Dedication
For Howie
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
June 19, 1953
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Francine Prose
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
To paraphrase one of my characters, this is a novel and not a work of history. Certain events, like Joseph Welch’s takedown of Senator Joe McCarthy, more or less follow the historical record, but it should be clear, for example, that I Love Lucy and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet were not broadcast on the same TV channel, on the same night: the night of the Rosenberg execution. Eleanor Roosevelt’s remark about the fish is now said to have been made by someone else on her boat.
June 19, 1953
CONEY ISLAND, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
The shades are drawn, the apartment dark except for the lunar glow from the kitchen and, in the living room, the flicker of the twelve-inch black-and-white screen. My parents and I are silent. The only signs of life squawk and jitter inside the massive console TV. My mother and I have been watching all day, and now my father has come home to join us.
Dad and I share the love seat. It’s comfortable, sitting close. Mom lies on the couch under a brown-and-orange crocheted blanket that she found in a secondhand shop. Sewn onto the blanket is a hand-embroidered silk label that says: Made especially for you by Patricia.
“Look, Mom,” I say. “Your blanket’s lying.”
“Who isn’t?” my mother says.
Though it’s not especially hot outside, our air conditioner is blasting. We’re chilly, but we can’t leave the room or adjust the thermostat. Changing channels is beyond us. We’d have to get up and fiddle with the antenna. My father is exhausted from work and the long subway ride home. My mother’s migraines have grown so unpredictable, her spells of vertigo so severe, that she’d have to cross the carpet on her knees like a penitente. I can’t even speak for fear of hearing the reedy, imploring voice of my boyhood: Hey, Mom, hey, Dad, what do you think? Would another channel be better?
Another channel would not be better. The Rosenbergs would still be dying.
ALL DAY, THE networks have been interrupting the regular programming with news of the execution, which, without a miracle, will happen tonight at Sing Sing. It’s like New Year’s Eve in Times Square: the countdown to the ball drop.
In between updates, we’re watching The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson are comforting their son Ricky, who hasn’t been invited to the cool kids’ party.
A reporter interrupts Ozzie and Harriet to read a letter from President Eisenhower. He’s stumbling over the hard words. The abominable act of treason committed by these Communist traitors has immeasurably increased the chances of nuclear annihilation. Millions of deaths would be directly attributable to the Rosenbergs’ having stolen the secret of the A-bomb detonator for the Russians. An unpardonable crime for which clemency would be a grave miscarriage of justice.
Miscarriage isn’t a hard word. The reporter must be rattled.
It’s the third time today that Mom and I have heard the president’s letter. Earlier, the reporters got the words right. Maybe it’s harder for them too, as zero hour approaches.
There’s an interview—also replayed—with the doughy-faced Death House matron, who wants the TV audience not to judge her because of her job. This is her chance to tell us that she is doing God’s work. “Ethel was an angel. One of the kindest, sweetest, gentlest human beings I ever met in my life. You don’t see many like that. Always talking about how much she loved her children. Always showing photos of those two little boys. She was very sad.”
“Damn right she’s sad,” says my father.
Back to Ricky Nelson sneaking into the party and being tossed out by the cool kids.
Cut to an older reporter explaining that the attorney general visited the Rosenbergs in prison. Their death sentences could have been commuted if they’d consented to plead guilty and name their accomplices. But the fanatical Soviet agents refused this generous offer.
“They were stupid,” Dad says. “They should have said whatever the government wanted. They should have blown smoke directly up Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ass.”
“Ethel was always stupid,” Mom says. “Stupid and proud and full of herself and too good for this world. She wanted to be an actress. She studied opera. She sang for the labor strikers, those poor bastards freezing their behinds off, picketing in the dead of winter. So what if they didn’t want to hear her? She had a beautiful voice. She was kind. Brave! They shouldn’t have killed her.”
I say, “They haven’t killed her yet.”
My parents turn, surprised. Who am I, and what am I doing in this place where they have learned to live without me? We hardly recognize one another: the boy who left for college, the son who returned, the mother and father still here.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE, I’d graduated from Harvard, where I’d majored in Folklore and Mythology. I’d written my senior thesis on a medieval Icelandic saga. I’d planned to go to graduate school in Old Norse literature at the University of Chicago, but I was rejected. I’d had no fallback plan. The letter from Chicago had papered a wall between the present and a future that looked alarmingly like the past.
In a way it was a surprise, and in another way it wasn’t. College was always a dream life. My parents’ apartment was always the real one. The new TV and the air conditioner were bought to keep my mother entertained, to stave off the heat that intensifies her headaches, and to console me for having wound up where I started.
My parents had so wanted me to live their parents’ immigrant dream. If I’d had a dollar for every stranger they told I was going to Harvard, I wouldn’t have needed the scholarship they never failed to add that I’d gotten. They’d assumed I’d become a Supreme Court justice or at least a Nobel Prize laureate.
