There were some chores he needed to do. The AC filters had to be changed, and while he was at it, he changed the refrigerator and oven hood filters, too. He did a walk around the outside of the house. Whoever was cutting the grass wasn’t trimming the edges very well, so he got the Weedwacker out of the garage and ran it along the front walk and around the flowerbeds. The motor had run dry on the fountain pump, so he primed it and got the water flowing again. He filled the bird feeder with black oil sunflower seeds.
The horses were nickering at the fence, and he went back and let them nuzzle his palms. Romeo lifted his tail and let three or four big turds plop to the ground, and Pete had a sudden flashback of the kids stringing a net in the pasture and playing badminton. Half the point of their game was to hit the birdie in such a way that the opponent couldn’t avoid stepping in manure to return the volley. As if that wasn’t hard enough, they usually played after dinner as twilight fell so they could barely see the piles they were dancing to avoid. They hooted and hollered whenever someone misstepped, and up on the patio, Pete and Leigh used to laugh, too, to hear it. The sound of the kids’ laughter ringing out through the pasture was a sound he’d always associate with summer nights. That and the sound of the hose running afterward to wash off their shoes.
Another flashback, to the first time he brought Kip and Mia here. They kept their kids apart while they were dating—Leigh knew too many children who got to know a prospective brother and sister, learned to share toys and meals and often bedrooms, only to watch them leave after a month or a year when things didn’t work out. No child should have to have an ex-sibling, she said. So they waited until they knew it was forever and arranged a big get-to-know-each-other dinner for the kids. It was late winter but unseasonably warm so they grilled out on the patio. Mia at five was desperately shy around strangers, especially those loud, lumbering, fifteen-year-old giants, so Leigh took her under her wing. She sat next to her at dinner and made ketchup smiley faces on her plate and stuck five candles in her cupcake to make up for all the birthdays she’d missed. By the time dessert was over, Mia was in her lap and Leigh was reading her one book after another by the fading light of the day. That was when the twins set up the badminton net in the pasture. Chrissy was yanking on her barn boots to play the first set when she looked up at Kip and suddenly clapped her hands in delight. Hey! she cried. We don’t have to take turns anymore! Now we can play teams! Three players were now four, and the world became perfect in her eyes.
The horses ambled away and so did he. He sat on the glider on the patio and watched the light fade from their garden. Their house, their home, and he wanted it back, all of it. The perfect life they’d built here. It still could happen, he told himself. Kip would soon be done with school. He could go stay with Karen, and Pete could move home. Live civilized again. End the campout and sleep on a real bed. With Leigh.
Except that Kip was barely tolerating his Sunday visits to his mom’s. There was no way he could live there full-time, and who would help him deal with Shelby and the case? Who would keep the lid on his wild mood swings? Not Karen and sure as hell not Gary. As for Pete moving back home— He looked up at the windows of the house, every one of them black and forbidding as dusk fell. Leigh wouldn’t even talk to him on the phone for more than thirty seconds. She wasn’t going to throw the doors open for him now.
He put his head in his hands. Kip was nearly grown and out of the nest. Leigh was the one Pete was supposed to be spending the rest of his life with. Forsaking all others, their wedding vows said. But when it came down to it, he chose Kip. Yes, the kid was having the worst time of his life, but, God, so was Leigh. Blood will out, his mother had said acidly when he told her a little of their situation, and maybe that was all it came down to. Despite a thousand years of civilization, the tribal mentality still prevailed.
He went back in the kitchen for Shep, but the dog didn’t want to go. He jumped up on the window seat and circled it three times and flopped down with a sigh. Pete called him and snapped his fingers and even hooked a hand in his collar and gave a tug. But Shep wouldn’t budge. “Have it your way,” he said.
Back in the truck he took a moment to text Leigh so she wouldn’t be startled when she got back. Shep’s in the kitchen, he typed. He didn’t want to leave home.
