The Wednesday Sisters (33 page)

“I’m liking the gray,” Laney says, and I agree. Betts’s refusal to color it is an odd form of penance, as if colorless hair could make up for not having loved Zack enough to keep him alive. Ginger needs to let her be.

“So you both like the gray on Betts, but not on yourselves?” Ginger says.

“Betts beats us all the way to heaven at being smarter,” Laney says. “Surely she’d allow us prettier, Ginge.”

I reach across Ginger to touch Laney’s hair, which, after twenty-five years of being chemically straightened and shoulder-length, has been allowed to reclaim its natural spring. It frames the curves of her jaw in loose rings of dark curls her face has clearly wanted all along. “I love this,” I say, meaning the hair, I think.

“Betts isn’t smarter,” Ginger says. “Just more disciplined.”

Laney and I lean our heads on Ginger’s quilted winter white shoulders.

“You’re right. You’re right,” Ginger says. “Smarter, too. I can admit that now: Betts is smarter than me.”

Laney and I each pat one soft, black-wooled knee of our dear, not always so humble friend as Milwaukee’s Finest requests and receives permission to ask one last question.

“But not you two. I get to be second smartest,” Ginger says, fingering an ebony button. “Damn, Betts is really going to do this, isn’t she?”

“Mrs. Zhukovski,” Milwaukee says.

Ginger, Laney, and I all whisper, “Ms.” in unison and smile at each other as if the shared thought is a shiny penny found heads up.

“Professor, “ I whisper.

The cameras, as quiet as they are these days, snap off each moment as though any single shot might capture the whole of what’s happening here, rather than distorting it. The TV cameras roll on, delivering every blemish in detail so the folks at home can wonder why Betts doesn’t have that little fatty deposit removed. The thought crosses my mind that Justice Sotomayor might never have been confirmed if her “wise Latina woman” comment had been caught on film. Visuals are so powerful, even when they’re untrue—or only a piece of the truth that, taken alone, is a lie.

I sit up straighter, leaning forward, wanting suddenly to warn Betts to be careful here: Milwaukee is sporting an expression like the one she’d dubbed “Professor Pooley’s you’re-about-to-be-called-on stare,” but without the humorous underlay. My hands go icy, my neck and my feet, too, my spine. Like the shock of that first plunge into the Chesapeake all those years ago.

“Mrs. Zhukovski,” Milwaukee repeats, “I’d like to ask you what you know about a death that occurred in the spring of 1982, at a home in Maryland where I believe you were a guest?”

“Oh, shit,” Ginger says—mercifully not before the silent blink of the crowd absorbing the question gives way to a collective murmur, the photographers surging forward as even the senators exhale their surprise.

I take Ginger’s hand and squeeze it. She looks startled, but if she was going to say more, she doesn’t. She links hands with Laney, and we watch as Betts, oddly, unlatches the clasp at her throat and lets the pearl necklace slide into her hand. Every moment of the gesture is caught in a shutter snap: a single manicured nail flipping the catch; her competent fingers opening the necklace; the gray globes of pearls following the white-gold loop into her palm. She fingers the dark blue-gray end pearl, worrying it between thumb and forefinger as if saying a Hail Mary over rosary beads.

The adviser sitting behind her looks like he’s praying for divine intervention, as does Senator Friendly up on the dais, but Betts looks unfazed. She doesn’t even seem to realize she’s removed the pearls. For a moment, I think she is going to stand to answer the senator’s question, the way we were required to stand to answer in law school. I think removing the pearls must have something to do with this.

She doesn’t stand, though. She remains in her chair. She leans forward from the seat back that is higher than her shoulders, moving closer to the microphone. She smiles the way she smiles when you stumble upon her doing yoga on her screen porch in the morning: a little embarrassed, but somehow more for you than for her. And in the same soft, self-possessed voice she and I rehearsed again and again over the telephone—a voice even I almost believe—she says, “Senator, I don’t believe I have anything to add to the public record on that.”

Read on for an excerpt from Meg Waite Clayton’s

The Language of Light

I
lie awake, studying the moonlight spilling over the foot of the bed I slept in as a girl. The soft splash of light is carved through with hard edges of shadow, vacillating lines of light meeting dark. I try to imagine capturing the image with my camera—how long could I leave the lens open to the subtle light before the crisp silhouettes of the bare branches outside the window blurred to murky gray? The image isn’t possible to capture in this light, but I can’t help thinking my father would have caught it anyway.

At two fifteen I slip from the bed, feeling on the nightstand for the brass skeleton key Dad gave me when I was ten. The key is small and hard and cool in my fist, and the house is dark, the wood floors cold on my bare feet as I make my way to his study. The room is drafty—it always has been—but sitting at Dad’s desk, I feel warmed. When I try to remember what he looked like sitting here, though, no image comes to mind, and I panic, the way I sometimes panicked after my husband, Wesley, died and I couldn’t remember some small detail about him—what color tulips he liked best or how he marked his place in a book or whether his crooked smile tilted to the right or to the left. But then I remember Dad in motion; he was always in motion. I feel his fingers gently squeezing my shoulders as he stands behind me in the Communion line. I smell the coffee on his breath as he whispers to me to move in closer for a better picture. I see his large hands wrapped around Ned’s and Charlie’s little ones as Wesley’s casket is lowered into the ground, his lips whispering that it’s okay to cry, that he was a grown man and still he cried when his daddy died.

