Robert Coover - Public Burning

He started going regularly to church again. He joined the National Presbyterian Church in Washington. He rejected the side-aisle pews used by Jackson, Pierce, Polk, Buchanan, Grant, and Cleveland, insisted instead on sitting “front and center.” He gave us frequent lectures on American history, tracing our lineage directly back to God. Jefferson’s phrase “We hold that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was like a tic with him, kept coming to his tongue. But it wasn’t the unalienable rights that interested him, it was the endowment by a Creator. “Thee Cree-AY-torr!” It was as though he’d never really believed in God until he discovered Him there in the Declaration of Independence. Maybe he’d read it for the first time while boning up for the 1952 campaign. “The Declaration of Independence established once and for all,” he liked to say, “that our civilization and our form of government is deeply imbedded in a religious faith. Indeed, those men felt that unless we recognized that relationship between our form of government and religious faith, that form of government made no sense.” Well, when an old soldier returns from the profane world to the sacred heart of his people, when he becomes overnight, without even realizing it, the workaday abode for the spirit of the race, we might expect such declarations. Indeed, the conversion of Dwight David Eisenhower was as great a proof of the immanence and immutability of Uncle Sam as the renewed preaching of the Disciples after their Good Friday dismay and dispersion was of the Resurrection of Christ. Even Ethel Rosenberg had come to recognize him as a “sensitive artist and devoutly religious man.” Clumsy as he was, you knew he was the one to know.

I had always had this instinct, I always knew who had it, whether at school, in downtown Whittier, or in Washington. I learned right away to talk things over with Dr. Dexter, president of the college, and Dean Horack at Duke, with Herman Perry, manager of the Bank of America in Whittier, with Herbert Hoover and Murray Chotiner, Karl Mundt and Christian Herter, Tom Dewey, Foster Dulles and his brother — there was a certain vibration they had, and I always felt it. And who was Julie Rosenberg hanging out with? Losers like Morton Sobell and Max Elitcher and William Perl and Joel Barr. Collecting money for the Reds in the Spanish Civil War and signatures for the Scottsboro boys. Organizing the Students’ Strike for Peace. Instead of telling his deans and teachers how much he admired them, he insulted them. A great deal of time during the trial two years ago had been spent on describing the Rosenbergs’ adolescent activities, what was termed their “premature anti-fascism.” The defense objected, but this was demonstrably relevant, not to show “motivation,” as Judge Kaufman allowed, but to reveal the hidden patterns of developing heresy.

The first thing I did when I went to Whittier College was help found a new fraternity, the Orthogonians (actually, we called ourselves the “Square Shooters”), which was a kind of bridge between the old-line Franklins with their fancy-dress rules and right-wing pride, and the more open but disorganized and apathetic independent students. Athletes mostly, Chief Newman’s boys, but we ran the politics and social scene as well. We met once a month down at Sanders’s cafe for our traditional symbolic meal, or sometimes I took the whole fraternity to Grandma’s house, and she and Mom fixed the beans and spaghetti. I was always generous like this. The Square Shooters was a real fraternity, all right, with all the usual hoopla, horseplay — I’ll never forget our christening ceremonies at a Wednesday-morning chapel service when Sheik Homan tried to break a bottle of Old Taylor over my head! — and campus politicking, but we were also innovators. True, we had “secret” symbols — a boar’s head and a square with “Beans, Brawn, Brains, and Bowels” as the four corners — and mottoes and special handshakes and I even composed a chapter song: “All hail the mighty boar, Our patron beast is he!” But at the same time, we got rid of the evening dress, fought against exclusivity, even initiated a Negro football star, shocked the whole campus with our risqué vaudeville skits and plays, most of which I wrote, and made a virtue of being a good guy instead of a rich guy. I’ve been making bridges like that between tradition and innovation ever since. In a very real sense, Julius Rosenberg was going to the electric chair because he went to City College of New York and joined the American Students Union when he was sixteen. If he’d come to Whittier instead and joined my Square Shooters, worn slouch sweaters and open collars with the rest of us, it wouldn’t be happening. Simple as that.

Tricia and Julie were running up and down the stairs screaming, and I could hear Pat calling them down to the table. Breakfast was cooking. I had expected an upset stomach this morning, but instead I was simply hungry. I hoped that Pat grasped the fact that I was in a major crisis and was fixing corned beef hash for me with an egg on it. That I hadn’t come to bed all night, that I’d slept in my clothes on the living-room sofa, should be enough of a clue. Probably not, though. She could be pretty insensitive.

I discovered, inspecting my face closely, that I’d somehow missed a patch of beard under my chin. Still not as alert as I ought to be. Hard to focus. I hadn’t completely shaken off all that happened last night. I had awakened with an erection, for example — luckily, Pat had come down to call me before the girls had seen it — and it still hadn’t gone away. I plugged in the razor again, grimacing at my face. Well, TIME’S right, I admitted, lifting my “fat cheeks” and staring down past my “duck-bill nose,” it’s true, I’m no goddamn Millard Fillmore. But then, what the hell, neither was Abe Lincoln. Once, a little girl came up to me with a news-magazine photograph to sign. After I’d autographed it, she thanked me and said: “It’s an awfully good picture. It doesn’t look like you at all.” I wondered afterwards if someone had put her up to it. But people have often registered an odd kind of surprise on first meeting me face-to-face. They tend to stare at my nose as though measuring its breadth, lost there and unable to find my eyes again. So, all right, I’ve often said that there wasn’t much that could be done with my face. In that regard I’m my own severest critic: it isn’t perfect; it’s never going to be.

Cartoonists had had a heyday with it. Not even Julie Rosenberg, who had a genuinely sinister mug, right down to the weak chin, pointed nose, and pencil-line moustache, had had to take the kind of punishment I’d received every week from Herblock and the others. Picasso had actually made the sonuvabitch look handsome, very Anglo-Saxon, whereas Herblock always showed me as a jowly, wavy-haired, narrow-eyed tough, linked usually with McCarthy and Jenner, and with suggestions of some bad odor about me, like a little boy who’d just filled his pants or something. He hadn’t given any of us a day’s rest since we came into office back in January, you’d think we were invading Mongol hordes or something, instead of fellow Americans. His cartoon Ike looked a lot like Jiggs from “Bringing Up Father,” only daffier, he drew Herb Brownell like a kind of Dracula, and Joe McCarthy was shown as a sweaty, hairy, cleaver-wielding tramp. I don’t know about these other guys, but cartoonists had always had fun with my face. Already back at Whittier College, they were happily nailing me with a few harsh lines: a solid black bar for eyebrows (no eyes), a stretched ski-slope S for a nose, a small sour turndown comma for a mouth, encompassed by curly black hair cut square, little parenthetical ears, meat-platter cheeks, and a stiff neck — just three mean marks and a dark frame. I didn’t mind. It was one of the consequences of power. If not a condition: maybe politicians needed faces like that to become recognizable. Something to set you apart: people respected the almost magical force emanating from archetypes, no matter what sort, or who put them there. Or maybe the caricature came first and the face followed….