Limitations (7 page)

He had thought then that he was getting in on the ground floor-before hordes of fellows his age were pursuing her, perhaps even before Patrice realized how much better she could do. There is never an ounce of false modesty when George declares that he married up, took a wife who is more capable than he. But Patrice was far ahead of him-as always. She knew what he was and had plans of her own. She wanted someone solid, faithful, supportive-and impressed. She had gone to architecture school, been the standout he expected, and then heaved most of it out when their second son was born. When she resumed practice, she worked on residences-not the highest art of architecture, pop tunes when she could have been composing symphonies. But she never complained. Patrice has always known her desires in a far more determined way than most human beings.

He has reached their house in Nearing. They have lived here almost a quarter of a century, having bought the place not long after George entered private practice. It was a starter home, but over the years it became Patrice’s canvas. They have undertaken four separate renovations, each one of which Patrice, unlike her husband, greeted as if it were the arrival of spring. What began as a flat-roofed Prairie-style ranch is now a two-and-a-half-story house graced with Arts and Crafts details and some touches of Wright, and is more than three times its original size.

With the taste of a burrito still somehow lodged in his salivary glands, George stops in the kitchen for a bottle of water before heading to his study to sort what the postman has delivered and to check his e-mail. George remains slightly vexed by Patrice’s forbidding reaction when he compared Warnovits with his own encounter decades ago. His wife at moments is wont to demand perfection of him. He is, fundamentally, her beautiful George- nearly as pretty as she is, well mannered, well liked, the senior member of a family that, as one of their friends said long ago, looks as if it came off the cover of a J. Crew catalog.

This has worked out well for them, because he is equally demanding of himself, a tendency that might well have been alleviated by age, were it not for going on the bench. Judging, to George’s mind, is essentially an arrogant enterprise. As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system-the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges-would take care of that; they didn’t need his help. But a judge’s duty is to declare right and wrong, a daring undertaking, because it contains an implicit warranty that you are above the weaknesses you denounce. After remembering what happened forty years ago in a refrigerator box, he regards that as a pitiable charade.

The incident, confined to recollected fragments for decades, is now coming back to him in larger pieces. And as he settles at his desk, George abruptly recalls that it had not ended with Joan, the young woman who was to become Mario’s wife, cracking wise about life.

‘Sweet Christ crucified, there’s a girl asleep in the library,’ the dorm proctor, Franklin Grigson, told George the following day. At 8:00 A.M., the old dorm languished in the somnolent air of a Sunday morning. Grigson and George might have been the only two young men awake after the night of partying. Grigson was heading to church. George was returning from the men’s room, where he had been sick yet again. He was better now, but his head still felt like the clanger in a ringing steeple bell.

‘Do us all a favor,’ Grigson said. ‘Find whoever she belongs to and have him get her out of here.’ If the girl was discovered, the unforgiving deans would revoke parietal hours for the dorm for the balance of the semester.

George crept to the library door. It was a handsome room, wainscoted in light oak in which generations of collegians had occasionally engraved their initials. The recessed bookcases were fully encumbered with old leather-bound volumes. On the torn maroon sofa farthest from the door, a girl slept. She was a slender, auburn-haired creature, in a raveled tartan skirt. A huge hole had eaten through the calf of one leg of her sheer tights. With just a glance, George knew who she was.

Upstairs, he pounded on Hugh Brierly’s door until Brierly appeared on the threshold, clad only in his pajama bottoms.

‘You lie,’ Brierly said. He claimed that he had escorted her to the dorm’s front steps and offered to find a ride, but that the young woman was sobering up and said she would look after herself.

‘You didn’t take her home?’ George asked. A gentleman-several of them-could have his way with a young lady in a refrigerator carton, but it was a breach of a code George had been taught was sacred not to see her back to her house.

‘Don’t be a pussy, Mason. I don’t know where she’s from. She showed up at the football game. What was I supposed to do? Escort her back to Scott?’ he said, referring to the stadium.

‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ George asked.

‘Me? You had as much to do with her as I did. You get rid of the slut,’ Brierly said and shut the door. Remembering the fistful of ‘rent’ Brierly had collected the night before, George pounded for some time, but Hugh would not open up. To the best of George’s memory, they never spoke again.

