The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Conrad.” Ginger stood, freeing hair the color of a shiny taffy apple threaded with gold from between her back and her chair—long, long hair pulled away from her clear forehead and secured with a red barrette at the nape of her neck, then looped down her back and up again so the end was caught in the barrette, too. “And it’s Ms. The idea that a woman ought to be identified by her marital status is demeaning.” Her full lips pressed together over teeth that were too big, but every fella in that classroom focused on her charming little overbite. There was not one hint of a question in her statement, which isn’t so dramatic nowadays, mind you, but this was years before The New York Times allowed women the option of “Ms.” in lieu of “Mrs.” and “Miss.”

  “Is there …” Professor Jarrett glanced to his seating chart, then to the fellas beside Ginger. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I have a … You’re not Virginia Cook?”

  “It’s a mistake.” Ginger fingered her barrette again, her knuckles spreading, her hand just about too wide and heavy for her narrow wrist. “Cook is my middle name.”

  “But it clearly says … Oh, you’re the—”

  “Ms. Virginia Conrad. The folks in admissions just got my name turned around.”

  “I see, of course.” Professor Jarrett leaned back against the chalkboard. “Miss Conrad.”

  “Ms. Conrad.”

  “Ms. Conrad, yes,” he said.

  “Even the admissions office here addressed me as Ms.”

  “I see,” he said, and he asked if she would accept his apologies, he was new to Michigan. “Clearly you’re the perfect choice for the little discussion we’re fixin’ to have here, Ms. Conrad. So the facts of Bradwell v. Illinois?”

  “Ms. Myra Bradwell applied for a license to practice law in Illinois but was turned down because she was a woman,” Ginger answered, using “Ms.” although the plaintiff was referred to as “Mrs.” in the opinion. “She appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, alleging violation of her Fourteenth Amendment rights.”

  The two of them proceeded through the meaning of the privileges and immunities clause and whether someone born in Vermont but living in Illinois could claim the privileges of Vermont law, Ginger tripping over the ends of Professor Jarrett’s questions in her hurry to answer: “The clause says, ‘The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.’ ” Then, “The Court cites Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland to say the choice of a vocation is an inalienable right.”

  “ ‘Inalienable.’ Excellent,” Professor Jarrett said. “Our first word for the day. Y’all will want to write it down.”

  Heads bent over the long, dark arcs of wooden lecture room desktops. Pens scratched. I spilled blue ink into my spiral binder while the fellas beside me wrote on yellow legal pads.

  “So in your humble opinion, Miss Conrad, did the Court come to the right decision?”

  “Ms.”

  “Ms. Conrad. With apologies. Old dogs and new tricks and all that.”

  “You don’t seem such an old dog to me, Professor,” Ginger said.

  We all tittered, but he only smiled slightly. “And in your humble opinion, Ms. Conrad?”

  “The Court uses this trumped-up excuse that since a married woman can’t enter into contracts without her husband’s consent, her clients wouldn’t be able to count on her doing whatever she said she’d do for them. They point to the Slaughter-House Cases and say stare decisis.”

  “Stare decisis. Now that’s a big phrase we haven’t covered yet,” Professor Jarrett said, provoking another full-class titter.

  Ginger again fingered her hair clip, but her pale-eyed gaze didn’t leave the professor’s face, and her straight brows didn’t move one little bit.

  “For those of you who haven’t yet memorized the entire contents of your Black’s Law Dictionary, that’s Latin for … do you know, Ms. Conrad?”

  Then, “Anyone else?”

  No one answered for such a shameful long time that I finally said, “To stand by that which is decided.”

  Professor Jarrett leaned back against the chalkboard and studied me as if something about my white Oxford shirt or my gawky height or the fact that I was a black girl who understood Latin puzzled him and pleased him all at once. I stifled a nervous urge to giggle as the whole class craned their scrawny necks to have a look at me. Orbis non sufficit, I was thinking. The world is not enough: James Bond’s family motto, from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. That’s where I first got interested in Latin, seeing bad movies with my daddy when I was thirteen.

