Robert Coover - Public Burning

They’d met in 1936 in New York at a New Year’s Eve fund-raising ball given by the International Seamen’s Union. Probably another front for the Phantom. One of those seamen’s unions was on strike right now, tying up ports, putting an iron curtain around the Statue of Liberty. It seemed like everything in the city was a front for something else, made me nervous just to walk the streets up there. Not like that out in Yorba Linda or Whittier. What was it about cities? When I was a boy, I sometimes dreamed of going to the city and leading a double life. Even now, I felt freer there. If that was the word. Ethel had been waiting to go onstage to sing “Ciribiribin.” This was her famous number, but she was out of practice. She’d been spending too much time as a labor organizer, her stage career was nearly over…just as I had been slowly giving up my secret dreams at that time of being a playwright and actor. Julius had walked up to her, got introduced, and asked: “Why are you nervous?” What a line. Why are you nervous. Just like one I might have thought of. Only I’d probably have said: “Why am I nervous?”

It was possible: I might have been there myself that night. I was in town. I was excited and lost, but pretending to know my way around. I could have stumbled in anywhere. I kept my head down, trying not to gawk at the skyscrapers, walked purposefully, even when I didn’t know where I was. To tell the truth, I rather liked New York, but I wasn’t all that impressed. There was something run-down about it, and it struck me as being a very cold and ruthless place to live. Not even exactly American — a kind of Hong Kong West. Therefore exciting, though; and challenging. A fast track, faster even than Los Angeles. A man needs that, even if he doesn’t like it. Any person tends to vegetate unless he is moving on a fast track. You’d have to bone up, I thought, to keep alive in the competition here, but I felt ready for it. I was about to graduate from Duke Law School, and I was looking for a position with a big law firm. I knew I’d get it. I looked forward to going back on campus and bragging about it. Modestly, of course. Writing home about it. I jotted down details I could use in letters. I enjoyed the prospect of passing the word more than the thought of living here. I was third academically in my class, president of the student bar association, a member of the Order of the Coif, and had worked for the Law Review and the Duke Bar Association Journal , had written an important article on auto-insurance law and helped Dean Horack research his goddamn book, it was a sure thing. But I didn’t get a job. They all looked down their noses at me. I felt like my clothes didn’t fit right or my haircut was too fresh or something. Maybe the accent gave me away — I told them I’d won the Harvard Club of California Prize in high school, but it didn’t seem to help. The two guys who went up to the city with me got positions, great positions, but I didn’t. I felt like a goddamn ass. If I’d gone to the International Seamen’s Union Ball that night instead of to Rockefeller Center and Times Square, I might have become a Communist and changed the course of history, I was pissed off enough. Later, when I settled down, I realized I’d been a little too generous in praising left-wing judges, and as president of the student bar had brought a hotshot New Deal trustbuster down to speak at Duke, and I supposed some of my enemies at school had distorted all this to their contacts in New York. That maybe accounted for my striking out with the FBI, too. So, to hell with them, I bought a new blue serge suit and went home to Whittier, did it my own way.

Oddly, though I didn’t go to the Seamen’s Ball, I seemed to have a very distinct impression of the hall: a vast slick floor, heavily waxed, a Victrola cabinet in one corner, a little stage, kitchen off the far end. Musty smell. Six-piece band. Balloons overhead. Julius and Ethel went to a room backstage so she could practice her song on him. His idea. He was trying to make out. And why not? I didn’t think it was a real dressing room. Just an empty room back there, couple of chairs maybe, some scribbling on the cream-colored walls. Might have been a mirror. I could see her smiling balefully up at him, giving it a try. “Cheery-beery-BIN!” Thin. But pretty. So open and bright-eyed. It turned out they were neighbors — to Julius, Ethel was literally the girl-next-door, just like in all the movies, even if she was three years older than he was and lived in a part-time whorehouse. “More than a decade ago, at Christmas time, 1936, I met a young lady, fair, sweet, unassuming…” So different from all the others. She had no other boyfriends either, never ever had one. Not like Pat. More like me. Afterwards, walking her home, Julie had explained that he was in trouble with his grades at college because of all the student activities. The activities at City College of New York were different from those at Whittier College, but I could see how he would get involved. “I’ll help you,” she’d said. No one had ever said anything like that to me. “I’ll help you.” Of course, I’d never been in trouble. With my grades or anything else. “I’ll help you….”

