The Four Ms. Bradwells (6 page)

Ginger sank completely underwater, her long hair drifting toward me before she reemerged with it slicked back from her pale forehead.

“So what’s your future, everyone?” she asked.

And when that evening was over, I still had no idea that Betts was a virgin, that Ginger had indeed once woken next to a guy whose name she didn’t know, that she’d dropped out of college a week later to move to
South Africa with him. But I did know more about the Ms. Bradwells than I would have imagined learning in just those few hours.

Laney meant to return to Atlanta after law school, maybe after a few years in D.C. with a politically connected firm, she said, to which Ginger said she ought to run for the Senate someday.

“Not president?” Betts offered, palming a spray of water in Ginger’s direction. “If Margaret bloody Thatcher can do it, can’t we?”

I admitted no real idea what I was doing in law school. My childhood dreams had included becoming a guitarist, movie star, news reporter, and Catholic priest. My mom had convinced me to take the LSAT, though, and I’d done well—a perfect 800, I found myself admitting in response to their inquisition.

“Mia, the Savant,” Ginger said, reaching for the wine bottle at the edge of the hot tub and refilling my glass.

She, unlike me, had her whole future laid out and
she
wasn’t afraid to admit it. She meant to join a Wall Street firm, make partner on an accelerated basis, have a weekend place in the Hamptons where she would race sailboats, and marry someone with a fortune to match the one she meant to make herself.

“The Prince of Wales is still available,” Betts suggested. “The Crown Princess Ginger? Ginger of Wales? Haven’t you always wanted to be ‘of’ somewhere, really? And you wouldn’t have to worry about recognizing him when you woke up. Then you could be beheaded or burned at the stake when you got caught waking up next to one of those guys whose name you didn’t know!”

“A
handsome
millionaire,” Ginger insisted. “I don’t care if he’s royalty, although I’m not opposed. And a flat in Paris—I forgot the flat in Paris.”

“I, on the other hand, just want my head on a coin,” Betts declared.

We talked for a minute about the Susan B. Anthony coin just out, the first U. S. tender ever to sport a woman’s face. Progress, I said, to which Ginger scoffed, “A dead woman’s head on a coin is progress?”

“It
is
a dollar,” Laney said.

A dollar that would be forever mistaken for a quarter—what does that say?

“Progressio advenit sensim,”
Laney said. “Progress comes slowly.”

Ginger thrust her hands toward Laney, index fingers crossed at right angles as she juggled her wineglass.
“In manus tuas, Domine!”

“Into your hands, Lord?” Laney said.

“From
Dracula
,” Ginger said. “You know—when they’re about to finish off poor Vlad?
In manus tuas, Domine!
It’s the phrase the professor uses to ward off evil spirits, evil like Latin spoken outside the classroom. We’ll have none of that in this hot tub.”

Betts made a finger cross too, then, her Speedo swimsuit puckering over her flat chest, and I followed, both of us mangling the Latin verbal shield, saying something that sounded, between us, like “In manners, too, dominate.”

“In manus tuas, Domine,”
Ginger repeated more slowly, as if she knew at least as much Latin as Laney did.

“In manners, too, dominate!” Betts and I insisted, laughing as much from the abundance of wine as anything.

“So your turn, Betts,” Ginger said. “What’s your dream?”

“My head on a coin isn’t ambition enough?” Betts floated onto her back in the water, looking up into the fuzzy dark sky. “I have humble ambitions, really,” she said. “I’d just like to be called ‘Judge Zoo’!”

The truth was that Betts dreamed of being on the Supreme Court even back then. Thirty years, that’s what she figured it would take to get there. No woman had ever been admitted to the Court at the time, and part of her hoped to God it wouldn’t be another thirty years until one was appointed, but another part of her—maybe the bigger part—hoped the opportunity to be the first would wait for her. That much truth, though, would roll out gradually, the way most of the truths about the Ms. Bradwells have.

“You should get a D.C. Circuit Court clerkship if you can, it’s the most influential appellate court,” Ginger said—a clerkship being a one- or two-year position working for a judge, not for the shabby paycheck but for the experience and prestige. “My mother has connections, that might help.”