  “Exactly: to stand by that which is decided,” Professor Jarrett said. “In general, matters decided in earlier cases are to be followed by the courts. That’s why what the Supreme Court does in any one case is so important: it becomes an interpretation of law that can’t be ignored. But that’s tomorrow’s lesson.” He wrote stare decisis on the board. “Y’all better get working if you plan to keep up with your colleague here.”

  Colleague, not classmate. An awful nice distinction.

  Professor Jarrett consulted his seating chart again. “Thank you, Ms. Helen Weils, is it?” he said, pronouncing it “Wiles.”

  “Weils, like on a bicycle, actually,” I confessed.

  “Ms. Helen Weils.” He frowned, a poor foil for the chuckle in his eyes: Hell on Wheels, the nickname that had followed me from Birmingham to Denver and on to Wellesley, finding me again at Michigan Law.

  The whole class observed me again. Damage done, Professor Jarrett must have decided, because he said, “Your parents had a sense of humor?”

  “I’m afraid they did, sir.”

  My “colleagues” had a nice little laugh, my treat.

  “You’ve studied Latin, Ms. Weils?”

  “Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina.” Everything said is stronger if said in Latin.

  “Ms. Cicero-Bradwell!” he said delightedly, and that was it for Hell on Wheels. Who knew having it out there would be easier than pretending it didn’t exist?

  Professor Jarrett returned to Ginger. “So you don’t agree with what the Court did here, Ms. Decisis-Bradwell?” he asked, and forever thereafter Ginger had a nickname, too. Every time Professor Jarrett was looking for that particular answer he’d call on “Ms. Decisis-Bradwell” and Ginger would pop up and answer “stare decisis,” even on mornings she wore her glasses rather than her contacts and nearly drowned in her Styrofoam cup of Dominick’s coffee, Professor Jarrett having a good bit of fun with Ginger like he did with all us Ms. Bradwells.

  “I certainly do not agree with what the Court did here,” Ginger said that first morning, her eyes shining like new money even as Professor Jarrett again eyed the seating chart.

  “Ms. Porter?” he said, looking to a pale gal in a middle row. “You look like a sympathetic sort to me. What do you think of these poor clients not being able to make their lady lawyer do the job she told them she’d do?”

  Mia tucked weedy-blond hair behind the tiniest little ears I ever have seen on a grown-up, before or since. “It does seem—”

  Professor Jarrett spread his arms palms up, Jesus Christ the Lord allowing this poor sinner to rise up and be healed. “If you complete this class having learned nothing else, you will have learned that you can speak while standing,” he said. “It’ll serve you well.”

  Mia stood, her knees so shaky that the fella sitting next to her, a big fella in a Dartmouth T-shirt, whose open casebook did not have a mark on the page, whispered something to her.

  “It does seem it could be a problem if a client can’t make Mrs. Bradwell do the job they paid her to do,” Mia conceded.

  “You might end up in prison for want of a lawyer when you’ve already emptied your pocketbook to pay the big retainer,” Professor Jarrett said, and the class again laughed. “So you’d agree with the Court here?”

  Mia looked like she wanted to say Heavens no but couldn’t come up with a single reason why not.

  He turned to Gi
nger. “Ms. Decisis-Bradwell?”

  “But the Court says the ruling applies to unmarried women, too,” Ginger said.

  “What about that, Ms. Porter?” Jarrett asked Mia. “What if our friend here is Ms. Miss Bradwell? Then shall we let her sit for the bar exam?”

  Dartmouth rested a hand lightly against Mia’s blue jeans, behind her knee. I felt a calm roll through me, too.

  “You can’t say what the Court would do from this, I guess,” Mia said. “The stuff about—The language about the destiny of woman to be wife and mother, that isn’t the whole Court speaking, it’s just one justice.”

  “Just one justice?” Jarrett’s face lit in mock astonishment. “Do you know how qualified a man has to be to be appointed to the Court?”

  “Person,” Ginger said.

  “Pardon?” Professor Jarrett said.

  “Person,” Ginger repeated. “You said ‘man,’ but a woman can be a justice, too.”

  “All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding,” Jarrett said.

  “All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding,” Ginger agreed, “and despite the holding in Bradwell v. Illinois.”

  “Do you know how qualified a person has to be to be appointed to the Supreme Court, Ms. Porter?” Professor Jarrett asked.

