The Four Ms. Bradwells (17 page)

“Bright moon,” Trey said. “And I
did
bring the spotlight.”

He extended his hand to Laney, saying, “Helen,” his voice as deep and strong as his eyes.

Laney shook his hand.

“I was hoping Ginger would bring you along,” Trey said, sounding like so many of the jerks I’d worked for the prior summer. But that was just the edge of New York in it, I decided as he said, “Very nice to see you again.”

“Mr. Humphrey,” Laney said.

“Trey.”

Laney looked down to where the red Oriental rug fringed into the wood floor. “Trey.”

“And she’s Laney,” Ginger insisted, bristling at Trey’s overruling her introduction by calling Laney Helen even though that
is
her name.

“Helen did some work for me this summer,” Trey explained to the rest of his quartet. “We’re lucky to have her returning to Tyler and McCoy after she takes the bar, Frankie.” Then to Betts and me, “I’m Ginger’s cousin.”

He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, shook one forward, and offered the pack toward Laney. She waved her hand slightly, declining, and he offered it to Betts, then to me. I had half a mind to take the offered cigarette even though I hated merely the smell of cigarette smoke. He seemed to expect it.

Ginger, to my amazement, did take one. Trey pulled out a monogrammed silver Zippo and flicked the wheel. She took a half step back as if needing more space, but leaned forward to dip the end of her cigarette into the yellow-white flame.

“So there were some ladies skinny-dipping off the pier as we approached,” Trey said. He snapped the lighter shut and returned it to his blue jeans pocket, the look in his eyes easier now without, somehow, being any less intense. He took a drag on his cigarette while reaching with his free hand to touch a strand of Ginger’s damp hair, just where the pattern around the neck of her Fair Isle sweater brushed her breast.

“ ‘Ladies?’ Were there really?” Ginger’s words emerged in soft puffs of smoke as her hair fell from Trey’s fingers. She turned to Doug. “Maybe you called Tessie McKee to let her know you were coming, Dougie?”

Frankie and Trey laughed the way guy friends laugh at each other. Betts and Laney and I shared an uncomfortable glance; none of us had
grown up as the lone girl in a pack of brothers and boy cousins, as Ginger had.

“Tessie?” Doug said. “I seem to remember Tessie being
Beau’s
particular favorite, Ginge. And I sure don’t remember her ever having such attractive friends.”

“You saw so much, obviously,” Ginger said.

“It takes a certain amount of persuasion to get an island girl skinny-dipping this early in the year,” Doug said. “Doesn’t it, Beau?”

“Not that any of us would know anything about that,” Beau said, trying, I thought, to spare us all embarrassment, but I was left with no doubt that they all did, in fact, know exactly how much persuasion an island girl might need to shed her suit.

Trey was a bastion of manners after that, though, directing Frank to be a good host and fetch four more glasses, pouring scotch for each of us, straight up, all the while asking solicitous questions about what we were doing after graduation, applauding how well we must be doing in law school to land the positions we had.

“Belt and Bayliss? That’s a great San Francisco firm,” he said to me. “Were you law review?” Then to Ginger, “All three of your friends here on law review, Skunky, but not you?”

Ginger looked to Laney, who said, “Just Mia and Betts.”

“Oh?” Trey was quick to mask his surprise. “Well, you and my cousin here are the smart ones, then, aren’t you, Helen? Law review is an unreasonable amount of work for anyone who doesn’t get their jollies out of telling prominent professors their commas are in the wrong places. Isn’t it, Betts?”

Betts, startled, looked to Trey, then stole a hopeful glance back at Beau, whom she’d been staring at as fantasy-romance moonily as she and I both used to stare at Professor Jarrett. “Sure. Right. Commas.”

“So we’re going gut-running, Ginger,” Doug said. “You and your friends in?”

Ginger pulled the curtain back from one of the windows: darkness. The clock on the mantel showed almost one a.m. “All of us in one skiff?”

“Just as far as the McKees’ dock,” Doug said. “We can borrow Max’s skiff.”

“I thought Max was at Columbia,” Ginger said. “In architecture school.”

