by Meyer Levin
Edgar Feldscher pointed out that complex medical and mental examinations had to be made. The Chief Justice kept gazing at the boys. “The best I can give you is an extra week,” he said.
I phoned the news and hurried in to write my feature. But instead of writing about Artie’s birthday I found myself impelled to write of Judd’s father, sitting there in the courtroom. I’ve come across that story, in the files:
Judah Steiner, Sr., a man with grey hair, sat in Judge Matthewson’s courtroom today for an hour. He did not move. The other men spoke, even smiled, gestured, disputed. Judah Steiner sat quite still…
Occasionally he put his hand to his ear. He was not angry, he was not weeping. He was merely trying to understand this thing. His son had killed someone. For no reason at all, and for the reason of some philosophy that he couldn’t understand. He had always thought his son was brilliant…
People were staring first at him and then at his son, noticing the same cut in the yellowing lips of the father and the firm, red lips of the boy. People were noticing the same contour of forehead, the same balance of cheek.
Then they came to him with questions. What did he think? What did he have to say?
He had only one sentence. “Why do you come to me? I – I have done nothing.”
I have done nothing. Today, the words echo ironically. But even then they set me to wondering.
I would speak to Myra, who knew the families well.
When we met that evening, she greeted me with bravado; her hand, as we went down in the lift, was hot, pulsing. Automatically we started to walk toward the campus, almost deserted at night in the summer.
Myra could tell me only of the Strauses. Her mother was a close friend. Mrs. Straus was indeed ill in Charlevoix, shattered, accusing herself, broken. “You see, she’s such an intelligent woman.” And most of all, Mrs. Straus had prided herself on her advanced knowledge of child care. She headed all sorts of committees for settlement work with children. And she was interested in the latest educational methods.
Why hadn’t she known what was happening with Artie?
The closest to him – Myra swayed, and I sat her on the stone bench in Sleepy Hollow. All those little fibs and lies as children – how was anyone to know that with him these things came to more?
And what of Artie’s father? I asked.
He was a man entirely occupied with his affairs. On festive occasions he would put in an appearance, at Artie’s birthday parties.
I asked, was Mr. Straus a cold person? No, Myra said, not really, and indeed the Straus household hadn’t been cold at all. Mrs. Straus had given it such a warm, open atmosphere. Everyone felt free at the Strauses; it was that kind of a house, with culture, good music. Of course, Mrs. Straus was quite busy – she was the leader of so many activities.
“I always thought,” Myra confessed, “I would have liked her for my own mother; she’s so much more up on things-” And Myra crumpled against me. “I was with Artie on every birthday,” she sobbed. “I wrote a poem for him every year.” She had written one today. She tried to recite it to me, in her gaspy hoarse whisper.
Oh, angry boy
Life’s a broken toy
Which you’d destroy,
No! angry boy -
Her voice choked. “It’s doggerel,” she cried desperately. “Oh, Sid, why can’t I-” I held her until she stopped trembling, and then I walked her home.
In my primitive way I was following the path of the psychiatrists, who began their work with family interviews. Dr. Allwin made a hasty trip to Charlevoix. Artie’s father was still in a state of shock, silent, withdrawn. The mother had begun somehow to encompass the blow. She could sit with Dr. Allwin and attempt to recall…
Of course Artie had been from infancy exceptionally wilful, mischievous, and for that very reason she had felt that a strong personality like Miss Newsome was a good choice as governess. Miss Newsome had her faults, and toward the end there had been quite a struggle with the poor woman who had no other avenue of affection and had become over-attached to Artie, seeking to replace his mother – but such situations frequently arose with governesses, didn’t they?
Then there had been the escapades. Yes, the times he had taken things from stores, they had been quite disturbed… and the dreadful accident here in Charlevoix, when he had taken the car to a dance. An old woman had been in the wagon Artie had run into, and she had lingered in the hospital for several months. Artie himself had suffered a concussion.
Had he changed markedly at that time?
She strengthened herself, to be unflinchingly honest. It had to be admitted that Artie had always been wild. And deceitful. Yes – but how could anyone have imagined…?
No, no, the doctor reassured her, it would have been virtually impossible to suspect homicidal tendencies. And he never confided in anyone?
She had always thought that possibly with James he… Her eyes wavered.
Perhaps, in other ways, Artie might have shown his true feelings? Sudden angers? Hatred? Jealousy within the family?
She recalled one time when his father had been going on a trip East, taking his brother James along, and Artie had wanted so badly to go to New York. He had been fifteen then, and he had screamed, even producing a tantrum quite like he used to have when he was a very little boy.
Tantrums?
Oh, very frequently. Childish tantrums, to get what he wanted. But all children did that, and she usually tried the method of letting the child scream itself out, shutting him in his room, as neither she nor his father of course believed in capital – she caught herself – in corporal punishment.
She had tried to make things always stimulating and agreeable for him around the house. She had always encouraged young people to congregate, though it did seem that Artie wore out his friends rather rapidly. For this reason, perhaps, she had tolerated too long his unhealthy relationship with Judd Steiner.