  “But one justice can’t make law by himself, can he?” Mia said. “He’d need to have a majority of the Court speaking with him. Or she, I mean. With her.”

  The set of Professor Jarrett’s mouth didn’t alter one little bit, but there was a new smile in his eyes that we would come to call his bravo gaze.

  “Well, that’s a pretty good guess. I’d bet on that one if I were you, Ms. Porter, if you’re a betting kind of gal.”

  As the professor eyed the room again, Dartmouth scrawled Good Job! in elephant letters on Mia’s notepad.

  “So tell me this, Ms. Cicero-Bradwell: Why isn’t the right to practice law an inalienable right?” Professor Jarrett asked, giving me the same Jesus Christ the Lord bit.

  I rose slowly, trying to cobble together an answer; it would have been easy if I wasn’t having to stand. “I don’t believe the Court … The Court as a whole only says … They’re just saying the right to practice law isn’t protected by the privileges and immunities clause. The Slaughter-House Cases are stare decisis on the issue.”

  I too was graced with the bravo gaze.

  “I hope you gentlemen are taking careful notes,” Professor Jarrett said to the class. “These ladies’ll be a tough act to follow.”

  He turned to Ginger. “So, Ms. Decisis-Bradwell, what if our Ms. Cicero-Bradwell here promises never to marry? Okay or no?”

  “Indubitably okay,” Ginger said in a tone that left everyone chuckling and me green as the spring grass on the Quad in envy at her ease in front of the class. “Okay with me, anyway. Although not with this Court.”

  “And what if Ms. Porter wants to be a soldier rather than a lawyer? Sergeant Porter-Bradwell.”

  “There’s no more excuse to prevent her becoming a soldier than a lawyer,” Ginger insisted. “Although the Bradwell Court would disagree. And the current Court, too.”

  Jarrett mock-frowned. “Those guns can be mighty heavy.”

  Ginger’s topcoat of cool gave way to something more like an eight-year-old with a bright new bicycle, the sexy mouth disappearing into an overwide grin. “Any gun you choose, and you can have five shots to my one. There’s a shooting range out West 94.”

  Professor Jarrett’s professorial mock-stern softened ever so briefly; he’d just warmed to Ginger as surely as I had. Funny how lovable we become at the first crack in our perfection-seeking façades.

  “Let’s say Sergeant Porter-Bradwell’s choice of weapon leans more toward hand grenades. She looks awfully innocent, I see that.” He nodded to Mia. “But she just has an irresistible urge to hear those little things explode. So she turns to terrorism. She comes to Room 100 here for a secret rendezvous with”—another glance at his chart—“the Drug Lord of Section Four, Ms. Els-bee-et-a Zoo … Zoo-cow-sky? Am I pronouncing that one right?”

  Betts, who is the most improbable of drug lords—she’s no bigger than a minute, with chipmunk cheeks and eight million freckles—popped up from her seat as if spring-released. “Elsbieta Zhu-kov-ski,” she said.

  “Ms. Zoo-kof-ski.”

  “Close enough. I’ll respond to that,” she said, and we all laughed.

  He returned to Mia. “So Ms. Terrorist-Bradwell, here you are buying your cocaine—that’s the drug of choice in the law school these days, right?—from Ms. Zoo … from Ms. Drug-Lord-Bradwell, we’ll call her. You’re planning to resell it to raise funds for more terrorist grenades, but you’re caught red-handed. Would the Bradwell Court here allow the state to treat you differently than a man?”

  Mia cleared her throat. “I guess … Yes! The Bradwell Court, yes. They would say it was okay to treat me differently because I’m a woman.”

  Professor Jarrett tsk-tsked for a minute, the way he would do repeatedly all year. “They’d probably spare you the Iron Maiden and even the rack, I suppose.”

  The bell rang then, and he called out, “Let’s all thank the four Ms. Bradwells for illustrating ‘the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex’ the Court talks about here!” Causing the class to laugh yet again, and then to clap.

