Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  Like gongs in the mind, hinting at echoing infinities, names, names and number: Sarah Dougherty sells the 4-story 1-family dwelling at 825 Carroll Street to Mrs. Rudolphine Dick. General Van Fleet kills a 1950-pound Kodiak bear and the 1952 profit ratio for department stores is the 2nd worst in 19 years. Mangrum Posts 69. There are big numbers like the $4998732500 foreign aid bill, little numbers like the 5 tons of gravel and dirt that Jimmy Willis is buried under in Lambertsville. The 6-2 record of Vinegar Bend Mizell. The 500 Fingers of Dr. T by Dr. Seuss—You’ve got to see the 480,000-key piano hit an atomic clinker! WITH STEREOPHONIC SOUND! Allison Choate of Apawamis cards a 77, 55 Chinese are ordered out of the country, Eleanor Hortense Almond dies at 103. Volume declines to 1010000 shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The President is visited by 100 schoolchildren, and the Vice President tells Senator Taft: “I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday, Bob!” A kind of accountability, but without irrevocable consequence, gently disturbing the timestream on occasions, but never causing it to leap its banks. The Red Sox scored a record 17 runs in one inning, canteloupe is selling at 19 cents for one pound. Even the patterns are usually familiar ones, suggesting cribbage runs, the inflationary spiral, countdowns: Eighth Race: Perón arrests 7 Radicals, a 4-nation chase nets 6 thieves, the French crisis enters its 5th week, Nick Condos was Martha Raye’s 4th husband, and Willi Goettling, leaving 3 dependents, is shot between his 2 eyes by the Russians, losing his 1 life. 37 Down: Zero. NIL.

  Despite all this effort at secularity, some communicants are nevertheless disturbed by these litanies, discovering in them hints of the terrible abysses beyond the tablets. The very enormity of the monument, at first thought comforting, begins to smother and overwhelm them. A few duck out. Others withdraw to a familiar corner, content to follow a recognizable time-line or two and keep their heads intact. But many begin to lose control. They twitch, lurch forward, jerk back, rush ahead, cower, circle back, then panic and race recklessly through the sanctuary as though lost in a circus or a ceremonial abattoir. Prince Karl Rudolf Marries. SOME HOPES FOR U.N. / TOO HIGH. Trouble on First Hole. HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT (if you really care…): The Goddess Strapless in fine white Push-Button Loading. DULLES’ REMARKS SHARP: Don’t Neglect Slipping FALSE liquid will help you to handle expanding demands as well as to weather adjustments Fair and a little warmer today highest temperature near 23980 entries in McCalls’ dress-your-best Candidate for the worst-dressed woman scattered with black polka dots RED PLOT! “What’s happening? Where am I?” they scream, tearing frantically through the shrine, plowing into other pilgrims, slapping up against the slabs: “Let me out!” But Papagos Sees Need for Speed and CLARK KNEW OF RHEE VIEW, all seams are bound: PHARMACISTS ELECT Michigan Assassin ‘BLIND FATHER OF 1953’ Following Crude Advance with that priceless American Quality—FRESHNESS! 19 COPIES OF THIS successful businessman keeps abreast of FAILLE LASTEX WANTED IN Mr. Divine’s imaginary atomic explosion bathing suit and bra colors *(T-T) TIMES tested! Churchill Voices Shock STEAK FOR FATHER’S DAY Wired for sun it’ll blast space helmets back to Mars and put all the cowboy hats out to pasture HOGS moderately active. HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? Sabers Down. Margaret Truman Passes. “How long has it been…?”

  11.

