The Soloist (18 page)

It was the longest speech I had ever heard her make, and I didn’t know what to say. I understood her better now, but it wouldn’t have done anyone any good for me to tailor Kyung-hee’s lessons to suit his parents’ interests. You either teach honestly or you don’t.

She spared me from having to say anything by sighing
heavily and looking down at her purse. “Everybody say you good teacher, famous teacher. You nice to Kyung-hee, he like you.” She shrugged. “You want to buy suit, you buy. Maybe Mr. Kim no have to see.”

We walked into the store together and found Kyung-hee standing next to the display model. I tried to forget everything I’d just heard and asked, “Is that the suit you want? Don’t worry about what I think. If it makes you happy, then you must have it.”

Kyung-hee seemed to be considering it. His mother had embarrassed him, but I hoped not too much. After a few seconds he glanced at me and nodded with his eyes. I think he was trying to answer without his mother seeing.

I bought the suit. It was shockingly expensive, especially after the salesman, an aggressive kid with the letters XTC shaved into the back of his scalp, insisted that the costume wouldn’t be complete unless it included the “utility belt,” an accessory that aspiring Bat-persons simply cannot do without, as one heard him tell it. When we returned to the house I didn’t ask if Kyung-hee would like to put it on for our lesson; I didn’t see any need to put myself or Mrs. Kim through the sight of him practicing with that shiny cowl, with its permanently molded frown, perched on top of his head. I gave him my own version of the pep talk von Kempen had given me, amending it only in that he was to wear the suit for practice only, not lessons. He seemed genuinely excited, which delighted me.

We picked up where we had left off with the drills and they went well. At the end I gave him a pat of encouragement on the shoulder, and smiled at Mrs. Kim. She only shrugged.

The killer’s father appeared as the second witness for the defense. He had been sitting in the gallery since the beginning of the trial, but I hadn’t guessed that he was the father; I had thought he was a member of the press.

Mr. Weber told the court that he was the senior vice president of a multinational paper-goods company. From the moment he got on the stand you could see he was no stranger to confrontation. In spite of a considerable paunch, the loss of most of his hair and deep worry lines etched around his eyes, he looked like a powerful man, with his huge shoulders and barrel chest. He maintained a stern, controlled expression for almost the whole time he was on the stand. His son, I noticed, only glanced at him furtively. His beatific expression had vanished for the time being, and was replaced by something more like embarrassment.

Ms. Doppelt asked Mr. Weber to tell the court when his son’s troubles at home and in school had started. The big man, who was sweating profusely in the air-conditioned courtroom, dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief and
began by describing his wife’s first hospitalization for mental illness.

“When Philip was three, Nancy started getting obsessive about cleaning the house. She’d always been a damn good housekeeper, but this was obviously not about having a clean house. She’d spend hours folding the clothes in a single drawer, over and over. Then one day I came home from work and found her in the bathroom, curled up in the bathtub and crying. Philip was in the bedroom—he hadn’t been fed all day, he was screaming. That’s when I had to call the doctor. They took her to the hospital, and she stayed there for twelve weeks.

“I had to get someone to take care of Philip. That’s the way it was until he left for college. Nancy was always in and out of hospitals. When she was home, she was pretty much helpless, so she wasn’t much of a mother. Because of my work, we moved around a lot, so we had to change nannies several times. I thought they were all adequate, but now … I don’t know …”

Mr. Weber testified that his son had always been moody, but seemed to be managing just fine until college, when he dropped out suddenly after only one semester.

“He came home—we were living in Sacramento at that time—and, oh, I don’t know, I think he said he wanted to write a novel, or screenplay, or something of that nature. I was skeptical. Some of his teachers said he was talented, but you don’t know how to interpret that. It sounded to me like he was just looking for a way to avoid having to work. I said he could live at home for six months and give it a try, but at the end of the six months he’d be on his own.”

Mr. Weber wasn’t at home for a lot of this period because his job took him back and forth to Europe frequently at the
time. But despite the absences, his relationship with his son got especially tense during these months. “As I say, he was always kind of … moody, quiet. But now it was more of a kind of … He sulked around the house all the time. He was going through one of those college-age attitudes where the father could do no right in his mind. He was very negative about me and my work.”

“In what ways was he negative?” Ms. Doppelt asked abruptly. As usual, she was not demonstrating a good bedside manner. With this witness, however, it didn’t bother me; Mr. Weber seemed like a fairly unpleasant fellow, so it was almost satisfying to see him grilled this way.

“Oh, well, it’s a paper company I run, right? So I cut down rain forests, I pollute rivers, I take owls’ nests away—the whole nine yards.”

“So would you say that most of your talks with Philip were actually arguments?”

“When we talked at all, yes. We had nothing in common, so it always felt like there was nothing to talk about.”

I knew that situation well enough. By the time I was ten I could no longer hold meaningful conversation with my parents; neither of them knew enough about music to follow what I was saying, and I didn’t know enough about life outside of music to talk about anything else. This didn’t seem to bother my mother, who made enormous sacrifices to protect me from the outside world. Believing as she did that my talent came directly from God, she felt it was her solemn duty to watch over my gift, and to make sure I was always comfortable and safe from unpleasant distractions. Her role as guardian and manager kept her busy and appeared to compensate for the fact that instead of a friendship developing between us we formed a bond that was made up almost
entirely of a sense of mutual obligation. Instead of talking with me, she generally issued reports on what she was doing for my benefit, and I reciprocated by allowing her to have her way in matters of policy, such as what I would eat and wear, where I would play and when, and whom I could meet.

