Scott Turow - Limitations

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.