Neither did I, he added, but the words glowed too brightly on the screen, and he hit the back arrow until they disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A photograph of the Reverend Brooks Brothers appeared on a poster outside the auditorium, along with his actual name: STEPHEN H. KENDALL, PHD, DD. Below that was the title of tonight’s lecture: “Truth and Consequences: The Ethics of Lying.” The university had billed the event differently on its website. “The Morality of Affluence, or How Much Is Too Much?” was the advertised title. There must have been a late-breaking change, after the posters were printed. The original title still appeared in spectral letters behind the plastered-on new one.
Leigh had googled Stephen Kendall only to find out where his church was, but it turned out he was on sabbatical from his parish in Chevy Chase and was now teaching Ethics at George Washington. The university was in summer recess, but this was a free lecture open to the public. Waiting in line for the doors to open were the usual white-haired retirees who tended to fill the seats of such lectures, but also businessmen straight from the office, women like Leigh who’d overdressed for the occasion, and a surprising number of young people.
One of them stood ahead of Leigh in line, a girl in shorts and sandals with a streak of bright turquoise through her dark hair. She was pulling a rollaboard suitcase behind her as they inched toward the door. “Sorry,” she yelped when it bumped against Leigh’s foot. “I didn’t have time to drop this off at my hotel.”
“You’re from out of town?”
The girl slid her sunglasses on top of her head. “I’m home in Boston for the summer. But when I heard Professor Kendall was speaking tonight, I dropped everything and hopped on the Acela.”
“You know him?”
The sunglasses bounced with the vigor of her nod. “I had him for Ethics in the Online World last semester. But I knew about him before that. I mean, he’s like a total rock star.”
Leigh smiled. “Not something you hear very often about a minister.”
“Oh, he’s a lot more than that. He’s an ethicist and a philosopher—I don’t know—a thinker, you know? Like Emerson. Or Voltaire.”
“Wow.” Leigh blinked and laughed.
“Seriously. And the cool thing is, he’s such an awesome dude. Good-natured and really funny sometimes. It’s amazing, considering.” The girl lowered her voice, her eyes gone wide. “You know about his son?”
Leigh had to look away as she nodded. She’d devoured the story after she found it online. Two years ago Reverend Kendall’s son Andrew was shot to death when he came home late one night and stumbled in on a burglary in progress. His parents were asleep upstairs, and they ran down to find the burglar gone and Andy on the floor in a pool of blood. He was only twenty-three.
Leigh felt sick with shame to think of it. The way she carried on that day in Stephen’s library, sobbing and wailing as if she were the only parent in the world to ever suffer the loss of a child. She didn’t know how he kept himself from screaming at her to pull her head out of her ass and see that others had endured horrors worse than hers. Instead he offered her tea and kind words and the first bit of comfort she’d felt since Chrissy’s death. “I don’t know how he goes on,” she said to the girl in line.
“I know, right? He’s like a total inspiration.”
But she meant the question literally. How could anyone go on after something like that? How could he not be consumed by grief and hatred and a thirst for revenge? Somehow Reverend Kendall not only went on, but also found a way to bring something good out of the tragedy. After he buried his son, he made a public appeal—not for information leading to the capture of the killer, as many parents would do—but rather
for an all-out effort to stem the tide of gun-related deaths across the country. Donations poured in, and today the Andrew Kendall Research Center on Gun Violence was a leading sponsor of research on the epidemiology of firearm deaths and injuries.
The doors opened and the line shuffled ahead into the building and across the lobby and into the auditorium. A single lectern stood on one side of the stage, like a pulpit in a church. The girl from Boston followed Leigh into a row and sat down with her rollaboard wedged in front of her and her knees tucked up to her chest. The auditorium buzzed with voices as people settled into their seats, but at a single chime, everyone hushed, and a moment later, Reverend Kendall took the stage to a burst of applause.
He wore a suit and tie, not a clerical collar, and he leaned easily against the lectern in a halo of yellow light. “Good evening, everyone,” he opened. “Welcome to Lying 101.” A titter of laughter rippled through the audience. “As some of you may know, I’m an ordained minister.” Even amplified through the microphone, his voice was as quiet and soothing as it was that day in his Snuggery. “And if you’re wondering what I know about lying—am I even qualified to teach this course?—well, let me tell you a story.
