Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  Wilk’s tired face glowed. For in the end, this had been his choice of emphasis, youth and the precedent of consideration for youth.

  “The court believes it is within his province to decline to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age.

  “This determination appears to be in accordance with the progress of criminal law all over the world and with the dictates of enlightened humanity. More than that, it seems to be in accordance with the precedents hitherto observed in this state.

  “Life imprisonment, at the moment, strikes the public imagination less forcibly than would death by hanging; but to the offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation.”

  The entire courtroom was stirring, breathing. Perhaps Judd was already computing the years before they might be admissible for parole. But Judge Matthewson’s voice took on a note of doom. “The court feels it proper to add a final word concerning the effect of the parole law upon the punishment of these defendants. In the case of such atrocious crimes, it is entirely within the discretion of the Department of Public Welfare never to admit these defendants to parole.

  “To such a policy the court urges them strictly to adhere. If this course is persevered in the punishment of these defendants, it will both satisfy the ends of justice and safeguard the interests of society.”

  Then he read the formal sentences. Upon each, for murder, “to be confined in the penitentiary at Joliet for the term of your natural life.”

  In addition, for kidnapping for ransom, “to be confined in the penitentiary at Joliet for the term of ninety-nine years”.

  As the sentences fell like successive iron bolts, sentences of life and for ever, the first surge of joy abated. But then the life-urge poured and inundated over all other feeling. Judd and Artie pounded each other, and turned to wave to those they knew in the court, and laughed with happiness, Judd quieting only for an instant as he caught his father’s eye, as the old man arose, scarcely less sorrowful than before, to follow Max from the courtroom. It was over. Disposition had been made.

  Judd was pushing toward Wilk, with his hand extended. Wilk took his hand. There seemed, momentarily, a danger of tears in Judd’s eyes, but the clasp was ended by the brusque interruption of the bailiffs, who laid hands on the boys to take them out of the room as a protection for the lives that had just been given back to them.

  During the rest of the day, the tumult over the verdict was augmented by rumours of assassination plots. Mike Prager offered bets that they would never reach the state penitentiary in Joliet alive. There was a tip that three hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan were massing in Berwyn, just west of Chicago, that they would block the road with their cars and lynch the prisoners.

  At dusk, Judd and Artie, surrounded by guards, were slipped into a large black Marmon that waited, with motor running, at the rear entrance of the jail. They were linked together by a short chain, from wrist to wrist. In their car sat four guards with pistols drawn and pump guns on their knees. A vehicle filled with police preceded their car, and two others followed. The cavalcade departed at high speed.

  So nervous were the custodians that they twice came close to wreckage on the road. Once, on the outskirts of the city, a collision was avoided only by a rapid swerve that threw guards and prisoners into one heap and brought laughter from Judd and Artie. The second time, a sudden stop at a railroad crossing forced the prisoners’ car into a ditch.

  But in a few hours Artie and Judd were delivered to the state prison authorities, and suddenly the entire drama was over. The walls shut in on them. For each, prison life began with solitary confinement.

  And it was indeed so that the world seemed to envisage the remainder of their existence. As the press wires compiled reactions to the sentence, we read the New York Times editorial declaring that prison for them should truly mean “the oubliette”, that it should be “a life extinguishment virtually as complete as death”.

  An Indianapolis paper declared that the judge had spoken truly when he pictured a lifetime in jail as worse punishment than execution. But could they not sometime get out? This seemed a pervasive fear. Legal experts gave interviews showing that they might be paroled in fifty years, even in twenty years. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that despite the judge’s advice against parole no one could tell what would happen. And while grudgingly accepting the sentence, the Tribune declared that it was more than anything a sentence against capital punishment, for if these two did not deserve to hang, then anyone hanged thereafter in the state of Illinois would be hanged unjustly.

  Yet for all the rumblings, the act of disposition seemed indeed to have ended the case. Crank letters and threatening calls rapidly fell off. The court had spoken, and the case was decided. And in a few days, we had not a line about Steiner and Straus in the paper. We ran only a Sunday article by an eminent law professor pointing out that the elaborate psychiatric evidence introduced into the case would prove a landmark in medical jurisprudence.

  A FEW DAYS after the verdict I made up my mind at last to call Ruth. Only then I learned that she had gone East, that she had transferred to Smith College.

  For the next few months I stayed on the paper in Chicago. I began an affair with a girl reporter on the News, an “emancipated woman”. Those were the beginning days of the gang wars, and I became an expert on them – always the speeding car, the fusillade, the riddled body or bodies; then the gangster funeral, and the box-score tally, and rarely an arrest, almost never a conviction; it was just people shooting it out on the streets, it was the same as when kids did it. Bang, you’re dead.

  There came the question of accepting the prize for helping to capture Steiner and Straus. Ten thousand dollars was to be divided between the Pole who had found the glasses and the detective who had traced them, and several others. And Tom and I were to have a thousand dollars each.

  If I refused, I would be implying that Tom was wrong in accepting. There was not a reason in the world for refusing. Afterward, Tom and I got ritually drunk at Louie’s. I said I would go to Europe and write.

