Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Whatever you know.”

  “At one time I could have told you much. Now I am not so sure I know anything at all.” He tilted his chair away from me, until he was virtually horizontal. “You should understand that around here I am known as the Fossil. A dinosaur in miniature. I make my students work hard. I make them think, not merely regurgitate. I dispute both their values and their tastes. I have a host of principles of my own, developed over a period of time longer than most of my critics have been alive, and I demand that they be acknowledged, if not acceded to. I find almost all current trends appalling, the product of the total lack of rigor in our society. I see Berkeley Law as an important counter to such trends, as a bulwark, if you will. Thus I am didactic. Doctrinaire. Goebbels, some of them call me behind my back.” He shrugged off the taint. “In any case, anything I tell you should be measured against this background.”

  I nodded, and waited for the disproportionately weighty voice to continue. Gus Grunig was staring at his computer, as though answers to the questions I would ask were merely mathematical, the product of data and device.

  “Larry, needless to say, was precisely my opposite,” Grunig said abruptly. “What he cheered, I bemoaned, and vice versa, whether the subject was legal, social or economic. Our disputes were legendary, yet despite our diverse perspectives I regarded Larry Usser as my surrogate sibling for many years. We were as close as two men can be in this day and age, when male friendship brings on whispers and snickers if it aspires to exceed the shallow. My regard extended to his family as well. I taught little Lisa how to ride a bike. I have been a regular contributor to the crisis center. In short, I loved Lawrence Usser, and I can say that about no other man of my acquaintance. Present or past.”

  Grunig’s sigh was long and pained. I asked him what had happened between him and Usser.

  He seemed to shrink even further, as though he wished to disappear entirely. “These are difficult times for places such as this. Funds are diminishing. The profession itself is under fire and founders without clear vision. The society at large rages almost beyond our comprehension, the populace cowering in fear of violence, almost helpless. Still, here at Berkeley Law our ideals are for the most part fully developed: We know what we want to do, and that is to offer an excellent legal education to as many persons as are able to absorb it, and to as many as we are able to absorb. Some will carp about the path to excellence, others about what skills are encompassed by the term ‘legal education,’ about what ethical component should be included in the phrase, for example. But basically our problem is not definitional, it is practical. The pursuit of our ideals must necessarily take place in the reality of the age. We can only draw our students and our faculty from the world that is, not the world we might wish to exist.”

  “For example?” I prompted.

  “Lawrence, Elmira Howson, others of their ilk, they look at the faculty and see only token numbers of blacks, women, other minorities. And they say that condition must change. Period. End of discussion. I and others insist that one more question needs be asked: Have we discriminated against minority applicants on bases unrelated to their teaching requirements? If we have, of course we must change. Invidious discrimination must be eradicated. Totally. The same with students. If we are keeping qualified minority students out, then of course we must act immediately to admit them. But if students or faculty are not qualified, if their admission into the Berkeley Law School would result in reduced levels of teaching and scholarship, in an inferior quality of graduates in terms of education and ability, then they must not be hired or admitted. We should encourage them to upgrade their skills and apply again, we should direct them to programs where this could happen, but we must not lower our standards. The minute we do so, we are threatened with total collapse, with anarchy, with an absence of excellence that will merely accelerate a similar trend in the society as a whole. That must not happen. I will oppose it with every fiber of my being.”

  Grunig stopped to gasp for air. His face had reddened with the force of his oration, from the Calvinist fires that burned inside him. It took a minute for the spell to break, then he smiled at me sheepishly. “It all seems to outsiders like yourself as such a simple difference of opinion. But believe me, its ramifications in a place like this are enormous. Then of course there is the problem of the curriculum.”

  “What problem is that?”

  “Lawrence commissioned a study to determine where our graduates were finding employment. The results were not surprising to me, but they were both surprising and disappointing to him. It seems the brightest students at Berkeley Law over the past five years have ended up in San Francisco working for the large corporate law firms. The Pillsburys, the Morrison Forsters, the Brobecks, et cetera. Larry saw this as an indictment of our entire approach to teaching. He wanted a course list that would result in the best and brightest ending up in the trenches, fomenting revolution. And he went further. He suggested that those faculty members whose research aided the corporate firms in achieving their ends, that promoted the establishment rather than the outcasts, were undermining the entire thrust of the law as he believed it should be, which was to oppose the status quo and to undermine privilege wherever it existed. He attacked some of our faculty with a vehemence more appropriate to criminals or fascists, and of course there was an appropriate reaction. What Lawrence really wants is to program our students to do his bidding after they leave here. And several of us have objections to that. A year ago, when he called me a monarchist in print, Lawrence and I were cleaved irretrievably.”

  Grunig smiled wanly. I said the first thing that came to mind: “I’m sorry.”

  Grunig shrugged. “If you ask questions around here for very long, you will hear many accounts of our quarrels. Lawrence and I disagreed over these and other subjects, and we did so violently and publicly. He once threw a drink in my face. I once called him a child. Our public pugilism lasted for about six months, until we both were exhausted by it. It is not an epoch I am proud of. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  He stopped and looked at me closely. “I tell you this to put my next comment in context: There is no way on earth that Lawrence could have done to Dianne what the papers say was done to her. He is capable of anger, of rage, of jealousy, of insult. He is not capable of butchery. Unless there is evidence of drug use of some pathogenic amount, there is no way Lawrence Usser is guilty of this crime.”