Mementoes, snapshots were brought out, and Dr. Allwin studied them absorbedly: the white-clad tennis youth, the smiling boy in the class photograph, the collegiate Artie in a roadster. And then, further back, among the childhood pictures, one snapshot halted the alienist: Artie in a cowboy suit, holding a toy pistol, stalking his teddy bear.
Did she remember when it was taken?
Of course she remembered it! Artie was four, yes. A Sunday afternoon – Artie was so cute, so darling that day, and Mr. Straus himself had been unusually relaxed and had taken the pictures. Why? Was there something about the picture?
No, nothing unusual, the doctor said. But yet – in the expression…
And he so loved his teddy bear, the mother said.
But still, the doctor mused, a kid would be grinning, or making faces, or looking toward his parents. But here, the boy was so intent, lost in his masquerade, really living the hunt. He asked, This was shortly after the governess, Miss Newsome, came into the household? Why, yes, the mother said, her brows contracted. But why?
He himself didn’t know, he was only feeling his way. Was this a moment that became fixed, frozen, a boy for ever masquerading, for ever a hunter with a pistol? “It’s just that he seems so concentrated,” the doctor said. Could he take this picture with him? he asked. But of course! And he pocketed the snapshot.
In the Steiner house, too, there were mementoes. The elaborate Baby’s Book that the mother had filled with such exalted pride – the photographs of the tiny, alert infant with his curiously brilliant black eyes. And Aunt Bertha talking all the while of the marvels of the precocious child, and how his father and mother would do anything, anything for him.
The alienist nodded, and meanwhile thumbed through the Mark Twain School Annual, bound in elaborately embossed leather. “He was the highest in his class,” the aunt said, “and the youngest.” And Dr. Allwin halted at a page of verse, one stanza devoted to each member of the junior class. The very end of it had caught his eye:
Now there’s our Junior list
And surely there’s no finer
.
But wait! we nearly missed
The mighty Judah Steiner!
Turning the page, Dr. Allwin came upon a photograph of Artie Straus – “Most Popular Twainite, and Youngest Student Ever to Enter the University of Chicago.”
From the brothers, there was little to be learned. Max said he had honestly tried to help the kid, but they just never had been interested in the same things. With the Straus men, brother James said maybe he had covered up too much for Artie, and Uncle Gerald said there was that incident four years ago – maybe the family should have paid more attention. James told of the incident. Going through his desk he had found a hundred-dollar Liberty Bond missing. “Artie got all excited and told some cock-and-bull story about seeing the chauffeur hanging around my room. But when Artie was out, I took a look in his desk and found the bond.” James had called him a lousy little thieving liar. And now James remembered how Artie had turned on him in bitter screaming anger, crying, “All right! So I swiped it! So what the hell is it to you!”
What the hell is it to you! It echoed now. Was that the kind of thing the doctor meant? “Maybe we should have done something about things like that, taken him to a doctor; maybe it was a sign.”
But Uncle Gerald said, “You should have beat the stuffings out of him.”
“Your father must have known something of his delinquencies?” the doctor asked of James.
“I guess he had an idea, but you see Dad was – well, off by himself. I’m afraid no one in the family was as close as we should have been to Artie.”
The doctor took a deep breath. Artie had apparently never learned to give anyone his confidence, he observed. Perhaps it would be best to prepare him for the study that was to be made. Since time was short, he should be made to understand that the doctors wished only to help him, but that they could do so only if he were entirely frank, and held nothing back. And as James and Uncle Gerald seemed after all to have most influence with him, perhaps they could suggest… They nodded, solemnly.
It was on their way to the jail that the disturbing thought came up. Should Artie really be advised to tell the doctors everything? The papers were still full of all those other crimes the police were trying to put on the boys. That awful taxi-driver thing. And the drowning and the shooting. All young men, all in the last year on the South Side. Who knew, with Artie? What couldn’t he have done, if he had done this thing! And if he now revealed, to his own doctors – James eyed Uncle Gerald, with the dreaded question.
“Well, how’s it look?” Artie said to them, coming jauntily into the visitor’s room.
Uncle Gerald suddenly noticed the torn sleeve on the prison coat Artie was wearing. “What happened to your clothes?”
“They got lousy,” Artie said cheerily. “So the screws gave me this.”
How did things look? Artie repeated. Any chances? And before they could answer, “Say, James-” Would James tell Dorothea Lengel to stand opposite his window at 10 A.M., he’d wave to her.
Now seriously, Uncle Gerald said, Artie was going to have to snap out of this silly attitude. He had to work with the alienists. Everything depended on the report of the alienists.
“Oh, a battle of experts!” Artie exclaimed. “I guess you can’t claim that I was temporarily insane, that’s out, but how about heredity, maybe we ought to say it’s in the family – how about Cousin Richard?”
“Don’t try to put on an act, Artie,” his brother advised. “Just co-operate with these doctors. Just tell them everything they want to know.”
“Everything?”
His brother met his eyes. “Even the things people never tell anybody, kid. Things you’d never tell – well, me.”
“Things I did? Everything?”
That peculiar look came into Artie’s eyes, conspiratorial, cunning, and yet cute.