  How to Handle a Bloodthirsty Mob

  I was getting dizzy trying to read The New York Times on the ride in. Actually, I felt very comfortable with a newspaper in my hands, reading them was a lifetime habit of mine, I’d been an enthusiast since I was a little kid, eccentric about it in fact, but I couldn’t read anything in the back seat of a moving car. And of all the papers, the goddamn Times was the worst. Letters too small and uneven, too gray, too much crammed onto a page—what the hell do we want with all this high-minded gossip, anyway? Had to get through it, though; you never knew what you might need in the middle of a Cabinet meeting. I did know what I was likely to need on the way in, however, and so turned to the sports pages: sooner or later my chauffeur was bound to ask me about yesterday’s ballgames or tonight’s pitchers. Who are you betting on tonight, Mr. Nixon? He was a Negro and so I always tried to have something good to say about Jackie Robinson or Roy Campanella of the Dodgers. Usually this was pretty easy because both those colored boys were having terrific seasons, they were hot and the team was hot, but not yesterday: I was glad to see that they’d both gone hitless and the Cardinals had whipped the Bums’ asses, 12 to 4. On the other hand, my own team, the Washington Senators, had lost to the White Sox and dropped back into the second division, overtaken by the Boston Red Sox, who had made a complete mockery of the game by scoring seventeen runs in one inning—the goddamn seventh, needless to say—crushing Detroit, 23 to 3. My God, what’s baseball coming to? By coincidence, 23 was exactly how many Boston batters had gone to the plate in that seventh-inning outrage. And it was also, it occurred to me, the number of my football jersey back at Whittier College…23. Well, what of it? Nothing.

  I leaned my head back a moment, closed my eyes for a little stomach-stroking seventh-inning stretch of my own, then braced myself and turned back to the front pages. Full of the Berlin, Rosenberg, Korean stories, the government crisis in France, the foreign-aid-bill fight in the House, the port strikes. I glanced through for my own name, noticed that Joe McCarthy was still getting a lot of headlines. That FBI agent’s hairy tale of the “goon squad” plot to assassinate Joe had made the front pages of all the papers this morning, Joe was also being widely quoted on his anti-Administration support of Rhee’s prisoner release in Korea, and there was even a long story on a new member of his staff, yet another “veteran Red-hunter.” Certainly, I wasn’t getting that kind of press these days, but this was probably for the best. I wouldn’t be running for office again for at least three years, and if I was going to create a sense of momentum, I couldn’t start from too near the peak. And I hadn’t gone hitless, they’d covered my work in the Senate yesterday, even if it was back in the middle pages, and there was even a report on my casual encounter with Bob Taft: “The Eisenhower Administration is improving its collective golf score, whatever luck it is having with its larger problems.” At first glance, I was flattered, pleased I’d pulled it off, but I began to wonder if maybe indirectly it was some kind of smear: trying to say we were out playing golf when we should be facing up to our national problems…? I didn’t care if they said that about Eisenhower, but it wasn’t fair to hit me with that one, I was only doing my goddamn duty. And then the score, too, they were obviously making fun about that: “‘I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday,’ Nixon declared, then bowed acknowledgement to Senator Taft’s congratulations. Taft was on crutches and appeared to have lost considerable weight, but was ‘gay’ as he exchanged golfing talk with Nixon.” Gay? Maybe I’d made a mistake warming up to a dying man. “Bob, I have news for you…”

  I sighed. News and more news: I read that New York City was installing “Atomic Age” city lights that turned on by radio, that several teachers had been axed in New York City in apparent reprisals against Albert Einstein, and that they were letting Trotsky’s killer out of jail—thank God I wasn’t paranoid, or I’d begin to worry it was yet another goddamn anniversary gift to Pat and me. At one time in my life, I actually thought I wanted to be a journalist and took some courses in it at college, but I hated it. Only C’s I ever got all through school. It was one thing to witness an event, another to go home and make up some story about it. Anyway, if it was worth witnessing, it was worth getting into—I couldn’t just stand stupidly on the sidelines and take notes, I had to jump in and play a part. Move things around. And then, whenever I did, and chanced to glance back over my shoulder at those cynical bastards watching me, grinning, jotting it all down, making a fat living off my spent hide and life-force like some kind of cannibals, even contributing to my suffering with their niggardly reports and mud-slinging insinuations, how was I expected to respect and admire them? Besides, it’s a fact, while most publishers might be Republicans, most reporters were Democrats, or worse—look at how they’d
smeared me last fall with that phony manufactured “fund crisis,” for example, hurling charges, ignoring my refutations—trial by press, that’s what it was, worse than trial by ordeal, not even Tass would have dared to do so much to damage our national prestige at home and abroad—to hell with them.

