Robert Coover - Public Burning

I could be happy right now, I thought, with an ice cream cone. A hot beef sandwich. A slice of chocolate cake. Even one of those dirty dates off the streets in Whittier. Other kids used to pick them up and eat them, but my mother told me it was filthy to eat things off the ground, and so I never did. They had big seeds, hardly any fruit at all. But I’d eat one now. Probably. Ethel Rosenberg used to buy ten-cent ice cream sodas when she was a little girl, I’d read, in a place called Marchiony’s on the Lower East Side. The FBI probably had the place staked out. Or maybe it was gone by now. I imagined a dark place with grimy windows and cockroaches crawling up the wall. Probably lousy sodas, too, not nearly so creamy and rich as the sodas in California. The people out here in the East are very arrogant about food, but they don’t know a goddamn thing about it. There’s a popular tendency to ridicule my tastes and call me square, but history will show I was one of the few Americans of my time who really knew how to eat.

I grew up with food, after all, what with my father’s fruit ranch, and then our family store, delivering groceries, buying produce, talking about food with the customers. And when Harold got sick and Mom took him to Arizona for a couple of years, leaving the rest of us alone in Whittier, I did a lot of the cooking, whipping up terrific suppers of canned chili, spaghetti, pork and beans, soup, even learned to fry eggs and potatoes. I could right now eat a can of pork and beans — cold! Yum. A western with mayonnaise. Jell-0 with bananas and whipped cream. A chicken salad on white, roasted marshmallows, a Coke float. But all I had was another antacid, so I ate it.

There was some fuss at the trial, I recalled, about the flavor of that torn Jell-O box used as a recognition signal between Gold and Greenglass: raspberry. Raspberry? Maybe this was just an in-joke down at the FBI: giving them the old raspberry. The flavor had to be red, naturally. I always liked raspberry Jell-O, I hoped they didn’t take it off the market now. It was one of the things Pat did very well. She baked good pies, too, like my mother did. While we were going together, she used to help Mom bake pies to sell in the store. Sometimes I had the feeling she was going with Mom more than with me, but I didn’t mind. Her own Mom had died young and Pat had had full charge of all the family chores when she was only thirteen, taking care of things until her Dad died, so she was right at home there in the kitchen. It was beautiful watching her make pies with Mom. She reminded me of Tillie the Toiler. And I was faithful Mac. Only a lot smarter.

I’d known a lot of girls, but not well. I’d helped them with their homework, served on committees with them, debated against them. But I’d only had one steady girlfriend before Pat — Ola — and she hadn’t appreciated me. Not that I hadn’t wanted to make out with almost every girl I ever knew. Oh no, I’d already wanted this when I was eight or nine years old, maybe younger, and there were times as the years went on when I could hardly stop myself from reaching out and grabbing a girl’s butt as she bent over a water fountain in the school corridor or brushed by me in a movie theater — but I couldn’t even talk to them right, much less grab their butts. I just couldn’t bring myself to say all the silly things I knew had to be said before it could be accomplished, this was my problem. Partly, too, it was shyness, of course — I had this Milhous face which made me look too serious and bookish to be any fun, and I didn’t know how to get around this. People don’t realize it, but I actually have to work harder, physically harder, to smile. They make jokes about my smiling calisthenics, but it’s not a joke really. I’ve always envied people like Dwight Eisenhower who are born grinning. I looked like a preacher the day I was born. Gloomy Gus, they called me. Maybe this was why Foster Dulles and I got on so well. And girls and I so poorly. They admired me for my brains and leadership, but they wouldn’t get in the back seat with me. They wouldn’t even go into the Sarah B. Duke Gardens with me. Sometimes this angered me, this inability to excite a girl beyond a kind of friendly respect, and I’d become momentarily reckless, but I was always disappointed.

And then came Pat. I’d been living like a monk at Duke and no better back home in Whittier. I hadn’t even kissed a girl in years when I met Pat that night at Little Theater tryouts. There she was, just like Jack Drown had promised: “a gorgeous redhead!” She was all the girls I’d ever dreamt of: she’d been an orphan, a student, a New York secretary, a hospital technician, waitress, librarian, movie extra, and salesgirl — and she was beautiful, industrious, popular, and Irish, to boot: it was fate. So that night I met her, the spirit of Christmas and homecoming and the New Year upon me, I proposed. That I did this, many people have found hard to believe and there have been a lot of stupid interpretations of it — even Pat thought I was joking, or else was some kind of nut: “I guess I just looked at him — I couldn’t imagine anyone ever saying anything like that so suddenly!” But to me it was just part of the was looking for a real adventurer like her Dad — a whaler, surveyor, prospector, and world traveler, who had finally married a poor widow in the Dakotas with two kids, and had settled down as a miner in Nevada to have three more, Pat being the last. It took her a while to realize that I was the adventurer she was looking for. She dated around a lot after that night we met, having to find out the slow way, while I waited, patiently playing my part. I didn’t put on any backstage rush, as I had with Ola. It wasn’t necessary, I knew. I’d read the ending. Sometimes I even drove Pat to her other dates. Didn’t matter, not at the time, I knew what had to happen. And eventually, after a couple of years, it did. On June 18, 1940. At first, I think, she’d identified me too much with the part I’d had in the play, but since then I’d — June 21, I mean. I was about to say that since then I’d shown her…never mind.

I pivoted in my chair to stare out the open window. It was a warm humid evening, very still, somewhat pregnant as though with rain, yet with a faint trace of the midsummer night’s light in the sky. Well, they’d made it, happy anniversary. I felt the leather straps, the electrodes, the hood: I realized that it made me sweat to think about getting electrocuted, anniversary or no anniversary. And how did they celebrate it? Seemed like they ought to be allowed to sleep together on the last night. If it was the last night — I shivered, remembering: the Phantom’s out there! That was what gave the night that heavy leaden feeling. What did Uncle Sam mean: “Even the Phantom’s having fun, I bet”…? I wondered if I should have driven home while it was still daylight. At least I was lucky I’d brought the car in today, it was too late now to bother my chauffeur. After midnight. I sighed, rubbed the back of my head. Perhaps, I thought, if I am ever electrocuted, my scar will prove to be a nonconductor and save me.

When was the last time a man and wife were executed the same day? French Revolution probably. Given the French sense of humor, they probably let them do it, but through the bars. Of course, there were no appeals then, anything could yet happen with the Rosenbergs — further delays, then a pregnancy, it could get to be a real mess. Still, think of it like the last meal, a final…ah, well, that was an idea, no risk of pregnancy either. Something I’d always been curious to try. Not with Pat, though. I could imagine the chewing out I’d get if I even brought it up. The Rosenbergs had no doubt tried everything. Since they were little kids maybe in the ghetto, being Jews and all. Ethel was two years younger than I was, around Don’s age, Julius was younger. We all probably went to the same movies, sang the same songs, read some of the same books. We were the Generation of the Great Depression. Now I demned to burn as traitors. What went wrong? Why was this necessary? Of course, they had had congress with the Phantom, I truly believed this, they had touched the demonic and so were invaded: and their deaths, I knew, would kill a part of the Phantom. What did it feel like, I wondered, to be possessed by the Phantom? Some said it was like swallowing a cold wind, others that it was a kind of fire that ran through the veins. Some believed he invaded through the eyes, like a hard light you could feel, others that he used the genital organs, that he could fuck like a man, but had no semen, leaving his chosen ones feeling all filled up, as though with an immense belch or fart they couldn’t release. I lifted one cheek. I was still okay, no difficulties at all. The Farting Quacker. Take that, you villain! Ungh! And that!