The terrible pressure of catching up with the American was over. Going home, I took the report along. I had really only skimmed it. After supper, I passed by Wilk’s apartment, and ran into Willie Weiss. He started at once on the report. What did I think? The material on Judd – his tremendous conflicts: Was he a boy or a girl? Was he a Jew or a Christian? Willie had never himself realized how completely Judd was torn.
From what he said, I had completely missed the important meanings of the material. We went to an ice-cream parlour on 61st Street, and Willie, with that feverish argumentative way he had, started to show me what I had missed.
Why had I paid so little attention to the family history? “Look at this-” There had been three unsuccessful pregnancies before Judd was born, and his mother had been sick throughout her pregnancy with him. Judd had always blamed himself for her illness, even for her death.
“He must have blamed his father, too,” Willie added. “Don’t forget he’s precocious. Kids get a strange idea, when they first begin to catch on – they imagine that fathers do something terrible to mothers. And this child feels his birth killed his mother, but his father killed her first. It’s the classic complex, the Oedipus-”
The term was not so popular then, but passionately Willie explained to me how well the Oedipal situation fitted the case, the boy in love with his mother, hating his father.
“His Baby Book records his first step at three months, his first word at four months.”
From the very earliest impressions, Judd was made to feel he was someone utterly extraordinary. And with this he had to keep up.
A small and sickly child, “until he was nine he had gastrointestinal disorders, complicated by fever, headaches, vomiting.” Anxiety, said Willie. He had been rather effeminate up to that age – that was the period of the girls’ school. “How could this child know what he really was?” Willie demanded. “He’s small, delicate like a girl; he hates girls because he knows he should be more of a boy, yet he is always thrust among girls. His father tries to send him to public school, but his mother still insists her darling is too frail, too special, too different. The father overrides the mother. Judd tries the public school.” Of this, the report said, “He realized his superiority over the other boys in wealthy parents, in the fact that his nurse accompanied him to and from school, and that he couldn’t attend the toilet in the school.”
“Poor bastard, holding himself in!” was Willie’s comment on this point. “Imagine this kid, feeling he is so special he can’t even use the can! No wonder he got a god complex!”
We turned back to the report. It went on to tell of his cataloguing all the churches, of his Madonna fixation on his mother.
This Willie seized upon. It fitted perfectly. “You see, by the Madonna fixation, he gets rid of his real father, whom he resents bitterly. And that leaves him free to consider himself as a magical, superior being, even magically born, the son of God. And look at this-” The report spoke of Judd’s innumerable sketches, all over his classroom notebooks. Of the thousands of things he drew the first item was “Crucifixions”. “The most interesting part of the Crucifixion for him appears to be somebody nailed to something.”
His mother was a Madonna, he was a Christ. And here, Willie supplied another conception that was new to me: “Remember, the church is a mother-idea, everything about the church is seductive, feminine; and the synagogue is a father-religion, harder and more austere, stemming from the patriarchs.”
And so Willie explained Judd’s conflict over being a Jew. At the time it seemed far-fetched to me, seemed perhaps a reflection of Willie’s own excessive concern with his “Jewish appearance”.
“But look,” Willie said, “Christ is born a Jew but in reality He becomes the symbol of Christianity. Isn’t this an inevitable identification for someone who is struggling with his Jewishness? Judd runs around to all the churches but hasn’t quite got the nerve to renounce his father-religion, to become a meshumed, a convert, so he nominally rejects all religion and says he’s an atheist. Wait. Look at his fixation on Artie-”
“But what’s that got to do with religion?”
Willie’s eyes gleamed. “Look at Artie, a tall blond fellow who is everything Judd wanted to be in appearance, who doesn’t look Jewish at all, a real collegiate shagetz type, and look what Judd says: ‘I identified myself with him completely.’” Now Willie lowered his voice, producing his culminating point. “I’m sure Judd never thought of this overtly. But remember, Artie’s mother is a Catholic. If Judd were Artie, he could more literally sense himself as the son of the Madonna.”
I thought it was too pat.
Actually, Willie argued, the entire subject of Jewish self-hatred was a rather new concept. He had read the basic book, available only in German. It showed how every Jew had a wish not to be burdened with the problem of being a Jew. Then came the guilt feeling for harbouring such a wish. “Haven’t you ever felt it?” he challenged me.
I could not deny that his words called up something of the sort in me. “All right. Then why should such a feeling make Judd kill Paulie Kessler?”
“Why? Self-destruction! They picked a boy, a Jewish boy, just at the age when Jews become Jews – thirteen, the bar-mitzua age.”
That was going too far. “They picked him at random, on the street-”
“Yes. That’s what they claim,” he said fanatically. “That there is no meaning, that everything is at random. Do you think that maybe, somewhere far back in their minds, it didn’t ring home that Paulie Kessler was the son of a pawnbroker, the symbol of everything that is shameful in being a Jew?” He leaned back, and grinned at me.
I wanted at first to laugh. Yet his ideas echoed and echoed. Wasn’t I, myself, ashamed? Didn’t I sometimes feel a secret rage at my father’s being a cheap Jewish cigar-maker?
Willie had fallen silent, brooding over his only partial explanation of Judd, an explanation which he was to complete for me, in an extraordinary way, years later. I turned the pages. “What about Artie?”
“It’s either obvious or a complete mystery,” he said. “Maybe he’s just a born maniac.”
“You think it could be heredity, then, after all?”
Willie didn’t believe it was entirely the fault of heredity. If these weaknesses had been detected early, perhaps the new psychiatry could have helped. But why hadn’t the faults been detected? “Ah, we don’t know a damn thing.” He had become morose.
“One thing you did guess,” I said, to restore the spark in him. “About the weapon.” I told him it was his insistence about the chisel that had led us to the tales of other taped chisels, other crimes.
Willie looked at me foggily for a moment. “For crissake, that wasn’t what I meant at all.” Though he wouldn’t be surprised if other such murders had been done. “Don’t you see what it is? The chisel? The tool itself? What it represents?”
Nowadays we would say I must have been blocked in some way, not to have understood instantly. As he made an obscene gesture with his hand, it dawned on me. It seemed at once weird, far-fetched, and obviously true. I felt stupid, too stupid to ask the next question.
He did it for me, rhetorically. But why should Artie have had to kill people with that thing? And why only men? For Artie had been against Judd’s idea to make it a girl, the report told us.