The Four Ms. Bradwells (49 page)

“I guess we’re going to let it be interesting at the Capitol in the morning?” I ask over lunch in the sunroom, with the drapes wide open to the day.

“I guess we are,” Betts agrees. “What better forum than the place where all those laws we don’t trust to be enforced are made?”

What follows is a long negotiation about who, exactly, will stand on the Capitol steps. Betts and Ginger are sure Isabelle and Annie will need to get back to school for classes, but their daughters don’t quite see it that way.

“I want to stand with you, Mom,” Isabelle says to Betts.

“I want to stand with you, Mom,” Annie tells her mom.

We talk for a good hour about the press and the cameras, the publicity. Laney tries to broker a compromise between Ginger’s and Betts’s rising unwillingness to include their daughters and Iz’s and Annie’s refusal to be prohibited.

“How about we let Izzy and Anne come with us to Washington,” she proposes, “but they wait inside while you open the envelope on the Capitol steps, Ginge, and then Betts addresses the press. That adviser fella could arrange to stow them somewhere, couldn’t he?”

“Aunt Mia says we both look great on film,” Annie replies. Not
I disagree
, but the more effective
Have you considered this?

Ginger looks like she’s about to throttle me.

“When they had to make their way through all the reporters here Saturday,” I admit.

“You’ll have microphones thrust in your face, Annie,” Ginger insists. “You’ll say something idiotic. Everyone does.”

Annie is so young, just eighteen. And she has always been so eager to follow after Isabelle, even when she’s not ready.

“You two don’t need to be out there,” Ginger says, tamping back her exasperation. “You don’t need to expose yourselves.”

For a minute, I think Izzy is going to agree to Laney’s compromise. Before she can, though, Annie fixes a gaze the caper green of her grandmother’s on Ginger and says, “Neither of us said anything idiotic to the
press Saturday, Mom. And we had plenty of microphones. Besides, you yourself said, ‘If change is needed and it doesn’t start with us, then where the hell does it start?’ ”

“If change doesn’t
continue
with us,” Izzy says.

To Ginger’s credit, she manages to fall back from an argument she sees she’s lost. “You don’t say one word to the press, Annie,” she says. “Not one word.” Then to Laney, “Next time you and Gemmy disagree on something, I get to mediate.”

Betts says to Isabelle, “You don’t say a word even to the janitors. Are we clear on that?”

Izzy grins back at her mother and says, “ ‘I have nothing to add to the public record on that.’ ”

I
T’S LATE AFTERNOON
when Laney and Betts and Ginger and I retire to Faith’s Library, where Ginger pulls open the middle drawer to her mother’s desk and pulls out blank paper and a chewed pencil.

“You write, Mi,” she says. She hands me the pencil, and we settle in on the floor by the fireplace to lay out together the things we want to say.

Mia

IN FRONT OF THE COLUMBUS DOORS
AT THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12

B
Y THE TIME
we stand with Betts on the Capitol steps, the heavy bronze Columbus doors looming behind us and Isabelle and Anne at our sides, we’ve begun to come to terms with the idea that Faith shot Trey, that she figured, as we all had, that there was not another way to protect Laney and Ginger, that the cost to them would be too high. When Ginger opens the envelope and reads the note, though—in front of a crowd of witnesses and with cameras rolling—it’s simpler and far less dramatic than any of us expect: a single line from Trey Humphrey, saying he was sorry, that he didn’t deserve the love of the Conrad family, that he would never cause them pain again. With it is a short note from Faith, explaining that Trey was bipolar—manic-depressive, it was called at the time—and that she’d concealed the note, wanting to spare her sister, Grace, the pain of feeling she’d failed her son as surely as she felt she’d failed Trey’s father when he’d killed himself.

Ginger stares into the roar of questions and then down at her mother’s handwriting again, her pale eyes filled with relief at not having to blacken her mother’s name. That first response is quickly washed away by something stronger, though, an emotion I initially read as grief: just as she’s embracing the idea that Faith would have done anything for her, that version of her mother slips through her fingers, reverting back to the one who loved her nephew more than anyone else. But then I’m less certain. There is something in her expression that reminds me of the way she looks at Annie, that looks almost like pride.

