The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  “The Rosenberg sons,” says the newscaster. “Going to see their parents for the final time.”

  “The older boy understands, not the little one,” says Dad.

  “They both do,” says my mother. “We’re watching two kids whose parents are about to be murdered. Real children. Not child actors. Murdered on TV.”

  The camera finds some carpenters checking the new fences around the prison. Protests are expected, and the workers keep looking over their shoulders to see if the angry mob has arrived.

  Where is the angry mob?

  Union Square. The silent protestors hold signs: Demand Justice for the Rosenbergs, Stop This Legal Murder. Close-up on a pretty girl in tears, then a sour old hatchet-faced commie with a sign that says, If They Die, The Innocent Will Be Murdered. Then back to the barricade builders, who have finished, though no one has come to test their work.

  A FLASH, AND two newscasters appear like genies from a bottle.

  “For those who have just joined us . . . This afternoon our attorney general informed the president that the FBI has in its possession evidence so damning, conclusive, and highly sensitive that, for reasons of national security, it could not be introduced at the trial.”

  The dark walls of Sing Sing bisect the screen. Another man gets out of a car.

  “Our sources have identified the man as the Rosenbergs’ rabbi—”

  My mother says, “The rabbi. That’s the case against them there. The Dreyfus Affair, Part Two.”

  “Ethel and Julius were hardly Jewish,” my father says. “Their god was Karl Marx. Remember him? Opiate of the people. Jewish Communists don’t think they’re Jews until Stalin kills them.”

  “Killed them,” I say. “Stalin’s dead.” Why am I correcting my father? Who do I think I am?

  “Blood is blood,” says my mother. “Ethel and Julius were Jewish.”

  “Are,” I say. “Are Jewish.”

  “Optimist,” says Mom. “And you? Still Jewish? After four years among the Puritans?”

  “Of course,” I say. But what does that mean? I’d wanted Harvard to wash away the salt and grime of Coney Island. Now I feel as if a layer of skin has been rubbed off along with it. At school I’d copied out a quote from Kafka: “What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself and should quietly stand in the corner, content that I can breathe.” Only now do I realize how far that corner is from my parents.

  What kind of Jews are my mother and father? We don’t keep kosher or go to temple or celebrate the holidays. Do they believe in God? We don’t discuss it. It’s private.

  On Brighton Beach, on the boardwalk, you see numbers tattooed on sunbathers’ arms. Whatever we believe or don’t, Hitler would have killed us. Had Kafka lived, he might have discovered how unfair it is, that the murderers who hate us are what we have in common.

  My parents are Roosevelt Democrats. They believe in America, in democracy. They believe that Communists were willfully blind to the crimes of Stalin. But America is a free country. Go be a Communist if you want, just don’t try to bring down our republic. My parents believe that McCarthy is the devil. He is the threat to democracy. His investigations are the Salem witch trials all over again, this time run by a fat old drunk instead of crazy girls.

  My parents long for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s sweet voices of reassurance and comfort. They never miss Eleanor’s syndicated column, “My Day.” Lately she’s been reporting from Asia, visiting orphanages, lecturing on human rights, meeting refugees from Communist China.

  “Come to administer last rites—” the newscaster says.

  “Jews don’t have last rites,” Dad says. “Moron.”

  “Maybe the rabbi can give her some peace,” says Mom.

  “Forty-five minutes,” says Dad. “The rabbi better talk fast.”

  A man in coveralls enters the prison. It’s the electrician who will see that “things” run smoothly. Shouldn’t he have come earlier? Maybe he’d rather not hang around, contemplating his crappy job. A few beers in a commuters’ bar in Ossining sounded a lot better. Several reporters have noted that, due to the expected influx of protestors and the press, local businesses will stay open late.

  Another reporter says we’re seeing the two doctors who will pronounce the Rosenbergs dead.

  “Nazi doctors,” says my mother. “How is this different from Dr. Mengele?”

  I remember Mom covering my eyes with her hand at the movies during a newsreel about the death camps. I peeked between her fingers at the living skeletons pressed against a fence, staring into the camera. My mother’s ring left a sore spot on the bridge of my nose.

