Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  She auditioned for the Schola Cantorum at the Metropolitan Opera House and was accepted, the youngest voice the choir had ever had, it looked like her dreams were coming true. But she couldn’t go on tour with them because she couldn’t leave her job, so they dropped her. Her mother said: “If God wanted you to have lessons, God would have made them possible.” She was like the heroines in all those musicals who starve and suffer unnoticed, until one night the star gets a sore throat and can’t go on, and against the better judgment of the fat cigar-chewing manager, the heroine takes over, wins the hearts of millions. Only Ethel never took over. She wasn’t there when the star got a sore throat. She married Julius Rosenberg, typed up spy notes, and got sentenced to the electric chair instead. What happens to us in life seems, in retrospect, inevitable. And much of it is, the main patterns anyway. And yet we are full of potential, there are many patterns in us, and there are significant moments in life when we can choose among those parts of ourselves we might fulfill. What if I had met her years ago? I could have recommended her for a scholarship at Whittier, she might have studied music like Ola, they might’ve even been friends, we could have acted in plays together. She was just a year behind me, having skipped a year, she was very bright, and I was virtually running Whittier College from my freshman year on, it would have been easy—Dr. Dexter would have admired the suggestion, bringing a poor girl from the Eastern ghettos out to the clean air and warm sunshine of Southern California, I’d have probably got special mention in the yearbook for arranging it. We could have taken walks and talked about all my student activities: the fraternity, football, debate and theater, politics—she might have helped me with my studies. I didn’t really need help, but I was always getting depressed about them, and she could have kept me going.

  I breathed the June air deeply, feeling the campus palm trees swaying gently overhead, and wondered if Ethel, too, a dreamer like myself breathing this same air, was being similarly moved, similarly drawn back into this trance of timelessness, on this, her last day on earth, falling in love all over again with life itself, or at least a dream of life? “Now I kneel down to a crevice in the concrete, filled with earth painstakingly accumulated from the underpart of moss, small velvety crumbs of which cling to the damp cool parts of the yard where the sun’s rays rarely penetrate. In this crevice an apple seed which I planted, and have watered patiently, is sprouting bravely. All my love, darling.” Just the thing to take root and crack up the concrete, I thought, the prison people must love it.

  In the Horatio Alger novels, in spite of everything, the heroines were always saved at last by rich uncles. Ethel didn’t have a rich uncle. Neither did I, growing up—except for Grandpa Milhous’s money which put me through school, we were as poor as any other middle-class family—but later I got adopted. By teachers, businessmen, Herbert Hoover, eventually Uncle Sam himself. I was successful with old men, she wasn’t. Was this it, then? Was this the reason that that serious little curly-headed girl watering an apple seed in a prison exercise yard was going to get 2000 volts bolted through her brain tonight? A missing character, a lost “closing scene”? Or had the story taken a wrong turn somewhere, putting her beyond the reach of rich uncles? That night she got attacked by that old guy from The Valiant cast, for example, or the day they knocked her down with fire hoses on Bleecker Street.

  What would I have done, I wondered—what would have become of me if they’d knocked me down with those hoses? Ethel was just sixteen years old, a sensitive little girl with a pretty voice and big dark eyes, trusting, innocent, bright and lively. She didn’t want to change the world, she wanted to love it, to sing to it, to give herself to it. Just like me. But it was 1931, the unemployed were marching on Washington, her family was wretchedly poor, and there was a job to be had: as clerk in a paper-box factory on Bleecker Street. “You’ll never get ahead!” her mother had screamed at her, pushing her out the door. “There’s no place in life for arty people!” But all right, she would get a job, share her money with the family, and still somehow save aside enough to take music lessons, maybe even go to the university, enter theater—it happened in the movies every day. But when she got to the factory, there were already a thousand people there ahead of her, trying to get the same job. I knew how she felt, I’d been through this, too, that Christmas in New York, trying to land a job with a law firm. But in her case, there was no private interview, there was a riot. The police were called and the crowds were broken up with fire hoses. Ethel was knocked down twice.