“So he won’t be needing his boat, now, will he?” Frank said.

Ginger considered this for a moment. “It’s high tide?” she asked.

The guys all laughed, and Doug said, “What? Are you afraid of getting a little mud on the bottom of your boat?” and they all laughed again.

Frank’s idea was that all eight of us would pile into the skiff and go together to “borrow” a second one, which we could return before anyone knew it was gone.

“I personally don’t mean to be found at the bottom of Fog’s Ghost Gut in a boat that sank in the middle of the night because eight foolish souls overloaded it,” Trey said. “Dougie, you and the brothers amuse Ginger’s friends here. Play Go Fish. Ginger and I will nab Maxie’s boat. That way if we’re caught we can claim to be out spooning, right Ginge?”

“I gave up spooning for Lent,” Ginger said.

We laughed at that, at the idea of Ginger letting go of the armor of her sexuality for a day, much less a full six weeks. Everyone but her brother Beau laughed. Beau stuck his hands in the pockets of his down vest and studied his Top-Siders, toeing his right shoe against the oriental carpet.

“I’ll go with you, Trey,” he volunteered. “Ginger will want to stay here with her pals.”

I imagined him kicking a friend’s face in if he took advantage of his little sister. I imagined how many faces he might actually have kicked in over the years. But Trey had already thrown an easy arm around Ginger’s shoulder. He was laughing and saying, “No spooning then. If we’re caught, we’re reclaiming the boat in the name of Jesus Christ our Lenten Lord.” And then Ginger was calling back over her shoulder, directing Beau to gag Doug if he started to sing again before she returned, and she and Trey disappeared down the hallway and out the door, two fresh cigarettes glowing red toward the pier.

Betts

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Summer 2005:
Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) has just returned to the law school after a six-month sabbatical carrying state secrets to the governments of Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries, including Poland, where she was born.

“B
EAU, YOU AND
I better take the two law review ladies,” Trey suggested after he and Ginger finally returned with the second skiff. “They’ll have had too much boredom already this year to be made to put up with Frank and Dougie on their spring break.” We were out on the pier by then. All eight of us. Ginger not even protesting being called a “lady.” And Trey’s hand on the center of my back. A gentleman dancer escorting his partner onto the starlit-bay-water floor.

“Hey, Skunky!” he called out to Ginger. She was already climbing into the other boat. “You protect Laney there, you hear me? Don’t you let Dougie start singing to her.”

My spirits lifted as our laughter rang out into the insect thrum of the starry night. Trey was guiding me into his boat. He’d chosen me over Ginger and Laney. Who were, let’s be honest, the passengers I would have chosen if I were a guy.

Before that summer in New York and the trip to London maybe I would have thought these guys were too old for us. Too old to bring home to Matka. They were grown-ups with jobs and responsibilities. Or all of them but Beau were. Beau was twenty-six. Laney’s age. Three years older than Ginger. And there were no closer friends than Laney and Ginger.

Trey had just made partner in the same D.C. firm Laney planned to join that summer, but even he wasn’t yet thirty. He’d already managed to work into the conversation that he’d graduated from Harvard at nineteen
and from Harvard Law at twenty-two. He’d been accelerated to become the youngest partner ever at Tyler & McCoy.

But we Ms. Bradwells were only weeks away from jobs and responsibilities ourselves. And one thing I’d learned that summer I’d worked in New York was that no one ever really feels like a grown-up.

It was such an odd time for me, law school was. I no longer fit in back home in Hamtramck, if I ever had. I knew how to pray over the paczki and I could stand in the line stretching from the New Palace Bakery before sunrise as long as anyone. But I didn’t dare tell my unemployed friends that my summer job at Caruthers, Smythe & Morgan paid more each week than my mother’s monthly take-home at the industrial cleaning job she worked. They already imagined me enjoying some cushy student life that didn’t exist. No one saw the long hours I spent bleary-eyed over casebooks. The pressure I felt to validate Matka’s leaving my missing father behind in Poland for my sake, if my father was even still alive. And no one in law school was anything like me, either. They’d never had to decide between going to the doctor and paying the electric bill. Even the Ms. Bradwells were nothing like me, although I did feel I belonged with them. That long late-night drive east from Ann Arbor to the Chesapeake. Stopping only for gas and potato chips and cans of Tab. As I listened to Mia babble on about Andy being unenthusiastic in bed, I thought I might even tell them about Ben. The only person I’d ever tried to tell about Ben, though, was Matka. And she’d refused to hear.

