world.'
'When we talk about democracy,' Hilliard replied, 'they're who we mean.
They're exercising the fifth freedom. Freedom of speech; freedom to worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear; freedom to smell like a wet bear.'
On the weekdays, worried-looking men between twenty-five and sixty, some heavily muscled, as many of them white as black or Hispanic, struggled front ally through the crowds of young people, using their shoulders and observably restraining strong impulses to shove others out of their way. They wore rumpled dusty suits that did not fit, under stained tan and gray raincoats with crumpled, button-tab collars that stood away from their necks at odd angles. Or they wore baseball caps and windbreakers or nylon parkas, open on plaid flannel shirts; plain tee-shirts; tee-shirts with messages extolling naked coed sports; chino pants or jeans or corduroys or warm-up pants; scuffed loafers broken-down at the counters, steel-toed yellowish-tan construction boots or heavily soiled white training shoes. They carried cardboard containers of coffee and folded newspapers, and if they were not on the way to report to Probation Intake, the room with the big gold-lettered brown sign on the right as they came in, they asked people in uniforms or men and women in civilian clothes who seemed to be at home in the surroundings how to find Room 7, 8 or 11.
Three assistant clerk-magistrates, two men and a woman, presided in those airless eight-by-twelve-foot rooms as though they had been built-in, permanent fixtures installed along with the electrical wiring and the brown vinyl mop boards during construction of the pitted ivory-painted cinder-block walls. The first assistant, Robert Cooke, nephew of the late Most Rev. Edmund Mackintosh, auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Springfield, was a thin, dour white man in his early fifties who became hostile when he knew or suspected that the person talking to him favored legal access to abortion. His wife, Mimi, had at last convinced him after many years first not to start conversations on the subject, and second not to try to attempt subtly to ascertain how others viewed the matter, because when they differed with him he became either sullen or scornful, depending on whether he considered them his superiors or inferiors. 'And it hurts you, Bob, it really does. It hurts you at the courthouse and it's why almost no one wants to see us or be friends with us except people who agree with you, and so when we go out that's all we ever talk about, and that's no fun at all.'
Tyrone Thomas was the third assistant clerk, an amiable black man in his early thirties who wanted no trouble and tried to make none. In his teens he had become the protege of a basketball coach at Cambridge Rindge amp; Latin School in Cambridge who'd gone on to a second career as a state senator. Thomas avoided prejudice by ignoring it if possible and by avoiding aggressive individuals who made ignorance impossible.
People who knew him and his wife, Carol, a tall and beautiful light-skinned black woman who worked as a field-audit supervisor for the Internal Revenue Service, believed he had married well above his station and wondered what she saw in him. He tried not to share that puzzlement and pretended not to notice or be hurt when he sensed it unexpressed or inferred it when implied.
The second assistant was a somewhat-overweight thirty-eight-year-old white woman, Jeanne Flagg. Her father, Archie Oakschott, after eighteen years on the bench had taken senior status as a judge of the Norfolk County Probate Court in Dedham, near Westwood where she had grown up. She continued to wear the cotton and wool, light blue, light grey and light green suits she had purchased when she had gotten the job four years before she became accustomed to the court-house-ritual morning coffee breaks with pastry in the snack bar. No longer somewhat underweight, she was therefore uncomfortable in her clothes, moving carefully and slowly, aware that each change of position tested the seams to the limits.
The assistant clerk-magistrates had to decide whether there were sufficient grounds to recommend to the judge that orders should be issued under Chapter 209A, Massachusetts General Laws, restraining the men who came before them from getting near enough to the people whom they had claimed to love, in order to harm them again. Usually the victims were their wives or girlfriends, but sometimes the men had beaten their children, or hurt their defenseless parents (men accused of sexually molesting children were processed differently). The assistant clerks grimly tried with squinting eyes to see things that could not be seen, hoping to reduce by means of narrow wariness the unreliability of the guesses that they made about whether the particular man under scrutiny was likely to lay rough hands in most instances, again on his female sexual partner; whether he would benefit from still another chance either to control his use of beverage alcohol or quit taking the illegal drugs that he thought licensed him to commit violence. Or whether instead he would soon steal away back into his addictions like a furtive animal skulking back to its kill to feed the rage that made him use his hands on her — and might some day if continued come to involve a gun or knife or club.