One of the journalists yells, “But you yourself thought Faith Cook
Conrad shot Trey Humphrey,” and I can see my ex-editor jumping at that headline:
DAUGHTER BELIEVED PROMINENT FEMINIST LAWYER FAITH COOK CONRAD MURDERED NEPHEW.
It Isn’t
PROMINENT FEMINIST LAWYER FAITH COOK CONRAD MURDERED NEPHEW
, but it’s not bad.

I shout over the fray, “That is not what anyone has ever said here!” And when I have their attention: “You have the footage. I’m quite sure it will show what Ms. Conrad said yesterday was that she had a note she believed ‘may have some bearing on the death of Trey Humphrey.’ Ms. Conrad has never suggested her mother was guilty of
any
wrongdoing.”

The press turn their disappointed attention to Betts, still in search of a headline.

“Mrs. Zhukovski,” one calls out, “what do you think this might do to your prospects of being confirmed?” Leaving behind the question of what might have driven Trey Humphrey to kill himself.

“
Ms
. Zhukovski,” Ginger insists.

“Pardon?”

“Ms. Zhukovski,” Ginger repeats. “Not ‘Mrs.’ The idea that a woman should be identified by her marital status is demeaning.”

“And it’s Professor Zhukovski, actually,” Laney says. Then under her breath, “Y’all know that, you mealy-mouthed toads. You’re just trying to yank her chain.”

“Professor Drug-Lord-Bradwell,” I whisper, pushing back the thoughts crowding in: the image of Trey with his eye to the telescope, searching the sky; that photo of Ginger as a young girl with her dad and brothers, all holding guns; Faith’s careful signature over the seal of the envelope; the sound of her rough voice urging me to write about the curse of the naked women. “Imagine what a difference it would make in this world if more of us were willing to take risks like that,” she’d said. “I wish I had the courage those women do. I wish I was willing to risk like that.” Words that left me wondering when in her life Faith had ever lacked courage.

What might have driven Trey to kill himself? Remorse for what he did to Laney? He
might
have regretted it afterward. He
might
have carried his gun and the things to clean it up all those steps to the watch room, meaning to kill himself.

The alternative: That Faith collected Trey’s gun and the cleaning gear and took them up to the watch room herself? That she loaded the gun and then brought Trey up there, where no one would hear them, insisting
they needed to talk? That she made him write … what? “I’m sorry. I don’t deserve the love of the Conrad family. I will never cause you pain again.”

An apology that might look like a suicide note if the writer were to be found shot dead.

Would a mother do that? And live with it the whole rest of her life? Never telling a soul? Or perhaps telling only the one friend she knew would understand. A smart friend, who knew the law. Who could help support the conclusion that Trey Humphrey killed himself if his death was questioned after Faith died, or claim not to have known of the sham suicide note if evidence that Trey’s gunshot wound had not been self-inflicted ever came to light. A friend who could save Faith’s reputation if it needed saving, or give it up for the sake of Ginger or Laney or Betts or me, or anyone else who might ever be suspected of having shot Trey.

As we watch the crowd pepper Betts with questions, I wonder if Ginger, too, is questioning the “truth” of this note from Trey, or if she’s content to settle back into the belief that Trey Humphrey, in a fit of remorse and depression, climbed 136 stairs to shoot himself just when we wanted him dead. I suppose if I were her, I would choose that easier reality. Something in the soft set of her overbite leaves me thinking she has. But maybe that’s my imagining Ginger is more like me than she is. For all my journalistic searching for the truth, I still think of all those women my mother met over all those summers as her “friends.” Ginger is the Rebel, though, with all the courage that nickname implies. And if there was ever any thought that she lacked courage, she put that to bed out on the pier yesterday.

“Thanks for saving me there, Mi,” she whispers.

