Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  “Thine is the battle,” respond the children of America. “From Thee comes the power; and it is not ours. The base of spirit wilt Thou burn up like a flaming brand in a hayrick, a brand that devours wickedness and that will not turn back until guilt is destroyed!” Then they tune in their radios to an all-night station playing Frankie Laine’s “I Believe,” and drift off, their minds freed of the Phantom’s terrors, dreaming peacefully of baseball, business, and burning hayricks.

  For the Rosenbergs, it is not so easy to sleep. Julius has dutifully composed his last will and testament, but Henry Ford II he is not. In fact, he has nothing to leave his two sons but best wishes, three cartons of rather pathetic personal effects which the FBI is bound to paw through, some dead bugs, and his exemplary misfortune. He has good reason to doubt they will possess even his name. “Love them with all your heart and always protect them in order that they grow up to be normal healthy people,” he begs his lawyer, Manny Bloch. “Our children are the apple of our eye, our pride and most precious fortune.” He last saw his sons two days ago. Unless Justice Douglas’s stay is upheld, he will not see them again. They were dragged away, screaming, confused. He can’t write to the boys himself. Ethel will do that. He is afraid the boys will be angry. With him. He is afraid their memories will be erased. Or will not be. He is afraid his legs will fail him on his way to the chair and make his boys ashamed. “You Manny are not only considered as one of my family but are our extra special friend. Be strong for us, beloved friend. Never let them change the truth of our innocence. For peace, bread and roses, in simple dignity, we face the executioner with courage, confidence and perspective, never losing faith. As ever, Julie.”

  It is time for the prisoner in the play to die, and the young girl must make her farewells. She endeavors to smile, but her voice catches in her throat and she nearly breaks down. She and her brother used to have a game at bedtime, reciting lines from Shakespeare, and though the prisoner has made it clear he is not after all her brother and doesn’t know Shakespeare from Barney Google, she wishes now she could…. “What was it?” the prisoner asks. “I… I told it to you once, and you said it was silly.” “Say it again,” the prisoner says softly. The girl swallows, looks up at him. “‘Good-night, good-night!’” She cannot quite control her voice, but struggles on, thinking: at the end, this is all there is. “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow… That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.’” She goes toward the anteroom, hesitates, hoping—in vain—that he might yet respond with the matching lines, and then with a choking sob hurries through the door and closes it behind her. For several seconds the prisoner stands rigidly intent upon that door, until at length, without changing his attitude or his expression, watched raptly by the Warden and the Chaplain, he speaks very tenderly and reminiscently:

  “Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast!

  Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!”

  “P.S.—Ethel wants it made known that we are the first victims of American Fascism.”

  7.

