The Four Ms. Bradwells (2 page)

At the dais, Milwaukee covers the chairman’s microphone and whispers, the creased lines around his narrow eyes leaving me wondering if my own eyes are as lined as his are, as lined as Betts’s, too, above her pearls. Leaving me wishing my budget allowed for Ginger’s expensive facials and creams—a smell trigger, I realize, as Ginger throws her arm
around me, not a hug so much as a coach’s arm drape. The soft fabric of her quilted winter white wool jacket tickles against my skin.

I turn back her collar to read the label: Kamila.

“I love the buttons,” I say.

Her slight overbite disappears into a double-wide grin. “Found-ebony wood chips,” she says. Fair trade. Eco-conscious. Fruit of the gods. “You can borrow it this weekend.” Evoking memories of the four of us sharing medium-sized Fair Isle sweaters, raiding each other’s closets before parties and dates.

Laney slides her long legs gracefully into the empty seat beside Ginger, whispering, “Mi,” and reaching across her to grasp my hand.

I pull us all into a three-way hug. “If you two had been much later,” I say, “you’d have missed the whole show.”

The guy in front of us shoots me a look.

“God, it’s so good to see you both!” I say more quietly, trying to tuck my rush of joy at being with them again into a smaller voice.

Ginger presses a folded scrap of paper into my hand—a faded old Juicy Fruit gum wrapper. I extract my reading glasses, a bamboo frame that cost next to nothing in China, and examine the tight loops of blue ink on the backside, Ginger’s angular, almost illegible scrawl. Laney takes the gum wrapper and reads without the need of glasses as I remember the four of us studying together in the Law School Reading Room, the hush unbroken but for the occasional
thwick
of a page turned in frustration, the scrape of a metal chair, the hushed
swoosh
of the revolving doors, and, if you listened closely enough, the
tick
of a small folded gum-wrapper note hitting the table in front of Laney or Betts or Ginger or me, like a spitball hitting home. Gum-wrapper humor-fortunes like this one, which reads:

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, September 2018: Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) has been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the first woman and the first foreign-born justice to be appointed to the country’s most important legal post. The line to kiss up to her forms outside N-32
.

“She’s already missed first woman justice,” Ginger whispers. “By decades.”

The chairman announces a five-minute recess, and the photographers
reach for new batteries and memory chips while, behind us, reporters tweet quick recaps.

“You’re forgetting the ‘Chief’ business, Ginge.” Laney’s Southern accent soft and warm and proud. “Betts could still be the first lady
Chief
. She’s got years before that silly gum-wrapper 2018.”

I swallow against a scratch in my own throat, envy too stingy to voice. I’ve always been as jealous of Betts as Ginger is. Not of her smarts so much as her discipline, her courage to imagine she might actually get what she wants.

“
Female
Chief,” Ginger says. “Let’s not be expecting proper, ladylike behavior from Betts when we don’t require the male justices to be gentlemen.”

“A real-life Justice Bradwell,” I manage finally. “Not made of stone.”

Laney’s dark fingers smooth the folds in the wrapper. Fifty-some-year-old fingers, fifty-some-year-old hands, but her short nails unbitten now, there is that. Her teeth aren’t as white as they once were and she has a few smile lines at her eyes and mouth, but the only place she shows her age in a real way is in her hands, bony and unevenly colored, lighter splotches against her African American skin where I have darker spots on my own Irish pale. I suppose she’s imagining, as I am, what a real
Law Quadrangle
magazine alumni update might look like after the full Senate vote:

Elsbieta (“Betts”) Zhukovski (JD ’82) has been appointed to the United States Supreme Court, following in the steps of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for whom Ms. Zhukovski clerked on the D.C. Circuit.

