by Meyer Levin
“Dat old debbil sex,” she quotes knowingly, soothingly. The sophisticated note returns to his voice and Judd makes some remark about Paris, soon – Paris, where they know how to make the most of such pleasures – and she mock-slaps his wrist, and he says well, of course, he believes in the same freedom for women as for men.
Ruth begins to say, “Would you like it if I-” but cuts it short, and Judd says, with a show of self-surprise, “You know I do believe I would feel quite furious; I would feel possessive about you,” and she laughs softly. “You see, all our smart theories-” And there is a lapse, and she remarks that she heard his brother is getting engaged.
Oh, he had meant to invite her – the party is Wednesday, Judd says. But is he sure it isn’t meant to be strictly a family party? Ruth asks. Perhaps she would be… “Oh, no!” he insists. “It’s a big brawl. The whole South Side will be there, and anyway even if it were a family party” – he feels suddenly peculiarly not himself to be saying a thing like this, yet tells himself he means it – “you must come!”
And the girl, his brother’s girl, Ruth asks, what is she like? Has he met her? Max met her in New York, Judd tells her; it was one of those conventional things, a perfect match, a Mannheimer. The girl is said to be very nice, quite pretty. She will arrive day after tomorrow for a visit, to meet Max’s friends, and from then on Judd is sure the house will be unbearable…
Suddenly he remarks that he has often thought of simply going away, leaving home on his own, bumming around, something like Harry Kemp tramping on life. She restrains herself from observing that all boys have such an impulse. And he continues, saying with a self-conscious little laugh, “Or maybe even getting married.”
“Now,” Ruth says, “that is surprising.”
Yes, Judd says, he has thought how it would be to have a wife and a home, but with someone quite different from his own family.
Ruth says she understands how he may sometimes feel a stranger at home, because even in her own home – though her mother and father are angels, and her mother is very young in feeling, more like a girl friend – still, parents can’t really tell you everything; you have to find out for yourself.
Then Judd is speaking of his mother. An invalid for many years, she was ethereal, like a Botticelli madonna – and within himself he goes on to say that truly she was a madonna, a virgin, and she was like Ruth – from Ruth there is something of the same emanation of purity and goodness – and then he sees himself being held aloft by a virgin mother. Though he is an infant, he is a person fully developed, speaking and able to walk, and already complete in intelligence.
He hears himself telling Ruth deprecatingly how he was indeed a prodigy, speaking his first words at the age of four months. She laughs softly, saying it is difficult to imagine him as a baby, and he declares he never was a baby; he resents the idea of having been a helpless baby.
Ruth has become so tender toward him; now their talk drifts into silence, and they sit looking at the dark lake, and their faces turn with the same impulse, and there is a slow tender kiss, the lips touching without weight, simply as though they were of one being. A lovely melancholy fatedness rises in their hearts. And it seems to Judd that he has the power to make the whole deed with Artie turn non-existent. It seems to him that he must somehow have drawn back that deed, erased that entire night from the schedule of time.
In bed that night, Judd could not summon the image of Ruth. He could not summon the madonna image of his mother. He could not summon the image of Artie. Instead there was his brother in the dark blue uniform with the brass buttons, the uniform of the military academy. He remembered when Max came home the first time in that uniform, Max, so huge, so strong, and Judd just a shaver eyeing him from the hallways.
And he remembered, too, the morning he was still in bed and Max caught him doing it and said if he kept on, the thing would come off and he would be a girl. Then way, way back there was fat Trudy, his nursemaid, her huge mouth open, laughing, the irregular teeth, and suddenly her head swooping down, and his terror, her laughing sounds through it all, and her joking threat that he would be no more than a girl, and the torture, pleasure, torture, like tickling, and big Trudy making imitation devouring sounds… “I love my little boy, my little man!”
