“Sure, only the Jews are perfect,” Judd found himself snapping.
“At least we Jews are law-abiding, and engaged in respectable businesses and professions,” his father said.
“All the Italians gave us is Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael,” said Judd, “Cellini and Aretino.”
“Maybe they were a fine people once, but today they are only gangsters.”
Max cut in. “I hear this Mussolini is a real leader, bringing back the glory that was Rome – a kind of superman.” Max wore a smile, to show he was for once trying to use his kid brother’s intellectual language.
In Judd’s mind, the word superman was echoing. The sullen, angry, god-furious figure of Artie, getting out of the car. If Artie were through with him now, because of the glasses… If Artie turned to Willie… The fear came over Judd – Artie leaving him alone. Like last time, before New Year’s Eve. The trouble hadn’t been his fault then either. Artie had been ready to blame him, and go off with Willie and some girls for New Year’s Eve, the one night, the most important night. Only Judd’s letter had kept him. A letter saying everything, analysing everything, explaining. Now, too, Judd would write a letter. In his mind, Judd began to form the words, showing clearly why the spectacles had to be counted as a shared mistake. Just as the entire experience was shared. If Artie started chumming with Willie… Christ, he couldn’t! They were bound together now, like when kids take an oath in blood…
Instantly, the blood image welled up, the pulsing spurt, sickening. It was himself, a child. He’d be sick…
Just then the phone rang. The maid came to say it was for Junior. Judd’s heart bounded. It was Artie, he was sure. He hurried out of the dining-room.
When Artie got home from the frat, he noticed quite an assembly still in the dining-room, and remembered that Mumsie had wanted to show him off to one of her chums visiting from the East.
“Arthur!” There was the usual loving reproach in his mother’s voice, but relief, too, that he had appeared at last. She was looking wan tonight, a bit over-ethereal in her greenish dress. The New York woman had bangs and horse-teeth; she was from far back, from that Catholic school of Mumsie ’s. The brothers were present, too – James, and even Lewis, complete with his recent bride. Full show.
“Arthur, dear, I was beginning to get frightened,” his mother said.
“Now who would kidnap me?” He laughed.
His father said, “It isn’t exactly anything to joke about.”
Artie dropped his lip to look contrite. “I know,” he said solemnly, and even felt a touch of sorrow. “Poor Paulie. Just the other day I took him on for a game, on the court. You know, for a kid his age he was real good – real strong arm muscles, had quite a smash. He must have put up a real fight with those fiends. I even asked him about buying a racket like his for Billy. Where’s Billy? Upstairs? How’s he taking it?”
“I tried to keep him distracted,” his mother said, drawing in her breath sharply. “But it was such an upsetting day I gave him his dinner upstairs. I’m taking Billy to Charlevoix first thing in the morning. I’m getting him away from here; there’s no telling what kind of madman is loose!”
At her words, Artie felt alive, glittery. On the table, they had their dessert: fresh strawberries. Mumsie hadn’t touched hers. “Hanging is too good for a fiend like that!” she was saying, her eyes fiery with indignation. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, but in a case like this, if they catch him, I think he ought to be tarred and feathered and then strung from a lamp-post! Oh!” She shuddered at her own words. Artie reached for her dish and helped himself. “Artie!” But her little sigh admitted her adoration for her incorrigible Artie, admitted that she had ordered the early strawberries especially for him. “At least sit down! Did you have any dinner?”
“I ate at the house. I’m sorry,” he apologized to Horse-teeth. “I guess I was upset and excited about this case.” He told all about his frat brother, the reporter who had identified the body.
“Poor Mrs. Kessler, she’s prostrate, I read,” Lewis’ bride put in.
Horse-teeth remarked that it was the war, the destruction that had taken place in the war. Life meant nothing any more.
“Sure, after all that mass killing, human life becomes only an abstraction,” Artie pronounced, feeling Jocko would have enjoyed this, and diving into a second dish that Clarice had set before him.
“What do you know about mass killing?” Lewis, the war veteran, demanded of Artie. “You were just a kid.” Big hero.
“That’s exactly when the effect is strongest,” Artie replied, glittering at the guest. Bet she’d wet her pants before he was through. “What did we play?” he demanded rhetorically. “Kill the Huns! Mow them down! We even had a scoreboard at school, how many Huns were killed! Hey! I forgot to tell you – I’ve got the inside news! They arrested a teacher! Steger! It isn’t in the papers yet. Sid Silver told me.” He gazed around, reaping their reactions. “You better watch out for Billy, Mums. That school is full of perverts.”
“Kiddo! Watch it,” his older brother Lewis sniffed, while his father looked pained. James, however, gave him a funny, keen look.
His father reminded Artie that it was unfair to come to hasty conclusions merely because a teacher was being questioned. It could have been any stupid brute.
“Oh, no! Take the ransom letter in the paper,” Artie exclaimed. “That’s no illiterate crook! That’s the letter of an educated man, also of someone who can type. Say, they ought to check every typewriter in that school!”
And in that instant, Artie saw the goddam portable still sitting in Judd’s room. Gobbling a last spoonful of strawberries, he leaped up.
“Date?” his mother asked.
“Yah. Just remembered.”
“Mary?” his mother asked. “Or would it be violating the etiquette of our flaming youth for a mother to ask?”
“It’s a new frail; you don’t know her,” he said. And on the spur of the moment added, “Ruth Goldenberg.” That way she couldn’t check up. “Brilliant babe – all A’s, and a good dancer. Folks are nobodies.”
He rushed to the phone.
Only to hear Artie’s voice, breathless, talking in their private code, gave back to Judd a sense of life; even if there were danger, it relieved the caged feeling he had had at the table – the sense of being defenceless there, alone, open to be caught. “I saw a bargain in portable typewriters,” Artie was saying. “Thought you might want to pick one up with me, two blocks south of Twelfth Street.” That meant two hours before twelve, Artie would be over. And portable typewriters? Judd gasped. Another error! His! And Artie had spotted it. The portable on which he’d typed the ransom letter, Artie leaning over him, suggesting phrases to make it sound real businesslike. The typewriter could give them away! If the glasses were traced to him, and the house searched, the portable found… They’d have to get rid of it tonight.
“Thanks,” he said. “I was thinking of getting rid of my old portable at that. Two south of Twelfth. I’ll go along with you.”
As Judd came back into the dining-room, preoccupied, Max remarked, “Your chum again?” Max never let up about him and Artie. “I never could figure out what two guys have got to call each other up about all the time. Weren’t you with him all day today? And yesterday?” Max said it jovially, but there was that smutty look back of his eyes. Ever since a certain story had got out about Judd and Artie, a couple of summers before, at the Straus’s summer place in Charlevoix, Max had never let up. “What were you guys doing all day long?”
“We went birding.”
“I’ll bet. Chickens,” he said with his fat chuckle, but with an air of letting it go. Max put a big cigar in his mouth, like the old man, and the two of them resumed talking business.