The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “She was an amazing person, your mom was,” I say.

  Ginger unlinks our arms. Her wide lips press together. “That’s a total crock of shit,” she says. She’s going for light and funny. It was one of Faith’s favorite phrases, “a total crock.” But “shit” is Ginger’s own addition. Her voice betrays the hurt she’s trying to hide. It makes me think of that miniature book with the peacock cover she stole.

  “Ginge,” I say gently. I want to do the your-mother-loved-you-really-she-did thing. But Ginger would see my needing to say it as doubt. Doubt and, worse, pity. Ginger can stand anything but pity.

  “It would have been worse if we’d gone to Mother about it,” she insists. “I know you don’t think so, but it would have been.”

  I should tell her the truth: that I did go to her mother. But I don’t know how to begin that conversation.

  “Laney wouldn’t have been able to bear the public humiliation,” she insists, taking my silence as disagreement. “You know that. You fucking knew it at the time.”

  You fucking knew it, or thought you did. That’s the sudden anger I almost spit out. You fucking knew it and wouldn’t listen to anyone else. And here we are now. Here I am now. About to be the one bearing the public humiliation. Having to withdraw my name from consideration for the Court under a cloud that will hang over me the rest of my life. Doomed to have the mention of my name in the press forever followed by “whose nomination for the Supreme Court was withdrawn when questions arose about a death on Cook Island in 1982.” And I will never be appointed to any bench, much less the Supreme Court.

  You fucking never listen, I almost say. You never listen, and look where it’s gotten you. Passed over for partner. Let out to pasture. Doing nothing at all with your life.

  The bitterness in Ginger’s voice stops me, though. Not just because she might be right about Laney. Not just because she might be right about what I thought. But because of the certainty revealed in her tone: she believes her mother went to her grave thinking Trey was the golden boy. The child Ginger herself could never be. And I never told her differently. I let this misunderstanding separate them when I might have brought Ginger closer to her mom. And now it’s too late.

  Mia

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Winter 2002: Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) is delighted to report that her goddaughter Isabelle Johnson took second place in the high school division of the national chess championships held in Memphis this winter. Ms. Johnson’s mother, Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) can claim no role in her daughter’s accomplishment, as, despite her Eastern European heritage and years of Ms. Porter’s tutoring, she can’t grasp the concept that “the horsey-guy” can jump over even a king.

  I REMEMBER WAKING in the Chawterley Sun Room to Faith’s voice booming, “Well, good afternoon, everyone!” and the sight of the crab-eating, gut-running, sunrise-watching gang—or most of us—startling awake on the rattan couches and the floor. She stood looking from the back foyer into the Sun Room with a man I recognized from photos as Ginger’s father. He had the same fair skin and broad hands, and the same hint of almost-arrogance in the angle of his not insubstantial nose. In Ginger, the hint was in her eyes more than her nose, though, and was just a cover for the many shortcomings she meant to hide from the world.

  The fact of her parents’ arrival registered in those almost-arrogant, sleep-faded eyes of Ginger’s as Trey and Frank came in, each holding one handle of a cooler. While we’d slept—maybe dreaming of seeing the syzygy we’d missed or maybe not—her brother and cousin had taken the boat across the bay to fetch her parents. Ginger was the one her parents hadn’t seen in months, the one you’d think they’d be most anxious to see, but they’d asked Frank and Trey rather than her to come for them.

  She snapped up to a sitting position, then stood and smoothed her rumpled clothes. “Daddy! Happy birthday!” She hurried to her father and gave him a big hug.

  If her mother felt excluded from the greeting, she didn’t show it, she only raised her eyebrows slightly at a woman who stepped into the foyer behind her, as if to say See, I told you they’d be slugs. “There are things to be brought in from the boat, gang, if you all don’t mind waking now that it’s”—Faith eyed her watch—“two in the afternoon?”

  “Aunt Margaret!” Ginger exclaimed. “Brody. I didn’t know you two were coming today.”