  A Little Morality Play for Our Generation

  The play is over. The girl has made her tearful exit, and her brother, the condemned prisoner, has gone through the act of clutching his throat and quoting Shakespeare on the fear of death, amazing the Warden and the Chaplain. The Jailer has arrived to call the prisoner to his execution, and the prisoner, standing erect like a soldier at attention, regarding them all fixedly and with a voice low and steady, has replied: “All right, let’s go.” They’ve gone. The curtain’s come down and the audience, if there is any, is now applauding. They take curtain calls. Now the condemned man is smiling and so is the girl in her little sailor dress. All just make-believe. Then, let’s see, they…uh…they scrub off the greasepaint and change out of their stage costumes. Always liked that part, the makeup. A kind of transformation comes over you, a kind of metamorphosis. It was while a girl in my class was putting makeup on me one night that I thought she was in love with me. Maybe she was. Probably I didn’t make the right moves. Water under the bridge. Anyway, off with the makeup and costumes. There’s a cast party afterwards at the Paramount Cafeteria tonight, they’re all going to that and hurrying to get ready. Everybody in the cast is lusting after little sixteen-year-old Ethel Greenglass, the sister in the play, and they all drop by casually to poke their noses in while she’s changing, but she’s too excited by her own performance to notice. She supposes that middle-aged men winking and blowing congratulatory kisses at her in her underwear is just part of the theatrical life. Anyway, let’s face it, she’s a tough little broad from the slums, a lot of horny brothers, this isn’t exactly Whittier High School, she knows the score. Anuses, dildos, the whole lot. She’s probably seen all there is to see right in the hallways of her own tenement house. Whores have often lived there, working their trade in the rooms next to her own bedroom, she’s no goddamn innocent. But has she ever…had it? Hard to guess. Probably not. Certainly no boyfriends. Not till Julie. Probably too idealistic. Standoffish. Too much familiarity with it has made her shy away. She wants something better out of life. She dreams of escaping the slums. She’s young, bright, pretty, talented, she can sing and act and she’s got nerve—that’s the famous Broadway formula for success, isn’t it? Just like in the motion pictures—and it’s all just a few blocks away. Each night they do The Valiant in this crummy little makeshift dump of a neighborhood theater, she thinks: Tonight I may be discovered! But each night nothing happens. She goes home to her lousy room in that stinking slum tenement, where her wretched old witch of a mother rails at her: “You’ll never get ahead, you smart-ass little twit! There’s no place in life for arty people!” Maybe she didn’t say “you smart-ass little twit,” I just made that part up. Quite likely, though. Or something just like it in Russian or Polish or whatever the hell the old lady was. Ethel has had to leave school and go to work. She makes seven dollars a week as a clerk in a shipping company on West Thirty-sixth Street, and gives it all to her mother. She gets two dollars back for carfare and lunches, but she walks to work and often skips lunch to save for voice and piano lessons at the Carnegie Hall Studios. At her job, left-wingers are trying to seduce her into union activities: she’s cute and has a lot of personality, she might make a good organizer. She likes the special attention they give her. She could be headed for a life of lawlessness and disorder, strikes, premature anti-fascism, a Daily Worker subscription, subversion, treason, and death in the electric chair. Or the theater could be her salvation. If she became another Clara Bow, her life and that of thousands of GIs fighting in Korea could be saved. And she doesn’t even have to become another Clara Bow—just so her dreams of success are not soured. That’s the secret: keep them hoping. But after the party at the Paramount Cafeteria, one of the older guys in the cast, some bum in his mid-forties, offers to take her home. Uh, the Lower East Side streets are dangerous, he’ll see her home safely, something like that. I didn’t know if the Paramount Cafeteria served beer or not. Probably not, anyway it was still Prohibition. I think. The guy probably had a hip flask. So he says he’ll see that she gets home safe, nothing wrong with that. The condemned brother maybe, good irony in that. Probably not, though, because that was the part played by Paul Muni in the movie—a younger guy. So maybe it’s the Chaplain, a pious man, maybe Catholic in the play, chastity vows and all that, though in fact he was probably a Jew or an atheist, most theater people are. Or maybe the Warden, keeper of law and order. Anyway, she’s grateful. She’s still feeling dreamy. Exhilarated. She’s glad to have somebody to talk to on the way home. What about? Her hopes, her fantasies. The old guy encourages her, putting an arm around her sympathetically. Like a father. She opens up her young heart to him. In response, he pushes her into a dark doorway, hauls up her skirt, tears his fly open, and tries to push his throbbing cock between her legs. She screams. No, she can’t scream, who would she scream for? Besides, uh…he’s pressing his mouth against hers. What does she do? She bites him maybe. Knees him in t
he nuts. Something like that. It’s a very rough scene for a little starry-eyed sixteen-year-old girl. She runs all the way home, terrified and disheveled, crying, her dreams shattered, thinking: So that’s what the theatrical life is like! She becomes a Communist instead and commits espionage.

