Robert Coover - Public Burning

I stood outside the station a moment, getting my bearings, gazing up what I guessed to be the Main Street. Slightly run-down, quiet, sleepily cheerful — were it not for all the cops, it would have been a very pleasant place, just the kind of village, updated by a century or so, that old Rip might have come home to. It was no longer a village, though, not even a town, but already something new: you could almost feel the place getting pulled toward the south, sucked into the Manhattan orbit. I understood such places. The same thing had happened to Whittier: I went into the Navy from “Ye Friendly Town” and came home three years later to a piece of Los Angeles. People all over America who had lived whole lives in such towns and villages, each with its own character and integrity, were suddenly finding themselves being annexed to once-distant urban centers, tied to the fortunes of the expanding city with all its vice and corruption and foreign faces. And its riches: it was hard to resist. We’d lived through a revolution, my generation had, and here at the middle of our lives we found ourselves uneasily adrift between the poles of some ancient dispute belonging to a generation not our own. Ike’s gang. Ike and I had both grown up in small communities, known the smell of pastures and cowdung, the feeling of leaving home to go “out into the world,” the hostility and perversity of the cities, but his Abilene was a simple old-fashioned village of prairie peasants, the “Cow Capital of the World,” with its legendary cowboy shootouts and its Sunday booze-ups and crapshooting joints at the edge of town, just emptiness beyond. For Eisenhower, everything rural was natural, everything urban unnatural, but my generation, however much temporary nostalgia we might feel for such simplicities, recognized that there was something wrong with this black-and-white view, just as with the contrary idea held by the big-city Brahmins and ghetto provincials that only the cities were civilized, the rest of the country untamed and barbarous. What was missing was the middle ingredient, the place in between where all the real motion took place now that the old frontier was gone: the suburbs, waystop for transients, and thus the true America. My America. Dwight Eisenhower and Julius Rosenberg would never understand each other, but I could understand — and contain — both. Was this to be my role? To urbanize the countryside and bring the wilderness back to the cities? To lead the New Revolution? To bring the suburb to all America?

I pondered this as I walked up into the town, looking for the best approach to the prison. There were wooden barricades up everywhere, even along the New York Central right-of-way, all entrances manned by Ossining City Police and New York State Troopers. All looking tough, especially the locals, Chief Purdy’s boys. I hoped that Warden Denno had spread the word. Spencer Purdy was a guy you didn’t fool with. When eight hundred New Yorkers came up here last Christmas to sing carols to the Rosenbergs, Purdy had barricaded all streets leading to the prison, had refused to allow the carolers to leave the area of the railroad station, had secreted five hundred cops, deputy sheriffs, and state troopers in an abandoned wire factory nearby with a fleet of buses assembled to convoy them to any trouble, and as much as possible had kept the demonstrators out in the open, under a bitter icy rain. He’d finally let six of them deposit in the prison parking lot a basket of flowers with a legend reading GREETINGS TO JULIE AND ETHEL FROM THE PEOPLE, but as soon as they’d gone he’d had it carted off by a garbage truck to the city dump. All of which was just a quiet little practice run compared to today’s operation. The place was like an armed camp. There were patrol cars everywhere, hundreds of sweating unhappy cops, Coast Guard helicopters rattling overhead. I couldn’t see them, but I supposed there were National Guard troops up in the hills as well, PT boats in the river. All of which made me feel very goddamn nervous. I decided to wear the moustache, after all, even if it was in pretty shoddy shape after the ride in my pocket — one side of it kept bending out away from my face.

For a while, I just walked the streets, considering alternatives, angles, practicing my Thomas Greenleaf lines for passing through the barriers (if they asked, I’d tell them I was a salesman, a traveling salesman — which was true after all: our greatest salesman against socialism, isn’t that what the party regulars called me?), nervously trying to recall the strategy I’d planned to use on Rosenberg. Something about the FBI, a confrontation…. The local residents watched me wander by. I hoped they’d take me for a cop or a reporter. Those not running for the trains were all standing outside their houses in the June heat, listening to car radios. Something about the Rosenbergs. I tried to pick it up: “…the Rosenbergs confessed. In Congress, heavily engaged upon major legislative work, the day has been one of anxiety and suspense…”

What—? Had they talked? Was it all over? This ruins everything, I thought. Forget it. Turn back now, and you’ll still have time to make it to Times Square for the ceremonies. I jerked around and started to run back down the hill. But then I reasoned: if they had confessed, what were all these cops doing here? The Phantom would have no use for the two of them now. I tried to reconstruct the sentence. Lot of possibilities: if the Rosenbergs confessed, had the Rosenbergs confessed, whenever the Rosenbergs confessed — I spun around on my heel again and started back up the street. The moustache blew off and I had to press it on again. People were staring at me now. I tried to cool it. I knew this was the most difficult period in a crisis situation, the period of indecision: whether to fight or run away. It was important not to commit yourself irrevocably to a course of action until you absolutely have to do so. Otherwise you’re just shooting from the hip, you can miss the target and lose the battle out of sheer recklessness. On the other hand, I’d already passed through this period, hadn’t I? Back at the office? On the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special? In Penn Station? Which period was I in, then? I was very edgy and short-tempered, and I was afraid I might blow my stack and throw a tantrum or something. I thought of my old man, doing everything wrong, raging futilely against the world: I’m no better than him! I tried to tell myself that if I didn’t feel keyed up like this, it would mean I wasn’t ready, mentally and emotionally, for the conflict ahead, but I was too upset to listen to such bullshit. My stomach was boiling, my nose was running with hay fever, and my need for a toilet was getting desperate.

Back on Main Street, I spied a drugstore and crossed over to it. Get some antacids. Find a John maybe. But when I peeked inside, I saw that the place was full of troopers lounging about in their snappy but grim black and gray uniforms. I ducked my nose into a revolving rack of postcards outside the door: tinted pictures of the Calvary Baptist Church, Jug Tavern, the Half Moon, and a tombstone pierced by a cannonball in Sparta Cemetery. I was trying to think, but my mind was a blank. “Ossining is a Sint Sinck Indian word meaning ‘stone upon stone,’” said a card depicting the first prisoners setting up the original old marble cell block, said to be still standing. Maybe that was where they were. No, here was the new Death House. There were postcard portraits of famous local Revolutionary War heroes and Death House victims, complete with their last words. Cartoons, too — crude jokes about the electric chair, last meals, and manacled prisoners fantasizing, pissing on their jailers, being tortured with near-naked girls: “Okay, Miss Ladoo, that’ll be enough for today!” A prisoner pulling his pants off on one side of a screen, a visitor lifting her skirts on the other, and a cop dashing up, shouting: “Hold it, Diddlemore!”