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this same building, the Central Branch Courthouse. Many friends had discouraged him from considering the higher court, predicting he would find this life isolated and passive after a career on the front lines of trial combat, but the job-hearing arguments, reflecting on briefs and precedents, writing opinions-has suited him. To George Mason, the law has always posed the fundamental riddles life has asked him to solve.
    In Virginia, law had been a family tradition, going back to his great namesake, the fabled American founder George Mason IV-the real George Mason, as the judge will always think of him. During George’s years as an undergraduate in Charlottesville, a legal career was yet another of the many ponderous expectations his parents had placed upon him that he was determined to escape. With his degree in hand, he fled here, spending two years as an ordinary seaman on a coal freighter, a job that provided an alternative to Vietnam. His vessel sailed up the river Kindle and around the Great Lakes, and in his solitary hours on watch, when duty required him to contemplate the limitless waters as vast as the adult life that lay before him, he was shocked to find himself preoccupied with the intense questions of right and wrong, justice and power that had been parsed each night at his father’s dinner table. At the end of his tour, he was eager to enroll at Easton Law School here, becoming a Deputy State Defender after graduation. He loved the ragged extremes of crime, which took him so far from what he had been born to, and yet it was the patina of the Southern gentleman that abetted his success. With his gold-buttoned blazer, penny loafers, and gentle drawl, he seemed to cast a spell over the courtroom, as if his presence assured everyone-cops and judges and prosecutors and court personnel-that none of them belonged to the world of hurt and rage and ignorance that propelled these crimes. He alone knew that his performance was a parody.
    So he had continued, not quite of this place yet surely not of the one he’d left. Popular with colleagues, he was elected President of the Kindle County Bar Association in the late 1980s. He remained successful and respected, but never the ultimate lawyer of choice in this town, where his friend Sandy Stern would forever be called first in a complicated criminal case. As George had wearied of practice, he found himself idly attracted to the ambition that had eluded his father: to be a judge. It was a wan hope, given the open disdain he’d always shown for the oily dealings of the party leaders who controlled such matters. He assumed he had damned himself forever when he agreed late in 1992 to represent a lawyer turned federal witness whose secret tape recordings led to the conviction of six judges and nine attorneys in a bribery scandal that burned through the Kindle County Superior Court. Instead, in one of those demonstrations of life’s perpetual defiance of expectations, George found himself regarded as the very emblem of lawyerly independence, begged to run by the party powers, who were desperate to meet the outcry for reform. He led the judicial ballot in 1994, a success that leapfrogged him over dozens of more experienced candidates when a seat opened on the appellate court for the 1996 election.
    Assuming George wants to keep his job, a yes-no question will appear this November on the County ballot: “Should George Thomson Mason be retained for another ten-year term as a justice of the appellate court?” Now and then, reading the record of a trial, he yearns to pick apart a weaseling witness again on cross-examination, and he frequently regrets the restrictions of a public salary. Occasionally, there are moments-when he longs to curse out the umps at Trappers Park or must respond stone-faced to certain jokes-that he feels caged by the proprieties of the role he’s taken on. Yet until Patrice’s illness, he had no doubt that he would stand for retention, which he is nearly