  Grunig paused for breath. His tiny body heaved like a bloated fish. “Having said that, I will also tell you that I am resisting all forms of student and/or faculty support for his defense. We are scholars here, not advocates. We must remain neutral on all issues of guilt or innocence. We defend principles, not people. It is the only way to maintain what integrity we still possess.”

  He came to a stop while I was still awash in his courage and his convictions. His eyes blazed until he heard a knock on his door. Then he glanced at the clock on the wall above my head and prepared to ask me to leave. “Just one more thing,” I said quickly. “You mentioned that your dispute with Usser began a year ago. Did that correspond with a change in Usser’s personality? Or with a psychological problem he might have developed at about that time?”

  “With the onset of legal insanity, you mean?” Grunig’s smile ridiculed my predictability. “The short answer is no. Lawrence was not insane or anything close to it. The more helpful answer is yes, over the past few months Lawrence became increasingly fractious, at least in my opinion. He increased the amounts of scholarship and consultation he engaged in to inhuman levels. He was always late, always behind schedule, always on the phone. He seemed to be engaged in some religious rite, if you want the truth, to be working to accomplish something that would compensate for his rather earthly sins. There was a strong element of fanaticism in his life, no doubt about it. I found it quite disturbing. I even suggested he see someone professionally. Someone besides his sidekick Lonborg.” Grunig shook his head. “Lawrence laughed at me and accused me of want
ing him put away. Now he is just that—away—and I am as sick at heart as I have ever been, save one instance. I must tell you, however, that I do and will continue to resist his return to the faculty in an active role until a final judgment of his guilt has been reached.”

  “You don’t believe in the presumption of innocence?”

  “I believe in it for the common man with all my heart. I believe, however, that those of us who endeavor to order the society—who teach students the concepts of right and wrong and suggest the processes through which such determinations should be reached—we must be held to a higher standard. Our lessons cannot be seen to spring from a desperate self-interest.”

  He seemed to be waiting for me to comment, but I had no idea what to say. His moral sense was so large it barely left me room enough to breathe, let alone debate.

  “There is one thing more you should know,” he said after a moment.

  “What’s that?”

  “Five years ago I was engaged to be married to a fellow member of the faculty of this institution. You should know her name before you proceed with your investigation.”

  “Professor Howson?”

  He tilted his head. “Very perceptive. Mutt and Jeff, they called us. I was very much in love, for the first time in twenty years. Elmira uttered similar sentiments, until Larry seduced her away from me. There are those who will tell you my differences with Larry stem entirely from that betrayal. They will be wrong—our friendship survived my heartache and my fury—but that will not stop them from talking. If ignorance were a muffler, the world would be as silent as a tomb.”

  I started to leave, convinced that Usser’s purloining of Elmira Howson was the personal matter Ms. Howson had been referring to a short while earlier. But then I reconsidered. It didn’t fit. It wasn’t a secret, first of all, and the timing was all wrong. Usser’s friendship with Grunig had continued for four more years. I settled back in my chair and ignored Grunig’s hints that he was tired of talking to me. “I understand you’re hoping to be appointed dean next year,” I said to him.

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  “Is part of your campaign an anti-Usser movement?”

  “I suppose some would call it that.”

  “In what way?”

  Grunig crossed his arms above his barrel chest. “The main change I will recommend upon my appointment is the abolition of all forms of consultation arrangements in litigation matters of the kind that Lawrence so frequently engages in. The imprimatur of this great school should not be lent to one side or the other in a courtroom dispute. No matter what the stakes.”

  Grunig’s final words were quick hard bites of rage. I watched his granite eyes a moment, then asked my question. “There was something personal between you and Usser that you haven’t mentioned yet, wasn’t there? Something more serious than him calling you a monarchist?”

  “Why do you say that?” Grunig’s look was stricken.

  “I’ve heard rumors. And I have hunches.”

  “What if there was?”

  “It might help me put all this together if I could know what it involved.”

  “Put what together?”

  “The reason Usser might have killed his wife.”

  “I’ve told you,” Grunig insisted. “I cannot believe he did it.”

  “Then all the more reason for all the facts to come out. One of them might exculpate him, based on a connection no one but Usser can explain.”

  Grunig thought it over. Like most people I encounter, he was reluctant to trust me. Like many of them, he finally allowed himself to be persuaded to speak out anyway.

  “The matter was kept from everyone at the time, Mr. Tanner. No one knows the truth except for Lawrence and myself and one other person who, though sworn to secrecy, would I’m sure divulge it immediately if she were at all persuaded it would help acquit Lawrence Usser. Which is why I’m telling it to you now.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  Grunig closed his eyes. “Two years ago a young man on this campus developed an obsessive attraction for a coed. He followed her everywhere, called her hourly, slept in her yard some nights, hounded her fiendishly, for months on end. She was progressively amused, annoyed and finally frightened by the devotions of the young man.”

