by Meyer Levin
“You really have a very strong reaction, don’t you?”
“I’ve always had it.” And Judd tells of an incident when he was quite young and saw a doctor examining his mother; the doctor said he would take her blood pressure. “I pictured it as blood gushing out, I suppose, and I became so sick the doctor had to take care of me instead of my mother.”
“How did you think of your mother?”
In his matter-of-fact, clacky voice, Judd says, “I used to picture her as the Madonna. I still do.”
He feels quite easy, talking to this elderly, gentlemanly doctor, and he tells of the stained-glass window in a church, to which he was taken by the young Irish nursemaid who preceded Trudy.
“But your family being Jewish – they had no objection to the girl’s taking you to church?” the doctor asks with civilized curiosity.
On the religious score they were not old-fashioned, Judd says. In fact, his father declared he did not mind Judd’s learning all about churches, since he was going to live in a Christian world. “I used to have the chauffeur drive me to different churches on every Sunday. I soon knew the differences between Catholic and Protestant, Methodist and Episcopal and Congregational services.”
“That was quite an unusual preoccupation for a child.”
“I kept it up as I grew,” Judd says. “I classified all the religions and their different ideas of God.”
“And this had an effect on you?”
“How could a kid help seeing it was all a lot of bushwa? God was three and He was one and He was a body and He was incorporeal and He was a Jewish old Moses with a beard.”
“I see. And in this time, when you were visiting the churches, did you visit synagogues too?”
“They had a certain type of training – my father wanted me to receive the usual training for boys. You study elementary Hebrew and you are supposed to participate in a ceremony at thirteen, to take part in the services. He used to send me to Rabbi Hirsch’s classes, but I got through with it all a few years ahead, and by the time I was thirteen I didn’t care to take part in the ritual – it’s a kind of confirmation – because I couldn’t believe in any of that any more.”
“And yet you say you still cling to this image of your mother as the Madonna.”
“That’s an exception. Oh, even as a child I realized she didn’t belong to us. And of course I later realized it was all a superstition, but I made this exception to keep this idea about my mother. And since Mother died, I prefer to see her that way.”
“You mean as the beautiful lady in the church window?” The pink-faced doctor seems to be smiling with him at childish notions. “A heavenly being?”
“Yes.” Then he continues, in that even, unemotional voice, “If not for me, she might not have died. I was responsible for her death.”
“How is that?”
“It was due to my birth,” Judd says. “She was never well after I was born. She became an invalid. She suffered from nephritis.”
“I’ve noticed a history of nephritis in the women of her family.”
“I contributed to her death,” Judd insists. “She was a perfect person.” He frequently visits her grave, he says, and adds, “I often wish I had never been born.”
“You have often wished it?”
“I used to wish it for years. When I was a kid.”
Another time, Dr. Allwin gets him to speak of those childhood years when he so often wished he had never been born. Judd explains that it was when the family lived on Michigan Avenue and he had to go to that school where there were only girls.
“You might have been proud of being the only boy among so many girls.”
He hated girls, hated females. They were all so stupid, gossipy.
Has he never had a steady girl, a real girl?
A few times he has been attracted, but not in love. And now, just lately, he had met a girl, a girl who made him feel different – he had even thought of running away with her, marrying her. His voice drops.
How did she make him feel different? Sexually?
No, he had not had sexual intercourse with her, though she stimulated him. But she was a nice girl and she made him feel he could understand things like marrying and having a family… Judd falls silent.
“Do you want to tell me more about this girl?”
“I don’t see any point to it.”
He tells, all at once, of an incident with Max, when he was a little kid: When they were playfully wrestling on the lawn, he hit his forehead on a stone and bled and cried, and Max called him a sissy. That was when he determined in his heart never to show Max, never to show anyone, if he felt hurt – in fact, never to let any feelings hurt him. “I discovered that emotions could hurt too much, and so I decided not to let myself be hurt that way.”
Another day, he finds himself talking of the few months he spent at the public school. The kids kept teasing him because he was such a shrimp, and a Jewboy.
“How did you feel about it?”
“That is hard to analyse at this point. Angry, I should think.”
“And perhaps ashamed?”
“No – no, I would not be ashamed of being a Jew. My people were always proud of it,” he adds automatically.
Then Judd tells of the strange day when Trudy wasn’t there and he started home alone, and two rough kids kept after him: “Hey, sheenie! Where’s your nursemaid?” Then they had hold of him, pulling him into an alley. Hey, that fat nursemaid, did he ever look under her skirt? “Yah, yah, you’re her slave, she makes you do it to her.” And then, “Hey, he got a pecker? Hey! the sheenies they cut off a piece of the petzel, maybe they cut off too much! Hey, maybe he’s a girl!” And tearing at his knickerbockers, holding him while he yelled, struck blindly. He feels their blows on his body, his face… kicks, blood… and he is running.
“This nursemaid, Trudy, she was with you for some years?”
“Until I was fourteen.”
What was she like?
