Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  What—? Had they talked? Was it all over? This ruins everything, I thought. Forget it. Turn back now, and you’ll still have time to make it to Times Square for the ceremonies. I jerked around and started to run back down the hill. But then I reasoned: if they had confessed, what were all these cops doing here? The Phantom would have no use for the two of them now. I tried to reconstruct the sentence. Lot of possibilities: if the Rosenbergs confessed, had the Rosenbergs confessed, whenever the Rosenbergs confessed—I spun around on my heel again and started back up the street. The moustache blew off and I had to press it on again. People were staring at me now. I tried to cool it. I knew this was the most difficult period in a crisis situation, the period of indecision: whether to fight or run away. It was important not to commit yourself irrevocably to a course of action until you absolutely have to do so. Otherwise you’re just shooting from the hip, you can miss the target and lose the battle out of sheer recklessness. On the other hand, I’d already passed through this period, hadn’t I? Back at the office? On the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special? In Penn Station? Which period was I in, then? I was very edgy and short-tempered, and I was afraid I might blow my stack and throw a tantrum or something. I thought of my old man, doing everything wrong, raging futilely against the world: I’m no better than him! I tried to tell myself that if I didn’t feel keyed up like this, it would mean I wasn’t ready, mentally and emotionally, for the conflict ahead, but I was too upset to listen to such bullshit. My stomach was boiling, my nose was running with hay fever, and my need for a toilet was getting desperate.

  Back on Main Street, I spied a drugstore and crossed over to it. Get some antacids. Find a John maybe. But when I peeked inside, I saw that the place was full of troopers lounging about in their snappy but grim black and gray uniforms. I ducked my nose into a revolving rack of postcards outside the door: tinted pictures of the Calvary Baptist Church, Jug Tavern, the Half Moon, and a tombstone pierced by a cannonball in Sparta Cemetery. I was trying to think, but my mind was a blank. “Ossining is a Sint Sinck Indian word meaning ‘stone upon stone,’” said a card depicting the first prisoners setting up the original old marble cell block, said to be still standing. Maybe that was where they were. No, here was the new Death House. There were postcard portraits of famous local Revolutionary War heroes and Death House victims, complete with their last words. Cartoons, too—crude jokes about the electric chair, last meals, and manacled prisoners fantasizing, pissing on their jailers, being tortured with near-naked girls: “Okay, Miss Ladoo, that’ll be enough for today!” A prisoner pulling his pants off on one side of a screen, a visitor lifting her skirts on the other, and a cop dashing up, shouting: “Hold it, Diddlemore!”

  Inside, the troopers were sucking milk shakes and horsing around with a young high-school girl behind the soda fountain, elbowing each other slyly, looking bored and horny at the same time. I recognized them. The first team. All suited up. A little kidding around, a little grab-assing, ball-tugging, just loosening up for the big game, no harm meant, no rapes intended. One of them was playing a pinball machine that said HOT STUFF along the top, and on the jukebox somebody was singing “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night.” Maybe I should risk it, I thought. They won’t even notice me come and go. A caramel milk shake might be just the thing I needed, better even than antacids. Or maybe pineapple. I adjusted my moustache and started forward, feeling uneasy, on the wrong side of things somehow—like that day long ago when I entered a strange drugstore to purchase my first packet of prophylactics and found myself face to face with a man who looked like my grandmother. That time, in panic, I’d bought a lotion for athlete’s foot instead. Today it was an old woman who looked like Herb Brownell. She met me in the doorway and said: “What’ll it be, mister?”

  “Uh…this one!” I croaked, reaching blindly behind me and grabbing a card. I fished for a nickel. “And…uh…could you tell me, please, the best way up to the, uh, prison?”

  “Sure, bud,” she said eyeing me suspiciously. She pointed: “Right over, uh, there: uh, Hunter Street.” Was she mocking me? Behind her, the cops had stopped joshing the little soda jerk and were staring dully out at me. I pocketed the postcard, thrust a coin at the old lady, and fled, nearly crashing into the side of a passing taxi. Behind me, I heard hard belly laughter, and it made my stomach knot up and my knees quake. But I was on the way at last.

  At the entrance to Hunter Street, however, I was stopped cold: “Sorry, mac, visiting hours are over.” He was a big potbellied gray-haired cop in a short-sleeved blue shirt, wet in the armpits.

  “The Warden’s expecting me,” I said as gruffly and matter-of-factly as I could. “Greenleaf…uh, Thomas—”

  “Sure he is, sure he is,” said the cop sourly, staring vaguely over the top of my head, as though I were too insignificant to be seen. He had a thick hairy nose and small pale eyes: a German, I supposed.

  “Listen,” I said, “believe me—”

  But the cop was busy with two guys who had come up behind me, wearing straw hats down over their noses, unknotted ties, and carrying big Speed Graphics. They flashed some kind of pass, press cards probably, and the cop let them through. I didn’t have one. The next guy did have one, though, and he still didn’t get through. “I’m sorry, bud, but we’re just too crowded.” The man shrugged, we exchanged commiserating smiles.

  “Hey, you know that guy?” snapped the fat cop, squinting darkly at me, one hand on his pistol butt.

