The privilege, p.20
The Privilege, page 20
The jury sat there, their mouths hanging open, their eyes wide with wonder, dazzled by what they had just heard. Boe looked at me.
“Is this sufficient answer to your question, Mr. Antonelli?”
Sufficient answer? I had asked him for his name. Sufficient answer? The judge, Michelle Longstreet, stared at him in dumb astonishment; the prosecutor, the redoubtable Eleanor McFarland, held her breath to keep her pose of studied indifference. The jurors had moved forward on their chairs, their eyes alive with the excitement of an audience at a performance better than anything they had expected. There was only one thing to do. I turned to McFarland.
“Your witness.”
“My witness?” she asked, incredulous. “What do you mean - my witness? You haven’t yet asked a question on direct.”
“I asked a question,’ I replied, smiling at her. “I asked him what his name was, and after the answer he has just given, I think the jury has heard enough to reach a verdict. Don’t you?”
She smiled back, and then lowered her eyes as if she were thinking through her response.
“He hasn’t denied that he murdered Lucas Fairweather. I think the jury might certainly remember that. Don’t you?” she asked, looking up at me.
I took it as a helpful suggestion and turned to Alan Boe.
“Did you murder Lucas Fairweather?”
“No, I did not,” he said, shaking his head at the utter absurdity of it. “Despite the many times I thought it might not be such a bad idea,” he added, nodding twice in succession to underscore the point, and to mark the difference, the crucial difference, between the thought and the deed.
I nodded back, and without bothering with the usual announcement that I had no more questions of the witness, took my seat, ready, like everyone else, to watch the show.
The prosecution had what, in any other trial, would have been enough circumstantial evidence to make its case, but Alan Boe was not any other defendant. Michelle Longstreet, ambitious, intelligent, vain and entitled, a woman who had always been told she could be anything she wanted to be and had not yet in her relatively young life encountered anything, or anyone, to challenge that belief, might have thought she could match wits with him, but Eleanor McFarland had a deeper understanding. She approached the witness with caution.
“You have been a member of the faculty at the university for nearly thirty years - isn’t that correct?”
“Twenty nine years,” replied Boe, looking straight at her.
“In other words, your entire working life.”
“No.”
“No? You worked somewhere else?”
“No - I’ve never worked. I teach students; I write about what I find most interesting. I would never call it work.”
“I see. But you’re paid for what you do: the university gives you a salary as a teacher, and you get paid for the books you write. Every time someone buys one, you get a royalty - correct?”
Boe’s remarkable eyes lit up. He turned to the jury, anxious to share a secret.
“Those books I write, they are not what you might call ‘best-sellers.’ But, I have to admit the sales are pretty consistent: nine or ten every year. In fairness to myself, I’m told the people who buy them read them more than once. In fairness to the truth, I have to tell you that it is probably because it takes more than one reading to begin to understand what I have written. Now, you know,” he went on, as if he were about to go back to the beginning and start all over, “there is that dialogue of Plato’s - the Phaedrus - you should read it - the remark that you cannot know what a writing means until you have read through it to the end and then read it again from the beginning with the benefit of what you have learned.”
McFarland had quite forgotten why she was there. She might not have remembered at all, had he not asked her if she had another question she wished to ask.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
She studied him almost as if she wanted to assure herself he was real, and not a figment of her own imagination. She looked down at the floor, and then, a moment later, looked up. He was still there, waiting, a smile of what actually seemed a smile of encouragement, a smile he might have used with a shy student reluctant to speak in class. Had it not been for her own self-awareness, her understanding of what she was trained to do - what she was there to do - she might have yielded to the feeling, a feeling I was certain she had, that Alan Boe could not possibly be guilty of murder, whether of Lucas Fairweather or anyone else. She took a deep breath, drew herself up to her full height, and pushed on.
Or tried to. Because just as she was about to ask her next question, he asked one of her.
“Have you ever had a case where in the middle of the trial you realized that the person you were prosecuting was not guilty? What did you do - what would you do - when that happens?”
“A jury - not the prosecution, not the defense - decides whether….” McFarland caught herself. “Your Honor,” she said, calmly, her eyes still on Alan Boe, “would you please instruct the witness that he is here to answer questions, not ask them.”
Boe held up his hand. He understood what was expected.
“When you were asked if you murdered Lucas Fairweather, you said that you had ‘many times thought it might not be such a bad idea.’ Why did you think that? Why did you think it would be a good idea to kill him?”
Alan Boe tapped his middle finger on the wooden arm of the witness chair three times. He pressed his lips together in a tight line across his mouth. He looked at Eleanor McFarland, seriously disappointed in what she had done.
