Читать книгу Compulsion - Meyer Levin - Страница 20

LEAVING TOM DALY, I decided to stop at the frat for supper before I went over to see Ruth; I suppose I wanted to display myself and collect glory for my scoop. A bridge game was in progress in the lounge, and Artie was pulling his usual act of jumping from one side to another, handing out advice.

I tossed the paper onto the bridge table. “Hear about the big story? Kid got murdered.” And to Artie: “Say, he lived right near your house.”

“They’ve got my whole street blocked off!” Artie cried. “You never saw so many cops! I was just telling everybody—”

“Blocked off? I was just there,” I said, irked by his habit of exaggeration. “Didn’t run into any street blocks.”

The fellows were exclaiming over the news. “You on this story, Sid?” Milt Lewis asked with awe.

“. . . identified by a Globe reporter,” Raphael Goetz read out loud.

I admitted I was the reporter who had identified the boy. They whistled.

“Say! Some scoop!” Artie stared at me, mouth agape. Then he flung his arm around me, patting my back. “Sonnyboy Silver, the hot-shot reporter! Fellows! We have a star reporter in our midst! The Alpha Beta is really getting there!” He seized the paper, glanced at it, waved it. “Hey! If not for Sid’s identifying him, it says they were just going to pay the ransom! Boy!”

He gazed at me so intently, his expression so strange that I clearly remembered the moment. “It was beginner’s luck,” I said. “I just happened to get sent out—”

Artie was avid with questions. How had the poor kid looked? Any marks on him? Any clues? Sometimes the cops made the papers hold back certain information, to trap the criminals. What was the inside story?

His excitement over the case seemed perfectly natural. Artie was a notorious detective-story addict. It was a common wonder around the house that he, who was supposed to be so brilliant, read practically nothing but pulp magazines and all that trash.

Actually, though he now developed a sudden friendship for me, Artie and I had never been more than nodding fraternity brothers. He had been on campus only during the last year, having spent the two previous years at the University of Michigan. And in Chicago, he lived at home, hanging around the frat only to play bridge. He was a shark. I didn’t play much, and anyway his crowd played for money, and Artie was always pushing up the stakes.

Moreover, I had an obscure hostility toward Artie. I suppose it was because everyone tended to bracket us. We were the prodigies, both graduating at eighteen. Indeed, Artie was ahead of me—he already had his bachelor’s—and was loafing along taking a few extra courses.

I resented being paired with him because Artie was, to me, a waster, a playboy. Certainly he was bright, but he used his brightness to get away with everything. He took snap courses, borrowed everybody’s term papers. He bragged about his all-A’s at Michigan, but I had heard differently—mostly B’s and C’s. I felt he was just a rich kid who had the carpet laid out for him; he was spoiling what could have been a good mind. And I suppose I was jealous that he had rubbed off the glamour of my being the youngest graduate.

Now Artie pulled me aside, conspiratorially. “Say, Sid, I’ll give you a scoop! I can tell you all about that Kessler kid!” And he rattled on, about Paulie Kessler using his private tennis court, about his being in the same class with his own little brother, at the same school he, Artie, had gone to. That’s where I ought to look for clues—the Twain School!

I told him I had just come from there. I mentioned the arrest of the teachers, a piece of news that was not yet in the papers. Artie became even more excited. So they had pinched that ass-pincher, Steger! He would lay ten to one they had the right guy! Did I want some inside dope about Steger? He could tell me a few things, all right! His own kid brother, Billy, had been approached by that pervert. Sure. A kid doesn’t know what it’s all about, but Billy had come home one day and said there was something funny about Mr. Steger, he was always putting his arm around you. Billy had even asked if it was all right to go in Mr. Steger’s car. God! What a narrow escape that must have been!

There was no doubt, Artie declared—the cops were on the right trail. Steger must have been monkeying around with Paulie, and killed the boy to keep his mouth shut.