  I tried to imagine this scene, but it was confusing. I thought of the street as narrow with little restaurants and movie houses, but I knew that further east, near Lafayette Street and the Bowery, it didn’t look like this. Rows of plain dirty brick buildings, I thought, five or six stories high, a lot of fire escapes, balconies, drainpipes, green paint. The street would be clotted with trucks, not to mention the rampaging mob, yet I felt the trees around, blue sky, room to run. I could see the police springing down out of their patrol wagons, faces alert, turned up, catching the sun, hands on their sticks or at their belts, tense yet exultant, like footballers taking the field, could see the hoses uncoiling from fire trucks, connected to fire hydrants that looked like stubby circumcised peckers, could feel the hoses suddenly fattening with surging water, could sense the excitement of the crowd, men mostly, tough and angry, and big women—where was Ethel? I saw her, small, all but lost in the huge crowd, an uncertain child, wanting to run, yet drawn obediently toward the job she’d been sent to ask for, thus moving neither with the crowd nor against it, and so isolated, a tempting target, framed in the solid arched doorway of a dingy yellow brick building, a kind of warehouse or something—and the guy with the hose, blasting away at the big broads, the clumsy old men, spies her standing there, legs spread, eyes wide open, clutching a handbag to her small breasts, and slowly he bends that big gray snake of his—I run toward her: “Ethel! Look out!” She looks up—but too late, the spray hits her full in the face and down she goes, kicking against the current, the jet blasts up her skirt, driving her, skidding on her backside, to the wall—I throw myself in front of her, absorbing the brunt of the spray. It slams hard against my butt, my head, I’m thrown against her, we tumble together in the driving shower, she clutches me to hang on, I fall between her legs, but I keep my back to the spray and she manages, protected, to scramble to her feet. “Run!” I say. “Get away while you can!” She grabs my hand. “Come!” she cries. Her voice is small, almost strident. Somehow, we’re out of the spray and running free, past the milling angry crowds, wheeling vehicles—then suddenly it hits us again, from a different direction maybe, knocks our feet out from under us, she’s down and hurt, skirt up around her waist, I pick her up, plunge forward through the driving spray, duck behind a car, then around a corner: safe!

  I set her down, lower her wet skirt. We stare at each other a moment, our faces blank with shock and exertion: and then we laugh. She pushes her curly hair out of her eyes, notices that my hair is curly too. We look down at our wet clothes, pasted to our bodies. She takes my hand: “My brother Sam’s got some clothes that will fit you,” she says. Her voice is gentle now, and musical. We walk south on the Bowery, past locked-up doorways, windows with junk piled high in them or cardboarded up, there in the sunshine, talking about our lives. It does not seem far. I feel at home here with her: she seems so at ease in the city. It excites me to watch her move, so self-assured. I tell her about my play, The Little Accident, and she laughs gaily, squeezes my hand. My fraternity, the Square Shooters, had just put it on in April, a “real shocker” they called it at Whittier—it was about a football star who gets benched for bringing his girl back to the dorm after eight o’clock. It had a lot of daring scenes like Coach Newman kissing his star goodnight when he tucks him in. The unique thing was that all the characters were real people, and the plot, though outlandish, was nearly true. Ethel says that’s very experimental. I tell her how I played the part of Joe Sweeney, my debating partner in real
life. The Whittier News said it was “one of the cleverest skits of the year.” She is greatly amused when I tell her that the climax of the play is when the star of the team is allowed to enter the game at last, but in a final wild effort to win the game, falls on his face on the three-yard line. “Really! Well, don’t worry,” she says laughing, and pulls me along. She tells me about the settlement-house theater groups and says I should write something for them. Why not? I think. This may be my big break! She leans against me. Water is running down through the drains in the streets from the melee now far behind us. When we get near the place she lives, she makes me wait. “It’s okay,” she says when she comes back. “My mother’s out shopping, my father’s busy in the shop, and the boys are gone.”

