Robert Coover - Public Burning

The people are getting edgy. They’d thought at first this was part of the show and had laughed at the lawyers, supposing they were clowns in disguise, but now it’s clear that something is wrong. Where is the President? Where is Uncle Sam? The Vice President? J. Edgar Hoover or Cecil B. DeMille? Nothing but confusion up there — even Judge Kaufman (what’s he doing out there on the stage?) seems unsure of himself. More demonstrators are pushing into the VIP section and others are circulating out among the common people — how did they penetrate the defenses so easily? wasn’t Monaghan supposed to contain these elements down in the ghetto somewhere? where’s the Army? where’s the National Guard? why is Betty Crocker out flat on her ass? “This is the hour of our country’s shame!” some guy is yelling. “No government has such a record of legal murders and legal lynchings as the Government of the United States in the past seven years!” There are rumors of FBI forgeries in the atom-spy trial and stacked decks, perjured witnesses. “We are here to proclaim that if the Rosenbergs die, it will be the most brutal murder ever committed in America!” they scream, seizing the microphones. “They are not traitors! It is those who want to kill them who are traitors to America!”

Distantly, out at the edge, there’s a strange clackety noise, starting softly, getting louder: what is it? The prisoners banging their tin cups on their bars! rattling the gates of their cages in protest! To the frightened crowds in the Square, huddling toward the center, it sounds like the Phantom himself shaking his death chains! The Phantom’s spectral image seems to appear, not only on door knockers like old Morley’s in A Christmas Carol , but everywhere they look: in skyscraper windows, in the shadows behind the bright lights, under the stage, in the bottles they drink from! The angry clatter is punctuated by remote but heavy whumps! — foreign A-bomb tests! Spreading over the earth like smallpox! News reports ratatat against the periphery of the crowd like the firing of Sten guns: riots in Liverpool, Toronto, and Turin! the American Embassies besieged in Rome and Paris and Ottawa! a port strike in Genoa in protest against the executions! firing squads in East Berlin! prayer vigils for the Rosenbergs in Iceland and Israel! plane crashes and battle casualties! ten thousand Communists are massing up to riot in Munich! screams of “Murder!” from rioters running amok through the streets of Melbourne and London! Copenhagen and Birmingham! there are reports of Mau Maus, Vietminh, Gooks, Arabs trying to break through at the rim, to get in! to get what we’ve got! “You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb!” cries a French voice above all the rest. It is Jean-Paul Sartre! “Magic, witch hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices: your country is sick with fear! Do not be astonished if we cry out from one end of Europe to the other: Watch out! America has the rabies! Cut all ties which bind us to her, otherwise we will in turn be bitten and run mad!” The French indeed seem to be going berserk: crackly on-the-scene radio reports say they’re running wildly through the streets of Paris, carrying big posters of Eisenhower flashing his famous smile but with each tooth an electric chair! “We are in the midst of a cold war,” remarks Bernard Baruch dryly to a couple of the Presidents sitting beside him, his hand in his pocket, resting on his billfold as on the butt of a six-shooter, “which is getting warmer…”

A new figure, ragged and wild-eyed, now bursts into the VIP section, leaps up on a concrete balustrade, and commences to rant: “ If you are happy about the Rosenbergs, then you are rotten to the core!” It’s that Russian-born Red vagrant from L.A. who caused the day’s delay, I.I. Edelman! People laugh at him and throw empty bottles, but they’re frightened, too!

Julius Rosenberg’s bespectacled old mother, Sophie, is pitching about in a fit of incoherent anguish! Other women are falling to their knees and sobbing and praying and beating their breasts!

The people glance up in anxiety at the clock on the Paramount Building: 19:41! Just 20 minutes to Zero Hour!

The pageant actors try to do something about all this, but fall into arguments as to which of them are Secret Service agents and which not! Some of the iconic Buckskin Militiamen, Sharecroppers, and Prohibitionists are getting hard to handle!

In the confusion, the National Rosenberg Committee has somehow managed to push an entire Clemency Float through the mobs and into the VIP aisles — or maybe they’ve smuggled the pieces in and assembled it here! It rolls toward the stage, carrying blow-ups of suppressed evidence, banners declaring the innocence of the Rosenbergs, pictures of the soon-to-be-orphaned sons, and signs that read FRAME-UP! and CLEMENCY MISTER PRESIDENT! People close their eyes, look the other way, scream for the police, or take a stiff blinding jolt from the bottles of booze still being passed around, trying to ignore the disruptions.

General Douglas MacArthur, all spit-and-polish in his full battle dress, molded hat, sun goggles, and medals, decides that enough is enough and marches forward to take over and bring some order to this society, but he hesitates at the edge of the elephant dung: the Justices are still wallowing about in there, up to their thighs and elbows in the muck, unable to see which way they’re going, bumping into each other like pigs around the feeding trough, it is not an attractive sight. The General stands there, at the water’s edge, so to speak, smoking his corncob pipe and musing on the inelegance of democracies. Harry Truman watches him and laughs, which makes the General’s neck go red.

Behind him, crowned with laurel leaves and gliding like statues on wheels, come the renegade scientists Albert Einstein and Harold Urey, exploding the “secret weapon” issue and casting doubt on the trial verdict. The Red Parson, Dr. Bernard Loonier, leaps through the disintegrating defenses with a clemency petition, shouting: “The death sentence in this instance is an indication of our national weakness rather than our national strength! It is a reflection of our own growing hysteria, fear and insecurity!” He’s clobbered with a dead cat by a Salem Witch and stuffed down an open manhole by a gang of soused-up examiners from the Patent Office, but no sooner is he popped down than Reverend Henry Hitt Crain, the fellow-traveling Methodist preacher from Detroit, pops up: “It implies an altogether unworthy capitulation to the hysterical temper of the times and reveals a recreant willingness to resort to ‘scapegoat’ devices to appease the homicidal urges of crowd compulsion!” For Christ’s sake, the people cry, who let these dingdongs in here? What’s Herbert Philbrick doing? Where is Norman Vincent Peale, now that we need him?

18 minutes to go! General MacArthur sighs wistfully, knocks the ashes out of his corncob pipebowl, turns, and fades away, kicking Truman on the shins as he passes. “Dumb son of a bitch!” yelps Harry.

The defense lawyer Manny Bloch has collared the Assistant White House Press Secretary Murray Snyder: “Has the Court’s last decision or Ethel’s letter been read personally by the President?” he demands.

“It’s…it’s not my function to ascertain this,” stammers Snyder.

“Damn it!” roars Bloch in a red-faced rage, “people are going to die!” 17…! “Make it your function!”

Through the Square, the electric lights dip ominously!

The drum majorettes in the Texas marching band squeal with fright and leap into the arms of the boys in the band, hug them close!

Snyder falls back in alarm!

Whiskey bottles drop and crash!

The packed-up mob flinches, squeezing out of itself an airy moaning wheeze, compounded of gasps, groans, farts, curses, shrieks, belches, and woeful wails.