“What about the ransom?” Some of the fellows had gathered around us.

“All right, what about the ransom?” Artie said. “Why not? That’s exactly what he’d do. Those poor suckers, those teachers, you know how much they get, maybe twenty-five bucks a week; they see all the kids coming to school with limousines—Christ, what a temptation!” In fact, suddenly Artie was all for the kidnaper—he should have collected from Kessler, the millionaire pawnbroker!

“After killing the kid?”

“I’ll admit that was terrible. But you can see, those teachers need money; it’s an obvious temptation.”

One of the fellows pointed out a flaw: how could the teacher have collected the ransom money if he wasn’t absent from school?

“He must have an accomplice!” Artie said. “Probably another pervert!” That school was full of them. He had gone there himself, and he knew.

“Yah, by experience!” Milt Lewis razzed.

“Nothing like Stratmore Academy,” Artie retorted, referring to Milt’s fashionable military prep school. “There, it’s an order!” Turning back to me, he wanted to know what the cops would do to Steger. Had I ever seen the third degree? Would they get it out of him?

“They’re not supposed to use it,” said Harry Bass, another of our law students. “If they use the third degree, he can repudiate the confession.”

“Crap,” said Artie. “They’ve got a way that leaves no marks.”

“Yah, in cheap detective stories!” Harry laughed.

Artie appealed to me as an expert, about the rubber truncheons that left no marks. Besides, he said, the cops got them in the balls.

Sure, the police had ways, I said knowingly. Could I go talk to his little brother about Steger?

His mother had the kid in hiding, Artie told me. All the mothers were scared out of their pants. But he would fix up an interview for me.

Too keyed up to sit at the dinner table, I decided to go over to Ruth’s. Artie followed me to the door, telling me to be sure to meet him tomorrow. “I’ll give you the benefit of my expert knowledge,” he half jested. And in the same breath he snagged Milt Lewis, who was passing. “Hey, Milt, you want a sure lay? I’ve got a terrific number.”

Ruth was my girl at that time. Or rather, I should say Ruth was my sweetheart, for there is no period that encompasses my feeling; whenever I think of her, and now as I write of her, the aura of that young love comes back, and I realize that what we then felt was indeed love. We were in love and afraid to know it, and nobody told us it was the true thing. Everybody, all the kids of our time, had endless doubts; we used to analyze ourselves and decide it was only sex attraction, and we didn’t quite have the nerve to test that out either.

She was eighteen, a few months younger than I, and a sophomore. We had met on campus, and dated, and petted; in the long moony evenings we spent together we would stroke and excite each other and decide that this alone couldn’t be love. She was bright, all A’s, and we would discuss the new poetry of Amy Lowell, and we discovered Walt Whitman together, and read his poems of the body aloud to each other sometimes as we lay close side by side on the grass in Jackson Park. We read them wholesomely, without any suspicion in those days that he could be singing of another kind of love.

And innocently reading Whitman, we used to discuss whether Ruth should give herself to me—that was how we put it—or whether we should wait. And waiting was vague; I had to go out in the world and become a great writer, or something.

Ruth’s folks were better off than my family, but still something of the same kind. Her mother, like mine, was always plying you with food, putting a plate in front of you even if you said you had just eaten. I felt comfortable in her house; I called it my second home.

Pushing the bell, I took the stairs two at a time; Ruth appeared in the doorway. “You’re a nice one!” she said reproachfully. And only then I remembered we had had a date for the afternoon.

“My God, look at you. Did you even shave today?” her mother demanded, from behind Ruth. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten all day either.”

“I haven’t stopped going since morning!” I said, bursting to tell my big news, but Mrs. Goldenberg disappeared into the kitchen, immediately fetching a bowl of noodle soup, calling, “Well, you’re lucky Ruth isn’t gone.”

“Yes,” said Ruth archly. “You might have found me missing, out riding.”

“Who with?”

