The Four Ms. Bradwells

ALSO BY MEG WAITE CLAYTON

The Language of Light
The Wednesday Sisters

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 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.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Graywolf Press for permission to reprint “Let Evening Come” from
Collected Poems
by Jane Kenyon, copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
www.graywolfpress.org
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clayton, Meg Waite.
The four Ms. Bradwells: a novel / Meg Waite Clayton.
p.     cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52435-5
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 3. United States. Supreme Court.—Officials and employees—Selection and appointment—Fiction. 4. Judges—Selection and appointment—United States—Fiction. 5. Secrets—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: 4 Ms. Bradwells.
PS3603.L45F68 2011
813′.6—dc22 2010033479

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Georgia Feldman
Jacket photograph: Burazin/Getty Images

v3.1

For the Hot Tub Gang, the Women of Division Street,
and all my Michigan Law School friends,
Section Four and otherwise

and, as always,
for Mac, Chris, Nick, Dad, and
(for this story about motherhood)
my amazing mom

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
—Mahatma Gandhi

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I

1.
Mia

2. Betts

3.
Mia

4. Laney

5.
Mia

6.
Mia

7. GINGER

8. Laney

9.
Mia

10. Betts

11. GINGER

Part II

12. GINGER

13. Laney

14.
Mia

15. Betts

16. Laney

17. GINGER

18. Betts

19. Betts

20. Laney

21. Betts

22.
Mia

23. GINGER

24. Laney

25.
Mia

26. Betts

27.
Mia

28. Betts

29. Laney

30. Laney

31. GINGER

32.
Mia

33. Betts

34. Betts

35.
Mia

36.
Mia

37.
Mia

38. Betts

39.
Mia

40. Betts

41. Laney

42.
Mia

43. Betts

44. GINGER

45. GINGER

46. Betts

Part III

47. Betts

48.
Mia

49. Betts

50. Betts

51.
Mia

52.
Mia

Acknowledgments

Questions and Topics for Discussion

About the Author

PART I

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.… The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.

—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, from his 1873 opinion in
Bradwell v. Illinois
, denying Mrs. Myra Bradwell the right to practice law

Mia

ROOM 216, THE HART BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

B
ETTS IS SITTING
alone at a table with two untouched water cups, the pen I gave her the day we graduated from law school, a clean legal pad, and a microphone. On the dais, one of nineteen senators talks his way toward a question he hasn’t arrived at quite yet. Cameras whir mercilessly as photographers on the floor between them vie for the better angle, capturing the small fatty deposit on Betts’s freckled face, her perky mouth and shattered-crystal eyes. The chair she sits in is poorly chosen; her square diver’s shoulders, in a suit the washed driftwood gray of her hair, fail to top its leather back. Still, she looks impressive as she leans toward the microphone, listening in the same intent way she has always listened to Ginger and Laney and me—the way we all need to be heard.

The senator’s voice booms, “You were born in an Eastern Bloc country, Professor Zhukovski, a communist child of communist parents,” as if this is something she might not have realized. The photographers edge closer on the journalistic racing pit of a floor, none pausing for fresh batteries or different lenses. Television cameras, too, peer down from booths in the side walls, relentlessly recording each intake of breath. “At least the TV cameras are shooting me from above,” Betts had joked over the phone a few nights ago. “The still photographers are shooting right at my crepey old neck.”

My own crepey old neck feels warm and moist as I stand at the back of the room, behind the computer-laden tables of reporters. Betts has already answered a week’s worth of questions, though, sticking to the script. She praised
Brown v. Board
and deplored
Dred Scott
and
Korematsu
, uttered “right to privacy” and
“stare decisis”
while avoiding “abortion,”
“gay rights,” and “guns.” She’s managed to appear to answer every question without actually stating a single view, all while demonstrating that she has great judgment without ever having been a judge. And the committee vote is scheduled for Tuesday, with the full Senate expected to confirm.

“How are we supposed to believe, Professor Zhukovski,” the senator asks finally, “that a communist child of communist parents is the best person in this whole free country to be the arbiter of our laws?”

Betts smiles warmly. “My mother, a doctor in Poland, scrubbed floors here …” she responds, her voice rolling gently against the senator’s snap. A softer sort of self-possession than she uses in her classroom is called for here, where the minds she is working to win over are still overwhelmingly older, and white, and male.

Scrubbed
toilets
, I’d suggested—words met with a long, expensive, overseas-line silence before Betts had responded, “You’ll be surprised when your mom dies, Mia, how much her dignity means to you.”

She’s taken my advice, though, I realize with a small measure of triumph: she’s gotten a friendly senator to ask about the Widow Zhukovski fleeing Poland with Baby Betts in a way that doesn’t seem friendly. And the gang back here in the press gallery is taking copious notes.

“My
mother
actually would have made an amazing justice,” Betts says. “A fact she would
not
have hesitated to tell you.”

The senators laugh easily, as does the audience, the stenographer, and even the press.

I
WAS ON
assignment when Betts called to ask me to come for this weekend; we’d practically had to shout to be heard over the rickety line. “So let me get this straight, Betts,” I’d teased her. “You want me to fly back from Madagascar?
Madagascar
, that’s off the coast of Africa, you know that, right? To hold your hand while you worry over a Senate confirmation there isn’t a shred of doubt you’ll get.”

“My crystal ball must be murkier than yours, Mia,” she said, her laugh as cozy as the room we’d shared in N Section of the Law Quad our first year, as comfortable as the couch on the porch of the house we’d shared with Laney and Ginger our second and third. I’d slipped my camera strap over my neck and set the Holga aside, laughing with her. Betts, the Funny One. Ginger, the Rebel. Laney, the Good Girl. And me, the Savant.

“Or else … Hmmm,” she said, “maybe
no one
is exactly a slam dunk for the Supreme Court?”

Laney had told her I’d be back home that week anyway. “They want to meet in D.C. for the hearings and then train up to New York for the weekend,” she said. “I told them they could come for the last afternoon. The part where my supporters make me sound like Superjudge.” And she laughed again. Betts is always the first to laugh at her little jokes.

“We’re thinking
Les Miz
Friday night,” she added.

“No doubt we’ll be seeing something about a bad mother on Saturday if we let Ginger choose.”

“Maybe not, now that Faith is gone.” Then, with a crack in her voice, “God, Mi, I wish Matka had lived to see this.”

“Matka,” Betts always called her mom, the only Polish word she was allowed outside the songs she sang in church, and in church she usually played her zhaleika. Here in front of the Judiciary Committee, though, she calls her “my mother.” I stick my hands in my pockets, feeling the cut of waistband, the little roll mushrooming over the top of my slacks as I head for three open seats in the back row. I settle into one of them, imagining Faith and Mrs. Z both cheering wildly together in whatever mom-heaven might exist.

B
ETTS IS FINISHING
speaking in her short, straightforward sentences—her “rehearsed immigrant-widow speech,” she would call this, although she’s avoiding hyphenating here—when the click of high heels sounds. A young woman edges through the crowded room to whisper to a senator we in the press call “Milwaukee’s Finest” for his professed love of his home state’s Blatz Beer over the Russian vodka he really drinks. I’m reminded, oddly, of the Wizard of Oz as he turns toward her, his gaze as dull-eyed as my editor’s—my
ex
-editor’s, now that he “let me go,” as if I’d just been waiting for his permission to lose my job.

My ex-editor. My ex-paper. My ex-husband and my ex-almost-fiancé. What a fool I am not to have made time to see Doug this weekend.