Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  “You—?” I croaked. “But you…you’re…you can’t—!”

  “Die? Oh, I ain’t immortal, son, I’d hate to think I was. Nothin’ goes on forever, Amber, not even History itself, so why should I? Sooner or later, the Phantom gets us all!”

  I was truly shaken. I caught myself staring at him the way I used to stare at my mother when I first realized that she had to die. Suddenly, everything seemed very fragile and tenuous. Brittle. “But you’re so…so strong—!”

  “Remember the old kings, boy, the times don’t change. I’m the force what’ll raise up the whole sin-besotten world, see if I don’t…but I’ll get et by it, too!”

  “I… I don’t understand…?”

  “I would not live alway, I ask not to stay, loveliest of lovely things are they, on earth what soonest piss away, so long as you get your kicks in in the passin’! That’s poetry, boy! Xerxes the Great did die; and so must you and I!”

  Yes, I was shaken, but oddly I also felt like I was very near the center of things. There’s been a point to all this, after all, I thought. I felt closer to Uncle Sam than I’d ever felt before.

  “Oh, probably, after it was over, like Christ, I could come back some day…” He sighed wistfully, puffed on his pipe, blew a plume of smoke shaped like a bird—an eagle. “But it wouldn’t be the same…” He added wings and it flapped off into the sun: I was blinded by the light, but as far as I could see it simply disappeared. When I looked back at Uncle Sam, he was staring at me very strangely, his blue eyes glowing as though lit from behind. “Sometimes,” he said softly, “sometimes I almost want to die….”

  A cold chill rattled through me. My sense of Uncle Sam’s presence in front of me dipped briefly, almost imperceptibly, as a candle will gutter in a faint draft—and for that fraction of a second, I seemed to have an intuitive awareness of everything happening in Uncle Sam’s head. And then, as quickly, it had passed. My head ached slightly and I felt a momentary emptiness down in the marrow of my bones. Then that, too, filled up.

  “Don’t worry,” Uncle Sam laughed, “it ain’t such a grave matter, if you’ll pardon the pun, son—in fact, it’s a lot more fun this way.” He put his arm around me and led me down the fairway toward my ball, his white locks blowing in the cool breeze. He seemed to have shrunk some in the last few minutes. “It’s like old Tom Paine useter say, panics in some cases got their uses—we ain’t had a party good as this one’s gonna be since you were just a little tyke sayin’ your breakfast prayers back home on Santa Gertrudes!” I felt swarmed about with fears and absences. Paradox. But I felt protected at the same time. I had a feeling that everything in America was coming together for the first time: an emergence into Destiny…. “Oh, I don’t reckon we could live like this all year round,” he said, “we’d only expunctify ourselves. But we do need us an occasional peak of disorder and danger to keep things from just peterin’ out, don’t we?” I nodded, remembering my own peaks—the Hiss Case and the Checkers speech, and before that my school highs, debate wins, romances with Ola and Pat, the war, even my brothers’ deaths—and I knew how they could light things up, make everything new again: after all, that was what light and darkness, the sacred and the diabolic, death and regeneration were all about! “Well, okay,” said Uncle Sam, pocketing his corncob pipe and clapping me on the shoulder, “let us, then, be up and doin’, with a heart for any fate; still achievin’, still pursuin’, and though hard be the task, keep a stiff upper lip!”

  “Oh, yes!” I said, flushing with pride and joy and eager to begin, for he’d just singled me out among all men: that fractured echo from the past was a piece of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which Grandma Milhous penned by hand under a photo of Abe Lincoln she gave me on my thirteenth—thirteenth!—birthday! I kept it on the wall above my bed all through high school and college: Learn to labor and to wait! “I will!”

