Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  It was her voice. She was singing her poem, the one she’d written when the year began. I could hear her outside the spare-room window…

  “Mourn no more, my sons, no more

  why the lies and smears were framed,

  the tears we shed, the hurt we bore

  to all shall be proclaimed…”

  Ah, tears, hurt: what did she know? I sat inside on the carpeted floor, curled up in the dark, there among all those dog biscuits and blankets, kennels, knitted sweaters, and rubber bones that the American people in their love and simplicity had sent to Checkers, whimpering softly to myself, nuzzling the curtains, scratching my itches, feeling sick and bitter and hairy and abused. I’d worked myself ill over this thing, and where had it got me? Cast out. Disgraced. Triped and fell on and kiked in the side—oh Jesus, I felt a pain all over…

  “Earth shall smile, my sons, shall smile

  and green above our resting place,

  the killing end, the world rejoice

  in brotherhood and peace…”

  I hadn’t stayed around after for Uncle Sam’s new instant-replay gimmick or for the boxing or wedding ceremonies, I’d had all I could take for one night, and besides I smelled too bad—instead I’d dashed off to that country-club boodle banquet in New Jersey, hoping to lose myself in the smoke of old-fashioned backroom politicking. But I hadn’t been able to get up any appetite for that shit either, I’d just sat there amid all those beaming fatsos, part of the waxworks, feeling ugly, very low-down and smarmy and ugly, deep in post-crisis fatigue, suffering their smirks and grimaces and thinking: Ah fuck, I’ve done it again. No matter how many times I warn myself, no matter how many goddamn notes I write myself or how many quotations I copy out, I always forget: the point of greatest danger is not in preparing to meet the crisis or fighting the fucking battle—it occurs after the crisis of battle is over. It is then, with all his emotional resources shot to shit and his guard down, that a guy can easily, if confronted with another battle, even a minor skirmish, blow it.

  When I got home I was very sore, feeling restless and troubled. I’d wanted to talk about it all somehow with Pat, but she’d been busy with the girls, still up and overexcited apparently by all the big-city entertainments, and she’d looked completely pooped. Of course, she always looked pooped, it was her way of advertising to the world what a joy it was to be married to me, but tonight there was something zombielike in her eyes that hinted at a final turning-off, an end of the road. She’d only had one thing to say to me all night. That was when I’d collapsed into my seat beside her at the burnings after having had to run the gauntlet of the VIP aisles from the Whale’s mouth. I’d been close to tears. I’d wanted her to hug me close and comfort me. Instead, she’d patted my hand absently and, staring blankly up at the electric chair, had said: “That was a nice speech, dear.”

  Now she’d come into the bedroom where I’d just commenced to get undressed, thinking to take a bath, and had asked flatly: “What does ‘I am a scamp’ mean, Dick?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I’d yelped. I was still very jumpy.

  “I don’t know. But it’s written there on your backside,” she’d said.

  “What—?!!” I’d turned my butt toward a mirror: sure enough, there it was, in big greasy red letters, still more or less legible though badly smeared. “Ah…well…that!” A moustache too, stuck there on one cheek, that one I’d bought for a disguise—I’d wondered where I’d lost the damned thing. All the time, feeling it pasted back there, I’d thought I’d somehow fouled myself. I’d snatched it away irritably and pulled my pants back up: “It’s, uh, it’s my enemies, Pat…they—”

  But Pat had already left the room: she was back in the bathroom picking up Julie, who’d fallen asleep on the toilet. I’d chased after her, holding my pants up, feeling hurt and misunderstood. Hated even: Jesus Christ, what an anniversary…! She’d brushed past me impatiently, carrying Julie into the girls’ bedroom, and I’d followed. Tricia was in there, jumping about in little circles with her hands over her eyes, singing out: “Help, help, the Phantom’s got me!” Checkers was bounding at her heels, yapping and wagging his tail.

