Laney

THE BAY WATER off the wood pier that first night on Cook Island was as cold as Aunt Frieda’s freezer, but not half so cold as when we found we had no towels. We left every little thing on the pier except the champagne, and we ran bare naked up the path, laughing so hard it nearly kept us warm. Inside, Mia and Betts and I collected the bay in little puddles on the marble floor while Ginger fetched us towels, her hair still unloading bucketsful when she returned to the landing above us. She slipped at the top step, and we all started or gasped or held our breaths, whatever expression you like for “were scared to death she’d tumble headfirst over the rail and splat on the marble floor.” The only thing that flew over that banister, though, was a pile of pure white towels.

Ginger laughed as she regained her balance, while huge, baby-soft bath blankets smelling of cedar and bleach landed with a flooop right in front of me. As we wrapped ourselves up in them, I thought if Chawterley were mine, never mind just one of my several homes, I wouldn’t have a friend in the world who didn’t know all about it. Bigmouthed as Ginger was about so many things, though, she never did like to talk about her family wealth.

The thing I best recall about that first night at Chawterley, the thing I best like to recall, is taking the Scrabble board and the rest of the champagne into the Sun Room, still wrapped in fluffy-soft towels. Ginger set a match to the fire, forgetting the flue at first, and the four of us curled up on the couch and chairs to choose seven letter tiles each. We weren’t sleepy. We were on that second-wind kind of day-after energy that would carry Mia and Ginger and me through all-nighters at work. Betts never did pull an all-nighter even clerking for the Supreme Court, which says something, that deals to buy grocery stores require Herculean efforts of sleep deprivation while the highest law of the land does not.

Maybe it was the fact that we’d brought no casebooks, that we had a whole long week ahead of us with nothing we much needed to do. Maybe it was that we were about to go separate ways in just a short while, that this would be the last time we ever would have to say this is who I really am to friends who wouldn’t be elbowing us in the ribs for the best assignments and bonuses, and partnership. Or maybe it was Chawterley itself.

The house had been shut up all winter, but it was as welcoming as if Faith had just run out for some something, never you mind that she was still deep into the Idaho v. Freeman appeal to the Supreme Court back in Washington. Ginger liked to call Faith’s efforts to save the Equal Rights Amendment back then “hours and hours of time wasted on a case that is going to be moot before it’s decided.” But Faith always did believe the ends aren’t the only things that matter, that process is important, too. “Losing a fight is better than never coming into the ring,” she liked to say.

We weren’t more than two words into that Scrabble game before I spilled out, “So I had this thing happen to me last summer.” An inarticulate way to set into a conversation about sexual harassment, a label you didn’t hear back then, but I’d worried how to begin that conversation so many times over the intervening months—or whether I ought to begin it at all given the fella involved—that it was a mercy to have it out. I never am as articulate as I imagine, anyway, in Latin or otherwise.

“This fella I was working with at Tyler & McCoy,” I said, “he just pulled me to him and kissed me in the elevator one night as we were leaving.” Like a bad cliché.

“Shit,” Ginger said. “Not Frankie.”

“No! No, of course not. I swear on my grandmama’s grave.” I pulled my towel close around me, shivering again. “I didn’t even meet your brother, Ginge. He was working in Abu Dhabi or someplace like that.”

“Shit, Laney,” Ginger said. “A partner?”

I’d been one of only two women and the only black lawyer—or almost lawyer—summer-clerking at Tyler & McCoy. I was invited to all the outings: the boat trips and the shows and the weekend gatherings at swanky country clubs, but I was the only one ever mistaken for staff at those clubs, and if I wasn’t the only summer clerk never invited to grab a sandwich at lunchtime, it surely felt like I was. Then I was assigned to work on a project supervised by a senior associate who’d been written about in Esquire and in an early issue of The American Lawyer, the latter with a full-page photograph of him on his boat and a caption claiming he never did go out on the water without a client aboard. He expected to be accelerated to partnership that fall, he told me, never mind that no Tyler associate had ever been made partner early. And if he was arrogant about his prospects, he had the good grace to be right: he’d been an associate when he kissed me, but had made partner that fall.

He was also undaunted by my gender, my race, my accent. He liked my work, too, or liked working with me, or both. He gave me a whole lot of rein, and credit for every clever thing we did together. He told everyone who would listen that when I returned to the firm after taking the bar exam they would have to stand in line behind him to get my time. Comforting words in a firm that didn’t always invite its summer clerks back for permanent jobs. And I wanted that job. Tyler & McCoy was one of the most politically connected firms in the country. Its ranks included an ex-attorney general and three partners who’d been in various cabinets over the years. Working there would provide me all the how-do-you-dos I needed to enter politics at the national level, not by running for office but by appointment or invitation to work on a senator’s staff.