  “Good boy!” he said. “I press thee to my heart as Duty’s faithful childering! Be prepared for anything, for this is one a them hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold, dear! But be brave, and whatever happens, just remember the sagassitous words of that other Poor Richard long ago: ‘Fools make feasts…and wise men eat ’em!’ So whet up that appetite!” He hugged me, then gave me his club to swing with, saying: “Now, listen here, a golf ball is propelled forward by the verlocity imparted to it by a club-head, see—this is physics, now, my boy—and it’s kept aloft by under-rotation or backspin, which producifies a cushion of air, and this is what gives the ball lift. To get this backspin, the clubhead’s gotta travel downward, right swat whippety-snap through the center of the ball, and this is where you been goin’ wrong. You think you gotta lift the ball up, and this is makin’ you pull your swing…”

  “Ah…”

  “Actually the uplift is projectorated by the spin, and the spin is got by hittin’ down and through, you got it? Now, another problem is movin’ your maximum verlocity back to six inches…”

  Down and through, got it. I took a practice swing, keeping my shoulder down, my eye on the ball—then, because when I looked up I realized that people were staring at me (got to watch it, can’t let my guard down like that), swung on up into a friendly wave at a carload of Senators disembarking the subway car. “See ya, Dick!” “Don’t miss the show!” “Not for the world!” “Take it easy!” Down and through. And out and up, back to the office, get rid of this goddamn thing. With maximum verlocity.

  6.

  The Phantom’s Hour

  The curtain rises upon the Warden’s office, a large old unfriendly apartment, with bare floors and staring whitewashed walls, furnished only with the Warden’s flat-topped desk and swivel chair, a few straight-backed chairs, and an eight-day clock. On the Warden’s desk are a telephone instrument, a row of electric bell-buttons, and a bundle of forty or fifty letters. There are two large windows, crossed with heavy bars, at the back of the room, and doors left and right. The Warden is verging toward sixty, and his responsibilities have printed themselves in italics upon his countenance. With him, staring out the window, is the Prison Chaplain, dressed in slightly shabby clericals. The Chaplain’s face, normally calm, intellectual, and inspiring, is presently depressed. The Warden blows a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, drums on the desk, and peers over his shoulder at the Chaplain. He clears his throat and speaks brusquely: “Has it started raining?” “Yes, it has,” says the Chaplain, without turning around. The Warden glares at his long thin cigar and impatiently tosses it aside. He is wearing a dark brown suit, open shirt, and black string tie. “It would rain tonight,” he complains.

  In fact, it is not raining tonight at Sing Sing. It is a warm clear evening, a little heavy, and there are rumors of an impending heat wave, maybe as early as Saturday. The prison officials, who have had to proceed today with all the usual death-chair preparations, are dressed in short-sleeved shirts with open collars. Not until Justice Burton’s announcement of the Supreme Court recess at 6:29 p.m. has the evening’s Death Watch been canceled, the electrician and rabbi sent off duty. Yesterday on the central radio speaker, during the seventh-inning stretch of the Dodgers’ baseball game, the Rosenbergs heard the news of Justice Douglas’s stay, and Warden Denno reported that they were “overjoyed,” but all that joy was soon dispelled by Attorney General Brownell’s rapid countermoves. The Rosenbergs still cling to hopes of further delays, but among the professionals it is generally felt that Douglas has overstepped himself on this one, and the odds are on for a vacated stay and a quick execution. They have their own reasons: all those preparations down in Times Square, the other executions stacking up, the daily expense: Ethel alone is costing the state $38.60 a day, Julius is due for more dental treatment, and there’s the burden of keeping 290 prison police and nearly as many New York State Troopers on constant guard, defending the prison against protest marches by the Phantom’s Legions of Darkness, even who knows? (guards in the tower gun emplacements flex their shoulders, scrutinize
the prison borderland, now losing definition in the gathering dusk)—a mad attempt at escape.