My father took a different approach. Once he felt he was no longer of use to me as an adviser or confidant, which was around my tenth or eleventh year, he abruptly retreated. Whenever people recognized him after concerts or were told that he was my father, he would hunch up his shoulders, lower his head and answer their questions in short, tense phrases, and would usually excuse himself by saying to my mother, “I’ll wait in the car.” It was as if he didn’t want to spoil things with his presence.

When I was very young I was embarrassed by him, but as I grew older his social awkwardness particularly irritated me. He wasn’t a stupid man, so I felt he had no reason to act ashamed of himself. If he hadn’t had to flee Germany with my mother he would have been a lawyer there; because of his poor English he wasn’t able to pass the entrance exams to any law schools here and finally had to take a job as a clerk in a large shipping firm. I could understand his disappointment, but it hardly made him a failure as a human being. It made me angry that at my concerts and at the parties our family was invited to he would make himself so conspicuously unobtrusive, because, I felt, this made people assume he must have had good reason to do so, and then I really did feel ashamed of him.

The whole time I was growing up I never knew my father to have any friends. He never invited any co-workers over for dinner, and he never went out at night or on weekends with anyone. He came straight home from work every night, and
stayed there every weekend, finding useful but entirely unnecessary things to do around the house. He would ask me how my studies were going, what music I planned to learn next and so on, but the few times I tried to talk to him about anything else he always found something to do with his hands so that he wouldn’t have to look directly at me. He would move his eyebrows up and down and nod occasionally so that I would know he was listening, but he kept his eyes on his hands, which would fold things, twist things, arrange things, prune things, polish things or whittle things, and this—intentionally or not—always seemed to drain the emotional content out of what I was saying and turn it into polite, indirect chatter.

My father rarely discussed his early life with me. I knew from my mother that his parents, who had chosen not to leave Germany, had died in the Holocaust, but I was in my twenties before I heard the rest of the story from a cousin. Our uncle, my father’s oldest brother, had been held at the same camp as my grandparents but had managed to survive. In the years after the war ended, consumed with guilt over having lived without being able to save his own parents, he became addicted to morphine and died of an overdose in 1949. I never spoke about this with my father, even after I’d heard the story. The only truly weighty conversation I ever had with him occurred when I asked if he thought America could survive having a poorly educated, morally confused former actor as its president.

“It depends,” he said.

“On what?”

“Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.”

When I asked him to explain how he defined these two groups, he said, “Reinhart, when somebody gets born, it’s
like he got pushed off the top of one of those ski-slope places. There’s only one way to go, and that’s down. Optimists are the people who face backwards; they’re looking up, but trying real hard not to notice that up is getting farther away. Pessimists are facing the direction they’re going.”

“So what are you, Dad?”

“I’m not looking.”

At the end of the six months Mr. Weber asked his son to show him the novel, and the boy admitted that he hadn’t written a line.

“I felt bad for Philip then, I really did. It broke my heart, because as a kid he was always slouching around the house, he had no friends, and the nanny said that all he did was watch TV all day and sleep on the couch.”

“Objection!” Mr. Graham interrupted. “That’s hearsay, your Honor.”

“Sustained. Mr. Weber, just tell us what you know to be fact.”

The anguished father nodded and continued: “This was my own son. But I felt I had to be firm with him; otherwise he might never take responsibility for himself. So I gave him five hundred dollars and told him he was on his own.”

“Was that the last time you saw him before he was arrested this year?” Ms. Doppelt asked.

“No. He showed up about a year after I’d kicked him out. I came home from work one night and there he was, sitting in the living room. He looked terrible. He was thin and pale, and obviously something was wrong with him. He talked kind of slurred and wasn’t always making full sentences. He was rambling about living in Los Angeles and how he was writing for some big movie company. I could tell that he was
on drugs and I confronted him. He didn’t deny it, just went pale and stormed out of the house. That was the last time I saw him. I assume he drove back to Los Angeles.”

“Mr. Weber, I realize this is a difficult question, but I think you understand why I have to ask it. Do you feel you did the right thing by sending him off on his own when you did?”

Mr. Weber mopped his forehead and cleared his throat. “With the information I had then, I think I did the best I could,” he said tightly. “But knowing what I do now, I would do it differently.”

“What makes you say that?”

The man exhaled loudly. He seemed very uncomfortable about having to admit that he had made a mistake. “When Philip dropped out of college I thought he was just being difficult, that it was just a childish way of getting attention. He didn’t act the way Nancy did during her bad spells, so I didn’t think he had her mental problems. I guess I couldn’t let myself think that was possible; it was too awful to think about. I thought that setting rules and being strict with him would make him grow up. I didn’t want him to become one of those spoiled rich kids who become parasites as adults. Now I realize that he did have a problem, something of a mental nature. It wasn’t his fault. I wish I had known that then. I would have sent him to doctors, and—”

Mr. Graham objected, saying this was all speculation, and the judge agreed.

Ms. Doppelt asked the father to read several passages aloud from a series of letters that Philip had addressed to his mother when he was living at the Zen Foundation. Mr. Weber had never passed them on to his wife because he felt they would only upset her. For the most part the letters
alternated between rambling, immature sentiments about life’s impermanence and dramatic promises to exert himself to his fullest until he became enlightened and fulfilled his vow “to save all sentient beings from suffering.” The overall impression you got was that Philip was a painfully insecure young man trying desperately to impress his absent mother, but in pathetically fantastical, overblown ways.