Robert Coover - Public Burning

“I know,” Ethel Rosenberg said calmly as the door closed behind her down at the other end of the Last Mile. She stood with her hands at her sides, utterly self-composed, unbroken. A strong woman, and brave, but there was a hardness as well, a kind of cunning: she struck me as something of an operator, like those brittle tough-talking chain-smoking girls I’d met at the OPA. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I was taken aback by this. Expecting me? I stared at her, not knowing what to say. Had she really understood who I was? Or was she already in some other world? She looked a little strange, as though she’d already left her body halfway behind. A little deranged maybe. Well, I could understand this, I’d only been living with the idea of it for a few days and had become pretty giddy myself. “It’s all right, Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said, “I just… I only want to talk.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling faintly, as though to say she forgave me, and stepped toward me down the glowing white corridor. She was shorter than I’d imagined, dumpier. Older, too. She was dressed in a simple cotton dress of no particular color, a little ragged at the seams, the skirt torn or slit on the left side. Her thighs, which I tried not to notice, were bare and rather thick. Her hair was unkempt, frazzled, as though she’d been trying to tear it out by the roots, and her face seemed shapeless, blank. But maybe it was just the distance, the strange light in this black-blinded whitewashed passageway, because as she came toward me, moving coldly, disdainfully, yet dreamily, as though remote from all this, padding along in her felt slippers and reflected in the waxed floor not as body but as shifting shimmering light, she seemed to grow in stature and her years dropped away. She walked like a good politician, simulating dignity, self-assurance, humility. Already practicing probably for the last walk to follow. But even as this thought crossed my mind, I felt a flush of guilt about it — I understood the depths of my own sincerity and integrity, so undervalued by the world at large, why did I doubt it in others? “But it’s no use, Mr. Nixon. There’s nothing more to be said.”

Her gaze drifted past my shoulder and she stopped dead in her tracks. “This…this is a very strange joke to play…!” she whispered.

“What—?” I glanced apprehensively over my shoulder, but it was only the chair she’d seen. “Oh, I, uh, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “It’s not my fault, the Warden left it open. Would you like me to—?”

“There’s no need for any pretense, Mr. Nixon. The farce is exposed. The executive arm of our government — with you as its spokesman — has become a party to murder! And now you are desperate to bury us quickly before the entire lid is blown off this stinking plot!”

“Now wait a minute,” I insisted, secretly pleased at her nomination, “let’s be fair about this!”

“Fair!” she snorted. “Do you call this fair? This is blackmail! Nazi barbarism!”

I could feel my blood rising, but I knew, if I was going to pull anything out of this goddamned hat, I had to keep my cool. Thinking of which, I removed my homburg and, clutching it by the brim by my left thigh, moved my right foot forward slightly and tilted my head as though expecting to be photographed. Or rather, expecting nothing of the sort, but recalling from other photographs that such a pose suggested alertness and vitality and clarity of vision. (She was not a photographer, she was a typist — why was I thinking of cameras? That stripper story that damned cabbie told me, probably.) “Believe me, Mrs. Rosenberg, I can understand your feelings,” I said, modulating my voice in the manner of Reverend Peale and trying to forget about the Dirty Crab, “I’ve suffered a lot of smear attacks myself, you know!”

She snorted again. It was not a very attractive gesture. I felt her contempt of me and was stung by it: was it nothing to her that the Vice President of the United States had taken a personal interest in her case? How could she recognize my power and ignore it at the same time? “I told Mr. Bennett that if the Attorney General were to send a highly placed authority to see me, even if you came just ten minutes before my execution, the plain fact of my innocence would not have changed in the slightest.” She was trying to keep her voice from pitching upwards in excitement. “But I didn’t believe, even then, you’d be cruel enough to do just that!”

“I’ve got nothing to do with Mr. Bennett! I’m here on my own! I’ve come to offer you—”

“We will not be intimitated by your fascist methods, Mr. Nixon!” she snapped. Her words were harsh, but she couldn’t hide her desperation. “We have done nothing wrong and if we must die for that, then we shall die for it!”

