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Divorce court: They never look at each other.

By John Bloom |

They never look at each other in the courtroom. Most of them never speak. The Joneses are the sixth divorce of the morning for Judge Harold Clapp. His beaming, grandfatherly face peers down at Mrs. Jones through thick glasses as her attorney’s soft, lilting British accent spins through the “discord or conflict of personalities” that prevailed from 1980 to the present in this failed union. She is in a wheelchair, wearing a flowered summer dress, wheeling backward a little to see the judge over the rim of the bench. The husband is young, trim, in a smart brown suit, and he’s staring at his shoes. If divorce is so easy, why do the couples always resemble prisoners waiting to be sentenced?

Everything is fine until the attorney reads through the community property settlement.

“Do you agree,” she asks him, “that $100 from the checking account will be used for the deceased child’s headstone?”

“Yes,” he says.

It takes two minutes to get a divorce-quicker if you speak up loudly and say the right things to old hands like visiting Judge Clapp. Today he is visiting from Tyler, helping to lighten the overloaded docket in the family law court of Judge Don Koons. Across the hallway Paul Rothermel, one of the “masters” working under each judge and exercising all the same powers, is hearing another dozen or so cases. Judge Koons himself is listening to more cases in his chambers. And all up and down the fourth floor of the Old Red Courthouse come the widows, the orphans, the strangers, abused wives, neglected children-many of them summoned to court not because they fear prison, but because they fear their own homes.

Why do they always crack at the end? Why do the no-fault divorces always send the happy divorced couple rushing out of the courtroom, as though they’ve been deprived of oxygen? Celicia Turner Morris, a handsome thirtyish woman in a striped dress, ends ten years of marriage in ten minutes-and gets $136 every two weeks to help support her three children. Billy Harold Morris can’t be here to object. He will have to learn of his divorce in the mail. Celicia is disoriented after the verdict. She ambles out of the courtroom, as though she might turn and ask the judge a question, ask him to tell her what it means. But it’s too late. Judge Clapp is already listening to the Foremans describe the microwave oven he gave her on their thirteenth wedding anniversary. Shouldn’t she be able to keep a gift like that?

“So you want me to divide up the pots and pans?” he says after a while. “Well, then, I want you both to bear in mind that, if you can’t agree on the division of property, then I’m inclined to hire a receiver. And that receiver will take everything and sell it and then I’ll divide the cash. And I guarantee you that you won’t have much to show for that. Okay. Now. I’m going to lake a ten-minute recess, and I want the two of you to get together and see if you’re willing to hurt yourself like that or not.”

Ten minutes later the Foremans, conferring with their attorneys in the hallway, ask for additional time. Ten minutes after that, the property has been divided.

Master Rothermel, a pleasant white-haired jurist, is having less luck across the hall. Darlene, standing before him in white stretch pants with little starbursts all down the leg, has just described how John “bothers” her and the baby all the time. She’s afraid of him. John, separated from his estranged wife by a no-nonsense attorney, stands stock-still while the charges of “family violence” are read.

“Mr. Gilliam, ” the master says, “you can now ask her any questions you might have or make a statement.”

“I just wanna say,” John says, raising his head and searching for the right words, “is it not true or not. that there’s been times when things were a lot worse when I didn’t do any violence?”

Darlene is the only person in the courtroom who understands the question.

“Yes,” she says. “That is true.”

“I wouldn’t do no more family violence,” John says. “That’s all I wanna say.”

“All right,” says Master Rothermel, “I’m going to find that there has been family violence in this case, and there is a likelihood of family violence in the future, and so I am issuing a restraining order that prevents you, Mr. Gilliam, from going within 500 feet of her residence or workplace. Do you understand this?”

“Yes sir. I don’t think it’s necessary, but if it’ll make Darlene happy, then that’s what I want, for her and the baby.”

“And I want you to know that this is a two-way street, and so Darlene will be prohibited from going within 500 feet of your residence or workplace as well. Do you understand that?”

Darlene nods.

Watching from the gallery, waiting for a chance to speak to Rothermel, is visiting Master John Elder, another temporary judge called in to lessen the workload in the court of Judge Carolyn Wright, two doors down and to the left.

“We do dozens of these,” Elder says. “Sometimes all I hear all day is temporary restraining orders. Abused kids. Violent spouses. Threats. Harassment. If you insisted on a jury trial in one of these cases, you would have to wait at least a year.”

Rothermel calls a ten-minute recess so that he can go into his chambers and interview Jane, a fifteen-year-old girl whose custody is being disputed by Bob and Suzette, her divorced, feuding parents. There are death threats involved, and charges of drug use, and allegations of incest, and a stepmother who thinks Jane is “letting the boys feel all up and down her dress” at junior high.

“He’ll talk to the child in chambers,” says Elder, “so that she’s not forced to look at both parents in the courtroom. We try to avoid that, because it forces the child to choose sides.”

“Looking at them?”

“Right. Looking at both of them at the same time.”

But then the widows and orphans and the strangers never do that. They never look at each other in the courtroom.

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