The Virgin Mary stumped her toe
On the way to Mexico!
On the way back she broke her back
Sliding on the railroad track!
Queevy, quavy, Irish Mary,
Stingalum, stangalum, buck!
He said the Indians had taught it to him.
Not that Uncle Sam was a secularist—how could he be? He was Uncle Sam, after all. Faith was essential to the Incarnation, it wouldn’t come off without it—“any deeply felt religious faith,” as Eisenhower liked to put it, “and I don’t care which it is.” True, by the letter of the Covenant, any would serve, but on the other hand, Uncle Sam clearly was not partial to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Voodooists, or Romanists. If he had any favorites at all, they were among people like Ezra Benson’s Mormons, the eccentric, evangelical, and fundamentalist sects nurtured here on this soil and here primarily, Adventists, Shakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Hardshell Baptists, Church of Christers, Four Square Gospelers…yes, and Quakers. And so I hadn’t been surprised at Jack Kennedy’s blindness, his blasphemies, and as always I’d held my peace when confronted by them: some men are born to greatness and some are not, no point in helping those who are slow to catch on. Especially a rich fucking Ivy League Brahmin like Kennedy—I hated all those guys, not personally, but because they didn’t play fair, they corrupted the American Dream with their bankrolled head starts: goddamn it, if they couldn’t sell penny candy and rescue millionaires like the rest of us, they could go to hell. I always thought that was how Uncle Sam saw it, too, that enthusiasm he had for the log-cabin starting line, but now suddenly there was this conversion: it could only mean one thing. I shrank miserably into my seat as the train pulled out, huddled in my rumpled clothes, smelling the acids of my fathers rise in an ancient indignation: the only good papist is a dead papist. Poo. I needed a fresh shirt and a deodorant, I stank worse than Sheba, but fuck it, I was past caring.
The car had filled up with festive exuberant people singing songs, uncorking hip flasks, drawing out mouth-harps and decks of cards, lighting up cigars…but no one had come to sit by me. Not that I gave a shit, that passion for anonymity was no joke with me, in school buses, at choir practice, on the bench at football games, at family picnics, I’d always had a place apart, I was the original Lone Ranger and wanted it that way, but still I didn’t like the implications—it was as though I’d been set up as a humpty dumpty and everybody smelled this on me, knew better than to get contaminated themselves. It was that same total isolation I’d been feeling since the fund crisis, like maybe Checkers had given me rabies or something, it was as though the last dozen years had not happened and I was back in Washington in the OPA, getting crapped on by the big-city Jews and Yalie New Dealers. Could I kill, I wondered? If it came to that, could I kill? Not something easy like the Rosenbergs, but this crowd in here…if they got in my way…? Why not? Killing was as meaningless as anything else. The only question was whether you risked getting killed yourself—and even that might be just another reason to go ahead and have a try. Not that I’m suicidal, I’d been scared all my life of dying and I was scared still. Yet I needed to confront it constantly. “That swarm of black thing.” I drew energy from it, only provided I didn’t name it. Though the threat of it paralyzed me, I was never so alive as when it threatened me. It made mere survival the central principle of my life. It molded my face. It made me reckless. I wanted to plunge into it and out the other side over and over again. It taught me that Self, though nothing, was everything. And it was what dragged me down the aisle that night in Los Angeles, when Dad took us boys in to Dr. Rader’s revival meeting. What a night! This was not the Friends Meeting House in tranquil reasonable Whittier. This was the goddamn truth. Awesome and fundamental. No play-acting piety here, no “Joy to the World,” there was a terrible choice to be made, and there were no third alternatives. Dr. Rader made one thing perfectly clear: the truth did not make you comfortable. I was wide open and ready for this—I had just started high school the day before and I wanted to bleed! We joined hundreds of others that night in making our personal commitments to Christ and Christian service. Or perhaps this was a formula for some transformation deeper than commitment. I remember the crying. How vulnerable my father looked. Jesus was like some kind of radiant loving cloud one walked through out of Death toward Progress. Toward true freedom. I believed. I thought: only in America could this happen!
We pulled out of the suburbs of Baltimore, picking up speed, and as I felt the train propelling me toward New York, I reminded myself, thinking back on that night in Los Angeles: whatever happens, there’s not much I can do about it now—start down the aisle, there’s no turning back. This is always true, the stream of events has a terrific force and momentum of its own. Once a man gets into an important position of leadership—mine, for example—he can set off a lot of big waves, but he can’t turn the river around completely. All about me, people were singing “Go Get the Axe” and “Tea for Two” and, changing the words somewhat to suggest the electric chair, “On Top of Old Smokey.” I didn’t join in, I felt less and less a part of them. I sat by myself, huddled up against the window in my homburg and sunglasses, reminded of the Inauguration: looking out over the stone banister at all those strange people. After the General’s pontifications, they had all erupted in whistling: wolf-whistles, they’d sounded like, as though it had been Eisenhower’s legs they’d liked, not his speech. Some applause, too, but the shrill brutish whistling was what you’d been able to hear best out there in that cold wind. Most people, I’ve found, are complete fools—that’s why it was so easy to get ahead, there just wasn’t any serious competition out there….
