Theodore Sturgeon: "A Crime for Llewellyn"

Theodore Sturgeon:  "A Crime for Llewellyn"


"He had a grey little job clerking in the free clinic at the hospital, doing what he'd done the day he started, and that was nineteen years back.  His name was Llewellyn, and Ivy Shoots called him Lulu.

Ivy took care of him.  He'd lived with Ivy ever since she was an owlish intellectual with an uncertain almost little girl look about her and he was a scared, mixed up adolescent wilting in the interim between high school and his first job.  Ivy was in several senses his maiden experience--first date, first drink, first drunk,  and first hangover in a strange hotel in a strange city accompanied by a strange girl.  Strange or not--and she was--she was his Secret.

A man like Lulu needs a Secret.  A sheltered background consisting of positive morality, tea-cosies, spinster aunts and the violent contrast of  eighteen months as a public charge--after the aunts had burned to death, uninsured--had convinced him that he was totally incapable of coping with a world in which everybody else knew all the angles.  So he fell joyfully into the arrangement with Ivy Shoots and the Secret that went with it.

He was small and he was pudgy, and he wasn't bright, and his eyes weren't too good, and the very idea of his stealing a nickel or crossing in the middle of the block was ridiculous.  It seemed to him that all the men around him emanated the virtue of sin--the winks and whistles at the girls, the Monday tales (boy did I tie one on Saturday night), the legends of the easy conquests and looseness and casual infidelity, the dirty jokes, and the oaths and expletives--and because they seemed to have no scruples they kept their stature as men in a world of men.

In this, Lulu could easily have drowned.  Only his Secret kept him afloat.  He told it to no one, partly because he sensed instinctively that he would treasure it more if he kept it to himself, and partly because he knew he would not be believed even if he proved it.  He  could listen contentedly to the boasting of the men he envied, thinking if you only knew! and you think that's something!  hugging to himself all the while the realization that no one among them had committed  the enormity of living in sin as he was doing."

That was his Secret:  He was living in sin!

Then, his world came tumbling down around him.  Ivy, misunderstanding him, thought he felt guilty about living together.  So, one night, after work, she confessed Her secret.  She brought out their marriage license--they were married after all.  That wild night when Llewellyn met Ivy and got drunk and woke up the next morning in bed with her was very hazy in his mind.  He had blacked out during the evening and never knew that he and Ivy had gotten married.  He was devastated.

But, Llewellyn had a stout heart and was more than ever determined to commit a crime.  After all, it can't be that hard to do something illegal or immoral, could it?  Somebody had once told Llewellyn that there were so many laws that it was hard for the average person to go through the day without committing some sort of crime.  Only luck kept most of us out of jail.  Lulu was confident--it should be easy.  And, it really was important. 

But, our destinies are not completely under our control.  Fate plays a role in determining what happens to us, and Llewellyn was soon to learn this inescapable fact--that if some are destined to be criminals, regardless of what they do, then there may be others who are just the opposite--in spite of theft or bigamy or murder or .  .  .

Poor Llewellyn.   We now follow Llewellyn as he fumbles his way around in his attempt to commit a crime, handicapped by Fate which seems determined that his destiny is to remain a good person.