Robert Coover - Public Burning

In fact, it is not raining tonight at Sing Sing. It is a warm clear evening, a little heavy, and there are rumors of an impending heat wave, maybe as early as Saturday. The prison officials, who have had to proceed today with all the usual death-chair preparations, are dressed in short-sleeved shirts with open collars. Not until Justice Burton’s announcement of the Supreme Court recess at 6:29 p.m. has the evening’s Death Watch been canceled, the electrician and rabbi sent off duty. Yesterday on the central radio speaker, during the seventh-inning stretch of the Dodgers’ baseball game, the Rosenbergs heard the news of Justice Douglas’s stay, and Warden Denno reported that they were “overjoyed,” but all that joy was soon dispelled by Attorney General Brownell’s rapid countermoves. The Rosenbergs still cling to hopes of further delays, but among the professionals it is generally felt that Douglas has overstepped himself on this one, and the odds are on for a vacated stay and a quick execution. They have their own reasons: all those preparations down in Times Square, the other executions stacking up, the daily expense: Ethel alone is costing the state $38.60 a day, Julius is due for more dental treatment, and there’s the burden of keeping 290 prison police and nearly as many New York State Troopers on constant guard, defending the prison against protest marches by the Phantom’s Legions of Darkness, even who knows? (guards in the tower gun emplacements flex their shoulders, scrutinize the prison borderland, now losing definition in the gathering dusk) — a mad attempt at escape.

Not that the Rosenbergs are showing any signs of sudden defiance — if anything, they seem to be mellowing as they near their exterminations. It could be a ruse, the kind of trick Errol Flynn often uses on his way to a last-minute rescue. Or it might be saltpeter in their diets. Most likely, though, they’ve known for years that the Phantom has intended this role for them, and they’ve been practicing. Ethel especially: for some time now she has ceased resisting and has taken the part on and made it her own. Julie still seems unable to believe it is all really happening to him, and continues to search frantically for the legalistic dodge that will get him out of here. “Everything seems so unreal and out of focus,” he writes, “it seems like we’re suspended somewhere, far off…” Today is their fourteenth wedding anniversary, and as a present from Sing Sing prison, they were allowed a full ninety minutes together at the dividing screen this evening. Not that they made much use of it — they sat as though tongue-tied half the time. What is there really to talk about on a warm June evening through a fine mesh screen with someone one’s been married to for fourteen years, after one’s been preparing all day to go to the electric chair? It’s all been said. Too many times. They’re weary of each other’s arguments, illusions, complaints. They’re weary of their own. Talking about the children only makes them cry or feel angry or guilty. They love each other, of course, more than ever — love indeed is why they’re here — so they could talk about the night they met at the Seamen’s ball on New Year’s Eve or their Sunday strolls through the Palisades or that first room they had together in Marcus Pogarsky’s apartment, but none of that seems real any more — it’s somebody else’s past, it belongs to those other people whose Death House letters are being read around the world. Anyway, they’re boxed in by prison guards and snoopy FBI agents with big ears, why give them a thrill? So they talked about things they’ve heard on the prison radio. How their suppers have settled down. The demonstrations. What they’ll do next if Justice Douglas’s stay is upheld. An interesting magazine article about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Julius said he read in LIFE that Henry Ford II’s personal income in 1951 after taxes was $87,000,000. After taxes! This was on his mind because of his intention to write out their own last will and testament later tonight. Ethel repeated her wish to see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible playing in New York. She’s heard that the audience applauds when a character says toward the end that he’d rather burn in hell than become a stool pigeon. They sat silent a good part of the time, not even looking at each other, as though afraid of what they might see in the other’s face, yet like a pair of octogenarians at the fireside, finding familiar solace in each other’s company, glancing up from time to time, then away, listening to the trains rattling by along the river, sounds floating up from the town below: music, kids playing softball, trucks grinding up a hill. Now they are separated, Julius struggling with the text of his will, Ethel perhaps dreaming of opening night many years ago of the Clark House Players’ production in the settlement house on Rivington Street of The Valiant , in which she starred as the sister of the condemned man, who was played by Paul Muni in the movies….

“Was he quiet when you left him?” asks the Warden uneasily. “Yes, yes,” says the Chaplain, “he was perfectly calm, and I believe he’ll stay so to the very end.” The Warden lights a fresh cigar. In the wings, the young girl awaits her cue. “You’ve got to hand it to him, Father. I never saw such nerve in my life. It isn’t bluff, and it isn’t a trance, either, like some of ’em have — it’s sheer nerve. You’ve certainly got to hand it to him.” He shakes his head in frank admiration. “He still won’t give you any hint about who he really is?” “Not the slightest. He doesn’t intend to, either. He intends to die as a man of mystery to us.”

What is this unnatural intransigence? It is not silence, no, the Rosenbergs are rarely silent. But their declarations are all bombast, impertinence, self-indulgent pique, nothing of substance, nothing Uncle Sam can use. At this very moment, there is a telephone in Warden Denno’s office linked directly to the Justice Department in Washington: the Rosenbergs need only avail themselves of it, agree to a public confession of their own duplicity and exposure of those who have schemed with them (not that the FBI actually needs this information, apparently — newspapers almost daily announce, just as they have done for the past two years, that the FBI has broken the ring and is “closing in” on the rest of the spies), and what is now a time of worldwide risk and disorder might well be converted into an occasion of national victory and joyous in-gathering, and even, if only briefly, a happy family reunion as well. But still, unnatural parents, they remain adamant. “We are confident of the righteousness of our cause,” Julius Rosenberg has written, “and we will not allow ourselves to be used as tools against the fight for peace, freedom, and decency.”

Ah yes, the fight for peace, freedom, and decency — everybody knows what a Communist means when he uses language like that. Wasn’t Uncle Sam struggling right now against a cunning Soviet “peace” offensive? They seem almost eager to die, as though in spite. “I shall not dishonor my marital vows and the felicity and integrity of the relationship we shared to play the role of harlot to political procurers,” Ethel has declaimed, her spontaneous use of that metaphor confirming what everyone has long believed about this tough little number off the ghetto streets, handmaid of the Phantom. The world has not forgotten the day twenty years ago when she and more of her kind descended upon those poor truckdrivers like frenzied maenads, ripped off their pants, and lipsticked I AM A SCAB all over their bottoms. And speaking of vows, what about her Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag? “I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon such bounty.” Meaning the rumored commutation of her death sentence, while burning Julie, so there’d still be the possibility, eventually, of getting the spy secrets out of her. “How diabolical! A cold fury possesses me and I could retch with horror and revulsion, for these saviours are actually proposing to erect a sepulchre in which I shall live without living, and die without dying…. And what of our children! What manner of mercy is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness?” Ronald Colman did it a lot better in A Tale of Two Cities . As for the children, everyone from the Judge to the President has observed that they loved their cause more, and indeed sacrificed their children to it. Even now their boys are being dragged around to all the clemency rallies to cozen old ladies with soft hearts and loosen purse strings, and their parents are actually using them as grounds for their contrariness: “As long as we do the right thing by our children and the good people of the world, nothing else matters…. The love we bear our two sons and each other demands that we hold fast to these truths, even to the death which may destroy our little family…. One thing I feel sure of — that when they are older, they will know that all the way through, we, their parents, were right, and they will be proud.” Pride, yes: that’s the key to it.