The Four Ms. Bradwells Read online

  “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.”

  Betts

  ROOM 216, THE HART BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  “I DON’T BELIEVE I have anything to add to the public record on that,” I say, thinking, You just close the damned door and walk on as if you haven’t left anything behind. Faith’s advice had nothing to do with dead bodies floating to the surface of Senate hearings. Still it comes to me as I lean toward the microphone and spit out the answer Mia and I rehearsed. Always from private lines in private rooms. Always with an irrational our-phones-might-be-tapped unease.

  The senators all stare back at me. Thin layers of I’m-in-control-here cover each what-the-hell? expression. The question is a dreadful one on which to end this. But the chairman announced it as the final one. And it’ll be worse if I let this drag out. So I walk on. I launch into my prepared closing remarks without waiting for an invitation. I allow no possibility there might be anything more to ask or say. No doubt I’m violating every Senate protocol by wrapping things up here without being invited to first. One of the few benefits of being a woman: men are reluctant to call out your transgressions to your face.

  I hope to hell the Ms. Bradwells have a plan to get us out of here without the press.

  I slash whole paragraphs from my closing remarks as I say them. I need to stand and leave before a single senator interrupts. The chairman, a big supporter of my nomination, adjourns the hearing almost before I finish thanking him.

  I stand and walk out. Jonathan follows. If every camera in the room has every moment of my leaving on film, well, then they have it on film.

  I can’t run, obviously. And the press can. Jonathan and I are not out the door before I’m eating microphones. “Maryland” and “death” bounce around me like echoes in a deep pit.

  “Frankly, we’re appalled at the senator’s willingness to muckrake when there is no dirt whatsoever here,” Jonathan answers. Pretty bold of him. He wouldn’t have been ten years old when Faith hosted that party at Chawterley. 1982. He wouldn’t have been watching the news even if this particular death had been news. Which it wasn’t. Maybe an obituary ran in The Washington Post or maybe it didn’t. I don’t even know. It wasn’t the unexplained death the senator is suggesting it was. The police didn’t interview a single party guest about it. They talked to Doug because Doug found him. They talked to Faith and Mr. Conrad because they owned Chawterley. I don’t think they even talked to Ginger. If anyone thought it was anything other than an accident, they thought suicide. “More often than you think, it’s suicide rather than accident,” I overheard one officer say as we were loading our suitcases the next morning. “But that only makes the family blame themselves, and Faith Cook has always been an awful nice lady, she and her sister Grace both.” So the police just added our names to the hundred other names. They filed their accidental death report. They sent us on our way.

  Mia’s arm links in mine as we near the outside door. She whispers that Laney and Ginger ran for the car before the gavel banged.

  A tap at my other elbow. Jonathan. It’s my turn to speak.

  “The only death I can imagine the senator might be referring to was ruled an accident,” I say. Words I might have said to the Judiciary Committee if I hadn’t just blurted out the line Mia and I had rehearsed. But without that response at the ready who knows what I might have said?

  “As I told the senators,” I say now, “I don’t have anything to add.”

  Mia squeezes my arm again. The nondescript silver rental car Laney took me to breakfast in this morning pulls into the drive. Ginger holds a cellphone to her ear in the passenger seat.

  Mia’s hand at the small of my back pushes me forward. Ginger is opening the rear car door. The microphones chase us. Mia pushes me into the backseat. Climbs in beside me.

  “Like the cliché of every criminal and his lawyer fleeing the courthouse press,” Mia mutters under her breath.

  Isabelle is occupied taking a midterm this afternoon. At least there’s that. And Matka is gone.

  I hope the president isn’t watching this. I don’t know why it matters but it does.

  “Good lord, you guys need to get a life,” Mia calls out as she slams the door on the press. Laney is already driving off.

  We burst into laughter. As if this is some law school prank.

  “Get a life? Tell me I didn’t really just say that.” Mia’s wry smile so familiar that for a moment we’re Izzy’s age again. O
r even younger than my daughter. Mia and me sitting on our beds in our tiny room in N Section discussing the latest dirtbag of a guy Ginger had chosen to date.

  “That’s my life they’re living!” she adds. “They need to get a life?!”