Though I don’t remember that; my father’s father was dead before I was born. I don’t remember ever seeing Dad cry except in the darkness of his darkroom, and I’m so young in that memory that I’m not even sure it’s real.

On the paneled walls around me, framed magazine covers and photojournalism awards—all my father’s—hang everywhere. Others rest against the books overfilling the bookshelves or lean against the walls. Some simply stand in stacks on the floor. A package with a New York postmark sits on the desk in front of me, addressed to my father. It arrived the day after he died. Inside it I find another framed magazine cover, this one showing a line of refugees walking down a dirt road. It’s a haunting photo, the endless line of exhausted, starving people carrying mattresses on their heads, babies on their backs. I find myself wondering what Dad had been thinking as he took it, and whether there are other photographs of these people, ones Dad might have kept for himself in his box.

Across the room, the closet where Dad stored his cameras and gear is nearly empty—only a single film canister and his metal file box, which I pull down from the shelf and set on the hearth. I start a fire in the fireplace and sit on the floor in my pajamas, rolling the key between my fingers. First the newspaper, then the kindling burns.

The logs are hot, glowing red by the time I unlock the box and pull out a thick stack of photos. A large envelope at the back holds the negatives, all sheathed in polyethylene. As I take a fistful and lean forward to the heat of the fire, Dad’s words come back to me, the words he spoke years after he first gave me the key, when he asked me to use it to open his box and burn the photographs in it after he died: “Those photos were never meant to be published,” he’d said. “I don’t ever want them to be.”

But his photographs are all I have of him now. In some ways, they’re all I’ve ever had.

“A glass of wine would be nice right now,” I whisper, as if Dad can somehow hear me, as if he were here. In the bookshelf cabinet, I find a few glasses and an old brown ice bucket with no lid, all covered with dust, and Dad’s scotch, too, though Mom’s sherry is gone. Dad must have removed it sometime after she died. But I find an almost empty bottle of it on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet, next to the serving platters and bowls we used on holidays when I was young. They were Grandma’s, and then Dad’s. Now probably they’ll be mine.

With the last of the sherry in hand, I sit down to burn the pictures as I promised Dad I would. I begin to look through them first, though; Dad never asked me not to, and I never volunteered. Maybe I’ll even keep one or two, keep some part of him for me. Surely he’d indulge me that. I’ll make my boys promise to burn them when I die so that, in the end, they’ll all be destroyed, as Dad wished.

The first photo is of a young man—a boy really—in uniform, army fatigues and a helmet, in a trench next to some type of large gun. He holds a letter in his hand, yet his eyes stare blankly. What could provoke a look like that? A lover gone? A brother killed? A mother dead?

I force myself to set the photo on the fire. Its center turns black, then melts.

The second photo is of a child, all ribs and bones and swollen belly. Huge, haunted eyes stare out from her dark face, her hair in tufts, patches. Her mother curls up on the dry, hard dirt beside her, eyes closed. She might be sleeping, but this photo is in Dad’s box; the mother is dead.

Staring at the child, the mother, I try to imagine why my father kept these photographs only for himself. I close my eyes, trying to remember the sound of his voice, some few forgotten words that would give me the answer. I can remember the feel of my eyes adjusting to the red darkness in the darkroom; I can smell the chemical smell—that distinctive acid smell; I can see the ghost of a picture seep out of the submerged paper in the tray. But I hear only the pop and sizzle of flames.

I put the second photo on the fire and watch it melt.

The third photo is of a young woman—nineteen or twenty, barely more than a girl—in black-and-white. She sits at a cluttered wooden table, in a pub perhaps, surrounded by half-empty glasses, full ashtrays, empty chairs. She leans forward over the table, her arm stretching to grasp something just out of reach. The camera? She does have that self-consciously rigid posture of someone who doesn’t want to be photographed. And then something catches my eye and I move the picture closer to the fire, to see the woman’s face. The look in those eyes. Humor. Delight. But with some melancholy, something unforgettable underneath. I move closer, study the picture more carefully: the arch of the brow, the shape of the lips, the set of the chin. Some part of me wants it to be someone else. But even so many years younger, I know that face. It’s Emma Crofton’s face.

A
LSO BY
M
EG
W
AITE
C
LAYTON

The Language of Light

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Meg Waite Clayton

Excerpt from The Four Ms. Bradwells copyright © 2011 by Meg Waite Clayton

Excerpt from The Language of Light copyright © 2003 by Meg Waite Clayton

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B
ALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clayton, Meg Waite.
The Wednesday sisters: a novel / Meg Waite Clayton.
p. cm.
1. Housewives—Fiction.                  2. Housewives as authors—Fiction.                  3. Female friendship—Fiction.                  4. Nineteen sixties—Fiction.                  5. Palo Alto (Calif.)—Fiction.                  6. Domestic fiction.                  I. Title.
PS3603.L45W43 2008
813'.6—dc22                           2008010627

www.ballantinebooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-345-50784-6

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