A Trial by Jury (15 page)

These answers grew more remarkable the more we thought about them. Given that no one had witnessed their altercation, Milcray was clearly at liberty to give any answers he wished. According to the prosecutor, the defendant was a sly and calculating liar, capable of tailoring precise dissimulations to disguise his guilt. And yet here, if anywhere, was the spot for a few well-placed fibs. If he had invented this tale of attempted anal sodomy in an effort to dodge prosecution for a cold-blooded murder, why didn't he have the good sense to embroider his account of the attack in order to make it more obviously life-threatening? Without any difficulty, Milcray could have asserted that “Veronique” assaulted him with much greater violence (Milcray was, after all, badly injured on the leg as well as the hand) or, at the very least, that she threatened his life. These would have been the obvious fabulations of a defendant seeking sympathy, a savvy criminal trying to confect a safe story. Moreover, had Milcray wished, he could very easily have framed Cuffee, by (for instance) leaving the large paring knife that sat on the kitchen counter in the victim's hand.

The logic of the argument was perhaps perverse, but it had considerable persuasive force: Milcray's story was weak, weaker than it needed to be, weaker than a calculated lie would have been. It was, in the end, improbable enough to leave the distinct impression of truth. The African church father Tertullian coined a phrase for this kind of reasoning in his early-third-century text on the incarnation:
certum est quia impossible
(it is certain because impossible).

There were other issues, too: the telephone records (which seemed to confirm the chat-line encounter), lingering unease about the thoroughness and reliability of the police investigations, the missing motive. But because we had mostly agreed to consider the case as we would one of alleged female date-rape, much of the evidence (for instance, the testimony asserting that Cuffee and Milcray were lovers) lost its significance. So what? Though we all agreed (except, possibly, Leah) that Milcray had lied a great deal, there seemed to be a straightforward and plausible way of accounting for all of his lies: accept that Milcray, more than anything else in the world, wanted to hide some experimentation with homosexual relationships (and this seemed quite likely), and then all the lies—the story of Veronique on the street, the unlikely timing of the events, the consensus of witnesses placing him on the scene—suddenly made sense, as did his initial reluctance to tell the police what had happened.

But none of this could help with the real question: Why did Milcray do what he did with that knife? Why did he stick it in the chest of Randolph Cuffee? Self-defense remained a very plausible explanation. Not, perhaps, the most probable, but it could hardly be ruled out, could hardly be placed beyond a reasonable doubt.

Rachel switched sides again. It could have been self-defense, she now said. We were ready for another poll, and it looked as if we were down to a single holdout.

A solid bang rang out on the door, followed by the perfunctory order to cease our deliberations. We were being called to assemble in the court.

When we had taken our places, the judge turned to us and read a statement: it had come to his attention that a juror was ill; he had decided to have her taken to the hospital; we would suspend deliberations until further notice, and were strictly prohibited from discussing the case any further until the full jury could reassemble. Dismissed.

It was shortly before 5 p.m. on Friday evening.

The hours that followed were the most painful of the whole trial. A new complement of court officers took charge, special-duty overtimers replacing the familiar faces of the last weeks, those kind guards who, in the long days of sequestration, had shuttled us to meals, brought aspirin to the jury room, and stood behind us at the urinals (we were never unattended).

These new paunchy weekend cops had oversized highway-patrol sunglasses and gonzo equipment belts. They exuded a palpable air of armed delight. On the judge's orders they herded us into a cavernous empty courtroom down the hall, where, for almost three hours, we waited without any sense of what to expect. Could the deliberations be suspended indefinitely? Could we be kept in custody all weekend? What if Pat got worse? Would the judge ever let us go?

These anxieties had different effects on the different characters. Paige grew hysterical. She spun into a full-out screaming fit at one of the new officers, and wept for some time. Felipe had managed to procure a large cigar from someplace, and he planted himself in a vestibule, puffing deeply. Jim, Rachel, Vel, and Dean seemed most solid; they looked ready to wait out anything. All of us, however, felt the overwhelming frustration of having been interrupted at just that moment: so close to a verdict, seemingly minutes from consensus.

Although perhaps not. Walking (under guard) down the hall from the jury room to our new holding area in the empty courtroom, I had whispered with Leah, who had been looking particularly preoccupied since emerging from the ladies' room. I asked if she was holding up. She made an ambiguous gesture.

“Do you have any sense of how things are looking?” I asked.

It was an elliptical question, intentionally. I didn't want to ask her for a report on her conversation with Adelle in the ladies' room, but I wanted it to be clear I was interested, if she felt willing to tell me how things had gone.

She did not look at me, keeping her bright-green eyes focused down the long institutional corridor. “I don't know what I think anymore,” she said hollowly.

So here was a shock. The bathroom colloquy had apparently not gone as I expected. It looked as if Adelle might have won over the absolute vanguard of those seeking acquittal. Incredible.

I took a deep breath, and as we entered the waiting room I reminded myself of my position from the start: a hung jury would be fine with me, probably better than an acquittal. Objective for the foreseeable future? Inner exile. I found a comfortable chair in the corner, faced the wall, put earplugs deep into my ears, and took out my copy of Wallace Stevens's
Collected Poems.
For some weeks I had been making my way through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” This would be an excellent time to shut out the world and do several cantos.

For many years this book had served me as a curious tool: I used it to be close to certain people (the small group of those with whom I read the poems regularly—mainly my wife, sometimes a colleague or friend), and to shield myself from many others. Whenever I put in earplugs and opened Stevens, I was both leaving the world around me and, to a degree, waving around a sign that I was leaving. With Stevens I expressed both affection and distance: to carry the book was to be armed to hold banality at bay, to reject the daily dibbling of unpoetic life; but also to be equipped to find kindred souls.
The Collected Poems,
in this sense, served me as a kind of Good Book.

