Scott Turow - Limitations

Why? he asks himself. But he’s already dialing. It rings four times, and whoever says hello sounds a bit breathless, as if she ran.

“My name is George Mason. Judge George Mason. I’m hoping to speak to a woman named Lolly Viccino-or who used to go by that name.”

Time passes. “Speaking.”

“And are you the Lolly Viccino who attended Columa College in 1964?” he asks, although he knows he’s found her from the little wrinkle of a Tidewater accent in the lone word she’s uttered.

Lolly Viccino, in the meantime, is engaged in calculations of her own.

“Is this about money? Are you raising money for that place? Because, brother, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“No, ma’am,” he answers, realizing that he himself sounds a little as he might have forty years ago. “Hardly that. No.”

“And you say you’re a judge?”

He repeats his title. “In DuSable.”

“DuSable. I’ve never been there. Are you sure you’ve got the right person?”

“No, no,” he says. “This isn’t official business.”

“Oh,” she says. “I hoped you were calling to tell me I’d inherited a fortune from a long-lost relative.” She laughs then, a little trick of sound raveled by bitterness.

“Afraid not,” he says.

“Well, why then?”

He finally says he’d been an undergrad at Charlottesville.

“And did I know you?” she asks.

“I think so.”

“Did we go out? I’m not sure I dated anybody there.”

“No,” he agrees.

“How was it we met?”

So here he is. There’s no way he can get the words out of his mouth. And it would be cruel to remind her of something she’s stored away, whether conveniently or with some measure of pain. Even the day after the event, he wasn’t sure how much she’d retained. He never answers.

“Because I don’t think about any of that,” she adds then. “I never go back to that part of the world. Do you?”

He doesn’t actually. Not since his parents died. Both his sisters are in Connecticut. He has surrendered his Virginia citizenship, as it were. And so has Lolly Viccino.

“It’s all so old there,” she says. “I’m just happy to be gone. I don’t talk to any of them from home, to tell you the truth. And how did you say I know you?”

“I just have a memory,” he says, “of bumping into you. During Party Weekend in the fall. And I’ve been thinking about some things that happened back then.”

“Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t remember. I can’t even picture anything from that time. I hated all of it.”

“Oh,” he says.

“So I’m afraid I can’t help you, Judge. Mason?”

“Yes.”

She lingers then. Of course, she thinks she knows the name. Which she does. You can’t grow up in Virginia without hearing of George Mason. They named a university for him, and roads. Saving that, George is certain she would have hung up moments ago.

“I suppose,” he says, “I suppose I’ve been curious about how your life turned out.”

“Really? And why is that? How did your life turn out?”

“Pretty well,” he responds instantly. “Very well.” That, in fact, has been the unvoiced question of the last few months, and this, he realizes, is his answer. He has most of what he ever wanted. He’s been able to say that for quite some time, especially since he reached the Court of Appeals. His family’s always been A minus to A plus, depending on the moment. Judge Mason gets up most mornings knowing that life worked out better for him than for most people.

“I can’t say that,” she says. “I get by. I’ve gotten by. But I’m here, you know? One day at a time. That’s how it is for everybody, right? It’s not easy for anybody, Judge, is it?”

“Well, I’m sorry for anything I did to make it harder,” he replies. If you had pressed him for an answer when he lifted the phone, he would have said that he was calling her to help decide a case. He thought he might have been searching for Lolly to see how much damage had been done, and how angry she remained four decades later. Or to try to confirm his current interpretations. Did she think she had been trying to punish or debase herself when she hooked up with Hugh Brierly and his roommate, or had she simply suffered from one of those boundless, youthful misapprehensions of what might be fun? Had she been deceived somehow? Or even coerced? Or was it possible, if he were being unsparing, that the incident did not stand alone? But it turns out that his greatest desire is to address her as someone who has profited from his life and now knows better. Who looks back with regret. Who wishes he made something sweet, rather than cruel, out of what was inevitably a momentous instant in his life, for his sake, first, and also for hers. And to tell her that.

“Oh, brother,” Lolly Viccino says in response. “Get in line. Are you in AA?”

“No.”

“Because those people always want you to get hold of somebody you haven’t seen since Noah and tell them you’re sorry. That’s why I quit,” she says. “I didn’t see the sense of that. Who forgives me for all the stupid crap I did? Nobody. That’s for sure. Just go on. That’s what you have to do. You can’t change the past, right, Judge? Am I right? So forget it. That’s my attitude.”

“I see,” he says.

“That’s how some people are. That’s how I am. So I’m afraid I can’t help you. Whatever it is, it’s all ancient history.”

“Of course.”

“So thank you for calling, Judge.” Now that she has reaffirmed the motto she lives by, she seems determined to get away before he can remind her of anything else. Then someone speaks behind her, a woman whose arrival only seems to hasten Lolly’s desire to end the conversation. The last word he hears from her as the phone is going down is “Strange.”

George Mason has known Cassandra Oakey all her life. He held her no more than a month after she was born, and he retains a clear memory of playing Go Fish with her for an entire afternoon when she was seven and had come to the office with Harrison on a school holiday while George was in the life-suspended state that always set in when he was waiting for a jury. Harry, ever the cheerleader, dragged George to several of Cassie’s high school tennis matches, when she played number two on a conference championship team. She lacked quickness, but she was a determined and powerful player, with a serve like a mortar.

But Cassie Oakey can-and does-walk in and out of the judge’s chambers with impunity, and among his staff, she would approach George’s personal computer with the least natural trepidation. Far more telling, Cassie Oakey was the only staff member with him at the Hotel Gresham when his cell phone disappeared. And Cassie is leaving in two weeks, apparently with a sense of unrelieved injury.

“It has to be somebody who works in chambers,” George explains to Patrice as they eat dinner in the kitchen, picking over the leftovers of a restaurant meal from two plastic containers. “It’s not realistic that anyone else would be able to steal on to my computer twice in the same day when I wasn’t around. Cassie’s office is right there. Who else could get in and out so quickly?”

“I don’t believe it,” says Patrice.

“I don’t believe it of any of them. Dineesha?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Banion’s been with me nearly nine years. Marcus-I mean people can surprise you, but if Marcus is a computer whiz-”

“No,” Patrice says definitively about George’s hoary bailiff.

“No.” He had reached the same conclusion about Cassie while he was speaking to Marina at Area 2 but wanted time to disprove it to himself. Her motive remains elusive. Harrison is often a practical joker, and George wonders if perhaps this started as some kind of prank, which she could not acknowledge when it turned out that no one saw the humor. “It’s got to be some psychiatric mishmash. Don’t you think? Some issue with her father? It just makes no sense.”