“They said it was with the idea that a boy might be identified-”
“Look, they knew better than that,” Willie said.
“Well, it was circumcised – he could be identified as a Jew. In fact, that’s how I came to identify him.”
“And wasn’t that part of it, for Judd?” Willie said, rather softly. “Wasn’t that one of his conflicts? Didn’t he have to obliterate the problem of being a Jew? To dissolve it, so that the sign would be gone, the mark in the flesh, it was even in his fantasy, the brand on the inner side of the leg, the brand that could sometime be removed.”
Something in me gasped at this leap of his imagination. Yet, resist the idea as I might, wasn’t it a possible connection?
“And there was more,” Willie said. “Oh, the id is extremely cunning, that’s one thing we’ve learned, it is poetic and cunning. You don’t know how clever it can be, how the associations leap – I suppose because it’s all open, there’s nothing to block them; and how literal it can be, too.”
Willie brought out his last point, quite casually, the way an actor sometimes throws away his most important line, using reverse emphasis. “If there were no penis at all, wouldn’t it be a girl that he had killed?”
I could, indeed, see how his whole argument came together. If Judd had always wanted to cease being feminine, if this had been his great conflict, if he had wanted to kill a girl symbolically in an act that was self-destruction as all murder is self-destruction, then in this final gesture with the annihilating acid – had he not been doing it? Killing the girl in himself? He had first sought to obliterate identity in the face, so that the child could be himself, and he had then sought to obliterate the male sex. The child, thus, could be representationally himself as a girl, and this child had been placed naked in a womb, returned to pre-birth. And the womb was a sewer – the way he had always thought of females.
If he wished he had never been born – wished he had never been born as a girl kind of boy – then the gesture was complete; he had exorcised the curse on himself. He had become unborn, in the womb of the mother who was in the earth.
And then there came to me the other possibility. If he had destroyed the male element and returned the body to the womb, was it not equally understandable as a way to rectify a mistake, to say that it was as a girl that he really should have been born? There was, indeed, as Willie had said, an incredible cunning, an amazing poetic compression in this way of thinking. For here was the duality of nature symbolized – here was Judd’s conflicting wish to be a boy, to be a girl – expressed in the symbol that could be fitted in either direction!
And would Judd not there, together, have had a seeming solution of both his conflicts, since a girl could not have the mark in the flesh of the Jew? It was both a death gesture, then, and a life gesture that he had made, impelled by a wish for being unborn, and a wish for rebirth.
We walked on silently.
Finally I asked of Willie, “You once thought the killing could have proven a catharsis for him. If they hadn’t been caught.”
Willie said, “In physical infections, the body creates poisons with which to kill the pathology and cure itself. Perhaps so does the psyche.”
Another thought came to me, changing the conception I had had until then of the crime. “Then Judd was not merely Artie’s accomplice. He wasn’t there only because he was in love with Artie. He had to do the murder because of some compulsion in himself. Just the way Artie did.”
“That’s what I think,” Willie said. “Once Artie started them on it.”
Automatically we had turned, to circle back. Willie remarked again about the choice of spot. Wasn’t it there that Judd took his class of children, perhaps literally to watch for a stork, a rare visitant in the Chicago area? And the children must have echoed for Judd his own childhood absorption in the source of the birth mystery. Thus it became inevitable that he should return the child’s body there, almost as though he had delivered his soul to the original source. And what did he lose, there? His glasses, his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more, in the womb or in the tomb.
For me, the depths of Willie’s explanation brought on an oppressive feeling. If something like this were valid, then we were hopelessly driven, in the grasp of such dreadful forces. This was only an elaboration of Wilk’s mechanistic philosophy, with the physiological determinants augmented by the mechanics of psychology and psychoanalysis.
If someone had seen what was happening in Judd, could he not have helped him? Couldn’t a less dangerous form of catharsis have taken place? Hadn’t he been on the verge of emergence into normal relationships with women?
Willie’s mind seemed to have walked with mine. “What became of Ruth?” he asked.
Even then, her name affected me. “I don’t know.”
“Myra was here,” he said.
“In Vienna?”
“She was in analysis.” Suddenly there had come over his face a grin so painful that I was caught in the pain. I wondered if Willie could have been in love with Myra. And only then did I fully see her in her own wretched frenetic prison, another innocent victim of the tragic crime.
Willie continued, with an air of complete control. “I don’t suppose you know you entered into her fantasies. Perhaps at a given moment you could have helped her. She’s gone back to the States.” He added, almost in a mutter, “I think she made a fairly good adjustment.”
When we parted he met my eyes with a kind of furtive look, his mouth grinned, and he turned and strode away.
A few years later, I met Myra in New York. She was a psychiatric social worker, still over-tense. I took her to the theatre, then we went back to her interior-decorated little apartment, filled with modern art; we drank a good deal; she told me all about herself, her affairs – there had even been a brief marriage. So generous, so quick, so filled with the latest things, the newest books, the newest psychoanalytic theories, playing the newest jazz records – boogie-woogie at the time. And always staggering with a host of illnesses and calling them psychosomatic.
She died of cancer. It was in the same year that Artie Straus was murdered, in prison, by a jealous inmate.
During those years I thought occasionally about Willie’s hypothesis. There was, for example, the fact that the burial place, the womblike cistern, was under a railway track. And as the train as a sex symbol became part of our popular vocabulary about dreams and fantasies, I saw a final detail in Judd’s compulsive selection of the place – the ruthless engine of sexuality for ever running over the cistern-image of the mother.
But then I would discard such ideas as intellectual play. In the thirties, in the forties, we elaborated, rather, on economic causation, and the Straus-Steiner case faded from importance.
Yet all this time, the analytical way of thinking had progressed, and today Willie’s hypothesis does not seem particularly bizarre. Nor does it seem so hopeless. For even in this short span of time, a single generation, we have seen some success in the manipulation of the dark forces.
It must seem ironic to speak with an accent of hope, when during these same years we have seen an outbreak of paranoia and a Nietzschean mania connected with the death of millions. Yet today an Artie or a Judd, while still in childhood, might more likely arrive at the desk of a therapist.
Although the alienists of the twenties were careful to predict that this crime in its peculiar form could scarcely be repeated, we have had adolescents in pairs and in larger groups, and also alone, in whom the destructive urges broke through. Perhaps this very pattern of disturbance increases shortly before the controls become generally available, just as the incidence in polio seemed to increase enormously shortly before the preventive vaccine was developed. And I sometimes believe that for me, in a curious way, the case itself served as a vaccine. For there was an incident, or a potential incident. It came during the war.