  Not that the Rosenbergs are showing any signs of sudden defiance—if anything, they seem to be mellowing as they near their exterminations. It could be a ruse, the kind of trick Errol Flynn often uses on his way to a last-minute rescue. Or it might be saltpeter in their diets. Most likely, though, they’ve known for years that the Phantom has intended this role for them, and they’ve been practicing. Ethel especially: for some time now she has ceased resisting and has taken the part on and made it her own. Julie still seems unable to believe it is all really happening to him, and continues to search frantically for the legalistic dodge that will get him out of here. “Everything seems so unreal and out of focus,” he writes, “it seems like we’re suspended somewhere, far off…” Today is their fourteenth wedding anniversary, and as a present from Sing Sing prison, they were allowed a full ninety minutes together at the dividing screen this evening. Not that they made much use of it—they sat as though tongue-tied half the time. What is there really to talk about on a warm June evening through a fine mesh screen with someone one’s been married to for fourteen years, after one’s been preparing all day to go to the electric chair? It’s all been said. Too many times. They’re weary of each other’s arguments, illusions, complaints. They’re weary of their own. Talking about the children only makes them cry or feel angry or guilty. They love each other, of course, more than ever—love indeed is why they’re here—so they could talk about the night they met at the Seamen’s ball on New Year’s Eve or their Sunday strolls through the Palisades or that first room they had together in Marcus Pogarsky’s apartment, but none of that seems real any more—it’s somebody else’s past, it belongs to those other people whose Death House letters are being read around the world. Anyway, they’re boxed in by prison guards and snoopy FBI agents with big ears, why give them a thrill? So they talked about things they’ve heard on the prison radio. How their suppers have settled down. The demonstrations. What they’ll do next if Justice Douglas’s stay is upheld. An interesting magazine article about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Julius said he read in LIFE that Henry Ford II’s personal income in 1951 after taxes was $87,000,000. After taxes! This was on his mind because of his intention to write out their own last will and testament later tonight. Ethel repeated her wish to see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible playing in New York. She’s heard that the audience applauds when a character says toward the end that he’d rather burn in hell than become a stool pigeon. They sat silent a good part of the time, not even looking at each other, as though afraid of what they might see in the other’s face, yet like a pair of octogenarians at the fireside, finding familiar solace in each other’s company, glancing up from time to time, then away, listening to the trains rattling by along the river, sounds floating up from the town below: music, kids playing softball, trucks grinding up a hill. Now they are separated, Julius struggling with the text of his will, Ethel perhaps dreaming of opening night many years ago of the Clark House Players’ production in the settlement house on Rivington Street of The Valiant, in which she starred as the sister of the condemned man, who was played by Paul Muni in the movies….

  “Was he quiet when you left him?” asks the Warden uneasily. “Yes, yes,” says the Chaplain, “he was perfectly calm, and I believe he’ll stay so to the very end.” The Warden lights a fresh cigar. In the wings, the young girl awaits her cue. “You’ve got to hand it to him, Father. I never saw such nerve in my life. It isn’t bluff, and it isn’t a trance, either, like some of ’em have—it’s sheer nerve. You’ve certainly got to hand it to him.” He shakes his head in frank admiration. “He still won’t give you any hint about who he really is?” “Not the slightest. He doesn’t intend to, either. He intends to die as a man of mystery to us.”

  What is this unnatural intransigence? It is not silence, no, the Rosenbergs are rarely silent. But their declarations are all bombast, impertinence, self-indulgent pique, nothing of substance, nothing Uncle Sam can use. At this very moment, there is a telephone in Warden Denno’s office linked directly to the Justice Department in Washington: the Rosenbergs need only avail themselves of it, agree to a public confession of their own duplicity and exposure of those who have schemed with them (not that the FBI actually needs this information, apparently—newspapers almost daily announce, just as they have done for the past two years, that the FBI has broken the ring and is “closing in” on the rest of the spies), and what is now a time of worldwide risk and disorder might well be converted into an occasion of national victory and joyous in-gathering, and even, if only briefly, a happy family reunion as well. But still, unnatural parents, they remain adamant. “We are confident of the righteousness of our cause,” Julius Rosenberg has written, “and we will not allow ourselves to be used as tools against the fight for peace, freedom, and decency.”

  Ah yes, the fight for peace, freedom, and decency—everybody knows what a Communist means when he uses language like that. Wasn’t Uncle Sam struggling right now against a cunning Soviet “peace” offensive? They seem almost eager to die, as though in spite. “I shall not dishonor my marital vows and the felicity and integrity of the relationship we shared to play the role of harlot to political procurers,” Ethel has declaimed, her spontaneous use of that metaphor confirming what everyone has long believed about this tough little number off the ghetto streets, handmaid of the Phantom. The world has not forgotten the day twenty years ago when she and more of her kind descended upon those poor truckdrivers like frenzied maenads, ripped off their pants, and lipsticked I AM A SCAB all over their bottoms. And speaking of vows, what about her Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag? “I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon such bounty.” Meaning the rumored commutation of her death sentence, while burning Julie, so there’d still be the possibility, eventually, of getting the spy secrets out of her. “How diabolical! A cold fury possesses me and I could retch with horror and revulsion, for these saviours are actually proposing to erect a sepulchre in which I shall live without living, and die without dying…. And what of our children! What manner of mercy is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness?” Ronald Colman did it a lot better in A Tale of Two Cities. As for the children, everyone from the Judge to the President has observed that they loved their cause more, and indeed sacrificed their children to it. Even now their boys are being dragged around to all the clemency rallies to cozen old ladies with soft hearts and loosen purse strings, and their parents are actually using them as grounds for their contrariness: “As long as we do the right thing by our children and the good people of the world, nothing else matters…. The love we bear our two sons and each other demands that we hold fast to these truths, even to the death which may destroy our little family…. One thing I feel sure of—that when they are older, they will know that all the way through, we, their parents, were right, and they will be proud.” Pride, yes: that’s the key to it.