In this way I carried the book through the initial phases of the trial, reading it alone, at a distance from collective moments as a jury, out of a desire to be apart, but also to find fellow believers and, where possible, to make converts. In the hall in the first weeks, Adelle and I talked briefly about a few of the poems when she asked me what I was reading. Why was “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” so often anthologized? we wondered. How representative of Stevens's work was it?

In the back of the bus on the morning of the second day of deliberations, one of the guards—a short, stocky Puerto Rican named Ernie—asked me about the book. What was it?

“Poetry,” I said.

Did I read a lot of poetry?

A fair bit.

He used to read a lot of it when he was younger. In fact, one time they had had a Puerto Rican poet on a jury, a great guy.

We talked a little about the island, my wife's home, and I encouraged him to read more poetry, and to try doing it with another person, so he could talk about what he read. He asked if he could see the book. Taking it, he flipped through for a while, and settled on a shorter poem to try, “The Good Man Has No Shape,” a particularly difficult piece. A few minutes later, he handed the book back. It was about Jesus, he said, which was not wrong. I suggested a few other things, and he nodded, saying that what always struck him about poetry was that it meant something different to everyone, “like art,” he added.

He said it was soothing. I said sometimes, but not always.

On the next morning's bus, Leah and I sat next to each other, and she asked if I wanted to do a poem together. I said yes, and I chose one of my favorites, “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” a poem that begins:

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

And it goes on to express the entanglements of geography and spirit:

There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

We read our way through the poem together, first silently, and then several times quietly aloud, before going line by line. It was pleasing to do this. Later, at the end of the day, she walked over to me and said that she had figured something out. She alluded to the poem's memorable last lines:

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

And she announced that this was why her business had failed. I looked puzzled. “I had an importing company for a while—jewelry, textiles, carvings. What he says, that is why it failed. . . .”

She was certainly right. I was moved by the insight. Objects taken from their places no longer had their power. The rings she bought in Peru were part of Peru; in the village they meant one thing, in the Village, something else.

I wondered. Did this explain why we had been willing to ignore the exhibits stacked in the evidence dolly—the blankets, the robe, the wig itself? Were these “invisible elements” of the scene that had been made visible? Could they transport the place from which they came? The things they had seen? They could not.

Now, in suspended animation for hours, I read Stevens, circling around the seventh canto of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” with its remarkable invocation of the fragility and context-dependence of truth:

Perhaps

The truth depends on a walk around a lake . . .

These were powerful words to read as a juror, locked up in a grim room.

We had been assigned the task of figuring out a
ver-dict
—literally, a
true-saying,
a
truth-to-be-spoken.
But we were obliged to come up with that truth in a particular room: a closed room, with two windows and white walls, facing west, on the fifteenth floor, without carpeting, a room with two adjoining bathrooms. Did the truth depend on the bathrooms? On the windows? Maybe. What truth would we have found on a walk around a lake? Such a walk seemed infinitely far away from Manhattan in February.

A walk around the lake—take the jury on a walk around the lake, or on a walk through apartment one at 103 Corlears Street, or on a walk around that neighborhood, to inspect the holes ripped in the concrete to preserve spatters of blood. Take the jurors on a walk to Lhassa. They get to know one another. What do they come back and tell you? Perhaps the truth depends on the room, on the walk, on the snow, on the number of chairs with arms. All these things, I now saw, were part of the truth that we would speak. I was part of this truth. So was my khaki tie, my bag of oranges, my wife, the sound of Canal Street in the morning. Dean was a part of this truth, and so were the Hell's Angels and the dirt in the aisles at Madison Square Garden. Vel was part of this truth, and so was her boss, the Mattress King of Miami. Stevens was a part of this truth, and so were his poems and their places—Hartford, Key West, the thirteen blackbirds. The verdict would come out of the whole of these things, out of us and our world. If there were gods, their justice might be beyond these streets, these people, these memories, but the ways of the gods were certainly not our ways.

I looked around the room behind me. Leah was sitting with Adelle in the back. Jessica and Paige were with them, and they were all talking in hushed voices. I suspected that I was seeing a new momentum building for a conviction. Jim was sitting alone, napping. Dean was talking to our guards, who had just caught Felipe trying, apparently, to escape out the back stairway.

The strong smell of cigar smoke had seeped around the room.

Paige approached me. She looked distraught to the point of collapse. Evidently she had made an effort to get a message to the judge directly, saying she wished to speak with him. He had declined, and she had begun to insist on contacting her lawyer, in order to discover her rights. I felt confident this was going to get her nowhere, and told her so.

When the judge had embarrassed me in front of the whole court, I had been so angry that I called a lawyer friend and asked him what would happen to me if I gave the judge a piece of my mind. He said I might well be held in contempt and tossed in jail for quite some time; the judge, he reminded me, had almost unlimited power over his courtroom. I now explained this to Paige, who asked me what I thought was going to happen next. Assuring her that I had no special information, I gave my opinion: “Chances are the judge leaves Pat in the hospital overnight, for observation, and he sends us all to the hotel again, with instructions to show up tomorrow at nine. By that point they have a diagnosis on Pat. If she is OK, then we continue; if not, we probably wait some more.”

She blanched. “I can't do any more,” she said.

“Well, I'm not really sure there is any option.” I shrugged.

She asked me directly if there was anything, anything at all, that I could think of that would get her out of the whole mess. I thought for a moment and said, “If you attacked me, right now, or assaulted one of the other jurors, or possibly one of the guards, that would probably do it—provided it was a good, hard, sustained attack.”