  I even had it in mind, when I went East, to stop at Smith College. And so I wrote to Ruth. Her reply was cordial but cool. She congratulated me on my reward “since it would help me further my writing ambitions”.

  I tried in a letter to explain myself, and she wrote back that the whole experience was perhaps too strong as yet for both of us, that perhaps when I came back from Europe, we could renew our friendship.

  The first person I looked up in Paris was Myra; she had gone abroad immediately after the trial. Myra was thinner, but more attractive than ever; her eyes were huge, her hair was sleek, and she was already the ultra-habitué of the Dôme, nodding and waving to everybody and telling me who everybody was – Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and the editor of transition, in which she hoped to get her poems published.

  We kept on drinking Pernod, then she was showing me the real Paris. We kissed along the quays, and it must have been nearly dawn when as a matter of course we went up to my hotel room – and she was pouring out talk by then: she wanted me to take her, it was “the only way to find out”. But when we tried, she became rigid, clenched, her body vibrating with her effort to break through her rigidity, and finally she said in a small voice that it was always like that – she hoped I would forgive her for trying to use me but…

  For some time after that, we met at cafés and talked and talked. Myra was always seen with the newest young male arrivals, holding hands on the street, going off intimately with them somewhere.

  After a few months in Paris, trying to write, I became restless. I would drop in at the Chicago Globe’s offices to look at the paper, and soon I was working full time. I seemed always involved in a serious affair or in an important story.

  I went to Italy, I went to Germany. Something of the great malaise, the gathering sickness of Europe, began to be felt, and it was as thoug
h I had already known it; the taste of it was quite familiar to me from Chicago. Everything was as though expected. So the years passed.

  Then came the troubles in Vienna, the brief abortive revolution when the socialists barricaded themselves in their model apartment houses. They were shot out in a few days. With other “experts”, I predicted great upheavals. With the socialists out of the way, what could stop the paranoiac Hitler from gobbling up Austria?

  I was done with the story, and lingering in the depressing aftermath of the shootings, when I got a call, one morning, in my hotel. “Herr Doctor Weiss,” the clerk announced. It was Willie.

  I found him waiting in the lobby, gnomish as ever, his head cocked to one side as he looked at me through narrowed eyes. There was the same knowing, ironic smile on his closed lips.

  What was he doing in Vienna?

  He seemed surprised that I asked. Where else would he be for his post-graduate work but in the home city of the Old Man?

  “Let’s walk,” he said, explaining that he allowed himself an hour’s walk every morning.

  Willie set off at a brisk gait, setting the pace for his rapid questioning. First, he pumped me dry on my opinions about the uprising. Then, quite brusquely, Willie demanded what news I had of the boys in jail. Had they succumbed to prison routine? Or was Judd, at least, finding it possible to keep up some creative, mental life?

  Here I disappointed him. I was completely out of touch. I recalled only a story Tom Daly had brought to me after the trial: it seemed that Artie’s denial of the “gland robbery”, at least, was somewhat substantiated by a tale current among the South Side police. The taxi driver had really been mutilated, it was said, by the brother of a girl he had raped. But that still left a good deal of mystery about Artie’s other crimes.

  The boys should have been studied further, Willie declared. Had I heard of the recent death of Dr. McNarry?

  I hadn’t. Indeed, it took me an instant to think myself back into the trial, to place him as the head of the psychiatric defence.

  What a fitting thing it would have been, Willie said, if the three families had gone through with McNarry’s idea. Maybe the idea still could be revived, right now, as a memorial to McNarry, one of the first psychiatrists in America open-minded enough to accept Freud.

  But what idea of McNarry’s was he talking about? I asked.

  Why, hadn’t I known? Just after the trial Dr. McNarry had suggested a wonderful idea to all three families – the Kesslers, the Strauses, the Steiners. After all, they were linked in the tragedy; each had lost a son.

  Dr. McNarry had proposed that the three bereaved millionaire families set up a joint fund for the study of mental diseases. “A great research centre in Chicago.”

  “He proposed it to all three families?” I asked.

  “I think it came fairly close, at that. Paulie Kessler’s father saw it. You know, that little man had a great deal to him.” And Artie’s mother had been most eager for the plan. “I suppose it would have relieved poor Mrs. Straus of some of her guilt feeling to have her tragedy acknowledged in that way.”

  But real opposition, Willie said, had come from Randolph Straus, who could not bring himself to have his son’s crime thus perpetuated.

  “What a pity, what a waste of great material!” Willie said. The first task would have been a depth study of the crime itself. “After the sentence, they could really have gone into all that material that didn’t come out.”

  What material? Was he going to tell me, even now, something of the mysterious crimes, A, B, C, D? Had Willie after all known something? I felt a curious reluctance to be drawn into the whole thing again, but I had to face the story. “Was there really more?”

  It was a different kind of material that he meant. Interpretive material.

  I recalled that he himself had tried an explanation and had brought up some strange theories. The chisel, the tool – but something else came back to me from that long-ago discussion with Willie. Two things he had mentioned, the tool and the burial place. About the second one I had never understood. The tool had been Artie’s idea. But Judd had picked the swamp.