The following morning all this was absent; he awoke with only the strange tenderness in him. The sense of wanting to see Ruth persisted. And as he drove to school, a whole new drama was being enacted in his mind; the play continued during class. He might perform it tomorrow at Max’s engagement party. “I have an announcement to make!” Oh, that would be a good one on brother Max, the self-satisfied groom, the centre of attention, suddenly fading into the background while the startled gasping crowd listened to his kid brother. Judd had to stand on a chair for his head to rise above their shoulders, and he announced – was it his own engagement or the crime? As he sat through the lecture his fountain-pen was busy: again a hawk, the talons open, sharp, long, and ready to strike. Near it he made patterns of the sun, with streamers of energy flowing out. Now, spread-winged on a cross, a great bird, an albatross. But still he was following something the instructor was saying about compound crimes – sometimes in compound crimes the lesser crime took precedence! Suppose they traced the glasses. To him. Suppose they somehow traced the letter. His. And it was he who had rented the car. (The cleverness of Artie! Judd smiled inwardly in appreciation.) But if he were caught by these items, wasn’t he free to make his own deal? Premeditated murder was death. But if the kidnapping had been a prank, the death accidental, if he made a deal for a charge of manslaughter, there might be only a few years in jail. He saw himself a model prisoner, studying, reading. Ruth waiting, and coming to visit him, and waiting…
What could you get, then, for kidnapping alone? Judd was shading in the initials on the cross, class was ending, and he managed to walk out alongside the instructor.
It wasn’t difficult to steer the conversation to the Kessler crime, as a striking current example of a compound crime. Suppose the criminal were apprehended, Judd asked, in preparing a defence would it not be advantageous to let him stand for the kidnapping instead of the murder?
Well, in some states, yes, that would be a distinct advantage, the instructor said. But in Illinois, kidnapping had quite recently been made a capital offence – since that miserable case of the abducted little girl assaulted in the coal cellar, the Fitzgerald case. “And in this crime,” said the instructor, “if they ever catch the perpetrators, I’m afraid the best legal manipulation would be of no avail. There are times when law seems pointless – any verdict short of hanging would be corrected by a lynch mob, I imagine.” He flashed an academic smile that had in it a touch of their shared superiority to the mob.
After his next class he met Artie. They strolled across the Midway, Artie hooting about the latest stupidities of the cops – checking every Winton in town. They even had the car wrong! And the two tramps and the vagabond woman who had been caught with a busted typewriter – now that was something! And that reminded him. “How’d you make out last night, Jocko? Did you get in?”
“Oh,” said Judd, “it wasn’t that kind of a date.”
Artie horse-laughed. She’d been running around with a frat brother of his, and Sid was no chump – Sid was a newspaperman. Hell, when they had all been together on Friday, hadn’t Judd been able to see that the girl was Sid’s push? Did he think a newspaperman would be wasting time with a girl that didn’t come across? Artie was willing to bet a ten-spot he could lay Ruth on his first date.
Judd was silent.
When he reached home, Aunt Bertha was already there, busily directing Emil in hanging summer curtains and draperies. It should have been done long ago! No woman in the house! And suddenly Aunt Bertha fixed her eyes on Judd, coming up to him and touching his sleeve. “And how are things with you, Judd? You’re looking worried. What can a boy like you have to worry about? He passes his Harvard exam with flying colours. And in a week he’s running of
f to sow his wild oats in Europe, and he’s worried!”
He smiled. She contracted her brows. “Maybe you are in love?”
“Maybe I am,” he said, to give Aunt Bertha some excitement.
“You just hate to have Max do something you can’t do,” she remarked, pleased at her shrewdness. And with a sigh: “If only your mother had lived for this. You see, Judd, it’s the same way with sisters, too. They’re jealous of each other and still they love each other.”
He kept the smile fixed on his face. Jealous of Max the Mope! “I was jealous of your mother when she married first,” his aunt said. Then, with a streak of asperity she added, “You know something? I was almost jealous of her for passing away first and being done with it all?”
