Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  Yet if one is filled with dread and loathing, he is also filled with awe. They have done something that has changed the world. Which of these petty politicians peeking out from backstage, listening to Georgia Gibbs sing “Kiss of Fire” over the p.a. system, has not dreamed of doing as much? But feared the price? The Rosenbergs have done it. They have propelled themselves toward the center with such ferocity that now not even Uncle Sam could prevent their immolation, and by doing so they seem for a moment to have brought History itself alive—perhaps by the very threat of ending it! Even their beggarly childhood on the Lower East Side, their clumsy romance, their abandoned children, their depressing withdrawn lives in the enemy’s service, acquire suddenly monstrous proportions, as if, by their treachery, new and appalling archetypes have been called into existence to replace the comforting commonplaces of “Stella Dallas” and “Young Widder Brown” being broadcast this afternoon across the nation on NBC radio. Everything they have touched seems suffused now with a strange dark power: this book or habit, that console table, this wristwatch. For years they kept on a shelf a coin-collection can labeled SAVE A SPANISH REPUBLICAN CHILD. Which child is that, and saved for whom? Replicas of this can are being sold by the dozens out there in the Square this afternoon, but there’s no magic in them—where is the original, they all wonder, what its force? Even Julius’s Talmudic name “Jonah,” Ethel’s mysterious “Madame” at the Carnegie Hall Studios, the inverted links with America’s historic heritage in the location—Monroe Street, Knickerbocker Village—of their one-bedroom flat on the Lower East Side seem to hint at uncracked codes, unpenetrated conspiracies.

  The disk jockey breaks for the five-o’clock news: Still no confessions. The Rosenbergs are playing it right down to the wire. The Phantom is said to be active in Milan and Genoa, Paris, London, and Teheran, but all this is coming to seem very remote. No breakthroughs in Korea or Berlin—if anything, the situations are worsening—and in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a housewife has been injured by a stray shell from an atomic cannon while lying at home in her own bed. Zap. Disquieting, but these frenzied last-gasp activities of the Phantom are to be expected as the hour of the executions draws near. Up in Queens, a forty-year-old window cleaner drops out of his safety belt to his death, there are floods in Bombay, somebody gets shot in Chicago. Weather forecast: a heat wave is predicted. No doubt.

  As far as the old panhandler can tell, it has already arrived. He has made it back into the Square, dressed now in his winter overcoat and stocking cap, newspapers stuffed round his feet in his old brogans. He works his way sweatily down a long line of tourists, who are evidently waiting to get into some picture show or something. They all want to take his picture, but that’s all right, he’s used to that—many’s the time he has poked in a wastebasket or curled up on a park bench under newspapers out of sheer narcissism—and anyway it tends to loosen the bigger coins. Dumb tourists are all underdressed, he notes, mopping his face with the frayed ends of his tattered muffler. Not all of them are friendly either: some are parading around gloomily, shouting for justice and shouldering provocative placards. Not only do these types never give him a nickel, they have a way of souring the trade. But luckily they are being shunted out of the area by police and pushed to the south. The old panhandler nearly gets swept up in this net when somebody on the run thrusts a sign in his hand, but fortunately the sign reads CHRIST SAVE US FROM A DEATH LIKE THIS, and the police assume the old man’s a walking advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous. “Hottest goddamn New Year’s Eve in living memory!” he’s heard to mutter as he bulks along in his thick wraps. One thing about it, though: people are generous this afternoon. Part of the ancient year-end superstition about wasting your goods to ensure a fat year. His pockets are heavy with jangling coins; he hopes he lives long enough to spend them.

  The disk jockey, cooling his bop patter and moving toward the center, has slipped sentimentally into his hayseed act, giving a recipe for crawfish pie, telling a joke about a girl who got run over on the tracks of history (“The track was juicy, the juice was Lucy!”), and loading up his turntable with hillbilly hits by the late and great Hank Williams, tunes appropriate to the occasion like “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” and “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” and “Sundown and Sorrow” and

  Hey, good lookin’!

  Whatcha got cookin’?

  How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?

  Williams, just twenty-nine, died mysteriously on New Year’s Day, about the time the Rosenbergs were granted their stay of execution for the Clemency Appeals, and many wondered at the time whether or not his death in the back seat of one of Uncle Sam’s convertible Cadillac super-mobiles might not have been a long-planned Phantom counterattack which had somehow gone off prematurely. “Ever since the coming to this world of the Prince of Peace, there has been peace in the valley!” the Montgomery Baptist Church preacher said at the funeral, standing beside the huge white floral piece that carried the legend I SAW THE LIGHT, and most folks assumed he was talking about Hank Williams. After all, he’d died even younger than Jesus. His small ghostly voice now flows thinly, sweetly, from a hundred amplifiers, filling the warm streets, singing the sun down, drawing the Square and indeed all of midtown America into a kind of hypnotic trance with its doleful messages from the other side…“There’ll be no teardrops tonight,” he sings. “Rootie tootie…!”