  While I was trying to interpret her tone—surprise, clearly, but was she pleased or not?—she turned to Laney and Betts and me. “This is Mother’s friend from her law school days, Margaret Traurig. Aunt Margaret, this is Betts. I told you about her, remember?”

  Betts stood and shook her hand, and Ginger introduced Laney and me. Following Betts’s lead, I shook Margaret’s hand, conscious of my un-brushed teeth, my unwashed face.

  Ginger moved to the side of the woman’s husband, saying, “This is Brody, who can drop a duck from about three million yards away with his eyes closed.”

  Brody wrapped an arm around her shoulders and mussed her hair as if she were a little girl.

  “You’re the shooter here, sweetheart,” he insisted. Then to us, “First time I shared a blind with this little girl, she took down a duck from an incoming flock over one pond and turned and shot one just leaving another hole while I was still pumping my gun.”

  “Anyone can do that from the Triangle,” Ginger said.

  “Well, only you and Trey here ever have, far as I know,” Brody said.

  Trey, wide awake and windblown from the trip across the bay, said, “The duck stops here,” provoking chuckles from Mr. Conrad and Brody, and groans from Ginger and Frank.

  “You’re coming out with us Saturday morning?” Brody asked Ginger. Then to Beau, as if an afterthought, “You too, son?”

  Beau glanced at me, and I raised my eyebrows, noticing Betts watching us, trying to appear not to be—the expression on her freckled face saying Pick, for God’s sake, Mia. Beau or Andy. I’ll take your leftovers, and wear them well.

  I felt guilty, I did, I felt selfish. I could see Betts liked Beau, and I had Andy. But I didn’t want to pick.

  Trey touched Laney’s arm lightly. “You’re all welcome to tag along. It’s an amazing way to experience dawn.”

  Laney frowned in my direction: how far did she have to go to make nice with a partner in her firm? I shook my head ever so slightly; Laney would lose her breakfast the moment anything was shot in front of her, and that would be a story Frank, and probably Trey, too, would get a kick out of telling to anyone who’d listen.

  “Not so many pairs of waders to fit them, I’m afraid,” Frank said. “And Ginger never has been much for sharing her hunting gear.”

  “It was my gun,” Ginger said, her tone truly light this time; this was a conversation that had played out before, all in good fun. “I share fine, but I can’t hunt without my gun.”

  Laney pulled at the shirt I was wearing. “Ginger’s shirt.” Then at the shirt she was wearing herself. “Ginger’s shirt. We vouch. She shares.”

  “We vouch,” I agreed.

  “My gun, Frankie,” Ginger repeated, “which I clean while you dump yours in the closet and forget about it until the next time we hunt. So I’m supposed to give you mine because we’re out shooting and yours is so gunked up it barely fires?”

  She sounded so reasonable that I wondered what little fact she was leaving out. Ginger tends to sound most reasonable when she is least entitled to lay claim to the word.

  Trey leaned close to her and whispered theatrically, “You had shot your limit an hour earlier, Ginger. You shot your limit in about eight seconds that day.”

  Ah. There it was: her gun that she no longer needed but still didn’t want to share.

  Ginger rubbed her ear, grinning that way she did whenever she stepped up to the grade wall and saw an A beside her number. She never blinked when she didn’t get an A, but we could always tell by the absence of her wide, unabashed grin.

  “And that’s a bad thing?” she sa
id. “That’s a reason for me to hand my gun over so Frankie can fail to take care of it like he fails to take care of his own gun? I didn’t see you handing yours over that morning, Trey.”

  “Of course, I hadn’t shot my limit yet. I still needed my gun.”

  Again, the grin: she’d just gotten Trey to admit she was a better shot than he was, which was so much sweeter than having to say it herself.

  “After you shot your limit, though,” she said.

  Trey said, “Frank was still up on me for the season.”

  Frank said, “But I wasn’t up on you, Ginge. You were still way ahead of me. Besides, you were … what? Maybe fifteen?”

  Trey extracted his Marlboros from his pocket and lit one. “Thirteen.”

  When Frankie balked, Trey insisted, “She was only thirteen, and she still outbagged you, boy.”