“I said that I did not murder Chancellor Fairweather. Then I added, as a way to put in perspective the difference between a criminal act and the kind of passing daydream we have, I think, all experienced when confronted by remarkable, and in this instance almost willful, stupidity, that I had many times thought it might not be a bad idea. I did not - and you know I did not - ever say that I thought ‘it would be a good idea to kill’ him. The distinction will seem small only to those incapable of making the kind of distinctions that matter. Now, as to the question - your question - the one you were starting to ask: why would I have ever thought that the world - or, rather, to be precise: the university - would be better off if Lucas Fairweather were not a part of it, that question, after what you and everyone in this courtroom heard from the vice-chancellor, almost answers itself. Lucas Fairweather represented everything a university should be against. Lucas Fairweather did not know the difference between a university and a trade school. It is our great misfortune that nearly everyone now thinks Lucas Fairweather was right; our misfortune that, like Lucas Fairweather, we no longer know what it means to have a conscience.”
McFarland was standing at the far end of the jury box. A few of the jurors turned to look at her; most kept their eyes on Alan Boe, afraid they might miss something if, even for an instant, they looked away.
“We don’t know what it means to have a conscience? Is that what you are saying? That, like Lucas Fairweather - the way he treated women - we don’t know the difference between right and wrong?” she asked, with a look of deep suspicion.
He had given her an opening, a chance to make him seem condescending, someone who looked down on other people, people like the twelve jurors who already had to think him strange. It was not much of leap from strange to unaccountable, someone you could not trust to act in any normal way; someone who might, after all, have done what he was accused of doing. Eleanor McFarland stood there in the attitude of a woman who deserves an explanation. But instead of a reply, Alan Boe just gazed back at her.
“You don’t want to answer my question?”
“How old are you?”
“How old am…? I’m not here to answer your questions; you’re here to -”
“Answer yours. Yes, I’ve heard that. But - tell me if you disagree - we’re both here to learn the truth. Am I wrong about that?” he asked, with a quick, disarming smile.
“No, you’re not wrong about….But we do that in a court of law by having the attorney’s ask questions, not the witnesses.”
“I asked how old you were, because you appear to be a very well-educated woman with a considerable amount of experience. You asked me how many years I have been teaching at Berkeley; if I knew how old you were - if I did not have to guess - I could perhaps answer your question in a way that would allow me to draw on your memory and not just my own.”
“My memory, your memory - I don’t think I quite understand.”
“My question goes to whether I am right in assuming that you have lived long enough to grasp, not just the changes that have taken place, but their significance.”
“The changes that have…,” she started to say, but stopped. She was angry at herself, angry for letting him throw her off track, angry at again yielding, if even for a moment, to the fascination he seemed to exercise on everyone. She practically shouted her insistence that he answer the question she had asked.
“You asked two questions: Do we know what it means to have a conscience, and do we know the difference between right and wrong? They are, both of them, very long questions. Begin with this: when do we learn what is right and wrong? It isn’t from books on ethics; we don’t learn it from our teachers in a university. We learn it before we know how to learn; we learn it, starting the day we are born, from our parents; we learn it in the stories we are told as small children; we learn it in a way that becomes so much a part of who we are that most of us never question what we know - what we believe - to be true. That is the nature of our conscience: what we know without any doubt whatsoever is right and wrong. But there is always a tension between the demands of conscience and what society thinks important and wants to protect. We all know this. Here, in the United States, money and fame have become, for a great many people, the only measure of success. Nothing else seems to matter. The worst effect of this addiction to wealth and its privileges is on education where, we are constantly told by people like Lucas Fairweather, the important thing is to train a workforce that can compete in the world market. What we learn from reading great works of literature, the sense of what it means to be human that we get from listening to great music - the music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven - what we see about the human condition in great works of art; in other words what not that long ago was thought to be the importance of a decent education is now dismissed as at best irrelevant, something that can be picked up in your spare time, and at worst harmful to the main business of learning a marketable skill. We have become like those Athenians someone told Socrates had all gathered around a horse. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Is the horse rich?’”