“If you die at all, it will be because you and your husband want to! You’ve been given a fair chance and it’s still open! You’re just doing this for your own goddamn glory!”

“Oh no! We do not wish to be martyrs or heroes, Mr. Nixon! We do not want to die!” she cried, her voice thin and defensive. “But we won’t lie to live!”

“Who’s asking you to lie? Listen, I’ve got a new—!”

“We are not the first victims of tyranny!” she ranted. I could see tears springing to the corners of her dark eyes, and her lip was trembling. I knew if I could keep attacking and counterattacking, I could break her, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Hadn’t her own lawyer said it? “She is a better lawyer than I am, no doubt!” Relatively, the Pink Lady was a pushover. “Six million of our coreligionists and millions of other victims of fascism went to the death chambers before us!”

“All this crap about fascism is a lotta hooey, and you know it!” I shouted, jabbing my homburg at her. “The only mass executions these days are on the other side of the Iron Curtain!”

“That’s not true!”

“Oh yeah? What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh? He and about ten more of your coreligionists, as you like to call them! Or the Doctors’ Plot — that was a good one! And just yesterday over in East Berlin, poor Willi Goettling, not even any goddamn trial, just dragged out and shot! And more being massacred right now!”

“Spies!” she shrieked, trying to drown me out.

“Oh,” I said calmly, dropping the homburg to my side. “That makes it okay, does it?” She flushed, trapped. I zeroed in: “And meanwhile, all century long, this country has opened its doors — its doors and its heart — to the people running away from all these tyrannies, no matter what their color, your own parents among them!”

“Yes, that’s right,” she replied, having recovered more quickly than I had expected, “until you came along — you and all those other super-patriotic demagogues and bigots who are taking this country over!”

“Now, wait a minute, don’t call me a bigot!” I stormed. “I’ve got plenty of Jewish friends! More than you have, I bet! Catholics, too, and Negroes — listen, when I was in college I helped initiate a Negro into our fraternity!” She seemed nonplussed by this — I took advantage of the point made and pressed on: “I’m a progressive, too, you know — don’t believe everything you see in Herblock’s cartoons! My ancestors fought with Cromwell in Ireland and George Washington in New Jersey, struggled against the Indians, spied on the British, operated an Underground Railroad station on the north bank of the Ohio, and got buried at Gettysburg! I’ve always believed in freedom! I personally opened up Whittier College to on-campus dances and championed the end of compulsory chapel! You don’t believe me, I’ll show you in the yearbook! I lived in a commune once and worked for the New Deal and the OPA and fought against the Axis in the South Pacific! I was at Bougainville! I might have got killed!” Christ, I realized I was getting very wrought up. She watched me somewhat agape. I didn’t know whether I was getting to her or just astonishing her. She was still very pale. Doe-eyed. Vulnerable: I could see how she must have knocked them out in that role of the condemned man’s sister. She looked like Ella Cinders. Her soft dark eyes began to narrow. I could see the shape of the argument forming up behind them, so I beat her to it: “Oh, I know what people say about me, trying to make me out like the heavy in some goddamn cowboy movie, calling me every name in the book — but it’s not my fault! It’s only because of the campaigns I’ve had to run and the legislation I’ve had to sponsor and support. I’m not any happier about a lot of it than you are, but that’s politics — a campaign diet of dishwater and milk toast doesn’t get you elected to office and you don’t achieve a national reputation by putting your name on nothing but blue-sky laws! A lot of blood gets spilled on the way to the top — where at last maybe you can do something about the world — and inevitably a lot of it is your own! Blood and mud: I’ve been accused of everything — bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole gamut of misconduct in public office, ranging from unethical to downright criminal activities — but nobody knows yet who I really am! You should understand this, Mrs. Rosenberg, you’ve caught some of it yourself! A fanatic, they’ve called you, an anti-Semite, a lousy mother, even something of a nut case — well, if you think you’ve suffered, just imagine how it’s been for me!”