One of us would write the note for her. We’ve written every one of each other’s alumni notes ever since Isabelle was born and Zack died in the same few short weeks and Betts, who’d somehow managed through it all, broke down over the writing of this irrelevant announcement. “How do I do this?” she wanted us to tell her. “How do I announce in fifty words or less that my daughter is born and my husband is dead?” The bones of her wrists as fragile as Zack’s had been, as if she’d gone through chemotherapy with him: an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, dead at twenty-nine. It had been, surprisingly, Ginger who had put her arm around Betts’s shoulder and said so soothingly she might have been reading a favorite poem, “Let me, Betts. Let me do this for
you, this one small thing.” It’s something we’ve done for each other ever since, too: set out the words to announce each other’s joys and sorrows to the world.

Or joys, really. Only joys, not sorrows. Betts would never have thought to submit a class note about Zack’s death if it hadn’t so closely coincided with Izzy’s birth. We don’t ever announce bad news in the alumni magazine. Ginger didn’t submit anything the fall she was passed over for partner, any more than I did when I divorced. And I sure don’t plan to submit a class note announcing I’ve been fired. If I find a new job—
when
I find one—Laney or Betts or Ginger will compose a note that makes it appear I’ve moved up in the world, even if I haven’t. That’s the way of alumni notes.

“Betts is wearing your mama’s black pearls,” Laney realizes in a whisper—“your mama” being Ginger’s mom and the pearls not really black so much as unmatched shades of gray tinted silver-green and blue and eggplant, with a looped white-gold clasp now resting at the base of Betts’s throat. They’re the good-luck pearls I wore to the Crease Ball our first year at Michigan, and Laney’s “something borrowed” on her wedding day. “ ‘Next to my own skin, her pearls,’ ” Ginger says in what Betts calls her “look-how-well-I-quote-poetry voice.”

I don’t remember ever seeing the pearls on Betts, but they look better on her than on any of us; it’s the hair color, I think, the echo of gentle gray.

She’s too thin again. She could stand to participate in one of those paczki-eating contests from her childhood—those celebrations of the Polish jelly doughnut Betts swears is not a doughnut. It’s the stress, of course: the months of interviews and background checks, and the worry she’d lose the nomination to someone with judicial experience—not that she regrets having stayed in Ann Arbor for her daughter’s sake. Then the weeks of holing up in a windowless room at the White House, crafting answers to every question the staffers could imagine, then practicing them again and again and again. And now the daily hearings, the cameras and questions, the news clips, a short few words taken out of context, replayed at 5:00 and 6:00 and 10:00, and then again on the morning shows. Betts’s confirmation may very well be as secure as I think it is, but that doesn’t make good press.

“We should make Betts color that hair this weekend,” Ginger says as she smoothes the cowlick at my right temple into submission.
Let me do
this for you, this one small thing
. “That gorgeous auburn it was before Zack died.”

“I’m liking the gray,” Laney says, and I agree. Betts’s refusal to color it is an odd form of penance, as if colorless hair could make up for not having loved Zack enough to keep him alive. Ginger needs to let her be.

“So you both like the gray on Betts, but not on yourselves?” Ginger says.

“Betts beats us all the way to heaven at being smarter,” Laney says. “Surely she’d allow us prettier, Ginge.”

I reach across Ginger to touch Laney’s hair, which, after twenty-five years of being chemically straightened and shoulder-length, has been allowed to reclaim its natural spring. It frames the curves of her jaw in loose rings of dark curls her face has clearly wanted all along. “I love this,” I say, meaning the hair, I think.

“Betts isn’t smarter,” Ginger says. “Just more disciplined.”

Laney and I lean our heads on Ginger’s quilted winter white shoulders.

“You’re right. You’re right,” Ginger says. “Smarter, too. I can admit that now: Betts is smarter than me.”

Laney and I each pat one soft, black-wooled knee of our dear, not always so humble friend as Milwaukee’s Finest requests and receives permission to ask one last question.

“But not you two. I get to be second smartest,” Ginger says, fingering an ebony button. “Damn, Betts is really going to do this, isn’t she?”

