The Soloist (30 page)

“No, but—”

“What are you saying, Reinhart?” It was Maria-Teresa asking me. Her voice sounded tired.

“I’m saying,” I said, feeling hopelessly bullied, “that this isn’t … It’s not a matter of black or white, absolutely guilty or absolutely innocent. It’s more like a gray area, and I think the insanity defense fits here. It seems to fit this boy and what he did. It wouldn’t be just setting him free, it would be more like … I mean, he obviously needs to be locked up, but this way he’d get treated, and since he never got to see a doctor when he was growing up, I think he deserves the benefit … I think he deserves the chance to get treated. Doesn’t that seem fair to you?”

“No it doesn’t,” Roy grumbled. “Look at what you’re saying! You’re saying that all the rest of us—all eleven of us—are totally wrong about this guy, but you’re the only one who sees it clearly. Doesn’t this strike you as being … Doesn’t it make you think that maybe you’re being unreasonable, that maybe
you’re
the wrong one?”

“Of course it makes me think that!” I said, slapping my hand on the long table in frustration. “Do you think I enjoy this? I’d love to vote guilty and go home! You’re staring and
yelling at me as if I’m doing this on purpose just to inconvenience you. I’m not. I’m examining as hard as I can everything I’m saying, and if I see I’m wrong I’ll be happy to admit it! I’m doing what I think I have to do. Am I wrong about this? Aren’t we supposed to take this seriously, and vote honestly? This is a murder trial we’re talking about, and I can’t vote guilty just yet. I can’t live with the idea that I’d be convicting a man of murder just because eleven people were annoyed at me. Can you possibly try to understand that?”

One thing that none of the jury-room dramas I’d seen or read prepared me for was the silence, the tense periods between exchanges that could last for minutes at a time. I kept thinking of the movie
Twelve Angry Men
, where Henry Fonda found himself arguing against eleven men, but at least there they kept talking the whole time. Having someone to argue with was far better than those interminable pauses, where no one said anything and I felt it was my obligation, as the sole holdout, to keep the debate moving. My mind would grasp wildly for new ideas, while at the same time I was asking myself, Is this really necessary? Would it really be wrong for me to change my vote?

The other thing that surprised me was discovering what sort of points contributed to the jury’s impression of the case, and to their decisions to vote for conviction. The lawyers’ clothing, mannerisms and accents counted heavily. Ms. Doppelt struck most of them as being “cold” and “pushy,” whereas Mr. Graham seemed “nice,” “a regular guy, not trying to put anything over on anybody,” “reasonable.” The fact that the defendant looked oblivious and smiled vacantly worked against him. The first psychiatrist was too young; he
was a smarty-pants, an intellectual, too smart for his own good. The state’s psychiatrist was no-nonsense, another regular guy. The Japanese man’s eloquent, almost poetic testimony had grated on many people’s nerves, it turned out. They thought he was snobbish, and acted superior. I got the impression it was because they didn’t like seeing a foreigner, particularly an Asian man, using bigger words than they did.

I really did think about changing my vote just to get it over with; I considered it all the time, over and over. If eleven people thought he was guilty and I couldn’t change all their minds, why bother voting against them? None of the others seemed to be hearing anything of what I’d been saying. It was as if I were speaking another language; when I spoke they all looked down at the table with barely concealed irritation. If I stuck to my vote it would mean that the trial would have to be done all over again. The lawyers would have to start all over, the witnesses would all have to come back, a new judge would have to be assigned, another courtroom would be needed, another jury would be selected, a whole new trial would occur, all because my conscience wouldn’t let me send a man who killed another man to jail. It would probably be a futile and expensive gesture.

I wondered if the hospital would really be so different from prison. I also wondered if treatment now could help this boy much after all. Both doctors had said that schizophrenia can’t be cured, and he looked perfectly satisfied with the way he was. Maybe he wouldn’t pay any attention to the treatment. Maybe it would make him even more self-satisfied. The worst part of it was that I really didn’t care what happened to him. I didn’t have much sympathy for him or feel that one day he would contribute to society. I assumed he would always be
a burden to us all. He had killed someone, after all. He took someone’s life away forever, and he was irritating even to look at.

Just before my first solo appearance with a full symphony von Kempen told me that an orchestral composition is like a piece of elaborately woven fabric. If you damage even one of the threads, the others around it start to unravel and the whole fabric can disintegrate. This is why individual members of the orchestra must be vigilant and maintain their concentration, even during passages when they don’t play at all. Von Kempen believed that if a single musician became distracted and thought of something other than the piece, he could feel it pulling the music down. I think that maybe society, not just music, is like that. When a man like Philip Weber punches a hole in the fabric, threads start to unravel. The damage spreads, far beyond the Zen church or the Japanese man’s family. Considering the damage he had caused, I wondered, was it really humanitarian to focus so much concern on him? Would it be better, perhaps, to focus attention on repairing the damage? One way to do so would be to send him to jail. Society likes to see people who have hurt other people be punished. It heals the fabric.

But just because society likes to see such people punished doesn’t mean that in the long run it’s the right thing to do. You wouldn’t repair a silk embroidery with fishing line. Just because the sort of people sitting on this jury with me, eleven people of average ignorance, more or less, wanted an eye for an eye wouldn’t necessarily make it a good outcome.

In the end, this was why I couldn’t change my vote. Since I couldn’t possibly know what was right, and since I couldn’t
know what the consequences of either verdict would be, I had no choice but to vote as I believed. It was really the only viable basis for a decision.

