In the late 1980s, the Third District Appellate Court was relocated by the County Board. Litigation had become a growth business in Kindle County, much like everywhere else in America, and the need for more civil courtrooms in the Superior Court building, known as the Temple, had forced the appellate judges to take up residence a mile away in the Central Branch Courthouse, where criminal cases were tried. Bolstered by Reagan-era law enforcement money, the County constructed a large criminal court annex. The appellate judges were allotted most of the grand spaces in the old building, which had been erected with the rich architectural detail characteristic of public projects during the Depression, when skilled tradesmen worked cheap. Nonetheless, many of the jurists were unhappy to move out of Center City. Beyond U.S. 843, the area is blighted, sometimes dangerous, and offers few decent spots for lunch. But George Mason, who began his professional career in this courthouse as a Deputy State Defender, relishes every day the fact that he has come full circle.
Now, in the adjacent concrete parking structure, Judge Mason throws his briefcase down on the front seat of his car. He triggers the ignition so he can put on the air-it is another close evening in early June-but he has no intention of driving anywhere yet. The 1994 Lexus LS 400 is a remaining prize of his flush times in private practice, and he maintains the car devotedly, in part because it is the only space in the world he thinks of as exclusively his. Here at the end of the day, he often reflects on cases and personal issues, when he is finally free from the robe, whose weight he feels everywhere in the courthouse, whether he is wearing it or not.
The gloomy parking garage would not strike many as a welcoming spot for reflection, especially since the Central Branch Courthouse is where many of the County’s most dangerous citizens must report monthly while they are out on bail. Although the garage is heavily patrolled by Marina’s forces during business hours, perpetual budget cuts have left only a small crew on duty after 6:00 P.M., when George customarily returns. Through the years, the garage has been the scene of stickups, beatings, and more than one shooting, involving Kindle County’s eternally warring gangs, the Black Saints Disciples, the Gangster Outlaws, and the Almighty Latin Nation, and their constituent ‘sets.’ ‘Get in and get out’ is the standard advice.
At the moment, the judge has his eye on two kids, one long, one short, both in sweatshirts, who have popped up in his rear- and side-view mirrors several times. From their looks, he takes it that the two are probably here for late-afternoon drug court. At one point, he feared they were actually circling him, but they disappeared soon afterward. Either way, he is not about to move. The vague tingle of lurking danger has always been one of the attractions of the garage for George, whose entire professional life has been founded on the conviction that he knows himself best under these shadows.
The driver’s seat in this car is as large and soft as a piece of den furniture, and he motors it back from the wheel, reclining slightly, so he can ask himself the question that has waited for hours. What is it that lingers with him about People v. Warnovits? ‘This case is me,’ he almost declared to his colleagues several hours before. Me? He had meant to say ‘my,’ on his way to offering, as a good-natured jest, ‘This case is my problem.’ Even that remark seems oddly proprietary in retrospect, since his role in the ideal is to speak for all three judges.
And so the inner tuning fork has been struck. He continues, eyes closed meditatively, trolling his memory until what he has long sought is suddenly snagged. His grin with the first recollection fades as the problem becomes apparent.
The event took place more than forty years ago, in a different world. In Charlottesville in those days, no one would have found it humorous to hear him say as a first-year-never ‘freshman’-that he was there to become a gentleman and a scholar. He attended class in a sport coat and tie. Like all the men in his family, he was colorblind. His mother had given him an index card explaining how to match his clothes, but he misplaced it and stepped out of the old dorm each morning expecting to be greeted with smirks.
He had not been happy then. The chafing and boiling that would ultimately drive him here, a thousand miles from home, had started. He could not have named everything that bothered him-his mother’s relentless social pretensions, his father’s rigid adherence to faith and honor as the credo of a Southern gentleman-but coming of age amid the unyielding proprieties of southern Virginia, where there were few open questions, whether about God or Yankees or Negroes, felt like growing up in a lightless closet. By high school, he was determined to escape and read Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, bards of the liberation that he believed in as a matter of spirit but that he had no idea how to practice.
Which was why it mattered so much to him that he was a virgin. He was supposed to be, of course, if you had asked his minister or his teachers or his parents. It was 1964. But both body and soul yearned for freedom.
Six weeks into his initial term, the college had its first party weekend. Having forsaken his high school girlfriend, a pretty but narrow young woman, he watched with envy as other hometown girls arrived on campus. George was miserable and alone. The reliable bond of male affection that had been forged in those first weeks was broken now by the preeminent claim exerted by the other half of the species.
