“What is it? Something bothering you?” his aunt appealed.
“You know, I may not be going to Europe,” Judd remarked. For an instant he was going to add, “I might get caught.” But instead he let the story of his love affair come out, saying he was quite interested in a new girl and might not care to leave just now.
“A new girl! And you’d give up your trip for her! Well, that’s really serious! Tell me! Who is she?”
Someone she wouldn’t know, he said. Just a girl.
Not a shikseh! Even with her supposedly liberal philosophy, there was this automatic horror. But Aunt Bertha covered it at once, giving him her lecture about how of course if he were truly in love with a nice gentile girl of good family, it would be no tragedy – there had been some good intermarriages on the South Side. Look at Artie’s mother, a Catholic. But still it was always luckier if you happened to fall in love with someone from your own background – like Max going to New York and meeting a wonderful girl at his brother’s, a Mannheimer, too! But suddenly she halted, eyeing him with new apprehension. It wasn’t some little tramp like that one he nearly got into trouble with last year, a pickup?
Judd shook his head. “This is serious, I assure you.”
Then he told her about Ruth, a brilliant student. Her family were respectable little people; her father owned a drugstore.
“Russian Jews, I’ll bet,” she said with a sigh. Still, there could be worse tragedies. “But you’re so young, Judd, a brilliant boy. Your father would be disappointed if-”
Then his aunt observed that perhaps the trip would really be the best thing. If he found himself still interested in the girl when he returned, and if she would wait until he got through Harvard Law School -
Wait. The word instantly brought an image; he was coming out of prison, his hair white at the temples, and Ruth was waiting at the gate, her dear face softened with years of faithfulness. Then a gush of grief came up in Judd, almost breaking out as tears, and at the same time he chided himself in disgust for this cheap sentimentality.
With her eyes still on his face, his aunt had caught the passing emotion. “It’ll be all right, Judd. It’s youth, youth. We all have to go through it,” and she patted his hand.
At dinner everything centred on Max. All the arrangements were reviewed again, to the last detail, for the arrival of his girl and for the engagement party. Uncle Adolph permitted himself some smutty jokes about Max’s impatience, with advice about what to do during the engagement period – “put it in the icebox” – and even the old man laughed indulgently. Max carried it all off with a large air of tolerance.
There was talk of honeymoon plans. “Kid, we might even meet you in Italy.” And Judd was squirming more and more at this smugness, while at the same time a choking self-pity was in him. “Never for me, never anything so ordinary and simple as happiness.” Then he took an inward vow – if he weren’t caught, if he got away with the thing, it would be a sign, an omen for him to marry Ruth and be conventional all his life.
They were sitting down for a little family game after dinner, and he even felt a kind of dopey pleasure in the ritual, perhaps for the last time. Then Artie burst in, waving his long arms, “Jocko, you’ve got to see this! They’re tearing up the whole street where Steger lives! The sewer is stuffed up! They think he shoved the clothes down there.”
“Steger?” It took the family a moment to think back to poor Paulie Kessler. “But I understood they let that teacher go,” Max said.
“They arrested him again.” Artie could hardly keep the laughter out of his voice.
Judd hurried him from the house. “Like a couple of kids to a fire,” he heard his aunt say as they rushed out.
The street was blocked off, and lights had been brought up, flaring over the small area where the crew chopped away at the trench, now waist deep.
“We should have thought of this too,” Artie whispered. “Stuffing the clothes down there.” Getting out of the car, Artie remarked that this was a good place to pick up some gash – easy to start a conversation. “How about those two?” Then began the game of undressing the girls with their eyes.
Artie pushed up against a pair and in great innocence asked what was going on, requiring a full explanation of the Kessler case. “Hey, don’t you even read the newspapers?”
He gave them the bootlegger act. “We’ve been up to the border for a shipment.” Judd tugged, getting him away. “What’s wrong? They’d have put out,” Artie snapped at him.
“Their teeth were bad,” Judd said.
“Oh Christ, just for a lay, you examine a twat as if you’re going to marry her.” He started on another pair, cute ones, full blown, with knowing looks. By this time Judd felt almost uncontainably excited. The peculiar feeling of tension, of expectancy about seeing Ruth, with which he had awakened that morning, seemed to have been multiplying progressively all day until now it was a general uncontainable lust. The presence of Artie had excited him even more than always; from the moment Artie came into the house, the need had been unbearable. And now it was the pressure of the bodies, Artie’s among them, until all the bodies seemed Artie’s, and something even more, something special in the excitement of the crowd, a crowd lust, the smutty things they were talking about. And perhaps compressed with it all, with Max’s engagement and the marriage talk, there was the danger in being here within arm’s reach of dozens of policemen. A cop was right in front of the girls, and Artie, instead of drawing the girls aside, started a conversation with the officer.
Pressed against the girls and against Artie, and tormented by the tumultuous raging need, Judd could have torn the bastard apart. “Come on,” he urged Artie.
But there was no moving him. “They’re just getting there!” Artie exclaimed. And someone wisecracked that the diggers had found a dead skunk. No, Artie said, it was a five-month baby! With a shocked gasp, the girls walked off. Artie pressed after them, loudly telling tales about the dreadful things women did – women were much dirtier than men, but women couldn’t help it. After all, the way they were made, they had their own sewer pipe.
And in that moment Judd recalled a chart in a drugstore window, first seen in childhood, with square-angled pipes going through a cross-section of a human body, a woman’s. And was there a baby curled in one part, or had he seen that in a medical book? But the picture remained in his mind, ugly, horrible. A nausea came over him; he backed out of the crowd. That nursemaid, Trudy, and even his mother, and even Ruth, the way a baby was made in there – no, it was too disgusting, too filthy in there. Females! He leaned against the car, feeling weak and ill.
Just then Artie spotted me in the group of reporters talking to the captain. He waved and pushed his way to me. “Anything new on the case?”
“They’ve got us running around in circles,” I said. “They’re even listening to a medium!” I told him about that crazy phone call. “She predicted a confession on Friday.”
“That’s only the day after tomorrow,” Artie said. “Want to bet on it?”
I said I wouldn’t be sorry if it happened; I hadn’t had any sleep for a week.
“You’d better watch out. Judd is making time on you, he’s stealing your girl,” Artie said.
We all laughed, and as they pulled away Artie blew the horn.
Judd was annoyed by that last remark; it was a night when everything that Artie did or said rubbed him the wrong way. And yet this only heightened his need. He was sure Artie was teasing him.