Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accused, Alvin Morlock, is charged with

the ultimate crime, the crime of murder. It is the intention of the State to

demonstrate, in the course of this trial, that he is guilty and that the degree of his

guilt, which it will be your function to fix, demands the ultimate punishment by

law. In other words, we charge him with murder in the first degree. Murder

calculated. Murder premeditated. Murder ruthlessly and heartlessly committed

on the person who had every reason to expect nothing but a cherishing affection

from the accused.

The defense will undoubtedly attempt to arouse your sympathy by attacking the

character of the victim of his homicide, Morlock’s dead wife. They will tell you

that she was extravagant, that she was a slattern and worse. But we will show

you that Morlock himself was at least partly responsible for his wife’s actions,

and I would impress on you that whatever his motives for murder, they in no

sense mitigate his guilt. It is not the dead Louise Morlock who is on trial here. It

is her husband, and the charge against him is the taking of a human life.

*

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Opening remarks of

Prosecution Attorney Gurney.

Morlock’s tenement was the second floor rear of an old sandstone mansion.

Once it had been a stately house, handsome in the dignity of spotless windows

and immaculate grounds. On an April afternoon he hurried toward its shelter,

head bent against the wind that buffeted his slender body. On other days he had

felt almost sorry for the house, humiliated now by pigeon droppings and candy

wrappers, by discarded cigarette packages and empty bottles that had once held

cheap wine and now gleamed dully in the barren hedge. Today he was concerned

only with his personal humiliation.

He hurried up the warped stairs to the tenement and let himself in. The door

opened from the hall directly into the kitchen, a shabby room with a chromium

dinette set looking out of place against oak wainscoting. There was a scattering

of dirty dishes on the table. A plate of margarine had half melted into a greasy

yellow pool and the bitter smell of reboiled coffee was in the air.

Morlock called, “Lolly?” There was no answer. Lolly—the name which had

once denoted affection—now choked in his throat. She was probably downstairs,

he decided, and walked into the living room. There was a desk in the room that

he used for his own work. She used a drawer in a cheap end table for her

correspondence. Morlock opened the drawer and took out an untidy stack of

envelopes.

She had made no effort to conceal the mess she had made of their finances. The

letters were all there. A slim pile from a department store._ Will you please

remit? A_ thicker pile from the appliance store that Morlock had just left. He

read through them swiftly. Polite, at first, then insistent. Some of them quite

clever in the manner in which they expressed dismay that a trusted customer

could so badly disillusion them. From the gas and electric companies there were

past-due notices but no letters. They hardly had to dun, Morlock reflected

ruefully.

He sat wearily at his own desk after he had gone through the correspondence. In

the last hour, the thought that he owed almost eight hundred dollars which he

had promised to pay by morning had recurred to him a half dozen times, but with

no lessening of its impact. He was stunned, overwhelmed by the personal

disaster that had had its beginning only this morning when the hall monitor

brought him a note from Dean Gorham requesting that he come to the Dean’s

office immediately.

Morlock had been discussing the minor British poets for the benefit of a bored

and listless class in English III when the summons came. After he read it, he had

felt no particular alarm although the summons was out of the ordinary. He was

not a good instructor; he knew that. He also knew that he was good enough for

Ludlow College. He stood up and called to William Cory to monitor the class.

In a class of louts Cory was the most loutish. In an undergraduate body

seemingly more callow and less purposeful than any Morlock had ever

instructed, Cory was the most callow. He was not the least purposeful, though,

for Cory was apparently dedicated with fanatic zeal and boundless patience to

bullying his instructors to the point of mute and hopeless exasperation. Those he

could not bully he attacked with seemingly inane questions that had viciously

calculated double meanings, with false naivete, and with brutal behind-the-back

pantomime.

Cory was older and bigger than most of his classmates. He was attending

Ludlow under the provisions of the GI Bill and this was his protection. The

college’s financial structure was shaky; the students attending under the Bill

were the difference between bankruptcy and a threadbare solvency. There was an

awareness of this among the instructors and consequently the Corys were

tolerated. Morlock, in turning the class over to Cory in his absence, tried to

convince himself that he was adopting the policies of the history instructor,

Dodson.

