Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  Now, in the hard light of day, scraping the bristle from my forty-year-old throat, freshly shampooed and showered, the sweat of yesterday’s ordeal sent safely down the drain, I could see that many of those associations from last night were more innocent than they’d seemed at the time. I’d pushed too long without rest or nourishment and had momentarily blown a few circuits in the memory-retrieval system, that was all. Opened up the gates and flooded the syntax routes. In fact, it could be fun, if you didn’t do it too often. Take that vivid image of Pat lying flat out on the bed, for example. I realized now that she was also somehow my little brother Arthur. And Mother was there all the time, though I don’t remember where. There was some kind of satire on the Rosenbergs mixed up in it, too, because at the time I had said to myself, watching Pat thrash about: “For peace, breast, and Moses.”

  Also, I realized now where some of those New York images might have come from, which last night had seemed so enigmatic. As a boy, for example, working in my folks’ store, I used to drive a pickup into the produce markets in Los Angeles in the early morning hours so I could get the fresh fruit and vegetables back in the store and ready for sale when we opened at eight. Not that L.A. was New York, but then neither was my image of New York New York. And for small-town kids like me back then, New York was like some kind of Jerusalem, an El Dorado. There were picture books and photos in the papers, newsreels, stereoscopes, and later, Tru-Vue films, all those movies about the great Empire City—who knows? those skylines in my mind may have been painted a few miles away in a Hollywood studio. The so-called Great White Way: invention of Warner Brothers probably. Washington Square. The Battery. The Chrysler Building and Astor House. And the Lower East Side: the mysterious ghetto with its hives of colorful immigrant populations, the place where the melting pot melted. Yes, we’d all been there. For a kid who loved baseball like I did, it was a real dream town, that was where the Babe and Lou and Burleigh and Red Ruffing lived, John McGraw and Zack Wheat, three great teams all in the same city—when I was a boy either the Yanks or the Giants were in the World Series almost every year, and more often than not, both of them. On street corners, we talked about New York. One of the first tunes I learned to bang out on the piano was “The Sidewalks of New York,” and even now I liked to play it and call up that city of my imaginings. I read a lot of books about the city, too, I think there was one by Horatio Alger with New York in the title, something about a poor kid whose real father turns out to be a millionaire, and that was where Wall Street was and the crash and the bread lines we read about. That’s right, no need to get upset last night by what seemed at times like telepathic messages from the Sing Sing Death House, I told myself, and pulled my cheek forward over my jawbone to examine the hidden stubble. “Just misses being handsome,” TIME had said. Just misses! If I‘m ever President, I thought, I’ll send that fairy to the boondocks and give the laureateship to Reader’s Digest, who deserves it anyway.

  It had all started, I remembered, with that inexplicable “memory” of the rented hall on Delancey Street where Julius and Ethel had met at a union ball, and I realized now, old piano tunes tinkling in the back of my head, where that vast gleaming waxed floor had come from: the Women’s Clubhouse in Whittier, across from the Bailey Street Park. Mom and Dad got married there. I‘d been in and out of that place all the time I was growing up—yes, the old Victrola in the corner, the kitchen…some of those pastoral images later on might even have come from the park out front. And the kids dressing around the kitchen coalstove: I‘d read in one of the FBI reports that that was the only heat Barnet and Tessie Greenglass had had in their Sheriff Street flat—the family used to huddle around it on cold afternoons, get dressed by it in the mornings. In the report, this was to show how poor they were and to make the point that poverty and injustice were “the parents of revolutionary idealism”—in other words, the poor, given their resentments, were not to be trusted, and if there were any trouble, it was smart to look there first. Naturally, this had reminded me of the stove we got dressed around in Yorba Linda, Mom full-bellied at the time with little Arthur. The Sam and Bernie Greenglass I had pictured might in a crowd have been mistaken for my own brothers Harold and Donald, and as for little Ethel’s naked bottom, well, to tell the truth, it had looked a lot like my daughter Tricia’s.

