allow prosecution forty years later, why permit it today? How do the words that the legislature wrote change meaning simply through the passage of time?”
She waves her blond head back and forth, unwilling to say one way or the other.
“Come on, Judge,” he says. “Decide.”
Cassie presumes on their lifetime acquaintance and sticks out her tongue by way of reply, briskly departing to the adjoining office. The judge turns to the window. The trees in the parkway below have passed from the winsome colors of spring to the more declarative shades of summer.
He knows Cassie is correct about one thing. They need a decision. In the end, this job really has only one essential requirement: Make up your mind. And don’t look back. Decisiveness in many ways is more important than being right. A couple of times each year, George is reversed by the state Supreme Court, whose downstate contingent often delights in putting the big-city judges in their places. It stings, but all you can say is, ‘That’s what they think.’ Power alone makes the Supremes correct. The law at those moments feels as arbitrary as a dream. But there’s no process at all without a decision.
Yet when he tries to force himself back to the Warnovits case, he cannot escape his own stake in it. His reflections return him instantly to Virginia, and the dormitory library where he encountered Lolly Viccino the morning after. Responding to her request for cigarettes, George had come back from the canteen with a package of Winstons, as well as a fried-egg sandwich and a nickel Coke. She ate wolfishly, then dabbed a napkin daintily at the corners of her mouth before using it to dry her running nose.
‘At least there’s one gentleman around here,’ she said. ‘The girls said all the boys down here were real gentlemen, and I decided I’d go see for myself.’ She worried her head at that thought. That was as close as they were ever to come to speaking about the night before. He did not know then, or now, what portion of the events she remembered or how clearly. Lolly lit a cigarette and quickly veiled herself in smoke.
‘I was wondering,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘If I could give you a hand getting home?’
Her face flashed to him. Clearly he had offended her, making it sound as if she were unwelcome. He expected a rebuke, but in a second her small brown eyes, initially hard as glass, were swimming. She crushed her hand to her nose and with a single gasp began to cry. That explained her appearance, George realized, the rheumy eyes, the drooling nose. Her look was that of someone who’d been crying for days.
She pulled the sleeve of her blouse over the heel of her palm and wiped her face with it.
‘Just go away,’ she told him. She swore, repeating the direction.
When he checked back in an hour, she had not moved. She was leaning against the oak paneling, smoking. Nearly half the pack was gone. She gave George a lethal look, then, recognizing him, grimaced as if to withdraw it. Apparently other young men had awoken and gawked from the library’s threshold.
He sat on the floor beside her.
‘My life stinks,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe how much my life stinks.’
‘Because?’
‘I flunked out of Columa this week,’ she said, referring to the women’s college down the road. ‘I mean, I was “asked to leave.” You know how they put things.’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s not as if I studied. I knew it was going to happen. But-’ She began to cry again. The way she went from hard to soft in a bare instant baffled him. But this time she managed to eke out the story. It was fairly simple: she had nowhere to go. Her father deserted the family a decade before. Last year, her mother met a man, and as soon as Lolly left for college, they married. Now the mother did not want her daughter to return for more than a day or two. She wasn’t going to bear the brunt of Lolly’s failures by putting her new marriage under any unneeded strain. Lolly would have to make do on her own.
At the time, George sensed there was much here he was too young to fully comprehend. It was unimaginable that his parents would ever spurn him this way. He knew the kinds of adjectives his mother would reflexively apply to families like Lolly’s. But what he could not fully absorb then was what she had told him about herself. He was yet to see hundreds, even thousands, of young people turn rejection into self-loathing, a force of indiscriminate destructiveness. Nothing that had happened to Lolly Viccino the day and night before was a mystery to George Mason now.
Then he understood only that she was unhappier than he was. He was always frightened by friends and classmates sunk in misery. It was an omen. A few wrong turns in his own mental fun house, and he could be similarly overwhelmed. His disagreements with his strict father, his mother’s disappointments-if he surrendered to them fully, he could be like this girl, a village in flames. And so he sat beside Lolly Viccino in silence for several minutes, lecturing himself with various Christian sayings his father would have employed but still inexpressibly relieved not to be her.
9
At the end of term, the work flow is heavy. Drafts of opinions arrive from almost every other chamber in the court, and George has to make prudential decisions about which are worth a special word from him by way of concurrence or dissent, bearing in mind the limits on what either he or the clerks can get done in the time remaining.
By Thursday afternoon he has not left his chair, even for lunch. He has interrupted himself only for calls to Patrice. He brought her home last night, but she remains under restrictions for three more days. She may not go out, since she must yet remain several feet from other people. In the same vein, the doctors insist that for the next three nights George and she should not share the same bed. They both enjoyed their jokes about radioactive love, but despite a longing glance, Patrice ultimately pointed him to the study, where he slept on the pullout sofa. The good news is that she is starting to feel less lethargic since being allowed to restart the synthetic thyroxine.
About to reach for the phone again, George is surprised by a squall of angry voices resounding from the corridor. John and Cassie look into his chambers from their small adjoining office, then run for the hall. George follows. Dineesha is there too. Abel is having words with a man. He looks close to thirty and is, as they say, ‘g’d up’ in full banger regalia: shiny white starter jacket, sagging trousers, rows, and a derringer-size pistol in gold around his neck. Urgent voices screech from the radio on Abel’s belt as the young man swats at him every time Abel reaches for him. The banger knows the part about a good offense being the best defense.
“Get yo’ fuckin’ dogs back, Chuck, otherwise they gone be some drama.”
The elevator dings, and two more khaki officers come tearing down the marble corridor. In an instant, another car delivers three additional members of Court Security. All have their radios on at full volume, and the young man is quickly surrounded and cuffed.
“I asked him ten times what he was doing here,” Abel tells Murph Jones, a tall black man who is Marina’s second in command.
“I was lookin’ for the baf’room,” the guy in cuffs responds.
“Plenty of men’s rooms downstairs,” Abel says. Access to the appellate court’s separate elevators is restricted, with khaki guards requiring ID in the lobby from anyone trying to go up. But the stairwells on either side of the building are open because of the fire code. Strangers, including many who look like this young man, are walking around up here all the time, even ambling down the judges’ private corridor.
“It’s a crowd down there,” he says. During the 10:00 A.M. court calls, the lower floors housing the criminal courtrooms teem like a rush-hour bus station. “I gotta go.”
“And what brought you downstairs?” Murph asks.
“You know, man. Got a turnout. On a case.” He means he has a required court appearance on a pending charge. The point is to be sure he hasn’t skipped bail.
“What kind of beef?” Murph asks.
“Some rudipoop 323. I ain’ gone catch no bit for it.” Mob Action is the violation he’s referring to. Living while
