Then Judd is speaking of his mother. An invalid for many years, she was ethereal, like a Botticelli madonna – and within himself he goes on to say that truly she was a madonna, a virgin, and she was like Ruth – from Ruth there is something of the same emanation of purity and goodness – and then he sees himself being held aloft by a virgin mother. Though he is an infant, he is a person fully developed, speaking and able to walk, and already complete in intelligence.
He hears himself telling Ruth deprecatingly how he was indeed a prodigy, speaking his first words at the age of four months. She laughs softly, saying it is difficult to imagine him as a baby, and he declares he never was a baby; he resents the idea of having been a helpless baby.
Ruth has become so tender toward him; now their talk drifts into silence, and they sit looking at the dark lake, and their faces turn with the same impulse, and there is a slow tender kiss, the lips touching without weight, simply as though they were of one being. A lovely melancholy fatedness rises in their hearts. And it seems to Judd that he has the power to make the whole deed with Artie turn non-existent. It seems to him that he must somehow have drawn back that deed, erased that entire night from the schedule of time.
In bed that night, Judd could not summon the image of Ruth. He could not summon the madonna image of his mother. He could not summon the image of Artie. Instead there was his brother in the dark blue uniform with the brass buttons, the uniform of the military academy. He remembered when Max came home the first time in that uniform, Max, so huge, so strong, and Judd just a shaver eyeing him from the hallways.
And he remembered, too, the morning he was still in bed and Max caught him doing it and said if he kept on, the thing would come off and he would be a girl. Then way, way back there was fat Trudy, his nursemaid, her huge mouth open, laughing, the irregular teeth, and suddenly her head swooping down, and his terror, her laughing sounds through it all, and her joking threat that he would be no more than a girl, and the torture, pleasure, torture, like tickling, and big Trudy making imitation devouring sounds… “I love my little boy, my little man!”
The following morning all this was absent; he awoke with only the strange tenderness in him. The sense of wanting to see Ruth persisted. And as he drove to school, a whole new drama was being enacted in his mind; the play continued during class. He might perform it tomorrow at Max’s engagement party. “I have an announcement to make!” Oh, that would be a good one on brother Max, the self-satisfied groom, the centre of attention, suddenly fading into the background while the startled gasping crowd listened to his kid brother. Judd had to stand on a chair for his head to rise above their shoulders, and he announced – was it his own engagement or the crime? As he sat through the lecture his fountain-pen was busy: again a hawk, the talons open, sharp, long, and ready to strike. Near it he made patterns of the sun, with streamers of energy flowing out. Now, spread-winged on a cross, a great bird, an albatross. But still he was following something the instructor was saying about compound crimes – sometimes in compound crimes the lesser crime took precedence! Suppose they traced the glasses. To him. Suppose they somehow traced the letter. His. And it was he who had rented the car. (The cleverness of Artie! Judd smiled inwardly in appreciation.) But if he were caught by these items, wasn’t he free to make his own deal? Premeditated murder was death. But if the kidnapping had been a prank, the death accidental, if he made a deal for a charge of manslaughter, there might be only a few years in jail. He saw himself a model prisoner, studying, reading. Ruth waiting, and coming to visit him, and waiting…
What could you get, then, for kidnapping alone? Judd was shading in the initials on the cross, class was ending, and he managed to walk out alongside the instructor.
It wasn’t difficult to steer the conversation to the Kessler crime, as a striking current example of a compound crime. Suppose the criminal were apprehended, Judd asked, in preparing a defence would it not be advantageous to let him stand for the kidnapping instead of the murder?
Well, in some states, yes, that would be a distinct advantage, the instructor said. But in Illinois, kidnapping had quite recently been made a capital offence – since that miserable case of the abducted little girl assaulted in the coal cellar, the Fitzgerald case. “And in this crime,” said the instructor, “if they ever catch the perpetrators, I’m afraid the best legal manipulation would be of no avail. There are times when law seems pointless – any verdict short of hanging would be corrected by a lynch mob, I imagine.” He flashed an academic smile that had in it a touch of their shared superiority to the mob.
After his next class he met Artie. They strolled across the Midway, Artie hooting about the latest stupidities of the cops – checking every Winton in town. They even had the car wrong! And the two tramps and the vagabond woman who had been caught with a busted typewriter – now that was something! And that reminded him. “How’d you make out last night, Jocko? Did you get in?”
“Oh,” said Judd, “it wasn’t that kind of a date.”
Artie horse-laughed. She’d been running around with a frat brother of his, and Sid was no chump – Sid was a newspaperman. Hell, when they had all been together on Friday, hadn’t Judd been able to see that the girl was Sid’s push? Did he think a newspaperman would be wasting time with a girl that didn’t come across? Artie was willing to bet a ten-spot he could lay Ruth on his first date.
Judd was silent.
When he reached home, Aunt Bertha was already there, busily directing Emil in hanging summer curtains and draperies. It should have been done long ago! No woman in the house! And suddenly Aunt Bertha fixed her eyes on Judd, coming up to him and touching his sleeve. “And how are things with you, Judd? You’re looking worried. What can a boy like you have to worry about? He passes his Harvard exam with flying colours. And in a week he’s running off to sow his wild oats in Europe, and he’s worried!”
He smiled. She contracted her brows. “Maybe you are in love?”
“Maybe I am,” he said, to give Aunt Bertha some excitement.
“You just hate to have Max do something you can’t do,” she remarked, pleased at her shrewdness. And with a sigh: “If only your mother had lived for this. You see, Judd, it’s the same way with sisters, too. They’re jealous of each other and still they love each other.”
He kept the smile fixed on his face. Jealous of Max the Mope! “I was jealous of your mother when she married first,” his aunt said. Then, with a streak of asperity she added, “You know something? I was almost jealous of her for passing away first and being done with it all?”
It was this, this cheerfully admitted pessimism, that made him every once in a while feel you could talk to Aunt Bertha. She might even understand the whole thing with Artie; if any of them could get a glimmer of it. Aunt Bertha would be the one. No she would put the blame on Artie, as his mother would have done. Just as they had blamed others every time he got a childhood disease.
Judd remembered suddenly the one year when he had gone to public school, and his mother had admonished him, “Don’t ever touch anything. You’ll get germs. Don’t sit on the toilets. You must absolutely wait until you get home, Judd dear, you understand? They’re just common children.” And it had indeed scared him, because being sick all the times with hives and boils and eruptions on his skin, he was in horror of more hurting and more ugliness of oozing and scabs. Judd recalled how he had felt all that time, with the kids jeering, but keeping their distance. And in the corridors of the school, he had always tried to walk so as not to touch or be touched, until it seemed there had always been a space around him, everyone leaving him alone. Until that one day…