  He called out over the rumble of gathering books that there would be a handout at the distribution center after noon, and we should read pages eight through thirty-three from the casebook, too. And we all shuffled out of that first class: Ms. Ginger Decisis-Bradwell with her unchanging opinions; Sergeant Mia Terrorist-Bradwell, whom Professor Jarrett brought in whenever he introduced violence to a hypothetical; Ms. Betts Drug-Lord-Bradwell, the improbable Drug Lord of Section Four; and me, Ms. Laney Cicero-Bradwell, tapped for every Latin translation the rest of the class whiffed on all year. The names would stick, too. They’d be the way Ginger worked us into her first law school poems at the end of that summer, silly little things that made all of Section Four laugh. It was the way we appeared on “Aristocracy Bingo” at the end of the year. That first morning, though, as Dartmouth took off before Mia could say how do you do, Ginger parked herself at the door and collected us like a kindergarten teacher herding hopscotchers off the blacktop. I see now she was setting out to make us her friends as surely as she’d meant to make her South African playwright love her. That’s the way Ginger is. And if it seems a bit manipulative, well, it’s hard to hold it against her once you realize how enormous her heart truly is, and how often she fails to get what she thinks she wants, or even to recognize that what she thinks she wants is a different thing entirely from what will bring her happiness.

  “Well, that’s over for us, isn’t it?” she said as she gathered us. “We’ve all survived our first ‘up.’ You guys want to study together in the Arb after Torts class? I’ll bring champagne.”

  So that afternoon we met in one of the Law Quad archways, under a gargoyle with dislocated shoulders and legs twisted in awful angles, who nonetheless smiled underneath his silly stocking cap. “Justice Bradwell,” we nicknamed that contortionist gargoyle, which would become our gathering place for ex-Quad activities: Saturday night dinners and movies; that first shopping expedition for navy blue interview suits; even the Cook Island vacation our third year, after we’d moved to the Division Street house. “Justice Bradwell at three o’clock” we’d say, or later, “Sub Judice Bradwell at three,” and although there was another gargoyle meant to represent the law, we weren’t ever confused. That first afternoon of law school, though, we simply headed side by side up South U toward Geddes, the Ms. Bradwells of Section Four.

  Mia

  ON THE ROW V. WADE

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  WHEN THE REPORTERS are specks in the distance, I turn back with my Holga to photograph the roiling lace of wake opening out to the disappearing shore. As I frame the shot, I recall the shiny teak battened-down world of that earlie
r sailboat, the teenage boy who helped us at this same yacht club saying, “Ought to be smooth sailing to yer island.” To which Laney had said, “Your island, Ginge?” Cook Island: Ginger’s middle name that was her mom’s maiden name—Faith Cook Conrad—and also the name on the sitting room in N Section of the Law Quad, the name of the women’s dorm across the street.

  Max, a slightly goofy-looking fifty-something guy in jeans that bag at the knees, studies Ginger from behind fashionably nerdy glasses that, on him, are all nerd and not the least bit fashion. He’s my type, I realize with surprise; I’ve always considered my type more like Professor Jarrett—handsomely boyish and charming rather than nerdily so—but this guy looks like so many of the men I’ve slept with over the years that it must be true. He looks like the one man I married, not unlike the one I nearly did. He looks, I realize, something like my father—a disturbing thought.

  Ginger declines his offer of help and he retreats below deck, leaving me to wonder if he’s the kind of guy Ginger loves or the kind who loves Ginger. Ginger’s taste in men tends toward total dicks, with the single and fortunate exception of her husband, Ted.

  I peel back the electrical tape from the red shot counter to manually advance the film, then pan upward to catch a flock of white birds passing overhead. They’ll blur a little but the motion might be interesting. Maybe the light leak that is characteristic of this particular Holga—a leak that creates a lightning bolt from God himself at the top left of the frame—will appear in the shot. You never quite know what you’ll get with a Holga, which is, I suppose, why I’m drawn to it.

  “Ducks?” Laney asks. Ginger always kept a photo by her bedside in law school: she and her dad and brothers in hunting gear after a day of duck hunting, their guns in hand. And “Ducks?” seems a better question than “What the hell do we do now?”

  When Ginger doesn’t answer, Laney says her name and repeats, “Ducks?” more loudly, to be heard over the motor and the lapping water, the thump of the boat against the waves.