  The trance is broken by the sudden arrival of the city mayor Vincent Impellitteri with a burst of glad tidings: he has just signed into law a bill permitting the sale of liquor in public theaters, and, the whole Times Square area being proclaimed one, booze is on the way! Amid the wild cheering, makeshift bars are thrown up by the boys from City Hall, bottles are broken out, orders taken. Tension has been mounting all day, and most everyone can do with a few snorts right now. It is impossible to get within two miles of Times Square by car or van, so ice and paper cups are dropped in by helicopter. The whiskey is replenished by a kind of bucket brigade from the periphery, and in the jubilant and prodigal mood of the moment, there’s no need to watchdog the supplies: what some people take for nothing, others gladly pay twice for. The old panhandler can’t believe his luck. Not only is he beginning to feel like the Bank of America, but people are setting him up faster than he can toss them down. “Thank ye, son! Need a little somethin’ to (burp!) warm the ole innards, tain’t easy sleepin’ out nights in a blizzard, not at my age! God bless!” But this is just the old litany, blizzards be damned, he’s in fact sweating like a stoat, his coat weighs a ton and scratches his poor hide, and he’s beginning to wonder if somebody is finally out to get him for good, cutting the years in half. He starts to lift a tourist’s watch, then decides to ask what time it is first, lift it after. “Howzat? Just past five? Well, well, thank ye, sir! Long life!” That’s it, then, another six hours and then some before the ball drops—if he doesn’t get soused and blow it all, he could leave here a rich man. The watch is gold, but very lightweight—don’t make them like they used to. The tourist buys him a whiskey. “Here’s spit in your eye, son!” he chortles with a sideways wink at the bartender (one born every day, ain’t it the truth!), and tips back his cup. There’s a crush around the bar, and a kid behind him buys him a refill. The bartender scratches about for another fifth. “Hey, ye still got almost seven hours to go, johnny!” the old man says cheerily. “Y’ain’t gonna have enougha that (wurp!) sneaky pete to last!”

  The bartender glances at his fob watch. “Naw, just three hours now, old-timer, and it’ll be all over.”

  “Wha—?!” Now he’s sure they’re finishing him off. Sonuvabitch, just when he was striking a real seam at last! He throws down the drink, stuffs the paper cup in his pocket, and decides to work his way out in the general direction of his digs, so he can at least die in his own bed like a proper gent. If he can get through—whew! his pockets are so heavy he can barely move, and he wonders confusedly if he’s being treated to some unpleasant moral on the accumulation of capital. Thi
s is the worst he’s ever seen it!

  It’s true, they’re really piling in now, everybody jamming up together, old and young, great and small, of all creeds, colors, and sexes, shoulder to shoulder and butt to butt, missionaries squeezed up with mafiosos, hepcats with hottentots, pollyannas with press agents and plumbers and panty raiders—it’s an ingathering of monumental proportions, which only the miracle of Times Square could contain! And more arriving every minute: workers in dungarees, millionaires in tuxedos, pilots, ballplayers, sailors, and bellboys in uniform, brokers in bowlers, bakers in white aprons tied over bare bellies. Certainly this is the place to be, and anyone who’s anyone is here: all the top box-office draws and Oscar winners, all the Most Valuable Players, national champions and record holders, Heisman Trophy and Pulitzer Prize winners, blue ribbon and gold medal takers, Purple Hearts and Silver Stars, Imperial High Wizards, Hit Paraders, Hall of Famers, Homecoming Queens, and Honor Listees. The winners of small-town centennial beard-growing contests have all come, the year’s commencement speakers, class valedictorians, and quiz-show winners, the entire Social Register, the secretariat of Rotary International. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Yehudi Menuhin, Punjab, Dick Button, who isn’t here? Gary Cooper hoves into view up in the Claridge, wagging his shiny new Oscar from High Noon and doing his much-loved toe-stubbing aw-shucks Montana grin for all his admirers, both on the House Un-American Activities Committee and off—he’s been one of the top ten box-office draws for thirteen years running now—only Bing Crosby has been loved so long so well. Uncle Sam has provided Coop a special position tonight in a third-floor window of the Claridge where he can both see and be seen, along with other Hollywood stars friendly these past years to HUAC’s efforts to shrive and scour Movieland—good Americanists like Jack Warner, Elia Kazan, Bob Taylor, Ronnie Reagan and Larry Parks, Budd Schulberg, Ginger Rogers, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou. Others, more suspect, like Bogie and Bacall, Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel, and Edward G. Robinson (his true identity, after all, is Emanuel Goldenberg of Bucharest!), are shunted off to the periphery, where they’ll be lucky, standing on tiptoes, to see a few distant sparks fly.