Each of the visitors knew what would happen to him if the clerk-magistrate decided that he was either unable or lying to conceal his refusal to stop hitting the woman who had angered him by attempting to influence some aspect of his behavior by means other than prompt oral, vaginal or anal attention to his sexual requirements. He would have to go before a judge who would reason that he must be put in jail.
Otherwise the judge would think himself at risk that the man who this time had beaten the living shit out of the woman he considered his chattel would kill her the next time he got riled up. If he did that then the judge would get reamed out on TV and in the papers. The men knew: that judges did not feature getting reamed out; that they themselves did not want to go to jail; and that the clerk-magistrates could seldom be appeased more than once by signs of contrition and remorse. But they also knew that if they were placed under orders restraining them from having anything to do with their scared women, or put in jail for having violated such an order, the next chance they got to get drunk or stoned each of them would know first who was to blame for putting him into this desperate, humiliating, probably hopeless, situation: the woman who had either called the cops or made enough noise while he'd been hitting her so that a neighbor had called them.
And that secondly in that red anger each of them would know uncontrollably that she must be punished for it, more severely than before, so that she would not do it again, not ever. And each of them also would know already and exactly what form the punishment must take.
This gave them a dim sense of inexorably advancing doom that threatened them with despair so bleak their minds cried out for a drink or a dime bag that would make it go away.
So the men who had hit their women, filled with resentment as they were, did not try at all to hide the fact that they felt troubled and dejected and very often severely hungover, as well. Trying to conceal the resentment, they exerted themselves to appear even sadder and more miserable than they felt, forcing themselves to grovel abjectly thus making themselves feel even worse.
The clerk-magistrates and the other people who worked in the courthouse were well aware of this tactic and its practice, and the vengeful feelings it was meant, but failed, to conceal, so they treated the batterers differently from other defendants, discounting their displays of woe, sadness, regret and remorse by sixty to seventy percent. This made it difficult for the personnel to conduct themselves in their customary courteous professional manner, dealing with the men who had hit women. The only way they could do it was by acting as though they didn't know why it was the men had come before them. This was harder for the women workers in the courthouse than it was for the men, because they had to hide fear as well as anger and contempt for the defendants. The men who had hit women found the pretense unconvincing and knew very well that the courthouse people did know that was what they had done, and scorned and despised them for doing it. The men tended to be fairly quiet, but still visibly resentful of this additional injustice they perceived against them.
Most of the time most of the people who worked in the courthouse tried to seem sympathetic and be polite to everyone who was there because they had gotten in some kind of trouble. The defendants often found their professional solicitude condescending, and sneered at it to demonstrate contempt, but in that, too, they were mistaken; it was not feigned. The personnel felt real empathy with hard-working men and women who had never been in court until the morning after the night they had had too much to drink and had gotten stopped driving home at two in the morning, doing fifteen miles an hour in the middle of the road, steering by the yellow lines, had blown.18 on the Breathalyzer, ten points over the legal state of drunkenness, and had fallen down when ordered to stand on one foot. 'There but for the grace of God' was a phrase they often murmured as the Driving-Unders begged futilely to retain their licenses in disregard of punitive statutes mandating revocation. When they were convinced that an injured defendant, accused of resisting arrest, had in fact been unsuccessfully attempting to defend himself against a police officer gone out of control, they saw to it that the judge handling the case became aware of the relevant facts, even if no evidence of them was offered in open court. They also often felt real pity for aimless early teenagers from dysfunctional homes whose undifferentiated fear and pent-up hostility enabled them to commit their first serious criminal offenses on the apparent basis of mere evil impulse (new personnel speedily