I sat up abruptly. I thought I’d heard it, heard her voice. A sheet of paper was stuck to my cheek. I peeled it off. “Light of my life, rose of my heart, you my beloved being kept apart from me, are the thing I hold most dear. When I see your beautiful expressive face I know we are as one.” Was this for me? Ah no. The Rosenberg letters. Right. I must have imagined the voice. Maybe it was my own. I’d started to doze off. I was very tired. It had been a long day. Crisis conferences, world tensions, chairing the Senate, fear for Uncle Sam, phone calls, the Rosenberg affair. I’d better clean up this mess and go home, I thought. I may be needed tomorrow. Home to Pat, the icebox, the kids. If I could just get organized. Couldn’t leave this mess for the girls to see tomorrow. I remembered someone had said that in prison Julius had read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again . Maybe he said that himself in one of his letters. Laugh-a-minute Julie. Some home: “The constant battle against rats and vermin still is vivid in my mind.” Be fair: that was when he was a kid. I staggered to my feet and stumbled over to my swivel chair, dropped heavily into it. I tried to reconstruct the thoughts I’d just had about the case. I couldn’t remember them. Only a vague sense of a dark hallway, the K 1C 3campaign formula, something about Manny Bloch and the FBI. That he was a secret agent? No, impossible. His ears stuck out too far. You couldn’t have ears that stick out like that and get into the FBI. Wrong kind of nose, too. You had to be big, athletic, deep-voiced, look like a young businessman, and wear gabardine coats and snapbrim hats. Also it helped if you were a Republican, Catholic or fundamentalist, an ex-military officer or lawyer, and chewed gum with your mouth closed. I wondered if I had a stick of gum somewhere in my desk. Or maybe a candybar. I rummaged through the drawers. I used to be able to live on candybars. Julius Rosenberg was fond of candy, too. There was this story about him at the age of four on his way to his Grandma’s house. He begged a penny off his brother and ran across the street to a candy shop. Crossing back over, he ran into the side of a passing taxi. He was okay, after treatment, but the shock caused his mother to give premature birth to her next baby and it died. America came that close to being delivered of one atom spy and saving its secrets. Because of a sweet tooth.

The episode had made a large impression on me because I, too, had nearly died young when our hired girl let me fall out of her lap and under the iron wheel of our horse-drawn buggy. It ran over my head and split my scalp open. I was rushed twenty-five miles to the nearest hospital in the neighbors’ automobile, and it took eleven stitches to sew my head up. I didn’t remember falling out of the buggy, remembered nothing of the hospital or my mother’s fright, all I remembered was the upholstering on the seats of that automobile. It was owned by people called Quigley and I think it was the only automobile in Yorba Linda. We were all terrifically impressed. I still had the scar — all the way from my forehead to my nape — but you could hardly see it because I parted my hair over it. At the time, everybody thought I was going to die. But then later two of my brothers died instead. What would history have been like, I wondered, if my brothers had lived and I had died? I found I was utterly unable to imagine this. I was also unable to find anything to eat in my desk. “Shit,” I grumbled, and slammed the last drawer shut, slumped in my chair. I started to say this again, more earnestly, but I was suddenly afraid Uncle Sam might be watching somewhere. I still had some difficulty getting used to this — and I would have to live with it, I knew, all the rest of my life. People don’t appreciate the sacrifices you have to make if you want to be President. There were times I wished I could have been happy just getting rich like Smathers or being an admiral in the Navy or a famous playwright or something.