47727592 Meet Mia From the FOUR MS BRADWELLS Early Excerpt

7/31/2019 47727592 Meet Mia From the FOUR MS BRADWELLS Early Excerpt

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The Four Ms. BradwellsA NOVEL

Meg Waite Clayton

TB A L L A N T I N E N E W B O O K S Y O R K


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This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used ctitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright 2011 by Meg Waite Clayton All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division ofRandom House, Inc., New York. Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarksof Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Graywolf Press for permission to reprint Let Evening Come from Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon, copyright 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clayton, Meg Waite. The four Ms. Bradwells: a novel / Meg WaiteClayton. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-345-51708-1 eBook ISBN 978-0-345-52435-5 1. Female friendshipFiction. 2. Middle-aged womenFiction. 3. United States. Supreme Court.Ofcias and employeesSelection and appointmentFiction. 4. JudgesSelection and appointmentnited StatesFiction. 5. SecretsFiction. I. Title. II. Title: 4 Ms. Bradwells. PS3603.L45F68 2011 813 .6dc22 2010033479 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper www.ballantinebooks.com 246897531 First Edition Book design by Victoria Wong


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THE FOUR MS. BRADWELLS

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Or else . . . Hmmm, she said, maybe no one is exactly a slam dunk for the Supreme Court? Laney had told her Id be back home that week anyway. They want to meet in D.C. for the hearings and then train up to New York for the weekend, she said. I toldthem they could come for the last afternoon. The part where my supporters makeme sound like Superjudge. And she laughed again. Betts is always the rst to laughat her little jokes. Were thinking Les Miz Friday night, she added. No doubt well seeing something about a bad mother on Saturday if we let Ginger choose. Maybe not, now that Faith is gone. Then, with a crack in her voice, God, Mi, I wish Matka had lived to see this. Matka, Betts always called her mom, the only Polish word shewas allowed outside the songs she sang in church, and in church she usually played her zhaleika. Here in front of the Judiciary Committee, though, she calls hermy mother. I stick my hands in my pockets, feeling the cut of waistband, the little roll mushrooming over the top of my slacks as I head for three open seats inthe back row. I settle into one of them, imagining Faith and Mrs. Z both cheering wildly together in whatever momheaven might exist. Be t ts is finishing speaking in her short, straightforward sentences her rehearsed immigrant-widow speech, she would call this, although shes avoiding hyphenating herewhen the click of high heels sounds. A young woman edges through the crowded room to whisper to a senator we in the press call Milwaukees Finest for his professed love of his home states latz Beer over the Russian vodka he really drinks. Im reminded, oddly, of the Wiz

ard of Oz as he turns toward her, his gaze as dull-eyed as my editorsmy ex-editors,now that he let me go, as if Id just been waiting for his permission to lose my job. My ex-editor. My ex-paper. My ex-husband and my ex-almostanc. What a fool I amnot to have made time to see Doug this weekend. At the dais, Milwaukee covers the chairmans 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 Bettss, too, above her pearls. Leaving me wishing my budget allowed for Gingers expensive facials and creamsa smell trigger, I realize, as Ginger throws her arm


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M E G WA I T E C L AY T O N

around me, not a hug so much as a coachs 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 fourof us sharing medium-sized Fair Isle sweaters, raiding each others closets beforeparties 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, youd have missed thwhole show. The guy in front of us shoots me a look. God, its 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 handa 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, Gingers angular, almost illegible scrawl. Laney takes the gum wrapper and reads without the need of glasses as I remember the four of us studying togetherin the Law School Reading Room, the hush unbroken but for the occasional thwickof a page turned in frustration, the scrape of a metal chair, the hushed swooshof the revolving doors, and, if you listened closely enough, the tick of a smallfolded 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: LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, September 2018: Elsbieta (Betts) Zhukovski ( JD 82) has been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the rst woman and the rst foreign-born justice to be appointed to the countrys most important legal post.The line to kiss up to her forms outside N-32. Shes already missed rst woman justice, Ginger whispers. By decades. The chairman announces a ve-minute recess, and thephotographers


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reach for new batteries and memory chips while, behind us, reporters tweet quickrecaps. Youre forgetting the Chief business, Ginge. Laneys Southern accent softwarm and proud. Betts could still be the rst lady Chief. Shes got years before thatsilly gum-wrapper 2018. I swallow against a scratch in my own throat, envy too stingy to voice. Ive 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 whatshe wants. Female Chief, Ginger says. Lets not be expecting proper, ladylike behavor from Betts when we dont require the male justices to be gentlemen. A real-life Justice Bradwell, I manage nally. Not made of stone. Laneys dark ngers smooth the in the wrapper. Fifty-someyear-old ngers, fty-some-year-old hands, but her shortnails unbitten now, there is that. Her teeth arent as white as they once were andshe 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 shes 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 SupremeCourt, 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. Weve written every one of each others alumni notes ever since Isabelle was born and Zack died in the same few short weeksand Betts, whod 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 fty words or less that my daughter is born and my husband is dead? Thebones of her wrists as fragile as Zacks had been, as if shed gone through chemotherapy with him: an aggressive form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, dead at twenty-nine.It had been, surprisingly, Ginger who had put her arm around Bettss shoulder andsaid so soothingly she might have been reading a favorite poem, Let me, Betts. Let me do this for


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this for you, this one small thing. That gorgeous auburn it was before Zack died. Iliking the gray, Laney says, and I agree. Bettss 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 shed allow us prettier, Ginge. I reach across Gingr to touch Laneys hair, which, after twenty-ve 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 isnt smarter, Gir says. Just more disciplined. Laney and I lean our heads on Gingers quilted winterwhite shoulders. Youre right. Youre right, Ginger says. Smarter, too. I can admitat 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 Milwaukees Finest requests and receives permission to ask one last question. But not you two. I get to be second smartest, Ginger says, ngering an ebony button. Damn, Betts is really going to do this, isnt she? Mrs. Zhukovski, Milwaukee says. Ginger, Laney, and I all whisper, Ms.nison 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 whats happeni

ng here, rather than distorting it. The TV cameras roll on, delivering every blemish in detail so the folks at home can wonder why Betts doesnt have that littlefatty deposit removed. The thought crosses my mind that Justice Sotomayor mightnever have been conrmed if her wise Latina woman comment had been caught on lm. Visals are so powerful, even when theyre untrueor only a piece of the truth that, taken alone, is a lie. I sit up straighter, leaning forward, wanting suddenly to warn Betts to


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Order THE FOUR MS. BRADWELLS By Meg Waite Clayton

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47727592 Meet Mia From the FOUR MS BRADWELLS Early Excerpt

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