The Soloist (31 page)

I went to court that day knowing that my conscience could not possibly allow me to change my vote. As soon as I entered the jury room I suggested going before Judge Davis again, and said that if necessary I would be willing to identify myself as the lone dissenter and answer any questions the judge might want to put to me. We sent word to Judge Davis, the clerk summoned us into the courtroom, and Dwight explained for the second time that we were a hung jury. Once again the judge ordered us back to the jury room, only this time without any comments or instructions. We waited for several long minutes, unsure of what to do next, but then the clerk came into the room and explained that the judge wanted to see us in the courtroom one at a time.

Dwight went first. He came back after a few minutes, then Rose was called. Gary went after her, and then Mathilda. I was the tenth to be called. The clerk led me into the courtroom and I sat down by myself in the jury box. The entire courtroom was looking at me while Judge Davis asked firmly, “Mr. Sundheimer, what’s going on in there?”

I nearly panicked, wondering if he knew that I was the holdout and wanted me to explain myself. Struggling to keep calm, I answered, “We seem to be deadlocked.”

“Yes, I know that. What I want to know is, have the deliberations stopped in there? Are the twelve of you still trying?”

“We’ve been deliberating the whole time, Your Honor.”

“Is there any chance of your reaching a verdict if you were to keep trying?”

“I believe not.”

“What do you mean, you believe not? Mr. Sundheimer, I am not going to declare a mistrial if there is any chance that further deliberations will result in a verdict. Is there any chance that a verdict can be reached?”

When I said that I felt there was no chance of this happening, Judge Davis dismissed me, and the clerk led me back into the room.

After all twelve of us had been through this process, the judge summoned us back as a group and, starting with Dwight, asked us the same questions.

“Mr. Anderson, are you still willing to deliberate?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there any chance that further deliberations will result in a verdict?”

“I believe not.”

When it came his turn, Roy answered the questions in the same way, but then requested permission to ask a question himself. Judge Davis allowed him one question.

“Your Honor, what I want to know is, if one juror isn’t willing to deliberate, could he be replaced with an alternate?”

The judge suddenly turned purple with rage. “It is against the law to refuse to deliberate on a jury!” he boomed. “If one of your members refuses to deliberate, he or she must be dismissed at once. In that case, one of the alternates would be chosen, and the deliberations would have to begin from scratch. I just asked each one of you individually if you were still willing to deliberate, and you each answered in the affirmative. I want to know right now—what’s going on in there? Is anyone not willing to deliberate?”

Roy leaned forward in his seat, turned toward me and
glared. One by one, the other jurors either glanced or turned to stare at me. My anonymity was stripped away in an instant; the whole courtroom now knew that I was the one.

“Mr. Sundheimer, are you no longer willing to deliberate?” Judge Davis asked.

Everyone was looking at me: the judge, the jury, the sheriff’s deputies, the good-natured prosecutor, the clerks, reporters and courtroom visitors, including a group of high school students with their social studies teacher. Although intellectually prepared for the consequences of my decision, I was emotionally devastated. Being the focus of such strong disapproval, particularly in the somber atmosphere of the courtroom, was astonishingly painful—more painful, I believe, than if I had been physically beaten. I felt myself start to tremble, and thought that I might collapse under the strain. Then I looked at the defendant’s table. The defendant himself wasn’t looking at me; his eyes were closed and he appeared to be whispering to himself. His attorney was looking at me, however, and a gesture of hers caught my eye. Ms. Doppelt was wearing a pair of simple pearl earrings, and she was fingering one of them nervously. That slight movement drew my attention to her face. I could see in her expression a combination of respect and gratitude so sincere that the worst of my panic subsided, and I was able to gather myself enough to answer the judge.

“I’m not unwilling to deliberate, Your Honor. I think the other jurors are just extremely frustrated that I don’t share their opinion.”

“Are you honestly listening to their opinions, Mr. Sundheimer?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And you honestly feel that there is no chance of your changing your mind?”

“Your Honor, the deliberations have become repetitive—we’re not getting anywhere. We’ve covered all the points many times. The disagreement between me and the other eleven jurors is fundamental, not a disagreement over details.”

The judge paused for a long time, then exchanged a weary glance with the prosecutor. He sighed heavily, leaned forward in his seat and, addressing the whole courtroom, said, “The jurors having been polled, the court finds that further deliberations would be meaningless and that the jury is hopelessly deadlocked. The court declares a mistrial, and the jury is excused.”

All of a sudden it was over. This time the dead Zen master’s mother was not in the gallery. Ms. Doppelt nodded gratefully at me, but I couldn’t imagine that she had much to celebrate. Now she was going to have to do the whole thing over again.

Philip Weber smiled in the same bland way he had throughout the trial. His father reached forward and touched him on the shoulder, but it was an awkward gesture, and Philip didn’t seem to react to it at all. He looked over at the jury box, and I’m sure he could tell that I was the one—maybe because I was the only one looking at him. Our eyes met, and after a pause of a few seconds, he shrugged, as if to say, Who knows? It was a very unsatisfying ending.

They say that after reaching a verdict, most juries are able to reconcile their differences, heal the wounds created during the most heated arguments and leave with a generally positive feeling. Not so our jury; we had failed, and everyone went
home angry. Toward the end of the deliberations only two people remained polite to me: Grace, who seemed incapable of raising her voice at anyone, and Dwight, who remained controlled during the whole procedure. I suspect it had something to do with his military background; he’d had to keep his head under worse conditions, I’m sure. Maria-Teresa had never yelled at me, but she had made no effort to conceal her exasperation.