She didn’t have a very highly developed intelligence, Judd explains. In fact, he would say she was a moron – she had gone only to a few grades in school in the old country. He spoke German with her. But she was cunning, and she was devoted to him. Once he wanted some stamps from a cousin’s collection and she just laughed as he went and swiped them. But after that she blackmailed him, by threatening to tell on him, making him do things she wanted.
What things?
Oh, just obey her. And not tell… about other things. Even, he sort of remembers, sex things – maybe when she gave him his bath, how she loved her little boy, kisses all over him. Trudy’s mouth, laughing and threatening, “If you’re not a good little boy…” and laughing, as if to devour, and then he would be her little girl.
How is Judd’s sleep? Dr. Allwin asks him. Does he fall asleep easily, or does he have some favourite fantasies, perhaps, before going to sleep? Judd becomes interested – this is a whole world of inquiry that he would not have thought of – and he talks quite freely, objectively. Yes, almost as far back as he can remember – “I used to make up these stories, before falling asleep. I was a king, sometimes, or else a slave-”
“Which were you more often, the king or the slave?”
“As it went on, I was almost always the slave.”
“It went on for a long time? Till the present?”
“Well, fairly recently.” Sometimes, he tells, it would last for an hour. He would lie on his stomach or on his side, usually hugging the pillow. After a while it would become very pleasant, with a pleasant warm bed odour, and he would imagine this was like the body odour of a naked slave who had been exerting himself, perhaps in battle, wielding a big sword and saving the life of the king. “Then the king would be grateful and offer to give the slave his liberty, but I would refuse, because I was devoted to the king.
“Another time I would be on a ship, and the vessel would be captured by pirates, and we would all be sold as slaves, and in the market place the Grand Vizier would notice me on t
he slave stand, and he would observe that I was more intelligent than all the rest, so he would buy me to become tutor for the young king, and then I would be branded.”
He breathes more deeply. “I would be branded on the inside calf of the right leg, a beautiful round mark of a crown-”
Another time he describes the king as his camp counsellor, when he was twelve. “His name was Chesty. He was about eighteen, and I admired him very much.
“Then I would picture myself as his slave. Sometimes it would be that the king got the slave as a stray baby found in the woods in a basket, or else the king was riding past the slave market and there was a boy of ten or twelve being sold, and the king took pity and bought him and took him for his personal slave. The king would have the boy slave come and sit with him, and he would pet him.”
“This was always your counsellor, Chesty?”
“After that summer it was other fellows, sometimes a teacher, and then a few years later we went up that summer to Artie’s in Charlevoix, and I began to idealize him, and from then on it was almost always Artie who was the king.”
“You idealized him?”
“I would see him as an athlete, a champion, even though I knew he is not a champion. And also. I would idealize him as a brilliant student, getting all A’s-”
“You knew his actual grades?”
“I knew Artie never got all A’s, but I told myself he could, if he wasn’t lazy. He has an almost perfect mind, and in other ways – sociability, and the ability to make people do what he wants – I would rate him very high. In fact, I once made a chart, and I rated everyone I knew, and Artie came out highest, ninety I think.”
“I see. You were aware, through all this, that you idealized Artie?”
Judd looks directly into his eyes. “It was blind hero worship. I almost completely identified myself with him. I would watch the food he ate, the drink going down his throat, and I would be envious.”
“And now?”
“Yes, even now. For a few days, I was angry with him. But now, when they take us through the corridors together sometimes, and to feel him near me, to brush against him, makes me feel I am alive.” He continues to look into Dr. Allwin’s eyes, not defiantly, not apologetically; Judd is entirely self-possessed, but there is between them, as a few days ago, a sense of shared pleasure in a task that is going well, even though its purpose remains obscure.
Another time, Judd recalls a reversed version of the fantasy, in which he was the king, and Artie was the slave. “We were on a sea voyage and we were shipwrecked, and came to an uncharted island. A piano was all we saved from the wreck, and I was the only one who knew how to play. There were natives on the island, and I was the only one who could speak their language.
“The natives of the island were divided into two groups, nobles and slaves. All of my companions were made slaves, but because of my ability to play the piano I was made a noble, for the natives knew nothing of music and were enchanted. Then, as a noble, I bought Artie to be my slave. He was very ill, and I nursed him back to health. Then when he was well, I gave him the choice of three alternatives:
“First, liberty. I would free him, and the brand mark on his right calf would be eliminated.”
“The slaves had been branded?”
“Yes. I would imagine this branding to be taking place, but it would not be on the island; it would be in the locker room of the Twain School, the locker room of the gym. Then we would be on the island and I would say, ‘If you choose liberty, you may go, but beware, because the first noble who sees you may capture you and make you his slave.’
“Secondly, he could remain my personal slave, in every sense of the word. Thirdly, I might sell him to some other noble. But if I did, he would receive bad treatment and would beg to come back to me. He would write me secret messages, using the pet secret word of the island. He would sign himself by that word.”
“And what was that?”
“Your kitty, or your pussy,” Judd says quietly.
