Meyer Levin - Compulsion

The Bureau was tense. The case was coming to a head. We couldn’t see Nolan; Cassidy was just going in. Tom caught Cassidy’s sleeve as he passed. “All set for Louisville?”

“Hell, what do we want with Louisville now!” Cassidy let out excitedly as he hurried to his chief.

What could he mean? We looked at each other. “You chase over to Horn’s,” Tom said. “I’ll see what I can get here.”

I found the State’s Attorney’s suite strangely quiet. The large outer office was deserted. But at a desk near the door was an oldish fellow, a kind of ward heeler on a sinecure. “Everybody gone to Louisville?” I asked.

He smiled slyly. “They don’t have to go that far on this case.”

That was all he would tell me. Clearly, Horn and his staff were questioning some new suspect, in secrecy. Or did all the other reporters know? Where were they all?

“Dick Lyman been here?” I asked. “Mike Prager?” He waved his hand reassuringly. “I told them boys all to go home.”

I hurried back to the Bureau. I found our rivals were all on hand. In the same mysterious way that had worked with us, others too had felt impelled to look in on the Bureau. Someone had recalled it was to the tracing of the spectacles that Cassidy had been assigned.

Finally Nolan emerged with his arm around Cassidy, and he let Cassidy tell the story. It was the rims. The horn rims had a slightly unusual hinge. Cassidy’s optician across the street didn’t handle any such rims, but from a catalogue he had found the name of the firm that made them, in Brooklyn. Cassidy had written to the Seemore Company, and discovered that only one store in Chicago handled their product.

For the time being, Nolan said, he had to withhold the store’s name. We all shouted our guesses. When Almer Coe, the biggest optical shop on Michigan Avenue was mentioned, we could see from Cassidy’s face that we were right.

“That special frame, on that prescription of the glasses – it cuts the prospects down,” Cassidy said.

“How many?” we all wanted to know.

Chief Nolan shook his head, smiling. “Just a few, just a few.” Now would we please play square with him? He had played square with us. He could not divulge that little list, and it would be no use pestering Almer Coe. Mr. Horn was checking on each and every one of those people. Before the night was over, he promised, the owner of the glasses would be known.

On Monday, Ruth was sitting in the university library. She had drawn a large volume filled with pictures of birds, and she was reading in it when Judd sat down next to her.

It was somehow an impulse that took hold of students, when a new romance was coming upon them, either to linger around Sleepy Hollow or to go and sit in the main reading room, with its cathedral windows and the soft light lying across the tables.

Judd had caught her nicely. Had she really become interested in bird behaviour? he asked. Mostly, she replied, in what it might explain about people. And she didn’t want to seem such a nitwit if he talked to her again. In a low library voice he asked whether she was angry with him about Saturday. She looked at him, her eyes fully open. She shook her head. “I suppose you couldn’t help it.”

In those remaining few days, were they in love? Judd was living under heightening tension. A week, he and Artie had agreed, might be enough to let them feel in the clear. The week had not quite passed. The pressure was still within him to live as if each day were his last, as if the gripping hand might fall at any moment upon his shoulder; this was indeed what he had sought – the intensification of life. And he carried it, containing in himself all the pressure, with no outward change in his manner.

But inwardly Judd seethed with a sense of being on the verge of a whole new area of cognition. It was not only the murder that had so sharpened his awareness, he felt. It was what had happened to him with Ruth on Saturday. Would it not be unique for a person of really unusual intelligence to permit himself to enter into an ordinary experience of love, to see what would happen? He might transmute that love into something hitherto unknown, something unusual, for it had to be said that Ruth was quite intelligent, exceptionally so for a female. As to the idea of the rape, it had turned in another direction; the force of the idea had propelled him into what might prove to be a novel experiment. What if he began something of importance to himself with this girl and in the meantime were caught? Wouldn’t he then suffer more than if he allowed no feeling to develop about loving a girl? And Judd even found himself thinking, Would it be fair to the girl?

They had their date that evening, and spent their time analysing what they might feel for each other. Judd maintained that there was no such entity as love, that it could always be reduced to self-interest or physiological response. “In your presence,” he explained, “I experience a certain ocular stimulation that causes a heightened activity in my glands.”

Ruth sat smilingly before him. But why, she inquired, should this stimulation be higher in the presence of certain members of the opposite sex than in that of others? And even if you explained the entire physical mechanism, she said, weren’t you still left with the same question? If you felt a longing for one certain person, and just wanted to be with that person and not with anyone else, didn’t you have to admit it was more than physiological?

I find it somewhat painful even today to project myself into this love scene between Ruth and Judd, for as I summon her up, I respond to the glow of her as though I were sitting opposite, at the small, round table with the menu card against the flower glass. I hear the music, “The Japanese Sandman”, and see all the couples around us, and feel Ruth’s own wonder at what was happening in herself, in regard to this boy, and in regard to me. Was she going to discover that what she felt for me was only “girlish attraction” and that her fate was with this tangled and intense boy, sometimes a genius, sometimes so childish about the most obvious things?

Judd must have tried to analyse what, in particular, drew him. He had a few times before experienced sudden compelling drives to “make” some certain girl – you gave the girl a rush, but always with the feeling of hurrying back to tell Artie. Now, since that stupid spilling of Saturday, he hadn’t wanted to tell Artie anything about himself and Ruth. He felt an endless need of exploration with this girl.

Was there for Judd a possible going-over? Was the time nearing for his going-over? Another day, another day, and would the emotion grow deep enough in him to hold?

So I torment myself with their little scene, with the certainty that while sophisticated words poured out, their fingers touched, and they reacted like any two kids made goofy at the contact. I see them later in the car, sitting mooning by the lake, perhaps only their hands clasped on the seat between them.

And he is still talking, talking as he never before talked to a girl, or to anyone. The slight clacky accents of self-satisfaction, so often irritating when Judd speaks, fade down and vanish. He tells her, his tone just barely tinged with sorrow, that he has never had a true friendship with a woman and has never thought it possible, because every connection between men and women becomes falsified through sexual desire. (There wings through his mind the image of his father, his mother, but how could his father ever have understood the delicacy, the fastidious quality, the purity of Mother Dear? The times when they must have copulated, since children were born, Judd banishes as gross, gross moments that didn’t really count in her life.) And so he explains to Ruth that pure love, disinterested love, can be felt only between men, just as Socrates said, for only then is nature unable to intrude her ulterior motive and to make people imagine they are in love. Yet as he speaks, Judd reserves within himself the knowledge that he includes the component of physical love between men. This knowledge gives him a feeling of power over her, the power of deception, but tinged with a tender shade of protectiveness – she need not know this thing in him, and how he has always felt toward Artie.