The Soloist (12 page)

Ms. Doppelt, strangely enough, didn’t even make a closing argument, which seemed shocking to me. With the evidence part of the trial over, the judge then gave us brief instructions about how to apply the law to the evidence and come up with a verdict. He reminded us that the crime of second-degree murder required that it be an intentional killing—not accidental—but did not require that Weber planned or thought about the crime beforehand at all. Even if the killing was entirely impulsive, it still counted as murder if the defendant possessed the intent to kill when he swung the stick. The custodian led us to our deliberating room, and we each chose a seat around a long oak table. I took a chair near a far corner, and Maria-Teresa sat down next to me.

Dwight Anderson was the last person in the room. He took the one remaining chair, which everyone had avoided because it was located at the head of the table. No one wanted to be foreman. Dwight, who was heavyset and had an air of military discipline about him, didn’t seem to mind. When he sat down, everyone naturally looked in his direction.

“As I understand it,” he said, “the first order of business is to appoint a jury foreman. Does anybody want to volunteer?”

No one raised a hand.

“Has anybody here ever done jury duty before?” he asked.

The older Jewish lady, who was a retired practical nurse, said she had served on a jury years ago. Her accent made her sound a bit like my mother.

“That makes you the most experienced, then,” Dwight said. “I nominate you. Anyone want to second that?”

A few people murmured their approval. The tiny nominee accepted with a shrug, but asked Dwight, “What about you, mister? You seem like you’d be better at it than me. I nominate you.”

He nodded pleasantly and asked for any other nominations or volunteers. No one spoke up, so he suggested we vote. He handed out some paper and pencils that the clerk had left for us, then said, “My name is Dwight Anderson. And your name is—ma’am?”

“Ruth Friedman.”

I figured that Dwight was going to be chosen because he was so obviously suited for it, so I voted for Mrs. Friedman as a kindness.

Either six other people had soft hearts like me or a majority of our group didn’t want to be led by a black man, because Mrs. Friedman won the vote seven to five. She looked surprised, but seemed resigned to it and said, “OK, so let’s get it over with.” She told us that in her other trial the jury cast a secret ballot first, and then reviewed the evidence as a group before voting again. So more slips of paper were passed out and we were instructed to write either “guilty” or “not guilty” on them.

Just before we started, the housewife with the pharmacist husband, Mathilda Jencks, raised her hand and asked, “But what if a juror is undecided? What do you write then?” There was something about her—an anxiety in her voice, a confused look—that made me think she was going to be a pain.

“It’s good you asked,” Mrs. Friedman responded. “If you’re undecided, that’s what you should write.”

We all scribbled away and handed our slips to Mrs. Friedman to count. I’d written “guilty” because there really was no choice. I wondered, though, if it would get more complicated during the second phase of the trial. When Mrs. Friedman had counted them all, she grinned. “Eleven guilty, one undecided.”

I think everyone tried not to look at Mathilda, but she sighed and said in an exasperated tone, “Well, so much for the secret ballot.”

“Let’s not worry about it,” Mrs. Friedman said, “there’s no rules about how this has to go, so … in the other trial I was in we reviewed the evidence; everybody did it together, we went over all the main points. That was a complicated trial. This one, it’s not so complicated.… Who wants to start? Mathilda, you want to tell us what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t see the direction we’re heading in here …” Mathilda said nervously. “I’ve just heard the evidence myself, and it’s not obvious to me that everything is out in the open here.”

An embarrassed silence followed. My guess is that everybody was thinking what I was thinking, which was Uh-oh. Mrs. Jencks appeared to be having difficulty either thinking or expressing herself clearly. The responsibility lay with our foreperson to break the silence. She shrugged and asked,
“Well, do you want us to go over the evidence? What would make you comfortable?”

“Frankly, right now I’m feeling a little pressured! I’ve been painted into a corner that I didn’t necessarily want to be in.”

“There’s no reason, dear. There’s no hurry here, is there? You take all the time you want.” It was nice of Mrs. Friedman to say that, but the truth was, we couldn’t do anything until Mathilda decided she was ready to talk.

We all sat quietly staring at the table, until Mathilda said, “I’m not saying he isn’t guilty. I’m just saying I don’t think he’s been
proven
guilty. I mean, they never went into the question of what kind of man he was, I mean the leader of their cult, the Japanese man who was killed. What if he was someone like that … what was his name? Tom Jones? The one who made all those poor women and children drink that awful poison in Guyana? If somebody had killed that monster before he did his evil things, would we call that murder? Or Hitler?”

The comparisons were so out of line that no one seemed to want to try to tangle with her. At last Mrs. Jencks, looking even more exasperated than before, shook her head and blurted out, “Well, if you’re all so sure he’s guilty, I guess I must be missing something. Whatever you say—if you say guilty, that’s fine.”

A more idealistic group might have encouraged her to stand by her sense of doubt for at least a few minutes more, but we accepted her surrender without hesitation.

“Good—it’s unanimous, then,” Mrs. Friedman confirmed. “Shall we let the judge know we have a verdict?”

We nodded, hoping to get back into the courtroom before Mrs. Jencks had any second thoughts. As we found our seats in the jury box, I noticed that the defendant was looking
closely at each of us. When his eyes met mine I started to look away out of habit, but then thought, Why not look back if he’s going to stare at me? So I returned his gaze, feeling a bit queasy again, as when I’d held the murder weapon. His face looked like a baby’s; he was utterly relaxed, and stared at me with benign curiosity. After a few seconds he lost interest in me and looked at Maria-Teresa. She actually smiled at him, and he smiled back.

