Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  “How do you do, suh!”

  “How about a few dozen immortal words for us tonight, you old blatherskite?”

  “Mah pleasure, suh! What about? Drinkin’ or huntin’ or—?”

  “About God, Billy! About God and the Phantom and the chosen people!”

  “Waal… In the beginnin’, uh… God created the earth…”

  “That’s pretty good…”

  “Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth.… Then God stopped.”

  “He stopped?”

  “Yuh see, God didn’t merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew thet man was competent fer a soul cuz he was capable of savin’ thet soul—and not only his soul but hisself…”

  “Himself?”

  “Yes, suh! He knew thet man was capable of teachin’ hisself to be civilized. It ain’t only man’s high destiny, but proof of his immortality, too, thet his is the choice between endin’ the world…and completin’ it!”

  “Aha! A lofty bit of talknophical assumnancy there, Billy—but what about the Phantom?”

  “The dark incorrigible one, yuh mean, who possessed the arrogance and pride to demand with, and the temerity to object with, and the ambition to substitute with…and the long roster of ruthless avatars—Genghis and Caesar and Stalin and Bonaparte and Huey Long—”

  This mention of the Kingfish gets a big cheer. “That’s whom I mean, okay,” says Uncle Sam, stoking up his corncob pipe. “But what do we do about him, Billy? What do we do about the goddamn Phantom?”

  “The answer’s very simple, suh,” says Faulkner, stroking his moustache. “Ah don’t mean easy, but simple… It begins et home.”

  “At home?” Uncle Sam blows a smoke ring that floats out to hover over the Nobel laureate like a halo.

  “Yup. Let us think fust of savin’ the integer we call home: not whur Ah live, but whur we live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid then rocks or citadels about the earth, so thet the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient Dark Spirit shall look and say, ‘There is nothin’ fer us here… Man—simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women—has beaten us!’”

  “Sweet Genevieve, Bill! that’s pretty highfalutin’ sesquipedalian advice! When I think on this majestic jazz, mine eyes dazzle! And that word ‘integer’ was a jimdandy, too! Let’s give him a hand, folks, he’s a good ole boy! And pass him a bottle a redeye! That’s right, on the house, nothin’ too good for an old Massassip screamer—that boy can head-rassle with the worst of ’em! All them little integers swarmin’ around—WHOOPEE! you gotta be born and reared up in the swamps to think ’em up like that!” He gives a puff and the smoke halo over Faulkner’s head disintegrates with a little tinkle into a sprinkle of gold dust.

  While out front, Uncle Sam picks out more celebrities in the roving spots and hands out foot-long panatellas in appreciation to all those who’ve helped make tonight’s show possible, backstage consternation over the missing Vice President is growing. Some think he might have been assassinated. Others that he’s been kidnapped, or else overslept. Or got picked up as a derelict—those who saw him on the train report that he was looking pretty scruffy. Or maybe the Phantom’s got him! Even as, from back in the wings and down in the subway station, they join Uncle Sam, the Singing Saints, and all the citizens out in the Square in singing a special Happy Birthday on this 19th of June to the Duchess of Dreamland, Bessie Wallis Warfield of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, they are thinking: Somebody may have to take his place. Maybe it’s me.

  Uncle Sam hugs the birthday girl, feet dangling, high off the boards (the Duchess struggles, smiling gamely, to keep her skirt from rucking up over her knees, while out in the crowd, the Duke squirms uncomfortably among his whooping and hollering in-laws), then sets her down, roughs up her hair playfully, and presents her with one of Betty Crocker’s giant angelfood birthday cakes. Amid the huzzahs and many happy returns, Uncle Sam spots the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill—he coaxes Winnie, who is often confused in the American imagination with W. C. Fields, into coming up on the stage to belt out a few boomers from the Golden Age of the Finest Hour. The P.M. squares his shoulders, winks puckishly, ducks his fat chin in his chest, snorts like a bull, paws the ground with his spatted hooves, jumps up once and cracks his heels together, and with the dignity of pink-cheeked greatness about him commences to bellow like a bona fide blueblood: “Cor blimey! the crisis is upon us, an iron curtain has descended on the broad sunlit uplands, and like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along beyond the soft underbelly of space and time! In the past we have a light which flickered, in the present”—here he raps the chair with his walking stick and whips out a new cigar—“we have a light that flames, so do not let us speak of -darker days, death and sorrow, the quivering, precarious sinews of peace, blood, toil, tears, and bloody ‘ell, God save the Queen, upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization! DREAD NOUGHT! When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite, short words are best! Now this is not the end, everyone has his day and some days last longer than others, it is not even the beginning of the end…”

  But while he’s blustering like that, Uncle Sam is filling the stage behind him and secret corners of the VIP section with Minutemen and Green Mountain Boys—suddenly they leap out and point their muskets at Winnie: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,’” they cry, spitting tobacco juice and flourishing buckets of tar and feathers, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government!”

