by Meyer Levin
“… identified by a Globe reporter,” Raphael Goetz read out loud.
I admitted I was the reporter who had identified the boy.
“Say! Some scoop!” Artie stared at me, mouth agape. Then he flung his arm around me, patting my back. “Sonnyboy Silver, the hot-shot reporter! Fellows! We have a star reporter in our midst! The Alpha Beta is really getting there!” He seized the paper, glanced at it, waved it. “Hey! If not for Sid’s identifying him, it says they were just going to pay the ransom! Boy!”
He gazed at me so intently, his expression so strange that I clearly remembered the moment. “I just happened to get sent out-”
Artie was avid with questions. How had the poor kid looked? Any marks on him? Any clues? Sometimes the cops made the papers hold back certain information, to trap the criminals.
His excitement over the case seemed perfectly natural. Artie was a notorious detective-story addict. It was a common wonder around the house that he, who was supposed to be so brilliant, read practically nothing but pulp magazines and all that trash.
Actually, though he now developed a sudden friendship for me Artie and I had never been more than nodding fraternity brothers. He had been on campus only during the last year, having spent the two previous years at the University of Michigan.
Moreover, I had an obscure hostility toward Artie. I suppose it was because everyone tended to bracket us. We were the prodigies, both graduating at eighteen. Indeed, Artie was ahead of me – he already had his bachelor’s – and was loafing along taking a few extra courses.
I resented being paired with him because Artie was, to me, a waster, a playboy. He took snap courses, borrowed everybody’s term-papers. He bragged about his all-A’s at Michigan, but I had heard differently – mostly B’s and C’s. I felt he was just a rich kid who had the carpet laid out for him; he was spoiling what could have been a good mind. And I suppose I was jealous that he had rubbed off the glamour of my being the youngest graduate.
Now Artie pulled me aside, conspiratorially. “Say, Sid, I’ll give you a scoop! I can tell you all about that Kessler kid!” And he rattled on, about Paulie Kessler using his private tennis court, about his being in the same class with his own little brother, at the same school he, Artie, had gone to. That’s where I ought to look for clues – the Twain School!
I told him I had just come from there. I mentioned the arrest of the teacher, a piece of news that was not yet in the papers. Artie became even more excited. So they had pinched that ass-pincher, Steger! He would lay ten to one they had the right guy! Did I want some inside dope about Steger? He could tell me a few things, all right! His own kid brother, Billy, had been approached by that pervert. Sure. A kid doesn’t know what it’s all about, but Billy had come home one day and said there was something funny about Mr. Steger, he was always putting his arm around you. Billy had even asked if it was all right to go in Mr. Steger’s car. God! What a narrow escape that must have been!
There was no doubt, Artie declared – the cops were on the right trail. Steger must have been monkeying around with Paulie, and killed the boy to keep his mouth shut.
“What about the ransom?” Some of the fellows had gathered around.
“All right, what about the ransom?” Artie said. “Why not? That’s exactly what he’d do. Those poor suckers, those teachers, you know how much they get, maybe twenty-five bucks a week; they see all the kids coming to school with limousines – Christ, what a temptation!”
“After killing the kid?”
“I’ll admit that was terrible. But you can see, those teachers need money; it’s an obvious temptation.”
One of the fellows pointed out a flaw: how could the teacher have collected the ransom money if he wasn’t absent from school?
“He must have an accomplice!” Artie said. “Probably another pervert!” That school was full of them. He had gone there himself, and he knew.
“Yah, by experience!” Milt Lewis razzed.
“Nothing like Stratmore Academy,” Artie retorted, referring to Milt’s fashionable military prep school. “There, it’s an order!” Turning back to me, he wanted to know what the cops would do to Steger. Had I ever seen the third degree? Would they get it out of him?
“They’re not supposed to use it,” said Harry Bass, another of our law students. “If they use the third degree, he can repudiate the confession.”
“Crap,” said Artie. “They’ve got a way that leaves no marks.”
