Robert Coover - Public Burning

I actually started a couple of beards back then, always got embarrassed, shaved them off before anyone started to notice. That drift from the focal center, which was somehow clean-cut and open-eyed — it had to do, I suspected, with the approval of old men. And fear of turning into the grizzly irresponsible red-eyed derelict I looked like after a day or two of stubble. With a beard you were expected to move differently, say different things, become more cynical and detached, I got conscious of my hands, eyebrows, lips. I could let myself look like that bent over law books on a Sunday night, but not in class on Monday morning. Then, before I knew it, I was a prosecuting attorney, had to set a community example, then an OPA civil servant in the war and soon a J.O. in the U.S. Navy, where hairiness was frowned on more even than gonorrhea, unless you wore it on your chest, and I wasn’t even out of the Navy before I was running for Congress. With that, my public face was set. Change it, lose votes, I was no longer a free agent. How a candidate looks is a lot more important than what he says, and the most important thing is to look familiar. Even our rare vacations became public appearances, I put it out of my mind. Except occasionally while shaving in the morning. Maybe someday when I’m President. Like Lincoln. Have some little kid write to me and suggest it. That would solve the television makeup problem, too — I can shave thirty seconds before I go on camera and, unless I put some powder on, still have such an obvious beard that people write me letters about it. The five-o’clock phantom. My enemies will stop at nothing.

As I’d feared, I’d had a sleepless night — probably for the best, it could be stimulating at a time like this, I knew, but for the moment it made me groggy, unable to see clearly how close the shave was, I had to go by feel. I’d been pushing too hard, consuming all my reserves, making myself vulnerable. All those disturbing apparitions, those images out of a life not my own.… It was as though something had got into me last night, like an alien gene, and I’d lacked the strength to fend it off — all my Early Warning rhetoric about “boring from within”: I’d suddenly begun to understand it for the first time. It was pretty stupid, banging my face on the wall like that, but in a way it had been a good thing. It had cleared my head, and by the time I’d reached my car I’d pretty much forgotten about old lady Greenglass’s inflated belly and the chickens and traffic on Delancey Street. Soft summer night out, new moon over my shoulder: I’d rolled the windows down, turned on the car radio, tuning in a station playing old songs like “Heartaches” and “Whispering Hope,” and had cruised down Independence, taking the long way home so as to calm down some, letting my mind fill up with reassuring pictures from my own past, my boyhood vibrating in me like an old movie: the Anaheim Union ditch in Yorba Linda where I went wading, Easter eggs and May baskets, the adventures of the Gumps, Grandma’s big austere house at Christmastime and “Joy to the World” being trumpeted out from our Meeting House steeple, Lindbergh’s flight and all the little stuff we collected from it, a book I read told by an abused dog, hanging baskets of smilax ferns on sunny porches, the Four Square Gospel Temple and Ken Maynard rolling off his horse inside the Berry Grand…Goddamn! I’d thought: I’ve lived a wonderful life! I’d remembered playing railroad fireman, learning to salute the flag at school and sing “Old Black Joe,” nosing through the Books of Knowledge, memorizing stanzas of “Snowbound” and struggling with “In a Persian Market Place” on Aunt Jane’s piano, sweating in the heat of a Tucson summer, mashing potatoes for Mom. I was good at that like everything else and Mom was always pleased because I never left any lumps, using the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down like the other boys did. I’d recalled — tooling past the Smithsonian and up around the Washington obelisk — mashing those potatoes, and it was like some kind of epiphany. I’d felt like I felt one morning at Whittier College when I’d been up for nearly three straight days and everything was incredibly beautiful — or that day, not all that long ago, when I was sitting on a dilapidated rocking chair on Whittaker Chambers’s front porch in Maryland, the warm sensation sweeping over me that it was all falling into place.

It had felt right, this feeling, I hadn’t resisted it. History working things out for me in its inexorable but friendly way: my brother had got sick and my mother, overburdened with work and worry, had sent me to live half a year with Aunt Jane. I had hated this and had felt cheated somehow. This was natural. I didn’t even like Aunt Jane. But that was where, feeling lonely, I’d learned the piano, and it had been an important part of my life ever since. Just as when I’d followed my mother over to Arizona. She’d taken Harold to a sanatorium there and was helping to pay the hospital bills by cooking and scrubbing at the sanatorium. I’d felt guilty tagging along without helping, so I’d got a job in the Prescott rodeo, cleaning out the stables. I’d been as thorough at that as I was at everything else, and so they’d asked me to be a barker for their wheel of chance. This was a come-on, I’d discovered, for the dice and poker tables in the back room, but everything out front where they’d put me was legal, the prizes were real hams and bacon, and I’d earned a dollar an hour and praise from the old guys for all the business I brought them. In many ways, in spite of the money, it had been the worst job I’d ever had, I was nervous for hours each day before I started, was scared to death of some of the people in those crowds — a complete waste of time, I’d thought…but without that experience, I would never have survived the cruelties of that whistle-stopping campaign tour last autumn when news broke about the so-called secret fund. Destiny. My Dad decided to open a gas station in 1922. He could have had a site in Santa Fe Springs, but he chose the one in East Whittier. The next year they found oil — lots of it — on the Santa Fe Springs property: we would have been millionaires. It gave my father bleeding ulcers, but for me, what was being a millionaire? Being at the center was everything, and this meant having nothing in excess to throw you off balance. Except power. Power, I knew, was something that existed in the universe like electricity. There was no reason to be a conductor. There was no reason not to be.

I’d skirted the Tidal Basin and wheeled around toward the Lincoln Memorial, then had followed the Potomac around to Rock Creek, letting the old tunes on the radio—“Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking”…“Me and My Shadow”—call up all the old feelings, the old scenes, the old dreams. No patterns, just a sweet nostalgic flow…the church picnics with homemade ice cream…the dense odor of the inside of my violin case… Tunney and Dempsey and the Irish Rebellion (how my father raged against it! “But aren’t we Irish, too?” I’d asked him; “Not that kind!” he’d bellowed)…a beautiful print we had in our house, an advertisement I think for Edison light bulbs, called “Shedding Light,” with a boy sitting on a purple rock in a misty rose and green landscape, gazing up at the light bulb glowing in the branches of a summery tree, looking for God up there, I supposed, as I always used to do while watching the clouds go by…or maybe it was a girl sitting there, I’d forgotten exactly. Passing the locks, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” fading in and out on the distant station, I’d had sudden total recall of Fredric March’s transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and back, which was nevertheless mixed up somehow with The Best Years of Our Lives , probably the greatest movie I’d ever seen, though I no longer remembered much of it. And so it had gone: the Armistice parade and a circus, Wallet finding a baby on his doorstep in “Gasoline Alley,” Grand Canyon through the stereoscope, the fear of Bolshevism, the strange light at Christian Endeavor meetings on Sunday nights, the 1924 World Series on our new radio and then Babe Ruth hitting sixty home runs when I was fourteen years old. But mostly school memories, ballgames, girls, clubs, bike rides, and things at home, Dad’s knuckled hands on a gas pump, the way his ears stuck out when he was dressed up, Mom’s smile when I brought things home from school, fights with my brother Donald, Harold’s vague grin, Dad coming home one day to tell us there was a little doll over at the hospital, a real live doll — poor little Arthur, who’d died so young. I’d once written a school composition about him, a kind of threnody…“And so, when I am tired and worried, and am almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up and see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes, and curly hair; I remember the child-like prayer — If I should die before I awake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take — I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my brother Arthur…” I got an A for it. A for Arthur….