  “That’s it,” Willie said. “That was Judd’s part. Artie, the tool. Judd, the receptacle.” Was the whole act, then, a symbol? Willie must have felt my resistant bepuzzlement, for he took another approach. “Do you know about the death instinct?” All life was a struggle with the death-wish, and we had seen the victory of that wish in the cases of Judd and Artie.

  “Don’t we always tend to fit events into the latest theory we have acquired?” I said.

  “Why did Judd pick that particular place?” Willie resumed.

  “The swamp? He was familiar with it. He went birding there.”

  “He went birding in a lot of other places. Something impelled him to go to that particular spot, instead of the dunes or the lake or anywhere.” Artie, for instance, must have used other places at other times – if one accepted that there had been other crimes for Artie. Yet this time it was Judd who insisted he knew the exact spot.

  “All right,” I said. “Why did he pick Hegewisch?”

  “It’s not Hegewisch – it’s the particular spot there.”

  “Under the tracks?” I said. “The cistern?” That had indeed always seemed peculiar to me, for it was obviously a not very safe hiding place.

  “Well?” Willie demanded. “Don’t you see what it represents?”

  I thought of the hole, the white concrete pipe, and it represented nothing to me.

  “The cistern.” He was staring at me until I thought, yes, perhaps Willie was a little like Judd and Artie, possessed by his own brilliant mind. “A naked body in the cistern,” he said. “It was a pretty tight fit, wasn’t it, and the fluid, the body in an aqueous environment, a slow amount of fluid flowing through the cistern-”

  I stared back at him, beginning to feel his meaning.

  “How many times did Judd say he wished he’d never been born?”

  I knew his meaning, then, and rejected it completely, almost revolted by it, even while – all the more revolting, like an obscenity – my mind kept adding the picture of the bushes screening the entrance to the pipe.

  As though forgiving my slowness in apprehension, Willie became torrential. I had to picture Judd as a baby. The last baby of a mother who had become an invalid through his birth. His mother had paid such a price for having him – her life, everyone believed.

  “Remember, this idea became overt with him. He told Dr. Allwin that he felt he had killed his mother because her illness stemmed from his birth. But what he actually meant, what he couldn’t say was that he felt his father had killed her, through the male demand on her.”

  “You got that far last time,” I recalled, “including his Madonna fixation, as a way of getting rid of his father.”

  “Yes,” Willie said, but since then, there had been some interesting ideas on the myth of virgin birth. Making the mother a goddess and a virgin – wasn’t that a perfect barrier against incest wishes in the boy? Wasn’t Judd particularly attached to his mother? And as he grew up, wasn’t his fear of having anything to do with women a fear of using them, and therefore an incest-fear of using his mother, of hurting his mother?

  “Yet he wanted to kill a woman,” I objected. “It was his idea that the victim should be a girl.”

  “The complement of over-tenderness is over-violence,” Willie responded. “But there was even more to it, about wanting to kill a girl.”

  He came to it, through all of Judd’s history. Hadn’t his mother wanted this last baby to be a girl? So she virtually made Judd into a girl. “She sends him to a girls’ school. The report said the old man wanted boys to be boys – but the mother was crazy for neatness and cleanliness. Here is where you get a couple of the characteristics that show up in Judd. All this feminine passion for order, for having things in their place. You see the conflict growing in him – is he a girl or a boy? And there was that terrific thing, when he got to public school,
about not using the toilet. Holding himself in! The sissy from the girls’ school! And that’s just when he tells us he started teaching himself never to have any emotions, to hold it all in! Well, where is it you don’t feel anything at all?”

  Did he mean death? Then the other state echoed to me. We had just talked of how often Judd repeated it. He wished he never had been born.

  We were walking more slowly. “Then he goes to Twain. He’s odd and sickly and always erupting all over with skin diseases, he’s allergic, he can’t stand the world. He’s a lone kid, the crazy bird, the last one they mention in the school annual – well, hell, we all knew Judd by then. I was older than he, but we all knew he was supposed to be queer, nasty, conceited, all that. Now, he develops his mania for languages and for birds. The languages – what’s language but communication? He couldn’t communicate with anybody. He had no close friends. He was looking for the key, the way to communicate, the universal language. And the birds, I haven’t quite got it – flight, you know, is commonly a sex symbol – wait a minute!” Willie halted, cocked his head. “What was the first bird he was looking for?”

  I must have looked stupid.

  “A child, watching birds. What bird does any little child wonder about first of all? The stork. He’s sceptical. Allwin reported when the nurse first told Judd the stork story, Judd said she had a sneer on her face. So he asked his father and the father said babies were bought in stores. Little Judd was going to find out who was right. He began watching for birds, to solve the great mystery that all children feel compelled to solve. Even in Hegewisch, he was still a child watching for the stork.”

  I must have looked dubious, because he said, “All right. Put that aside. We’ll see. Take him from Twain. That’s when he began to get these crushes, first on his brother in uniform, then on a camp-counsellor, and then he fixed on Artie-”

  “We all had kid crushes like that,” I objected. “It didn’t make us all homosexual. Or did it?”