  Harry James arrives, snaking his band through the thickening mob toward the Hotel Astor, where they’ve got a gig up on the Roof—their rendition of “Ciribiribin” will be featured tonight during the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. Paulette Goddard’s in the crowd, José Iturbi and Consuelo Vanderbilt, John L. Lewis and George Mikan. Esther Williams turns up in her tanksuit, hand-in-hand with the Oscar-winning cat-and-mouse team, Tom and Jerry—and old Mickey Mouse himself is there, too, celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday and elbowing his way through the crowd with Minnie, Goofy, Horace, and the rest of the aging Rat Pack. It’s also Eastern Airlines’ twenty-fifth birthday tonight, and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker has brought four thousand of his employees to the Square to celebrate it. The deejay, from his prominence, catches a glimpse of the famous bald pate of John Reginald Halliday Christie, the polite bespectacled necrophile, brought over here from London to model for wax museums before his hanging (the Mother Country is still catching on to electricity) next month, and in his honor plays Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues” and “I Can’t Help It.” It is said that Christie—who murdered at least seven women, including his wife Ethel, and copulated with their corpses, sent an innocent man to the gallows and earned two commendations as a member of the Police War Reserve for “efficient detection in crime”—was wounded in World War I, just like tonight’s Official Executioner Joseph Francel, by mustard gas. Patterns everywhere. Little Reggie, led through the Square by a brace of English bobbies, gazes gently at all the women, leaving a wake of frothy excitement. Some women are frightened, some smile, some faint, some come to orgasm. It’s supposed that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, invited here tonight to pursue his celebrated studies into the effects of electrocution upon the erogenous zones, cannot be far behind.

  In such a pack-up there’s a natural rush on anything cold and wet. Some of the bars near the center are running out of liquor—the bottle brigades are drying up before they get all the way in, so heavy is the demand further out—and there’s talk of getting Eddie Rickenbacker to fly supplies in. Ice cream vendors are being mobbed, and nobody cares any more whether it’s Cherry-Oonilla or not. Fights break out, ice cream is shoved in faces, bottles shatter, people jab each other with their I LIKE KIKES buttons. Marquees read WE ARE SWINGING ROUND THE CIRCLE and THE FIERY TRIAL THROUGH WHICH WE PASS WILL LIGHT US DOWN IN HONOR OR DISHONOR TO THE LAST GENERATION, while around the Times Tower in electric lights circle the oracles of the American Prophet Gil Imlay…

  EVERYTHING HERE GIVES DELIGHT * * * SOFT ZEPHYRS GENTLY BREATHE ON SWEETS AND THE INHALED AIR GIVES A VOLUPTUOUS GLOW OF HEALTH AND VIGOR THAT SEEM TO RAVISH THE INTOXICATED SENSES * * * FAR FROM BEING DISGUSTED WITH MAN FOR HIS TURPITUDE OR DEPRAVITY, WE FEEL THAT DIGNITY WHICH NATURE BESTOWED UPON US AT THE TIME OF CREATION * * *

  Backstage, Uncle Sam, fresh arrived from his containment exercises out in the receding world, is watching all this ravishment and dignity through a peephole cut in the set for the purpose, the profane muscles of his face in tune for laughter and a merry twinkle in his steel-blue eyes. “Great balls of fire!” he whoops. “This may be the biggest thing since we struck oil at Titusville!” With him are some of the night’s key performers, due to go onstage any moment for the early part of the show, as well as a few of the heavyweights up from the VIP subway shelter for a sneak peek at the congregation. Which in its glow and vigor is getting a bit unruly. They seem to have been invaded by a certain anxiety out there, a certain exultation now that the sun has slipped behind the skyscrapers, a giddy sense of being at the edge of something terrific—like a striptease or the end of gravity or an invasion from Mars. There are whoops and screams and loud laughter. People are pressing into the sideshows not so much to see as to join them. Teetotalers elbow frantically toward the bars, shy clerks pinch bottoms and make naughty remarks, tourists forget their cameras, businessmen toss off their jackets, empty their pockets. The police are still managing to keep a semblance of order, but they can’t help being a little excited themselves—no matter which way they turn, or how quickly they whirl about, there’s always somebody behind them they can’t see, goosing them with electric shockers.