It was this, this cheerfully admitted pessimism, that made him every once in a while feel you could talk to Aunt Bertha. She might even understand the whole thing with Artie; if any of them could get a glimmer of it. Aunt Bertha would be the one. No she would put the blame on Artie, as his mother would have done. Just as they had blamed others every time he got a childhood disease.
Judd remembered suddenly the one year when he had gone to public school, and his mother had admonished him, “Don’t ever touch anything. You’ll get germs. Don’t sit on the toilets. You must absolutely wait until you get home, Judd dear, you understand? They’re just common children.” And it had indeed scared him, because being sick all the times with hives and boils and eruptions on his skin, he was in horror of more hurting and more ugliness of oozing and scabs. Judd recalled how he had felt all that time, with the kids jeering, but keeping their distance. And in the corridors of the school, he had always tried to walk so as not to touch or be touched, until it seemed there had always been a space around him, everyone leaving him alone. Until that one day…
“What is it? Something bothering you?” his aunt appealed.
“You know, I may not be going to Europe,” Judd remarked. For an instant he was going to add, “I might get caught.” But instead he let the story of his love affair come out, saying he was quite interested in a new girl and might not care to leave just now.
“A new girl! And you’d give up your trip for her! Well, that’s really serious! Tell me! Who is she?”
Someone she wouldn’t know, he said. Just a girl.
Not a shikseh! Even with her supposedly liberal philosophy, there was this automatic horror. But Aunt Bertha covered it at once, giving him her lecture about how of course if he were truly in love with a nice gentile girl of good family, it would be no tragedy – there had been some good intermarriages on the South Side. Look at Artie’s mother, a Catholic. But still it was always luckier if you happened to fall in love with someone from your own background – like Max going to New York and meeting a wonderful girl at his brother’s, a Mannheimer, too! But suddenly she halted, eyeing him with new apprehension. It wasn’t some little tramp like that one he nearly got into trouble with last year, a pickup?
Judd shook his head. “This is serious, I assure you.”
Then he told her about Ruth, a brilliant student. Her family were respectable little people; her father owned a drugstore.
“Russian Jews, I’ll bet,” she said with a sigh. Still, there could be worse tragedies. “But you’re so young, Judd, a brilliant boy. Your father would be disappointed if-”
Then his aunt observed that perhaps the trip would really be the best thing. If he found himself still interested in the girl when he returned, and if she would wait until he got through Harvard Law School -
Wait. The word instantly brought an image; he was coming out of prison, his hair white at the temples, and Ruth was waiting at the gate, her dear face softened with years of faithfulness. Then a gush of grief came up in Judd, almost breaking out as tears, and at the same time he chided himself in disgust for this cheap sentimentality.
With her eyes still on his face, his aunt had caught the passing emotion. “It’ll be all right, Judd. It’s youth, youth. We all have to go through it,” and she patted his hand.
At dinner everything centred on Max. All the arrangements were reviewed again, to the last detail, for the arrival of his girl and for the engagement party. Uncle Adolph permitted himself some smutty jokes about Max’s impatience, with advice about what to do during the engagement period – “put it in the icebox” – and even the old man laughed indulgently. Max carried it all off with a large air of tolerance.
There was talk of honeymoon plans. “Kid, we might even meet you in Italy.” And Judd was squirming more and more at this smugness, while at the same time a choking self-pity was in him. “Never for me, never anything so ordinary and simple as happiness.” Then he took an inward vow – if he weren’t caught, if he got away with the thing, it would be a sign, an omen for him to marry Ruth and be conventional all his life.
They were sitting down for a little family game after dinner, and he even felt a kind of dopey pleasure in the ritual, perhaps for the last time. Then Artie burst in, waving his long arms, “Jocko, you’ve got to see this! They’re tearing up the whole street where Steger lives! The sewer is stuffed up! They think he shoved the clothes down there.”
“Steger?” It took the family a moment to think back to poor Paulie Kessler. “But I understood they let that teacher go,” Max said.
“They arrested him again.” Artie could hardly keep the laughter out of his voice.
Judd hurried him from the house. “Like a couple of kids to a fire,” he heard his aunt say as they rushed out.