“Yah, in cheap detective stories!” Harry laughed.
Artie appealed to me as an expert, about the rubber truncheons that left no marks. Besides, he said, the cops got them in the balls.
Sure, the police had ways, I said knowingly. Could I go talk to his little brother about Steger?
His mother had the kid in hiding, Artie told me. All the mothers were scared out of their pants. But he would fix up an interview for me.
Too keyed up to sit at the dinner table, I decided to go over to Ruth’s. Artie followed me to the door, telling me to be sure to meet him tomorrow. “I’ll give you the benefit of my expert knowledge,” he half jested. And in the same breath he snagged Milt Lewis, who was passing. “Hey, Milt, you want a sure lay? I’ve got a terrific number.”
Ruth was my girl at that time. Or rather, I should say Ruth was my sweetheart, for there is no period that encompasses my feeling; whenever I think of her, and now as I write of her, the aura of that young love comes back, and I realize that what we then felt was indeed love. We were in love and afraid to know it, and nobody told us it was the true thing.
She was eighteen, a few months younger than I, and a sophomore. We had met on campus, and dated, and petted; in the long moony evenings we spent together we would stroke and excite each other and decide that this alone couldn’t be love. She was bright, all A’s, and we would discuss the new poetry of Amy Lowell, and we discovered Walt Whitman together, and read his poems of the body aloud to each other sometimes as we lay close side by side on the grass in Jackson Park. We read them wholesomely, without any suspicion in those days that he could be singing of another kind of love. And innocently reading Whitman, we used to discuss whether Ruth should give herself to me – that was how we put it – or whether we should wait.
Ruth’s folks were better off than my family, but still something of the same kind. Her mother, like mine, was always plying you with food, putting a plate in front of you even if you said you had just eaten.
Pushing the bell, I took the stairs two at a time; Ruth appeared in the doorway. “You’re a nice one!” she said reproachfully. And only then I remembered we had had a date for the afternoon.
“My God, look at you. Did you even shave today?” her mother demanded, from behind Ruth. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten all day either.”
“I haven’t stopped going since morning!” I said, bursting to tell my big news, but Mrs. Goldenberg disappeared into the kitchen, immediately fetching a bowl of noodle soup, calling, “Well, you’re lucky Ruth isn’t gone.”
“Yes,” said Ruth archly. “You might have found me missing.”
“Who with?”
“Oh, a swell machine, a Franklin, stopped at the door,” said her mother.
“He honked enough for the whole street to hear,” said Ruth.
“Millionaire’s manners.” Mrs. Goldenberg went back for meat and potatoes.
“In fact, it was a frat brother of yours,” Ruth teased. “The sheikh of the campus, no less, suddenly remembered I was alive.”
“Artie? I just saw him at the house,” I said. “I didn’t know you go out with him.”
Oh, Ruth told me, not really. So it was odd, the way he had appeared all of a sudden today, saying he was lonesome. He had seemed quite upset.
“It must have been the murder, so close to his house,” I said, and pulled the paper from my pocket, spreading it on the table.
“Oh, I know,” Ruth said. “I read the extra. Isn’t it terrible!”
It really was, I agreed �
� after all, I had really seen it. “You mean this was you? The reporter that identified the body! Oh, Sid!” Ruth’s voice hovered between pride and shock.
“Horrible, a horrible crime!” her mother said, and urged me to eat. Chicago was becoming so terrible, you couldn’t even let a child go out in the street. And it was I who had reported all this, on the frong page?
“You saw the body? Poor kid.” Ruth was gazing at me, as though she could virtually see the child, through me.
I told her how the teacher had been arrested, and how Artie’s little brother was in the same class.
“I know. Artie told me. That’s why he was so upset. He tries to act blasé, but I think Artie is really softhearted,” Ruth said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’d better watch your step with him. That’s how he gets all the girls, with that winsome boyish line.”
“Do you think he’ll seduce me?”
“No, but he’ll say he did.”