A loud backfire popped from the fireplace, startling us as Ginger laid the word “drift” on the Scrabble board. “Well, what the hell can you do in a situation like that?” she said.

Mia and Ginger nodded while Betts sat silently watching the flames pop red and yellow and a blue that was neon compared to the blue-green of the bay lapping against the pier outside.

“Thank goodness the elevator stopped at the next floor,” I said. “He introduced me to the receptionist who joined us, and then chatted with her.” Flirted with her, as if he hadn’t just had his lips pressed to mine.

“A receptionist saw you kissing?” Ginger asked.

“Lord, no, Ginge. The elevator dinged and …” And he’d stepped away from me as if he kissed women on the elevator about every time he pressed the button for the ground floor. “No, of course not,” I insisted, wondering which ruffled me more: that he’d kissed me like he was entitled to, or that he didn’t seem to much care that he had.

“The fastest conduit for any rumor is a law firm receptionist,” Ginger said.

Betts asked, “Was he married?”

“Lord no! At least I don’t think …” Was he married? But I recalled a conversation earlier that night he’d kissed me, about folks he took out sailing: not only clients.

Maybe he’d thought I was flirting with him, that I was angling to go sailing. Was that why he thought he could kiss me on the elevator, in the middle of a conversation about where I should start my research the next day? I’d lain awake the whole long night worrying over what I would say to him the next morning, but in the end I’d said nothing and neither had he.

“I bet he’s sleeping with the receptionist,” Ginger said. “Half the guys at Tyler have slept with that receptionist, including Frankie. Do you think it was … I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to say it. Maybe he wanted to try a different flavor?”

“Ginger!” Betts said.

“I know, I know,” Ginger said. “It’s just … even my brother, who isn’t a bad guy—”

“Laney is beautiful!” Betts said. “What guy wouldn’t want to kiss her? This doesn’t have to be about race.”

“But I think maybe it was,” I said, the words coming out more hushed than I meant. I shrugged, recalling his thin lips pressed against mine, his pale hand, his probing tongue. “I don’t know why. I just think maybe it was.”

I laid three tiles on the board, spelling the word “hour,” not many points. “Your turn, Mi.”

“It’s inexcusable whether it was about race or not,” Ginger insisted. “He kissed her on the elevator. At the office.”

“Men and women who work together are going to fall in love sometimes,” Betts said.

“So you recommend this as a dating strategy?” Ginger shot back. “We should all corner attractive subordinates on elevators and kiss them before they can object?”

This was long before Anita Hill, and even when she came forward to challenge Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court nine years later, we watched the way one watches a wreck occurring close enough to touch when there is not a single thing you can do but step back. “That woman is committing career suicide,” I recollect Betts saying. We played by the old rules; if you didn’t, you’d sure enough be shown the door. No one would ever admit you were let go because you’d ruffled feathers, but the truth was if a prominent partner liked to kiss young associates in the elevator, your job as the young associate was to avoid any elevator he might be on.

“He never did bother me after that,” I said.

“See,” Betts said. “He was a perfect gentleman after that. He was great to work for. He made a pass at her. She rebuffed it. He respected that. I don’t know how you can fault either of them.”

We talked late into the night about problems we’d encountered at work the prior summer. Ginger was asked if she could take dictation. Betts was asked to fetch coffee despite the suit she was always careful to wear, and one partner liked to take her to lunch at his men’s club, where they had to ride the back “pink” elevator up to the “pink” dining room in which “ladies” were allowed. But Mia suffered the worst indignities. She was asked if she’d been a cheerleader, if she wore pantyhose or garters, if women liked to sleep in the nude. She and Andy shared an apartment that summer, and although she’d been careful to be discreet about it, not even admitting her living arrangements to her parents, word had gotten around. She wasn’t offered a permanent job at the end of the summer, although Andy was: the difference between being a stud and being a slut. This was 1981, when the firms we were joining had no women partners and few women associates. The class that graduated before us marked the first year large firms hired women in substantial numbers, and the medium and small firms had yet to follow suit.