  Had I resented the implication in the FBI report that, because I had also had to dress around a kitchen stove on winter mornings, my life too might be suspect? Perhaps. But it was not the same. We lived in frost-free Yorba Linda, after all, home of the Mother Tree of the Fuerte Avocado in California, we rarely needed heat at all. And even if we weren’t rich, we were never resentful. We just got busy and improved ourselves. “Self-respect, self-regulation, self-restraint, and self-attainment!” my mother always admonished us. Strange I even remembered that kitchen coalstove, it was so long ago. No wonder it seemed like something in a dream! To think of the changes that this country had seen in the few years since I was a boy! Just look at that terrific layout Pat now had in her kitchen: who would want to change something that was working so well? These Communists were crazy. Every time I flicked a switch, adjusted a thermostat, started a car, boarded a plane, walked through automatic doors, flushed a toilet, or watched a record drop on a turntable, I loved America more. And not just for her material progress either, but for her great traditions as well. Like Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Church picnics and the Rose Bowl. The annual Congressional baseball game. The bonfire at Whittier College—it may seem frivolous to some that while Julius Rosenberg at the age of fifteen was circulating a petition for Tom Mooney, I nearly six years older was chairmanning the annual bonfire on Fire Hill and establishing a new all-time record by topping it, not with the traditional one-hole privy, but with a real four-hole collector’s item—“the hottest thing that ever happened at Whittier,” it’s been called—but anyone with any understanding at all of the American mainstream will know that in 1933 Tom Mooney was peripheral to it and that shithouse-crowned bonfire was dead center. Now, twenty years later, Julius Rosenberg was still outside, in fact he was colder than ever, while I was playing golf with Uncle Sam. Oh, he was still trying. Identifying himself with the Founding Fathers, black martyrs, and what he liked to call “the people.” But even that yellowed newspaper copy of the Declaration of Independence that he kept taped up on his cell wall, presumably to demonstrate his undying patriotism, was just one more sign of his alienation: the Declaration was never part of the mainstream either.

  On my office wall, by contrast, I had the Inaugural Prayer of President Eisenhower, framed and under glass: “Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong.” As I told the American Legion: “Among the great privileges that we enjoy is the privilege of hearing President Eisenhower pray at the beginning of his Inauguration. That could not happen in half the world today!” It was a treat, all right, listening to him, his voice high-pitched and straining against the cold, against the strangeness, the vast multitudes, somewhat snappish, militant, overeager, sing-songy at times, a bit tongue-tied and struggling to overcome it. “DEAR FRIENDS!” He really cracked that out, made us all jump. Wonder it didn’t start us giggling, but we were all new to this, afraid of forgetting our parts or getting assassinated or something. “Uh, BE-fore I begin… THE expression…of those thoughts…that I deem appropriate…uh-TO this mo-MENT…would you permit me the privlidge of uttering ay little private prayer of my own…and I ask that you bow your heads!” This was amazing, because for Dwight David Eisenhower, religion was something organized by the USO for the entertainment of the troops. When he was a kid it was what dragged you out of the crap games at the Herd on Sundays, and once out of Abilene he had rarely let it interfere with his life any longer. Asking no questions, he suffered no answers. For Ike, Jesus was some kind of loser, attractive to old ladies. Bowing your head in prayer was to make you look tougher and taller when you raised it again. Talking about religion, a consolation for the dying, could be bad luck for
a soldier—the less said about it, the better. And then, suddenly, standing there before us was the inspired visionary of the Inaugural Address—here, clearly, was a man who had gone to the center and seen the sacred. You could see it in the sweat on his brow, hear it in the constriction in his throat, the crack and thunder of “faith,” “freedom,” and “good and evil,” rolling off his tongue. “All-might-y GAWT!”