  “Wha—? N-no!” I gasped. I felt like I used to feel around Ola’s old man: shabby, obsequious, guilty.

  “Who was it?” asked another cop, wandering by with a walkie-talkie.

  “Fuckin’ Daily Worker reporter. He had a lotta fuckin’ nerve.”

  “Judas, I’ll be glad when this thing is over,” sighed the cop with the walkie-talkie.

  The fat cop shrugged heavily and mopped his brow. “A job’s a job.”

  “Yeah, so long as the damned you-know-who don’t show up,” said the other one.

  “The Phantom? Shit, I wish he fuckin’ would,” snarled the fat cop, hiking his gunbelt. “I’d love to tangle asses with that greasy cocksucker. I bet he ain’t half what he’s fuckin’ cracked up to be!”

  “Half’s enough,” the other one said, giving me a long inquisitive stare. “Who’s the dude in the handlebars and funny bags?”

  “A crasher. Says his name is Nature Boy.”

  “Greenleaf,” I corrected, but I knew it was hopeless. I could see the prison up the hill at the top of the street, so close and yet so far.

  “Thomas Greenleaf?” asked the cop with the walkie-talkie. “It’s all right, Frank. The Chief said to let him through. The Warden’s waiting for him.”

  Frank shrugged and waved me by, moving to stop some other guy coming up behind me. Made it after all! I braced my shoulders and strode by them—but then the cop with the walkie-talkie grabbed me as I passed: “Hold on there a minute, pal!”

  “Eh? What—?! You said I—”

  “It’s your moustache,” he said, leaning down to whisper in my ear: “You got it on upside down!”

  “Oh! Uh, right…!” Just as well. It was beginning to itch, and changing it around gave me a chance to scratch. The cops’ laughter, though, I could have done without.

  It got more congested the further up the hill I went. There were other checkpoints, but they were easier to get through than the first: the weakness of all security systems. Once you cracked the periphery, the rest got easier. But not all that easy. At the prison parking lot, I found at least a hundred and fifty reporters and cameramen, some of whom I recognized, and nearly that many more police, among them the Sheriff of Westchester County, apparently a guest of honor in the cavalcade that would soon transport the Rosenbergs to Times Square. “Anything stirring below, Sheriff?” a state trooper asked him.

  “Nope, all quiet,” he said. “Nothing but Republicans down there.” Everybody laughed. Even I was laughing, it was like someone was pulling my face and shaking i
t.

  “They say there’s trouble brewing up in the city,” a reporter said.

  Somehow I had to find a way past all these guys without being recognized. Access was through a gate in a wire fence behind all these people. There were more guards there, then another heavier gate in a thick wall, the prison beyond that. I’d expected gray blocks of marble—stone upon stone—like an old castle, but most of the walls and buildings in fact were made of brick. Brick and concrete. It was large, but it had seemed larger from below. Impregnable, just the same. And archetypal: probably those familiar hexagonal watchtowers with the peaked roofs gave you this feeling. Just like in the Raft and Cagney movies. You could get nostalgic about this place if you hung around long enough. The guards in the towers were armed and wore dark sunglasses. They seemed very relaxed. They reminded me of the captains of some ships I’d been on. There was some kind of walk up through the chopped granite hillside by the north wall: maybe there was a way in through the back. But one of those towers hovered over the place where the walk began, with a lot of smiling cops gazing down. Not a chance.

  I stood for a few uncertain moments in the sun at the edge of the parking lot, near a bank of telephones hanging exposed on a fence there. I reasoned: if somebody comes up to me suddenly, I could duck my head over a phone and give someone a call. I realized I’d probably call Pat. I was sweating heavily and my moustache kept slipping. The sun was dropping over the river: time running out. It was now or never. A couple of reporters turned my way, apparently coming to use the phones. I stepped brusquely out into the parking lot as though heading for my car, then turned on my heel and walked straight toward the gate. My moustache fell off: I grabbed it, clutched it in my fist. My heart was pounding away a mile a minute, but I remained outwardly cool. Courage—or, putting it more accurately, lack of fear—is a result of discipline. Any man who claims never to have known fear is either lying or else he is stupid. I was afraid, all right, I knew a lot was at stake, but I’d made up my mind to do this, and now I had to carry through. I was famous for this, this stubborn carry-through, everyone from my mother to Uncle Sam had noticed it, I probably couldn’t do otherwise. But I felt like I’d felt getting into that cage with Sheba. There was a sign at the gate:

  DEAD

  STOP

  END

  I felt a rush of activity around me as I bulled forward. People turning to stare. Reporters lifting their cameras. Guards rushing toward the gate. Christ, I thought, afraid to look up at the towers, they might even try to shoot me! I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be. All I could think of was Greenglass, but that wasn’t it. I glanced up and saw that on the other side of the fence some guy was barreling straight at me with a magazine held up in front of his face like a mask. In my panic I thought it might be me! That I was charging straight at a mirror! That I’d been inside all the time and was rushing out! But that there was no “out”! If life is all free flow, I wondered, bracing myself for this astounding collision, then how do such things happen? And if it is not, then what the hell am I doing here?

