“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?”
“A little bit, all of us. But we got out of it. The trouble for Judd was, with all the girl stuff in his childhood, he still didn’t know-what he was. So he got into it. And his conflict must have been worse than ever. Because don’t forget his nurse got him all tangled up when he was a kid, got him mixed up about sexual release, so that even if he didn’t know it he wanted it the way she showed him, the first way, the oral stage, or probably he was polymorphous perverse – the exploratory stage. He gets a fixation on Artie, and even when he tries sex with a girl, he sees her as Artie. But he must have been struggling all the time in himself to become a male. He’s in this adolescent period, the worst period, when his mother dies – the one real attachment, apparently, that he had.
“Then the scheme starts. The revenge on life. In Judd’s mind, it is a scheme to kill a girl. He kept pulling for it all the time, trying to convince Artie it ought to be a girl.”
“He had that mixed up with the war,” I reminded Willie.
“All right. That’s where he got the image. From a war poster. Man stuff. But that only added to the hatefulness of the world. And himself in it. And he was going to rid himself of all this by killing a girl. What girl?” Willie looked at me and said with finality, “The girl in himself. Judd had to kill the girl-part of himself, before he could become a man.”
It was really ingenious, I told him. He had built up a really clever theory. Perhaps it was a good thing the alienists had not brought such an idea into court, because Horn would have had a field day with it.
“Yah?” Willie’s voice became argumentative. “Now look at the act of murder. How were they going to accomplish it? They talked about it for weeks, they developed the details. There was the chisel, to knock the victim on the head – that was Artie’s part, we know that. And it was Artie who used it. But then they had all these other things they planned to use. There was the ether. They were going to put the victim to sleep. Judd saw it not as killing, but the sleep of death, the sleep before life, you could say. The ether was Judd’s idea, connected with the birds. But the ether wasn’t all. After that, the plan was to use a cord, strangling the victim with the cord, a silken cord they wanted, not a rope, each holding on to an end for equal participation.
“Isn’t this idea a birth in reverse? What were they reading at the time? Judd was full of Huysmans’ A Rebours. And the perversity, the inverted ideas of writers like Huysmans, the ideas like the Black Mass, the conception of doing everything backwards, by the substitution of opposites, black for white, girl for boy, death for life – the cord – you can’t discard that clue entirely.”
I said I would admit it as an obscure possibility; I would still go along to see where it would all lead.
“It led to the cemetery,” Willie said. And, reflectively: “You know, that’s a possible connection I hadn’t thought of before. Judd was driving. And in his confession he says they went up a side road to a cemetery and waited there until it got dark – a couple of hours. Now, why the cemetery? Certainly because death was in his mind, by then, and Judd must have been as though calling for his mother, the way a kid does when everything has gone wrong and he is scared. This wasn’t the particular cemetery where his mother is buried, but he had been visiting his mother’s grave, he said, almost every week, and so the association was there, and he was drawn to a cemetery as to his mother; and that was where they waited, with the dead kid, until it got dark. Then they drove to the real burial place he had picked out in advance, and before they put the body into the cistern there was one more ritual, and this was Judd’s too. Remember, he was so queasy he couldn’t strike anyone, he couldn’t touch a dead body, yet this was a thing Judd did and not Artie: he took the can of hydrochloric acid that was intended to obliterate recognizable parts of the body – they imagined it would dissolve the flesh-” Willie glanced at me and his eyes emphasized again the birth in reverse. “Judd took this acid, and he said he poured it on the face, and he poured it on the penis.” He became silent.