“Mrs. Zhukovski,” Milwaukee says.

Ginger, Laney, and I all whisper,
“Ms.”
in unison and smile at each other as if the shared thought is a shiny penny found heads up.

“Professor,”
I whisper.

The cameras, as quiet as they are these days, snap off each moment as though any single shot might capture the whole of what’s happening here, rather than distorting it. The TV cameras roll on, delivering every blemish in detail so the folks at home can wonder why Betts doesn’t have that little fatty deposit removed. The thought crosses my mind that Justice Sotomayor might never have been confirmed if her “wise Latina woman” comment had been caught on film. Visuals are so powerful, even when they’re untrue—or only a piece of the truth that, taken alone, is a lie.

I sit up straighter, leaning forward, wanting suddenly to warn Betts to
be careful here: Milwaukee is sporting an expression like the one she’d dubbed “Professor Pooley’s you’re-about-to-be-called-on stare,” but without the humorous underlay. My hands go icy, my neck and my feet, too, my spine. Like the shock of that first plunge into the Chesapeake all those years ago.

“Mrs. Zhukovski,” Milwaukee repeats, “I’d like to ask you what you know about a death that occurred in the spring of 1982, at a home in Maryland where I believe you were a guest?”

“Oh, shit,”
Ginger says—mercifully not before the silent blink of the crowd absorbing the question gives way to a collective murmur, the photographers surging forward as even the senators exhale their surprise.

I take Ginger’s hand and squeeze it. She looks startled, but if she was going to say more, she doesn’t. She links hands with Laney, and we watch as Betts, oddly, unlatches the clasp at her throat and lets the pearl necklace slide into her hand. Every moment of the gesture is caught in a shutter snap: a single manicured nail flipping the catch; her competent fingers opening the necklace; the gray globes of pearls following the white-gold loop into her palm. She fingers the dark blue-gray end pearl, worrying it between thumb and forefinger as if saying a Hail Mary over rosary beads.

The adviser sitting behind her looks like he’s praying for divine intervention, as does Senator Friendly up on the dais, but Betts looks unfazed. She doesn’t even seem to realize she’s removed the pearls. For a moment, I think she is going to stand to answer the senator’s question, the way we were required to stand to answer in law school. I think removing the pearls must have something to do with this.

She doesn’t stand, though. She remains in her chair. She leans forward from the seat back that is higher than her shoulders, moving closer to the microphone. She smiles the way she smiles when you stumble upon her doing yoga on her screen porch in the morning: a little embarrassed, but somehow more for you than for her. And in the same soft, self-possessed voice she and I rehearsed again and again over the telephone—a voice even I almost believe—she says, “Senator, I don’t believe I have anything to add to the public record on that.”

Betts

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

“I
DON’T BELIEVE
I have anything to add to the public record on that,” I say, thinking,
You just close the damned door and walk on as if you haven’t left anything behind
. Faith’s advice had nothing to do with dead bodies floating to the surface of Senate hearings. Still it comes to me as I lean toward the microphone and spit out the answer Mia and I rehearsed. Always from private lines in private rooms. Always with an irrational our-phones-might-be-tapped unease.

The senators all stare back at me. Thin layers of I’m-in-control-here cover each what-the-hell? expression. The question is a dreadful one on which to end this. But the chairman announced it as the final one. And it’ll be worse if I let this drag out. So I walk on. I launch into my prepared closing remarks without waiting for an invitation. I allow no possibility there might be anything more to ask or say. No doubt I’m violating every Senate protocol by wrapping things up here without being invited to first. One of the few benefits of being a woman: men are reluctant to call out your transgressions to your face.

I hope to hell the Ms. Bradwells have a plan to get us out of here without the press.

I slash whole paragraphs from my closing remarks as I say them. I need to stand and leave before a single senator interrupts. The chairman, a big supporter of my nomination, adjourns the hearing almost before I finish thanking him.