  “Not every doctor is Mengele,” says my father. “The prison docs aren’t experimenting on twins.”

  Mom says, “Franklin and Eleanor would never let this happen.”

  Twenty minutes. Fifteen.

  Ethel Rosenberg is reported to have kissed the prison matron goodbye, a sweet little peck on the cheek. A photo of Ethel and Julius kissing flashes onto the screen. If we can’t see them strapped in the chair, at least we can see their last embrace.

  IN THE KITCHEN, the light above the table blinks.

  “That’s that,” Mom says. “Adios, amigos.”

  “That’s not possible,” my father says. “Scientifically speaking.”

  Blink blink blink. What was that?

  WE STARE AT the walls of Sing Sing. A helicopter drones overhead. Up in the tower, a prison guard waves both arms like an umpire ruling on a play. Safe!

  The reporters have revived. “A guard appears to be signaling that the execution is over. Ladies and gentlemen, I think everyone would agree that it’s been an extraordinary day for Americans everywhere and for those following this dramatic story from all over the world.”

  My mother is weeping quietly. My father perches on the edge of the couch and tries to put his arms around her. He hugs her, then hoists himself up and, groaning, sits beside me.

  A man appears in the prison doorway. “Reporter-columnist Bob Considine witnessed—”

  Reporter-columnist Bob Considine looks shaken. His clipped robotic delivery makes him sound like a Martian emerging from a flying saucer. We come in peace, the Martians would say, but that’s not what Bob Considine is saying:

  “They died differently, gave off different sounds, different grotesque manners. He died quickly, there didn’t seem to be too much life left in him when he entered behind the rabbi. He seemed to be walking in time with the muttering of the twenty-third Psalm, never said a word, never looked like he wanted to say a word. She died a lot harder. When it appeared that she had received enough electricity to kill an ordinary person, the exact amount that killed her husband, the doctors went over and pulled down the cheap prison dress, a little dark green printed job—”

  “A cheap prison dress! Ethel was such a clotheshorse!” my mother says, through tears.

  “—and placed the stescope . . . steterscope . . . I can’t say it . . . stethoscope to her and looked around and looked at each other—”

  “All those doctors and electricians,” Dad says, “they can’t even get that right.”

  “—looked at each other rather dumbfounded and seemed surprised that she was not dead.”

  “Her heart kept beating for her boys,” says Mom.

  “Believing she was dead, the attendants had taken off the ghastly snappings and electrodes and black belts, and these had to be readjusted. She was given more electricity, which started the game . . . that . . . kind . . . of ghastly plume of smoke that rose from her head and went up against the skylight overhead. After two more jolts, Ethel Rosenberg had met her maker, and she’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “He’ll have a lot of explaining to do,” says my mother. “In hell.”

  “He’s doing his job,” Dad says. “Explaining why two murders should make us feel safer.”

  I CAN’T GET past that one word: game. Started the game of the ghastly plume of smoke coming f
rom Ethel’s head. The game. Did Bob Considine really say that? Did I hear him wrong? I can’t ask my parents. Game is what I heard.

  “Please don’t cry,” I beg my mother. “It’s bad for you.”

  “It’s good for me,” she says.

  “Go out,” Dad tells me. “You’re young. It’s early.”

  I go over to the couch, lean down, and kiss my mother goodbye. She reaches up to cradle my face. Her hands are soft, unroughened by years of dishes and laundry, and, as always, cool. Cooler than fever, cooler than summer, cooler than this cold room. Once her hands smelled of chalk dust, of the dates she wrote on the blackboard: 1620, 1776, 1865. Now they smell of lavender oil. Soothing, my mother says.

  I put my hands over hers. Her graduation ring, which I’ve always loved, presses into my palm. In the center is an onyx square, studded with diamond specks spelling out 1931: the year she graduated from high school. Microhinges flip the onyx around, revealing its opposite face, a tiny silver frame around a tinier graduation photo of Mom: smiling, hopeful, prettier than she would ever be again.