I have tried to feel my way into the mind of Artie, but there are areas of impenetrable density that I suppose will for ever remain dark. It is curious that we all thought we knew Artie better than we knew Judd, since he was among us more, and perhaps that is why we puzzled less over him than over Judd. And another confusion resulted from our pairing them, from our feeling that they were in the crime to the same degree precisely, utterly commingled. This tendency to confuse them was to continue all the way through the trial, with lawyers and psychiatrists again and again naming the one when they meant the other. The record is filled with these snap-ups. “Steiner-” “You mean Straus?” “Yes, yes, I mean Straus-”
Thus they were a joint personality in our minds. Yet from their revelations to the psychiatrists, different patterns could be traced.
And despite the streaks of darkness in Artie’s revelations, a good deal can be made out of how these two distorted personalities conjoined. Artie was cunning and apt to withhold incidents in telling of his life. But when Dr. Allwin led him into his fantasy life, Artie, too, became easy and garrulous. Yes, he had indulged almost every night in picturizations, as he called them. There was something uncanny in the way they dovetailed with Judd’s.
Judd’s dominant fantasy rôle was that of a slave; Artie saw himself as a master. He was the chief of all criminals, commanding absolute obedience.
Even on the reverse side of their fantasies, there was an interlocking symmetry. Judd as a slave was, however, a superior being, a champion, a godlike, handsome person. Thus, while an inferior in the nominal side of his rôle he was superior on the active side. He lived in comfortable quarters, and he was the mentor of kings. Conversely, Artie was superior in the nominal side of his rôle he was a master mind, a chief, yet in carrying out his picturizations he saw himself as captured and jailed, chained and in rags. He derived greatest satisfaction from imagining himself incarcerated and whipped.
And in real life their fantasy relationships were carried out with beautiful inevitability. Both now related their strange compact, made after the frat-house robbery – the compact in which Artie was the master who must be implicitly obeyed; and yet, the other side of the agreement was the sexual act in which Artie had to submit and which was carried out in the spirit of a rape, a violence, almost a punishment – but, as in his fantasy, a punishment which he passively enjoyed.
Then, when he was nine, Artie’s little brother Billy was born. Three developments came with this event in Artie’s life. It was at nine, he told Dr. Allwin, that he first started pinching small articles from the counters of the Five and Ten. And it was then too that he began voraciously to read dime novels, hiding them from Miss Nuisance. The story of a kidnapped baby, hidden in the attic, made a lasting impression on him.
And it was then that he secured his first real information about sex.
There is the overcurious little boy, peeking, prying, trying to discover the secret of how the baby comes. Maybe Mumsie and Popsie are having the baby really because they want someone else, not you. Nobody wants you. Except maybe Hank, the chauffeur, who lets you hang around the garage. Miss Nuisance hates him – Hank is dirty, filthy, says Miss Nuisance. Because Hank does all kinds of things with girls. Everybody knows.
Hank is working around the car, the hood is open, and the garage is filled with the smell of gas and grease and rubber.
“Hand me the big hammer, Artie, will you?” The hammer has a sledge head. There is black tape wrapped around the handle for a grip. Hank is halfway under the hood, chiselling at something, with a chisel that cuts through iron. “The bloody nut is stuck,” he says. “That screw is tight as a witch’s twat.” That’s a bad word, and then Hank laughs at a big joke he just thought of – a joke about a couple that got caught being lovey-dovey and the police and the fire department had to be called to pull them apart. “Pull what apart?” Artie asks. “Their faces?” And Hank roars. And that is the day Hank tells Artie about the difference between men and women. It’s just
like this nut and bolt, he says, just like a key and a keyhole!
When a fellow grows up, Hank says, the pecker gets big, and sometimes it swells up, it gets as hard as a goddam hunk of steel, and Hank shakes the chisel in his hand, to show how hard it gets.
Artie has picked up the chisel Hank put down. “What’s the tape on there for?” the boy asks. And Hank says, “For a grip, so the shaft won’t get too slippery from the sweat of the hand.” And then he breaks out into a real roar of dirty laughter. “That’s a good one, but don’t ever tell that to a girl!”
“What?” asks Artie, puzzled.
“That!” says Hank, taking the chisel in his fist, holding it the wrong way, the iron in his hand. “Boy, you could really knock them dead with something like this! Boy, there must be many a little man with a no-good pecker wishes he had one like this!”
And just then Miss Nuisance marches in on them. “Artie! What are you doing here?”
A tool, a rod – “stiff as a rod”, the frat brothers said, hard as steel, knock them over with it – Sure he would go along. He’d show them he was a man. They claimed they’d done it the first time at fifteen, at fourteen, at thirteen. He’d done it lots of times already, he said – hell, he’d done it to his governess; that’s why she had to leave.
And in Mamie’s place the fellows stood around in a circle, close. The raucous laughter… there was his broad all spread out and waiting, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t – hell, many times, when he was alone, it did – but now, “little mousey”, she said, and they all roared, the bastards, the stinking sonsabitches.
Sonofabitch thing. Hard now in jail when you couldn’t – when you wanted it, limp as a rag. With Judd that time with the two broads, that little punk Judd doing it on the other side of the car. And his own broad trying to let him off easy, wagging her finger at it – “You bad little boy, you had too much to drink, didn’t you?” and, giggling, “He just wants to curl up and go to sleep.”