“And then a Supreme Court clerkship,” Laney suggested, and Ginger said, “Right.”

No one said anything like, “Gosh, you need to graduate at the top of your class and be some kind of freaky genius to get a Supreme Court clerkship.” No one pointed out that Nixon and Ford together had appointed exactly two women to the federal courts in their combined twelve years in office, two out of almost three hundred appointments. No one said that Caruthers, Smythe & Morgan, the law firm Ginger meant to join, had no women partners—much less that it would still have none
the year our class would come up for partnership. And none of us uttered a word suggesting that Laney should plan on being a widow or facing a short term in office if she wanted to be a senator, even though half the fourteen women who’d sat in the U. S. Senate by then had filled their late husbands’ seats and none of the others had served longer than nine months.

That was one of the things we Ms. Bradwells had in common pretty much from the start: we might laugh at ourselves or at our own chances, but even when we didn’t know each other very well yet—when we might have mistaken light tones for lack of seriousness—we never did laugh at each other’s dreams.

Mia

ON THE
ROW V. WADE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

G
INGER HOISTS THE
sail on her mom’s boat, calling out to me, “Hold that helm tight and straight for a minute, Mi!”

“Lordy, how
did
we get back to the Law Quad, as drunk as we were?” Laney asks, and I can almost hear her voice saying “Lordy, Lordy” in that hot tub all those years ago, after confessing to claiming an A at the grade wall when she’d actually missed it by two points that would cost her law review. I’d confessed to the opposite: pretending the grade beside my student number wasn’t an A when it was so that Andy wouldn’t think I’d done better than he had. And Ginger, much later that night, after the drugs had come out, had confessed that the man in the portrait in the Cook Room, the man who donated all that money to build the Law Quad, was her great-great-uncle—in response to which Betts had demanded, “Why in the world is that any kind of confession?” Ginger had said she didn’t know, but it was.

Ginger takes the helm back from me, the sail billowing gracefully in the afternoon breeze, the boom swinging out to accommodate the power of a wind we can’t otherwise see as I remember Betts waking to the coffee I’d made her the morning after the hot tub party, the two cups I’d carried across the Quad and up the stairs to Ginger and Laney’s room. Despite my efforts, we were all late for class.

“Makes you worry about what our daughters might be doing right this minute,” Betts says.

“I can’t imagine Annie is anything like I was,” Ginger replies with a hint of melancholy that suggests sadness, or relief, or both.

“Gemmy doesn’t
want
to be like me,” Laney says. “She’d like to be not-me. She’d like to be reborn a Baby Terrorist-Bradwell.”

I shoot a frame of her dark eyes looking directly at me as I imagine that: me taking Laney’s place in her annual holiday photo-cards—Laney and her picture-perfect family with their picture-perfect needlepointed Christmas stockings hanging from the mantel behind them. William, Laney, Willy J, Manny, Gem, and Little Joe. I send holiday photo-cards too these days: Mia with birds swarming overhead outside the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, where I was researching a piece on honor killings; Mia at a school in Angola, with too-thin children and something that passes for a chalkboard; Mia in Kenya, helping plant indigenous trees. But I don’t have a Christmas stocking or a fireplace, much less a family.

“I loved the expression on that
Washington Post
fella’s face at the yacht club when your friend Max said he was calling the police, Ginge,” Laney says. “It was even funnier than when he told them there wasn’t a boat within fifty miles that would take them anywhere.”

I shoot another frame, Betts’s face in the upper right corner so her gray hair will bleed off into the vignetting.

“We’re not exactly in for a quiet weekend on the island,” I say. “The press is going to catch up with us.”

“You say that like you’re not one of them, Mia!”

Betts means it in good fun, but I’m left wondering if she really thinks I’m like the journalists who had conniptions when Max in his pale-kneed jeans informed them the yacht club was members-only, and pulled his phone from his pocket lest they think he’d hesitate to call the police. The headlines tomorrow will be wicked, but the papers will be reduced to running a photo of our backs entering the club, or perhaps a long-lens shot of the boat disappearing into the bay. And I suppose Ginger is right that it will take them some time to find us, since Cook Island is only a small dot of unnamed land on navigational maps, and nonexistent on your average visitor map of the Chesapeake.

