Robert Coover - Public Burning

“This man and wife, this guilty pair

Must die in the Electric Chair,

So rang the Judge’s fervent Cry

These traitors are condemned to die!

And burn for treason, guilt and shame,

So let us note each traitor’s name—

Julius Rosenberg

And Ethel Rosenberg

Both tried to sell

America to

A Russian hell…”

Threading her way now through the dignitaries, comedians, musicians, evangelists, and police detachments backstage, dressed in a dark suit with lace frills, a crisp white handkerchief in her breast pocket and her graying hair neatly but not severely combed back, comes General Mills’s famous daughter Betty Crocker, hostess for the VIP processional to follow. Uncle Sam greets her with an ebullient wave of his star-spangled plug hat—“Let Grandmaw through there!” he shouts — and invites her to share his peephole.

She bends over stiffly to peer out, and what she sees out there is a terrible excitement, an impressive agitation: thousands upon thousands of people, singing at the top of their lungs, most of them well beyond either sobriety or modesty, led by a noisy group of musicians, even more rambunctious and ostentatious than Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees, and though they’re singing about “cooking” and “frying,” she certainly doesn’t recognize it as a recipe from her cookbook! Goodness! Fights are breaking out here and there in the heat of the packed masses, hard liquor is being passed about freely, girls are kicking their bare legs high in the sky, and there’s a lot of rude behavior — but there’s a positive excitement out there, too. She sees flags being unfurled everywhere, patriotic lighting displays, fireworks, Red Cross teams rushing through the crowds with bromides, film crews hovering from derricks and lifts, capturing it all for posterity, which Betty, like all Americans, believes in. Every window of every building looking out on the Square is packed with happy cheering people, even the rooftops, and the billboards and theater marquees bear impassioned messages like NEW YORK, THY NAME’S DELIRIUM! and LET NO GUILTY MAN ESCAPE! and WHAT A SWELL PARTY THIS IS! “My sakes,” she remarks, squinting out through the peephole, “it’s getting a bit wild, isn’t it?”

“Yes, honey,” laughs Uncle Sam, “there yam a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last act of the Patriots, what I greatly admire! We ain’t had so much as a skumpy lynching in this land o’ hope and glory for a year and a half, there’s a real bodacious belly-wringin’ appetite up! You feel it, too? O, it sets my heart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock…!”

“…Now should this pair outwit the law

And wriggle from death’s bloody maw;

An outraged nation with a yell

Shall drag them from their prison cell

And hang them high

Beyond life’s hope,

To swing and die

And dangle from

The Hangman’s Rope…!”

“But aren’t they a little bit…well…extreme?”

“Don’t worry,” smiles Uncle Sam, stroking her pastry-fattened thighs. “This is their big moment, but they won’t last the night out.”

“…Then, while the buzzards make a feast

On their Red flesh as on a beast;

Our natives shall rejoice and sing

And shout while these two traitors swing,

And freedom’s cry shall soar and swell

With songs that echo—’All is…’”

“Well,” quoth Uncle Sam as the Pentagon Patriots swing into their final chorus, “the ole Doomsday Clock on the wall tells me it is the hour of fate and the last full measure of devotions, so step up, all you screamers — it’s outa the strain of the Doing, and inta the peace of the Done!” Besides all the preachers, comics, and politicians crowding backstage with Uncle Sam, there are also scores of actors, dressed up as American Patriots and Presidents, Pilgrims and Pioneers, famous Warriors, Broncbusters, Prophets, Prospectors, and Railroad Barons, all part of the pageant to come. “You are about to embark upon a great crusade, my children, toward which we have strove these many months, so make sure your fly’s buttoned up and your seams are straight! I wanna see a lotta hustle tonight — when your name is called up there I want you to move! Let the catamount of the inner varmint loose and prepare the engines of vengeance, for the long looked-for day has come!”

“…So when the Rosenbergs lie dead

Wrapped in a shroud of Kremlin-red;

All future traitors should beware

They, too, will burn within the ‘chair…!’”

The Warden led me down a path through a garden by a house. His apparently, very nice. The sun was dipping low over the Hudson; not so hot now, and there was a breeze off the river. The gun towers were momentarily out of sight, and looking down through the trees toward the river, what I saw was a baseball diamond. Next to it, a tall stack was belching smoke into the pale blue sky. The trees were full of birds. There was even a prison bird-watching society, the Warden told me. Hilly and Dilly Hiss would have enjoyed themselves here, Whittaker, John McDowell, all those ornithological nuts.

“Ever see a prothonotary warbler?” I asked.

“A what?”

My stomach was still tight as a knot, but I didn’t feel all that displaced here, now that I’d made it inside. All in all, it wasn’t as hostile a place as I’d anticipated. Pleasant even, in its way. I’d always liked cells, whether it was bell towers, library cubicles, or private inner offices. A sweaty animal odor seemed to pervade the place, but you could probably get used to it after a while. Might even get to like it. Like the Whittier locker rooms, the Duke gym. I had the sensation in here of having escaped something wild and unpredictable outside, of having found a peaceful corner in a wound-up and turbulent world. On the other hand, I’d shifted rather heavily back into being the Vice President again, and was therefore beginning to have serious second thoughts about this whole project. Did I really want an out-and-out confrontation with the FBI? What did they know over there about me?

“Yes, made from marble quarried right here at the prison…”

“Ah…”

As we went along, the Warden told me about the age and peculiar architectural features of the different buildings, the improvements made, prisoner capacity, the recreational and religious facilities, famous landmarks and prisoners of the past, basic prison industries, hospital services, ideas for the future. I took it all in, smiling or scowling as seemed appropriate, asking occasional questions, but all the time working out my strategy for breaking the Rosenbergs while protecting myself. “This is a much bigger place than I’d imagined,” I said, just as a back-up plan occurred to me: if all else failed, I could attach myself to the police cavalcade south to Times Square, and thus be seen to be bringing the Rosenbergs to justice myself, as it were.

There were guards everywhere — around the gates, up in the towers, along the stone embankment that climbed the mountain to the east, on patrol here in the compound. Most of them in short-sleeved shirts, ties but no jackets, less spiffed up than Purdy’s boys or the state troopers, but just as unfriendly. The Phantom would need one hell of a disguise to get through this army, I thought. In fact, I’d nearly lost my nerve again at the gate, I’d been half afraid one of them might get trigger-happy and let me have it, but instead I’d been whisked right through to the Warden. Doors clanking open and shut like applause. Easy as pie. Just a few gestures, the right word, a nod — there was a kind of sublanguage working here, just under the surface, shared by keepers and kept alike, and if you knew the code, life was relatively easy. I’d even lucked out and escaped the attention of the newsguys. A lot of them out there knew me, but they’d been distracted by that guy coming at me as I was coming in, the one with the magazine up in front of his fedora: it had turned out that that was David Rosenberg, Julie’s brother. He’d come up for a last farewell, but too late: visiting hours were over, they hadn’t let him in. And as he’d been ushered out, the reporters and photographers had swarmed around him, missing me. It’s moments like that that convince me I lead a charmed life, even though I don’t believe in such things.