Meyer Levin - Compulsion

We tried the dining room, but it was in use. Mrs. Wilk, sighing, offered us the maid’s room behind the kitchen.

So we sat on the cot in the tiny room. There was an unshaded overhead bulb, and I felt Dr. McNarry studying me.

Wasn’t I the reporter, he inquired, who was so much involved in the case? Unfortunately he hadn’t been present during my testimony.

“I’m perhaps even more involved,” I said, and told about my friend, Ruth Goldenberg.

“Your girl?”

“Well, not exactly. Not any more, I’m afraid.”

“Judd’s?” He identified her then as the girl Judd had not wanted to name during all the examinations. Yes, Judd had even talked about leaving home and marrying this girl. But – McNarry touched his fingers together – it had all seemed rather a fantasy.

Willie stated the problem that was troubling me. “Sid has been wondering if this sudden attachment to a girl could be a sign that Judd was overcoming his pathology? I think it’s an interesting question.”

Dr. McNarry studied his fingertips. “Of course it happens. Homosexuals can behave simultaneously as heterosexuals – that seems to have been true in both these boys – but they can also go over, as we sometimes see, to normal relationships. In fact, in late adolescence that’s a common pattern, isn’t it?” He gazed at me. “Judd’s nineteen.”

“Doctor,” Willie broke in, “couldn’t the murder have acted as a kind of catharsis, freeing Judd from his homosexual bond?”

An appreciative smile came over the alienist’s face. “But then the bond has apparently reasserted itself,” Dr. McNarry said.

“Because now, in jail, he has no alternative,” Willie argued. “But in the week after the crime, in fact virtually the day after, for the first time in his life he had what seems to be a true emotional reaction to a girl.”

Dr. McNarry asked, “The young lady was affected by him?”

“Yes,” I said, hurt by Willie’s having to hear it. “I believe she intends to testify.”

He looked at his hands again.

One more question pressed itself forward in me. That time with Ruth on the beach – wasn’t it somehow a proof that Judd, by himself, could master his impulses? The doctor stared at me. I finally had to ask: Would it help if something like that were brought out in court?

Instantly, under his gaze, I had an intense feeling of shame at my own thought of Ruth on the stand questioned about physical intimacy.

“This is the girl Judd brought to his brother’s engagement party,” Willie remarked. Dr. McNarry nodded, as though he had known.

Then he sighed, not as a doctor but as one of us. “The poor wretch.” He shook his head. “All in the wrong time. The poor wretch.”

It was just as Myra was taking the stand that I saw Ruth enter the courtroom. Willie pulled Ruth into the room and led her to the front bench, filled with witnesses. The fellows moved together to make room for her. Ruth saw me watching her then and gave me her serious smile.

I felt her somehow changed, and an anguish came over me; I wiped sweat from my face, so I could furtively dry my eyes. Would Ruth say Judd had asked her to marry him? Would that somehow for ever close me away, as though my girl had really given herself to another man?

The questioning of Myra had begun.

She was dressed in white, like a nurse, in a straight white linen frock, with only a few huge buttons to show it wasn’t a uniform. Ferdinand Feldscher was questioning her in a soft fatherly manner.

Yes, she had known Artie since childhood.

And would she characterize him as a stable character?

Highly unstable, she said. He was nervous, smoked nervously, throwing away his cigarettes after a few puffs. He was given to lying for no reason at all, making up stories the way kids did, like his bootlegger stories, and then, often, he behaved in an infantile way, so much so that it was embarrassing, and everyone had remarked on it.

“Can you think of an example?”

“Quite recently, I had a date and Artie dropped in just before my date arrived. When the bell rang, he put on my sash, and ran to the door…”

There was giggling at the story. Horn was grinning. Of course, Myra said, such antics could be due to high spirits, but with Artie they often became disturbing.

“Would you say that he was fully developed, mature?”

“Oh, no, decidedly not. He was very childish.”

“Childish? In his emotions?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

The lawyer made the point over and over, then backed slowly away, and Horn approached Myra; he was still grinning, but his voice was bland.

She was a cousin of Artie’s?

A distant cousin.

She had been his playmate as a child?

One of them.

“Would you call yourself his sweetheart?”

She flushed and couldn’t answer.

“You kissed, I presume, at times?” he demanded, hard. Despite objections, the judge directed her to answer.

“Yes,” she said, her resentment helping her to regain her composure.

“And would you call these kisses from a grown sweetheart childish emotional behaviour?” Over the full laughter, Horn rubbed it in. “Were they childish or mature kisses?”

The judge rebuked him.

“As his childhood playmate and young lady friend, you would help Artie out if you could?”

“Certainly,” she said, “but not-”

“Being a lady, you wouldn’t be lying now, to help Artie out?”

“I don’t lie!”

There was a knowing murmur from the courtroom. “Oh, wouldn’t she!”

“Haven’t you been lying, right here on the stand?” Horn demanded. He glanced at some papers in his hand. “You made a statement, did you not, to a representative of the State’s Attorney’s office, the day after Artie Straus and Judd Steiner confessed to this crime?”

“I was asked some questions. I was very upset at the time.”

“Let me read to you from the statement. Question: ‘Would you say that Artie is intelligent?’ Answer: ‘Exceptionally.’ Question: ‘Mature in his ideas?’ Answer: ‘Oh, very mature in his ideas.’ Now, do you remember giving that answer?”

“I might have said it, I don’t know. I didn’t know what they meant by mature – I said a lot of other things they didn’t put down-”

“Miss Seligman, in this signed and sworn statement, you declare this man to be mature. Here on the stand you testify-” He had the court stenographer read back her testimony. “Question: ‘Would you say he was fully developed, mature?’ Answer: ‘Oh, no, decidedly not. He was very childish -’”

Horn cut in, his arm outflung, finger pointing at her. “When were you lying, ten minutes ago in this courtroom, or now?”

Myra’s face squeezed, contorted. “But – but-” She struggled to speak.

“Excused,” Horn snapped. Ferdinand Feldscher rushed to help her as she stumbled from the stand. Wilk glared at Horn with utter loathing, red spots of fury on his cheeks.

With a frantic movement, Willie Weiss was across the enclosure, on the other side of Myra. We all rushed from our press seats as Myra was carried into the judge’s chambers. Presently, Feldscher came out to us. Dr. Allwin had given Myra a sedative, he announced, and she was being taken home.

When I resumed my place in the press box, I saw that Ruth was no longer in the courtroom. “No more girl witnesses,” Tom told me, as he left for the office to write the story. “Wilk cancelled them all.”

I caught Judd’s eye. I told myself that he, too, felt relieved.

And could it have helped him? Even if Ruth had been able to make everything known – everything, even the inner, uncompleted feelings…

Then, to our surprise, the defence used Milt Lewis, despite his having produced the fatal typing notes. Milt told about the day in law class when Judd had insisted that a superman was above the law.