Robert Coover - Public Burning

I was badly stung by this. I would be a good golfer if I had the time to play regularly, but a man can’t give himself to everything on this earth. And the innuendos worried me: Stevenson was a loser. I realized it was still touch and go…

Uncle Sam sucked on his empty pipe a couple of times, then blew it out, reached into his pantaloon pockets for tobacco. “There’s one thing about criminals and kings, priests and pariahs,” he said. He packed the tobacco into his pipe with one long bony finger, peering at me as though over spectacles. “They may be as unalike as a eagle to a rattlesnake, but they both got a piece a that dreadful mysterious power that generates the universe!” As he said this, he whipped a long wooden match out from behind his ear. “The difference,” he went on, “is what happens when they try to use it. The ones with the real stuff, the good guys, they achieve peace and prosperity with it — these are…” he scratched the head of the match with his thumbnail and it popped ablaze: “…the Sons of Light!” He cupped it over the pipe bowl and continued: “The other geezers, the ( puff! ) Phantom’s boys, well, if you ( puff! puff! ) don’t watch out, those squonks can haul off and ( puff! ) exfluncticate the…” he looked up and held the match out, still burning, then crushed it in his fist: “whole durn shootin match!”

It’s true, I thought, he’s not exaggerating, the Rosenbergs no longer belonged to the ordinary world of men, that was obvious, you could see the sort of energy they now possessed, even though stuffed away in Sing Sing prison, in the rising fervor of world dissent — in France, the whole damned government was being shaken. I walked up to my ball, teed it up on a little hump of grass. I felt a little shaky myself. “You mean, we’re not executing them…just because…?” I poked my toe about, looking for firm footing.

“We ain’t goin’ up to Times Square just to fulfill the statutorial law, if that’s what you mean,” Uncle Sam said. He blew a smoke ring, then another and another, each inside the other, ending with a little puff of smoke for the center. “This is to be a consecration, a new charter of the moral and social order of the Western World, the precedint on which the future is to be carn-structed to ensure peace in our time!” He hacked up a gob and spit into his smoke rings, hitting the bull’s eye…. “We’re goin’ up there to wash our feet , son!” A miniature mushroom cloud welled up from the center, and the concentric rings flattened out and spread like shock waves.

I understood his question now. I turned back to my ball, dug my feet firmly into the turf. Times Square, the circus atmosphere, the special ceremonies: form, form , that’s what it always comes down to! In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities — why did I keep forgetting that? I smiled. “Then, wouldn’t it have been better to burn them at our Inauguration?” I commenced my backswing, shifting my weight confidently onto my right foot.

“Tried that,” said Uncle Sam, “but we got knocked down with a lame duck. Anyhow, don’t matter, now we got the summer-solstice and the anniversary angles—”

“Eh—?” I was so startled my knees buckled and I sliced the ball out of bounds. “The— what?”

“Thunder and tarnation, boy! That’s four strokes already, and you ain’t even off the damn tee yet!” cried Uncle Sam.

“I… I’m sorry! I, uh, thought you said…”

“The solstice and the anniversary, soap out your ears, son!” he repeated irascibly. He had blown a smoke ring shaped like an outline map of the United States and, as it expanded, was trying to fill in the several states. “The Rosenbergs signed their dierbollical pact fourteen years ago come Thursday the eighteenth,” he muttered around puffs and rings. He was trying to squeeze the District of Columbia into his map, but it was getting very cluttered in that area. He seemed about to lose his patience. “I thought you knew that!”