  “What? What?” roars Churchill. He puts two fingers in his mouth and lets rip a deafening whistle. People hear troops marching, singing “Yankee Doodle”—they open up to let them pass through—but wait! they’re not Americans after all, they’re Redcoats! A Patriot comes loping up ahead of them, slapping his thigh, hippety-hopping as though galloping in on an imaginary horse: it’s Paul Revere! He warns the Minutemen, and they fall into defensive formations against the attackers. “Stand your ground! Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here!” There’s musket fire! Screams! Eight Minutemen drop dead! The Redcoats march on into the center, led by the likes of Hair-Buyer Hamilton, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Lord Cornwallis, strutting like peacocks! George Washington organizes his forces and a full-scale free-for-all breaks out! Rhetoric is flying through the air like musket fire: “The die is now cast,” bellows Churchill, popping his buttons with excitement and looking for all the world like John Bull himself, “the Colonies must either submit or triumph!”

  “There’s something absurd in supposin’ a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island!” snorts Uncle Sam. “Come on, boys! From the East to the West blow the trumpet to treason and make the most of it! Now is the seedtime of Continental union, faith and the clash of resounding arms, the original Merrycunt Revilusion! I know not what chorus others may take, but as for me, stick a feather in your girl and call her Maggie Rooney! Whee-oo! I must fight somethin’ or I’ll ketch the dry rot—burnt brandy won’t save me! C’mon, you varmints, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the massacree! Laxation without intoxification is tyranny, so give me Molly Stark or liberty sleeps a widder!”

  Blood is splattering everywhere. Washington’s tattered troops shrink to a shivering handful. But the old vestryman of Truro Parish gathers them into a make-believe ark and, invoking Divine Providence, they paddle across one of the aisles in the VIP section and take the wassailing intruders by surprise. “A race of convicts—a pack of rascals, sir!” storms Churchill. “They are a set of tatterdemalions, th
ere is hardly a whole pair of breeches in an entire regiment! Bugger the lot!” But it’s not to be: the swamp foxes and backwoodsmen scatter through the forest of VIP seats and pick off the Redcoats like sleeping coons, teaching Burgoyne and Cornwallis with buckshot to their retreating rears the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare. “All right, then,” says the P.M., reaching inside his siren suit to scratch his distinguished ballocks, “we have been subdued.”

  Cheers erupt through the Square and beyond as Uncle Sam unveils the stone tablets of the Constitution, said to be the same ones that George Washington brought down off Bunkum Hill. All the “dead” soldiers get up and sing “Yankee Doodle” together, then step back to help guard the perimeter of the VIP area. Winston Churchill and Uncle Sam pick each other’s pockets clean, and Winnie is sent off, amid wild cheering, Uncle Sam’s Dr. T beanie on his head, its yellow rubber fingers flashing his famous V-for-Victory sign.