  We laugh and laugh. It isn’t even funny, but what else are we going to do? Gallows humor. The way we always survived finals weeks. Laney is laughing so hard it’s a miracle she can still drive.

  She hurries through a yellow light, the locks clicking down as we reach some critical momentum.

  Mia wipes away laughter-tears.

  “I’m guessing you need to turn your cellphone back on, Betts,” she says. “I’m guessing you should call whoever you need to call before they call you.”

  Ginger says into her phone, “Max, I’m hoping the fact I have to leave a message means you’re already on your way.”

  In the rearview mirror, I watch a press van pull into the Hart Building drive. Another follows just behind it. A third opts for the curb at the street. The reporters and cameramen load in no more efficiently than Mia and I did, despite being unhampered by microphones thrust in their faces.

  I strap on my seat belt. “I guess the great break-the-bank orchestra seats for Les Miz are off the table,” I say. “So where the hell do we go?”

  Mia

  THE CHESAPEAKE BAY YACHT CLUB, OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  THE FISHY STINK of the Chesapeake is as overwhelming now as it was the first time Ginger and Laney and Betts and I made the trip to Cook Island, spring break of our third year in law school. Ginger had wanted us to go to Mexico, but a week in Cancún wouldn’t explain all that well to the financial aid office for Betts and me. Ginger’s father’s sixtieth birthday was that week, anyway, and Ginger’s mom—“Faith,” she’d asked us to call her—thought it would be “just grand” if Ginger brought us all along. So with “Sub Judice Bradwell at 4:05” as the plan, we’d muddled through Friday classes imagining the warm waters of the Caribbean—never mind Ginger’s insistence that the bay wasn’t exactly balmy in August, much less in the spring. After Ginger’s Corporate Tax class, with the trees the dead gray of late winter and clouds spitting something between mist and rain on the windshield of Mrs. Z’s rusty Ford, we’d set off at the mandated gas-saving fifty-five miles per hour (more or less) to conquer the five hundred miles from the Law Quad to this same yacht club.

  A boat to take us across to Cook Island waited for us then just as one does now. I hope Ginger is right that my fellow members of the press will have a harder time following us to Cook Island than they would to New York. She’s a poet; she has no idea how resourceful we journalists are.

  Betts has been on her cellphone nonstop since we closed the car door on the thrust microphones and rolling cameras, as if to make up for having spoken so little in the Hart Building lobby. Her restraint there showed how good her prep was; Betts is not one to stand down when there are things to be said. Now she’s assuring one White House aide after another that the death the senator was questioning was indeed ruled an accident. I pretend not to be listening, but of course I am.

  “A blog?” she says.

  Laney is intent on the road ahead and the press vans behind as Ginger directs her into the yacht club parking lot. “Max says to pull right up to the entrance,” Ginger says. “He’s got someone to take care of the car, and the press won’t be allowed in the door.” She and Laney either haven’t heard Betts or it doesn’t surprise them that this mess has broken in a blog.

  Betts is being so Betts here. Calm and even. I hear the edge of alarm in her voice only because I’ve heard it before, that fall of our third year when she realized she’d forgotten to turn in a take-home midterm. Just forgotten, which was so unlike her. She was so unlike herself that whole term that I’d begun to imagine she was in trouble, unwed girl trouble. But she’d handled that midterm like she’s handling this: she’d simply taken it to the professor and explained what happened, direct and honest and sure of herself. And he’d accepted it and given her an A.

  “I can’t imagine what the senator is thinking,” she is saying over the phone now. And then, “Yes. Yes, of course I’ll hold.”

  A few frantic minutes after we pull up to the door of the yacht club, we slip out the back of the building to a waiting boat, an elegantly simple one with a clean white deck and a hull some color between royal and navy, its masts bare, the boom wrapped in canvas the blue of the hull. It’s the boat’s name, though, written in the same blue on the white stern, that announces in no small way that this was Faith Cook Conrad’s boat: the Row v. Wade.