“Anytime,” I reply, realizing that whatever Ginger or I believe happened, Trey Humphrey’s death occurred thirty years ago, under circumstances so murky that the truth will never be known.

“Consider it the first official act of the firm of Porter and Conrad, Ginge,” I whisper. “And by the way, you’ll need to turn the phone and Internet back on.”

“Conrad and Porter,” she says, her little bit of overbite disappearing into her wide smile.

Betts is still answering questions, saying now, “As Michelle Obama has said, real change occurs one determined woman at a time. Almost thirty years ago now, my dear friend Laney Robeson-Weils was raped. At the time, we remained silent. She did. I did. Our friends did. Even the
prominent feminist lawyer Faith Cook Conrad did. We decided it would be too personally devastating to stand up for our friend.

“Perhaps it was a decision that made sense. Perhaps it wasn’t. The fact remains even today that it is a very hard thing for a woman who has been raped to stand up for herself. Particularly a woman raped by someone she knows. No young woman ought to have to make the decision to risk her own reputation in order to bring a criminal to justice. No woman—young or old—ought to. Like it or not, a change in the way our society thinks about violent crimes against women has to start with women like my friend Laney who are willing to stand up and say ‘this happened to me and it wasn’t my fault.’ ”

The cameras adjust to catch Laney, shots that perhaps will be seen differently than they might have a few days ago, now that her story is known. Her rape will be a part of her biography for a long time to come. But she’s standing tall, starting finally to make some good of the bad things that happened to her. I think of Gemmy watching from Palo Alto, and I wonder if we were right to talk her out of taking the red-eye to be here with her mom.

“Senator Cicero-Bradwell,” I whisper.

“And Justice Drug-Lord-Bradwell!” Ginger says.

“
Chief
Justice Drug-Lord-Bradwell by … what was the date in your gum-wrapper note?” I say. “2016?”

“2018,” Ginger says. “She may need every minute of that.”

“Progressio advenit sensim,”
Laney whispers.

Progress does come slowly, I think as Ginger and I raise discreet finger crosses at Laney.

And I can almost hear, then, over the clamor of the gathered reporters, the quiet
tick
of a gum wrapper note landing on my Constitutional Law casebook spread open under the green lights of the Michigan Law School Reading Room. So many planets need to align on one side of your sun to reach any dream. But Betts is right. Faith was right. The change starts with the reaching itself, whether the goal is attained or even attainable be damned. If enough of us reach, the syzygy will occur someday. And if we don’t reach, every planet in the universe aligning will do no good.

“I think I might write a book,” I whisper, listening as Betts continues to answer questions, working in the prepared bits I wrote for her last
night. As I say it, I see that this is my way of reaching and always has been: through words.

The way Ginger and Laney look at me, I’m not sure if they realize I’ve finally, after all these years, come to embrace my own dream, or if they think I’ve lost my mind.

“I think I’ll write a novel titled
The All-True Tales of the Ms. Bradwells of Cook Island
so everyone will assume it’s true,” I say, “and I’ll write myself as the pretty one
and
the smart one!”

I don’t think either of them hears that last part because Ginger is saying (perhaps a bit more loudly than she should), “That’s us! The law firm of Bradwell and Bradwell!”

Neither she nor Laney is laughing at my dream.

“Bradwell and Bradwell—and of course we’ll be sure to bring ‘the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex’ to our efforts,” I agree.

“Bradwell and Bradwell and Baby Bradwell,” Izzy says. “I graduate this spring, you know. And I’m still looking for just the right job.”

“Bradwell and Daughters,” I say, taking the hand of this goddaughter of mine.

Betts is coming to a close, saying, “Women need to step forward. To run for office like my friend Laney is. To seek out and accept judiciary appointments. To participate in shaping the law and determining what, exactly, a Constitution that didn’t contemplate our participation in the world beyond the home means for us. We need to grab for the reins at corporations and trade unions and universities, where we can foster environments in which women are treated with respect. Because that’s what it all comes down to: Insisting on the respect we deserve. Saying we are powerful, too.”