Which is what I told them over and over, grueling hour after grueling hour. I said it before lunch, I said it after lunch, I said it all day. And as I became more and more exhausted they became more and more exasperated. By the end of the second day it wasn’t just Maria-Teresa who could hardly bring herself to look at me. At nearly six o’clock that afternoon we agreed to go home and come back for one more day, and if I still felt I couldn’t change my mind, we would announce a hung jury.

After less than an hour the next day the others voted to declare themselves a hung jury. We filed back into the courtroom, where Dwight stood up and told the judge we were deadlocked, eleven to one, and that we hadn’t gotten anywhere at all in two days of painful deliberations. The courtroom burst into confusion and noise; the dead man’s mother began crying and had to be led by her family out of the room.

Once she left the room I thought the worst was over, but to everyone’s surprise and dismay, Judge Davis refused to accept our decision. After bringing the court to order he frowned at the jury so hard that his eyes nearly disappeared, and he rebuked us in booming tones for not trying hard enough. He reminded us that this was a murder trial, and that it had cost the courts, not to mention the witnesses and lawyers, a great deal of time and money to put on, and he wasn’t going to let us give up and go home after only two days. He sent us back to the jury room and told us not to return until we had fulfilled our obligation to serve justice and had reached a verdict.

I thought the deliberations had gone badly before, but I
didn’t know what bad was until I lived through what came next. We stayed in that room for four more days, forcing me to cancel Kyung-hee’s lessons for the second Monday in a row. One by one the jurors abandoned all pretense of having any respect for me or my opinions, making each day more uncomfortable than the last. I felt violently torn between the desire to change my vote and the fear that if I did it would haunt me for the rest of my life. I believed that Philip Weber was out of his mind and that the right thing to do was to send him to a medical institution, regardless of how viscerally unsatisfying that might have been. I felt that sending him to jail would be demoralizing in the long run. Our social conscience is nourished whenever we live up to the agreement we have made with one another not to punish people who don’t deserve to be punished, including people who are incapable of being responsible for their actions. Was I sure that Weber couldn’t have stopped himself? No, not absolutely sure, but reasonably so, and if it is true that in the United States someone is innocent until proven guilty, and that as a society we have agreed that it is better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to send one innocent man to jail, on what basis could I have voted guilty? If I was an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime, I would certainly hope that at least one member of my jury adhered to those ideals. How could I have changed my vote, as the others were asking me to do, in order to save taxpayers the expense of another trial? That shouldn’t be a consideration at all.

During the worst moments, when I thought I might go insane myself from the tension, I remembered that von Kempen had lived through this and far worse. Every day of the last twenty-five years of his life he had to live with the knowledge that his name had come to be associated with one
of the most shameful periods in recorded history. Believing that it would do more harm than good to struggle against those accusations, and probably also out of guilt that he had not taken a more vigorous stand against fascism as Casals had, he responded with dignified sacrifice. For a man like him to silence his instrument was surely as painful as for an ordinary person to cut out his or her own tongue, but instead of redeeming him, his sacrifice led to his being merely forgotten. In spite of all this, he never gave in to despair or breathed a word of complaint to anyone.

In the jury room we asked for transcripts of the testimony and went over the evidence of the trial so many times that I learned most of it by heart. One quote in particular, originally from an American Bar Association report, summed up the whole trial, as well as our dilemma as jurors: “There is no objective basis for distinguishing between offenders who were undeterrable and those who were undeterred, between the impulse that was irresistible and the impulse not resisted, or between substantial impairment of capacity and some lesser impairment … the question is unanswerable or, at best, can be answered only by moral guesses.”

Eleven people, one of them the only woman I’d ever tried to make love to, guessed that Philip Weber was deterrable, I guessed that he was not. For an entire week we argued over whose guess was better. Maria-Teresa rarely spoke to me during the arguments, but occasionally when I would say something, she would click her tongue and close her eyes, hold her breath for half a second and then sigh, as if she couldn’t believe what I was turning out to be like. Her nonverbal commentary hurt me far more than the others’ blunter criticism. Once, when I said that I couldn’t see
punishing a man for losing his mind, since no one loses his mind on purpose, I caught her sharing a look of disgust with Rose. It was the final blow; I couldn’t actually hate her, but from then on I felt numb toward her.

To make matters worse, Betty, whose husband was supposed to work “in sales,” confided to me bitterly that he was actually a drunk and had no steady income, and that they were living off her undeclared income as a domestic. She couldn’t admit this during the voir dire because she was terrified of being caught and having to pay taxes on it. Every day of the trial was money she wasn’t bringing home to her family, and she told me that her customers were starting to hint that they might have to look elsewhere for help.

While all this was going on I was trying every night to practice, believing music was my only hope. Bach, I reminded myself, hadn’t even published any music until after his fortieth year; I was still young, there was still hope, the deliberations would end soon, and this dreadful experience, along with my devastating encounter with Maria-Teresa, would soon fade into the past. But the sound of the cello, even the smell of rosin, was torture for me. I often wished I could scream or throw something or cry, but nothing came out. I’ve never known how to express my strongest feelings except through music, and now even that channel was blocked.

On the last morning of the trial, however, I stepped into the shower before going to court and had my head under the hot water when the strange thought occurred to me that no one could possibly see me under all that water. A ridiculous thought, since no one could have seen me in the shower stall of my apartment anyway, but the water seemed to form a tangible, comforting screen, and I was able to cry for a few
minutes with my hands gripped around the shower head. It felt so good that I actually laughed at the same time.