  There’s a big plate-glass window with her father’s name on it in peeling gold leaf: BARNET GREENGLASS. Two doors: one goes into the sewing-machine repair shop; we take the other and climb a steep flight of stairs. Her wet body is silhouetted against the dim daylight at the top as though it were naked. Her room is separate from the rest and opens off the hallway. It is plain but clean, a bed and a chest of drawers, some pamphlets and books, musical scores, ashtrays, a wooden chair. Right away, I want to buy her something for it, flowers maybe, or a soft doll. “Get your clothes off,” she says, “and I’ll go get you a towel.” I remember a movie in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert spent a rainy night together in a hotel room with a blanket up between them like the walls of Jericho. I try to strip the cool way Clark Gable did, but I feel more like Claudette Colbert. My shirt and pants are heavy, and I see there’s a puddle where I’ve been standing. I lay them across the windowsill.

  She comes back with a towel and some clothes. A warm bath would feel good, but the only tub, I recall, is a large primitive enamel affair with a heavy wooden lid down in the kitchen by the stove. Water for it is heated on the stove, like for the big metal bath Millard Fillmore installed in the White House a century ago. She has unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it out, and now she kicks off her shoes. I’m standing near the window in my underwear, my hands crossed in front of me, but unable to hold back the bulge of my excitement. She lays her brother’s clothes out on the bed, turns toward me questioningly with the towel. I pull my undershirt over my head, feeling vulnerable. She watches as though admiring me. She rubs my back and chest hard with the towel. I know that Jewish girls have no religious restrictions against having…doing…going all the way. She peels my underpants down, kneeling as it were to the crevice—my penis, released, falls stiffly forward, brushing her cheek. “Let me get you out of those wet clothes,” I say hoarsely, pitching my voice down like Clark Gable’s. Her fingers are trembling as she unlocks the stay on her skirt. Her brassiere slips forward off her narrow shoulders. “Richard,” she whispers, “I’ve never…never…” “Neither have I,” I say softly. We stare at each other in the bare room. A warm summery breeze is blowing in through the window, a song from some radio. We kiss. I slide her wet panties down over her cool damp bottom, getting a glimpse of her black round thing, my heart beating wildly. She strokes me gently. “I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She pulls—

  “Well, I see that the old flagpole still stands,” somebody said. It wasn’t Douglas MacArthur, it was Uncle Sam, who had just flown in through my open window. “You know, son, you’ll go blind playing with yourself like that,” he said. “It can make your hair fall out and your brain rot, too!”

  18.

  The National Poet Laureate Meditates on the Art of Revelation

  The boatmen’s strike is over. The Iron Curtain around the Statue of Liberty is down, the sightseer ferries are running again. The jam at the south end of Times Square collapses momentarily as crowds stream away to the Battery to make the traditional birth voyage in the sunshine-yellow ferries across to Bedloe’s Island, there to enter into the Mighty Lady and reach the fount of Liberty: “Oh Mother of Exiles, merciful and mild, refuge of the tempest-tost and comfort of the wretched refuse, conceived without the stain of sin, full of grace and reinforced copper, noble couch of the three branches of government and perfect holocaust of Divine Love whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, watch over us!” But the Square soon fills up again as thousands of newcomers arrive and press toward the center, where now the Entertainment Committee is making a special announcement: to beat the Sabbath and any further postponements, the executions have been moved up from eleven p.m. to eight o’clock—the Federal Express is not only on time, she’s three hours early! The Rosenberg defense lawyers, already wild with frustration, explode in a fit of incoherent anguish and suicidally charge the Square—they’re allowed to pass through, one time, end to end, like fraternity pledges running the gauntlet, pelted with laughter and good-natured abuse as they go shrieking by, into the center and out, zooming along like their tails are on fire, into well-deserved oblivion. Or so everyone hopes.

