you told her?”

The morning of the day Trey shot himself.

“I … I just assumed she knew,” Betts stutters. “But she didn’t. I’m sorry, Ginge.”

“She didn’t know,” I repeat dumbly, trying to make sense of it, thinking Mother
didn’t
know then, Mother
didn’t
allow it to go on. Maybe she should have known but she didn’t, she just didn’t know.

And then she did?

“Her reaction …” Betts looks from my face to the pearls, the book, the letter. “It was more than just … you know. Concern that I knew. She didn’t know.”

“Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus,”
Laney says.

Betts stands and moves to Laney’s bed, then, sits next to me and picks up the book. She sets aside the photograph and examines the sealed note:
For Margaret, should the time come
.

“She wouldn’t have let it go on if she’d known,” she says. She turns the envelope over to the sealed triangle, Mother’s signature sprawling across the joined edges. “Your mother? She wouldn’t have let it go on, Ginge. You must see that.”

I wipe my eyes with the tissue again, and I say I do see, even though I don’t see, I don’t understand anything except that I need to stop Betts from saying anything more until I’ve sorted this out. “I do see,” I say again, to prevent a silence she might need to fill, trying to imagine Betts telling Mother, and Mother hearing. How do you tell a mother she’s failed to protect her daughter for years? How can a mother bear to hear that?

I climb from Laney’s bed, trying to imagine Mother telling Daddy. Would she have? Or even telling Margaret. There is the sealed envelope and there is the photo and there is the poem “Briar Rose.” But that can’t be Mother speaking from the grave, to tell Margaret about a relationship her daughter had thirty years ago. That doesn’t make sense either.

I walk to the window, look out into the rain. The drapes are open; Mia or Laney must have opened them this afternoon. To hell with the press if they come back.

When I turn back to the room, Betts is still studying me, watching my hands, which, I come to realize, are worrying the pearls Mother gave me, that we all have worn. She stands and comes to me, rests her hands on my shoulders, her face close to mine, her hair gray where it was such a pretty red, her face lined and marked but still freckled, her eyes through the bifocals still the same intelligent blue gold green.

“Your mother loved you, Ginge,” she says. “Surely you must know that by now.”

I look down at the manicured nails of hands that look more and more like my father’s, fingering these pearls that have been mine for nearly as long as I can remember. Mother’s favorite pearls, which she gave to me years ago, when she still wore them. Betts is trying to tell me something
without saying it. I don’t know if I am trying to hear her or trying not to, but all I can think of is the way Mother and Daddy came in from a walk around the island the night Mother gave me the pearls. She came in to the Sun Room to find Frankie and Beau and me all huddled around the Risk board. Trey was there, too, I remember, because I was sitting on the couch and he was sitting next to me but not touching me, and I wanted him to touch me like he sometimes touched the island girls when we were all hanging out together, and since he wouldn’t I was being merciless, about to wipe him out. I was acting all gleeful about it, but I wasn’t feeling gleeful. And then Mother and Daddy came in, laughing. I remember thinking they were laughing at me, although I couldn’t say why. Maybe because I felt Trey laughing at me, and my brothers, too. And then Mother was standing behind me, setting her pearls around my neck, lifting my hair to fix the clasp and then gently turning the necklace so that the clasp would sit at the base of my throat, like it did on her. She didn’t even say anything. She just latched them there and kissed the top of my head and said good night, and when I turned to see her, she and Daddy were headed up the stairs, holding hands.

How odd I’d felt with those pearls around my neck. Confused. Like I was playing dress up. Like Mother was dressing me up, making me her. The weight of the dark pearls where I rarely wore more than a thin silver chain.
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress / bids me wear them, warm them
. But they came to my skin already warm.

None of the boys said anything, but they ganged up on me then; I’d been about to wipe Trey off the board before Mother and Daddy came in, and Frankie and Beau were all for it, and then they weren’t and I lost, and the funny thing was I didn’t really care.

After they wiped me out, Trey said he didn’t want to play anymore, he thought we should all go gut-running, Frankie and Beau against him and me. I remember not wanting to go out in the skiff with Trey, and going anyway. I must have been fourteen, because I’d already been out to Fog’s Ghost Cove with him, and not just that summer. I remember thinking I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore, and not knowing how to say no, and going with him even though I didn’t want to, knowing that we would lose Frankie and Beau somewhere in the darkness of Tizzie’s Ditch or Rock Creek or Midden Gut. And then we would have sex out in the skiff, quick sex on the little wooden centerboard, or more often with me lying down on the smelly hull and Trey over me. But maybe that
memory isn’t even real. Maybe I didn’t hesitate that night any more than I had any other night. Maybe that’s just gauze I’ve overlaid in the intervening years, wanting to be someone other than the girl I was.