As recompense for abandoning their double, George’s roommate had bought him a cheap bottle of Scotch. Alcohol was one of the grave sins condemned in his home that he had been quickest to take up, and George was soon drunk on hard liquor for the first time in his life. By now it was nearly 10:00 P.M. The couples had finished their restaurant dinners, danced in the sweaty mash of fraternity parties, and were retreating to the dorm for the moments that mattered most to many of these young men, before parietal hours ended and the women had to return to the local rooming houses or the dorms at a nearby female college where they had been put up. With the Scotch under his arm, George careered through the halls. The doors to most of the rooms were cracked open an inch or two in accord with university rules, allowing tracks from Meet the Beatles! to scream out from the hi-fis within. Knowing that men and women were in each other’s arms, necking, groping, running the bases, George was battered with longing.
In that condition, he ran into his best friend, Mario Alfieri. Mario had come here from Queens on a wrestling scholarship and seemed as out of place in genteel Charlottesville as a platypus. Boisterous, profane, wisecracking, he was the renegade George wanted to be, and they had developed a quick appreciation for each other. Coming downstairs, carrying a bucket of ice, Mario grabbed George’s elbow.
‘You won’t believe this,’ he said, repeating it several times as he bent with laughter. ‘Brierly’s got a girl up in the second-floor hallway pulling a train.’
George knew the term, but still he looked at Mario without comprehension.
‘No lie,’ Mario said. ‘She’s out in a refrigerator box, entertaining the troops. So, Georgie boy, listen to me. You’re saved. Saved.’ Mario knew George’s barren sexual history. ‘Get yourself up there.’
‘Did you go?’
‘I have a date, knucklehead.’ George had met the young woman briefly. She was the sister of another wrestler whom Mario had been persuaded to invite blind on the promise that she was as irreverent as he was. In person, Joan had proved even prettier than her snapshot, but she was also one of those rare women who seemed defiant even standing still. ‘Five to one, I get nothing off her,’ Mario had whispered to George.
‘What about the syph?’ George asked now, contemplating what supposedly was occurring upstairs.
‘What about getting laid?’ Mario reached back to his wallet and slapped the emergency prophylactic always there into George’s hand. ‘Greater love,’ Mario said. He pushed his friend to the staircase with both hands.
Coming off the landing, George found a scene that seemed entirely improbable, notwithstanding Mario’s description. A huge carton, about eight feet long and four feet high, had been wedged across the threshold of Hugh Brierly’s room at the far end of the hall. Projecting between the open flaps on one side, George saw a white shirttail and four naked legs, two with pairs of men’s trousers and boxer shorts bunched at the ankles. The boy was on his toes while the box lurched minutely with his efforts.
At least two dozen men were lined up on either side of the hallway to witness this, all with their ties loosened and drinks in hand. They jolted in laughter and slapped one another’s shoulders, shouting out lewd one-liners. But none of them, no matter what, took his eyes off the box. It was as if it contained the secret of fire. Every now and then, one or two would break away to peer into the open end of the carton and shout obscene encouragement to the fellow inside.
George crept closer until he realized that he’d chosen the side of the hall where the line had formed. The nearer he came to the front, the more he felt the frantic charge that seemed to grip all of the spectators. A dull knocking sounded from the box, and at one point as George waited, a boy inside suddenly screamed ‘Score!’ The men in the corridor erupted in laughter that seemed wild enough to loosen the bricks of the building.
In front of him in line was Tom McMillan, another first-year. ‘I’m going again,’ he told George. The girl, McMillan explained, had appeared at the football game alone, apparently ditched by her date. She had started talking to Brierly and Goren, two boys from the dorm, both dateless too, and returned here with them. The three drank for hours, until they were all witless from the favored libation of the weekend, a cocktail of grain alcohol and fruit punch consumed directly from a Hi-C can. At some point, the girl had said that she’d be everybody’s date, and that had become a motif for their increasingly lewd conversation, until the boys began to press the idea that she could not disappoint them. Brierly had found this refrigerator box, and the girl had supposedly climbed in with him, laughing.
As George neared the head of the line, a first-year named Rogers Peterson came charging down the hall toward Brierly.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Jesus. Some of us have our dates up here. We can’t have this going on. What’s wrong with all of you? What should we tell our girls?’
‘Tell them not to look,’ Brierly said, and the mob howled, jeering Peterson as he retreated.
The throng of onlookers was growing fast. Word was spreading. Fellows in ties and blazers had actually stepped out on their dates for a few minutes and come running. George could feel his anxieties wearing through the effects of the Scotch, and he noticed that there were far more men watching than awaiting a turn. But the line was growing behind him fast enough that he knew there was no time for indecision.