When the time came, Mrs. Friedman stood up and handed the verdict forms to the bailiff, who passed them to the judge, who then gave them to the clerk. After this oddly calming ritual, the clerk faced the courtroom and read in an even voice, “We the jury find the defendant guilty of the charge of second-degree murder.” The pale young man sat with his back straight and his eyes closed, and showed no reaction. Neither of the lawyers looked at all surprised. It was only when I noticed the group of relatives of the murdered man whispering to one another and nodding with satisfaction that I was reminded that we weren’t deciding whether to fine someone for parking illegally. Their response was controlled, though; they certainly knew that the killer could still be found insane and therefore acquitted in the second half of the trial.

Again I looked at the defendant. It was still almost impossible to imagine him committing the crime. He looked so passive and resigned. He had just gone halfway toward spending a long time, maybe the rest of his life, in jail, and he didn’t seem affected at all. It was a maddening, incongruous sight, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he faking? Was he really out of his mind? Or did he really undergo some sort of drastic transformation as a result of all the concentration and riddles?

I once saw a documentary about India that focused briefly on mystics. One man was shown standing barefoot on a frigid, snowy mountaintop, wearing only a thin muslin cloth. He stood there, stock-still, all day, every day. He hadn’t spoken for over ten years. At night local villagers would bring him rice and vegetables to eat. What could he be thinking about, staring straight ahead like that all day? It does seem that a human being would have to possess a substantially different way of looking at things to be able to endure such a discipline.

The documentary also discussed another man whose guru had died and who vowed to stand in prayer at his teacher’s gravesite until the guru gave him a sign that it was all right to stop praying. The local villagers helped build the man a sling from a tree so that he could even sleep standing up. At the time the documentary was shot he had been standing for three years. Two questions came to my mind: you would think that after only a few days, exhaustion and sheer boredom would have caused this fellow to imagine that the teacher was giving him signs. I know that I would interpret every tweet of a bird, every barking dog or police siren as a
sign to go home and lie down. My other question was Why did the local people seem so willing to go along with this? In fact, they were largely responsible for making it possible, both for the bereaved student and the stoic old man in the muslin drape. They fed these mystics and seemed to worship them. Why did they find this sort of behavior inspiring and holy, whereas we … I tried to imagine a man wearing only a bedsheet planting himself in the center divider on the Santa Monica Freeway, staring straight into the smog and not speaking and being fed by pious locals. He would have been carted away in a matter of hours.

I’ve never had any interest in mysticism, of either the Eastern or Western variety. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know much about it, but it all seems half-baked to me. Maybe if you starve yourself and don’t talk or move for a long time you do go into some kind of trance, but what would the point of that be? Sleeping is an even better trance because you disappear completely for a few hours. We all do that every night, so why try so hard to do it in the daytime? Is it enjoyable for those people? Then there’s the fact that we all die anyway; no matter what we do, we’re all going to experience the ultimate trance, so what’s the rush to imitate it? It seems so unnecessary; you don’t see animals forcing themselves into unnatural postures and then trying not to move for hours. The closest parallel might be a flamingo standing on one leg without moving, but a flamingo is built to do that. Human beings are primates, and primates weren’t designed to tie themselves up into knots and hold still.

Someone once told me that I should try meditation—that I would be good at it because of my ability to concentrate for hours a day practicing the cello. I read a book on the subject and even tried it a few times, but couldn’t find
any similarity at all. When you are playing music, you have a clear goal: to organize and produce sounds in such a way that they express shades of emotion. By practicing, you struggle throughout your life to make your communications more direct and concise, so that a person hearing you play receives emotional impressions in as pure a form as possible. Meditation, on the other hand, seems to be a kind of free-floating concentration, where you fix your mind on either nothing at all or on a repetitious chant or irrational puzzle—concentration for the sake of concentration. What do you do with it? How would you measure your progress, and how could you be sure you weren’t fooling yourself about your abilities? I couldn’t see any purpose to it, so I gave up after a few attempts.

I take after my father in this regard; he treated Judaism as a form of culture rather than as a religion. He believed that by observing the holidays, learning Jewish history and studying the Talmud, one gained an intellectual understanding of the tradition that helped give one a good starting point, but not an end point, for the development of personal morality. He felt that people had to adapt to changing times, and that strict religious dogma was unnatural. He and my mother argued over this frequently; my mother would accuse him of just telling himself what he wanted to hear, and my father would respond by saying,
“Ja
, and so? The rabbi says what he wants to hear, and you want to listen! What makes
your
judgment so good?”

Von Kempen was a deeply religious man, but not in the sense of contemplation of the supernatural or the promise of an afterlife; he simply couldn’t get over his sense of awe and wonder that something as magnificent and beautiful as music
could be channeled through such flawed creatures as human beings. Every time he encountered music he opened his mind to it with the humility and gratitude of someone receiving a gift he could not possibly deserve. Toward the end of his life that attitude grew to embrace such ordinary phenomena as the changing light of the seasons, the sounds of migrating birds or the taste of fine tobacco. The only thing I could see that he felt no particular sense of gratitude for was politics. He had the newspaper delivered to his home every day, but would not even glance at it until Frau Schmidt, his housekeeper, had first thrown away all of it except for the art, science and food sections.

Judge Davis had a huge head. At first I hadn’t realized it because the rest of him was so big as well, but when either of the lawyers approached the bench you could compare more easily. His head looked like one of those heroic Roman busts of Caligula or Nero or Brutus that at first look life-sized, but gradually you see as you get closer that they are really about half again as big. During lulls in the trial, I enjoyed picturing him with a little crown of olive leaves on top of his head, presiding over events at a marble coliseum. After we’d brought in the guilty verdict, he swiveled his massive chair around to face us, taking a quick moment, I noticed, to arrange his robes so that they spread out evenly on either side of him. He resembled an already large bird puffing out its feathers to look even more impressive.