We were now ripping along through open country, and the excitement seemed to build as we drew toward New York. The air was heavy with smoke, singing, intense talk, and the smell of booze, which was beginning to make me nauseous. Nobody offered me any of the liquor getting passed around, but just as well. I loosened my collar, leaned my head back. Jesus, that was all I needed now, to get sick. Nothing to throw up, I knew. “Hollow, hollow—like the case against the Rosenbergs.” I’d missed lunch again, hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and though I couldn’t remember what I’d had then, I was sure it wasn’t much. No goddamn corned-beef hash, nothing that would have helped. All I could recall about breakfast was scolding the girls and barking at Pat, which I regretted, even if she did deserve it. She didn’t understand me any more, damn it. I had this big thing to do and she wasn’t paying any attention. She’d lost interest. She said she didn’t like politics—but it was me she didn’t like! I could never count on her when I was really down. Take election day two years ago against Helen Douglas: I was sure I’d lost, I knew my whole political career was ended, but I didn’t want to show this, I had to make it look like it didn’t matter. So I decided we’d all go to the beach. The children, too, I made everybody go. It was a terrible day, I admit, cold and gray, with a bitter offshore wind beating in—it seemed to confirm my worst suspicions and I reveled in its punishment. The girls cried and wanted to go home. I wanted to hit them. Instead, I smiled and told them to go dig in the goddamn sand and shut up. But the worst thing was that Pat didn’t understand either. She sat there on the sand wrapped up in a blanket, sulking and nagging, until I finally gave up and took them all home. I was so disgusted I just pulled up to the curb and dumped them out, then went off to a movie by myself. And now, Christ, she was even complaining publicly about my thrashing around in bed, about my jumping up in the middle of the night to take notes, waking her up with my sudden fears or enthusiasms—I’d made her the Number Two lady in the nation, did she think you got something like that for nothing? Some woman had wandered into the car and by request had sat down on the armrest of the empty seat beside me to sing “I’d Rather Die Young” for everybody, which was apparently a big new hit. I stared at the way her bottom plumped out over the armrest, thinking: I was the only goddamn faithful husband in national politics,
and where had it got me? Stranded here on the Whip with a carload of boozy loonies, the cockeyed Community of God. Cast Intact.
“Hey, how about ‘Down the Trail of Achin’ Hearts!’”
“‘Doggie in the Window!’”
“‘Changin’Partners!’”
I sat there in all that smoke and ruckus, feeling sour and overburdened, slumped over my broken fly as over the law books in Durham, wishing the whole thing would get called off somehow. The real crisis of America today, I thought sullenly, is the crisis of the spirit. I’d failed to button my shirt cuffs and the sleeves were bunched up inside my jacket. I knew I should stand and take the jacket off, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Besides, I was too nauseous. The thick smoke, the noise, the dust from the old seats were getting to me. I was afraid I might have a hay-fever attack. I leaned my head back again and from under the brim of my homburg read the blow-ups of letters written to the Rosenberg Clemency Committees, mounted over the windows and at each end of the car like advertisements…
To whom it may concern. All I say is why have they been wasting so much time when the government Knows how guilty they are!… Its traitors like these human snakes that cause wars. I say Kill them before our silly government turns them loose to cause further hell and treachery and torture to our Sons. Just because they are Jews like yourselves you selfishly want them released. You have taken over nearly all the U.S.A. you ungrateful Dogs. If your friends are released I’m no longer an American.
The distraction helped, but not much. I kept seeing Uncle Sam’s finger shooting out and trembling in front of my nose. Somewhere a glass smashed and a woman squealed.
Build a strong wailing wall with four sides, and put dear little Mammala and Papala Rosenberg in the big middle of this wailing wall in Sing Sing, and let them wail and wail and wail. What do the Jew$ do in return [for being] permitted to live in the U.S.? He is without exception the spy, the Saboteur, “Commies,” Left Wingers, Infiltrators, hate mongers and all around trouble-makers, to say nothing of their intense Zionism which makes Hitler look like an amateur.
These 2 Rats should of been hung long ago & so should you.
A good American
There were more, they were plastered all over the goddamn car, but I was getting too train-sick to keep on reading them. Jesus, we seemed to be picking up speed—racing through piled-up industry now, must be in New Jersey already, the slums and factories were racing past so fast you could hardly see them, flashing by like the flipping of pages in a picture book! Somewhere a whistle screamed, the wheels clacked and banged, I whacked my head on the window and my homburg fell off! I grabbed it up and pulled it down over my ears. The drunks in the car were now singing train-wreck songs at the top of their lungs, but they were completely drowned out by the thunderous ruckety-pucketa of the wildly careening Look Ahead, Neighbor Special. I like campaign trains, I’m no front porcher, but this was too goddamn much! I once read in a dictionary of quotations that politicians were said by someone to be “monsters of self-possession.” Well, we may show this veneer on the outside, but inside the turmoil could become almost unbearable, and that was how it was with me now, I wasn’t even doing so good on the outside! I was perspiring heavily, feeling very clammy, clinging to the seat with both hands. It had always been my lifelong conviction that a man should give battle to his physical ailments, fight to stay out of the sickbed, and learn to live with and be stimulated by tension—in fact, I once said these very words to Bob Taft to cheer him up when he first fell ill with cancer—but now, eyes squeezed shut against the impending disaster, mouth dry, stomach knotted up, and smelling very funky, all I could think of was: I quit! Just let me out of here!