Somehow I’d failed to mention that I was learning Old Norse to puzzle out the words for decapitation, amputation, corpses bristling with spears. I told them about my required courses, in history and science. With every semester that passed, my parents felt less entitled, less qualified to ask what I was studying. What, they wondered, would they—a high school teacher, a vendor of golf clubs—know about what I was doing at Harvard? During the summers, I’d stayed in Cambridge, mowing lawns, washing cars, working in a secondhand bookstore to pay for what my scholarship didn’t cover.
WE’RE BACK TO Ozzie and Harriet telling Ricky he should throw his own cool party. But none of the cool kids will come.
“Ridiculous,” says Dad. “The kid’s a celebrity teen heartthrob. Everyone goes to his parties.”
Outside the White House, protestors wave signs: The Electric Chair Can’t Kill the Truth. Or Rosenbergs! Go Back to Russia! God Bless America. A reporter intones, “The Rosenberg case has excited strong passions. It’s incited an almost . . . political crisis at home and around the world. Demonstrators were killed in Paris while attempting to storm the US embassy.”
Then it’s back to Ricky moping on his bed until Harriet assures him that one day he’ll be a cool kid and give the coolest parties.
Someone in the cont
rol room must have gotten something wrong. Or right. The Nelsons vanish. Blip. Blip. Fade to black. Filling the screen is a photo of an electric chair, so menacing and raw, so honest about its purpose—
“God help her,” my mother says.
“We’re not supposed to be seeing that. Someone just got fired,” I say.
“Holy smokes,” says my father.
“Hilarious,” says Mom. “Funny guys.”
“I wasn’t joking,” I say.
“Sorry,” my father says.
“Two boys,” Mom says.
Dad says, “I apologized, damn it.”
“Not you two. Not Ricky and David. Michael and Robbie Rosenberg. Those poor boys! Not Ozzie and Harriet. Ethel and Julius. Look how people live on TV. Teenage-party problems.”
“It’s not real,” says my father. “The Nelsons live in a mansion with servants.”
And now a commercial: A husband growls at his wife until she hands him a glass of fizzy antacid. There’s a jingle about sizzling bubbles. Sizzle sizzle. The husband drinks, it’s all kisses and smiles. It was just indigestion!
Here’s John Cameron Swayze reminding us that, without a last-minute commutation, the Rosenbergs are scheduled to—
“Sizzle,” says my father.
“Stop it,” says my mother. “Simon, make him stop it.”
“Dad’s nervous,” I say. “That’s what he does when he’s nervous. It’s not as if you just met him.”
“Two hours and fifty-four minutes,” chants John Cameron Swayze.
My mother says, “Where are they getting fifty-four?”
“They know something,” says Dad.
“Gloomy Gus,” says my mother.
“Look who’s talking,” says Dad.
“Are you okay, Simon darling?” my mother asks me. “Are you feeling all right? You don’t have to watch this, you know.”
But I do. I have to watch it. I have left the glittering world of ambitious young people bred for parties and success, students who had already succeeded by getting into Harvard. I’ve lost my chance to become one of them. They have all gone ahead without me. I’ve said farewell to the chosen ones with their luminous skin and perfect teeth. I have returned for this summer or forever because—I tell myself now—this is where I am needed. Watching TV tonight with my parents is my vocation, the job I was born to do.
“Anyone hungry?” my mother asks. “I can’t eat.”
“You’ll eat later,” says Dad.
“Later, after Ethel is dead, we’ll grill steaks on the fire escape.”
“That’s not what I meant,” says my father.
WE’VE MISSED THE opening of I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball is telling her friend Ethel about a mystery novel she’s just read.
“Ethel,” murmurs my father. “Not Lucy’s Ethel. Our Ethel . . .”
“No one will ever have that name,” says Mom. “All the Ethels will change their names. Already there are no Rosenbergs. Ten years from now you won’t meet one Ethel. You won’t find a Rosenberg in the phone book.”
“Don’t tell me the end of the mystery,” Lucy’s Ethel is saying.
Lucy says, “Okay. I promise. The husband did it.”
“That’s the end!” says Ethel.
“No,” says Lucy. “They arrest the husband. That’s the end.”
“You can say that again,” says Dad. “The husband did it.”
“We don’t know,” says my mother. “Nobody knows what Julius did.”
“Julius did it. He and the brother-in-law were in bed with the Russians. She typed some papers because the baby brother asked. Those guys wouldn’t trust a woman with sensitive information. The brother sold them for a plea deal. And the Feds threw Ethel into the stewpot for extra flavor. It’s spicier with the housewife dying. The mother of two with the sweet little mouth.”
“Not everyone thinks that mouth is sweet.” Is Mom jealous of a woman about to be executed? Ethel had a beautiful voice. Ethel sang for the strikers. Maybe my mother envied Ethel, but she doesn’t want her to die.
“Look, Simon. It’s Jean-Paul Sartre. Hush now. Quiet. Listen.”
Why is Sartre at Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s? But wait, no, he’s in Paris, in a book-lined study. And how does Mom recognize Sartre?
I can never let my parents suspect what a snob I’ve become. My mother is a teacher. She knows who Sartre is.