The judiciary, where Betts herself was headed, was perhaps the worst of the old-boy networks. Carter let a few women climb up onto the federal bench, but Reagan went right back to the tradition of senators recommending their golf buddies for judge. The “old boy” Betts would be clerking for on the D.C. Circuit after graduation was one of those Carter girls, though: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They’d spent Betts’s interview discussing Judge Ginsburg’s notion that laws banning abortion are gender discrimination rather than violations of privacy.

To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t go on and tell Ginger it was her cousin Trey who kissed me on that elevator. Trey, whom I’d met thanks to Faith.

I’d had dinner with Faith at the Conrad home outside Washington regularly that summer; it was my home away from home. One night, she was showing me a miniature science text with beautiful flowers decorating the diagrams and text—“As if the scientific truth isn’t beautiful enough,” she said. The book, by Johannes Kepler, had put us into a discussion about the path astronomers wove to avoid the wrath of religion: Galileo forced by the Roman Catholic Church to recant his belief that the earth orbited the sun, Giordano Bruno, another believer in Copernican theory, burned at the stake. “The work of putting powerful men in the position of being seen to be mistaken is often dangerous work,” Faith said.

Profane, I recall thinking. From the Latin profānus, outside of the temple. And I found myself confessing I’d blundered into telling a partner he was mistaken earlier that week. With no audience, I’d been able to back off and suggest I was the one who was mistaken, only to hear him touting my idea as his own in a meeting the next day.

Faith lit a menthol cigarette and exhaled, then asked if I’d met her sister Grace’s son, Trey Humphrey. “You should introduce yourself. Tell him you’re Ginger’s roommate. Trey has always been fond of Ginger, like siblings without the competition, or without much of it. He’s spent summers on Cook Island with us ever since his father wrapped his car around a tree when Trey was ten. Just tragic, as you can imagine. Grace could barely take care of herself, much less Trey.

“I should warn you that Trey doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” she said, “but you’re a smart girl, you’ll love working with him.”

I was like a calf staring at a new gate when I walked into my office the next morning to see a fella sitting in my desk chair, reading a brief I’d been working on. “You’re Helen,” he said, his gaze so intent that I wanted to deny I was. “My Aunt Faith tells me I ought to meet you. She says you took my cousin Ginger’s spot on the Law Review.” He stood and shook my hand, grinning suddenly, his face opening into boyishly oversized front teeth. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I hadn’t made law review, that I was only ALR, “almost law review.”

“You can’t be nervous about meeting me,” he said, wiggling his fingers as if to warm them; my own hands were cold cold cold. “We’re practically family, and really, despite all the rumors you’ve no doubt heard, I don’t often bite.

“Sit,” he said, moving to the visitor chair. “Sit. I’ve been raised a gentleman, so until you sit I have to stand here waiting for you to do so.”

A New York City gentleman. Where does a father wrap a car around a tree in New York City?

I sat, pushing away the rumors I had indeed heard, about secretaries who didn’t type fast enough and copy machine operators who wouldn’t stay until three in the morning now looking for new jobs. He settled his lean legs into the guest chair and extracted a pack of Marlboros from his pocket.

“Smoke?” he asked, extending the pack. When I declined, he asked if I minded if he did, and although I didn’t much look forward to working all day in an office that smelled like an ashtray, I didn’t have the nerve to say so.

He grilled me on what I was working on, which wasn’t much. “Shit,” he said, his expression so like Ginger’s that I might have laughed if I hadn’t had fresh in my mind that conversation with Faith about offending powerful men.

“Okay, so I can’t get you unstaffed from that. It would ruffle feathers, and I’m up for partner this fall, or that’s the speculation anyway. But I’ve got this project …”

And not much later, the work coordinator poked his head in my office to say Trey Humphrey had heard that I was a superstar and wanted to work with me. “I’ll tell you honestly we don’t often let Trey close to summer clerks,” he said. “He has a reputation for being … demanding.”

From the Latin meaning responsible for more than one summer clerk not getting invited back to the firm.

I DON’T KNOW what time we finally did fall asleep that first night on Cook Island, but we woke with a start to Ginger exclaiming, “Oh, shit! I left the book on the boat!” She bounded from the couch, her towel dropping away and her fanny jiggling as she bolted out into the bright daylight and sprinted down the path. At the pier’s end, she leapt onto the boat like it might take off without her, and disappeared below deck. A chill set in to the Sun Room, but none of us rose to close the door before she burst back into the house with what looked to be a sandwich-sized baggie in her hand, the kind Betts had used for her Ms. Drug-Lord-Bradwell Halloween costume herb-drugs. It contained something the size of a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards.

