The Four Ms. Bradwells (15 page)

The house had been shut up all winter, but it was as welcoming as if Faith had just run out for some something, never you mind that she was still deep into the
Idaho v. Freeman
appeal to the Supreme Court back in Washington. Ginger liked to call Faith’s efforts to save the Equal Rights Amendment back then “hours and hours of time wasted on a case that is going to be moot before it’s decided.” But Faith always did believe the ends aren’t the only things that matter, that process is important, too. “Losing a fight is better than never coming into the ring,” she liked to say.

We weren’t more than two words into that Scrabble game before I spilled out, “So I had this thing happen to me last summer.” An inarticulate way to set into a conversation about sexual harassment, a label you didn’t hear back then, but I’d worried how to begin that conversation so many times over the intervening months—or whether I ought to begin it at all given the fella involved—that it was a mercy to have it out. I never am as articulate as I imagine, anyway, in Latin or otherwise.

“This fella I was working with at Tyler & McCoy,” I said, “he just pulled me to him and kissed me in the elevator one night as we were leaving.” Like a bad cliché.

“Shit,” Ginger said. “Not Frankie.”

“No! No, of course not. I swear on my grandmama’s grave.” I pulled my towel close around me, shivering again. “I didn’t even meet your brother, Ginge. He was working in Abu Dhabi or someplace like that.”

“Shit, Laney,” Ginger said. “A partner?”

I’d been one of only two women and the only black lawyer—or almost lawyer—summer-clerking at Tyler & McCoy. I was invited to all the outings: the boat trips and the shows and the weekend gatherings at swanky country clubs, but I was the only one ever mistaken for staff at those clubs, and if I wasn’t the only summer clerk never invited to grab a sandwich at lunchtime, it surely felt like I was. Then I was assigned to work on a project supervised by a senior associate who’d been written about in
Esquire
and in an early issue of
The American Lawyer
, the latter with a full-page photograph of him on his boat and a caption claiming he never did go out on the water without a client aboard. He expected to be accelerated to partnership that fall, he told me, never mind that no Tyler associate had ever been made partner early. And if he was arrogant about his prospects, he had the good grace to be right: he’d been an associate when he kissed me, but had made partner that fall.

He was also undaunted by my gender, my race, my accent. He liked my work, too, or liked working with me, or both. He gave me a whole lot of rein, and credit for every clever thing we did together. He told everyone who would listen that when I returned to the firm after taking the bar exam they would have to stand in line behind him to get my time. Comforting words in a firm that didn’t always invite its summer clerks back for permanent jobs. And I wanted that job. Tyler & McCoy was one of the most politically connected firms in the country. Its ranks included an ex-attorney general and three partners who’d been in various cabinets over the years. Working there would provide me all the how-do-you-dos I needed to enter politics at the national level, not by running for office but by appointment or invitation to work on a senator’s staff.

A loud backfire popped from the fireplace, startling us as Ginger laid the word “drift” on the Scrabble board. “Well, what the hell can you do in a situation like that?” she said.

Mia and Ginger nodded while Betts sat silently watching the flames pop red and yellow and a blue that was neon compared to the blue-green of the bay lapping against the pier outside.

“Thank goodness the elevator stopped at the next floor,” I said. “He introduced me to the receptionist who joined us, and then chatted with her.” Flirted with her, as if he hadn’t just had his lips pressed to mine.

“A receptionist saw you kissing?” Ginger asked.

“Lord, no, Ginge. The elevator dinged and …” And he’d stepped
away from me as if he kissed women on the elevator about every time he pressed the button for the ground floor. “No, of course not,” I insisted, wondering which ruffled me more: that he’d kissed me like he was entitled to, or that he didn’t seem to much care that he had.

“The fastest conduit for any rumor is a law firm receptionist,” Ginger said.

Betts asked, “Was he married?”

“
Lord
no! At least I don’t think …”
Was
he married? But I recalled a conversation earlier that night he’d kissed me, about folks he took out sailing: not
only
clients.