What did I do at college that raised me so far above them? I’d studied the university’s most arcane and impractical subjects. Each semester I’d taken classes with a legendary professor, Robertson Crowley, an old-school gentleman adventurer–anthropologist–literary theorist who had lived with Amazonian healers, reindeer herders in Lapland, Macedonian bards, Sicilian witches, and Albanian sworn virgins who dressed and fought like men. I’d studied literature: English, American, the Classics, the Russians and the French, with some art history thrown in and the minimum of general education.
While I memorized fairy tales and read Jacobean drama, my father was selling Ping-Pong paddles at a sporting goods store near City Hall. And like the angel guarding Eden, my mother’s migraines drove her from her beloved high school American history classroom and onto our candy-striped, fraying Louis-the-Something couch.
The interpreter chatters over Sartre’s Gallic rumble. “United States . . . legal lynching . . . blood sacrifice . . . witch hunts . . .”
“Blowhard,” Dad says.
“Sartre says our country is sick with fear,” says my mother.
“Everyone’s sick with fear. That’s why he’s a famous philosopher?”
Mom says, “To be honest, I haven’t read him. Simon has. Have you read Sartre, darling?”
“Yes,” I say. “No. I don’t know. I don’t remember. In high school. Yes. Probably. Maybe.”
“I know you read the Puritans. I gave them to you, right? I remember your reading Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather. And look, the Puritans have come back. Like zombies from the dead.”
“They never died,” says Dad.
I say, “I wrote my college essay on Jonathan Edwards. Remember?”
“That’s right,” my mother says. “Of course. Didn’t I type it for you?”
No, she didn’t. But I don’t say that. I’m ashamed of myself for expecting my mother to remember the tiny triumphs that once seemed so important and were always nothing.
RICKY RICARDO IS keeping secrets. Someone delivers curtains that Lucy didn’t order. The husband in the mystery novel wrapped his wife’s corpse in a curtain. Is Ricky plotting a murder? Close-up on Lucy’s fake-terrified eyes jiggling in their sockets.
Cut to a commercial for Lucky Strike, long-legged humanoid cigarettes square-dancing. “Find your honey and give her a whirl, swing around the little girl, smoke ’em, smoke ’em—”
“Smoke ’em,” says my father.
“Please don’t,” says Mom. “I’m begging you.”
Did Ricky kill Lucy? We may never know because the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, Emanuel Bloch, is reading a letter from Ethel. He’s read it aloud before, but it hasn’t gotten easier.
“You will see to it that our names are kept bright and unsullied by lies.”
You will see to it that our names are kept bright and unsullied by lies.
The attorney’s voice is professional, steady, male, until it breaks on the word lies.
“Ethel’s dying wish,” says my mother.
Dying wish. So much power and urgency packed into two little words: superstitious, coercive, freighted with loyalty, duty, and love. A final favor that can’t be denied, a test the survivors can’t fail.
My father says, “How come her dying wish wasn’t, Take care of the boys?”
“We don’t know what she told her lawyer,” says Mom.
THE NEWSCASTER TELLS us yet again how the state’s case hinged on a torn box of Jell-O that served as a signal between the spies. The Communist agent Harry Gold had half the box, Ethel’s brother the other half. Gold’s handlers instructed him to say, This
comes from Julius. The jagged fragments of the Jell-O box fit, like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
“She should have stayed kosher,” Mom says. “Observant Jews don’t eat Jell-O. Cloven hoof, smooth hoof, the wrong hoof, I forget what.”
“Some rabbi ruled that Jell-O is kosher,” says Dad. “Probably the Jell-O people found a rabbi they could pay off.”
“Was Ethel kosher?” I ask.
“Who cares? There was no torn Jell-O box,” my father says. “Except in someone’s head.”
ROY COHN, MCCARTHY’S right-hand man, appears on screen, grinning like the mechanical monsters outside the dark rides on Neptune Avenue.
“In his head,” says Dad. “The strawberry Jell-O is in Roy Cohn’s head.”
My mother curses in Yiddish.
I say, “Did they specify strawberry?”
“Is this a joke to you, Simon?”
Flash on the famous photo of Ethel and Julius in the police van. How sad they look, how childlike. Two crazy mixed-up kids in love, separated by their parents.
Then back to Lucy. Ricky isn’t plotting to kill her. He’s throwing her a surprise birthday party!
“Birthday secrets, atomic secrets. Everyone’s paranoid,” says Mom.
“Rightly so,” says Dad.
“Two hours to go,” says my mother.
“There’s still hope,” says Dad.
“There’s no hope,” says my mother.
The air conditioner is pumping all the oxygen out of the room. I want the Rosenbergs to live, but meanwhile I can’t breathe. I want them to be saved. I want the messenger to hurtle down Death Row, shouting, Stop! Don’t throw that switch! Meanwhile some secret shameful part of me wants them dead. I want this to be over.
Lucy and Ricky wear party hats. Lucy blows out the candles, and the camera swoops in for the big smoochy kiss. How can anyone not think of Ethel and Julius?
THE NETWORKS STOP the sitcoms. The action is at the jail. The two Rosenberg boys get out of the car, holding the lawyer’s hands, tugging him forward, the younger boy more than the older, trying not to run from the shouting reporters, the popping flashbulbs, the rat-tat-tat of the cameras.
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