Robert Coover - Public Burning

I sat there, firing shots at the Phantom, one part of my mind trying to plan out an orderly clean-up of the office so I could go home, the other part floating idly back through time, back beyond the Pink Lady and the Hollywood Ten, the Snack Shack on Green Island and Dick Nixon of the OPA, past all the torts and plays and campaigns and debating contests, to my childhood in California, recalling the lonesome train whistles in the night, the prayers and Bible verses at breakfast, the Rio Hondo near Jim Town, the fishing, the grinding sound of cranking up the old Ford, the smell of produce and plowed earth and hot tar, the nervous excitement of smoking cornsilks where Dad couldn’t see, the rusty taste of ice chips off the bed of the iceman’s wagon, the odd impression of my little brother’s clumsy kiss when I came home after a long time away, my first recital in the eighth grade when I played “Rustle of Spring.” But somehow these memories were mixed up with other images, just as vivid, but strange to me. I seemed to remember things that had never happened to me, places I’d never been, friends and relatives I’d never met who spoke a language I didn’t know. I recalled narrow streets filled with trucks, lined with crude stalls, stacks of trousers and shirts and underwear, chicken feathers in the gutter. I distinctly remembered a kind of tacked-up wooden cross with work gloves hanging from it, ties draped over it, sweaters and slips heaped and tumbled below, short fat men with glasses and flat-billed caps haggling with women dressed in long shiny black dresses and bell-like bonnets down around their ears. There was a hand-painted sign overhead of the bottom half of a man, with the words PANTS TO MATCH. A white nag hitched to a truck with wooden wheels, scales eight feet tall, barrels of fish, men in overalls shoveling chopped ice from wooden crates. A dingy room with no curtains on the windows, just a shade, some kind of pot, an old woman gabbling in a foreign language, the roar of vans and trains outside.

Hey — where did I get these memories? Me, a farmboy, born in Yorba Linda, California, the first child ever born there — it was so unusual there was an eclipse of the sun the next day. I lived all alone with Mom and Dad and my three brothers in a lemon grove and dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer on the Santa Fe. When I was school-age, we moved in to Whittier where Grandma lived—“Ye Friendly Town,” where folks believed in “plain living and high thinking”—just a meadow with scattered houses, chosen by the Quakers as a place to settle because of its remoteness from the blighted urban East: what did / know about the stink of sweatshops and fish markets and fifth-floor cold-water flats? Yet, sitting there in my swivel chair, wet with sweat myself and staring numbly out the window into the night, I could smell them, see them, it was very peculiar. And it was also somehow pleasant. I felt richer somehow. Girls with bobbed hair and plain cloth coats, clutching soft handbags to their flat bosoms, seemed to come walking toward me, heels clicking on the hot city sidewalks, ogled by men wearing vests and dusty pants. A fat Gypsy lady in a flowered blouse grabbed up a piece of material, stretched it, and an old man rose feebly to protect his small heap of goods. I saw the kosher live-chicken merchants on Delancey Street under the Williamsburg Bridge holding up their squawking birds, the heads rearing, wings flapping madly, saw doll buggies perched on wooden crates, men leaning over the slatted sides of pick-up trucks, saw huge rolls of newsprint piled on the sidewalk in the shadow of an elevated train on Canal Street, kids chasing each other, heard a window break — I ducked: no, it was still whole. They’ve found me, I thought. All the way from Sing Sing! My heart was beating wildly. I could hear it thumping in the empty room, the hollow night, the dark silence. I sat rooted to my seat, trying to force my mind back to Whittier, back to Yorba Linda…the picnics, the Sunday comics, the palm trees and sandlot ballgames, grinding hamburger in the store, sharpening pencils at school—

And then suddenly I had this stunning vision of little Ethel Greenglass, about six years old, standing naked by a kitchen coalstove, pulling on a pair of white cotton panties, watched furtively by her brothers, her mother nagging at all three of them from the kitchen table where she was laying out some kind of breakfast. It looked like bread. The table was spread with an oilcloth. Her swollen belly was pressed against the lip—

I tried to shake it off. But the stove was still there. There was something like linoleum on the floor. I could smell the breakfast and feel that early-morning tremor of getting ready for school. Then I remembered that my brothers and I always used to get dressed huddled around the kitchen stove like that in Yorba Linda, and I caught this exact look of midwinter grayness out the window, only there were old brick buildings out there, not a lemon grove. And this peculiar sensation that Mama — Mrs. Greenglass, I mean — was pregnant, I could see the very shape of her swollen belly just about eye-level. Was it when my mother—? And Ethel’s amazing bottom: we didn’t have any sisters. Only the hired girls.

I leapt up, grabbed my jacket, switched off the lights and, praying fervently: “God, get me home safe!”, fled the office, afraid even to look back over my shoulder, much less clean the place up. As I ran down the corridor of the old Senate Office Building toward the elevator, my footsteps echoing and reverberating through the empty marble hallways of that dark tower, I seemed to see rats and vermin everywhere, to hear the grinding racket of traffic and feel the violence and dereliction of tenement houses crowding around me, yet at the same time I felt the stomach-churning excitement of a school football game, a piano recital, dance date, my nostrils twitching with a wild murky reminiscence of chlorinated pools, choir robes, girls’ hair, pie crusts, and greasepaint. I felt angry with myself for giving way to panic like this, it was like lurching offside in a big football game, I tried to stop myself but couldn’t — I heard footsteps just behind or beside my own, somebody breathing, the stairwells were sunk in a swarming darkness, doors seemed to be yawning open. At the elevator I pulled up, tried to catch my breath, my heart was beating wildly, I— what? something rustling in the dark space behind the elevator! I wanted to cry out, to run the other way, but I was determined not to lose my cool, not to show fear in the face of the Phantom, not any more than I already had. I knew I had to do something unexpected. I turned and walked directly toward the shadow behind the elevator. “Coward!” I gasped, and gritted my teeth. There was a wall back there and I hit it with my face.

I staggered back, half blinded by the blow, feeling hurt and alone. I found the elevator button and leaned against it, remembering that hired girl who let me fall out of the carriage and get run over, her big lap, big to me, yet not big enough. I could almost smell her as she came to tuck us in, fresh from washing up. To listen to our prayers. Read to us from James Whitcomb Riley: “Listen, boys…”—the elevator door gaped: a big mouth — I was frightened of it and took the stairs down, jumping them three at a time—“… I’m tellin’ you…

“The Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out!”

(from Public Papers of the Presidents , January 20–June 19, 1953)

Tonight,

as you sit in your homes all across this broad land,

I want to talk to you about an issue

affecting all our lives — the question