“One day I was walking down the street near my home in Maryland when I saw a circle of boys surrounding a dog. I was afraid they might be abusing it, so I burst in and demanded to know what they were up to. ‘This dog is a stray,’ one of the boys told me. ‘We all want him, but only one of us can take him home. So we decided whichever one of us can tell the biggest lie gets to keep the dog.’
“Well, as you can imagine, I was appalled. ‘You boys shouldn’t be having a contest telling lies!’ I said. ‘Don’t you know it’s a sin to tell a lie? Why, when I was your age, I never told a lie.’
“The boys looked at each other and scuffed their shoes in the dirt, and I thought I’d actually gotten through to them. Then one of them gave a sigh and said, ‘All right, give the old guy the dog.’ ”
A surprised burst of laughter rolled through the auditorium, and Leigh startled herself by laughing along.
“The moral of the story? Everyone lies. Anyone who says he doesn’t is lying, and that applies equally to members of the clergy. Let’s begin, then, shall we? With an exploration of exactly what a lie is.”
Leigh looked around at the attentive faces throughout the audience. Some people were even taking notes, like the girl from Boston in the seat beside her, who scribbled furiously on a tiny reporter’s pad.
He began by attempting to define what a lie was. Was an affirmative statement required or could silence alone amount to a lie? He talked about the paradox of a truthful lie—a true statement made with the intent to deceive.
“Is lying always wrong?” he said next. “Well, it must be; the Bible says so, right?” He let a beat of silence pass as he gazed out at his audience. “Wrong.”
Beside Leigh, the girl’s head snapped up.
“Let’s start with the Ten Commandments. In both Christianity and Judaism, the Commandments are considered God’s universal and timeless standards of right and wrong. The Eighth Commandment—Ninth in the Talmud—says: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. That’s a blanket prohibition against lying, right? Well, let’s think about that. All you lawyers out there, parse through it with me. It doesn’t say Thou shalt not lie, or Thou shalt not deceive. No, it forbids us to bear false witness. That’s a testimonial term. And the rest of the commandment puts it in context. Against thy neighbor. This commandment is a prohibition against libel and slander. Lies intended to harm the reputation of another.”
Leigh had never thought of this, but once he said it, it was so obvious. This was classic tort law language. Conduct causing harm to another that gave rise to a common law cause of action. Usually bodily harm, but in the case of libel and slander, harm to the reputation was the requisite.
“So out of all the Ten Commandments, there’s only one rather narrow prohibition against lying. Don’t go around bad-mouthing your neighbor. Unless it’s true, and he really doesn’t keep up his property.”
Another titter of laughter from the audience.
“This is a commandment having more to do with law and commerce than it does with truth and honesty. There’s a parallel commandment in the Qur’an: Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with a balance that is straight. In other words, be an honest merchant. Don’t cheat your customers. Islam doesn’t have a blanket prohibition against lies any more than Christianity and Judaism do. Muhammad himself took the view that deceit is permitted in three situations: to reconcile two or more quarreling parties; between husband and wife; and in war.”
Stephen paused for effect. “Some of you may see some redundancy there.
“So,” he continued when the laughter receded. “In the central moral code of all three major religions, there is no absolute prohibition against lying. Against defamation, yes, and against dishonest trade. But not against other kinds of lying.
“But surely there must be some prohibition somewhere. Weren’t we all brought up with the notion that lying is wrong? So let’s look elsewhere for the source of that notion. Start with St. Augustine, whose writings shaped not only Christian theology but also much of Western philosophy. He maintained lying was always wrong. God gave us speech so that we can make our thoughts known to others. If we lie, we’re using speech to do the opposite of what God intended. But even St. Augustine allowed for some wiggle room. Some lies are okay, he said. Lies that hurt nobody and protect someone else from harm are at the top of his list, and lies that hurt nobody and benefit someone else come next. Lies that hurt nobody is the common refrain.”