“Artie,” his uncle said, “are there important things we don’t know?”
“Well, do you want to know?” Was he teasing? Kidding? Now he laughed. “You believe all that crap in the papers?”
“Well, let’s say this,” his uncle stipulated reflectively. “If there is anything you run into that you’re in doubt about, Artie, maybe you’d better ask James first whether you should tell it.”
A snort escaped from Artie. “Maybe it would be easier to tell the docs.”
James said, “This may be your life, kid.”
“The hell you care!” Artie snapped.
James gasped. Artie’s voice had suddenly sounded quavering, the cry of some six-year-old kid wanting something from his big brother. “We all care, kid. We want to help you.”
Artie had changed back. “How’s Mumsie bearing up?” he asked contritely.
“She’s a little better. The doctors said for her to stay in Charlevoix,” James said. Was there anything else Artie wanted?
Sure. They could send in a couple of broads, he said with his old grin.
With Judd, it was Max who explained about co-operation with the psychiatrists. As usual, Judd’s response was to show he knew more than the experts. “According to the legal definition, I’m sane.”
“You wouldn’t think it,” Max let slip, and the old hostility was there between them. “For Christ’s sake, if you’re not crazy, what made you do it?” Max cried. “You must have been all ginned up!”
“I’m afraid drunkenness would not be a defence,” Judd remarked with cool superiority, “and although we did have a bottle in the car, I don’t think we took more than a swallow. Perhaps when we were waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“For school to let out.”
Max groaned. “Judd, kid, for crissake, why didn’t you stop? All right, Artie is wild, but why didn’t you call it off?”
“Back out? You want me to be a coward?” And there it stood naked between them, an accusation, a sneer with some kind of bitter laugh behind it, pointed at Max himself: You taught me, you taught your own little brother – be a man, never be a coward, never back out – that’s your own goddam code!
Then for a time things became relatively quiet. Dr. Storrs and Dr. Allwin proceeded with their work. It was to prove the most extensive psychiatric study made for a court case, certainly up to that time, and I believe perhaps even to this day. While Dr. Allwin gathered family material, Storrs began the psychological tests.
The prisoners were conducted each day to a large unused cell on the ninth floor. The room seemed almost an office, with its desk and chairs, its sunlit warmth. Along one wall was a bench, and between tests Artie would stretch out, dozing, while Judd engaged Storrs in a kind of reverse quiz, usually trying to prove the worthlessness of the test he was taking.
Psychological testing had not yet been developed in the specialized ways in which it is used today. Knowledge tests, tests of mental agility, were already in wide use. But testing of emotional responses had only begun. The Rorschach, now indispensable, was not used on Judd and Artie. The thematic apperception test had only just been invented by a young psychologist at Harvard; Dr. Storrs experimented with it and found curious results.
Of the other tests, the standard intelligence forms, the results were predictable. Judd completed the Stanford-Binet so rapidly that the scale was not high enough to rate him. Artie’s results were almost as phenomenal. The vocabulary tests and the problem-solution tests were child’s play for them. In a word test for which five minutes was considered a minimum, Judd completed his paper in three minutes and fifteen seconds. Artie, too, was rapid.
For emotional reactions, Storrs began with word association. Through an entire list, each boy reacted quickly and with a virtual absence of emotional tone. Only the word chisel, inserted between neutral words, suddenly brought Artie to a halt. He waited a full minute before saying, “trouble.”
It was then that Storrs tried the set of pictures used in the thematic apperception experiment. For example, there was a picture of a boy with one shoe on. Near him lay the matching shoe, an overshoe, a slipper. What did the picture suggest?
With this and other pictures in the set, Artie and Judd produced stories hardly to be expected from young men of their age and seeming mental development. Artie at once decided that the boy might be putting on someone else’s shoes, so as to leave false footprints. And on he went, in a childlike fantasy of crime. Judd ignored the little situation in the picture – the incompleted act of dressing or undressing. The boy was waiting for someone, he ventured. Something important was happening. A big decision was being made, and the boy was waiting, perhaps for his mother. It could be that there was an argument about him going on in the house. About where he should go to school… Then Judd looked at Storrs, cunningly, with the caught-on look of the test sophisticate.
In another week, it is Dr. Allwin who conducts the examination, aided by medical specialists for the new-fangled metabolism tests and cardiograms.
On one of these mornings, there is Judd coming in alone, finding Dr. Allwin in a white jacket, laying out a few instruments on a clean towel.
Allwin greets Judd as one might greet a colleague, collaborating in pure scientific inquiry. But this morning Judd notices several hypodermic needles laid out, and turns pale.
“Anything wrong?” asks the doctor.
“What’s all this for?”
“We’re only going to take a few blood samples.” Picking up a syringe, the doctor turns to him, but now Judd is absolutely white.
“I’m sorry, doctor,” he says, “but the mere idea of blood always affects me this way. I know it is a stupid reaction, but I can’t help it.”
“Well this will only take a second.” Judd has an involuntary reaction of shrinking and pulling away, as the sample is taken from his ear lobe. When it is over, beads of sweat are on his forehead.