“Oh, a swell machine, a Franklin, stopped at the door,” said her mother.

“He honked enough for the whole street to hear,” said Ruth.

“Millionaire’s manners.” Mrs. Goldenberg went back for meat and potatoes.

“In fact, it was a frat brother of yours,” Ruth teased. “The sheik of the campus, no less, suddenly remembered I was alive.”

“Artie? I just saw him at the house,” I said. “I didn’t know you go out with him.”

Oh, Ruth told me, not really. Sometimes, on campus, they kidded around. So it was odd, the way he had appeared all of a sudden today, saying he was lonesome. He had seemed quite upset.

“It must have been the murder, so close to his house,” I said, and pulled the paper from my pocket, spreading it on the table. I had been waiting eagerly to tell my big news.

“Oh, I know,” Ruth said. “I read the extra. Isn’t it terrible!”

It really was, I agreed—after all, I had really seen it. “You mean this was you? The reporter that identified the body! Oh, Sid!” Ruth’s voice hovered between pride and shock.

“Horrible, a horrible crime!” her mother said, and urged me to eat. Chicago was becoming so terrible, you couldn’t even let a child go out in the street. And it was I who had reported all this, on the front page? Sid was getting ahead!

“You saw the body? Poor kid.” Ruth was gazing at me, as though she could virtually see the child, through me.

I told how the teachers had been arrested, and how Artie’s little brother was in the same class.

“I know. Artie told me. That’s why he was so upset. He tries to act blasé, but I think Artie is really softhearted,” Ruth said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “You’d better watch your step with him. That’s how he gets all the girls, with that winsome boyish line.”

“Do you think he’ll seduce me?”

“No, but he’ll say he did.”

Her mother disappeared. Mrs. Goldenberg always said she was broad-minded and if her girl was going to do anything like petting, it was better for her to do it in her own home than out in a dark car on a dark street. So we sat on the overstuffed sofa in the sun parlor, and I kissed Ruth and put my hand over her breast. That was our limit. We fell into a kind of trance, a melancholy dreamy state of yearning love, mingled with a sense of futility, even of the horror of the world.

“It’s so horrible about that little boy,” she said.

I remarked that it seemed pretty certain the crime had been done by a pervert.

We were silent for a moment, and then she said in a classroom-questioning voice, “What exactly is a pervert, Sid? I guess I’m supposed to know, but I don’t.”

I explained, trying not to reveal that my own knowledge was limited. I said it was like Oscar Wilde.

“Oh. That was what the scandal was about him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But then,” Ruth said, “aren’t they suffering from a sickness?”

It was the first time in the whole day that I had remained still long enough for this thought to come through. And while I might ordinarily have expected myself to concur in this broader view, I found now that the thought made me almost angry.

“We can’t forgive crime by calling it a sickness,” I snapped. “It was murder, after all. It was a cold-blooded attempt to collect money from a kidnaping. And the perversion was just an added act of viciousness; maybe it was even a cunning way to disguise the rest of the crime.”

Ruth had drawn her hand out of mine. I went on, “It’s simply like a savage—murdering, and then mutilating his victim out of sheer savagery.”

“But, Sid,” she said, “why are you so angry? I was only asking, not arguing.”

She looked at me so earnestly, her eyes puzzled, and I melted with love of her, and took hold of her and kissed her. In the kiss, our melancholy feeling returned, our loving seasoned with bitterness over the world I had seen that day. We sometimes said we had Weltschmerz, but it was more like a presentiment that everything would be vile in our time. On that day it was as though the crime had split open a small crack in the surface of the world, and we could see through into the evil that was yet to emerge.

From the other room, Ruth’s mother spoke. “Children, why don’t you dance? Put on the Victrola.” And after giving us time, an instant for Ruth to smooth her dress, perhaps, Mrs. Goldenberg snapped on the light behind us. “You know, Ruthie,” she said, “I’m thinking of bobbing my hair.”