I said I would admit it as an obscure possibility; I would still go along to see where it would all lead.
“It led to the cemetery,” Willie said. And, reflectively: “You know, that’s a possible connection I hadn’t thought of before. Judd was driving. And in his confession he says they went up a side road to a cemetery and waited there until it got dark – a couple of hours. Now, why the cemetery? Certainly because death was in his mind, by then, and Judd must have been as though calling for his mother, the way a kid does when everything has gone wrong and he is scared. This wasn’t the particular cemetery where his mother is buried, but he had been visiting his mother’s grave, he said, almost every week, and so the association was there, and he was drawn to a cemetery as to his mother; and that was where they waited, with the dead kid, until it got dark. Then they drove to the real burial place he had picked out in advance, and before they put the body into the cistern there was one more ritual, and this was Judd’s too. Remember, he was so queasy he couldn’t strike anyone, he couldn’t touch a dead body, yet this was a thing Judd did and not Artie: he took the can of hydrochloric acid that was intended to obliterate recognizable parts of the body – they imagined it would dissolve the flesh-” Willie glanced at me and his eyes emphasized again the birth in reverse. “Judd took this acid, and he said he poured it on the face, and he poured it on the penis.” He became silent.
“They said it was with the idea that a boy might be identified-”
“Look, they knew better than that,” Willie said.
“Well, it was circumcised – he could be identified as a Jew. In fact, that’s how I came to identify him.”
“And wasn’t that part of it, for Judd?” Willie said, rather softly. “Wasn’t that one of his conflicts? Didn’t he have to obliterate the problem of being a Jew? To dissolve it, so that the sign would be gone, the mark in the flesh, it was even in his fantasy, the brand on the inner side of the leg, the brand that could sometime be removed.”
Something in me gasped at this leap of his imagination. Yet, resist the idea as I might, wasn’t it a possible connection?
“And there was more,” Willie said. “Oh, the id is extremely cunning, that’s one thing we’ve learned, it is poetic and cunning. You don’t know how clever it can be, how the associations leap – I suppose because it’s all open, there’s nothing to block them; and how literal it can be, too.”
Willie brought out his last point, quite casually, the way an actor sometimes throws away his most important line, using reverse emphasis. “If there were no penis at all, wouldn’t it be a girl that he had killed?”
I could, indeed, see how his whole argument came together. If Judd had always wanted to cease being feminine, if this had been his great conflict, if he had wanted to kill a girl symbolically in an act that was self-destruction as all murder is self-destruction, then in this final gesture with the annihilating acid – had he not been doing it? Killing the girl in himself? He had first sought to obliterate identity in the face, so that the child could be himself, and he had then sought to obliterate the male sex. The child, thus, could be representationally himself as a girl, and this child had been placed naked in a womb, returned to pre-birth. And the womb was a sewer – the way he had always thought of females.
If he wished he had never been born – wished he had never been born as a girl kind of boy – then the gesture was complete; he had exorcised the curse on himself. He had become unborn, in the womb of the mother who was in the earth.
And then there came to me the other possibility. If he had destroyed the male element and returned the body to the womb, was it not equally understandable as a way to rectify a mistake, to say that it was as a girl that he really should have been born? There was, indeed, as Willie had said, an incredible cunning, an amazing poetic compression in this way of thinking. For here was the duality of nature symbolized – here was Judd’s conflicting wish to be a boy, to be a girl – expressed in the symbol that could be fitted in either direction!
And would Judd not there, together, have had a seeming solution of both his conflicts, since a girl could not have the mark in the flesh of the Jew? It was both a death gesture, then, and a life gesture that he had made, impelled by a wish for being unborn, and a wish for rebirth.
We walked on silently.
Finally I asked of Willie, “You once thought the killing could have proven a catharsis for him. If they hadn’t been caught.”
Willie said, “In physical infections, the body creates poisons with which to kill the pathology and cure itself. Perhaps so does the psyche.”
Another thought came to me, changing the conception I had had until then of the crime. “Then Judd was not merely Artie’s accomplice. He wasn’t there only because he was in love with Artie. He had to do the murder because of some compulsion in himself. Just the way Artie did.”
“That’s what I think,” Willie said. “Once Artie started them on it.”
Automatically we had turned, to circle back. Willie remarked again about the choice of spot. Wasn’t it there that Judd took his class of children, perhaps literally to watch for a stork, a rare visitant in the Chicago area? And the children must have echoed for Judd his own childhood absorption in the source of the birth mystery. Thus it became inevitable that he should return the child’s body there, almost as though he had delivered his soul to the original source. And what did he lose, there? His glasses, his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more, in the womb or in the tomb.
For me, the depths of Willie’s explanation brought on an oppressive feeling. If something like this were valid, then we were hopelessly driven, in the grasp of such dreadful forces. This was only an elaboration of Wilk’s mechanistic philosophy, with the physiological determinants augmented by the mechanics of psychology and psychoanalysis.
If someone had seen what was happening in Judd, could he not have helped him? Couldn’t a less dangerous form of catharsis have taken place? Hadn’t he been on the verge of emergence into normal relationships with women?
Willie’s mind seemed to have walked with mine. “What became of Ruth?” he asked.
Even then, her name affected me. “I don’t know.”
“Myra was here,” he said.
“In Vienna?”
“She was in analysis.” Suddenly there had come over his face a grin so painful that I was caught in the pain. I wondered if Willie could have been in love with Myra. And only then did I fully see her in her own wretched frenetic prison, another innocent victim of the tragic crime.
Willie continued, with an air of complete control. “I don’t suppose you know you entered into her fantasies. Perhaps at a given moment you could have helped her. She’s gone back to the States.” He added, almost in a mutter, “I think she made a fairly good adjustment.”
When we parted he met my eyes with a kind of furtive look, his mouth grinned, and he turned and strode away.
A few years later, I met Myra in New York. She was a psychiatric social worker, still over-tense. I took her to the theatre, then we went back to her interior-decorated little apartment, filled with modern art; we drank a good deal; she told me all about herself, her affairs – there had even been a brief marriage. So generous, so quick, so filled with the latest things, the newest books, the newest psychoanalytic theories, playing the newest jazz records – boogie-woogie at the time. And always staggering with a host of illnesses and calling them psychosomatic.