  Smiling wryly at all the hidden ironies, the National Poet Laureate watches them go, then wanders unobtrusively through the area, collecting images, experimenting with various forms and meters, searching for the metaphoric frame by which to contain and re-create tonight’s main ceremony (“…the last scene…the seventh decision…dance to his violent tune…shouts of anathema…as the clock ticked on…”) and cause it, by his own manifesto, “to happen in people’s heads.” This is what his art is all about, this is what it means, as his mother says, to be “called to be the servant of truth.” It is not enough to present facts—something has to happen in time and space, observed through the imagination and the heart, something accessible and yet illuminating to that reader he writes for, the Gentleman from Indiana. Raw data is paralyzing, a nightmare, there’s too much of it and man’s mind is quickly engulfed by it. Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination, of giving them shape and visibility, keeping them personal. It is, as Mother Luce has said, “fakery in allegiance to the truth,” a kind of interpretive reenactment of the overabundant flow of events, “an effective mosaic” assembled from “the fragmentary documents” of life, quickened with audacious imagery and a distinct and original prosody: “Noses for news lie betwixt ears for music.” Some would say that such deep personal involvement, such metaphoric compressions and reliance on inner vision and imaginary “sources,” must make objectivity impossible, and TIME would agree with them, but he would find simply illiterate anyone who concluded from this that he was not serving Truth. More: he would argue that objectivity is an impossible illusion, a “fantastic claim” (“gnostic” is the word on his tongue these days), and as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible.

  Thus, debating uneasily with himself, less self-assured than his readers might suspect or hope, he threads his way through the masses in Times Square, alert to his task, but reflective in mood, worried that he’s got off the track somehow, fearful of his powers even as he fears their diminishment, and conscious, a young man at the pinnacle of success and in the full bloom of life, of his own mortality—didn’t Mother Luce predict his death as long ago as 1936? He and his brothers must surely die, she said then: “I don’t suppose we can establish the date for the euthanasia… But one way to look at them, at this date, might be to say that they have twenty more years of life….” He was only thirteen years old when she said that, and it had frightened him to think that, like Jesus Christ, he might have only thirty-three years to walk this earth. And it was possible, it was all too possible. Not only were the actuarial tables dismal enough for poets like himself, but hadn’t his own father died prematurely at the age of thirty-one? A sudden and sordid death on the night of young TIME’S sixth birthday, he’s never quite got over it. Almost like his Dad was trying to tell him something. The hard way. Though TIME loves his mother and is often inspired by her, it’s the ghost of his unhappy father, he knows, that he carries in his poet’s heart. And now thirty of his al
lotted thirty-three years have washed away, he has just three of them left, three short years to sort things out, find some way of rejuvenating himself, of overmastering the world’s entropie attack on him before it’s too late. And in this, he knows, his fate and America’s are linked: he and America both seem to have lost, as his mother says, “that feeling for the future, the confidence in the bigger and the better, the spirit of you-ain’t-seen-nothin’-yet”—but perhaps tonight…?

  Twice before, he thought he’d found the secret: once, just before World War II, with his dream of “The American Century” (“We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world…the dynamic leader of world trade…the powerhouse from which the ideals [of Western Civilization] spread throughout the world…”), and again three years ago, at the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, with his vision of perpetual War: “One of the great perennial themes along with Love and Death.” His mother’s vision, actually, but as always he had been inspired by her: “In the next few years Americans will have to live with War as they have not since the days of the settler and the Minute Man…. War always has been, is and always will be part of man’s fate until Kingdom come.… In any case, we are not going to end War without practicing it some more—and living with it…. If ‘coexistence’ with the present Soviet Communist system is impossible, is total War ‘inevitable’? Maybe so, maybe not, but what no man has a right to say is that we can live peaceably and happily with this prodigious evil…. The Soviet Empire will continue to expand unless it is opposed with all our strength and that includes the steady, calm and constant acceptance of the risk of all-out War…. The truth will be made plain by wrath if not by reason!”