  He started going regularly to church again. He joined the National Presbyterian Church in Washington. He rejected the side-aisle pews used by Jackson, Pierce, Polk, Buchanan, Grant, and Cleveland, insisted instead on sitting “front and center.” He gave us frequent lectures on American history, tracing our lineage directly back to God. Jefferson’s phrase “We hold that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was like a tic with him, kept coming to his tongue. But it wasn’t the unalienable rights that interested him, it was the endowment by a Creator. “Thee Cree-AY-torr!” It was as though he’d never really believed in God until he discovered Him there in the Declaration of Independence. Maybe he’d read it for the first time while boning up for the 1952 campaign. “The Declaration of Independence established once and for all,” he liked to say, “that our civilization and our form of government is deeply imbedded in a religious faith. Indeed, those men felt that unless we recognized that relationship between our form of government and religious faith, that form of government made no sense.” Well, when an old soldier returns from the profane world to the sacred heart of his people, when he becomes overnight, without even realizing it, the workaday abode for the spirit of the race, we might expect such declarations. Indeed, the conversion of Dwight David Eisenhower was as great a proof of the immanence and immutability of Uncle Sam as the renewed preaching of the Disciples after their Good Friday dismay and dispersion was of the Resurrection of Christ. Even Ethel Rosenberg had come to recognize him as a “sensitive artist and devoutly religious man.” Clumsy as he was, you knew he was the one to know.

  I had always had this instinct, I always knew who had it, whether at school, in downtown Whittier, or in Washington. I learned right away to talk things over with Dr. Dexter, president of the college, and Dean Horack at Duke, with Herman Perry, manager of the Bank of America in Whittier, with Herbert Hoover and Murray Chotiner, Karl Mundt and Christian Herter, Tom Dewey, Foster Dulles and his brother—there was a certain vibration they had, and I always felt it. And who was Julie Rosenberg hanging out with? Losers like Morton Sobell and Max Elitcher and William Perl and Joel Barr. Collecting money for the Reds in the Spanish Civil War and signatures for the Scottsboro boys. Organizing the Students’ Strike for Peace. Instead of telling his deans and teachers how much he admired them, he insulted them. A great deal of time during the trial two years ago had been spent on describing the Rosenbergs’ adolescent activities, what was termed their “premature anti-fascism.” The defense objected, but this was demonstrably relevant, not to show “motivation,” as Judge Kaufman allowed, but to reveal the hidden patterns of developing heresy.

  The first thing I did when I went to Whittier College was help found a new fraternity, the Orthogonians (actually, we called ourselves the “Square Shooters”), which was a kind of bridge between the old-line Franklins with their fancy-dress rules and right-wing pride, and the more open but disorganized and apathetic independent students. Athletes mostly, Chief Newman’s boys, but we ran the politics and social scene as well. We met once a month down at Sanders’s cafe for our traditional symbolic meal, or sometimes I took the whole fraternity to Grandma’s house, and she and Mom fixed the beans and spaghetti. I was always generous like this. The Square Shooters was a real fraternity, all right, with all the usual hoopla, horseplay—I’ll never forget our christening ceremonies at a Wednesday-morning chapel service when Sheik Homan tried to break a bottle of Old Taylor over my head!—and campus politicking, but we were also innovators. True, we had “secret” symbols—a boar’s head and a square with “Beans, Brawn, Brains, and Bowels” as the four corners—and mottoes and special handshakes and I even composed a chapter song: “All hail the mighty boar, Our patron beast is he!” But at the same time, we got rid of the evening dress, fought against exclusivity, even initiated a Negro football star, shocked the whole campus with our risqué vaudeville skits and plays, most of which I wrote, and made a virtue of being a good guy instead of a rich guy. I’ve been making bridges like that between tradition and innovation ever since. In a very real sense, Julius Rosenberg was going to the electric chair because he went to City College of New York and joined the American Students Union when he was sixteen. If he’d come to Whittier instead and joined my Square Shooters, worn slouch sweaters and open collars with the rest of us, it wouldn’t be happening. Simple as that.

  Tricia and Julie were running up and down the stairs screaming, and I could hear Pat calling them down to the table. Breakfast was cooking. I had expected an upset stomach this morning, but instead I was simply hungry. I hoped that Pat grasped the fact that I was in a major crisis and was fixing corned beef hash for me with an egg on it. That I hadn’t come to bed all night, that I’d slept in my clothes on the living-room sofa, should be enough of a clue. Probably not, though. She could be pretty insensitive.

