Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Probably. Most of it. Why do you ask?”

“Uh…oh, just looking for an angle…”

“Mm.” He pondered that. I got the idea he was becoming habituated to the idea of reading sentences more ways than one. “There is something between them, though. I don’t know what you’d call it. Despair, I guess. Even their best hopes seem colored with it. It doesn’t make them very happy, but it does create a kind of bond between them. Maybe they don’t want to be happy, I don’t know. Mrs. Rosenberg seems to feel it worse than her husband. He’s got a lot of resources finally, but she…well, she’s sort of given up. She’s become…very withdrawn.”

“I see. Uh…psycho?”

“No, not exactly. Just…well, you’ll see for yourself…”

I took it by his tone that we’d reached the Death House and I glanced up. Ah. Yes, this was it all right. Unlike any other building on campus. In the prison, I mean. We’d been strolling down the bluff past really massive cell-block buildings, at least five stories high with huge dark window areas, everything on a superhuman scale. By contrast, this small clean brick structure was all too human in its dimensions. There was a pretty semicircular garden in front of the main entrance with trimmed hedges, shaped trees, and patches of flowers, but the two-story red brick walls, aglow in the afternoon sun, were windowless. I paused at the edge of the paved walk that led up to the heavily barred front door. It reminded me of the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz . “So this is it,” I said. Already, I’d forgotten all the arguments I’d been rehearsing. Well, I was better at ad-libbing it anyway.

“Yes,” said the Warden. “This is it. Come. I’ll take you around by the back door.”

We walked along the paved pathway between the Death House and the river, the warm June sun beating down on us. At the corner there was a patch of green lawn with a birdbath in the middle of it. No birds though. “These are the, uh, Death House cell blocks…?”

“Yes, that’s right, Mr. Nixon. Twenty-four cells for men, three for women. But the Rosenbergs aren’t in there any more. They were moved this morning into the special Death Cells.”

“The Death Cells?”

“In the middle of the complex. A kind of halfway house, away from the other condemned prisoners. It’s where we get them ready.”

“Ah, I see…get them ready…” High above us loomed a gun tower, the guards in it smiling down at us. The Warden waved and they nodded, cradling their weapons. Past them, it was a clean dash to the river, only fifty steps or so. But a long swim. “Is there a…a bathroom—?”

“Here we are,” said the Warden, and he led me through a door on the south side of the complex and into a plain room with drab tan walls, a few chairs, a table. It was gloomy and sour, stifling hot. I thought I must be in the very heart of the prison, the solitary-confinement area or something, but the Warden said it was actually a meeting room for reporters and execution witnesses. “It will be filling up soon when we get ready to move the Rosenbergs. It’s probably not the best place.”

“The best place?”

“You said you wanted some place where you wouldn’t be bothered, where they wouldn’t feel watched.”

“Oh yes, right,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve (where had I left my handkerchief?). I glanced up at the clock on the wall: after 6:30 already! How much time did I have? Fifteen minutes? Thirty?

“That clock’s eight minutes fast,” the Warden explained with an apologetic smile.

“Oh, I see…” But what did I see? There was a calendar on the wall that read SATURDAY JUNE 20. Like everybody was in a hurry here. “I hope it’s not suppertime or anything, is it?” I asked irritably.

“That’s all right,” the Warden said. “It’s only scrambled eggs.”

“Scrambled eggs?”

“We didn’t have time to fix a proper last supper, I’m afraid. All this has come on us so fast…”

“That’s not your fault,” I said. Actually, scrambled eggs didn’t sound all that bad to me. I remembered I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Where does that door lead to?” I asked, wondering if maybe it was a men’s washroom.

“The death chamber.” The Warden went to open the door. I was sorry I had asked.

“That’s all right,” I said, and while he wasn’t watching ran the end of my tie around my neck, under the collar. I realized I was still wearing my sunglasses. I pocketed them.

“I’m sorry we don’t have any air-conditioning in here,” he said. He flicked a switch by the door and the room beyond exploded with light. The walls were whitewashed, which probably intensified the glare, but the lights were bright by themselves. Must be one hell of a shock to walk out of a dark cell into that. But as Uncle Sam would say: That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? “Here, you can see the setup we have. Can’t stay there in the press room anyway, not if you want privacy — it’ll soon be filling up with people.”

“Ah. Well.” I followed him hesitantly into the death chamber. As I moved toward the door, it reminded me somehow of the doorway into the downstairs bedroom off the living room in my folks’ house back in Whittier. “I, uh, don’t have much time…” Because of my brothers, I thought. Where they were laid out.

“New York was a pioneer in the use of the electric chair, you know,” the Warden was saying. “The first one was a man named William Kemmler up in Auburn Prison back in 1890. That one was pretty crude and, uh, shocked a lot of people, if you’ll pardon the expression…” The Warden chuckled loosely at his joke and I smiled weakly, staring at the cherry-colored oak chair with its leather straps and wires, amazed at all the empty space around it. I guess I’d expected a small room, private, glassed off, like the gas chambers we had out in California. There was something weird about all this space. “But we’ve made a lot of refinements over the years, and it’s not so gruesome any more. For the victim, electrolethe, as we used to call it, is probably the best way to be taken off — much faster than gassing, garroting, or hanging, surer than shooting. As far as we know, it destroys them instantaneously — the current melts the brain so fast that the nervous system probably doesn’t even have time to register any pain.” It’s not the shock itself that hurts, I thought, goddamn it, my own brain tingling, it’s the anticipation. “Of course,” smiled the Warden, “we can’t be sure, since nobody’s ever come back to tell us what it’s really like.”

“You mean, it’s that…it always…”

“Not even the guillotine has a better record, Mr. Nixon.” It looked like an ordinary high-backed dining-room armchair with leather upholstery, brass-studded, something you might find in an antique shop or up in the attic. Except for the special headrest, the thick cables, and a broad middle leg that stuck out in front like a kind of deck-chair foot-rest. The burning tree. Maybe that crossword puzzle answer wasn’t GOLF after all…. “The only near-failure we ever had was just sixty years ago this summer up at Auburn when the chair broke during the first jolt. Took over an hour to repair it, and meanwhile the prisoner, who was still semiconscious, had to be kept doped up with chloroform and morphine. The poor bugger. One wonders what dreams he was having. But here at Sing Sing we’re still batting a thousand.”

There was a large skylight overhead, the panes sooty. From the inside? The lamps in the ceiling were shaped like flowers. “Is this the first woman you’ve had to…you’ve had to put to…”

“To sleep?” The Warden seemed amused at the expression. “Oh no, she’ll be the ninth. If the sentence is carried out.” He paused. “The first one we had here was a woman named Martha Place. That was back when Teddy Roosevelt was governor. She appealed to him for clemency, and when he refused her, what she said was: ‘That soldier-man likes killing things and he is going to kill me!’ She was right enough about that…” What was the Warden trying to get at? If he wanted to accuse us of something, why didn’t he just come right out with it? “You can buy souvenir postcards of her down in the town.”