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 though 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 triaclass="underline" 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.