  “Enough!” Faith interrupted with more exasperation than I would have imagined, although that might have had as much to do with too much work left behind in D.C. and too much party preparation ahead of her at Chawterley as it did with her children needing more attention than she could give. “Enough.” She found a cigarette, and Trey lit it for her, the menthol of hers mingling with the grittier smell of his. “It’s your father’s birthday weekend. We have a hundred people coming. Let’s all make nice in the sandbox for just these four days, shall we? Now, out to the boat, everyone.”

  That was Thursday about 2:00 in the afternoon, as Faith didn’t let us forget all the rest of that day, or on into the evening. Despite our explanation that we’d stayed up all night to watch the syzygy, despite the hunting guns and suitcases and many bottles of birthday champagne we schlepped from boat to house without complaint, her disapproval hung thick in the Chawterley air. I felt the keen shot of her disappointment not so much through any coldness to us, but through her warmth toward Frank and Trey, who’d taken the boat across to fetch them while the rest of us slept. I think that was when I began to understand a little better Ginger’s relationship with her mom.

  Betts

  THE WATCH ROOM, COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  GINGER GLANCES UP at a sound from above us, Laney out on the lantern deck. “Shit, she went up by herself?” she says. Without waiting for an answer, she charges the last flight of lighthouse stairs. Two at a time. Despite her bare feet. I feel a little bubble in my heart as I watch her go. Which is maybe affection. Or maybe jealousy. Or maybe both. All the Ms. Bradwells are close. But there are no closer friends in this world than Laney and Ginge. We are a foursome composed of two pairs. If I have a best friend it’s Mia. How can I think she would have written that blog?

  Anyone at Mr. Conrad’s party might have written it. Someone turns up dead like that, anyone at that party might have doubts. Mia is right about that. Anyone on the island, even. But she was so quick with that answer.

  Not that I really imagine Mia is jealous enough of me to say those particular unsaid things in an anonymous blog. But why didn’t she tell me she’d lost her job? Or if she didn’t want to bother me during the hearings, then Ginger or Laney. Ginger, because Laney has enough to worry about with her campaign.

  Upstairs, the door creaks. Ginger going to Laney.

  A speck appears on the horizon. It remains after I blink. A fishing boat. A yacht out for a morning cruise. I push back the irrational hope that it’s Izzy and Anne; if anyone is headed to this island this morning it’s the press. I push back the thought of Trey found dead in this room. The memory of Zack in his hospital bed.

  Zack, when he knew he was dying, asked me to play two songs on my zhaleika at his funeral service. He had always loved to hear me play. He said Laney could accompany me on the piano for the first song just like we had in the law school talent show; she and I always played together when we visited. But Zack wanted me to play the second song by myself. He never said why. He just asked me to promise I would play it alone.

  “You aren’t going to die,” I’d said.

  “I know,” he said. “But promise me, just in case.”

  When the moment for me to play at the funeral came I sat in the pew holding on to Izzy. Unable to move. Laney was at the piano and the silence in the church was interminable. Mia asked in a low whisper if I wanted her to tell Laney to play alone. But Matka was already standing. She took Isabelle from my arms and placed her in Mia’s hands. Mia, who I know will take care of Izzy if ever she needs taking care of and I’m not there. Mia was the only one other than Matka to whom I could have entrusted my daughter in that moment.

  She put my instrument in my hands and she extracted her own zhaleika from the bag she’d carried mine in. She took my hand and walked with me to the seat set up by the piano where I was to play. “Our music will rise up to Zack,” she whispered as she guided me. “He will know you and Isabelle will be okay, and he can be at peace.”

  The three of us played Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “None of Us Are Free,” Zack’s personal anthem. He’d gone to Yale Law School meaning to change the world. Izzy started cooing as we finished the song, the way she always did whenever Zack tickled her. As if his spirit was with us in the church.

  I looked to Matka, sure I couldn’t possibly play the second song alone. She blew the first notes of “Let It Be,” and I raised my zhaleika to my mouth and joined her. Only as I was blowing the last note did I realize that I was playing alone. That I had been doing so for most of the song.

