It was possible: I might have been there myself that night. I was in town. I was excited and lost, but pretending to know my way around. I could have stumbled in anywhere. I kept my head down, trying not to gawk at the skyscrapers, walked purposefully, even when I didn’t know where I was. To tell the truth, I rather liked New York, but I wasn’t all that impressed. There was something run-down about it, and it struck me as being a very cold and ruthless place to live. Not even exactly American—a kind of Hong Kong West. Therefore exciting, though; and challenging. A fast track, faster even than Los Angeles. A man needs that, even if he doesn’t like it. Any person tends to vegetate unless he is moving on a fast track. You’d have to bone up, I thought, to keep alive in the competition here, but I felt ready for it. I was about to graduate from Duke Law School, and I was looking for a position with a big law firm. I knew I’d get it. I looked forward to going back on campus and bragging about it. Modestly, of course. Writing home about it. I jotted down details I could use in letters. I enjoyed the prospect of passing the word more than the thought of living here. I was third academically in my class, president of the student bar association, a member of the Order of the Coif, and had worked for the Law Review and the Duke Bar Association Journal, had written an important article on auto-insurance law and helped Dean Horack research his goddamn book, it was a sure thing. But I didn’t get a job. They all looked down their noses at me. I felt like my clothes didn’t fit right or my haircut was too fresh or something. Maybe the accent gave me away—I told them I’d won the Harvard Club of California Prize in high school, but it didn’t seem to help. The two guys who went up to the city with me got positions, great positions, but I didn’t. I felt like a goddamn ass. If I’d gone to the International Seamen’s Union Ball that night instead of to Rockefeller Center and Times Square, I might have become a Communist and changed the course of history, I was pissed off enough. Later, when I settled down, I realized I’d been a little too generous in praising left-wing judges, and as president of the student bar had brought a hotshot New Deal trustbuster down to speak at Duke, and I supposed some of my enemies at school had distorted all this to their contacts in New York. That maybe accounted for my striking out with the FBI, too. So, to hell with them, I bought a new blue serge suit and went home to Whittier, did it my own way.
Oddly, though I didn’t go to the Seamen’s Ball, I seemed to have a very distinct impression of the hall: a vast slick floor, heavily waxed, a Victrola cabinet in one corner, a little stage, kitchen off the far end. Musty smell. Six-piece band. Balloons overhead. Julius and Ethel went to a room backstage so she could practice her song on him. His idea. He was trying to make out. And why not? I didn’t think it was a real dressing room. Just an empty room back there, couple of chairs maybe, some scribbling on the cream-colored walls. Might have been a mirror. I could see her smiling balefully up at him, giving it a try. “Cheery-beery-BIN!” Thin. But pretty. So open and bright-eyed. It turned out they were neighbors—to Julius, Ethel was literally the girl-next-door, just like in all the movies, even if she was three years older than he was and lived in a part-time whorehouse. “More than a decade ago, at Christmas time, 1936, I met a young lady, fair, sweet, unassuming…” So different from all the others. She had no other boyfriends either, never ever had one. Not like Pat. More like me. Afterwards, walking her home, Julie had explained that he was in trouble with his grades at college because of all the student activities. The activities at City College of New York were different from those at Whittier College, but I could see how he would get involved. “I’ll help you,” she’d said. No one had ever said anything like that to me. “I’ll help you.” Of course, I’d never been in trouble. With my grades or anything else. “I’ll help you….”
I sat up abruptly. I thought I’d heard it, heard her voice. A sheet of paper was stuck to my cheek. I peeled it off. “Light of my life, rose of my heart, you my beloved being kept apart from me, are the thing I hold most dear. When I see your beautiful expressive face I know we are as one.” Was this for me? Ah no. The Rosenberg letters. Right. I must have imagined the voice. Maybe it was my own. I’d started to doze off. I was very tired. It had been a long day. Crisis conferences, world tensions, chairing the Senate, fear for Uncle Sam, phone calls, the Rosenberg affair. I’d better clean up this mess and go home, I thought. I may be needed tomorrow. Home to Pat, the icebox, the kids. If I could just get organized. Couldn’t leave this mess for the girls to see tomorrow. I remembered someone had said that in prison Julius had read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Maybe he said that himself in one of his letters. Laugh-a-minute Julie. Some home: “The constant battle against rats and vermin still is vivid in my mind.” Be fair: that was when he was a kid. I staggered to my feet and stumbled over to my swivel chair, dropped heavily into it. I tried to reconstruct the thoughts I’d just had about the case. I couldn’t remember them. Only a vague sense of a dark hallway, the K1C3 campaign formula, something about Manny Bloch and the FBI. That he was a secret agent? No, impossible. His ears stuck out too far. You couldn’t have ears that stick out like that and get into the FBI. Wrong kind of nose, too. You had to be big, athletic, deep-voiced, look like a young businessman, and wear gabardine coats and snapbrim hats. Also it helped if you were a Republican, Catholic or fundamentalist, an ex-military officer or lawyer, and chewed gum with your mouth closed. I wondered if I had a stick of gum somewhere in my desk. Or maybe a candybar. I rummaged through the drawers. I used to be able to live on candybars. Julius Rosenberg was fond of candy, too. There was this story about him at the age of four on his way to his Grandma’s house. He begged a penny off his brother and ran across the street to a candy shop. Crossing back over, he ran into the side of a passing taxi. He was okay, after treatment, but the shock caused his mother to give premature birth to her next baby and it died. America came that close to being delivered of one atom spy and saving its secrets. Because of a sweet tooth.
