“I’m sorry, doctor,” he says, “but the mere idea of blood always affects me this way. I know it is a stupid reaction, but I can’t help it.”
“Well this will only take a second.” Judd has an involuntary reaction of shrinking and pulling away, as the sample is taken from his ear lobe. When it is over, beads of sweat are on his forehead.
“You really have a very strong reaction, don’t you?”
“I’ve always had it.” And Judd tells of an incident when he was quite young and saw a doctor examining his mother; the doctor said he would take her blood pressure. “I pictured it as blood gushing out, I suppose, and I became so sick the doctor had to take care of me instead of my mother.”
“How did you think of your mother?”
In his matter-of-fact, clacky voice, Judd says, “I used to picture her as the Madonna. I still do.”
He feels quite easy, talking to this elderly, gentlemanly doctor, and he tells of the stained-glass window in a church, to which he was taken by the young Irish nursemaid who preceded Trudy.
“But your family being Jewish – they had no objection to the girl’s taking you to church?” the doctor asks with civilized curiosity.
On the religious score they were not old-fashioned, Judd says. In fact, his father declared he did not mind Judd’s learning all about churches, since he was going to live in a Christian world. “I used to have the chauffeur drive me to different churches on every Sunday. I soon knew the differences between Catholic and Protestant, Methodist and Episcopal and Congregational services.”
“That was quite an unusual preoccupation for a child.”
“I kept it up as I grew,” Judd says. “I classified all the religions and their different ideas of God.”
“And this had an effect on you?”
“How could a kid help seeing it was all a lot of bushwa? God was three and He was one and He was a body and He was incorporeal and He was a Jewish old Moses with a beard.”
“I see. And in this time, when you were visiting the churches, did you visit synagogues too?”
“They had a certain type of training – my father wanted me to receive the usual training for boys. You study elementary Hebrew and you are supposed to participate in a ceremony at thirteen, to take part in the services. He used to send me to Rabbi Hirsch’s classes, but I got through with it all a few years ahead, and by the time I was thirteen I didn’t care to take part in the ritual – it’s a kind of confirmation – because I couldn’t believe in any of that any more.”
“And yet you say you still cling to this image of your mother as the Madonna.”
“That’s an exception. Oh, even as a child I realized she didn’t belong to us. And of course I later realized it was all a superstition, but I made this exception to keep this idea about my mother. And since Mother died, I prefer to see her that way.”
“You mean as the beautiful lady in the church window?” The pink-faced doctor seems to be smiling with him at childish notions. “A heavenly being?”
“Yes.” Then he continues, in that even, unemotional voice, “If not for me, she might not have died. I was responsible for her death.”
“How is that?”
“It was due to my birth,” Judd says. “She was never well after I was born. She became an invalid. She suffered from nephritis.”
“I’ve noticed a history of nephritis in the women of her family.”
“I contributed to her death,” Judd insists. “She was a perfect person.” He frequently visits her grave, he says, and adds, “I often wish I had never been born.”
“You have often wished it?”
“I used to wish it for years. When I was a kid.”
Another time, Dr. Allwin gets him to speak of those childhood years when he so often wished he had never been born. Judd explains that it was when the family lived on Michigan Avenue and he had to go to that school where there were only girls.
“You might have been proud of being the only boy among so many girls.”
He hated girls, hated females. They were all so stupid, gossipy.
Has he never had a steady girl, a real girl?
A few times he has been attracted, but not in love. And now, just lately, he had met a girl, a girl who made him feel different – he had even thought of running away with her, marrying her. His voice drops.
How did she make him feel different? Sexually?
No, he had not had sexual intercourse with her, though she stimulated him. But she was a nice girl and she made him feel he could understand things like marrying and having a family… Judd falls silent.
“Do you want to tell me more about this girl?”
“I don’t see any point to it.”
He tells, all at once, of an incident with Max, when he was a little kid: When they were playfully wrestling on the lawn, he hit his forehead on a stone and bled and cried, and Max called him a sissy. That was when he determined in his heart never to show Max, never to show anyone, if he felt hurt – in fact, never to let any feelings hurt him. “I discovered that emotions could hurt too much, and so I decided not to let myself be hurt that way.”
Another day, he finds himself talking of the few months he spent at the public school. The kids kept teasing him because he was such a shrimp, and a Jewboy.
“How did you feel about it?”
“That is hard to analyse at this point. Angry, I should think.”
“And perhaps ashamed?”
“No – no, I would not be ashamed of being a Jew. My people were always proud of it,” he adds automatically.
Then Judd tells of the strange day when Trudy wasn’t there and he started home alone, and two rough kids kept after him: “Hey, sheenie! Where’s your nursemaid?” Then they had hold of him, pulling him into an alley. Hey, that fat nursemaid, did he ever look under her skirt? “Yah, yah, you’re her slave, she makes you do it to her.” And then, “Hey, he got a pecker? Hey! the sheenies they cut off a piece of the petzel, maybe they cut off too much! Hey, maybe he’s a girl!” And tearing at his knickerbockers, holding him while he yelled, struck blindly. He feels their blows on his body, his face… kicks, blood… and he is running.
“This nursemaid, Trudy, she was with you for some years?”
“Until I was fourteen.”
What was she like?
She didn’t have a very highly developed intelligence, Judd explains. In fact, he would say she was a moron – she had gone only to a few grades in school in the old country. He spoke German with her. But she was cunning, and she was devoted to him. Once he wanted some stamps from a cousin’s collection and she just laughed as he went and swiped them. But after that she blackmailed him, by threatening to tell on him, making him do things she wanted.
What things?
Oh, just obey her. And not tell… about other things. Even, he sort of remembers, sex things – maybe when she gave him his bath, how she loved her little boy, kisses all over him. Trudy’s mouth, laughing and threatening, “If you’re not a good little boy…” and laughing, as if to devour, and then he would be her little girl.
How is Judd’s sleep? Dr. Allwin asks him. Does he fall asleep easily, or does he have some favourite fantasies, perhaps, before going to sleep? Judd becomes interested – this is a whole world of inquiry that he would not have thought of – and he talks quite freely, objectively. Yes, almost as far back as he can remember – “I used to make up these stories, before falling asleep. I was a king, sometimes, or else a slave-”
“Which were you more often, the king or the slave?”
“As it went on, I was almost always the slave.”
“It went on for a long time? Till the present?”
“Well, fairly recently.” Sometimes, he tells, it would last for an hour. He would lie on his stomach or on his side, usually hugging the pillow. After a while it would become very pleasant, with a pleasant warm bed odour, and he would imagine this was like the body odour of a naked slave who had been exerting himself, perhaps in battle, wielding a big sword and saving the life of the king. “Then the king would be grateful and offer to give the slave his liberty, but I would refuse, because I was devoted to the king.