When McMillan reached the head, Brierly waved him away.
‘No seconds, not yet.’
McMillan was still protesting when a short, obese fellow George did not know backed out of the box, refastening his trousers.
‘What a swamp!’ he said, and the hallway again rocked with laughter.
Brierly pointed at George. ‘Next,’ he said, ‘in the tunnel of love.’ Only then did George see that Hugh was collecting money, ‘Rent,’ Brierly said. ‘It’s my box.’
George dumbly picked ten dollars, a week’s spending money, out of his wallet.
‘You have five minutes, Mason. Do your best.’
He did not even touch his belt to lower his trousers until he had crept inside, where he was overwhelmed by the intense odor. Someone, probably the girl, had vomited, and the smell was heavy in the close air, which was sodden with overheated breaths and perspiration. The box was so low he could not really kneel over her and had to support himself with one hand to pull down his pants. The girl was talking to herself, half sentences, song lyrics, he thought, a high-pitched mumbo jumbo. He made out one phrase she sang: ‘I want to hold your hand.’
She addressed him when he touched her. ‘Hey, honey,’ she said in a lyrical, drunken, carefree voice, seeming to relish this fleeting moment of anesthesia.
He wanted to make the most of his opportunity and explored the girl’s skinny body without much tenderness. A wool skirt was in a lump at her waist, and a silky undergarment had been pushed up to her shoulders. Lying down, she had only the smallest swell of breasts and tiny nipples like peas.
When he had first crawled into the carton, revolted by the heat and the smells, it occurred to him that he had to do no more than push his pants down to his ankles. None of the boys in the hallway would know what had happened. He could rock a bit, then talk the good game that so many fools talked on Sunday morning. But that was the point. No one would know. He was free. And although he was drilled by terror, he was going ahead, because he wanted to get this moment over with. There were two groups in the world, the ones who had and the ones who hadn’t, and he was convinced that every uncertainty of his age would be abated if he crossed that divide.
When he entered her, after a terrible moment of fumbling, his body was divided by a scream from his own heart. With startling clarity, he heard warnings of damnation. But those were the voices he was determined to be free from, and so he continued and finished that way, determined, somehow isolated from the sensations of pleasure. The girl, as he remembered, had rested a hand on his back and made some effort to move below him.
When he was done, he refastened his trousers.
‘Are you okay?’ he whispered before he crawled out.
‘Oh, honey,’ she answered.
‘No, really. Are you okay?’ He touched her cheek for the first time.
She was singing again, with a sudden clarity that frightened him.
His eyes stung when he emerged into the blazing fluorescence of the hallway. A few men reached out to pat his back and joked about his speed-he might not have been inside two minutes-but he wanted to escape the hungry pack. They had no idea what had actually happened. It was not what they thought or what they were celebrating. A moment later he was downstairs, trying to make whatever he could out of having passed through the membrane between his fantasies and his life. The Scotch was starting to back up on him.
Mario Alfieri’s blind date, Joan-with whom Mario was destined to spend the next thirty-seven years, until he died in the second World Trade Center tower on 9/11-appeared from the door of the bath designated for the weekend as the ladies’ room. She nearly ran into George while he was still trying to jam his shirttails into his trousers.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked.
He could not find a discreet answer. ‘Life is strange,’ he told her.
As much of a wise guy as Mario, Joan eyed him at length and asked, ‘Compared to what?’
Over the decades, when Judge Mason has loitered with the incident in recollection-and that is not often-he has dismissed it under the rubric of amusing follies of youth. Everyone had a first experience, and half of them were crazy. Faltering. Unsuccessful. Life and love moved forward to a better footing. He has not fully considered this moment in years and never attached to it the name he is required to apply today: a crime.
He reconsiders the word, the idea. Crime? He is a lawyer, a master of distinctions. It is not the same at all. Yet the incident is too close to the case he heard this morning for any comfort. The girl was drunk. Virtually incoherent. Her actions might have passed for consent in those days. But not now. The men in that dormitory hallway, including most especially him, had, in every sense of the antique phrase, taken advantage of her.
In the tomb darkness of the parking garage, George Mason feels how harshly his heart is beating. This is serious. Because he realizes that he has suddenly lost one of the comforts of middle age. There is joint pain, fading hearing, and trouble recalling names-even cancer. But generally speaking, not this. Yet now his soul seems as insubstantial as a fume. At the age of fifty-nine, George Mason wonders who he is.