Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  “Hey, Irving,” sings Uncle Miltie softly in the Judge’s ear, chucking him under his plump chin and wrapping his arm around him, “life is just a bowl of cher-ries….!”

  He nods. What, after all, could he do about it? He can only be what he is: vocation is a prevenient grace. Willy-nilly, he’s bound up in a mystery. He wraps his own stubby arm around Uncle Miltie’s waist and, hoping it will get easier when he makes it to the Supreme Court, croons along with the comic: “Don’t make it serious, life’s too mysterious…!”

  Certainly he has nothing to fear from this crowd: when he appears, introduced by George Sokolsky of the Washington Times-Herald (“… To the galaxy of America’s great judges can now be added the name of Irving Kaufman, servant of the law!”), the ensuing ovation ruptures the applause meter. This technical breakdown momentarily unsettles the audience (measurement is what it’s all about!), but it’s soon forgotten in all the thrills, tears, and laughter of the acts that follow: everybody from Veronica Lake and the Duke of Paducah to Yogi Berra and the Dragon Lady. Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester work a Frankenstein act with all the electrical paraphernalia, then Dean (Ethel) Martin drags Jerry (Julie) Lewis around the Death House set by his lower jaw while singing “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly in a drunken falsetto. Amos ‘n’ Andy turn it all into a blackface minstrel show, with Kingfish doing the lawyer’s part, very wily, but bungling things up as usual, and then Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore come out and play it for pathos, using the letters to the children. Out front the people glance up at the Paramount clock, their eyes filling with tears of laughter and unabashed sentiment, as Jimmy and Garry climax their skit with Jimmy sitting in the electric chair in a curly wig, playing the piano, and singing: “Oh, who will be wit’ chew when h’I’m: far h’way, when h’I’m: far h’away from H-YOU?”

  25.

  A Taste of the City

  “I know,” Ethel Rosenberg said calmly as the door closed behind her down at the other end of the Last Mile. She stood with her hands at her sides, utterly self-composed, unbroken. A strong woman, and brave, but there was a hardness as well, a kind of cunning: she struck me as something of an operator, like those brittle tough-talking chain-smoking girls I’d met at the OPA. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  I was taken aback by this. Expecting me? I stared at her, not knowing what to say. Had she really understood who I was? Or was she already in some other world? She looked a little strange, as though she’d already left her body halfway behind. A little deranged maybe. Well, I could understand this, I’d only been living with the idea of it for a few days and had become pretty giddy myself. “It’s all right, Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said, “I just… I only want to talk.”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling faintly, as though to say she forgave me, and stepped toward me down the glowing white corridor. She was shorter than I’d imagined, dumpier. Older, too. She was dressed in a simple cotton dress of no particular color, a little ragged at the seams, the skirt torn or slit on the left side. Her thighs, which I tried not to notice, were bare and rather thick. Her hair was unkempt, frazzled, as though she’d been trying to tear it out by the roots, and her face seemed shapeless, blank. But maybe it was just the distance, the strange light in this black-blinded whitewashed passageway, because as she came toward me, moving coldly, disdainfully, yet dreamily, as though remote from all this, padding along in her felt slippers and reflected in the waxed floor not as body but as shifting shimmering light, she seemed to grow in stature and her years dropped away. She walked like a good politician, simulating dignity, self-assurance, humility. Already practicing probably for the last walk to follow. But even as this thought crossed my mind, I felt a flush of guilt about it—I understood the depths of my own sincerity and integrity, so undervalued by the world at large, why did I doubt it in others? “But it’s no use, Mr. Nixon. There’s nothing more to be said.”

  Her gaze drifted past my shoulder and she stopped dead in her tracks. “This…this is a very strange joke to play…!” she whispered.

  “What—?” I glanced apprehensively over my shoulder, but it was only the chair she’d seen. “Oh, I, uh, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “It’s not my fault, the Warden left it open. Would you like me to—?”

  “There’s no need for any pretense, Mr. Nixon. The farce is exposed. The executive arm of our government—with you as its spokesman—has become a party to murder! And now you are desperate to bury us quickly before the entire lid is blown off this stinking plot!”

  “Now wait a minute,” I insisted, secretly pleased at her nomination, “let’s be fair about this!”

  “Fair!” she snorted. “Do you call this fair? This is blackmail! Nazi barbarism!”

  I could feel my blood rising, but I knew, if I was going to pull anything out of this goddamned hat, I had to keep my cool. Thinking of which, I removed my homburg and, clutching it by the brim by my left thigh, moved my right foot forward slightly and tilted my head as though expecting to be photographed. Or rather, expecting nothing of the sort, but recalling from other photographs that such a pose suggested alertness and vitality and clarity of vision. (She was not a photographer, she was a typist—why was I thinking of cameras? That stripper story that damned cabbie told me, probably.) “Believe me, Mrs. Rosenberg, I can understand your feelings,” I said, modulating my voice in the manner of Reverend Peale and trying to forget about the Dirty Crab, “I’ve suffered a lot of smear attacks myself, you know!”

