“I’m afraid drunkenness would not be a defence,” Judd remarked with cool superiority, “and although we did have a bottle in the car, I don’t think we took more than a swallow. Perhaps when we were waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“For school to let out.”

Max groaned. “Judd, kid, for crissake, why didn’t you stop? All right, Artie is wild, but why didn’t you call it off?”

“Back out? You want me to be a coward?” And there it stood naked between them, an accusation, a sneer with some kind of bitter laugh behind it, pointed at Max himself: You taught me, you taught your own little brother – be a man, never be a coward, never back out – that’s your own goddam code!

Then for a time things became relatively quiet. Dr. Storrs and Dr. Allwin proceeded with their work. It was to prove the most extensive psychiatric study made for a court case, certainly up to that time, and I believe perhaps even to this day. While Dr. Allwin gathered family material, Storrs began the psychological tests.

The prisoners were conducted each day to a large unused cell on the ninth floor. The room seemed almost an office, with its desk and chairs, its sunlit warmth. Along one wall was a bench, and between tests Artie would stretch out, dozing, while Judd engaged Storrs in a kind of reverse quiz, usually trying to prove the worthlessness of the test he was taking.

Psychological testing had not yet been developed in the specialized ways in which it is used today. Knowledge tests, tests of mental agility, were already in wide use. But testing of emotional responses had only begun. The Rorschach, now indispensable, was not used on Judd and Artie. The thematic apperception test had only just been invented by a young psychologist at Harvard; Dr. Storrs experimented with it and found curious results.

Of the other tests, the standard intelligence forms, the results were predictable. Judd completed the Stanford-Binet so rapidly that the scale was not high enough to rate him. Artie’s results were almost as phenomenal. The vocabulary tests and the problem-solution tests were child’s play for them. In a word test for which five minutes was considered a minimum, Judd completed his paper in three minutes and fifteen seconds. Artie, too, was rapid.

For emotional reactions, Storrs began with word association. Through an entire list, each boy reacted quickly and with a virtual absence of emotional tone. Only the word chisel, inserted between neutral words, suddenly brought Artie to a halt. He waited a full minute before saying, “trouble.”

It was then that Storrs tried the set of pictures used in the thematic apperception experiment. For example, there was a picture of a boy with one shoe on. Near him lay the matching shoe, an overshoe, a slipper. What did the picture suggest?

A simple response might have been that the boy would next put on his other shoe, and then the overshoes, and go to school. Or he might have been undressing – he would take off his shoe, put on the slippers.

With this and other pictures in the set, Artie and Judd produced stories hardly to be expected from young men of their age and seeming mental development. Artie at once decided that the boy might be putting on someone else’s shoes, so as to leave false footprints. And on he went, in a childlike fantasy of crime. Judd ignored the little situation in the picture – the incompleted act of dressing or undressing. The boy was waiting for someone, he ventured. Something important was happening. A big decision was being made, and the boy was waiting, perhaps for his mother. It could be that there was an argument about him going on in the house. About where he should go to school… Then Judd looked at Storrs, cunningly, with the caught-on look of the test sophisticate.

In another week, it is Dr. Allwin who conducts the examination, aided by medical specialists for the new-fangled metabolism tests and cardiograms.

On one of these mornings, there is Judd coming in alone, finding Dr. Allwin in a white jacket, laying out a few instruments on a clean towel.

Allwin greets Judd as one might greet a colleague, collaborating in pure scientific inquiry. But this morning Judd notices several hypodermic needles laid out, and turns pale.

“Anything wrong?” asks the doctor.

“What’s all this for?”

“We’re only going to take a few blood samples.” Picking up a syringe, the doctor turns to him, but now Judd is absolutely white.

“I’m sorry, doctor,” he says, “but the mere idea of blood always affects me this way. I know it is a stupid reaction, but I can’t help it.”

“Well this will only take a second.” Judd has an involuntary reaction of shrinking and pulling away, as the sample is taken from his ear lobe. When it is over, beads of sweat are on his forehead.

“You really have a very strong reaction, don’t you?”

“I’ve always had it.” And Judd tells of an incident when he was quite young and saw a doctor examining his mother; the doctor said he would take her blood pressure. “I pictured it as blood gushing out, I suppose, and I became so sick the doctor had to take care of me instead of my mother.”

“How did you think of your mother?”

In his matter-of-fact, clacky voice, Judd says, “I used to picture her as the Madonna. I still do.”

He feels quite easy, talking to this elderly, gentlemanly doctor, and he tells of the stained-glass window in a church, to which he was taken by the young Irish nursemaid who preceded Trudy.

“But your family being Jewish – they had no objection to the girl’s taking you to church?” the doctor asks with civilized curiosity.

On the religious score they were not old-fashioned, Judd says. In fact, his father declared he did not mind Judd’s learning all about churches, since he was going to live in a Christian world. “I used to have the chauffeur drive me to different churches on every Sunday. I soon knew the differences between Catholic and Protestant, Methodist and Episcopal and Congregational services.”

“That was quite an unusual preoccupation for a child.”

“I kept it up as I grew,” Judd says. “I classified all the religions and their different ideas of God.”

“And this had an effect on you?”

“How could a kid help seeing it was all a lot of bushwa? God was three and He was one and He was a body and He was incorporeal and He was a Jewish old Moses with a beard.”

“I see. And in this time, when you were visiting the churches, did you visit synagogues too?”

“They had a certain type of training – my father wanted me to receive the usual training for boys. You study elementary Hebrew and you are supposed to participate in a ceremony at thirteen, to take part in the services. He used to send me to Rabbi Hirsch’s classes, but I got through with it all a few years ahead, and by the time I was thirteen I didn’t care to take part in the ritual – it’s a kind of confirmation – because I couldn’t believe in any of that any more.”

“And yet you say you still cling to this image of your mother as the Madonna.”

“That’s an exception. Oh, even as a child I realized she didn’t belong to us. And of course I later realized it was all a superstition, but I made this exception to keep this idea about my mother. And since Mother died, I prefer to see her that way.”

“You mean as the beautiful lady in the church window?” The pink-faced doctor seems to be smiling with him at childish notions. “A heavenly being?”

“Yes.” Then he continues, in that even, unemotional voice, “If not for me, she might not have died. I was responsible for her death.”

“How is that?”

“It was due to my birth,” Judd says. “She was never well after I was born. She became an invalid. She suffered from nephritis.”

“I’ve noticed a history of nephritis in the women of her family.”

“I contributed to her death,” Judd insists. “She was a perfect person.” He frequently visits her grave, he says, and adds, “I often wish I had never been born.”