  “Pat!” I’d cried. “Listen to me! It’s not what you think!” It had welled up in me: that new fondness for her I’d been feeling ever since the near-betrayal. “I did it for the nation, Pat! For the Party!” I’d be nowhere without her, I knew. She was the only one I trusted, the only one I loved—I needed her, couldn’t she see that? “I did it for you, Pat! For us!” But she’d acted like I didn’t even exist. I’d recalled suddenly that game we used to play when we were just engaged: “Hey, look, Pat! Rrowf! Snort! Gr-r-roww-ff!” I’d squatted down and hunched my shoulders, roughed up my hair, bared my teeth, and gone lumbering about the room, barking and yelping and rolling my eyes up at Pat and Tricia. If I’d had a tail, I would have wagged it.

  “Oh, Dick, grow up,” Pat had snapped irritably.

  “I don’t wanna play monsters, Daddy,” Tricia had whined, breaking into tears. “I wanna play Run, Sheep, Run with Mommy!”

  “We’re not playing anything, young lady. Your Daddy’s leaving this room right now and you’re going nighty-night! It’s very late! Now get your pajamas on!”

  “Yarf, Pat!” I’d pleaded, scratching my armpits, bounding up and down pathetically, then rolling around on the floor. If only she’d patted my head, scratched my ears, anything! My elbow had bumped Julie’s doll Tiny and it had fallen off a chair, banged its head on the floor, and let out a little crying noise. This had started Checkers barking at me, in turn waking up Julie. “Gruff! Yip!” I’d bellowed over her wailing. “Hrr-r-roiiwl-ll!”

  “Now stop that, Dick!” Pat had scolded, her voice cold and angry. “You’re going to give them bad dreams!”

  Grunting and huffing, I’d lurched for the doll and tipped over a table full of games and building blocks. I’d squatted amid the debris, clutching Tiny. Now everybody was screaming. Because of the doll. Somehow I’d managed to take Tiny’s head off. What was happening to me? I’d struggled for words, I’d wanted to tell Pat that she was the only one who could free me from this terrible enchantment, but all I could think of were arf and whine and snarl.

  “Get out of here!” Pat had cried. “Right now! Or you’ll be sorry!”

  I’d gone galumphing out into the hallway on all fours, feeling hunted, banging my shoulder—the sore one—on the doorjamb, skinning my face on the hallway carpet. That swarm of black thing was coming down on me again. I could feel it in Checkers’s fangs as he growled and nipped at my shins. I could smell it in my skunky armpits and foul breath. And I could see it coming out of Pat’s mouth as she passed me to go into our bedroom. What she’d said was: “Put Checkers in the basement, Dick, before you go to bed,” but what I’d seen coming out was: “You make me sick.” I’d reared up on my hind feet to follow after, but she’d slammed the door in my face. Oh, the bitch! I’d fallen back, howling and moaning like a wounded bear, then had gone lunging about, crashing into things, batting the walls, falling through doorways, ending up finally in a dark corner of the spare room, curled up, pawing my ears in misery, listening to Ethel Rosenberg’s aria drifting in through the window on the midsummer-night’s breeze, howling along pathetically and thinking: in the end, I’m not hard enough for politics, I don’t deserve to be President, I’m too good, the world’s not like that, my mother and my grandmother ruined me…

  “Work and build, my sons, and build

  a monument to love and joy,

  to human worth, to faith we kept

  for you, my sons, for you…”

  Well, poor Ethel—let’s face it, she hadn’t had it easy either. I’d envied her her equanimity at the end: she’d died a death of almost unbearable beauty. In fact, it was unbearable—that was probably why we’d all fought our way up to the switch when the electrician bungled it. Ultimately anyway: I’d have to admit that wasn’t exactly what was on my mind at the time. I’d been thinking
more about just getting the goddamn thing over with. I was hanging on then by the grace of one thought only: that the day had to end, it would all be got past. Had to. Time marches on. Shakespeare said that in some play, I believe. Some tomorrow would inevitably become today and we could start forgetting, that was the main thing. I’d never doubted this until that moment the doctors said she was still alive: then suddenly I’d felt like we were teetering on the brink of infinity. Scared the hell out of me. The rest was simple reflex.

