A Trial by Jury (18 page)

I wanted to prove to myself that I felt right enough about what we had just done that I could pass through them and could countenance whatever they wanted to say or do.

And so, after sixty-six hours of confinement, I put on my coat, shouldered my duffel bag, and proceeded down the narrow corridor that led along the side of the courtroom, linking the jury room to the main hall of the court building. I was not alone, but the group of us who had chosen the front exit neither walked together nor spoke as we made our way out.

In the end, I had prepared myself for more drama than we found. The prosecutor and his assistant were nowhere to be seen. Milcray and his lawyer had not yet left the courtroom. As I passed the double door I could see them through the small window, making their way up the aisle. The victim's family, I suddenly remembered, had begun leaving the courtroom before the judge had finished his closing remarks. It had been foolish of me to think that I would see them here, in this long green corridor, as I had so many times before, huddled together on the low benches that served as the court's only waiting area. In fact, the hall was almost abandoned, dingy, and poorly lit. It was, after all, late morning on a Saturday.

Two women approached, recognizable as members of Milcray's family. One I took to be his fiancée, who had appeared several times in the courtroom and had shaken her head skeptically at damning testimony; the other was an older woman I took to be her mother. The younger woman was carrying a child. As I walked past them to the elevator, the older woman began to thank me, and to point to the child, calling out weepily, “See, this is his baby! This is his little baby!”

Something in the drama rang false, and it goaded me into the elevator after a quick nod. The idea I had taken into my head as I left the jury room—that I ought to give the twelve index cards to Milcray, because they belonged to him, because for him they would have deep significance, because he would understand that they had given him back his life and that they were therefore a precious relic, a sacramental folio—all of this evaporated in the hollow moment of melodrama in the hallway. The twelve cards remained in my pocket, where I had put them when I threw out everything else on the table, cleaning up before I walked out.

 

A
rriving home, I found my wife waiting anxiously. She had gotten back from her trip late the night before, and had spent the morning calling around fruitlessly to figure out in what court building I might be found, so that she could try to bring me anything I needed. We sat together for a while, and I was reluctant to attempt to begin the story of what had happened. So we were quiet.

Then the phone rang. We let the machine get it, but I heard a familiar voice. It was Leah Tennent. I picked it up, somewhat shaky, and said hello.

Her news overwhelmed, brought great relief, cut me adrift.

She had stayed to talk with Milcray's lawyer, and he had told her that he had fought in pretrial motions to have evidence admitted concerning Cuffee's prior record. What the defense had found was a complaint filed by a young man who alleged that Cuffee had molested him. The case had been dropped because the alleged victim refused to press charges, and the evidence had not been admitted because it was judged “more prejudicial than probative.”

In the complaint, the young man alleged Cuffee had enticed him to the apartment by posing as a woman and soliciting sex.

“Oh God,” I mumbled into the phone, my eyes closed tight, the space inside my head large, dizzying.

“Oh my God . . .”

EPILOGUE

_______________________________

103 Corlears Street

I
n the weeks that followed, I tried to return to regular life. I started going back to my office at the humanities center, and even vetted a few of the illustration captions for my book. I rescheduled a trip overseas that I had been forced to cancel when the trial dragged into a third week.

Still, things did not really feel the same. Life had been weirdly sapped of its vitality and importance; my work seemed bizarre and insignificant. Conversation with colleagues at lunch—about books, about the progress of our research, about a columnist several of us disliked—pained me immensely.

In the mornings, perched on the edge of consciousness, I found the trial continuing, not as a nightmare, not even as a dark irruption I sought to avoid. There was no blood, only talk. I drifted in and out of sleep for hours, always yearning at first light to return to the world of the dream, which was the world of the deliberations, as if, somehow, I could continue to discharge a task that seemed impossible to close.

The twelve cards themselves featured prominently in these reveries, the folded stack of them rustling through my head as I slept, though in reality they lay as still as a corpse, right where I had left them on arriving home, in a neat pile on my bookshelf, next to a packet of Advil and a cigar box full of pocket change.

I wrote personal notes to about half the jurors, saying thank you, and telling them how much I had admired their spirit through the deliberations. I sent one to Adelle. I sent one to Dean. Leah and I made plans to have a coffee, but they fell through, and neither of us made another effort. For all its power, I never allowed myself to put too much store in what she had called to tell me the afternoon of the verdict. Was it the trick ending we had all wanted? Had the messenger descended in the final act, wing-footed, wand in hand, dispelling doubt, bearing the Truth? I could not really see it this way: welcome as the news was, it ransomed our verdict only by bankrupting its logic, which I had held so dear. Did any of us, in the end, actually think Milcray was telling the truth? And yet, if this complaint was real . . .

