Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  He was apparently fascinating to watch on the witness stand, a man so used to living in make-believe worlds under one cover or another he couldn’t remember rightly the real one any more, yet outwardly very calm and convincing, with an ingenious sense of detail—a man at home within the artifice of a courtroom trial. Maybe Bloch was afraid to probe such talent, no telling what he might come up with. That smug self-confidence reminded me in some ways of Alger Hiss, except that Gold was both creepier and humbler than Hiss and could spin it off with less self-consciousness. He had a round face with a sharp nose and big dark eyes, wore a pinstripe suit with enormous lapels and fat bright ties—he looked like a silent-film comedian doing an imitation of Roy Cohn. Outpost Harry. Must have seemed like a gift from the goddamn gods to the FBI, and maybe that was the best way to think of it. He was the man who supposedly turned up in Albuquerque one day with half a card from the back of a Jell-O box that matched a half that Julius Rosenberg had given David Greenglass, told David “I come from Julius,” and then exchanged some money for some atomic-bomb sketches and other material. Thus, he was the master link that brought it all together, made a “spy ring” out of it. Hamilton told me that in his early conferences with Gold, he’d apparently forgotten all of this, but once he’d had a couple of weeks with the FBI agents, it all “came back” to him. That “I come from Julius,” for example, maybe the key piece of corroborative testimony: at first glance it was very damaging. But in fact, if true, it was strong evidence that Rosenberg was not involved, since these intelligence agents always use made-up names, not real ones, especially in recognition signals. Moreover, Greenglass had felt obliged, after the exchange of money and data, to give Gold Julius Rosenberg’s name and phone number as a way of getting in touch when David was in New York on furlough, so in any case both of them must have assumed Gold was referring to some other Julius. Fuchs, for example: one of his middle names was Julius. So for that matter was Herb Brownell’s. Hamilton didn’t even think this was the real signal used. He said that in his first conversations with Gold there’d been no mention of these signals at all—in fact, no mention of Greenglass or A-bomb sketches either—all this had come later after Gold had had several helpful sessions with the FBI. But even after Gold had begun to “remember” Greenglass, there had still been no Jell-O box and no Julius, just “something on the order of Bob sent me or Benny sent me or John sent me or something like that.”

  Admittedly, Bloch didn’t know then what I knew now—and thank God for that, I suppose, God and John Hamilton, who kept his mouth shut—but how the hell are you going to find out if you don’t ask? Bloch had surely read the transcript of the earlier Brothman-Moskowitz rehearsal when Gold had spun off that fantasy-family routine—with that alone I could have split that screwed-up schizoid in two, right slap through the void in his middle. He could’ve walked out of the courtroom afterwards through two separate doors. And one thing about a witness with a penchant for all those cute little supplementary details: keep egging him on and he’ll invent one too many, ask any of those famous inspectors from the classic murder cases of literature. Or take that baseball game played with a deck of cards, I can just imagine what I might have done with that one…

  DEFENSE: Say, by the way, this fella “John,” you know, your Russian contact—an older fella. I gather, tall and sort of blond…

  GOLD: No, he was about five feet nine inches in height, had a medium build, which tended toward the slender, and he was about twenty-eight or thirty years old…

  DEFENSE: I see. But blond and—

  GOLD: No, he had dark or dark brown hair and there was a lock of it that kept falling over his forehead, which he would brush back continually…

  DEFENSE: Tried to keep it stuffed under his cap, I suppose…

  GOLD: Yes, and he had a rather long nose and fair complexion, dark eyes. He walked with somewhat of a stoop…

  DEFENSE: Like a catcher, you mean. Or a rightfielder…

  GOLD: NO, first base was his position actually…

  DEFENSE: Not too tall, but agile…

  GOLD: Yes, he had a good reach, and…uh…ah…

  DEFENSE: I see. Tell me, Harry, what…uh, what team did John play for?

  GOLD: (A slight twitch in the left side of his face. His fingers flutter as though shuffling cards, as his eyes glance to and fro uneasily, DEFENSE smiles at the PROSECUTOR.)

  Like taking candy from a baby. Which makes one wonder why Gold caused Bloch such distress. He seemed very eager not to hear more. It may have been simply that Rosenberg didn’t want anyone else to get implicated, and just couldn’t trust a fabulator like Gold. Gold had said little so far that touched Julius, had admitted he didn’t know him at all, but if you kept him talking, who knew what friends or relatives might get dragged in? And maybe Julius knew damned well who Gold was and what he might say. According to Edgar’s secret files, Gold, under prompting, had begun to “remember” passing Julius on a street corner in Jackson Heights during an aborted “contact” with an unknown agent back in 1950, Julius suited up in the style of his newspaper photos, scowling and wallowing a cigar like Groucho Marx. A preposterous tale, but who could say? More than once what looked like a complete Gold fantasy had resulted in arrests and confessions, almost as though he were dreaming the world into being. Maybe he was the real playwright here. And maybe the Rosenbergs quite reasonably feared some irrevocable casting. Whatever, the net effect was terribly damaging to them.

