“I’m not sold on Corazon, Marina. Frankly, I still think whoever’s doing this is just talking dirty.” The paranoid crackpots are the correspondents George has learned to fear-they attack thinking they’re protecting themselves. But a rational person intent on mayhem does not send warnings, simply because they’d make reprisals harder to carry out. George is convinced that #1’s only aim is to roil his peace of mind, a goal far too civilized for Corazon.
“I take this creep seriously, Judge.”
Inclined to debate, George chooses not to answer. He’s long understood that people in law enforcement yearn to see themselves as knight protectors-you could bet a goodly sum, for example, that Marina Giornale had grown up reading everything she could about St. Joan. The more gravely Marina takes these messages, the more important they make her.
“And the Bureau and my people agree on one thing,” she says.
“Which is?”
“It’s time for a detail.”
“No,” says George, as he has said before to the idea of a security detail. A bodyguard would be an infernal nuisance-and far worse, something that couldn’t be hidden from Patrice. He has said nothing to his wife about these threats, and he does not intend to. Her own condition provides enough worry at the moment. “I can’t handle that at home, Marina.”
Aware of Patrice’s illness, Marina offers a lingering sympathetic look before massaging her jaw to contemplate.
“Look, Judge, how about this? Your house is your house. I can’t tell you what to do there. You’re not listed, right?”
An unlisted phone has been required since George’s days as a defense lawyer, the better to avoid the 3:00 A.M. call from the white-collar client who’d just awoken from a nightmare of prison.
“But when you get to County property, Judge, you’re on my turf. So all due respect and genuflecting several times, and doing the dance of the seven veils”-she smiles in her apple-cheeked way, a winning child-“I still gotta have somebody with you. When I run through the God-forbids in my head, Your Honor, I can’t even imagine how I’d explain leaving you uncovered.”
She is saying that he can’t require her to engage in the law enforcement equivalent of malpractice. He slaps his thighs in resignation, and Marina quickly offers her hand.
George sees her out. As he opens the door, Banion is there, a draft opinion in hand that has just arrived from another judge’s chambers. On the threshold, Marina turns back to both of them.
“Say, you drew quite a crowd this morning.” She’s referring to the horde trying to gain admission to the oral argument in Warnovits, which her staff was required to handle.
Recalled, the case immediately nags at the judge. It’s like a bad meal, a fight with your spouse, something carried with you that douses your mood all day.
“I hate that case,” he responds. This is no news to Banion. The judge assigned John to review the portions of the videotape that Sapperstein said should not have been shown to the jury after George reached the point where he could not stand watching any more. Ever impassive, John shows little more than a mild frown. But Marina draws back.
“Why’s that? I thought deciding the big ones is what you guys live for.”
She’s right about that. In fact, it’s part of the larger riddle about his reactions to the case. George wanted to be a judge because the job matters, because you are trusted to be the conscience of your community and to apply the time-ennobled traditions of the law. He often feels the weight of those responsibilities, yet seldom regrets them. But now he gives his head a decorous shake, pretending that propriety rather than utter mystification prevents him from trying to explain.
3
George races down the judges’ private corridor toward the conference chambers adjacent to the appellate courtroom. He is actually a few minutes ahead of schedule for his meeting with Purfoyle and Koll, but he wants to phone Patrice, and he stops by a long window where cell reception is better. It is a goofy rectitude, he knows, uncomfortably reminiscent of his father, to avoid personal calls from the County line in his chambers, but as a judge he never shakes the expectation that he must lead by example in matters large and small. He wears a suit and tie each day and requires similar apparel of his staff, notwithstanding the more casual attire favored by his colleagues when they do not have to appear in the courtroom. He is determined that, if nothing else, he will always look the part: tall, trim, gray-haired, and handsome in a conventional middle-aged way. Standard-issue white guy.
“Fine. Tired. Not a bad day at all,” Patrice says when he reaches her at the hospital. He has tried her several times this morning, but the line has been constantly engaged. At the moment, Patrice’s interaction with the human race is confined to the telephone. “They think my Geiger levels may be down enough tonight to let you in the room. Most women want a man’s heart, Georgie. I bet you were never counting on risking your thyroid.”
“Gladly, mate,” he answers, a term of mutual endearment. “Any organ you like.” The Masons have always relished each other’s company and the way they generally ride along on a current of low-voltage humor. But at the moment, his druthers are to be more sincere. To many men George knows, marriage is a war against their longings. Yet he is among the happy few. For more than thirty years now, he has been able to say that he has wanted no one more than Patrice.
These sentiments swamp him frequently these days. The nodule on Patrice’s thyroid was discovered on February 10, and when he stood in a store a day later reading the humid poetry on several valentines, he actually wept. But at the moment he feels obliged to keep this torrent of affection to himself. For Patrice right now the only acceptable behavior is what she deems ‘normal’-no dramatics and certainly no proclamations of a kind that Patrice, being Patrice, would deride as ‘soft and runny.’
“How about if I bring dinner?” George asks. “We can eat together. Any cravings?”
“No more limp green beans. Something with spice.”
“Mexican?”
“Perfect. After eight. That’ll be thirty-six hours. But they won’t let you stay long, mate.”
Yesterday at 6:00 A.M., he’d brought Patrice to West Bank Lutheran-Sinai. There she’d swallowed a large white pill full of iodine-131. Now she may not have any physical contact with other human beings. The radiation broiling through her and eradicating every thyroid cell, especially the wayward ones that have wandered dangerously into other portions of her body, might also kill the healthy gland in someone else. The treatment has a long record of success, but it is disquieting to experience. At the moment, Patrice would be less isolated on a lepers’ island, where at least she would have company. At West Bank, she is housed alone in a small, white room of cinder block laid over a lining of lead. The decorating aims to avoid the sterile appearance of a hospital room, with the result that the space instead has the dismal look of a cheap motel, with scarred furniture and a thin chenille spread on the bed. Any item that will exit the area must be destroyed by special staff or quarantined- the books and magazines Patrice has been reading, her undergarments, and the leavings in the bedpan she must use. Her pulse and temperature are monitored electronically, and the orderlies serve her meals through a lead flap in the door.
Yesterday, even George was not permitted in her room. Instead, his wife and he spoke through telephone handsets on either side of a large window cut into the wall adjoining her bed, on which Patrice can raise the shade. For George, the comparison with his professional life was unavoidable. How many clients in how many institutions had he conversed with this way? And how many of their fellow inmates had he surreptitiously eyed with the usual mix of empathy and judgment, as the prisoners pawed the glass or wept, with a child or lover on the other side, feeling only now the sharpest tooth of confinement, and thus of crime? With his own wife isolated this way, George could not shake a miserable, low conviction that he had failed. Their conversation was listless and unsettled. The glass between them might well have been her illness. After thirty-three years, it has turned out that their life together is a matter of grace rather than mutual will. Patrice is sick and he is not. ‘There is really no such thing,’ one social worker warned a support group for spouses, ‘as having cancer together.’