“A prayer book?” I guessed. “Except that thing is even smaller than any prayer book I’ve ever seen. And considerably more colorful.”

“The Holy Church of the Blessed Virgin Flamingo?” Betts suggested.

“It’s a peacock on the cover,” Mia said.

“Oh! That’s much more likely: the Holy Church of the Blessed Virgin Peacock!”

“A male peacock,” Ginger said, still catching her breath. “Female peacocks are an undistinguished brown.”

“Female peahens,” Mia said.

“A male can’t be a blessed virgin?” Betts asked Ginger. “That sounds sexist to me, Ms. Decisis-Bradwell.”

Ginger pulled off the tape sealing the baggie and extracted what we could all see now was a beautiful miniature book.

“Sonnets from the Portuguese?” Mia took the book from Ginger and opened it. “ ‘The face of all the world is changed, I think.’ ”

“It certainly is!” Betts said. “Or at least it will be when we’re through with it. Us in our navy blue skirt suits and high-cut blouses. But really, Ginger, even you don’t jump up from a warm fire to run naked in the cold without a reason.”

“You’re forgetting the hot tub party, Betts,” I said.

“Let me rephrase, your honor: even you, Ginger, don’t jump up from a warm fire to run naked in the cold without a reason unless you’re drunk.”

I lifted one of the empty champagne bottles, pointed it at the cold ashes and the sad remains of a half-burnt log.

As Betts reloaded the fireplace, I said, “It’s your mama’s book, Ginge?”

“Why would you think that?” Ginger shot back, the astonished expression in her gray-blue eyes confirming the book’s ownership.

I pulled my soft white towel more securely, huddling lower, wishing we all had on clothes.

“I stole it,” Ginger said, plucking the book back. “Laney’s right, it’s Mother’s. I lifted it from her library and no one missed it for so long that it was impossible to track when it had disappeared or who might have taken it, and I’ve had it ever since.” Her smile not real but rather what Betts calls her the-thing-I-hate-most-is-waking-up-next-to-a-man-whose-name-I-don’t-know smile.

“And you just”—Betts waved a hand toward the book or the growing fire or both, inexplicably annoyed—“carry it around with you wherever you go? That’s why you happen to have it with you? Why you sprinted in a panic to the boat when you realized—”

“What exactly is a sonnet?” Mia interrupted. Betts never could begin to understand back then that the stolen Sonnets volume was about more than a silly book. That the fact of Ginger’s family owning this big old house and another in Virginia while Betts grew up in a tiny apartment in Hamtramck didn’t mean Ginger grew up with the kind of ubiquitous happiness Betts thought she did.

Ginger touched a hand to her still-damp hair, flipping it over the back of the couch. “Fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ A pentameter is five feet.”

Betts glanced at her toes, the nails bare like Mia’s where Ginger and I had painted ours red before we left Ann Arbor.

“Five two-syllable pairs. Iambs, so the second syllable is stressed,” Ginger said.

“Now is the spring break of our wildness spent,” Mia chimed in, and we all smiled.

“Except that has a trochee at the beginning,” Ginger said. “An inverted foot.” She stretched out her own leg and twisted it so her toes were nearly pointing to the floor.

“Is now the spring break of our young wildness spent?” Betts amended.

“Is now the spring of our dreams yet unmet?” Ginger proposed. “And that’s eleven syllables, Betts.”

“Did y’all know the word ‘verse’ comes from Latin that means something like a plow at the end of a furrow turning around to begin again?”

They threw couch pillows at me, calling me “Ms. Cicero-Showoff-Bradwell.”

Ginger ran a hand over the cover, the lovely peacock, as the fire crackled, the room warming again. “I didn’t even read poetry when I was thirteen,” she said. “I had no idea what a sonnet was, much less anything about Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Then after another moment, “She grew up on an estate in England. Hope End.”

“There’ll be a million people here for your dad’s party, Ginge,” Mia said. “You could just leave it here somewhere after everyone has arrived and no one will ever know who took it. You could leave it in the library here, or maybe not, maybe leave it where it will be sure to be noticed after the party, so it’s clear any of the party guests who’d ever been to your house in Virginia could be the thief.”

“I might could leave it somewhere here,” I offered. “If I was to be caught carrying that little book, I’d just say I found it somewhere. No one would expect I was the thief since it disappeared years before you and I met.”

And we left it at that, no one saying another word about that book, but it was clear we’d made a plan.