  Most of Bloch’s blunders, in fact, implied that he was running scared, that a wrong move could sink them all—implied in short that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty. As no doubt they were. You only had to look at them. Like Uncle Sam said: They reeked with guilt. Their arrogance, their clumsy lying, their hiding behind the Fifth Amendment, those obvious Communist links they wouldn’t admit to, their obsequiousness, their phony complaints about bad health, their frequent failure to “recall” simple facts, all the political grandstanding—from considerable experience in observing witnesses on the stand, I had learned that those who are lying or trying to cover up something generally make a common mistake—they tend to overact, to overstate their case. Even the way they took the Fifth was different from the way an innocent man might take it on principle. Like Alger Hiss, they’d hung themselves with their transparent deceitfulness, their pompous denials, their pretensions of injured innocence.

  Part of what seemed to give the lie to their testimony, of course, was the phony role they’d cast themselves in: the ordinary middle-class American couple, romantic and hardworking, loving parents, being framed by a deceitful and unnatural brother, backed by a monstrous State bureaucracy, victimized by some ghastly error. Julius wore a business suit. He carefully obeyed every rule. He had never broken a law, though he’d once been fired from an Army job as a suspected Red. Ethel pursed her lips and wore a cloth coat like Pat. Their children had neat haircuts and scrubbed faces. Julius kept his chin up. Ethel smiled at the witnesses. They said they loved their mixed-up brother. They were shocked at Saypol’s indecorous puns. They held hands and kissed each other through wire mesh. “All our lives,” wrote Ethel for international publication, “we lived decent, constructive lives…” They had probably moved automatically, even gratefully, into these middle-class clichés after their arrests—I understood well the solace and protection you could find in them—but they wore them awkwardly. Julius moved like a whey-faced automaton in his stiff blue suit. The jurors called Ethel’s courtroom composure “steely” and “stony.” They had the wrong kind of friends, which didn’t help, noisy old left-wingers from college days whom they’d stayed loyal to—they just couldn’t play the bourgeois act straight, knowing those friends would be tuning in, watching for betrayals, contemptuous of anything less than heroics. Every time Julius said “sir,” you suspected him of satire. They were very impressive in their open willingness to put themselves in the witness box and in their bold denial of all charges, but their taking of the Fifth on ideological questions undid all that a
nd suggested continuing Party orthodoxy, while deep in their voices like an indelible stain ran irrepressible un-American accents, the sour babble of steerage passengers and backpack peddlers, scarcely concealed, the pedantic precision of bright children whose parents don’t speak proper English. The electorate, needless to say, were not fooled.

  But then who were the real Rosenbergs behind their role-playing? Probably never know. FBI reports had hinted at a taste for pornography and histrionics. Their apartment was cluttered with cheap junk, and they hung out with friends who lived pretty unconventional lives. People Pat and I wouldn’t even know how to talk to. They seemed to live without any structure, without any roots, yet they never went anywhere. I’d grown up across the river from the Mexican ghetto of Jim Town, so I knew what one looked like, but I couldn’t imagine living in a ghetto. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t just move out and go somewhere else. Lack of imagination or something. Terrible life there, they both got pushed around a lot. Ethel, just sixteen, had gone to apply for a job and had got knocked down by police fire hoses. Her ghetto past had haunted her, frustrated her theatrical career, just as I’d been frustrated in my hopes for a New York City law career by my small-town California past, only I didn’t let it embitter me. Julie had taken a lot of punishment, too, and seen worse. He’d become a left-winger in college, but ghetto Jews were supposed to be left-wingers at a time when most right-wingers were Jew-baiters, so in a way he was being just as conventional as I was back at Whittier College. He’d seen young Bundist toughs beating up bearded old Jews playing chess in Seward Park, Negroes shot in race killings. He’d got stopped one night near Union Square by two brownshirts who’d asked him what CCNY meant. “City College of New York,” he’d told them. “Naw!” they’d laughed, shoving him off the sidewalk: “It means Christian College Now Yiddish!” And then, one thing had led to another. They’d stayed loyal to the left-wing friends who’d admired them—their constituency, as it were—and the next thing they’d known, there was a war on, the Communists were amazingly our allies, Julius was working for the Army and Ethel had a brother out on the A-bomb project, other engineering friends were similarly dispersed—so suppose the request came through: how could they say no? Get out of the overt activities of college days and withdraw to the very center of the heresy that excited them: why not? After all, I’d become Vice President of the United States of America by a chain of circumstances not all that different, one thing drifting into the next, carried along by a desire, much like theirs, to reach the heart of things, to participate deeply in life.