  Maybe. Maybe not. Too pat somehow. And the details were blurred. Where was the Paramount Cafeteria? And what dark doorway was it? Maybe it was her own. Under the peeling gold letters of her father’s name. I sighed, sat up, stared at all the notes and data spread around me on the office floor. It was getting late and I was floundering about in midfield, getting nowhere. Pat and the girls had no doubt wondered why I wasn’t home for supper. Should have called. Pat was probably still waiting up for me. But I couldn’t go home. Not yet. I had to complete this investigation, make sense of it somehow. Douglas’s stay of execution, coupled with the sudden rise of tensions throughout the world, had cast a whole new complexion on the case. Uncle Sam had projected me into the heart of this thing and I had to respond. Anyway, Pat would suppose I was in some emergency meeting, that was all right. Or preparing a speech. She was used to my late nights. At the time of the Hiss case, I spent as much as eighteen to twenty hours a day at my office, we hardly saw each other. At such times, I deliberately refuse to take time off for relaxation or “a break,” because my experience has been that in preparing to meet a crisis, the more I work the sharper and quicker my mental reactions become. “Taking a break” is actually an escape from the tough grinding discipline that is absolutely necessary for superior performance, and Pat has had to learn to live with this. Many times I’ve found that my best ideas come when I think I can’t work another minute, when I literally have to drive myself to stick at the job. Sleepless nights, to the extent the body can take them, can stimulate creative mental activity, it’s happened to me lots of times. Oh, you have to take the machine out of gear once in a while, but it’s never wise to turn the engine off and let the motor get completely cold, not when you’re on to something. I could write a goddamn manual about it.

  This was why my golf game disappointed Uncle Sam so. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the game, it was the going and coming, the time lost in the clubhouse, all those empty-headed boozers clomping around in golf shoes, a whole day could get shot down. Whenever I was in the middle of a period of intense study or work, leaving the problem for a day on the golf course simply meant I had to spend most of the next day getting myself charged up again—to the point of efficiency I had reached before leaving the task in the first place. That was why I was collecting all this flab around the middle, too. I knew that was something I had to watch—Americans rarely elected fat men President. Old Taft got away with it, but that was because he went to the other extreme. But just fat and sloppy, never. As long as I was down on the floor, I decided to do a few sit-ups. After a couple, though, I felt a little giddy—hungry probably—and so stayed stretched out, my head pillowed in bomb diagrams. I had already studied these sketches, looking for hidden objects, thinking they might be some kind of puzzle pictures, but I hadn’t turned up anything. They tended to suggest sex organs, but this was natural with bomb diagrams.

  I lay there, just letting my mind wander. Often I got good ideas this way. Felt good, too. I thought about the names of the principals in this case: all the colors. Strange. Green, gold, rose…which nation’s flag was that? I played with the street names, codenames, names of the lawyers, people at the edge of the drama—Perl, Sidorovich, Glassman, Urey, Condon, Slack, Golos, Bentley. I realized that the initial letters of the names of the four accused—Sobell, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, and Yakovlev—would spell SORRY were it not for the missing 0. Was there some other secret agent of the Phantom, as yet unapprehended, with this initial? Oppenheimer? Oatis? No, he was our man, we’d just got him back from the Czechs. O’Brien, the FBI man? What a fantastic idea! Bobo Olson? The OPA maybe. Always hated the OPA. My first political job. I was glad to see it liquidated six weeks ago—fulfillment of my oldest campaign pledge. Those goddamn hucksters. And that awful joke that went around when I got into politics: Dick Nixon of the OPA, maybe that one would die now. “Meet J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI…!” Obnoxious. Odious. Or how about the Orthogonians—somebody out of my old fraternity at Whittier? A Square Shooter who was a Double Dealer? It would explain why Uncle Sam had pulled me into this case. But it was hard to believe. Football players mostly, hardly the type. We did wear those big “O’s” on our sweaters, though. I remembered those symbolic suppers of beans and spaghetti we used to have. One would taste pretty good right now, and fuck the symbols. Also there was Old Nick, and Ola, and Señor Ortega, a role I had in a play once. No, I was getting pretty far off the track. Then suddenly I recalled that Justice William Douglas’s middle name was Orville. Mmm, that fit, that was probably it, all right. He’d sure set us back with that stay of his, which if nothing else was goddamn disrespectful of the wishes and wisdom of the American people. The tramp who’d reverted to type. Just as the Rosenbergs had caused the Korean War, so perhaps had Douglas enabled the Russians to crush our revolt in East Berlin. Why not?