Her mother disappeared. Mrs. Goldenberg always said she was broadminded and if her girl was going to do anything like petting, it was better for her to do it in her own home. So we sat on the overstuffed sofa in the sun parlour, and I kissed Ruth and put my hand over her breast. That was our limit.
“It’s so horrible about that little boy,” she said.
I remarked that it seemed pretty certain the crime had been done by a pervert.
We were silent for a moment, and then she said in a classroom-questioning voice, “What exactly is a pervert, Sid? I guess I’m supposed to know, but I don’t.”
I explained, trying not to reveal that my own knowledge was limited.
“But then,” Ruth said, “aren’t they suffering from a sickness?”
It was the first time in the whole day that I had remained still long enough for this thought to come through. And while I might ordinarily have expected myself to concur in this broader view, I found now that the thought made me almost angry.
“We can’t forgive crime by calling it a sickness,” I snapped. “It was murder, after all. It was a cold-blooded attempt to collect money from a kidnapping. And the perversion was just an added act of viciousness; maybe it was even a cunning way to disguise the rest of the crime.”
Ruth had drawn her hand out of mine. I went on, “It’s simply like a savage – murdering, and then mutilating his victim out of sheer savagery.”
“But, Sid,” she said, “why are you so angry? I was only asking, not arguing.”
She looked at me so earnestly, her eyes puzzled, and I melted with love of her, and took hold of her and kissed her. In the kiss, our loving was seasoned with bitterness over the world I had seen that day. We sometimes said we had Weltschmerz, but it was more like a presentiment that everything would be vile in our time. On that day it was as though the crime had split open a small crack in the surface of the world, and we could see through into the evil that was yet to emerge.
From the other room, Ruth’s mother spoke. “Children, why don’t you dance? Put on the Victrola.” Mrs. Goldenberg snapped on the light behind us. “You know, Ruthie,” she said, “I’m thinking of bobbing my hair.”
Even though there were only the three of them at the table, Judd’s father, neatly carving the roast, gave the meal almost a formal air. This was the way of the Pater. In everything always so certain of how he measured things out. So he must have been in the early days, with Grandfather in the woollen business – measuring with his yardstick, the solemn, upright young Judah Steiner. And so with his honest yardstick he had measured the growth of the woollen house as it was drawn along with the growth of Chicago ’s garment industry, and with his yardstick he had measured what family to marry into, and purchased woollen mills, and measured his real estate, and his honourable place in the world.
Yet tonight Judah Steiner was trying to speak in a lighter mood to his sons. There was Max’s engagement party; next week his fiancée would arrive from New York. Aunt Bertha must see to it, the house should be filled with flowers.
Max was sitting there quite proud of himself for the fine piece of merchandise that had been selected for him by brother Joseph in New York, a Mannheimer, no less.
Could it be, actually, that neither of them had heard of the sensational crime? Judd considered bringing it up – the topic would be normal enough: the kid had been snatched from Twain, almost across the street. But now the old man was turning to him. Was Judd ready for his exam tomorrow? “A Harvard law entrance should be taken seriously, even by a genius.” He chuckled, wiping his moustache.
“Huh, he’ll probably spend the night chasing tramps with Artie,” Max remarked. “That’s how a genius prepares. Me, I had to bone.”
“Even a genius can trip up some time; look at the tortoise and the hare,” said the Pater. “And how would a genius like to spend the summer preparing for Harvard instead of touring Europe?”
“Try and stop me. I’ve got the ticket!” Judd said, and all at once like a hand coming down on him was the thought that he really might be stopped in the two weeks before sailing. Should he try to get an earlier boat, leave immediately after tomorrow’s exam…? He’d go up and glance at his notes. He had them typed up, a complete set, from the session a few weeks ago with Milt Lewis and the fellows. What if a cop stepped in right now to make the arrest? Are these your glasses? What if the old man were told his Junior had achieved the greatest crime in the world? Could he ever understand such a conception? Could he comprehend that there was as much greatness on one side as on the other? Indeed, more. For the crime had to be created against the grain, à rebours, and law was with the grain.