  “Poor Ethel,” says my mother.

  “Poor Ethel.” I’m still thinking of her in the present tense.

  “Be safe, sweetheart,” my mother says.

  “I love you,” I tell my mother, my father, the room.

  “Have fun,” my father calls after me. “Just stay off the Parachute Jump.”

  DEPENDING ON THE stoplights, the traffic on the corners, and whether I take the streets or the boardwalk, it’s between a twelve to fourteen minute walk to the amusement park. I can do it with my eyes closed, like a dog, by smell, into the cloud of hot dog grease, spun sugar, sun lotion, salt water. I can follow the rumble of laughter, the demented carousel tunes, the screams carried on the wind from the Cyclone. I could find my way by the soles of my shoes sticking to the chewing gum on the sidewalk, rasping against the sand tracked in from the beach.

  Thousands are weeping in Union Square, in San Francisco, London, and Paris. But in Coney Island, it’s a regular fun Friday night. Guys plug away at shooting galleries, massacring yellow ducks while their girlfriends squeal because they are about to win the stuffed animals they’ll have to lug around all night like giant plush albatrosses. Their kid brothers slam their skinny hips into the pinball machines, while the children stuffing themselves with cotton candy look first happy, then glum because the melting candy is tasteless and sticky and getting all over their faces.

  I buy three hot dogs, double fries, a lemonade. Clutching the bag to my chest, I take the food up to an empty bench on the boardwalk. I gulp down my dinner, gaze at the sky, and try to recall where I’d read a passage about the sky turning a glorious color for which there is no name. In the story the sunset reminds the hero that everything in the world is beautiful except what we do when we forget our humanity, our human dignity, our higher purpose.

  The only thing the sky says to me is that the third hot dog was a mistake. I feel anxious and queasy. The spectacular pink and cerulean blue purple into the color of a bruise, and the wispy charcoal cloud is the plume of smoke rising from Ethel’s head.

  To my right the Parachute Jump flowers and blossoms and drops, flowers and blossoms and drops, like a poisonous jellyfish, a carnivorous undersea creature.

  Just after the Second World War, for reasons never made clear, my father’s little brother, Mort, was parachuted into Rumania, where he disappeared forever. His body was never found. I can’t leave the house without my father warning me to stay off the Parachute Jump.

  It’s a tic. He can’t help it.

  I’d avoid it without his advice. The height has always scared me. The fragile canopies, the probable age of the suspension lines.

  I head along Neptune Avenue, past the dark rides. The Spook-A-Rama, the Thrill-O-Matic, the House of Horrors, the Devil’s Playground, the Den of Lost Souls, the Nightmare Castle, the Terror Tomb. Then along the Midway, past the crowds waiting to see the Chicken Boy, the Three-Legged Girl, the Lobster Baby, the Human Unicorn. Then on to the thrill rides, the Wild Mouse, the Thunder Train, the Rocket Launch, the Twister, the Widowmaker, the Spine Cracker.

  How could any of it be scarier than Ethel’s death? Not the goblins, the pirates, the skeletons and laughing devils, not the shaming of the freaks, the plunging freefall, the vertigo, the fear of flying off the track, of being launched into space, the fear of the parachute failing to open and of the eternity before you hit the ground.

  As always, I wind up at the Cyclone. The line isn’t long. The ticket taker knows me. Hey, Simon. Hey, Angus. How’s it going. Fine, thanks, and you? Same old, same old.

  I give Angus two dimes. He hands me a ticket. I walk through the gate in the fence surrounding the wooden roller coaster. I fold my long legs into the compartment in the middle of the little train. I lower the safety bar over my lap.

  I wait for the ride to begin.

  Chapter 1

  In the winter of 1954, I was assigned to edit a novel, The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, a steamy bodice-ripper based on the Rosenberg case.

  The previous year, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for allegedly selling atomic secrets to the Russians. The horror of the electric chair and the chance that the couple were innocent had ignited outrage in this country and abroad. Protestors took to the streets in sympathy for the sweet-faced housewife whose only crime may have been typing a document for her brother, David Greenglass.