  She snorted again. It was not a very attractive gesture. I felt her contempt of me and was stung by it: was it nothing to her that the Vice President of the United States had taken a personal interest in her case? How could she recognize my power and ignore it at the same time? “I told Mr. Bennett that if the Attorney General were to send a highly placed authority to see me, even if you came just ten minutes before my execution, the plain fact of my innocence would not have changed in the slightest.” She was trying to keep her voice from pitching upwards in excitement. “But I didn’t believe, even then, you’d be cruel enough to do just that!”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with Mr. Bennett! I’m here on my own! I’ve come to offer you—”

  “We will not be intimitated by your fascist methods, Mr. Nixon!” she snapped. Her words were harsh, but she couldn’t hide her desperation. “We have done nothing wrong and if we must die for that, then we shall die for it!”

  “If you die at all, it will be because you and your husband want to! You’ve been given a fair chance and it’s still open! You’re just doing this for your own goddamn glory!”

  “Oh no! We do not wish to be martyrs or heroes, Mr. Nixon! We do not want to die!” she cried, her voice thin and defensive. “But we won’t lie to live!”

  “Who’s asking you to lie? Listen, I’ve got a new—!”

  “We are not the first victims of tyranny!” she ranted. I could see tears springing to the corners of her dark eyes, and her lip was trembling. I knew if I could keep attacking and counterattacking, I could break her, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Hadn’t her own lawyer said it? “She is a better lawyer than I am, no doubt!” Relatively, the Pink Lady was a pushover. “Six million of our coreligionists and millions of other victims of fascism went to the death chambers before us!”

  “All this crap about fascism is a lotta hooey, and you know it!” I shouted, jabbing my homburg at her. “The only mass executions these days are on the other side of the Iron Curtain!”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Oh yeah? What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh? He and about ten more of your coreligionists, as you like to call them! Or the Doctors’ Plot—that was a good one! And just yesterday over in East Berlin, poor Willi Goettling, not even any goddamn trial, just dragged out and shot! And more being massacred right now!”

  “Spies!” she shrieked, trying to drown me out.

  “Oh,” I said cal
mly, dropping the homburg to my side. “That makes it okay, does it?” She flushed, trapped. I zeroed in: “And meanwhile, all century long, this country has opened its doors—its doors and its heart—to the people running away from all these tyrannies, no matter what their color, your own parents among them!”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she replied, having recovered more quickly than I had expected, “until you came along—you and all those other super-patriotic demagogues and bigots who are taking this country over!”

  “Now, wait a minute, don’t call me a bigot!” I stormed. “I’ve got plenty of Jewish friends! More than you have, I bet! Catholics, too, and Negroes—listen, when I was in college I helped initiate a Negro into our fraternity!” She seemed nonplussed by this—I took advantage of the point made and pressed on: “I’m a progressive, too, you know—don’t believe everything you see in Herblock’s cartoons! My ancestors fought with Cromwell in Ireland and George Washington in New Jersey, struggled against the Indians, spied on the British, operated an Underground Railroad station on the north bank of the Ohio, and got buried at Gettysburg! I’ve always believed in freedom! I personally opened up Whittier College to on-campus dances and championed the end of compulsory chapel! You don’t believe me, I’ll show you in the yearbook! I lived in a commune once and worked for the New Deal and the OPA and fought against the Axis in the South Pacific! I was at Bougainville! I might have got killed!” Christ, I realized I was getting very wrought up. She watched me somewhat agape. I didn’t know whether I was getting to her or just astonishing her. She was still very pale. Doe-eyed. Vulnerable: I could see how she must have knocked them out in that role of the condemned man’s sister. She looked like Ella Cinders. Her soft dark eyes began to narrow. I could see the shape of the argument forming up behind them, so I beat her to it: “Oh, I know what people say about me, trying to make me out like the heavy in some goddamn cowboy movie, calling me every name in the book—but it’s not my fault! It’s only because of the campaigns I’ve had to run and the legislation I’ve had to sponsor and support. I’m not any happier about a lot of it than you are, but that’s politics—a campaign diet of dishwater and milk toast doesn’t get you elected to office and you don’t achieve a national reputation by putting your name on nothing but blue-sky laws! A lot of blood gets spilled on the way to the top—where at last maybe you can do something about the world—and inevitably a lot of it is your own! Blood and mud: I’ve been accused of everything—bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole gamut of misconduct in public office, ranging from unethical to downright criminal activities—but nobody knows yet who I really am! You should understand this, Mrs. Rosenberg, you’ve caught some of it yourself! A fanatic, they’ve called you, an anti-Semite, a lousy mother, even something of a nut case—well, if you think you’ve suffered, just imagine how it’s been for me!”

