Free The Magician by Sol Stein Page B

color was the American flag, which drooped on its stand beside the black-robed judge. Some years earlier a village trustee had suggested that a quiet electric fan be hidden behind the bench, tilted upward at the flag so that it would seem to be waving, but the justices dismissed the notion as undignified.
    Urek stood in front of the bench, no longer in handcuffs because his lawyer had assured the policemen that he wouldn’t try anything funny. George Thomassy did not want to plead for low bail for a client under physical restraint.
    Judge Clifford, a proud man, spent a good part of his time on the bench trying to control a human affliction: he had the habit of swallowing air and subsequently burping, which, though he had learned to burp quietly behind a hand held in front of his lips, disturbed him because it seemed inconsistent with the dignity of his office. Once, in the course of a prolonged and unruly trial, the affliction had distressed him so that he visited a doctor, who told him that air-swallowing was not an uncommon nervous habit among people; the less fortunate could expel their intake only through flatulence. The judge thought himself lucky because the indignity of passing wind in court would certainly exceed what he suffered as a burper.
    The point at which the judge most tried to control his affliction was when a defendant first came before his view. The judge had developed a personal ritual of considering each defendant as if he were an employment applicant. During his initial study of a defendant’s appearance, a moment that would last anywhere from five to thirty seconds, the judge’s hands, pressed together before his lips, served not only the purpose of burp concealment but gave most defendants a sense that they were being studied by God in an attitude of prayer.
    To Judge Clifford, Urek’s face did not seem to be American, that is, clean-cut, short-haired, near handsome, with a look of innocent honesty. On the contrary, he looked markedly Slavic. The judge was also disturbed by the deep scar that ran vertically along Urek’s right cheek and almost onto the ear. When he saw such scars on Negroes, he assumed them to be the result of knife fights, but in the case of this Slavic boy, perhaps it had been a spill from a bicycle. He wouldn’t, of course, ask. The boy’s hair had been plastered down in a way that betrayed uncustomary effort. Still, he was wearing a white shirt, with a striped blue tie, and his suit was pressed. The judge did not like to believe that he was influenced by dress, which could be contrived for occasions, as indeed Urek’s had been by the lawyer who had brought the dress-up gear to the jail, but so many young people he saw these days just had no regard for their physical appearance.
    Thomassy argued that his client was known to him for many years (true), that he lived at home with his mother and father (true), that he had not been in serious trouble before (false), and that bail should be nominal, considering all these points and the defendant’s youth.
    The police sergeant described the seriousness of the injury to Japhet, the smashed windshield, the fracas in the school auditorium, the difficulty in making the arrest, and the danger the police had been put in just in trying to get this young fellow to come along.
    No mention was made of the fact that Urek’s small, feared organization controlled the student body at the school more than the principal or the teachers could be said to do.
    Judge Clifford decided that Thomassy was doing his duty in making Urek out to be a nice boy, and that the police sergeant was once again emphasizing the strain and danger of police work. As happens in smaller communities, the judge had Thomassy before him fairly frequently; in fact, at a mutual friend’s party recently, Thomassy and the judge had gone off in a corner to discuss the recent Supreme Court obscenity decisions for a good part of the evening. Thomassy was probably the smartest