“Give the bad ones responsibility,” Dodson contended when the instructors were

talking shop. “Maybe it will teach them some common sense. If it doesn’t it will

keep them out of your hair for a while anyway.”

Morlock, watching Cory shamble up the aisle, knew that his purpose in picking

Cory for monitor had not been the hope of instilling common sense but was

based instead on an admission that he feared Cory, and that Cory could

embarrass him if he chose, because of that fear.

Cory loomed up beside the desk, a hulking, square-faced man of twenty-three

with a lingering rash of acne on his cheekbones. His eyes were green and small,

his teeth already in poor condition. He affected a varsity sweater and denim

jeans. The cuffs of the sweater were shiny with dirt and grease. Morlock turned

his head aside to avoid the smell of perspiration and of underwear not often

enough changed.

“Alla right, teach’—I got it,” Cory said in a ridiculous imitation of an Italian

immigrant. As he spoke, he looked toward the class expectantly. Looking for his

laugh, Morlock supposed. Getting it, too. The watching faces grinned or smirked

dutifully.

Once, in the hall, Morlock moved more hurriedly. He was a gray man—gray

suit, gray eyes, light brown hair already starting to retreat from his high

forehead. A worried man now that he had time to consider the possible

implications of Dean Gorham’s note.

Dean Gorham had a receptionist, a part-time student worker, young and pretty in

a plaid skirt and cardigan sweater. She motioned Morlock into the inner office

when he entered the Dean’s suite, and he glanced down at her to see if he could

read anything in her expression that might give him a clue to the nature of the crisis that had pulled him away from his class. If there was anything at all in her

expression, it was the sort of contempt that Morlock was accustomed to seeing

on the faces of the student body, and it probably had no relationship to the

present circumstance. He hurried past her and into Dean Gorham’s office. ‘

Morlock had some respect for Gorham as a scholar. Gorham, however, was a

big, imposing figure of a man with a Roman profile. His statesmanlike stature

had led to his being pushed into administrative assignments where he would be

available for public display almost from the time he qualified as a teacher; so

that his scholarship had drowned in a tide of paper, leaving him harried and

unhappy. He looked up uneasily as Morlock came into the room.

“You, Alvin,” he said fussily. “Close the door, won’t you, and take a chair.”

Morlock, not speaking, pulled up a leather covered chair from against the wall

and sat down.

Gorham stood up and walked toward the window, where he stood looking out

toward the meager campus with his hands clasped behind his back. He coughed

once, started to speak and stopped, and finally turned back toward Morlock.

“This is very embarrassing,” he began again. “I don’t like to meddle in my

teachers’ affairs. I don’t think I ever have with you, have I?”

Morlock—he had a growing and horrible suspicion now about the reason for

Gorham’s summons—said, “No, sir.”

Gorham beat one fist lightly into the open palm of his other hand. “Maybe it

would be easier if you read this,” he said. He picked up a letter from his desk

and handed it to Morlock.

Morlock said, “Excuse me,” before he began reading. The letter was addressed

to Gorham in his official capacity as Dean.

Sir, it read.

This is to call your attention to a situation which we feel you will wish to deal

with personally in order to avoid undesirable publicity. A teacher at Ludlow, Mr.

Alvin Morlock, is very much in arrears in his payments on several appliances

purchased by him from us on our time contract plan. Repeated letters to Mr Morlock have gone unanswered. Before taking legal action we are taking this

means of attempting to reach an agreement as to prompt payment by Mr.

Morlock. We shall appreciate hearing from you on this matter without delay.

The letter bore the heading of a local appliance store. When he had finished it,

Morlock’s reaction was shameful embarrassment. He wished for a moment that

he were dead—anything rather than be in this room with Gorham and his own

humiliation. He mumbled, “I didn’t know, Dean Gorham. There must be some

mistake.”