  Then George Washington, the American Fabius, so-called, brushes himself off and leads out all the other Presidents: His Rotundity the Machiavelli of Massachusetts, Long Tom the Sage of Monticello, Withered Little Apple-John, the Last of the Cocked Hats, Old Man Eloquent, King Andrew, Little Van the Red Fox of Kinderhook, Old Tippecanoe and Turncoat Tyler, too, Young Hickory the Sly, Old Rough and Ready, the American Louis Philippe, Yankee Purse, Old Buck the Bachelor, the Illinois Baboon, Sir Veto, the Butcher, the Fraud of ‘77 and his wife Lemonade Lucy, the Evangelist, the Gentleman Boss, the Stuffed Prophet, Cold Ben, Prosperity’s Advance Agent, Tiddy the Bull Moose, High-Tariffs Fats, Dr. God-on-the-Mountain, the Mainstreeter with the Soft Heart, the American Primitive, the Great Humanitarian, Old Again and Again and Again, and Give ’em Hell Harry. As they emerge, wearing their shiny papier-mâché heads modeled from official portraits, they’re accompanied by iconic figures from the epochs they represent: Pilgrims, Pirates, Planters and Pioneers, Boston Merchants, Virginia Orators, Inventors, Southern Gentlemen and their Darkies, Canal Boatmen, Land Speculators, Powder Monkeys and Brave Engineers, Pony Express Riders, Bible Belters, Village Blacksmiths and Forty-Niners, Raftsmen and Dirt Farmers, Roving Gamblers, Lumberjacks, Johnny Rebs and Damyankees, Sheepherders and Cattle Kings, River Boat Captains, Desert Rats, Millionaires, Whalers, Cowboys and Indians and the U.S. Cavalry, Carpetbaggers and Ku Klux Klansmen, Country Fiddlers, Coalminers, Oil Barons and Outlaws, Bluebloods and Rednecks, Wall Streeters, Suffragettes, Rough Riders, Motorists, Movie Stars and Moonshiners, Stockbrokers, Shortstops and Traveling Salesmen, Gangbusters, Quarterbacks, Songwriters, Private Eyes, Self-Made Men, and more, all doing skits, singing songs, dancing in chorus lines, miming the high drama of building a nation and taking over the world. A lot of the performers are as stiff-kneed and self-conscious as those of any home-town centennial pageant—many of them are Secret Service agents in disguise and ambitious amateurs with influential relatives—but the acts flow in and over one another so fast there’s no time to notice, all watched over by a ceaselessly inventive and unpredictable Uncle Sam, who’s out there stirring up a veritable feast of Train Robberies, Famous Debates, Lynchings, Brawls, and Dust Storms, and carrying on his running patter of Yankee proverbs and prophecies, the Singing Saints humming gospel songs in the background.

  “Hoo boy!” gasps Uncle Sam, ducking backstage for a second during the Battle of Gettysburg, “what I like mostes’ is showin off!” He mops his broad brow with a red-white-and-blue bandanna and conducts a hasty roll call. Some of the Senators and judges are by now too drunk to recognize their own names, but that’s hardly noticed. What does rile the old Superhero, though, is the continued absence of his Number Two Gun. “As I’m a cockeyed Christian,” he barks, “that craven, chickenbred, toad-hoppin’, duck-nosed mother’s son of a unbroke sea-horse is gonna make me slip my cable and unloose more than my matchless magnanimity around here!” He glances at his fob watch. Sundown’s at 8:31 tonight, still a couple of hours to go, but the Jewish Sabbath starts eighteen minutes before that, the period of “anticipation,” as they call it. It’ll take him five or six minutes each to fry the two thieves, so the most leeway he can allow the young maverick is, say, twelve minutes. “Awright, you bandy-shanked double-jawed desperaydos! Zero Hour is one minute after eight—he’s got better’n a hour to make it! So hustle up them epistolary numbers! We’ll stall till the last minnit with the contest, but if that monkey ain’t here by 20:01 we’re goin’ on without him!”

  This epistolary-contest announcement stirs a fresh backstage jostle: Uncle Sam will be awarding silver-dollar jackpots and new top ratings to the funniest, saddest, most terrifying, etc., skits and readings from the Rosenbergs’ Death House Letters, and so all the actors in town are suddenly pressing excitedly into the wings, eager to go on for a crack at the winnings, not to mention a chance to play before this fantastic house. This audience is a dream!

  Pretty dismal material, of course, these prison letters, but real professionals are never daunted by poor scripts. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, for example, are working up a dance routine around a single line from one letter of each of them…

  JULIE: Honey, I sat so reserved and pent up looking at you through the screen, and all the time I wanted to take you in my arms, smother you with kisses and tell you in more than words of my consuming love for you!

  ETHEL: How utterly shameless were my thoughts as gazed at your glowing face through the double barrier of screen and bar!

  …in which they hold up a wire-mesh screen between them and fantasize a tender and loving future for themselves, even as they are dancing toward the chair. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have a cruder act on roughly the same theme, building their gags around the argument of who goes first. Fibber McGee and Molly are incorporating the letters into one of their familiar domestic situations (when McGee’s closet is opened a whining cacophony of Rosenberg complaints will come clattering out, and Molly’s famous line—“‘Tain’t funny, McGee!”—will take on an unsuspected moral force), while Andy Devine and Marjorie Main are going for straight drama, focusing on the erotic bits. Archie of Duffy’s Tavern intends to solo with a telephone, as does Red Skelton with a handful of hats. Ozzie and Harriet, contrarily, are bringing the entire Nelson family into their act by picking up on the periodic visits of the Rosenberg boys to the prison, and One Man’s Family is even going them yet one better by pushing for a complex fragment of the disturbing Greenglass-Rosenberg family saga.