The girl from Boston tucked a turquoise strand of hair behind her ear and jotted that down—hurts nobody—benefits somebody. Leigh stared at the words on the notepad. Was that how Kip rationalized his lie? Chrissy couldn’t be hurt anymore, and he could save his own skin. His lie hurt nobody and protected himself, he must have thought. But he didn’t think of Leigh. He didn’t think about how much she’d be hurt.
Her attention had wandered, and by the time she brought it back, Stephen was talking about Plato’s concept of the Noble Lie. Political lies supposedly told for the greater good of the populace. “The economy is fine,” for example, to avoid a run on the banks. And then there were the pious fictions—religious tales presented as true but almost certainly concocted, albeit with an altruistic motive. The Book of Daniel, for instance.
Immanuel Kant was his next topic. Kant was an absolutist who professed that lying was always wrong. Even if it harmed no one, and no matter how noble the goal might be, lying to acquire or accomplish something was in denigration of the humanity of the person lied to and thus a violation of universal law.
“John Stuart Mills saw it differently. He was a consequentialist. A utilitarian. If telling a lie leads to a better result than telling the truth, it’s right and good to tell the lie. Let’s take an example. You’re hiding Anne Frank and her family in your attic when the SS knocks on your door and asks if you know where the Frank family is. You say no. That’s a lie, but it’s a good lie under Mills and utilitarianism.
“But it’s not always easy to predict the consequences of a lie, and you also have to ask for whom the expected result is better. Not for the SS officer, obviously, in my Anne Frank example. Let’s imagine you’re harboring a different fugitive in your attic, a neighbor boy who’s suspected of having set off a bomb that killed dozens of innocent people. There’s a huge manhunt under way. He swears he’s innocent, but the level of hysteria in the streets is so high you’re afraid he won’t get a fair trial if you turn him in. If he even makes it to jail alive. The police knock on your door and ask if you’ve seen him. What do you do? In Kant’s world, you say yes, here he is. In Mills’s? You have to do a lot of crystal ball gazing to guess what the consequences might be. What if you lie and he’s not innocent, and he escapes and goes on to kill again? But what if you don’t lie and he is innocent and he’s ki
lled while allegedly trying to escape police custody? It’s a tough call, isn’t it? As between absolutism and consequentialism.
“The modern philosopher Sissela Bok suggests a third alternative. She rejects the Kantian absolute prohibition, but she also rejects Mills’s utilitarianism. It’s not enough for the liar himself to balance the benefits and harms that might follow from the lie, because he can’t account for the damage that might be done to the overall level of trust in our society. Not to mention the damage to his own credibility. A liar’s house is on fire but no one believes him, goes the old proverb. No, Bok says, the better test is the court of public opinion, or at least a panel convened for that purpose. The would-be liar should consult with friends and colleagues and particularly with people of allegiances different from his own to see if they concur that the lie is justified under the circumstances presented.”
Leigh tried to imagine such an exercise. Convening a panel to test the ethics of Kip’s lie. They could assemble a jury made up of Peter and Leigh and the twins, and all right, even Karen and Gary, and let Kip put the question to all of them. Should he lie and say Chrissy was driving? It would save him from a trial and allow him to go on to college and pursue his career and live the rest of his life without the taint of a criminal conviction. It would save Peter money that he could use in his business or to pay tuition or to care for Mia. It would save Karen immeasurable heartache. But it would cause—was causing, this minute, every minute since he first spoke the words—immeasurable heartache for Leigh. How would the majority of the panel vote?
The answer hit her like a punch. She’d lose.
At the end of the hour, Reverend Kendall took some questions from the audience. A student volunteer moved through the aisles with a microphone and reached over rows to hold it to the faces of those who stood up. A series of so-called hypotheticals followed. The doctor tells you your elderly mother has a terminal disease. Should you tell her and probably accelerate her death and increase her suffering and despair? Or keep her in blissful, medicated ignorance, but with no opportunity to make her peace with the world before she leaves it? The next question was political: you believe the enemy possesses weapons of mass destruction but you are unable to confirm it; should you lie about it as a means to justify an invasion? And finally a question designed only to get a laugh: my wife asks if these pants make her look fat, and in fact they do. Should I lie?
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