  The whole church was almost sacredly silent after I lowered my zhaleika. Even Izzy no longer making a sound. Stifled sniffles from around the room. The quiet drip as my own tears splashed onto my instrument.

  Izzy exploded into such an enraged wail then that she captured how everyone in that church felt about Zack’s dying so young. Oddly, the whole church erupted in laughter. To this day I can’t explain why. But even I had laughed.

  I measure that funeral now against the way Ginger and her brothers buried Faith: after Frank and his family returned from their uninterrupted European vacation. In a ceremony that excluded even their closest friends. I can’t now imagine how I ever thought I’d trade Matka in for Faith. Or even for Ginger’s whole extended family.

  I thought I wanted Izzy to have a big family like that. But if I did, why have I never reached out to anyone else after Zack? I didn’t even have the excuse Matka did. The possibility my husband might still be alive somewhere.

  Perhaps we’re better off having only each other. Like Matka and me. Perhaps an abundance of family inevitably leaves one taking them for granted the same way we take for granted so many things we have more than enough of. More than we need.

  THE DOT ON the horizon is taking shape. A large power boat. The kind I’d look for if I were a reporter trying to cross the Chesapeake to Cook Island. We’ve reached no conclusions about what we should do or what we should make public. What we should admit and what we should continue to deny. But the fact that we aren’t ready for the cameras and reporters isn’t going to slow their descent on us.

  How powerful are their lenses? Can they see us here if they know where to look? Would withdrawing my name from consideration for the Court take us out of this spotlight? Or would it just fuel the flames?

  The unsubstantiated whiff of scandal already in the air will sink my appointment. I’m suspect to start with. An immigrant woman who, as smart as I might be, has no judicial experience. I suppose it shouldn’t matter: Is having my particular mind deciding the law more important than remaining a professor and having it shape thousands of young minds to do so in the future? It’s hard to say which would have the bigger impact. And yet I want this appointment to the bench. I think I would be a good justice. Perhaps it’s bragging to think so, but I’m good at considering all sides of a thing. I’m fair. I think I can imagine lives different from my own. I think I have a good sense of what isn’t right. And what is.

  This you must remember, Elsbieta.

  Having an immigrant on the Court will make a difference, too, the way the justices ser
ving with Thurgood Marshall said he made a difference just by being there. Not the daughter of an immigrant like Justice Sotomayor. Someone who was actually brought to this country from another world. A physical representation of what closing our borders costs us. A symbol of what denying immigrant children a public school education might mean.

  Having more women on the Court is important, too: women who understand what it means to be denied equal wages because of gender. Who know how difficult it is to do one’s best in a work environment where our breasts are more closely examined than our work. (Okay, maybe not my particular breasts.) And Faith taught me well what rights women used be denied, and where we are now, and what we still need to insist upon. She taught me how to compromise, too. And how and when not to. But there is more to it than that. The truth is I want this for myself. I want to reach this goal I set even before I was a Ms. Bradwell. When only Matka believed I could reach goals like this. I want it for Isabelle. So her future will hold more possibility. I want it for Matka. For all the sacrifices she made for me. For her certainty that choosing to do the right thing was always the better path.

  I could have told her I was pregnant in law school. She wouldn’t have been ashamed of me. She would have felt only love. She was a mother. The worst that could happen to her no longer had anything to do with what might happen to her and everything to do with what might happen to me, her daughter. There was nothing she wouldn’t endure for me. Just as there is nothing I wouldn’t endure for Izzy. Nothing Ginger wouldn’t endure for Annie. Or Laney for Gem. Or Mia for any of the girls. It’s a mother’s lot. I suppose it must have been Faith’s lot, too.

  So what do we do now? Can we possibly ask Laney to tell the world about her rape? How could that do anything but undermine Gemmy’s sense of safety? How can a daughter feel safe if the mother who is supposed to keep her from harm can’t even protect herself? Is that the lesson she would be teaching? That the world is as dangerous a place for our daughters as it was for us? What could possibly be gained by telling that truth?