The episode had made a large impression on me because I, too, had nearly died young when our hired girl let me fall out of her lap and under the iron wheel of our horse-drawn buggy. It ran over my head and split my scalp open. I was rushed twenty-five miles to the nearest hospital in the neighbors’ automobile, and it took eleven stitches to sew my head up. I didn’t remember falling out of the buggy, remembered nothing of the hospital or my mother’s fright, all I remembered was the upholstering on the seats of that automobile. It was owned by people called Quigley and I think it was the only automobile in Yorba Linda. We were all terrifically impressed. I still had the scar—all the way from my forehead to my nape—but you could hardly see it because I parted my hair over it. At the time, everybody thought I was going to die. But then later two of my brothers died instead. What would history have been like, I wondered, if my brothers had lived and I had died? I found I was utterly unable to imagine this. I was also unable to find anything to eat in my desk. “Shit,” I grumbled, and slammed the last drawer shut, slumped in my chair. I started to say this again, more earnestly, but I was suddenly afraid Uncle Sam might be watching somewhere. I still had some difficulty getting used to this—and I would have to live with it, I knew, all the rest of my life. People don’t appreciate the sacrifices you have to make if you want to be President. There were times I wished I could have been happy just getting rich like Smathers or being an admiral in the Navy or a famous playwright or something.
I could be happy right now, I thought, with an ice cream cone. A hot beef sandwich. A slice of chocolate cake. Even one of those dirty dates off the streets in Whittier. Other kids used to pick them up and eat them, but my mother told me it was filthy to eat things off the ground, and so I never did. They had big seeds, hardly any fruit at all. But I’d eat one now. Probably. Ethel Rosenberg used to buy ten-cent ice cream sodas when she was a little girl, I’d read, in a place called Marchiony’s on the Lower East Side. The FBI probably had the place staked out. Or maybe it was gone by now. I imagined a dark place with grimy windows and cock
roaches crawling up the wall. Probably lousy sodas, too, not nearly so creamy and rich as the sodas in California. The people out here in the East are very arrogant about food, but they don’t know a goddamn thing about it. There’s a popular tendency to ridicule my tastes and call me square, but history will show I was one of the few Americans of my time who really knew how to eat.
I grew up with food, after all, what with my father’s fruit ranch, and then our family store, delivering groceries, buying produce, talking about food with the customers. And when Harold got sick and Mom took him to Arizona for a couple of years, leaving the rest of us alone in Whittier, I did a lot of the cooking, whipping up terrific suppers of canned chili, spaghetti, pork and beans, soup, even learned to fry eggs and potatoes. I could right now eat a can of pork and beans—cold! Yum. A western with mayonnaise. Jell-0 with bananas and whipped cream. A chicken salad on white, roasted marshmallows, a Coke float. But all I had was another antacid, so I ate it.
There was some fuss at the trial, I recalled, about the flavor of that torn Jell-O box used as a recognition signal between Gold and Greenglass: raspberry. Raspberry? Maybe this was just an in-joke down at the FBI: giving them the old raspberry. The flavor had to be red, naturally. I always liked raspberry Jell-O, I hoped they didn’t take it off the market now. It was one of the things Pat did very well. She baked good pies, too, like my mother did. While we were going together, she used to help Mom bake pies to sell in the store. Sometimes I had the feeling she was going with Mom more than with me, but I didn’t mind. Her own Mom had died young and Pat had had full charge of all the family chores when she was only thirteen, taking care of things until her Dad died, so she was right at home there in the kitchen. It was beautiful watching her make pies with Mom. She reminded me of Tillie the Toiler. And I was faithful Mac. Only a lot smarter.