But was it? I had no doubt that the lawyer told this story, but who knew the truth? I thought about making an effort to look up the complaint in police records, but I decided it was better to let the whole matter lie.

I did take a day away from the office and walk uptown from home, retracing in reverse the path Milcray took from Cuffee's apartment to Sheridan Square. I wanted to see the building where it all happened, I wanted to see the divots in the sidewalk where the crime-scene unit had pulled up
in situ
blood samples. Each day during the trial the judge had explicitly forbidden us to make this walk, so each step, even now, felt like a transgression. I hung around for a while outside 103 Corlears and peered through the glass door into the entrance hallway. The curtains to apartment one were drawn, and there was no name on the bell. Someone pulled up on a bicycle, locked it, and went inside the building. I was tempted to strike up a conversation, but thought better of it. No need to alarm people; probably nothing to learn. I found the holes in the cement, and in the asphalt, and probed them absentmindedly. They were exactly where they had been marked on the prosecutor's diagram of the corner. Encouraging. Or perhaps not. I peered into the storm sewer where the knife had been found, and walked down the block to the Watutsi Lounge. It turned out I had been there once before, when I was apartment-hunting in the neighborhood. I had gone in to pick up a copy of the
Village Voice
in the vestibule.

I was wasting my time. But my time felt like a waste. Conversation was toothless, books had no life, days were without focus.

This disturbing sense largely passed. But it took quite a while. For four days my whole being had been focused on a single problem; the solution exacted much, demanding my full intellectual and emotional ranges, extending these. It was a shared problem, a difficult problem, and a problem of considerable immediate consequence. It drew on all of me, and all of others, and we were bound by this. Life hands one few such episodes, and they are, in a way, gifts that go on costing.

I got a packet from Rachel, who sent a picture of herself in her security-guard uniform at the National Police Monument, along with a calendar from the Policeman's Benevolent Association and a money order for the twenty dollars I had lent her on the last day of deliberations.

 

I
n the spring, late on a Friday night, my wife and I went to the Met to take in an exhibition of the late-medieval German master sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. The galleries were mostly empty, quiet, and cold. The sculpture was exquisite, expressive figures in bare wood, softly lit in the open, gray space. We wandered through together, but apart, in silence. Just as the museum was starting to close, and we were leaving the gallery, there was Adelle, dressed elegantly in black, looking lovely, accompanied by a set of fellow medievalists on an outing to see the show. I introduced her to my wife; I asked how she was. She was well, and she thanked me for my note. Had she adjusted to life as usual again? More or less.

The guards asked us to move along. Her group was headed to dinner, as were we. We would keep in touch, yes? Yes. And we said goodbye.

As we made our separate ways out, I thought: “Life as usual again? More or less.”

More or less.

 

A
nd in the mornings, I write, telling the story, trying to tell the story; and it isn't until the end, the very end, as I look at the writing, as I leave the desk, that I see (and I see it sharply, suddenly) that the writing has been, all along (without my knowing), the doing of the thing I wanted so badly from the start, that the writing has done the thing I wanted so badly from the start—it has made the trial into words, a thing to read, to interpret, to circle back through. A text. Like art. Meaning something different to each person. Keeping the large questions open.

But the trial was not that.

Acknowledgments

When Robert Darnton addressed the first class of Fellows at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he said that he hoped the center would be a place where, among other things, a scholar could come, be surprised, and take a departure; or allow a serendipitous foray to become what it became. This book happened there, in that way. My thanks to this institution, its benefactors, and the friends I made during the fellowship. I owe special thanks to a number of others: Tony Grafton, Danielle Allen, Ariela Dubler, Jesse Furman, Aaron Hirsh, Jim Schulz, Tina Bennett, George Andreou, David Burnett, Claire Gaudiani, Maria Burnett, and, of course, Christina.

A Note About the Author

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science and the author of
Masters of All They Surveyed.
After graduating from Princeton University, he was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1999, Chicago's Newberry Library awarded him the Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. A 1999–2000 Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he has taught at Yale and Columbia Universities, and is currently an assistant professor in the History Department at Princeton.

Also by
D. Graham Burnett

Masters of All They Surveyed

This Is a Borzoi Book
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Copyright © 2001 by D. Graham Burnett

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