  I felt that I was close, hovering as it were (even though in fact I was flat out on my back) over the answer, not quite able to pick it out. Something about judgment. Time. My generation. My lousy drives. The city. The riddle of history, the letter O. Growing up. Balance. Motion.… I wondered if I should trace the travels of Harry Gold on a map to see if some kind of picture would emerge. Roughly, in my mind’s eye, they seemed to trace out half a cheese sandwich. I remembered that he said somewhere that the Greenglasses asked him where they could find good Jewish delicatessen in New Mexico. Or maybe Gold asked them. I realized the bomb diagrams somewhat resembled cheese blintzes. Deviled eggs. Stuffed cabbages. My stomach rumbled. I realized I should stop thinking about food.

  I tried to think instead about the money, the amounts exchanged, what got done with it. Murray Chotiner taught me this rule: When you’re attacking an opponent, looking for scandal, ask first about the money. But the sums here were small and the evidence even for these was dubious. In fact, the only people with real money in this story were the Judge and Prosecutor, Attorney General, and FBI Director. The jury members were modestly but comfortably salaried, most of the witnesses were getting by, while the Rosenbergs were the poorest of the lot. Which was maybe the point: O for zero. They ran a small business that lost money, apparently donated their services to the Phantom for nothing—real fanatics. Well, I could understand Julius’s business failure: I’d gone that route myself once with frozen orange juice, and my father had entertained us all with a whole lifetime of successive failures. I could even understand their working free for the Phantom—I’d do the same for Uncle Sam, though I was glad he had never asked this of me. How could he? Money is dignity, he’s told me that himself. What I couldn’t understand, though, was the Rosenbergs staying poor. Not that poor. Not in America. They didn’t even have a car or a TV. Hell, I was earning money by the time I was eleven years old, picking beans on farms and working in my Dad’s store, pumping gas, grinding hamburger, culling rotten apples and tomatoes—Dad didn’t give me any abstract lessons in the American Way of Life, he simply turned over the vegetable shelves to me, let me fill them, keep them in order, and take the profits. I learned everything I needed to know about hard work. And its rewards. Now, even the simplest lump could pump gas or grind hamburger, so I figured Julius Rosenberg had to be faking it. Their poverty was just a cover. They no doubt had a secret bank account somewhere—Poland probably, since that country had had the brass to offer them political asylum. There were people who said Julie was throwing money around like water toward the end—I think it was the FBI who said this—he was buying clothes, photographs, eating out at expensive restaurants. I wondered if I should take Pat out to an expensive restaurant on our anniversary. There was a good Mexican place on Connecticut I’d heard about. At one time, I’d been eager to take up Mexican food, because I had so many California constituents who ate
the goddamn stuff, and I knew it was something you had to get in practice for. Pat would probably want to eat fish down by the river. Where all the mosquitoes were, very romantic. I’d settle, as always, for a good well-done hamburger. And a pineapple malted. Or even a dish of cottage cheese. I eat a lot of cottage cheese, I can eat it until it runs out my ears. And one thing I do that makes it not too bad is put ketchup on it. I learned it from my grandmother.

  My stomach growled. I loosened my belt a notch, belched emptily, ate an antacid. I’ve been at this too long, I thought. If I wasn’t careful, I’d make myself sick again. How did other people get where they were without having to work like this? Since the moment I’d got in off the course Sunday, I’d been going at it. I hadn’t even paused to take a shower in the clubhouse (of course, I rarely shower in public places any more—I agree with Ulysses Grant about that, I don’t think it’s wise to let people see what any Incarnation of Uncle Sam looks like without his clothes on—or even in his shorts or pajamas; I just couldn’t understand Eisenhower making his valets help him on with his underpants every morning, it seemed like some kind of unnecessary strategic risk), I’d rushed straight back here and headlong into a full-scale exhaustive study of the Rosenberg case, the trial, the background, personal histories and peripheral issues, appeals, the impact on world affairs, everything. This is my way with every project, scholastic, political, athletic, or romantic: I talk for hours with every person I can find, spend every spare moment studying reports and recommendations, gather up and try to absorb every known bit of information, make hundreds of calls, read whatever philosophy or political science or history I need to accomplish the task. “Iron Butt,” they called me in law school. There was always a tradition of hard work in my family, especially on my mother’s side, the Quaker side. And it always paid off.