  Like the way I’d left the stage earlier on. When the lights went out, everybody had started screaming. It was terrible. Somebody was screaming wildly right where I was! It was me, I’d realized. Christ, I’d leapt completely outside myself! I’d pulled myself together as best I could, swallowed down my yelping panic, groped around in the dark for something to hang onto. What was awful was the terrible emptiness—it had felt like there was nothing holding anything together any more! I’d hit upon a chair and sat down in it. I’d felt safer. Thank God for gravity! I’d remembered my pants: I had to get them untangled before the lights came up again. I’d worked one shoe off. Then I’d felt the leather on my butt, the studs, and it had come to me suddenly where I was sitting. For one dreadful moment I’d felt locked to the chair, as though the leather of the seat and the skin of my ass had got interchanged somehow—then I’d ripped free at last, and the rest, as I say, was reflex. The momentum had carried me right off the edge of the stage and down with a bruising splat onto that sea of turbulent flesh below. Don’t know who I hit, but it had felt like Bess Truman. I’d pitched and rolled blindly through the turmoil, carried along by the tide. Everything was wet and slippery and violent, with high crests and deep troughs: like rape, I’d thought. I was afraid I was going to get seasick.

  Then I’d opened my eyes and discovered I could see after all, even though everybody else in the Square had still seemed to be flopping about helplessly with glazed looks in their eyes, screaming about the darkness. I’d understood this. When I was very young, just a freshman in high school, my father took Harold and Don and me to Los Angeles to hear Dr. Paul Rader preach a revival sermon and give ourselves to Jesus. Mother did not go. I grasped, even then, that this was not her Jesus, not the Jesus I’d grown up with, the Jesus of little boys. This was a ferocious Jesus who lived in a wild place only grown-up men could go to. Or anyway this was the impression I got from my father, who seemed very serious, even frightened. My mother was sad to see us go and I felt sorry for her—it was like some kind of conspiracy against her. At the meeting, everyone became very emotional. My own father became very emotional, in a way I’d never seen before—he cried and seemed to lose control of himself, seemed to want to lose control of himself, as though the very firmness of his will—and he was always a very willful man—depended on this momentary release. Harold and Don cried, too. So did I, it seemed to be important to my father that I did so and I obeyed as I always obeyed. And like the rest of them, I walked down the aisle through that dark forest of wild emotions and pledged my life to that fierce Jesus. But all the time I felt as though I were walking in a dream, somebody else’s dream, not mine—I didn’t really quite believe in what I was doing. It was like being in a play and I could throw myself into the role with intensity and conviction, but inside I was holding something back. Even as I wept: later I was to recall this scene to help me to weep on cue in Bird-in-Hand, in the back seat of my Dad’s car with Ola, up at Wheeling—but that night I felt guilty about it. I worried that I had not been completely saved. Grace, I knew, was a matter of luck—after all, there were peoples all over the world who had missed out, who were still missing out, who’d never even heard of the name of Jesus, much less had a chance to be baptized, so grace wasn’t a blanket promise…and maybe I was not one of the chosen ones. I wept and knelt and prayed with the others, but I couldn’t really give myself to Jesus, not entirely, not the way the others did. Later, after I’d seen more of the world, I felt pleased with myself for not having given in. I was proud of my discipline—what my mother called Self-Regulation and Self-Restraint—and even though I envied my brothers’ ability to plunge uncritically out into Dad’s world, I nevertheless felt a notch above them. I felt singled out, touched by a special kind of grace, a unique destiny: I was God’s undercover agent in a secular world. For such a one, emotional release was a kind of debauchery. An impiety. My way was harder, but at least I could see where I was going.

  And so it had been there in Times Square: the lights had been snuffed all right, the marquees and billboards now as dead as the old city trolleys, but though it had been like peering through pea soup, I could nevertheless make out what was happening, even if nobody else could. It was awesome to look at, of course—flesh, as far as you could see, engaged in every grab-assing obscenity imaginable, a frantic all-community grope that my own privates did not entirely escape—but the dimensions had taken the excitement out of it. In fact, if anything, it had been spooky, unnerving: all that desperate weakness, that frenzied vulnerability, everybody screaming and reaching out and plunging haplessly away in one another—it was like something out of Fantasia or The Book of Revelation. I’d bobbed along on the flood, longing for the old bell tower back home, some place of refuge where I could lock myself away, think things over, work out the parameters of this new situation, get my pants back up. Maybe, I’d thought, this is what hell will be like for me: endless self-exposure. This was a Self that was not in my mother’s lexicon. It was the toughest part about being a politician, the one thing I personally hated the most. I’m no shrinking violet, I’m not unduly shy or modest, but I’m a private man and always have been. Formal. When I have sex I like to do it between the sheets in a dark room. When I take a shit I lock the door. My chest is hairy but I don’t show it off. I don’t even like to eat in public and just talking about one’s personal life embarrasses me. And now all this today—Christ, I believed in touching the pulse of the nation, but this was going too fucking far! It was probably a good thing I was all washed up.