  As we board—Laney and Betts teetering in their pumps, leaving me glad of my practical flats—a faint whiff of Faith’s menthol cigarettes mingles with the salt air. I remember the waxy up-close scent of Faith’s “trademark red lipstick”—really more of a dark pumpkin, but some detail-challenged journalist called her lips red in the days of black and white newspaper photos, and his “trademark red” stuck. I imagine Faith still with us, in the cabin maybe, improbably hunched over a legal brief in a pleading clip, with pages rolled back over the top and the graphite of a chewed pencil spilled all over the page. Faith talking easily to the press we’re running from, her wide smile so like Ginger’s, or Ginger’s so like hers. I can almost hear her voice, gravelly and certain, Faith advising us … but what would she advise us to do now, stuck as we are between the truth and our own unwillingness to accept it all those years ago?

  And Faith has been dead for months now. The only person with us is Ginger’s friend Max.

  “All right. Thank you, Mr. President. Yes, I will. Thank you.” Betts closes her cellphone and looks up, surprised to find herself already on the boat.

  “Mr. President,” Ginger repeats. “As in, of the United States?”

  In Betts’s perky, small-mouthed smile, I find the girl she was when I first met her, all that irreverent humor and kindness and drive. “He said if anyone catches us skinny-dipping this weekend, I should deny, deny, deny.”

  “Lordy! Betts is joking with the president of the United States!” Laney says.

  I’m thinking it’s us Betts is joking with. I didn’t hear the term “skinny-dipping” cross her lips.

  “I promised him we’d all do our best not to get photographed in the buff,” Betts says.

  I say, “Ginge, the press will have a boat in thirty seconds,” trying to hurry her.

  “Won’t, actually,” her friend Max says. “The club members are more loyal than the press is persistent, and there’s no other boat for miles. Nor another way to get to Cook Island except by boat.”

  Ginger pushes the bracelet sleeves of her jacket up over her elbows and takes one of the two steering wheels at the back of the boat. Why two steering wheels? I remember my Holga and pull the camera out, framing Ginger’s broad hand on the white wheel as the engine hums to life, low and easy in the reddening afternoon light. And we are out on the Chesapeake again, with only the briny stretch of water and the inadequate stretch of years between us and Chawterley and the lighthouse, and everything that happened that spring break of our third year at Michigan Law.

  Laney

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Summer 2010: Ms. Helen (“Laney”) Robeson-Weils (JD ’82) has accepted the Democratic Party nomination for Georgia state senator from the forty-second district. For information on establishing residency in the area (which includes parts of suburban Atlanta) prior to November voting, please contact any of the Ms. Bradwells.

  THE FIRST THING we Ms. Bradwells ever did have in common was our nickname, “the Ms. Bradwells,” which came about in the very first hour of the very first day of law school, 8:00 a.m. Constitutional Law class. It was a Thursday in May of the year 1979. May rather than September, because we were Section Four “summer starters,” a fine way to go about starting law school; the long days can get as hot as old-time revival meetings, too pasty-hot to work at anything too hard. So everyone just settles for doing their own best rath
er than trying to slaughter everyone else.

  Have you ever seen the Michigan Law Quad? Think gothic stone cathedral but no altar, or a different kind of altar, something you can’t quite see. Its centerpiece is the Reading Room, the scene of all our gum-wrapper tossings. It’s an enormous room with a vaulted fifty-foot ceiling and tracery stained-glass windows, a place at its finest on the few evenings a year when a renegade brown bat careers back and forth up in that high expanse of wood beam and blue and gold tile, winging gracefully around the wrought-iron chandeliers. The unearthly quiet of the room explodes in a chorus of chatter that echoes from the hard stone walls, like the voices of monks lifted from their vows of silence by that unexpected creature of God. The good Lord knows there’s nothing to do then but open the doors and hope the poor thing finds its way out.

  It was Ginger’s particular good fortune, Ginger’s and mine both, to be nicknamed in that first hour of law school; we’d have walked out of that class with nicknames in any event. “Gunner G,” Ginger likely would have been, for the seat she chose, front and center before the professor resat us alphabetically, and for the way her hand shot right on up into the air, too, while the rest of us were still blinking at the fella in khaki shorts and Birkenstocks writing his name on the chalkboard rather than settling in with the rest of us. Professor Charles E. Jarrett. “Sundance,” we nicknamed him on account of his easy blond good looks.

  “Ladies first, then,” Professor Jarrett said in a Southern accent Betts would call “edible,” although it sounded just like folks from home to me. “The facts of Bradwell v. the State of Illinois, Miss”—he peeked down at his seating chart—“Virginia Cook?”