I’d known a lot of girls, but not well. I’d helped them with their homework, served on committees with them, debated against them. But I’d only had one steady girlfriend before Pat—Ola—and she hadn’t appreciated me. Not that I hadn’t wanted to make out with almost every girl I ever knew. Oh no, I’d already wanted this when I was eight or nine years old, maybe younger, and there were times as the years went on when I could hardly stop myself from reaching out and grabbing a girl’s butt as she bent over a water fountain in the school corridor or brushed by me in a movie theater—but I couldn’t even talk to them right, much less grab their butts. I just couldn’t bring myself to say all the silly things I knew had to be said before it could be accomplished, this was my problem. Partly, too, it was shyness, of course—I had this Milhous face which made me look too serious and bookish to be any fun, and I didn’t know how to get around this. People don’t realize it, but I actually have to work harder, physically harder, to smile. They make jokes about my smiling calisthenics, but it’s not a joke really. I’ve always envied people like Dwight Eisenhower who are born grinning. I looked like a preacher the day I was born. Gloomy Gus, they called me. Maybe this was why Foster Dulles and I got on so well. And girls and I so poorly. They admired me for my brains and leadership, but they wouldn’t get in the back seat with me. They wouldn’t even go into the Sarah B. Duke Gardens with me. Sometimes this angered me, this inability to excite a girl beyond a kind of friendly respect, and I’d become momentarily reckless, but I was always disappointed.
And then came Pat. I’d been living like a monk at Duke and no better back home in Whittier. I hadn’t even kissed a girl in years when I met Pat that night at Little Theater tryouts. There she was, just like Jack Drown had promised: “a gorgeous redhead!” She was all the girls I’d ever dreamt of: she’d been an orphan, a student, a New York secretary, a hospital technician, waitress, librarian, movie extra, and salesgirl—and she was beautiful, industrious, popular, and Irish, to boot: it was fate. So that night I met her, the spirit of Christmas and homecoming and the New Year upon me, I proposed. That I did this, many people have found hard to believe and there have been a lot of stupid interpretations of it—even Pat thought I was joking, or else was some kind of nut: “I guess I just looked at him—I couldn’t imagine anyone ever saying anything like that so suddenly!” But to me it was just part of the was looking for a real adventurer like her Dad—a whaler, surveyor, prospector, and world traveler, who had finally married a poor widow in the Dakotas with two kids, and had settled down as a miner in Nevada to have three more, Pat being the last. It took her a while to realize that I was the adventurer she was looking for. She dated around a lot after that night we met, having to find out the slow way, while I waited, patiently playing my part. I didn’t put on any backstage rush, as I had with Ola. It wasn’t necessary, I knew. I’d read the ending. Sometimes I even drove Pat to her other dates. Didn’t matter, not at the time, I knew what had to happen. And eventually, after a couple of years, it did. On June 18, 1940. At first, I think, she’d identified me too much with the part I’d had in the play, but since then I’d—June 21, I mean. I was about to say that since then I’d shown her…never mind.
I pivoted in my chair to stare out the open window. It was a warm humid evening, very still, somewhat pregnant as though with rain, yet with a faint trace of the midsummer night’s light in the sky. Well, they’d made it, happy anniversary. I felt the leather straps, the electrodes, the hood: I realized that it made me sweat to think about getting electrocuted, anniversary or no anniversary. And how did they celebrate it? Seemed like they ought to be allowed to sleep together on the last night. If it was the last night—I shivered, remembering: the Phantom’s out there! That was what gave the night that heavy leaden feeling. What did Uncle Sam mean: “Even the Phantom’s having fun, I bet”…? I wondered if I should have driven home while it was still daylight. At least I was lucky I’d brought the car in today, it was too late now to bother my chauffeur. After midnight. I sighed, rubbed the back of my head. Perhaps, I thought, if I am ever electrocuted, my scar will prove to be a nonconductor and save me.