  But according to the manuscript that landed on my desk, the Rosenbergs (in the novel, the Rosensteins) were Communist traitors, guilty of espionage and treason, eager to soak their hands in the blood of the millions who would die because of their crime.

  The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, Anya Partridge’s debut novel, portrayed the Rosensteins as cold-blooded spies, masterminding a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life. Esther Rosenstein was a calculating seductress, an amoral Mata Hari who used her beauty and her irresistible sex appeal to dominate her impotent husband and lure a string of powerful men into putting the free world at risk of nuclear Armageddon.

  It was strange that I, of all the young editors in New York, should have been chosen to work on that book. My mother grew up on the Lower East Side, in the same tenement building as Ethel—Ethel Greenglass then. They went to the same high school. They hadn’t been close, but history had turned Ethel, in my mother’s eyes, into a beloved friend, almost a family member, the victim of a state-sanctioned public murder. Perhaps my mother’s sympathy was unconsciously spiked by our natural human desire for proximity to the famous.

  My being assigned The Vixen was, I thought, pure coincidence.

  No one at work knew about the family connection. The only person who bridged the distant worlds of home and office was my uncle Madison Putnam, the distinguished literary critic and public intellectual, who had used his influence to arrange my job. If he knew that his sister-in-law had been Ethel’s neighbor and classmate, he would never have said so.

  Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin, was still conducting investigations, accusing people of being Communists plotting to destroy our freedom. There were no trials, only hearings. McCarthy was the prosecutor, judge, and jury. To be accused was to be convicted. Once you appeared before the committee, your friends and coworkers shunned you. Most likely you lost your job. There were betrayals, divorces, suicides, early deaths brought on by panic about the future. Refusing to cooperate with the investigation could mean contempt citations and prison. The cooperating witnesses who agreed to “name names” were despised by their more courageous and principled colleagues.

  You didn’t mention someone you knew in the same sentence as a Russian spy. You definitely didn’t admit that your mother or wife or sister-in-law grew up with the woman who committed the Crime of the Century. Those were not the celebrities whose names anyone dropped, not unless you wanted the FBI knocking on your door. If someone found out that Mom had known Ethel, my father could have been fired from his job manag
ing the sporting goods store, and Mom would likely have been barred from going back to teaching when the doctors cured her migraines.

  A tawdry romance loosely based on the Rosenberg case, The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic was intended to be an international bestseller. It was not the sort of book that would normally ever appear under the imprint of the distinguished firm of Landry, Landry and Bartlett.

  Landry, Landry and Bartlett published literary fiction, historical biographies, and poetry collections, mostly by established poets. The company was founded just after the Second World War, though it seemed to have been fashioned after an older, more venerable model: a long-established family firm. Since the retirement of its ailing cofounder Preston Bartlett III, one heard rumors—whispers, really—that its finances were shaky and its future uncertain, rumors that my uncle seemed delighted to pass on.

  The hope was that the money The Vixen generated might allow us to continue to publish the serious literature for which we were known and respected, and which rarely turned a profit. It was made clear to me that publishing a purely commercial, second-rate novel was a devil’s bargain, but we had no choice. It was a bargain and a choice that our director, Warren Landry, was willing to make.

  * * *

  Perhaps this is the point to say that, at that time, my life seemed to me to have been built upon a series of lies. Not flat-out lies, but lies of omission, withheld information, uncorrected misunderstandings. Many young people feel this way. Some people feel it all their lives.

  The first lie was the lie of my name. Simon Putnam wasn’t the name of a Jewish guy from Coney Island. It was the name of a Puritan preacher condemning Jewish guys from Coney Island to eternal hellfire and damnation. My father’s last name, my last name, was the prank of an immigration official who, on Thanksgiving Day, in honor of the holiday, gave each new arrival—among them my grandfather—the surname of a Mayflower pilgrim. Since then I have met other descendants of immigrants who landed in Boston during the brief tenure of the patriotic customs officer. Brodsky became Bradstreet, Di Palo became Page, Maslin became Mather. Welcome to America!