  Standing waist-high among all these characters and looking very down in the mouth is the Boy Judge, Irving Kaufman: he and Irving Saypol have been asked to reenact, as a kind of curtain raiser to the contest, some of their routines from the trial, and although he and Saypol work well together, he seems unsure of himself. He’s taken a great risk in setting up tonight’s show and preventing it from falling through—maybe too much—and the strain is beginning to tell. Discovering him like that, his old friend and former client Milton Berle, backstage with the rest of the contestants, cautions him: “Be careful, Irving, or you’ll drop the world!”

  Kaufman smiles foolishly, displaying the gap between his two front teeth, then sighs profoundly. “It’s such a terrible responsibility,” is what he says, but what’s really troubling his mind is that sometimes, like now (Supreme Court Justice William Douglas has just been dragged onstage for a “spontaneous” public spanking—“Only thing not Red about this rapscallion,” Uncle Sam has shouted, “is his bottom!” and there’s a great clamor: everyone, it seems, wants to get his hands or other weapons on Judge Douglas’s posteriors, and this, Irving supposes, under other circumstances could happen to him!), he gets the feeling he’s just being used, that he’s as much a victim as the Rosenbergs. Even if now he is a National Hero…

  Congressman Don Wheeler, brushing past him, rushes out onstage to announce that he’s still pressing for Douglas’s impeachment and a one-way visa to Russia—then rears back like Babe Ruth going for the fences and lands such a blow on him that it seems he might be trying to belt him over into Phantom country single-handedly. Oth
ers come out and holler about the Judge’s “arrogance” and “treason” and “villainous ambition” as they whop him, and some even fulminate against his sex life. “Last May twenty-first at a meeting of the American Law Institute,” cries Walt Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, laying into him, “Douglas said America had lost its position of moral leadership—this from a man who went vacationing for some weeks with another man’s wife!” There’s a lot of hooting and whistling out in the crowd, a tremendous agitation building up. “And from a man who some years ago stooped from the High Court to string obscenities into verses which shocked a select group of Americans, which has numbered two Presidents, a Chief Justice, admirals of the fleet, generals of the Army, Senators, governors, and lesser characters including myself! I was there when this would-be liberal spouted his filth!”

  Douglas, patiently taking his licking amid all the uproar, remarks to Uncle Sam, over whose knees he’s been turned, that as a Superhero he’s really degenerating fast. “Not my fault,” says Uncle Sam with a coy wink, “I gave you a chance to save me, Billy, but you turned me down!”

  “Whew!” complains the Attorney General, out for a retributive barehanded whack at Justice Douglas’s nefarious backside, “hitting this guy is like slapping an old weathered board!”

  “Presidential timber, Herb,” grins Uncle Sam.

  Judge Kaufman understands, of course, that every judgment is a kind of marriage, that he and the Rosenbergs needed each other to fulfill themselves, need each other still—judge and judged: two sides of the same coin…but what coin was that? He remembers the great up feeling he’d had when they were drawn together—inexorably, it had seemed then—toward that classic Passover Trial of just two years ago, the sense of being Chosen (and he was, yes, he was a Great Man now) and of being ready, the magisterial power and artistry with which he’d conducted the trial, the seemingly inevitable convictions and the Maximum Penalty drama that hovered over them…and yet, he’d not imagined that it would end this way. And how inevitable had it been really? He felt deep in his heart he had done the right and necessary thing—but could he trust his heart? Had they not been Jews would he have done the same? There were those who thanked him for putting the heat on them—but who has put the heat on whom? he wonders now, as he watches Bob, Bing, and Dottie practicing a sketch called “The Road to Radiance.” In the sketch, apparently, Crosby plays a priest who, with a lighthearted wink, sings “Goin’ My Way?” as he leads Bob and Dottie to the electric chair, while Hope, trying frantically to hide in Dottie’s sarong, gets lost (Lamour loses Hope!), only to come popping out like a champagne cork when they pull the switch on Dottie and go bounding—boing! boing! boing!—around the stage, singing “Thanks for the Memory.” He thinks: maybe those old priests at Fordham were right about invincible ignorance, after all. At the time, Irving had argued fiercely with them, supposing they were only trying to excuse his Judaism for him (it needed no excuses!), but now it’s suddenly come to him, thinking about that indivisible two-sided coin, that the one thing you could never understand was the thing you were intimately a part of; identity, they’d taught him (tried to), made modal and virtual distinctions impossible. Something like that. If he weren’t who he was on the face of that coin, if he were just a common citizen out there in the faceless crowd, he might have a better overview of the whole, but—