  The Secretary of Agriculture, up for a glimpse of the festivities, objects piously to all this sensuality. “Pshaw! We need it, Ez—sex’ll cause the flame to grow,” retorts Uncle Sam. “You gotta plow up a field before you can grow something in it—what in tarnation did you think agriculture was all about, my friend?”

  Messengers arrive from the subway station below with roll-call lists: most of the Supreme Court has arrived, as well as hundreds of Congressional leaders and State governors, the members of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, the Rosenberg prosecution team and jury, J. Edgar Hoover and his boys, the Executioner and Guest Speakers. “Sir, before God and his chilluns, I believe the hour is come,” grins Uncle Sam, glancing over the rolls, “to hot up the brandin’ arns, open up the gates, and get this ro-day-oh under way! Yessirree bob! my judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is flat in it! I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-lookin’ varmints to my side!”

  There’s an excited backstage hustle and bustle, rippling all the way down into the station below. Ties are straightened, pants hitched, drinks drained, hair primped, crotches fiddled, lips licked, brows wiped nervously. This is it.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” someone calls out. “Where’s Dick Nixon?”

  21.

  Something Truly Dangerous

  The sun was slipping off toward the western horizon, dipping down over the Catskills, as I stepped off the empty train and into the streets of Ossining. I felt a little like one of those beardy desperadoes arriving at a dusty Hollywood cowtown for the final showdown. On the other hand, it was like coming home. Not to Sing Sing, of course, hunkering up on the bluff to my right like some impenetrable medieval fortr
ess, ringed round with its high turreted ramparts (or else like a cluster of friendly red-brick schoolhouses sitting in a sunlit playground—everything seemed double-edged like that since my sudden decision to come here, full of promise and danger at the same time), but to this familiar suburban Main Street with its squat three-story buildings, its scattered fleet of dented Fords and Chevies, its shops and billboards promoting all the recognizable brand names. I didn’t know whether I was going to be met by the Sheriff or by Mom and Dad. Or which was the more threatening prospect. The very familiarity of this place could be a kind of bait, I recognized. An elaborate trap. Maybe Mom was the Sheriff. Not literally, of course, but she was the one I’d turned away from back there in Penn Station, and if I was walking with either of them now, it was the rebellious and hot-blooded old man, not her. The people streaming past me into the station, rushing for tickets on the southbound trains, might well have been found on the streets of Whittier, all right: middle-aged men in shirtsleeves and suspenders, ladies in unfashionable summer dresses, low-hemmed and sleeves to the elbows, a lone Negro—a trusty maybe—idly sweeping out the station. We had a Negro in Whittier, too. What we didn’t have out there, though, were all these cops—they were all over the place, it was like a goddamn military occupation. All this protection was a relief in a way. But also unnerving, given the reason for my being here. They might not all agree I was on their side. Some boys were playing marbles down by the tracks. That was what Tyler was doing, I recalled, when the Incarnation hit him: playing marbles. Yes, anything could happen. Or nothing. Very scary, but there was no turning back. Courage and confidence, I told myself. The valiant never etc. The choice has been made: now live with it.

  I hadn’t reached this decision in the calmest of circumstances. In fact it was just when the horseplay aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special had really started to peak that it had come to me what it was I had to do. But this was to be expected: in a critical situation it wasn’t supposed to be easy, and I often got my best ideas just when the going was toughest. We hadn’t crashed, as I’d feared, but we hadn’t slowed either—if anything, we’d started screaming along faster than ever, and the closer we’d drawn to New York, the sicker I’d become and the wilder the scene around me. The songs had got dirtier, the laughter louder, people were wandering around a lot, exchanging flasks and getting very playful with each other. A couple of young legal assistants up at the other end of the car had got into a scuffle that no one had seemed to want to break up. Girls were squealing giddily. A plump prissy clerk from the General Accounting Office, strutting fruitily up and down the aisle in crushed field hat, sunglasses, and corncob pipe, and singing “Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fly Away!”, had slipped on some spilt booze and crashed into the arms of TIME’S showman kid brother LIFE, launching what had showed every sign of becoming an outrageous romance. Anything to keep LIFE busy. The sonuvabitch had been snapping a lot of pictures, probably for one of those anthropological features, “LIFE Goes to a Party,” and the popping flashgun had been making me very goddamned edgy. The few drunks with any voice left were singing “Roll Your Leg Over”…