  “I’ve heard a little about it,” I said.

  “Yes, I thought you might have. Well, one evening, the girl and the boy she truly cared for decided to torment the tormentor. While he was watching from his car, they began what used to be known as heavy petting. Rather than driving the suitor away, however, the tactic enraged him. He advanced to the porch where the couple was embracing and killed the girl with a single thrust of his knife, then fled down the street, leaving his car behind. He was later caught and tried for his crime. The killer’s name was Ronald Nifton. The dead girl’s name was Swanson.”

  “Right. I remember.”

  “Do you remember the name of the boy on the porch?”

  “No.”

  “Few do. He was a witness at the trial, but the focus was on the maniacal young killer, of course. Well, to make a long story short, Lawrence Usser defended Nifton, won him an acquittal on the basis of insanity, and then was instrumental in seeing that Nifton was released from the state mental hospital shortly thereafter, to resume his place in the society of free men.”

  “Nifton,” I repeated. “The girl in Usser’s office is named Nifton.”

  “That’s right. She is the sister of the murderous young man. But my point is not Ronald Nifton or his sister, it is the other boy. The real boyfriend of the dead girl. Do you know what happened to him?”

  “No.”

  “He left Berkeley ultimately, haunted by the death of the girl and the thought that he should have somehow been able to prevent it. He wandered the West for several months, used drugs in increasing quantities, was arrested for shoplifting twice. Finally, a year ago and a year after the murder, he killed himself down in Big Sur. He jumped off a bridge on Highway I and was smashed on the rocks below.”

  “That’s very sad.”

  “Yes. His name was Wendell Dainwright. He was the child of a couple that included his natural mother and the stepfather who adopted him. His birth was the product of an unfortunate if not calamitous marriage that ended in divorce many years ago. The marriage was mine. The boy was my son. Now he is dead, and thanks to Lawrence Usser the Nifton man appears before me regularly, amid the swirl of Telegraph Avenue, to remind me of my loss and of his own outrageous liberty.”

  FOURTEEN

  By the time I found my way back to the car, it was pushing six and time to eat. I drove down Bancroft, circled left, and came back up Telegraph Avenue, where so many young people had marched for their own immoderate formulations of peace and freedom, where so many arms of the state resisted them, where the scars of those struggles still linger twenty years after the wounds first began to be inflicted.

  Once a beacon to the world or at least a vocal portion of it, symbol of the ascendancy of youth and the assault on fixed ideas, Telegraph Avenue seemed to have no essence anymore, seemed to be trying to do too much for too many and as a consequence did too little for too few. Perhaps it’s because society as a whole has no essence beyond a shriveled cinder, and Telegraph is merely its mirror. Or perhaps it’s just that Berkeley’s day has passed, its revolution come full circle so that it worships what it once reviled. Or perhaps, as I raced toward my fiftieth year of life, I was begging the past to be more momentous than it was, in a piteous attempt to augment my own lame history. I sighed. The traffic stopped and started. I stuttered my way along and studied the street more closely.

  A few of the old stores remained—Moe’s, Cody’s, the Mediterraneum, Foley’s Drugs, Larry Blake’s, Nicole’s. But in place of Robbie’s and Fraser’s and other landmarks of the past was a string of storefronts that marked the recent shift in Berkeley’s passions—Blondie’s Pizza, Yogi’s Yogurt, Thomas Sweet Ice Cream, Mrs. Field’s Cookies, and Ribs R Us. The Ban
k of America branch still loomed large, but now was windowless, shamelessly immune to riot and revolt. On the other hand, the view of Sather Gate was blocked not by a rank of state police but by a phalanx of falafel stands on wheels.

  People still thronged the avenue in impressive numbers—more people walk Telegraph Avenue than walk Times Square—but they were not the same mix I’d seen in the mid-sixties, when all the world had seemed to stroll the street. Today’s Telegraph was mostly given over to street people—vendors pushing everything from toys to ties to crystal amulets; aging foreign students jabbering in oddly warbled tongues; dingy transients with bedrolls on their backs and lunacy behind their eyes; disabled people in motored chariots scooting like a superior species through globs of plodding pedestrians, BMXers and skateboarders; street musicians exchanging riffs for tips; and more visible than all the other breeds the never-young kids displaying their erupting sexuality or their still-untested courage or their nuclear nihilism in the most impudent manner they could both imagine and afford.

  By the time I reached Bancroft Way I had decided what was missing was the radiant spark that had arched across the avenue some twenty years ago, that electric sense that things were happening on Telegraph Avenue that had never happened before, not in Berkeley, not anywhere, things that would cleanse the world, bleach out its stains forever, perfect the heretofore imperfect march of man. Now Telegraph was merely bogus, to use Cal’s term: stale, warmed over, tired, bizarre by necessity and not by choice, too weary to be worthy of its past. Still, by the time I turned left at Bancroft I sensed that I’d be back on Telegraph before the Renzel case had ended, looking for something or someone that would be very hard to find, and probably dangerous to seek. I turned right on Shattuck and a few blocks later settled for a hamburger at Oscar’s, which had been in town long before anyone knew what falafel was.