Gorham snatched at the straw eagerly. “Of course. Of course,” he agreed. “Those

things do happen.” While Morlock listened dumbly, he began to relate some

anecdote about a bank deposit he had himself made which had been credited to

the wrong account. There had been no mistake. He knew it and he was certain

that Gorham knew it. The Dean was, in his way, trying to restore his dignity, as

if his own self-respect had dwindled because he had been forced to shatter

Morlock’s.

Gorham, from a sense of duty, continued, “Of course, being teachers we are very

vulnerable, Alvin. Caesar’s wife, you know,” he added with heavy-handed good

humor. The Dean sat down behind his desk. “You’ve been married three months

or so, isn’t it?”

Morlock nodded.

Gorham said, “I thought so. Of course, there are expenses involved in setting up

a household and sometimes it is difficult. At the same time, we must be very

careful to avoid things like this, particularly since the college’s own situation—”

He continued hastily, “Of course, in this case it is a mistake. Clerical error

probably. You’ll take care of it then?”

Morlock rose. “This afternoon,” he said. He turned and would have left the room

but Gorham called to him.

“Alvin. I don’t have much but if I can help—”

The unexpected kindness shook Morlock more deeply than his shame had. He

tried to speak and could not. Instead he shook his head and rushed from the

room, past the receptionist and down the hall to his own classroom. He paused to

regain his poise before he entered the room; when he did enter, Cory was talking to the class, telling some dirty story. Morlock said, “That will do, Cory. You can

return to your seat.”

Cory stood up indolently. “Alla right, teach’,” he said in the same moronic

affectation of an accent. Morlock, infuriated, shouted, “Oh, for God’s sake, Cory,

stop being a jackass.”

His glance was turned toward the class when he called out to Cory. He was

surprised to see among the sly, anticipatory smirks a few smiles of

congratulation, admiration, perhaps. He assigned a chapter for study and forgot

the incident in planning what he would say, to Louise—or Lolly, as she called

herself. It was not in him to rail at her or to demand any explanations; he

accepted this at the same time that he admitted there was no other way to reach

her short of physical violence. He had tried sarcasm and it had withered in the

face of her stupendous lack of sensitivity. And Morlock was disarmed by his

own sense of guilt. He had known—or at least he should have known, he

reflected in the drowsy classroom—that she was incapable of handling money or

any responsibility. But in the first days of marriage he had tried to see her

irresponsibility as a rather charming naivete. When he could no longer maintain

the absurdity that she was naive, he had still hesitated to destroy the illusion, and

with it his marriage that he had counted on so heavily. He had once thought, a

little desperately, that she would gain a sort of assurance through his trust in her.

And now with that hope gone, he could not bring himself to ask her why she had

not paid the bills, why she had not told him of the dunning letters. She would

react in one of two ways. She would become sly and sullen, probing to find out

how much he knew. Or—and this was much worse—she would become

kittenish._ Daddy is mad at mother for spending his money?_

Morlock remembered quite clearly the circumstances surrounding her

assumption of the family funds. Three days after they were married he had

handed her a check—it amounted to seventy dollars—and asked her to cash it

for him on the following morning. When he came home from the college on the

next day she handed him some bills.

“I paid another week on the rent,” she said brightly. “And I have to do some

grocery shopping tomorrow. Do you want to give me the money now?”

The marriage was new enough so that this seemed a kind of sharing and a bond.

He had meant to give her a few dollars for housekeeping expenses but he kept only a few dollars for himself and handed the rest back to her. “You might as

well pay all the bills,” he said. It was this demonstration of faith that he hated to

take back in spite of a growing distrust.

Dismissing his thoughts of Lolly, Morlock decided that he would have to stop at

the appliance store and find out exactly how much he owed—which brought up

another problem. Somehow he would have to get money. From a bank, perhaps,

although he did not have the slightest idea of how money was borrowed from

banks. Or from one of those companies that advertised in the papers

interminably:_ Pay your bills. The money you need in one hour._ Morlock

resolved to stop at the appliance store and then at the bank. But he would not tell

Lolly. He felt a moment’s panic at the thought that there were probably other

creditors besides the utility companies. The grocer. The butcher.