Downstairs, the young woman had awakened. She was a mess. Sitting on the threadbare Oriental carpet, she braced herself against one wall, trying to separate the patches of her long hair gummed together by the detritus of what had passed the night before. From her reddened features, he took it that she had allergies or a cold. The large gold pin that was meant to hold her wraparound kilt had been reinserted sideways, and there was a bright magenta stain from Hi-C covering the upper portion of her blouse. When she saw George in the doorway, her look was piercing.

“Whatta you want?”

The question, as he recalled, had struck him dumb. Because he had realized suddenly that there was in fact something he desired from her. Now, forty-some years later, sitting in the large leather desk chair that once was in his law office, George Mason is still. Along the pathways of memory, he crawls like a bomb expert creeping down a tunnel. It is a sensitive operation. A false move will destroy his chance, because he hopes for a second to inhabit the skin of that young man who was still unformed at the core. What had he wanted from her, as he stood at the threshold? Not forgiveness. It would flatter him too much to think his state of moral understanding was so far ahead of his times. In those days, it never once occurred to him that she might have been in any sense unwilling. He must have felt some lash of shame for sinning and some embarrassment at seeing her. Perhaps he was visited by an impulse to blame her, to call her names, as Brierly had. But standing twenty feet from her in the old library, preposterously, improbably, he had wanted one thing more than any other: connection. He had been with her in public, when she had been virtually insensate. But they had been joined in that fundamental way. Euclid said that a straight line is the most direct connection between two points, no matter how random or distant, and at that moment George Mason would have told you that it was a rule about sex as much as about geometry. Was it instinctive that a bounty of tenderness went with the act? Looking at her, he felt acute despair that she did not even know his name.

And so he introduced himself. He approached and, lacking any other gesture, offered his hand. She took it limply.

‘I wonder if I can help you,’ he said.

For all his good intentions, the question provoked a ripple of despair that briefly withered her red face before she contained herself. For reasons George understood only too well, her fingertips then pressed each of her temples.

‘Get me cigarettes,’ she said. She lifted the empty pack that had been squashed in her right hand and flung it at the sofa. ‘I need a cigarette.’

He waited there, still feeling everything he had an instant before.

‘You didn’t say your name,’ he told her.

She made a face but succumbed, clearly regarding this as the price she had to pay.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘Great, George. I’m Lolly. Viccino.’ She turned away and let her head fall back against the wall. ‘I’m Lolly Viccino, and I’d love a cigarette.’

As he sits recalling all of this, a clear image of the four boys from Glen Brae in the front row of the courtroom this morning returns to him. Their supporters and defense lawyers have trumpeted each young man’s good character over the years, and in their dark suits, their hair freshly trimmed, Sapperstein had done his best to make them look their parts. No amount of defense burnishing can really render Jacob Warnovits appealing. He is clearly a thug with a long disciplinary record, including four earlier arrests, in high school and college. But the other three defendants, all now with their B.A. s, have each had notable achievements. One, a junior Phi Beta Kappa at an eastern college, had been planning to join the staff of a local Congresswoman until his indictment. Another was the founder of a program to teach inner-city kids to ice skate, which he still runs as a volunteer. The last, up to the time of his conviction, worked on the athletic staff at the Mid-Ten university he’d attended on a hockey scholarship.

From the bench, George had scrutinized the four. One young man was aging fast; his lank hair was thinning, and he had plumped up to the point that he no longer looked like an athlete. The judge hoped that was Warnovits, although he knew that nature seldom follows the design of justice. But the other three were handsome emblems of their potential, who watched their fates being argued with the quick, disbelieving eyes you might expect from anyone finding that one hour seven years ago still held the power to determine the rest of his life.

Seeing them in his mind’s eye, George draws the contrast to the young man in the dormitory library forty years before. Why assume his character was any better than theirs? Isn’t it likely that one of them-even all of them-felt some decent impulse, shame or caring for Mindy DeBoyer, in the aftermath? Not enough, of course, to set it right, to call an ambulance or her parents. But when they redressed her like a sleeping child, or bore her unconscious body down the stairs, is it possible that one or two did not respond to the warm weight of humanity?