“Ah…” So, it was also the Rosenbergs’ anniversary! I’d thought for a moment he’d been referring to my wedding anniversary! When Kaufman had set the date finally for the week of June 15th, I had seen that it could fall on Pat’s and my anniversary — our thirteenth! — on June 21st. And I’d seen that summer-solstice angle, too: after all, we hadn’t married on the 21st for nothing. It was the climax to our “Beauty and the Beast” game, time of the roar of Behemoth and all that. Then, when I learned that this year June 21st was also Father’s Day, it had suddenly looked like a sure thing. I’d said nothing to anyone about this, but it had worried me: if it was intentional, were they doing it as a favor, giving Pat and me something extra to commemorate? or was somebody out to get me? I’d feared the latter, usually the safest of the two assumptions when you’re in politics. But then the marshal had scheduled it officially for the 18th, and I’d forgotten about it…until now. I teed the new ball up, twitching my shoulders and wrists, trying to loosen up. I had a better understanding of things now, but it didn’t make me feel any easier. Their fourteenth! And what were we doing here on the seventh tee? “I… I guess I missed that,” I admitted frankly.

“It seems to be you missed just about everything!” snapped Uncle Sam. “You don’t know no more about this case than a goose knows about rib stockings!” He had given up on the map and with a flick of his finger had drawn the Canadian border up to a straight perpendicular line, the Great Lakes clustering like a knot, turning the whole thing into a kind of gigantic hangman’s noose. “Do you know what law the Rosenbergs were actually convicted under? Do you know who the Clark House Players were? Sarah O’Ken? Helen Rosenberg? Catharine Slip? Do you know why they called David Greenglass ‘Little Doovey’ or what Julius Rosenberg’s secret Talmudic name was? Why was Julius born in Harlem? How is it that Roy Cohn was working for Irving Saypol? What were the Rosenbergs doing in Peekskill in 1943 or Irving Kaufman in Washington in 1948? Eh? Did you even know that Ethel Rosenberg played the Major Bowes talent rackets? that Julius read Horatio Alger and Tom Swift and took to the stumps against the National Biscuit Company? or that Emanuel Bloch’s marriage is on the rocks? And who’s that screamer workin’ for anyway?”

“I thought you…you said the past was a pot of lies…”

“We ain’t talkin’ about trials now, boy, stay awake, we’re talkin about the sacraments!”

“I… I’m sorry,” I said, and stepped up to the ball. I felt like I’d been stepping up to this goddamn ball all afternoon. Roy Cohn once mentioned that Saypol used to be a really rotten golfer himself, but that he read almost every book ever written on the subject, and it improved his game immeasurably. Maybe that was what I ought to do.

Uncle Sam raved on and on about the case; most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about. I tried to pay attention, I knew it was important, but the coincidence of anniversaries and my own stupid panic about it when he brought it up were still troubling me. “And what about the CCNY Class of ’39? Why was J. Parnell Thomas sent to the same jail as Ring Lardner, Jr., of the Hollywood Ten? What the hell’s a proximity fuse? Should we feed ’em on cheese and barley cakes and beat ’em with fig branches? Why does that Russian astronomer now say that the vegetation on Mars is blue? Eh? Eh?” Of course, June, a lot of people get married that month, Eisenhower’s own anniversary was just another ten days away, wasn’t it? It wasn’t all that improbable. But it was all tied up somehow with those generational vibrations which were exercising such a grip on me these days — how many other parallels might there be? I was afraid to find out. Maybe it was because I’d just passed forty, things like this happened to people when they reached forty, I supposed. Uncle Sam was trying to explain why it was the Rosenbergs, why the Lower East Side, the Foley Square Courthouse (another link to the Hiss case! my subcommittee met there, it was just before I finally nailed the bastard!), Sing Sing, and now Times Square, why Nelson Eddy and Bernard Baruch had to be there, Louella Parsons and Dr. Kinsey, why an electric chair instead of sending them out to sea in a leaking boat as in the old days, and why just now, this week…. “I mean, McCarthy’s got such a cactus up his cornhole, he’s bound to blow it soon, and now that we’ve laid the threat of a A-bomb attack on them heathen Chinks, they gotta fold their hand any day now, and what with Stalin dead the whole goddamn mood could change — this may be our last chance to kill these people! And what if the Phantom squeezes an extra day out somewhere? Have you thought about that? That hodag’s known to have a lotta contacts in the jew-dishiary — then what? If we had to go through the Fourth without them atom spies burnt or burning, the whole shebang could come unhinged like a hog shed in a Okie twister!”