  Even were they not guilty of stealing the secret of the A-bomb, such grandstanding, reminiscent of the hyperbole of their student days, together with their open-faced provocation of international unrest—“The world has come to recognize the true nature of our case and the people, the most effective force on earth, are behind us and are demonstrating a thorough awareness that they know how to fight for peace and freedom!”—would alone warrant their present condemnation. For make no mistake: that the world is tonight in crisis, that the Phantom is afoot with rare favor and authority, is largely due to the persistent agitation of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who will not talk and who will not be silent. The Rosenbergs have been honing their incendiary rhetoric for twenty years, testing their vitriol on the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Standard Oil—they’ve even propagandized against Nabisco cookies! Ethel launched her oratorical career, after a fling at the stage, as a union whip and street shrieker, Juliu
s as a student agitator, participating in the Stalinist purges of decadent Trotskyites. The FBI has accused them of “premature anti-fascism.” In their flat, they found an empty collection can bearing the label: SAVE A SPANISH REPUBLICAN CHILD, VOLVEREMOS, WE WILL RETURN! And now their training in perversity has come to fruition, their target is the entire American System:

  No need for any pretense—the farce is exposed. / This harsh and cruel decision was sired in madness / part of a pattern of pro-fascist and bellicose actions by those who rule our land—/ this is political prosecution, shameless, blatant, cynical. / The executive arm of our government has become a party to murder. / They hide their demagogy under a mask of super-patriotism, wild lies and charges. / The courts have deteriorated to the point that they are mere appendages to an autocratic police force and in political cases the rights of defendants and the protection of the Constitution no longer operate. / Such a situation will only lead to a police state at home and war abroad. / While we are able, we must prevent these evil men from enslaving the mind as a prelude to complete subjugation—/ it is imperative to stand up to these fascists and nail them to their own lies! / Progressives are beginning to fight back against McCarthyism—the fuehrer of American fascism. / At this late hour, I am still confident the good people of our country will make their will felt in Washington and stop the execution!

  And indeed, now, tonight, as evening marks the close of day and skies of blue begin to gray, the “good people” emerge, as though on cue, to protest the executions, attack Uncle Sam and his Legion of Superheroes on the frontiers and harass him within, violate human decency, threaten the Free World with terror and disruption, and strike ruthlessly at the very faith that binds it together. It is no real surprise that in the vanguard of the rebellion are agents of the Phantom disguised as ministers of the Holy Gospel—clemency appeals and rabid protests have been pouring in all week from preachers and theologians in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, California, Latin America, the Vatican, France, and the Evangelical Churches of Italy. Nearly 2300 American “clergymen” sign a last-minute appeal for clemency, demand an audience with the President. There is loose talk about “peace” and “justice” and “mercy.” One would think the Daily Worker had seen the light, so many churchmen appear these days in its pages. “Obvious evidence that the Angels of Darkness are deceiving the very Elect,” FBI undercover agent Herbert Philbrick warns, “is the increasing number of Communist-sponsored petitions going out over the imprimatur of ministers of the Gospel and the outsized number of clergy who are signatories! Never is an Angel of Darkness more secure than when he poses as an Angel of Light!” In Washington, the Rosenberg forces move with a cynical snicker into “Inspiration House” on Kalorama Road. Thousands hold a protest vigil in front of the White House, pretending to “pray” that the Rosenbergs be spared. “I saw those ministers in action,” G-man Phil-brick confides, “ruthless Communist leaders prostituting the Christian ministry to the evil ends of atheism and oppression!”