  Maybe Julius, like me, had somehow gotten this quality from his mother. Sophie had come to the United States at the age of fourteen, had worked eleven hours a day, six days a week, for eight dollars a week, and had somehow saved enough out of that to bring her own mother and four brothers over from Poland, then had wed Harry Rosenberg, a fellow worker, at age eighteen. They’d been flamboyant, romantic, in love with the old Polish culture, but terribly poor, living on the top floor of a five-story tenement on Broome Street where the roof leaked and in winter icicles hung from the ceiling and windows. Like my own father, Harry Rosenberg had tried to keep a store going, a dry-cleaning business, but had failed, fallen into abject poverty, and then, through hard work and tenacity, had fought his way back through bread lines and soup kitchens, had finally reached the point where he could afford for his family an apartment with steam heat. Like something out of a Horatio Alger story, except that Harry was a socialist. Phantom-seed brought from the Old World like lice in an old hat brim. Also, Judaism was not the prevailing faith of the Alger heroes, but in this regard one couldn’t help but admire the Rosenbergs’ orthodoxy and commitment. Little Julius had been very serious about his religion as a boy—we shared this—and moreover he’d been a strict fundamentalist. At the synagogue, they’d called him “Jonah,” and he’d been elected vice president of the Young Men’s Synagogue Organization. Like me, at Christian Endeavor. He had led lessons and had even considered becoming a rabbi, just as my mother had always thought I might become a Quaker missionary. He was younger than me, about the age of my baby brother, Arthur, who’d died when I was twelve. Julius was a sickly boy with bad eyesight, given to allergies, sudden illnesses—he’d nearly died of a ruptured appendix when he was ten, just a year or so before my bad attack of undulant fever, and he’d suffered from asthma and other psychosomatic problems. Kept him out of World War II and set him up for his spying mission—he became an inspector of electronics products manufactured by private industry for the Army Signal Corps—but his draft deferment pissed me off: didn’t he care about all those poor fellow Jews in Germany? Whose war was this anyway? A lot of things he’d said at the trial and in letters had disgusted me, but one of the worst was when he got Reveille mixed up with Taps. Of course, I suffered from hay fever myself, but my problem was strictly physical, and I joined the Navy anyway. His problem was, he was sick. Probably started when he was a little boy and his mother had to go with him to the bathroom at night to hold a lighted candle—it was down an unlit corridor, and he was afraid of the dark. A stinking place used by everybody on the floor. Rats rustling behind the walls, drunks sprawled in the hallways. Maybe one of them asleep on the toilet right now. Or holding a knife. Back in the night of my parents’ bedroom, I could hear my father calling me a baby. I was afraid that when I stepped through the door I’d fall down a deep hole. Mother was angry and told me to hurry. Tallow dripped into the stool. It was clogged up. Stuff seemed to be moving down there. I couldn’t get started. I thought I could hear my dead brother crying behind the walls….

  I reared up with a start. Where was I? I glanced about: the office was empty. Just the documents scattered about. Ah yes, the Rosenbergs…. I gazed blearily at all the litter, wondering what Pat might have back home in the icebox. What a mess. What if somebody came in here and saw me like this? I thought. At least I should sit up straight, be seen to be thinking, concentrating. The Spartan look. But I was too tired. My back was stiff and my butt hurt. I wondered if I’d got blisters from sitting too long. Or boils—didn’t that happen to somebody famous? My old butt ain’t so ironic as it used to be, I mused to myself as I got to my feet and staggered off to take a piss. I grinned at this and said it out loud: “My old butt’s not as ironic as it, uh, used to be…” It didn’t sound as funny out loud. Like Saypol’s puns at the trial: “Did you say ‘a Russian business’ or ‘rushing business’?” Even Bloch pretended to enjoy that one, and Judge Kaufman said: “Try to restrain your desire to be another Milton Berle.” Which might sound like a scolding, but which in fact was a gentle compliment, drawing an affectionate link between himself, the comic, and Saypol, and serving in its embracing humor to unite Judge, jurors, lawyers, spectators, the outside world—indeed everyone except the two outcast defendants, suddenly more isolated than ever—while at the same time subtly providing a bit of promotion on the side for Uncle Miltie, one of Kaufman’s former clients and oldest friends, setting him up as the very paradigm of American wit and humor.

  I checked the refrigerator again. For the fortieth time. Nothing there but an empty cigar box, empty cottage cheese carton, half a bottle of ketchup, and a tin of maple syrup, almost empty. I uncapped the syrup, tipped it up—it took forever draining down, and then all I got from it was a long stale lick. I threw the can in a wastebasket, did a few deep knee-bends, trying to stir the dead cells, get alert enough to bring this thing to a close, make conclusions, clean it up. Late. Very quiet. Spooky in fact. I could hear voices very far away, chanting. I knew the National Gallery Orchestra was performing some new work celebrating the Old South this week, but it didn’t sound like “All Quiet Alone the Potomac Tonight.” Too late for that anyway. The demonstrators probably. They’d been infiltrating the Capital all week. Clemency vigils tonight at the Odd Fellows Hall. Could be dangerous out there. I should get home and get to bed. Cabinet meeting tomorrow morning early. But in fact, to tell the truth, I liked staying up all night. Got in the h
abit back in high school when I had the bell tower to go to. I was always more efficient at night, something about the pressure in the air, and I liked the dark down around me. So did Kaufman, apparently. He liked to brag he slept only ninety minutes a night during times of stress. And visited the synagogue several times a day. For meditative catnaps probably. I yawned.