A sound interrupts, a chirping from his computer to signal the arrival of new e-mail. He and his sons exchange messages every night about their mother, her mood and her condition. A photo of the two boys together, each buoyant and handsome, is on his desk. Patrice and he had done this part very well, although even on this subject Patrice can’t resist occasional sarcasm. ‘Where did I go wrong?’ she asks whenever she confesses that both their sons are lawyers. Peter split the difference and practices construction law here in town. He recently became engaged. Pierce, the younger, is with a giant entertainment firm in L.A.

But as soon as the e-mail client opens, George sees that neither is his correspondent. The From and Subject lines bear the now familiar omens. The words of #1, buried after the returned-message notice, are ‘Good advice,’ followed by the blue letters of another link. Clicking, George finds himself at the site of a well-known life insurance company. There the page header reads: ‘If you’re a married man, plan accordingly. Your wife is quite likely to live longer than you.’

George closes his eyes, trying to take in the fact that #1 has invaded his home. But for the moment that seems no worse than an annoyance. His spirit has not yet fully returned from Virginia forty years before, where, like a wandering ghost, it is still dumbly seeking Lolly Viccino.

When George Mason drives into the Judges’ Section of the parking structure on Wednesday morning, Abel Birtz is waiting by the third-floor stairway to greet him. Abel appeared in the judge’s chambers late yesterday afternoon, about an hour after Marina left, heaping himself onto the green Naugahyde sofa in the reception area. ‘I’m your detail, Judge,’ he explained. George did his best to appear pleased.

‘Sorry you have to waste your time with this, Abel.’

‘Hell no, Judge. We take this serious.’

From the start, George recognized the flaw in Marina’s plan to assign him a bodyguard. Court Security’s resources are too strapped to waste anyone worthwhile on this kind of thumb twiddling. Abel, a former Kindle copper, is garrulous and inoffensive, but he has gone to pasture. His khaki sport coat, emblazoned at the pocket with the court’s seal, would need another yard of fabric to close across his massive belly. Greeting the judge yesterday, he required several attempts to hike himself forward on the sofa cushion before arriving on his feet, his large, square face considerably reddened. And he clearly has an arthritic hip. He walks with a swinging gait as they cross the covered gangway between the parking garage and the courthouse. God help them both, George thinks, if #1 strikes and they need to run for their lives.

And there is another problem with Abel’s presence, which does not strike George until he takes in the vexed look with which Dineesha greets him as they push through the door to chambers. Though it is no fault of either, Dineesha and Abel have an uncomfortable history.

George and Patrice first met Dineesha more than two decades ago at PTA meetings, which Dineesha attended as the mother of Jeb, a scholarship student at the Morris School. Jeb, who now practices rehabilitative medicine in Denver, was in the same fourth-grade class as Peter, the Masons’ elder son. But it was Dineesha’s oldest boy, Zeke, who served to fortify her relationship with George. Knowing what he did for a living, Dineesha sought George out when Zeke was arrested. It was not Zeke’s first bust, but these charges, for having supposedly joined other gangbangers in burning down the apartment of a young man attempting to quit, carried a mandatory prison term. It was a bad beef on a bad kid, mud the cops were willing to throw at the wall because it was time something stuck. Maybe Zeke had been there, but if so, George became convinced he was merely a spectator.

George took the case without fee and won, but Dineesha insisted on doing overflow typing in his office as a form of payment. She was soon a permanent addition to George’s practice-and so was Zeke. As a first-year in Charlottesville, George had fought fiercely with classmates about the Civil Rights Act, which he was sure would leave the path to progress for Negroes unimpeded. Work hard. Play by the rules. Get an education. He had no understanding of the perils for young black men, even those like Zeke, who could not have been raised by more loving or ambitious parents. Who knew where Zeke’s problems started? Probably by being less academically gifted than his two younger sibs. It is an inevitable rule of family life, as George sees it, that children occupy the space provided, and in Dineesha’s house the available space turned out to be a cell in Rudyard penitentiary, where Zeke has been twice. Back on the street at the moment, he still shows up at his parents’ home often for a meal and money. George has given up his lectures to his assistant on tough love. But the sight of Abel ten feet from Dineesha’s desk can only refresh her heartbreak. It was Abel Birtz, then a property crimes detective, who pinched Zeke on the burglary bit that first led him to do time.