  INTERMEZZO

  Their lips have remained sealed and they prefer the glory which they believe will be theirs by the martyrdom which will be bestowed upon them by those who enlisted them in this diabolical conspiracy, and who, indeed, desire them to remain silent.

  —JUDGE IRVING R. KAUFMAN

  We shall never try to placate an aggressor by the false and wicked bargain of trading honor for security.

  —DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER,

  Inauguration Address, January 20, 1953

  Human Dignity Is Not for Sale

  A Last-Act Sing Sing Opera by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  CAST

  Julius Rosenberg, prisoner (tenor)

  Ethel Rosenberg, prisoner (soprano)

  James V. Bennett, Federal Director of the Bureau of Prisons (baritone)

  The Warden (bass)

  The Turnkey

  A Matron

  Choral effects, courtesy of Congressional Records under the direction of The Hon. Hale Boggs, Paul Shafer, Edward Martin, Overton Brooks, Frank Bow, Clarence Kilburn, Morgan Moulder, et al.

  SCENE 1

  The Sing Sing counsel room at 11 a.m., Tuesday, June 2, 1953. JAMES is standing near the back wall under a huge diagram, much larger than life, of an electric chair with its various auxiliary elements: a dynamo, excitor, rheostat, volt and ampere meters, switches, attachment sockets, and so on, all of it wired up, labeled, and complete with instructions, JULIUS is brought into the room by the TURNKEY, who then retires, closing the door behind him. JULIUS glances curiously after the TURNKEY’S departure, since this is the first time he has ever been alone with anyone without an officer or Sing Sing official present. JAMES allows JULIUS to do a few anxious turns onstage, then steps forward to commence the Overture:

  JAMES

  (Overture:) Mr. Brownell, the Attorney General, sent me to see you and he wants you to know that if you want to cooperate with the Government you can do so through me.

  Furthermore, if you, Julius, can convince the officials that you have fully cooperated with the Government, they have a basis to recommend clemency!

  JULIUS

  (visibly shocked but struggling to maintain his temper and self-control)

  In the first place, we are innocent!

  That is the whole truth, and therefore we know nothing that would come under the meaning of the word “cooperate!”

  JULIUS

  JAMES

  (Duetto angoscioso:) It isn’t necessary to beat me with clubs, but such a proposal is like what took place during the middle ages!

  It is equivalent to the screw and rack! Why, do you know that I didn’t sleep last night when I knew I had to see you and Ethel the next day and talk to you about this matter?

  I was terribly worried!

  JULIUS

  How do you think we feel, sitting here waiting for death for over two years when we are innocent?

  (Aria:) My family has gone through great suffering!

  My sister had a breakdown!

  My aged, ailing mother is tormented!

  Our children have known much emotional and mental agony!

  Then you talk to us about this?

  Remember, Mr. Bennett, we love our country!

  It is our home, the land of my children and my family!

  We do not want its good name to be shamed and in justice and common decency, we should be allowed to live to prove our innocence!

  JAMES

  No—not a new trial. Only by cooperating will there be a basis for commutation. Look here, Julius, you didn’t deny that you do not know anything about the espionage.

  JULIUS

  I certainly did, and furthermore, did you read the trial record, sir?

  JAMES

  No, I did not, but you had dealings with Elizabeth Bentley.

  JULIUS

  I never did, and if you read the record, she said on the witness stand that she did not know me and never met me.

  JAMES

  But you had dealings with Gold, didn’t you?

  JULIUS

  Of course I didn’t. Gold also said on the stand he never met me or knew me. You should have read the record to be familiar with the facts!

  JAMES

  Oh, I read the newspaper accounts of it.

  JULIUS

  (aside to the audience)

  It is interesting to note how they become convinced of their own lies and will not stick to the trial record of the case!

  JAMES

  Listen, Julius, I was just sent here, but if you agree, I will bring someone to see you who is thoroughly familiar with the case and you will try to convince him you have cooperated with the Government….

  JULIUS

  JAMES

  (Duet:) What do you want to do?

  Have him convince me

  I am guilty when I am not!

  You want him to put ideas in my head!

  You will only be satisfied w
hen I say the things you want me to say, but I will not lie about this matter! Look, Julius, Gordon Dean, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, is a very good friend of mine and if he is convinced that you have cooperated fully and told all you know about espionage he will see the President and recommend clemency!

  JULIUS

  (Aria:) Our country has a reputation to maintain in the world and many of its friends are outraged at the barbaric sentence and the lack of justice in this case!

  JAMES

  I know there has been a lot of publicity in the case, but that is not germane….

  JULIUS

  (Aria:) You yourself, Mr. Bennett, as head of the Prison Bureau,

  You know

  that Greenglass and Gold were together in the Tombs for nine months discussing the case, studying notes from a big looseleaf book, rehearsing testimony, talking to FBI agents, the prosecution, and their attorney!

  You know this

  because the records of the Tombs will show it, and yet your department refused to give us an opportunity to subpoena these records to prove this!

  You know

  that Greenglass was coached on the A-bomb-sketch testimony, both verbally and from notes!

  You know