  She might have snorted again at this, but she didn’t. She was watching me in a new way, studying me curiously. She looks a little bit like Claudette Colbert at that, I thought. Only softer, more like one of those Italian actresses. Her dress hung loosely on her and gave you the impression it was all she had on. She poked absently into her skirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, gazing thoughtfully at me all the while. She didn’t flip a cigarette from the pack, but reached in carefully with her fingertips, plucked one out, and fitted it between her lips. Her hand was trembling faintly as she lit it.

  “It’s…uh, it’s not allowed,” I said uneasily, glancing up at the NO SMOKING sign on the wall.

  “No? What do you think they’ll do to me, Mr. Nixon?” she asked drily, and exhaled a lungful of smoke. She seemed almost to be pitying me. I did not object to this. I was no longer sure just what I was doing here, but it had to be for good reasons, and I knew that somehow, difficult as it might be, I would succeed. She stood close to me now, small, delicate, even fragile. I realized that I really didn’t want her to die.

  “Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said as gently as I could, attempting a smile but feeling it twitch away as soon as I’d tried it, “Mrs. Rosenberg, we want to, uh, help, I want to help, Pat and I—”

  “You’re wasting your time,” she said simply. “I am innocent. My husband is innocent. We know nothing about any espionage.” She kept her head up but she seemed close to tears. There was a tremor in her voice. How much time did she have left to live—seventy minutes? eighty? She took another deep drag on the cigarette, then dropped it on the floor and squashed it out with her slipper, creating an ugly black smudge in the middle of all that gleaming wax polish. She exhaled slowly, then gazed up at me again. I was touched by her great reserves of strength and serenity. “We understand these desperate moves,” she said. “You’ve made a mistake and now you’re trying to get out of it!”

  “But, Mrs. Rosenberg—Ethel! You don’t understand!” She seemed surprised I’d used her first name, and with such feeling. Dumfounded even. I was surprised myself. “I tell you, Ethel, this has nothing to do with the government—I’ve run away from the government—believe me, it’s you I care about, can’t you see that?” She seemed startled, confused, disbelieving. I could hardly believe it either, it was sheer madness, but I couldn’t stop now, I’d turned some corner and there was no going back. Besides, my instincts told me I was right. “I’ve come to save you, I don’t know how, but I’ve got to get you out of this, I’ve got to get you out of here!” What did I mean? That I was going to pick her up and make a run for it? Trade clothes with her like they did in the movies? Maybe it was the utter impossibility of it all that drove me on—it couldn’t happen, so I could be all the fiercer in my insistence that it would. It reminded me of my greatest moments with Ola. “I don’t want your confession, Ethel! I don’t care about the past, it’s now I care about!”

  “You…you can’t be serious!” she whispered.

  “But I am!” Not serious! To question my seriousness was like questioning Ike’s smile. “I believe in you! I’ve made a careful study—I… I don’t want you to die!”

  Even though she was shorter than I was, I’d felt all the while she had been gazing down on me. Now we seemed to be on the same footing, face to face. We were very close. My heart was beating wildly. I thought: there’s just the two of us left! I felt her eyes, dark with anguish and uncertainty, searching my own. I struggled, with my eyes, against her distrust. I felt I had not known such intensity since I was a boy in high school. I wanted to weep so that she would believe me and I tried to remember those lines from Bird-in-Hand: I’ve never had but one child—that’s ’er… Then suddenly she seemed almost to collapse, her knees seemed to buckle—I reached forward, gripped her arm. She did not resist. “All right,” she said weakly. “All right. Where’s Julie?”

  “Julie—?”

  She drew back, one hand in front of her face as though to ward off bad breath. “Did you mean you were going to save me and leave Julie to die—?!”

  “But…but, Ethel—!” Why did women always expect this of me?

  “So that’s it! My life is to be bargained off against his! I need only grasp the line chivalrously held out to me and leave him to drown without a backward glance!”

  The metaphor betrayed her. “You’re just pretending, Ethel,” I said coldly. “You’re faking it!”

  “How diabolical! Oh, I could retch with horror and revulsion! You are proposing to erect a sepulcher in which I shall live without living, and die without dying!” All of this sounded familiar. Like lines from some soap opera. I kept thinking of Aeneas and Dido, but that was absurd. Some Horatio Alger novel probably. “Over and over again, I shall sob out the last heartbroken wracking good-byes and reel—”

  “Damn it, Ethel, cut that out!”

  “And what of our children!” I’d forgot about the children. Yes, and it came back to me now what had happened to my handkerchief, too…. “What manner of mercy is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness?”

&nb
sp; Perhaps, I was thinking, I should just walk out of here while there was still time. But was there still time? The state she was in, she’d probably shout it all out at the top of her voice in Times Square tonight, right in front of the whole goddamned world. And how would I explain that at Monday morning’s Cabinet meeting? I could just see old Foster staring down his nose at me, Ike peering over his spectacles, Lodge licking his chops. I wondered what Abraham Lincoln would do in this situation…