Robert Coover - Public Burning

The “Yeas and Nays” bell rang. I leapt to my feet, hauled on my jacket, and dashed out the door. I took the subway car over to the Capitol, arriving breathlessly in the middle of the roll call. “Jesus, Dick, where the goddamn hell ya been?” whined Knowland through clenched teeth. I rushed forward to relieve Purtell and count the vote: it was another tie, this time 41 to 41. Once again I cast the tie-breaker, but then into the Chamber came Dennis Chavez, Democrat from New Mexico: “Mr. President, ah, due to unavoidable circumstances…” That did it. All this effort for nothing, I thought. I felt weak from the run over, sweaty — I realized I’d forgotten to have lunch; mustn’t let supper go by, I could make myself sick. Willis Robertson, yellow-dog Democrat from Virginia, announced flatly, almost sadly, that he wished to speak for three minutes on the dubious merits of the issue, and then he would call for a vote on the conference report itself and have it simply voted up, eh, or down…that is, unless the distinguished Senator from California wished to postpone a vote on the report until three p.m. Monday, as the Democrats had originally requested.

I watched the collapse set in on Knowland’s big florid face. It was like an old fortress turning to putty. There was nothing more that I could do. He rose slowly, heavily, like a tired old walrus, and made one last stand: all right, goddamn it, not till Monday then — but two p.m., not three p.m. Knowland probably thought the Democrats would let him have that point to save his pride on this, his maiden sally as Leader, but if so, he should have known better. Chavez in fact suggested they delay the vote until Tuesday. Knowland, crashing to defeat, agreed to hold the vote no sooner than three p.m. Monday. Johnson, grinning like a possum, nodded, and it was all over. Monday! — it seemed light years away! I was eager now to get back to my office and get some of my thoughts down on index cards before I forgot them — not just about the Rosenbergs and their goddamned fourteenth anniversary either: I remembered that I’d had an important thought about the 1954 campaign tactics that had already slipped my mind, and another about justice and my generation. And then, as I banged the ivory gavel down, terminating the exercise and giving the Democrats their victory, it suddenly occurred to me: ivory was the traditional gift for fourteenth wedding anniversaries! The trouble with me, I thought, is that I’m too attentive, I see things too clearly. One could well envy old boozers like Bill.

I took the elevator down to the subway, jammed in with the others on their way to their offices and homes, but once below decided against riding the subway car — it was crowded and I saw I might have to sit facing the rear of the car, something I always hated to do. It even made me motion-sick sometimes, short a ride as it was. Also, they were squeezing as many as sixteen to eighteen on the damned thing, and I hated to sit that close to anybody, especially perspiring as I was now, so I set out on foot on the walkway beside the monorail, glancing back over my shoulder from time to time, mindful that John Bricker had nearly got assassinated down here five or six years ago. It was windy in the tunnel, it was always windy in here, but it seemed windier than usual today, threatening, almost as bad as it was out at Burning Tree Sunday. The Burning Tree Golf Club was also known on Capitol Hill as the Smouldering Stump, but I now thought of it as the Burning Bush because it was there, during the past few months, where Uncle Sam had most often dropped his mask and talked with me directly about such things as statecraft and incarnation theory, rules for the Community of God, the meaning of the sacred in modern society and the source of the Phantom’s magical strength, the uses of rhetoric and ritual, and the hierology of free enterprise, football, revival meetings, five-card stud, motion pictures, war, and the sales pitch. And it was there last Sunday, in the comparative seclusion of the seventh tee, that he slipped out of his duffer’s disguise, hit a hole in one, and on the way over to rinse off his balls, asked me what I thought about the Rosenberg case.

In the aftershock of Uncle Sam’s transmutation, it is difficult even to hear a question, much less to grasp or answer it. One is struck by a kind of inner thunder, a loss not so much of vision as of the coordinates of vision, and a loosening of all the limbs as though in sympathy with the dissolution of the features of Uncle Sam’s current Incarnation. I say he went over to rinse off his balls and asked me about the Rosenbergs — but perhaps he had asked me long before, while watching his drive arc distantly toward the flag on the sixth green, for example, or even during the backswing, somewhere in that timeless era between the first snap and crackle of metamorphosis, Ike’s blue eyes flashing me a glance full of fear and trembling as the moment grew in him, and my own slow recovery from the awesome dazzle of this miraculous transubstantiation. My senses only began to pull together and function again, as it happened, while watching his large pale freckled hands plucking the little white balls, gleaming wet, out of the suds and popping them into the gray folds of the towel: at that moment it came to me that Uncle Sam, freshly shazammed out of the fretful old General, had just whipped out a five-iron, smacked the ball four hundred yards to the green, vacated the tee like a priest his altar, and somewhere along the way, asked me my opinion on the atom spies.

I realized he was putting me on the spot, testing me, and I didn’t know quite what to answer. Did it have something to do with Korea? Stalin? My Checkers speech? American jurisprudence? Alger Hiss? I raked my mind for some clue to his drift. He was leaning against a bench, tossing the shiny white balls up in the air, juggling them two, three, seven…thirteen at a time. His white cuffs flashed in the sunlight like signal flags. Of course, I expected to be tested like this, expected it and welcomed it, knew it to be part of the sacred life, something Uncle Sam had to do to protect his powers. And I trusted him — he’d never used kid gloves on me, but he’d never been unkind to me either, I was pretty sure he liked me — I trusted him and was eager to please him. Maybe he only wants to be reassured, I thought.

I was glad about the way the case turned out, of course, but he knew this already. After all, having gone out on a limb about it back in ’49, I couldn’t help but be flattered when J. Edgar Hoover actually found a spy ring and busted it. But past that, I had to admit, I didn’t know too much about the case. The trouble was, by the time it came up in ’51, I had begun to catch fleeting glimpses of Uncle Sam’s blue coattails and was busy chasing them, and so I had pretty much stayed out of Hoover’s and Saypol’s way. Oh, I knew well enough what the Big Issue was, my whole political career had been built on it. And I knew, of course, that the Rosenbergs were part of it, an important part: Edgar had called it “the Crime of the Century” in the Reader’s Digest , and I’d gone along with that, even if I did think he should have given equal billing to the perjury of Alger Hiss. And even though I didn’t follow the details — about all I knew for sure was that Fuchs had led the FBI to his American courier Harry Gold who had led them to Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass who subsequently had turned state’s evidence against the Rosenbergs (Morton Sobell fitted in there somewhere — maybe he was the one who tore the Jell-0 box) — I did admire Irving Saypol’s dynamic, intransigently hostile prosecution of the case, applauded the breadth of Judge Kaufman’s vision and courage, and was properly relieved when the Supreme Court, still dangerously New Deal-tainted, refused to review the case. On the other hand, let me say — and I don’t mind being controversial on this subject — I was a little sorry that two people, a father and mother of two little boys, had to die. I’m always sorry when people have to die, my mother taught me this. Especially women and children. But how much of the world’s sadness can any one man handle, no matter how sensitive he is? I had troubles of my own, and I knew that Uncle Sam would do what was right and necessary; just stay on the reservation, keep the faith, do your own job well, get your rhetoric ready, and don’t ask too many irrelevant questions: that seemed the best policy.