I don’t know how long I waited for Mother to ask for the pearls back, dreaded her asking for them back and dreaded her not doing so. That whole summer, I think. And it was only after I came downstairs in a new dress I’d picked out especially for our annual end-of-summer party that she mentioned them again. I was at the top of the front stairs and she was greeting someone at the door. Daddy’s partner, Mr. Johns, I remember, because he whistled up at me like he thought I looked hot, then looked as surprised as I felt. I’d giggled, and he’d laughed, and Mother had said, “Why don’t you wear your black pearls tonight, sweetheart? They’ll look beautiful with that dress.” And I did wear them, and I suppose they did look beautiful, but I never could get used to wearing them, I never could come to think of them as anything other than Mother’s pearls.

Mother, whom Betts had told. Who’d learned about Trey and me the day before I watched Trey bleed to death.

I reach up and hold the pearls at Betts’s throat. I don’t even know why. These pearls I so love to loan, but never wear. They seem to belong on Betts as surely as they ever belonged on Mother, even though Betts looks nothing like Mother, even though the pearls are a different thing against her skin than they are in my memory of my mom.

“They’ve never looked better than they did around your neck in the hearing,” I say.

“They bring out the gray-blue of your eyes,” Mother had said when I’d reappeared at that end-of-the-summer party. No, what she’d said was, “They
pick up
the gray-blue of your eyes.” Not them bestowing beauty on me but me bringing my beauty to them.

I loop the pearls around Betts’s too thin neck, under the edge of her driftwood hair. I fasten the clasp at her throat just as Mother did when she gave them to me, except that I am facing Betts, she can see my face.

“They’ll look stunning with your black robes,” I say.

Betts smiles wryly. “My orange prison garb, you mean.”

I touch the clasp that nestles into the dip between her collar bones, the pearls on either side. “Mother would be so pleased to know her pearls adorn the neck of a Supreme Court justice,” I say. “I want her to have that.”

Betts, fingering the pearls herself now, starts to protest.

“I want her to have that,” I repeat, “and you want her to have it, too.”

“I can’t accept your mother’s pearls,” Betts says.

A circle of unmatched black pearls, each one bringing something different to the connected whole.

“You’ll no doubt feel them spontaneously strangling you if you even think about overturning
Roe v. Wade
,” I say.

“I can’t accept your mother’s pearls, Ginge,” Betts insists.

“They’re not Mother’s pearls,” I say. “They’re my pearls, that Mother gave me. And now I’m giving them to you.”

Betts

THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE, CHAWTERLEY
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

“I
NEVER THOUGHT
I would be like Matka. I thought I would be like your mother, Ginge,” I say. Because I have to say something. Some thank you for her gift of these pearls. And I’m not ready to say what I know I need to say here. Which has nothing and everything to do with the gift.

“And here I am,” I say. “Exactly like Matka. And Izzy is turning out the same way.”

I dip my chin but of course I can’t see my own neck. Then catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass. A dim outline against the darkness outside.

“ ‘A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing,’ ” Ginger says.

She denies the credit Laney wants to give her for the line; it’s from Anne Sexton’s “Housewife.”

I wonder if it’s true. Is Ginger her mother? Would she do the things Faith has done?

“ ‘A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing,’ ” Laney repeats as if saying penance for blasting Ginger about her poetry last night.

“I never thought I’d be my mom either,” Mia says. “All the friends she met on those summer trips? I thought I’d marry Andy and never have another lover. I thought I’d be loyal and chaste. Then I blew it even before the wedding, and now the only difference between Mom and me is that I prefer men.”

“And you’re not married,” Laney says.

“Rub it in, Lane,” Mia says.

“That’s not what I mean,” Laney says. “I mean you’re not betraying a single soul.”

“And you live a life that makes you happy,” Ginger says. She settles again on Laney’s bed.

I feel awkward standing here by myself. Still wanting to make Ginger take the pearls back. But it seems that moment has passed.

Outside the rain has slowed. It spits against the glass. The last little cough of the dying storm.

“You’re doing something you love to do, Mia,” Ginger says as I settle back on the end of Mia’s bed. “Don’t underrate that.”

“Except I’m unemployed now,” Mia says.

“Me, too,” Laney says. “Or as good as unemployed. I have no job, and the odds of my gaining the one I’ve set my sights for are looking slim to none, with the smart money betting on none. You at least might write a book about this whole fiasco to make a dollar or two. And seriously, I didn’t mean to swipe at you for not having a man. I just meant you’re not living through your daughter, like your mama did.”

“I don’t have a daughter to live through,” Mia says.

“But you’re living a life you
chose
, Mi. Living choices your mama didn’t have, or didn’t think she did. Even if you did have a Gemmy or an Izzy or an Anne, you wouldn’t be living your life through her. None of the rest of us is.”