The Four Ms. Bradwells (30 page)

This you must remember, Elsbieta
.

Having an immigrant on the Court will make a difference, too, the way the justices serving with Thurgood Marshall said he made a difference just by being there. Not the daughter of an immigrant like Justice Sotomayor. Someone who was actually brought to this country from another world. A physical representation of what closing our borders costs
us. A symbol of what denying immigrant children a public school education might mean.

Having more women on the Court is important, too: women who understand what it means to be denied equal wages because of gender. Who know how difficult it is to do one’s best in a work environment where our breasts are more closely examined than our work. (Okay, maybe not
my
particular breasts.) And Faith taught me well what rights women used be denied, and where we are now, and what we still need to insist upon. She taught me how to compromise, too. And how and when not to. But there is more to it than that. The truth is I want this for myself. I want to reach this goal I set even before I was a Ms. Bradwell. When only Matka believed I could reach goals like this. I want it for Isabelle. So her future will hold more possibility. I want it for Matka. For all the sacrifices she made for me. For her certainty that choosing to do the right thing was always the better path.

I
could
have told her I was pregnant in law school. She wouldn’t have been ashamed of me. She would have felt only love. She was a mother. The worst that could happen to her no longer had anything to do with what might happen to
her
and everything to do with what might happen to
me
, her daughter. There was nothing she wouldn’t endure for me. Just as there is nothing I wouldn’t endure for Izzy. Nothing Ginger wouldn’t endure for Annie. Or Laney for Gem. Or Mia for any of the girls. It’s a mother’s lot. I suppose it must have been Faith’s lot, too.

So what do we do now? Can we possibly ask Laney to tell the world about her rape? How could that do anything but undermine Gemmy’s sense of safety? How can a daughter feel safe if the mother who is supposed to keep her from harm can’t even protect herself? Is that the lesson she would be teaching? That the world is as dangerous a place for our daughters as it was for us? What could possibly be gained by telling that truth?

And yet how can I ask for a place on the Court without laying the truth of what happened at Cook Island out in the open?
This you must remember, Elsbieta: to be leader you must lead, even when it will harm you. To be leader, you must always do what is right
.

Laney

L
AW
Q
UADRANGLE
N
OTES
, Summer 1987:
Helen (“Laney”) Weils (JD ’82) married William Robeson on July 3 in Atlanta, Georgia. The bride will keep her name and, after considerable negotiation, the groom will, too.

A
FTER TWO WILD
nights of gut-running and stargazing and falling asleep after dawn, we went to bed with the chickens the night Faith and Mr. Conrad arrived at Chawterley. We set the alarm for 5:15 a.m., an hour before the sun would show itself, not to please Faith but to have one more opportunity to see Mercury rise. We didn’t precisely leap from bed when it went off, but we did dress and make our way to the lighthouse by the light of a not quite full moon.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via
. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.

This time, I insisted on having the last turn at the telescope, and we all did see Mercury there at the horizon, or we all said we did. It was as close as we were going to get to seeing all the planets on the same night.

We spent the rest of Friday helping unload the boats each time Trey and Ginger or Frank and Beau returned with guests, carrying luggage and pouring iced tea and lemonade and, later in the afternoon, cocktails. We ought to have been beat by the time dinner was served Friday evening, a buffet catered by the Pointway Inn so guests could eat whenever they arrived. But we were so young then, and the house so chock-full of the older Conrads’ friends that we jumped at Mr. Conrad’s suggestion that we “kids” go for a swim. We put on our bikinis and Frank dug sweatshirts from the dresser in the Captain’s Office—his bedroom he’d turned over to guests for the weekend—not wanting us to freeze our fannies off
again
, he said.

We weren’t in the icy water a quick minute before Ginger shed her suit. We’d been sipping cocktails all evening, and Ginger always did get
wild when she drank. Beau mentioned that Mia and Betts and I might be uncomfortable skinny-dipping with a bunch of fellas we’d hardly been introduced to, but Ginger insisted we “were cool,” and Trey was already adding his suit to Ginger’s on the pier, telling Beau not to be a “sissy-assed prude.” Even Mia was untying her top in the moonlight.

The sun was long set and the moon not yet risen, at least there was that. I tried to shrug off my discomfort as we splashed each other, as we raced to the buoy and back, working up a little warmth, our own laughter mixing with that spilling from the house. Breathless from the race, we tilted our heads back to see the stars, and we talked about people all over the world seeing the same sky, and what might be up there, and whether there was life anywhere else in the universe. I was starting to shiver in a serious way when I had the sense someone was missing. Had Mia and Beau swum off somewhere? But then Beau directed us all to observe the moon rising big and bright at the horizon, the light soft on the gentle waves.

“Does the moon rise as quickly as the sun sets?” Mia asked.
Two minutes and eight seconds. Don’t blink
.

When no one answered, I knew Trey was the one missing.

I climbed Fool’s Hill in a hurry searching for my suit again. I tried to stay low in the water, but I couldn’t sort through the pile on the pier without my breasts peeking up into the moonlight. Only Mia’s face was turned toward me, though, so I pulled myself partway out of the water, pressed myself against the waterlogged wood, and dug. I had half a mind to put on whichever bottom I came to first, if only mine might’ve fit anyone else. But I had to stand twice in the same place to cast a good shadow back in those days.

Everyone was getting out then, Ginger saying, “Shit, it’s cold.” That’s when I saw Trey still in the water, floating alone on the far side of the pier.

I
N THE WARMTH
of the fire at the Lightkeeper’s Cottage, we all had a good laugh over my bikini bottoms being inside out under my borrowed sweatshirt. By the time I’d rectified that particular situation in the lightkeeper’s primitive bathroom, the others were sitting around a Risk game map of the world with a newly opened bottle of scotch and glasses all around.