The street was blocked off, and lights had been brought up, flaring over the small area where the crew chopped away at the trench, now waist deep.
“We should have thought of this too,” Artie whispered. “Stuffing the clothes down there.” Getting out of the car, Artie remarked that this was a good place to pick up some gash – easy to start a conversation. “How about those two?” Then began the game of undressing the girls with their eyes.
Artie pushed up against a pair and in great innocence asked what was going on, requiring a full explanation of the Kessler case. “Hey, don’t you even read the newspapers?”
He gave them the bootlegger act. “We’ve been up to the border for a shipment.” Judd tugged, getting him away. “What’s wrong? They’d have put out,” Artie snapped at him.
“Their teeth were bad,” Judd said.
“Oh Christ, just for a lay, you examine a twat as if you’re going to marry her.” He started on another pair, cute ones, full blown, with knowing looks. By this time Judd felt almost uncontainably excited. The peculiar feeling of tension, of expectancy about seeing Ruth, with which he had awakened that morning, seemed to have been multiplying progressively all day until now it was a general uncontainable lust. The presence of Artie had excited him even more than always; from the moment Artie came into the house, the need had been unbearable. And now it was the pressure of the bodies, Artie’s among them, until all the bodies seemed Artie’s, and something even more, something special in the excitement of the crowd, a crowd lust, the smutty things they were talking about. And perhaps compressed with it all, with Max’s engagement and the marriage talk, there was the danger in being here within arm’s reach of dozens of policemen. A cop was right in front of the girls, and Artie, instead of drawing the girls aside, started a conversation with the officer.
Pressed against the girls and against Artie, and tormented by the tumultuous raging need, Judd could have torn the bastard apart. “Come on,” he urged Artie.
But there was no moving him. “They’re just getting there!” Artie exclaimed. And someone wisecracked that the diggers had found a dead skunk. No, Artie said, it was a five-month baby! With a shocked gasp, the girls walked off. Artie pressed after them, loudly telling tales about the dreadful things women did – women were much dirtier than men, but women couldn’t help it. After all, the way they were made, they had their own sewer pipe.
And in that moment Judd recalled a chart in a drugstore window, first seen in childho
od, with square-angled pipes going through a cross-section of a human body, a woman’s. And was there a baby curled in one part, or had he seen that in a medical book? But the picture remained in his mind, ugly, horrible. A nausea came over him; he backed out of the crowd. That nursemaid, Trudy, and even his mother, and even Ruth, the way a baby was made in there – no, it was too disgusting, too filthy in there. Females! He leaned against the car, feeling weak and ill.
Just then Artie spotted me in the group of reporters talking to the captain. He waved and pushed his way to me. “Anything new on the case?”
“They’ve got us running around in circles,” I said. “They’re even listening to a medium!” I told him about that crazy phone call. “She predicted a confession on Friday.”
“That’s only the day after tomorrow,” Artie said. “Want to bet on it?”
I said I wouldn’t be sorry if it happened; I hadn’t had any sleep for a week.
“You’d better watch out. Judd is making time on you, he’s stealing your girl,” Artie said.
We all laughed, and as they pulled away Artie blew the horn.
Judd was annoyed by that last remark; it was a night when everything that Artie did or said rubbed him the wrong way. And yet this only heightened his need. He was sure Artie was teasing him.
They ended up in a cat house, Judd agreeing to go just to get the stuff out of his system. But when the moment came when he always imagined himself doing it to Artie, this time again it didn’t happen. The act itself lasted longer, and for a time he imagined a wedding scene – Ruth in white, a shining bride, coming toward him. He would not picture himself doing it to her. There came back the scene on the beach, and then a kind of blank grief was in him, and, at his climax, a dreadful trembling, a sense of tumbling, like giants crashing in a circus act.
Going home, Artie was half potted. Judd still felt querulous; the post-coital compound of disgust and remorse was on him, and with it some dreadful unidentifiable anticipation.