  Pat was luckier, they were kinder to her. Always had been. “Patricia Ryan as Daphne Martin had a role which called for temperament, and did she have it? Plenty. She did some fine acting as she wheeled in and out of the room, always in a semi-rage. Richard Nixon had a small part but carried his assignment well.” No smaller than hers, goddamn it. That was from the Whittier News in its review of that play we were in, The Dark Tower, the one where we met. It was about actors in the big city. An evil man’s possession of a young girl’s mind. Murder. I was the playwright, Barry Jones, “a faintly collegiate, eager blushing youth of 24,” a small-town greenhorn outsider among these snide and pompous Easterners, a rare part for me since I usually played old men. Pat played the part of Daphne Martin, “a tall, dark, sullen beauty of 20, wearing a dress of great chic and an air of permanent resentment,” in short, a hot-pants actress on the make, tough and lethal. In the play we ended up going off to get married, but it was meant as a kind of cynical joke. “Jones & Martin, card tricks and sex appeal.” It wasn’t an altogether pleasant part to play. All the way through the thing, they made fun of me, whether I was onstage or not, made fun of my open-faced self-confidence, my naïveté, my youth, my name, my piano playing, my writing, my taste, it probably put Pat off me for months. Even as she and I made our final exit, Pat slipped back onstage to tell the real hero: “Listen—as soon as he’s tucked in his crib I’ll call you up!” But they all forgot one thing. I wrote the play that was the title of this play, the play within the play—or perhaps the play that embraced the play. The Dark Tower was mine, and they all lived in it….

  “Eh? Stole what?”

  “Stole second, Mr. Nixon. That’s how him and Sammy White scored when Umphlett singled, see…”

  “Oh. Yes, I see…” I realized John had been talking for some time. Trying to tell me about that mad 17-run inning. “A good move…” While John talked, I turned to the entertainment pages, looking for some place to go Sunday on our anniversary. Washington was out, the National was closed, getting ready for Guys and Dolls, nothing on but Man and Superman and Show Boat. Some good boxing matches, but she’d probably never go along with that. Maybe the new Cinerama or one of those 3-D movies like House of Wax. I’d feel silly wearing those goddamn cardboard glasses, though.

  “…So with the bases loaded, Jim Piersall singled and Dick Gernert homered, so that was seven runs in…”

  “Izzat so?” I smiled. I’m generally very good at these one-to-one relationships.

  “The pitcher come up and singled and they started the whole lineup over again. Sammy White…”

  There was a new Dr. Seuss movie premiering in New York about a boy who hated piano lessons, but it looked a little childish. Mary Healy looked like she had big boobs, though. And another new one with Sylvana Pampanini in it called O.K., Nero—wasn’t that the guy who used corpses as torches? A little heavy maybe for the season. To tell the truth, the idea of going to a movie bored the hell out of me, boobs or no boobs. I recalled the days when I was investigating the Hollywood Ten with HUAC, that proximity to the stars—in fact, I was surprised how ordinary they seemed. There were Bogart and Bacall out there, pushovers for the Reds. Cooper was a hopeless dope, I haven’t been able to sit through one of his pictures since, even if he was on our side, and guys like Menjou and Disney and McCarey weren’t much better. Then came the stoolies, guys like Parks—whoo…. Made me angry in a way. Of course, having lived near Hollywood all my life—and even married, as it were, into the industry—I’d never been really star-struck like other people. And besides, there was my father’s eccentric habit of naming all his cows after movie stars—after you’ve milked Lillian Gish and remarked on her swollen blue teats, slapped Greta Garbo on the rump, and cleaned up Mary Pickford’s shit, it’s hard to be romantic about them.