When Judge Davis declared the trial over, only Dwight said good-bye to me before leaving the courthouse; he said something about knowing what I must have felt like through the ordeal. He even shook my hand. I didn’t see Maria-Teresa leave; I could understand why she would want to get out of there without having to talk to me again. I waited in the empty room for about twenty minutes so I wouldn’t have to ride on the shuttle with any of the others, then left the courthouse. I was halfway down the front steps when I heard someone call my name.

It was Ms. Doppelt. She walked up to me and said, “I just wanted to say thank you. I’ve never had to go through what you had to go through, and I don’t know that I could. That was a hard trial to sit through, and a very hard one to understand clearly. You did, though, and you did a very important thing, and under unbelievably bad circumstances. I won’t ever forget it.”

I was unable to tell her how much her appreciation meant to me. We shook hands, and my experience as a juror at last came to an end.

After a few days I called Kyung-hee’s mother to resume his lessons, but right away I sensed that she felt uncomfortable talking to me. “Sorry for trouble you,” she said, “but Kyung-hee no more coming your house for lessons. Kyung-hee very sorry.”

I asked why and she seemed hesitant to discuss it, but finally I was able to learn that her husband had had mixed feelings about lessons with me from the beginning. He felt that it was too expensive for them, for one thing, and involved too much driving time for Mrs. Kim. But, most important, he wanted Kyung-hee to spend more time on his math. For the first time, I learned that the boy showed as much promise in that subject as in music. Which explained, at last, how the Kims could be so perversely unenthusiastic about Kyung-hee’s musical ability. Faced with their child’s two extraordinary gifts, they worried that trying to pursue both might be a mistake. Now Mr. Kim had, perhaps understandably, decided that music was the more expendable of the two. In view of this, he had decided that Kyung-hee should study the cello once a week rather than twice, and with a local cello teacher who was less demanding and who
charged a more reasonable fee of eight dollars for forty-five minutes.

In spite of my deep disappointment, I did not try to persuade Mrs. Kim to change her husband’s mind. After the ordeal of the trial I didn’t have the energy to argue with anyone, and even if I did—offering to teach their son for free, for example—I would still have had to cope with Mr. Kim’s resentful suspicions that I was leading his son into poverty, and I did not want to find myself in that situation.

I stopped practicing entirely after the trial ended. The few times I forced myself to try, it was like playing with mittens on my hands.

Toward the end of that summer I moved out of my apartment and found a place in the hills up north, away from campus and the city. Fall came and went, then winter, and I still didn’t play. I taught without using my cello at all. I don’t remember much about that time. It was as if for seven or eight months my mind was full of static, a cloud of soft noise, and I had only a slight awareness of what lay on the periphery. It was like a dream where you want to look at something but your eyes can see everywhere but right in front of you. For that whole period my cello stayed in its case in my bedroom closet.

Then, in February, Mrs. Kim called and asked if I was still teaching. She said that Kyung-hee didn’t like his new cello teacher at all, and indicated that his grades in math had suffered rather than benefited from the shift in emphasis away from music. Also, she said several times that he had never stopped begging to be allowed to study with me again, and Mr. Kim had finally given his wife permission to call me. In view of my having stopped playing altogether, along with my
general state of mind at the time, I was not sure I could be a good teacher for Kyung-hee anymore, but it gave me some pleasure to know that he had missed me, as I had missed him, so I agreed to try again. He and his mother came over to the new apartment on Saturday morning and I felt genuinely happy to see him. He seemed almost afraid to look at me that first day, however, probably from embarrassment over my having been fired by his parents the year before.

I asked Kyung-hee what he’d been working on with his other teacher, and his shoulders drooped a little. He reported that they had been playing a lot of Popper and Grützmacher—dull student exercises, for the most part. But, he said, on his own he’d been practicing the Bach suites I’d given him, and he wanted to play the fifth for me.

From the moment his bow touched the strings I could see that he had matured; he was more relaxed, and had obviously benefited from his technical studies. By the time he finished the suite twenty minutes later, something in me had changed. Perhaps it sounds mystical, but I really did feel something move in me; it was both a physical and an emotional sensation. Never in my life have I cried in front of a student while he was playing, but that morning I did. Imagine! In front of a small boy like that. Fortunately, he was so intensely absorbed in the music that he didn’t seem to notice my reaction, and I managed to control my emotions before he finished.

While Kyung-hee played, the music seemed to have hands that reached into my chest, took a firm grip and shook me savagely—so hard that I felt as though I were really waking up from a dream. It was like waking up from a dream only to realize that you are in another dream, but then finally you wake up for real, and there is something unmistakable about
that reality—you are really waking up. That was what I felt like; it was so strong that it was like a hallucination. When I opened my eyes and looked around me, what I saw was a tiny boy playing the cello, and I felt engulfed, swept away by something immediately familiar. It was the experience of music I had felt almost every day for the first half of my life. As he played I remembered what it felt like to be playing the music myself. Then I had a strange thought. I said to myself, It’s so simple and so obvious: when he plays, the music goes into my ears, resonates in my mind and becomes a part of me! It becomes my music too. When I thought about it that way, the boy’s awkward personality, his appearance, his unfortunate situation at home—everything about him—became irrelevant except for the music. I had a delicious sense that teaching Kyung-hee might just possibly be enough. It could fill in the blanks; it could satisfy me.

After Kyung-hee left that afternoon I took a drive up into the mountains to the east, to Mt. Wilson, where there is a huge observatory housing a telescope with a mirror a hundred inches in diameter. I’d read in one of my books that it was while looking through this telescope that Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, and had all started from one unimaginably large explosion at a single, infinitesimal point. I parked at a turnout in the road near the observatory, got out of the car and looked down at the ocean to the west and the city directly to the south.