When was the last time a man and wife were executed the same day? French Revolution probably. Given the French sense of humor, they probably let them do it, but through the bars. Of course, there were no appeals then, anything could yet happen with the Rosenbergs—further delays, then a pregnancy, it could get to be a real mess. Still, think of it like the last meal, a final…ah, well, that was an idea, no risk of pregnancy either. Something I’d always been curious to try. Not with Pat, though. I could imagine the chewing out I’d get if I even brought it up. The Rosenbergs had no doubt tried everything. Since they were little kids maybe in the ghetto, being Jews and all. Ethel was two years younger than I was, around Don’s age, Julius was younger. We all probably went to the same movies, sang the same songs, read some of the same books. We were the Generation of the Great Depression. Now I demned to burn as traitors. What went wrong? Why was this necessary? Of course, they had had congress with the Phantom, I truly believed this, they had touched the demonic and so were invaded: and their deaths, I knew, would kill a part of the Phantom. What did it feel like, I wondered, to be possessed by the Phantom? Some said it was like swallowing a cold wind, others that it was a kind of fire that ran through the veins. Some believed he invaded through the eyes, like a hard light you could feel, others that he used the genital organs, that he could fuck like a man, but had no semen, leaving his chosen ones feeling all filled up, as though with an immense belch or fart they couldn’t release. I lifted one cheek. I was still okay, no difficulties at all. The Farting Quacker. Take that, you villain! Ungh! And that!
I sat there, firing shots at the Phantom, one part of my mind trying to plan out an orderly clean-up of the office so I could go home, the other part floating idly back through time, back beyond the Pink Lady and the Hollywood Ten, the Snack Shack on Green Island and Dick Nixon of the OPA, past all the torts and plays and campaigns and debating contests, to my childhood in California, recalling the lonesome train whistles in the night, the prayers and Bible verses at breakfast, the Rio Hondo near Jim Town, th
e fishing, the grinding sound of cranking up the old Ford, the smell of produce and plowed earth and hot tar, the nervous excitement of smoking cornsilks where Dad couldn’t see, the rusty taste of ice chips off the bed of the iceman’s wagon, the odd impression of my little brother’s clumsy kiss when I came home after a long time away, my first recital in the eighth grade when I played “Rustle of Spring.” But somehow these memories were mixed up with other images, just as vivid, but strange to me. I seemed to remember things that had never happened to me, places I’d never been, friends and relatives I’d never met who spoke a language I didn’t know. I recalled narrow streets filled with trucks, lined with crude stalls, stacks of trousers and shirts and underwear, chicken feathers in the gutter. I distinctly remembered a kind of tacked-up wooden cross with work gloves hanging from it, ties draped over it, sweaters and slips heaped and tumbled below, short fat men with glasses and flat-billed caps haggling with women dressed in long shiny black dresses and bell-like bonnets down around their ears. There was a hand-painted sign overhead of the bottom half of a man, with the words PANTS TO MATCH. A white nag hitched to a truck with wooden wheels, scales eight feet tall, barrels of fish, men in overalls shoveling chopped ice from wooden crates. A dingy room with no curtains on the windows, just a shade, some kind of pot, an old woman gabbling in a foreign language, the roar of vans and trains outside.
Hey—where did I get these memories? Me, a farmboy, born in Yorba Linda, California, the first child ever born there—it was so unusual there was an eclipse of the sun the next day. I lived all alone with Mom and Dad and my three brothers in a lemon grove and dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer on the Santa Fe. When I was school-age, we moved in to Whittier where Grandma lived—“Ye Friendly Town,” where folks believed in “plain living and high thinking”—just a meadow with scattered houses, chosen by the Quakers as a place to settle because of its remoteness from the blighted urban East: what did / know about the stink of sweatshops and fish markets and fifth-floor cold-water flats? Yet, sitting there in my swivel chair, wet with sweat myself and staring numbly out the window into the night, I could smell them, see them, it was very peculiar. And it was also somehow pleasant. I felt richer somehow. Girls with bobbed hair and plain cloth coats, clutching soft handbags to their flat bosoms, seemed to come walking toward me, heels clicking on the hot city sidewalks, ogled by men wearing vests and dusty pants. A fat Gypsy lady in a flowered blouse grabbed up a piece of material, stretched it, and an old man rose feebly to protect his small heap of goods. I saw the kosher live-chicken merchants on Delancey Street under the Williamsburg Bridge holding up their squawking birds, the heads rearing, wings flapping madly, saw doll buggies perched on wooden crates, men leaning over the slatted sides of pick-up trucks, saw huge rolls of newsprint piled on the sidewalk in the shadow of an elevated train on Canal Street, kids chasing each other, heard a window break—I ducked: no, it was still whole. They’ve found me, I thought. All the way from Sing Sing! My heart was beating wildly. I could hear it thumping in the empty room, the hollow night, the dark silence. I sat rooted to my seat, trying to force my mind back to Whittier, back to Yorba Linda…the picnics, the Sunday comics, the palm trees and sandlot ballgames, grinding hamburger in the store, sharpening pencils at school—
Public Burning Page 19