  “No kidding!” I said, since John seemed to have paused in his story.

  “Right, so they bring in another pitcher, the third one this inning—and he can’t get the ball across the plate! He walks one guy, filling the bases, then walks Gernert, forcing a run in! And then the pitcher comes up and gets another single…!”

  One thing I wanted to do was go in to New York and see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible after all I’d heard about it, but we couldn’t risk giving it any kind of official sanction, and besides, Edgar was probably photographing the audience for his files. Could go and denounce it publicly, maybe. Should get a headline or two. Protocol-wise, though, the smart thing would be to take her to that film of the British coronation ceremonies which was such a surprise box-office smash. England had spent five and a half million dollars to crown the Queen and now they were going to get it all back in film royalties. Make history, make money…

  “Say, uh, how much longer is this going to go on, John?”

  “It’s wild, ain’t it, Mr. Nixon?” he laughed. I rattled the paper impatiently. “Well, so Gene Stephens singles, see, and that’s his third hit of the inning, a new all-time record. Umphlett comes up and he singles, and Sammy White comes in, scoring his record-breaking third run of the inning. The next guy walks, filling the bases—”

  “My God! Listen, I tell you what, John…”

  “But then finally Kell flies out to retire the side.”

  “Ah. He probably got bored and did it on purpose.”

  “How’s that, Mr. Nixon?”

  “I said, sometimes that’s how the ball bounces, John, we all have to live with our victories and defeats, only teams that believe in themselves can rise to their challenges.”

  “Oh yeah. I see what you mean, Mr. Nixon…”

  There was a summer ice show, “Scents and Nonsense,” on at the Hotel New Yorker, I noticed. Pat might like that, she used to be hot for ice skating before we got married, I busted my head more than once trying to keep up with her, never did get the hang of it. She was a real time-waster, dancing, skating, gadding about, it was a relief to get married and get all that over with. Better skip the ice show, she might get ambitious again. It occurred to me that I had been living with Pat for nearly thirteen years, thirteen years this Sunday, and yet in a real sense she was a complete stranger to me. Only when she was chewing me out did she become somehow real, but the rest of the time…well, it was almost as if I’d married some part of myself, and Pat was only the accidental incarnation of that part. Do we all do this? Is this what marriage is all about, finding fleshly embodiments of our ghostly selves, making ourselves whole?

  I’d found her very gloomy at breakfast this morning for some reason. Feeling neglected maybe. I remembered the way I’d found her last night. My Wild Irish Potato. People have noted my unusual empathy with despondent people; on the other hand, Pat gets despondent all the time and this only tees me off.

  Julie had greeted me at the kitchen door with a sticky strawberry-jam kiss, then had wrinkled up her nose and said: “Oh, Daddy, your beard!”

  “Don’t be silly,” I’d said impatiently. “I just shaved it.” This had got to be a joke with the girls and I was a little tired of it. I wondered what would happen if Tricia and Julie grew up and met and fell in love with the Rosenberg boys. Maybe that was what was troubling Pat. Looking at her then, standing there at the stove frying bacon in her bathrobe, she had seemed like all those well-washed people from obscure little California towns and suburbs who used to come to see me in July and August when I was their Senator, shake my hand, get an autograph, talk about the weather back home or the condition of the roads or some pet theory about the Red Menace. Plain and simple people, not very bright, not very well informed, nice though, and they were voters. And they were on my side. Pat was a voter. She was on my side. But, no, it was more than that, she was the choice that gave others trust in me, earned the
ir vote. What do the common people care about tidelands disputes or wars in Asia? The important thing to them is who you married, how you live, what kind of kids you’ve got. I married Pat and revealed to the world something about myself, and so became Vice President of the United States of America.

  “Sit down, Dick, and eat your breakfast,” she’d said dully, munching toast. “I told John you’d be out in a few minutes. What happened to your face?”

  “Eh? Nothing. An accident.” I’d dropped irritably into a chair, ducked my head in the Congressional Record. Why was it, whenever I was at home, I felt guilty?