  I’d beached finally in the mouth of a whale, one of Disney’s exhibits evidently. A dismal cavernous maw, dark and foreboding, but under the circumstances I’d found it inviting. I’d dragged myself inside, down the throat, away from the murky insanity of the mainstream out in the Square, clutching my poor bruised nuts and glad of any sanctuary. This has been worse than Bougainville, I’d thought. I’d wished Pat were with me and I’d wondered if I should go looking for her once I’d got my pants on—but then I’d realized I’d already seen her out there, part of her anyway (or was that a dream I’d had? it was all getting mixed up in my mind), it was really my mother I’d wished were with me. Jesus, I’d sighed, crawling along, drawn toward the belly by a distant flickering light, this has been the longest day of my life!

  What had I expected to find inside the Whale? I’d seen the film with my daughters, and so had anticipated the craggy cathedral-like walls, the tremulous shadows cast by a lonely lantern, eerie digestive noises. Past that? A little benevolent magic maybe? a touch of the Mission Inn, Gepetto with a stiff drink and fried fish? Probably just a little peace and quiet where, covered in darkness, I could draw myself together, stop gesturing, jerking about, come to rest. What I certainly had not expected was to find my grandmother Almira Burdg Milhous sitting there in her rocking chair, gazing sternly down upon me over her rimless spectacles.

  “Pull yourself together, Richard,” she’d said gravely. “Seek the soul’s communion with the Eternal Mind!”

  “Grandmother!” I’d gasped, unable to believe my eyes. “My God, what are you doing here?”

  “No swearing, Richard. And put your trousers on.”

  She’d sat there in her creaky old chair, gently rocking, her hair rolled up in a tight little bun on her head, her delicate white throat ringed round by a small lace collar, watching me with her sad deepset eyes, a melancholic smile on her lips, as I struggled with my pants, tearing them off, unknotting them, tugging them back on again. “I—I’m so
rry, Grandmother!” For everything that had been happening out there, I’d meant, my own indecency included—just seeing her there, quietly juxtaposed against all that madness, had thrown it all into a new perspective: what must she think of us? I’d lost buttons and belt and the zipper didn’t work: I’d had to hold my pants up with my hands.

  “Where are your shoes, Richard?”

  “I…uh, must have lost them! I—” But I’d reached the point where I had exhausted all my emotional reserve. Tears had rushed into my eyes, and I’d pitched forward into her lap. I’d wanted to hide myself there forever. “Good old Grandmother!” I’d wept.

  “Stand up, Richard,” she’d commanded. “Remember the Four Selfs!”

  “But why has this happened to me, Grandmother?” I’d wailed. “I’ve always been a good man!”

  “Not always,” she’d replied matter-of-factly. “What about that time your father caught you swimming in the ditch?”

  “The…the others dared me!”

  “And you used to smoke cornsilks, steal grapes and watermelons, don’t tell me you didn’t, and you were mean to your brother Donny!”

  “He was a smart aleck, he asked for it!” Why was she challenging me like this?

  “You were jealous of poor Harold and didn’t really care when he died.”

  “I did!” I’d protested, drawing back, and had shed some more tears just to prove it. “And I was really sorry when Arthur died!”

  The tears were real now, but she’d pressed on mercilessly: “Why didn’t you ever have any friends? Why did you go off by yourself at our picnics and not join in the fun? What’s the matter with you, Richard? Why have you always been so moody and proud and selfish and standoffish?”

  “I had friends! They voted for me! But in politics—”

  “Politics! Yes, I heard about that, too, Richard. All those naughty tricks you played on poor Jerry Voorhis and Mrs. Douglas and that nice Mr. Warren—”