Maybe he’d thought I was flirting with him, that I was angling to go sailing. Was that why he thought he could kiss me on the elevator, in the middle of a conversation about where I should start my research the next day? I’d lain awake the whole long night worrying over what I would say to him the next morning, but in the end I’d said nothing and neither had he.

“I bet he’s sleeping with the receptionist,” Ginger said. “Half the guys at Tyler have slept with that receptionist, including Frankie. Do you think it was … I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to say it. Maybe he wanted to try a different flavor?”

“Ginger!”
Betts said.

“I know, I know,” Ginger said. “It’s just … even my brother, who isn’t a bad guy—”

“Laney is beautiful!” Betts said. “What guy wouldn’t want to kiss her? This doesn’t have to be about race.”

“But I think maybe it was,” I said, the words coming out more hushed than I meant. I shrugged, recalling his thin lips pressed against mine, his pale hand, his probing tongue. “I don’t know why. I just think maybe it was.”

I laid three tiles on the board, spelling the word “hour,” not many points. “Your turn, Mi.”

“It’s inexcusable whether it was about race or not,” Ginger insisted. “He kissed her on the
elevator
. At the
office.
”

“Men and women who work together are going to fall in love sometimes,” Betts said.

“So you recommend this as a dating strategy?” Ginger shot back. “We should all corner attractive subordinates on elevators and kiss them before they can object?”

This was long before Anita Hill, and even when she came forward to challenge Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court nine years later, we watched the way one watches a wreck occurring close enough to touch when there is not a single thing you can do but step back. “That woman is committing career suicide,” I recollect Betts saying. We played by the old rules; if you didn’t, you’d sure enough be shown the door. No one would ever admit you were let go because you’d ruffled feathers, but the truth was if a prominent partner liked to kiss young associates in the elevator, your job as the young associate was to avoid any elevator he might be on.

“He never did bother me after that,” I said.

“See,” Betts said. “He was a perfect gentleman after that. He was great to work for. He made a pass at her. She rebuffed it. He respected that. I don’t know how you can fault either of them.”

We talked late into the night about problems we’d encountered at work the prior summer. Ginger was asked if she could take dictation. Betts was asked to fetch coffee despite the suit she was always careful to wear, and one partner liked to take her to lunch at his men’s club, where they had to ride the back “pink” elevator up to the “pink” dining room in which “ladies” were allowed. But Mia suffered the worst indignities. She was asked if she’d been a cheerleader, if she wore pantyhose or garters, if women liked to sleep in the nude. She and Andy shared an apartment that summer, and although she’d been careful to be discreet about it, not even admitting her living arrangements to her parents, word had gotten around. She wasn’t offered a permanent job at the end of the summer, although Andy was: the difference between being a stud and being a slut. This was 1981, when the firms we were joining had no women partners and few women associates. The class that graduated before us marked the first year large firms hired women in substantial numbers, and the medium and small firms had yet to follow suit.

The judiciary, where Betts herself was headed, was perhaps the worst of the old-boy networks. Carter let a few women climb up onto the federal bench, but Reagan went right back to the tradition of senators recommending their golf buddies for judge. The “old boy” Betts would be clerking for on the D.C. Circuit after graduation was one of those Carter girls, though: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They’d spent Betts’s interview discussing Judge Ginsburg’s notion that laws banning abortion are gender discrimination rather than violations of privacy.

To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t go on and tell Ginger it was her cousin Trey who kissed me on that elevator. Trey, whom I’d met thanks to Faith.

I’d had dinner with Faith at the Conrad home outside Washington regularly that summer; it was my home away from home. One night, she was showing me a miniature science text with beautiful flowers decorating the diagrams and text—“As if the scientific truth isn’t beautiful enough,” she said. The book, by Johannes Kepler, had put us into a discussion about the path astronomers wove to avoid the wrath of religion: Galileo forced by the Roman Catholic Church to recant his belief that the earth orbited the sun, Giordano Bruno, another believer in Copernican theory, burned at the stake. “The work of putting powerful men in the position of being seen to be mistaken is often dangerous work,” Faith said.

