Robert Coover - Public Burning

Now, in the hard light of day, scraping the bristle from my forty-year-old throat, freshly shampooed and showered, the sweat of yesterday’s ordeal sent safely down the drain, I could see that many of those associations from last night were more innocent than they’d seemed at the time. I’d pushed too long without rest or nourishment and had momentarily blown a few circuits in the memory-retrieval system, that was all. Opened up the gates and flooded the syntax routes. In fact, it could be fun, if you didn’t do it too often. Take that vivid image of Pat lying flat out on the bed, for example. I realized now that she was also somehow my little brother Arthur. And Mother was there all the time, though I don’t remember where. There was some kind of satire on the Rosenbergs mixed up in it, too, because at the time I had said to myself, watching Pat thrash about: “For peace, breast, and Moses.”

Also, I realized now where some of those New York images might have come from, which last night had seemed so enigmatic. As a boy, for example, working in my folks’ store, I used to drive a pickup into the produce markets in Los Angeles in the early morning hours so I could get the fresh fruit and vegetables back in the store and ready for sale when we opened at eight. Not that L.A. was New York, but then neither was my image of New York New York. And for small-town kids like me back then, New York was like some kind of Jerusalem, an El Dorado. There were picture books and photos in the papers, newsreels, stereoscopes, and later, Tru-Vue films, all those movies about the great Empire City — who knows? those skylines in my mind may have been painted a few miles away in a Hollywood studio. The so-called Great White Way: invention of Warner Brothers probably. Washington Square. The Battery. The Chrysler Building and Astor House. And the Lower East Side: the mysterious ghetto with its hives of colorful immigrant populations, the place where the melting pot melted. Yes, we’d all been there. For a kid who loved baseball like I did, it was a real dream town, that was where the Babe and Lou and Burleigh and Red Ruffing lived, John McGraw and Zack Wheat, three great teams all in the same city — when I was a boy either the Yanks or the Giants were in the World Series almost every year, and more often than not, both of them. On street corners, we talked about New York. One of the first tunes I learned to bang out on the piano was “The Sidewalks of New York,” and even now I liked to play it and call up that city of my imaginings. I read a lot of books about the city, too, I think there was one by Horatio Alger with New York in the title, something about a poor kid whose real father turns out to be a millionaire, and that was where Wall Street was and the crash and the bread lines we read about. That’s right, no need to get upset last night by what seemed at times like telepathic messages from the Sing Sing Death House, I told myself, and pulled my cheek forward over my jawbone to examine the hidden stubble. “Just misses being handsome,” TIME had said. Just misses! If I‘m ever President, I thought, I’ll send that fairy to the boondocks and give the laureateship to Reader’s Digest , who deserves it anyway.

It had all started, I remembered, with that inexplicable “memory” of the rented hall on Delancey Street where Julius and Ethel had met at a union ball, and I realized now, old piano tunes tinkling in the back of my head, where that vast gleaming waxed floor had come from: the Women’s Clubhouse in Whittier, across from the Bailey Street Park. Mom and Dad got married there. I‘d been in and out of that place all the time I was growing up — yes, the old Victrola in the corner, the kitchen…some of those pastoral images later on might even have come from the park out front. And the kids dressing around the kitchen coalstove: I‘d read in one of the FBI reports that that was the only heat Barnet and Tessie Greenglass had had in their Sheriff Street flat — the family used to huddle around it on cold afternoons, get dressed by it in the mornings. In the report, this was to show how poor they were and to make the point that poverty and injustice were “the parents of revolutionary idealism”—in other words, the poor, given their resentments, were not to be trusted, and if there were any trouble, it was smart to look there first. Naturally, this had reminded me of the stove we got dressed around in Yorba Linda, Mom full-bellied at the time with little Arthur. The Sam and Bernie Greenglass I had pictured might in a crowd have been mistaken for my own brothers Harold and Donald, and as for little Ethel’s naked bottom, well, to tell the truth, it had looked a lot like my daughter Tricia’s.

Had I resented the implication in the FBI report that, because I had also had to dress around a kitchen stove on winter mornings, my life too might be suspect? Perhaps. But it was not the same. We lived in frost-free Yorba Linda, after all, home of the Mother Tree of the Fuerte Avocado in California, we rarely needed heat at all. And even if we weren’t rich, we were never resentful. We just got busy and improved ourselves. “Self-respect, self-regulation, self-restraint, and self-attainment!” my mother always admonished us. Strange I even remembered that kitchen coalstove, it was so long ago. No wonder it seemed like something in a dream! To think of the changes that this country had seen in the few years since I was a boy! Just look at that terrific layout Pat now had in her kitchen: who would want to change something that was working so well? These Communists were crazy. Every time I flicked a switch, adjusted a thermostat, started a car, boarded a plane, walked through automatic doors, flushed a toilet, or watched a record drop on a turntable, I loved America more. And not just for her material progress either, but for her great traditions as well. Like Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Church picnics and the Rose Bowl. The annual Congressional baseball game. The bonfire at Whittier College — it may seem frivolous to some that while Julius Rosenberg at the age of fifteen was circulating a petition for Tom Mooney, I nearly six years older was chairmanning the annual bonfire on Fire Hill and establishing a new all-time record by topping it, not with the traditional one-hole privy, but with a real four-hole collector’s item—“the hottest thing that ever happened at Whittier,” it’s been called — but anyone with any understanding at all of the American mainstream will know that in 1933 Tom Mooney was peripheral to it and that shithouse-crowned bonfire was dead center. Now, twenty years later, Julius Rosenberg was still outside, in fact he was colder than ever, while I was playing golf with Uncle Sam. Oh, he was still trying. Identifying himself with the Founding Fathers, black martyrs, and what he liked to call “the people.” But even that yellowed newspaper copy of the Declaration of Independence that he kept taped up on his cell wall, presumably to demonstrate his undying patriotism, was just one more sign of his alienation: the Declaration was never part of the mainstream either.

On my office wall, by contrast, I had the Inaugural Prayer of President Eisenhower, framed and under glass: “Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong.” As I told the American Legion: “Among the great privileges that we enjoy is the privilege of hearing President Eisenhower pray at the beginning of his Inauguration. That could not happen in half the world today!” It was a treat, all right, listening to him, his voice high-pitched and straining against the cold, against the strangeness, the vast multitudes, somewhat snappish, militant, overeager, sing-songy at times, a bit tongue-tied and struggling to overcome it. “DEAR FRIENDS!” He really cracked that out, made us all jump. Wonder it didn’t start us giggling, but we were all new to this, afraid of forgetting our parts or getting assassinated or something. “Uh, BE-fore I begin… THE expression…of those thoughts…that I deem appropriate…uh-TO this mo-MENT…would you permit me the privlidge of uttering ay little private prayer of my own…and I ask that you bow your heads!” This was amazing, because for Dwight David Eisenhower, religion was something organized by the USO for the entertainment of the troops. When he was a kid it was what dragged you out of the crap games at the Herd on Sundays, and once out of Abilene he had rarely let it interfere with his life any longer. Asking no questions, he suffered no answers. For Ike, Jesus was some kind of loser, attractive to old ladies. Bowing your head in prayer was to make you look tougher and taller when you raised it again. Talking about religion, a consolation for the dying, could be bad luck for a soldier — the less said about it, the better. And then, suddenly, standing there before us was the inspired visionary of the Inaugural Address — here, clearly, was a man who had gone to the center and seen the sacred. You could see it in the sweat on his brow, hear it in the constriction in his throat, the crack and thunder of “faith,” “freedom,” and “good and evil,” rolling off his tongue. “All-might-y GAWT!”