November first. I remember the day exactly because we’d all dressed as the appropriate Ms. Bradwells for a Halloween party the night before. Laney Cicero-Bradwell in a toga. Ginger in judicial robes. Mia in military garb. Me in a very attractive hooded sweatshirt, the pockets stuffed with “nickel bags” of herbs. I’d washed off the makeup I’d used to make myself drug-addict-looking, but there were still dark circles under my eyes when I arrived in Hamtramck.

“I’m just here for the day, Matka,” I insisted. “For Mass and supper afterward.” I hadn’t told her I was coming. Afraid I’d lose my nerve.

Matka and I walked to Holy Cross and sat through a Mass said in Polish. We made potato and cheese pierogi in the tiny kitchen of the tiny apartment that had been home my whole remembered life. We talked about how not-well the neighbors were doing with ten percent of Michigan unemployed. We talked about my classes. The articles we’d chosen
for the
Review
. Interview season. Applications for clerkships. And Laney and Mia and Ginge.

“Ginger, she is going home to Washington, Betsy?” Matka asked. She was always surprisingly fond of Ginger.

“New York,” I said. “Caruthers, Smythe and Morgan. The firm we worked at this summer. She’s going back there.”

“New York.” Matka shook her head, her thinning hair sprayed into utter stillness.

“Matka …” I said. I didn’t know how to start, so I said “Matka” again.

She set her fork down on her plate. I remember how sad it looked. The cheap stainless. The chipped stoneware. Things I’d never noticed until that summer I’d dined at every Long Island country club to which any partner at Caruthers, Smythe & Morgan belonged. Always on spotless tablecloths with silver and carved crystal and food presented as art.

“I have a friend,” I said. “I was wondering … She thinks she … You were a doctor in Poland, right?”

She touched worn fingers to worn cheeks. She picked up her cheap fork. Set it back on her plate. “This is Ginger,” she said.

It would have broken her heart if I’d come to her saying I was pregnant. That the father was a partner I’d worked with that summer. That late one night when Ben and I were working on a case together he’d kissed me. That I’d kissed him back. That we’d gone to Los Angeles together on business. That he’d introduced me to Paul Newman at a party after a long day defending the deposition of a studio head client of his. That I’d had my own hotel room but after the party I went back to Ben’s Jacuzzi suite. We slept together the next week, too. In Houston. Again on business. And at the end of the summer he flew me to London for a long weekend of theater and expensive dinners. Strolls along the Thames. This time with only a carefully orchestrated
story
of the business we might claim should we be seen together by someone who knew one of us.

I didn’t know anyone in London, of course. Ben was the one who knew people everywhere. Who knew the little boutiques on Bond Street in Mayfair. Who spent thousands of dollars on clothes and jewelry for me. He liked to dress me and I was surprised to find I liked to be dressed. Not lingerie so much as suits, dresses, bags, and shoes. One silky-soft tweed cost over a thousand pounds. A month’s wages for Matka. I told
her I bought it on sale at Macy’s. I didn’t tell her Ben had insisted I have it because its mix of pale blue and gray and green matched my eyes.

“No, not Ginger,” I told her.

She wet her lips. Studied me over the cracked wood of our kitchen table for such a long time that I knew she must know. She must understand. I took a bite of potato pancake. Made myself swallow it so as to have an excuse to avoid her. Wondered in the silence if maybe Ginger knew about Ben and me. She’d worked in the same firm all summer. We’d lived together. Did she never suspect? But she was wrapped up in her own life. Busy stringing Ted along. She was almost never home to find out that I wasn’t either. And I had my history of innocence working for me, too. Ginger probably couldn’t imagine me having a flirtation, much less whatever it was Ben and I had. And Ben and I were discreet.