His father was passing the pickles, remarking that he had stopped at the delicatessen for them himself. The staff forgot such things since Mama Dear had passed away. “Now Italy -” the old man was saying. “It might be advisable to avoid Italy in these unsettled times.” Judd let him talk.
“Oh, Italy isn’t so bad since that fellow Mussolini took charge,” his brother declared. “The country is under control.”
“You never can trust the Italians,” said his father. “Even here in Chicago, all the bootleggers are Italians. With their law amongst themselves, their killings, they give the city a bad reputation.”
“Sure, only the Jews are perfect,” Judd found himself snapping.
“At least we Jews are law-abiding, and engaged in respectable businesses and professions,” his father said.
“All the Italians gave us is Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael,” said Judd, “Cellini and Aretino.”
“Maybe they were a fine people once, but today they are only gangsters.”
Max cut in. “I hear this Mussolini is a real leader, bringing back the glory that was Rome – a kind of superman.” Max wore a smile, to show he was for once trying to use his kid brother’s intellectual language.
In Judd’s mind, the word superman was echoing. The sullen, angry, god-furious figure of Artie, getting out of the car. If Artie were through with him now, because of the glasses… If Artie turned to Willie… The fear came over Judd – Artie leaving him alone. Like last time, before New Year’s Eve. The trouble hadn’t been his fault then either. Artie had been ready to blame him, and go off with Willie and some girls for New Year’s Eve, the one night, the most important night. Only Judd’s letter had kept him. A letter saying everything, analysing everything, explaining. Now, too, Judd would write a letter. In his mind, Judd began to form the words, showing clearly why the spectacles had to be counted as a shared mistake. Just as the entire experience was shared. If Artie started chumming with Willie… Christ, he couldn’t! They were bound together now, like when kids take an oath in blood…
Instantly, the blood image welled up, the pulsing spurt, sickening. It was himself, a child. He’d be sick…
Just then the phone rang. The maid came to say it was for Junior. Judd’s heart bounded. It was Artie, he was sure. He hurried out of the dining-room.
When Artie got home from the frat, he noti
ced quite an assembly still in the dining-room, and remembered that Mumsie had wanted to show him off to one of her chums visiting from the East.
“Arthur!” There was the usual loving reproach in his mother’s voice, but relief, too, that he had appeared at last. She was looking wan tonight, a bit over-ethereal in her greenish dress. The New York woman had bangs and horse-teeth; she was from far back, from that Catholic school of Mumsie ’s. The brothers were present, too – James, and even Lewis, complete with his recent bride. Full show.
“Arthur, dear, I was beginning to get frightened,” his mother said.
“Now who would kidnap me?” He laughed.
His father said, “It isn’t exactly anything to joke about.”
Artie dropped his lip to look contrite. “I know,” he said solemnly, and even felt a touch of sorrow. “Poor Paulie. Just the other day I took him on for a game, on the court. You know, for a kid his age he was real good – real strong arm muscles, had quite a smash. He must have put up a real fight with those fiends. I even asked him about buying a racket like his for Billy. Where’s Billy? Upstairs? How’s he taking it?”
“I tried to keep him distracted,” his mother said, drawing in her breath sharply. “But it was such an upsetting day I gave him his dinner upstairs. I’m taking Billy to Charlevoix first thing in the morning. I’m getting him away from here; there’s no telling what kind of madman is loose!”
At her words, Artie felt alive, glittery. On the table, they had their dessert: fresh strawberries. Mumsie hadn’t touched hers. “Hanging is too good for a fiend like that!” she was saying, her eyes fiery with indignation. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, but in a case like this, if they catch him, I think he ought to be tarred and feathered and then strung from a lamp-post! Oh!” She shuddered at her own words. Artie reached for her dish and helped himself. “Artie!” But her little sigh admitted her adoration for her incorrigible Artie, admitted that she had ordered the early strawberries especially for him. “At least sit down! Did you have any dinner?”