20.
Yippee, the Divine Concursus
The sun is settling on the tips of the skyscrapers, the temperature crests at 85 degrees and out on the periphery begins to drop, the humidity begins to rise: out at the edges, one can feel the chill spread of shadows—the people, now arriving by the tens of thousands, press forward, into Times Square, into the center where it’s still warming up. Loudspeakers are turned on and tested out, and a bop-talking disk jockey from California is invited to emcee an hour or so of pop records: Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Ray, Harry Belafonte…“Hey, zorch, man!” his hepcat fans holler—which is fuzzbeard lingo for the “colossal!” of their folks’ generation—and their bodies start to swing and bounce, sending massive ripples through the tightening crowd like the wind blowing across Kansas wheat fields. Some weirdos turn up, Frisco fans of the deejay, with green hair and purple lipstick; they get absorbed (this place can absorb anything) but not imitated.
In between numbers, the disk jockey goes down into the mob with his “raving microphone” to interview dignitaries, zanies, and ordinary mortals against a background of teen-age screams, and to conduct a straw poll on which of the two spies should be burned first. Of the first thousand votes cast, 438 are for Julius, 417 for Ethel, but there are also a number of votes for Mayor Impellitteri, the Dragon Lady, Jackie Robinson, Alger Hiss, Kilroy, Syngman Rhee, Justice Douglas, and Clifton Fadiman, among others, and including one vote each for Mr. and Mrs. Richard Nixon and two for Harold Stassen. Bobo Olson and Paddy Young, who follow the Rosenbergs on the program tonight with a fifteen-round middleweight-championship fight, are intercepted ducking into Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant for some pre-bout sirloins: they vote sportingly for each other.
Out back, poking around in Dempsey’s garbage, is an old panhandler who has been working this area since it was Indian territory, long enough certainly to know that though the meat’s better over at Al and Dick’s Steak House, it’s also picked closer to the bone—lot easier to get a full meal back of Dempsey’s. This old man is, in his way, as good as a Ford or a Rockefeller at picking up the country’s loose change, though he’s been slipping a bit since the turn of the century. Now, as he makes his addled way down Broadway, gumming a T-bone, he encounters a gathering of millions. He blinks, casts a bleary eye at the clock over the Square, mops his brow in disbelief, then shrugs, pockets the bone, and hobbles hastily back to his cellar digs for his cap and overcoat.
Below the streets meanwhile in the Times Square subway station, now closed off to ordinary traffic and guarded by G-men, T-men, and city vice-squad detectives, the first trainloads of VIPs are beginning to pull in. The earliest to arrive are first-term Congressmen and their wives, minor administration officials, federal judges from outlying districts, pro-statehood delegations from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Formosa, and Alaska, and (in the line of duty) the Advisory Board on Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, but others of higher rank are not far behind. Handshaking and elbow-tugging, they circulate through the vast undergound complex, doing their best to impress each other and learn a few more names. Special bars have been set up for them, and they dip in cautiously, trying not to let the heat beneath the street and the gathering excitement make them soak it up too fast.
Some slip topside to peek out from backstage at the crowds rapidly filling the Square—still hours to go, and already the crush and jostle is terrific! They’d like to sneak out a minute and visit some of Walt’s sideshows, but they’re afraid they might not be able to make it back through the jam to their special reserved seats in the VIP section in time for the main proceedings. It’s going to be a big show all right—there are bands, choirs, preachers milling about backstage, the Pentagon Patriots have arrived and are unpacking their instruments, Gene Autry is tuning up and Nelson Eddy is gargling with lemon water—but what they all see when they look out is that bare twilit stage and the antique Rube Goldberg contraption bolted to the middle of it. The chair. Two people will sit there tonight and die. Without them, none of this would be possible. Those two are to the program what the soul is to the body: the inner mechanism that sums it up and gives it meaning. In the middle of the middle of the Western World stands this empty chair: and only the Rosenbergs can fill this emptiness. Not the Nazi war criminals, not the disloyal union agitators or
the Reader’s Digest Murderers, not even the grisly necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie can sit that seat tonight. For the Rosenbergs have done what none, not even these, may dream to do. They have denied Uncle Sam, defied the entire Legion of Superheroes, embraced the Phantom, cast his nefarious spell upon the innocent, and for him have wrested from the Sons of Light their most sacred secret: the transmutation of the elements. This is no mere theft, no common betrayal, and “plain, deliberate, contemplated murder,” as young Judge Kaufman has said, “is dwarfed in magnitude” beside their crime—for they have sought nothing less than the ultimate impotency of Uncle Sam!
Public Burning Page 45