  I discovered, inspecting my face closely, that I’d somehow missed a patch of beard under my chin. Still not as alert as I ought to be. Hard to focus. I hadn’t completely shaken off all that happened last night. I had awakened with an erection, for example—luckily, Pat had come down to call me before the girls had seen it—and it still hadn’t gone away. I plugged in the razor again, grimacing at my face. Well, TIME’S right, I admitted, lifting my “fat cheeks” and staring down past my “duck-bill nose,” it’s true, I’m no goddamn Millard Fillmore. But then, what the hell, neither was Abe Lincoln. Once, a little girl came up to me with a news-magazine photograph to sign. After I’d autographed it, she thanked me and said: “It’s an awfully good picture. It doesn’t look like you at all.” I wondered afterwards if someone had put her up to it. But people have often registered an odd kind of surprise on first meeting me face-to-face. They tend to stare at my nose as though measuring its breadth, lost there and unable to find my eyes again. So, all right, I’ve often said that there wasn’t much that could be done with my face. In that regard I’m my own severest critic: it isn’t perfect; it’s never going to be.

  Cartoonists had had a heyday with it. Not even Julie Rosenberg, who had a genuinely sinister mug, right down to the weak chin, pointed nose, and pencil-line moustache, had had to take the kind of punishment I’d received every week from Herblock and the others. Picasso had actually made the sonuvabitch look handsome, very Anglo-Saxon, whereas Herblock always showed me as a jowly, wavy-haired, narrow-eyed tough, linked usually with McCarthy and Jenner, and with suggestions of some bad odor about me, like a little boy who’d just filled his pants or something. He hadn’t given any of us a day’s rest since we came into office back in January, you’d think we were invading Mongol hordes or something, instead of fellow Americans. His cartoon Ike looked a lot like Jiggs from “Bringing Up Father,” only daffier, he drew Herb Brownell like a kind of Dracula, and Joe McCarthy was shown as a sweaty, hairy, cleaver-wielding tramp. I don’t know about these other guys, but cartoonists had always had fun with my face. Already back at Whittier College, they were happily nailing me with a few harsh lines: a solid black bar for eyebrows (no eyes), a stretched ski-slope S for a nose, a small sour turndown comma for a mouth, encompassed by curly black hair cut square, little parenthetical ears, meat-platter cheeks, and a stiff neck—just three mean marks and a dark frame. I didn’t mind. It was one of the consequences of power. If not a condition: maybe politicians needed faces like that to become recognizable. Something to set you apart: people respected the almost magical force emanating from archetypes, no matter what sort, or who put them there. Or maybe the caricature came first and the face followed….

  “Dick!” Pat called from the foot of the stairs. The maid had
the sweeper going in the living room, and I could smell bacon frying on the stove in the kitchen. So much for corned beef hash. “Your car’s here!”

  “What—!” I glanced at my watch: holy shit! nearly eight! I was going to be late for the goddamn Cabinet meeting! I scrubbed my face angrily—it smarted where I’d hit the wall last night, but I deserved it for so much lollygagging—and applied talcum and deodorant, hobbled into the bedroom for a fresh white shirt, muttering irritably under by breath. I was ordinarily a very punctual man: down to breakfast every morning by seven, fruit, toast, a cup of coffee with a half teaspoon of sugar and a touch of cream, break up the squabbles between the girls, check the newspapers and thumb through the Congressional Record, get picked up by John just before eight, read The New York Times on the way in, and be at work in my office before most of my staff turned up. That I was nearly an hour behind this morning was yet another sign of how disturbed I was by this damned thing—I’ve got to get to the office, I thought with some anxiety, rushing stiff-legged down the stairs, knotting my tie on the run, folding a white handkerchief for my breast pocket, tripping over Julie’s doll Tiny, and taking the last of the stairs three at a time, and clean up that mess!