“How does this mess surface in a
blog
?” Betts says.

She looks at me, I’m sure she does. My roommate, and then my housemate, who knows me better than anyone in the world.

“Half of D.C. was there for Mr. Conrad’s party, Betts,” I say. “A hundred guests. Someone shows up with …” With their guts blown out.
“Someone turns up dead like that, anyone at that party might have doubts.”

Or anyone on the whole island. Any of the “slutty island girls.”

I turn the camera to Ginger, remembering her words:
Tessie McKee? She was just a slutty little island girl everyone seems to think popped Beau’s cherry
. Remembering how fiercely loyal Ginger was to her brother Beau, and he to her. How fiercely loyal they still are, I’m sure. I focus on the soft white of Ginger’s jacket, her ebony buttons. The contrast unsettles me. I raise the camera higher, to her pale gray-blue eyes, her wide mouth, which is not smiling, not even trying to hide the bare sorrow as she looks ahead, guiding her dead mother’s boat toward her dead mother’s home.

As I press the shutter release, I imagine the Cook Island house as empty today as it was thirty years ago. That emptiness had been rich with possibility, though, a whole week of fun stretching out before us. Now, even in the warm afternoon light, the emptiness looms dark and murky, as bottomless as the Chesapeake.

Ginger presses a knee against the wheel to hold the boat straight, then pulls a barrette from her trouser pocket—found-ebony to match the suit buttons—and battens down her hair. The long loop from law school is gone, her hair now barely long enough to catch in the clip. She cut it all off after Betts’s husband, Zack, died, and she donated it to an outfit that made wigs for children going through chemo, although she never told me that. She only said she needed a change. Laney was the one who told me Ginger gave up all that beautiful hair for some kid who was as bald as Betts’s Zack was when he died. I don’t think Betts knows that to this day.

“You okay, Ginge?” I ask.

A few strands escape around her face, whipping against her cheeks as she realizes I’m addressing her. “I was just imagining who you Ms. Bradwells would be if you were poets,” she says brightly, with the smile that isn’t a smile, that is only the same screen she has always thrown up to mask sorrow or disappointment or wounded pride. “You, Mia, would be Elizabeth Bishop: the way she never settles, she’s always going somewhere. And something about her reaction to the moose: ‘Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?’ ” She doesn’t look at me as she speaks, as she repeats the phrase “this sweet sensation of joy.” Nor does she turn to Betts when she says, “Betts, you’d be William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow, simple and pure and fun.” When she does look at Laney, her pale eyes are as tired as they ever were in law
school. “I was thinking of you, Lane, as Marianne Moore. ‘The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.’ ”

Laney considers this in silence or restraint or both. “What about you, Ginge?” she asks.

Ginger’s eyes do actually brighten—although not enough to match her voice—as she decides that she would be Emily Dickinson. “ ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’ ”

“Slanted beyond recognition sometimes, as I recall, and maybe not quite
all
the truth!” Betts laughs then and we all laugh with her, a gentle sound that barely registers over the motor, the waves, the wind in our ears.

“And your mom, Ginge?” Laney asks gently. “Which poet would she have been?”

It’s hard to imagine any poet capturing the spirit of Faith Cook Conrad. It’s hard to imagine her as anyone but herself. When I think of Ginger’s mom, I think of that poster from the mid-1980s, the women who showed up at art museums naked but for gorilla masks, to draw attention to the dearth of work by women artists included in museum collections. I think of the newspaper photos of Faith arriving at the steps of the U. S. District Court for Idaho dressed as Susan B. Anthony on life support during the appeal for
Idaho v. Freeman
, where despite her efforts the Court upheld state rescissions of earlier Equal Rights Amendment ratifications, killing any chance the ERA would become law before the deadline for ratification passed. I think of her arriving at a men’s steam room with a tape measure, singing “Is That All There Is?”—which in reality was Gloria Allred trying to end the Friars Club’s all-men policy, but it’s the kind of thing Ginger’s mom crowed about even if she didn’t do it herself. Humor, she always said, was a much more effective way to get press coverage for something you cared about than was rage.