Profane
, I recall thinking.
From the Latin
profānus,
outside of the temple
. And I found myself confessing I’d blundered into telling a partner he was mistaken earlier that week. With no audience, I’d been able to back off and suggest
I
was the one who was mistaken, only to hear him touting my idea as his own in a meeting the next day.

Faith lit a menthol cigarette and exhaled, then asked if I’d met her sister Grace’s son, Trey Humphrey. “You should introduce yourself. Tell him you’re Ginger’s roommate. Trey has always been fond of Ginger, like siblings without the competition, or without much of it. He’s spent summers on Cook Island with us ever since his father wrapped his car around a tree when Trey was ten. Just tragic, as you can imagine. Grace could barely take care of herself, much less Trey.

“I should warn you that Trey doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” she said, “but you’re a smart girl, you’ll love working with him.”

I was like a calf staring at a new gate when I walked into my office the next morning to see a fella sitting in my desk chair, reading a brief I’d been working on. “You’re Helen,” he said, his gaze so intent that I wanted to deny I was. “My Aunt Faith tells me I ought to meet you. She says you took my cousin Ginger’s spot on the
Law Review.
” He stood and shook my hand, grinning suddenly, his face opening into boyishly oversized front teeth. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I hadn’t made law review, that I was only ALR, “almost law review.”

“You can’t be nervous about meeting me,” he said, wiggling his fingers as if to warm them; my own hands were cold cold cold. “We’re practically
family, and really, despite all the rumors you’ve no doubt heard, I don’t often bite.

“Sit,” he said, moving to the visitor chair. “Sit. I’ve been raised a gentleman, so until you sit I have to stand here waiting for you to do so.”

A New York City gentleman. Where does a father wrap a car around a tree in New York City?

I sat, pushing away the rumors I had indeed heard, about secretaries who didn’t type fast enough and copy machine operators who wouldn’t stay until three in the morning now looking for new jobs. He settled his lean legs into the guest chair and extracted a pack of Marlboros from his pocket.

“Smoke?” he asked, extending the pack. When I declined, he asked if I minded if he did, and although I didn’t much look forward to working all day in an office that smelled like an ashtray, I didn’t have the nerve to say so.

He grilled me on what I was working on, which wasn’t much. “Shit,” he said, his expression so like Ginger’s that I might have laughed if I hadn’t had fresh in my mind that conversation with Faith about offending powerful men.

“Okay, so I can’t get you unstaffed from that. It would ruffle feathers, and I’m up for partner this fall, or that’s the speculation anyway. But I’ve got this project …”

And not much later, the work coordinator poked his head in my office to say Trey Humphrey had heard that I was a superstar and wanted to work with me. “I’ll tell you honestly we don’t often let Trey close to summer clerks,” he said. “He has a reputation for being … demanding.”

From the Latin meaning
responsible for more than one summer clerk not getting invited back to the firm
.

I
DON’T KNOW
what time we finally did fall asleep that first night on Cook Island, but we woke with a start to Ginger exclaiming, “Oh, shit! I left the book on the boat!” She bounded from the couch, her towel dropping away and her fanny jiggling as she bolted out into the bright daylight and sprinted down the path. At the pier’s end, she leapt onto the boat like it might take off without her, and disappeared below deck. A chill set in to the Sun Room, but none of us rose to close the door before she burst back into the house with what looked to be a sandwich-sized
baggie in her hand, the kind Betts had used for her Ms. Drug-Lord-Bradwell Halloween costume herb-drugs. It contained something the size of a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards.

“A prayer book?” I guessed. “Except that thing is even smaller than any prayer book I’ve ever seen. And considerably more colorful.”

“The Holy Church of the Blessed Virgin Flamingo?” Betts suggested.

“It’s a
peacock
on the cover,” Mia said.

“Oh! That’s much more likely: the Holy Church of the Blessed Virgin Peacock!”

“A
male
peacock,” Ginger said, still catching her breath. “Female peacocks are an undistinguished brown.”

“Female pea
hens
,” Mia said.

“A male can’t be a blessed virgin?” Betts asked Ginger. “That sounds sexist to me,
Ms
. Decisis-Bradwell.”