“You sit here, Lane,” Ginger said, patting the floor between her and Doug. “You’re purple.”

“A world domination color,” Frank joked, and he handed me a glass of scotch I didn’t much want.

“You have to change more quickly if you want a say in what color you are,” Ginger said.

Trey lit a cigarette, grabbed a cheap tin ashtray from a table, and said, “Purple. The pope’s color.”

“Laney the Good Girl,” Mia said.

“She’s not Roman Catholic any more than you are,” Betts said with an edge in her voice that was all about how close Mia sat to Beau.

“I’m sorry to say, you also pick last, Lane,” Ginger said. “I rolled the die for you, fair and square.”

Everyone else had set colored blocks of wood on the board: armies, Doug explained when it was clear I had no idea how to play this game. At his suggestion, I set my first block on Brazil, and settled in.

I was playing well enough with Doug’s help—never you mind all Ginger’s protests that he was guiding me to attack everyone but him—when Trey picked up the bottle and started refilling glasses. I alone needed no refill.

“Sadly, gentlemen, our scotch does not meet with Miss Weils’s standards,” he said.

I protested and took a polite sip.

“Like this, Lane.” Ginger drained her refilled glass and held it out to Trey again.

“Cheers,” Beau said, and lifted his glass and did the same, perhaps with a sideways glance at Mia. Which was probably why Betts, without hesitating, drained her glass. And Mia never will be outdone by Betts. I was left the last Ms. Bradwell standing, too self-conscious not to drain my glass.

Ginger cleared Trey out of Australia on the next turn, gaining additional armies by possessing that whole continent.

“You unfriendly slut,” Trey said, joking, yes, and Ginger laughed and held her glass out for more scotch, but still the word left me uneasy. Trey dutifully refilled her glass, then went around the group, playing host. When he got to my still full glass, he tapped the edge of the bottle against its side. I hoped I didn’t look as stupid as I felt. Why was I like that, feeling as dumb as dirty dishwater just because I didn’t like to get drunk? I wasn’t much used to folks noticing, was the thing.

I lifted my glass and I said,
“Meus calix inebriat me!”
and took a substantial slug of scotch.

Ginger had a no-Latin finger cross up faster than any half-drunk Risk player ought to have managed, and Betts and Mia followed suit.

“An inside joke,” I told the fellas.

“Clearly our cups are making us
all
drunk,” Trey said. “Not just you.”

And somehow that comment left me feeling all right. Maybe it was the fact that he’d understood the Latin, or that he was still sober enough to translate, or that he wasn’t embarrassed that he could. If Ginger hadn’t been between us, I might have leaned a head on his shoulder affectionately, as she sometimes did. I might have done it before it occurred to me I shouldn’t, that it might not be appropriate to be that comfortable with someone I would work with, someone who’d told everyone at the office who would listen how brilliant he thought I was. Who’d taken the liberty of kissing me, yes, but only that once.

Beau was the first to lose all his armies, followed quickly by Mia; if they were throwing the game so they could go off alone together, they had the good sense to lose their countries to Ginger. As Mia tossed her last army back into its little box, Beau asked her if she’d like to take another peek at the sky. Mia hopped up and brushed off the seat of her bikini, and off they headed to the lighthouse. Betts, across the board from me, rolled her eyes.

Ginger established a second line of attack on the Risk board, in North America, but that was later, after Trey had been eliminated and I’d been reduced to a few insupportable armies. Doug eliminated me altogether by attacking my South American holdings through Africa. “To establish a bulkhead against Ginger’s North American flank,” he explained with no hint of real regret. “The battle for world domination is serious stuff.”

Trey stubbed a half-smoked cigarette out in the now-full tin ashtray and said this gang could be playing for some time yet, and would I like to join Mia and Beau?

T
HE LIGHTHOUSE LANTERN
had been flashing when we went into the cottage, but it was off by the time Trey and I emerged. Who knew what Mia and Beau were doing up there? I challenged Trey to a race to the top, calling out, “First one to the watch room,” already sprinting off ahead of him, intent on making enough noise that Mia would hear us
coming. I thought I could stall at the watch room on the excuse of catching my breath to buy Mia just a little more time to, say, put her panties back on.

I made the most unprofessional ruckus racing up the stairs, whooping and calling out taunts to Trey. By the time I got to the watch room I truly did need to catch my breath. Trey would have won our little race if I’d given him a chance to get by me on the narrow stairs.

As we stood collecting ourselves, Trey reached a hand to the back of my neck and pulled me to him, and kissed me. I closed my lips to the stale cigarette and scotch taste of his mouth, and after a moment he took the hint, stepping back and turning away from me.

“Beau!” he called out as he sprinted up the last flight of stairs from the watch room to the lantern room. “You better be handling that telescope as lovingly as you handle your own little friend.”

I did hesitate then. I know I did. I felt a jolt of unease. But he’d seemed embarrassed when I didn’t kiss him back, and maybe he meant Mia rather than the part of Beau’s anatomy I was imagining he meant. He’d been drinking, and so had I, and he’d just followed my bikini-covered fanny up more than a hundred stairs. Not everything was as clear as it should have been. Nothing seemed clear except that Mia would be up on the lantern deck, and when we Ms. Bradwells stuck together, we were always just fine.

Trey was already at the telescope when I emerged from the lantern room. I don’t expect I realized he was alone until I was beside him, until he reached out and took my arm and said, “Look, you have to see this.” And so I put my eye to the telescope.

He put his arms around me again, began kissing my neck. I stiffened. I said no. I’m sure I must have said no.