The courtroom erupted in laughter. Michelle Longstreet could not quite suppress a grin as she gently tapped her gavel and reminded everyone that this was a courtroom and silence was required
“This is the most serious danger we have ever faced,” insisted Alan Boe, his eyes shining with all the certainty of a thing foretold. “We are speaking - you asked about - conscience. What I said is true: we learn the difference between right and wrong while still in our cradles, but the choice between them is not always easy, or as straightforward as we would like, as we get older. We do not live by ourselves; we live with others. We are part of a country, a society of human beings. If you look around, what do you see - a frenzied attempt to gain recognition, to have more than others, to show yourself to advantage, to rise above the crowd, but to do so by becoming what the crowd admires. Public opinion becomes the only opinion that matters, and because, in the age of television and the internet, public opinion can change overnight, there is scarcely time to think. Instead of timeless values - that sense of right and wrong, the basis of our conscience, our ‘shared knowledge,’ - everything has become provisional. The morning paper, for those who still have one to read, has become, as it were, a typesetter’s nightmare in which before you have reached the end of a sentence the beginning is already being rewritten.”
Eleanor McFarland stared down at the floor, nodding in a way that suggested she did not disagree. She was old enough to remember when a university education meant more than the acquisition of marketable skills. But there were some things that had not changed, and a jury trial, a murder trial, was one of them.
“You considered Lucas Fairweather a threat, a danger, to the university, what you believe a university should be. That is why, as you have now admitted, you had ‘many times thought it might not be a bad idea’ - isn’t that the phrase you used to correct my characterization? - if he was to be murdered. You are now on trial for that murder, and -”
“A murder I did not commit!”
“A murder the jury will decide you did or did not commit. When you were questioned by the police, you said there were circumstances in which murder was justified - isn’t that correct, Professor Boe?’
“Yes, I said that.”
“The example you used, an obvious example - Hitler?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Because Hitler was a threat to everything we believe - isn’t that the reason.”
“To everything we believe, and to the lives - the millions of lives - of everyone who stood in his way.”
“Someone presents a threat to our way of life, to what we hold most sacred, to what we would die to defend - the death of someone like that would not be murder, it would be the act of a hero, someone willing to risk their own life to rid the world of someone who posed that kind of danger - would you not agree?”
“Yes, no question.”
“You just told us that - and tell me if I misquote you - that what Lucas Fairweather, and others like him, wanted to do with the university was ‘the most serious danger we have ever faced.’ The greatest danger we have ever faced,” she repeated, as she turned slowly to the jury. “The greatest danger.” She let the words echo in the silence of the courtroom and then, shaking her head, she glanced at the bench. “The prosecution has no more questions of this witness.”
I was on my feet before she reached her chair.
“Re-direct, your Honor.”
Alan Boe still sat in the same figure eight position, leaning forward, more than willing, eager, to hear the next question. It did not matter what the question was. He had the answer before you asked it. Better than anyone I had ever seen in a court of law, he understood the connections between things, the single thread that held everything together.
“No, I did not consider Lucas Fairweather that kind of threat.”
Eleanor McFarland was just sitting down. I had not asked a question.
“I beg your pardon - you didn’t consider…?”
“Lucas Fairweather - I was asked a question by Ms. McFarland. She did not give me time to answer. That is my answer.”
He bent his head to the side, waiting to see if I wanted him to explain. It was a matter of form, a polite way of encouraging someone to join the conversation. If I had said nothing, just stood there, waiting to see what he would do next, he would have begun without me, but made it seem that he was only responding to what he knew I wanted him to do. It was a teacher encouraging a student. I looked at the jury, and with a slight smile let them know I was as fascinated by Alan Boe as I knew they must be.
“You didn’t consider Lucas Fairweather the kind of threat that would justify his murder. You didn’t think of him as someone like a Hitler, whom everyone would have wanted dead - is that the answer you would have given, had you been given the chance to answer?”
“Yes, exactly. I meant what I said about the dangerous changes that have taken place, about the way the university - and by this I mean all universities - has forgotten that the purpose of higher education is to liberate the mind from the dominant prejudices of the times in which we live, to preserve the long tradition of the timeless standards by which we should measure what we think important. That requires, not the death of individuals who are incapable of that kind of understanding, but the existence of people who can bring back to life what we too often kill: curiosity about how those who came before us - Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Julian - saw the world, saw it through eyes that had not been darkened by all the changes we in our ignorance think so beneficial. Kill - murder - someone who does not agree with that? I would have to murder nearly everyone alive!”
I could have listened - the jury, everyone in the courtroom, could have listened - for as long as Alan Boe wanted to go on talking, listened until the sun vanished from the sky and the moon took its place. It was the perfect time to bring things back to specifics, the reason why we were here, what the jury had to decide.
“I want to take you back to the night of the murder. Why were you there?”
“I walk every night, a mile or so, always at the same time, always the same route. Every night, for so many years, I don’t know I’m doing it. It gives me exercise, and without having to think where I am going, allows me to think about what I am studying, what I am trying to write.”
