Robert Coover - Public Burning

I was getting dizzy trying to read The New York Times on the ride in. Actually, I felt very comfortable with a newspaper in my hands, reading them was a lifetime habit of mine, I’d been an enthusiast since I was a little kid, eccentric about it in fact, but I couldn’t read anything in the back seat of a moving car. And of all the papers, the goddamn Times was the worst. Letters too small and uneven, too gray, too much crammed onto a page — what the hell do we want with all this high-minded gossip, anyway? Had to get through it, though; you never knew what you might need in the middle of a Cabinet meeting. I did know what I was likely to need on the way in, however, and so turned to the sports pages: sooner or later my chauffeur was bound to ask me about yesterday’s ballgames or tonight’s pitchers. Who are you betting on tonight, Mr. Nixon? He was a Negro and so I always tried to have something good to say about Jackie Robinson or Roy Campanella of the Dodgers. Usually this was pretty easy because both those colored boys were having terrific seasons, they were hot and the team was hot, but not yesterday: I was glad to see that they’d both gone hitless and the Cardinals had whipped the Bums’ asses, 12 to 4. On the other hand, my own team, the Washington Senators, had lost to the White Sox and dropped back into the second division, overtaken by the Boston Red Sox, who had made a complete mockery of the game by scoring seventeen runs in one inning — the goddamn seventh , needless to say — crushing Detroit, 23 to 3. My God, what’s baseball coming to? By coincidence, 23 was exactly how many Boston batters had gone to the plate in that seventh-inning outrage. And it was also, it occurred to me, the number of my football jersey back at Whittier College…23. Well, what of it? Nothing.

I leaned my head back a moment, closed my eyes for a little stomach-stroking seventh-inning stretch of my own, then braced myself and turned back to the front pages. Full of the Berlin, Rosenberg, Korean stories, the government crisis in France, the foreign-aid-bill fight in the House, the port strikes. I glanced through for my own name, noticed that Joe McCarthy was still getting a lot of headlines. That FBI agent’s hairy tale of the “goon squad” plot to assassinate Joe had made the front pages of all the papers this morning, Joe was also being widely quoted on his anti-Administration support of Rhee’s prisoner release in Korea, and there was even a long story on a new member of his staff, yet another “veteran Red-hunter.” Certainly, I wasn’t getting that kind of press these days, but this was probably for the best. I wouldn’t be running for office again for at least three years, and if I was going to create a sense of momentum, I couldn’t start from too near the peak. And I hadn’t gone hitless, they’d covered my work in the Senate yesterday, even if it was back in the middle pages, and there was even a report on my casual encounter with Bob Taft: “The Eisenhower Administration is improving its collective golf score, whatever luck it is having with its larger problems.” At first glance, I was flattered, pleased I’d pulled it off, but I began to wonder if maybe indirectly it was some kind of smear: trying to say we were out playing golf when we should be facing up to our national problems…? I didn’t care if they said that about Eisenhower, but it wasn’t fair to hit me with that one, I was only doing my goddamn duty. And then the score, too, they were obviously making fun about that: “‘I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday,’ Nixon declared, then bowed acknowledgement to Senator Taft’s congratulations. Taft was on crutches and appeared to have lost considerable weight, but was ‘gay’ as he exchanged golfing talk with Nixon.” Gay? Maybe I’d made a mistake warming up to a dying man. “Bob, I have news for you…”

I sighed. News and more news: I read that New York City was installing “Atomic Age” city lights that turned on by radio, that several teachers had been axed in New York City in apparent reprisals against Albert Einstein, and that they were letting Trotsky’s killer out of jail — thank God I wasn’t paranoid, or I’d begin to worry it was yet another goddamn anniversary gift to Pat and me. At one time in my life, I actually thought I wanted to be a journalist and took some courses in it at college, but I hated it. Only C’s I ever got all through school. It was one thing to witness an event, another to go home and make up some story about it. Anyway, if it was worth witnessing, it was worth getting into — I couldn’t just stand stupidly on the sidelines and take notes, I had to jump in and play a part. Move things around. And then, whenever I did, and chanced to glance back over my shoulder at those cynical bastards watching me, grinning, jotting it all down, making a fat living off my spent hide and life-force like some kind of cannibals, even contributing to my suffering with their niggardly reports and mud-slinging insinuations, how was I expected to respect and admire them? Besides, it’s a fact, while most publishers might be Republicans, most reporters were Democrats, or worse — look at how they’d smeared me last fall with that phony manufactured “fund crisis,” for example, hurling charges, ignoring my refutations — trial by press, that’s what it was, worse than trial by ordeal, not even Tass would have dared to do so much to damage our national prestige at home and abroad — to hell with them.

Pat was luckier, they were kinder to her. Always had been. “Patricia Ryan as Daphne Martin had a role which called for temperament, and did she have it? Plenty. She did some fine acting as she wheeled in and out of the room, always in a semi-rage. Richard Nixon had a small part but carried his assignment well.” No smaller than hers, goddamn it. That was from the Whittier News in its review of that play we were in, The Dark Tower , the one where we met. It was about actors in the big city. An evil man’s possession of a young girl’s mind. Murder. I was the playwright, Barry Jones, “a faintly collegiate, eager blushing youth of 24,” a small-town greenhorn outsider among these snide and pompous Easterners, a rare part for me since I usually played old men. Pat played the part of Daphne Martin, “a tall, dark, sullen beauty of 20, wearing a dress of great chic and an air of permanent resentment,” in short, a hot-pants actress on the make, tough and lethal. In the play we ended up going off to get married, but it was meant as a kind of cynical joke. “Jones & Martin, card tricks and sex appeal.” It wasn’t an altogether pleasant part to play. All the way through the thing, they made fun of me, whether I was onstage or not, made fun of my open-faced self-confidence, my naïveté, my youth, my name, my piano playing, my writing, my taste, it probably put Pat off me for months. Even as she and I made our final exit, Pat slipped back onstage to tell the real hero: “Listen — as soon as he’s tucked in his crib I’ll call you up!” But they all forgot one thing. I wrote the play that was the title of this play, the play within the play — or perhaps the play that embraced the play. The Dark Tower was mine, and they all lived in it….

“Eh? Stole what?”

“Stole second, Mr. Nixon. That’s how him and Sammy White scored when Umphlett singled, see…”

“Oh. Yes, I see…” I realized John had been talking for some time. Trying to tell me about that mad 17-run inning. “A good move…” While John talked, I turned to the entertainment pages, looking for some place to go Sunday on our anniversary. Washington was out, the National was closed, getting ready for Guys and Dolls , nothing on but Man and Superman and Show Boat . Some good boxing matches, but she’d probably never go along with that. Maybe the new Cinerama or one of those 3-D movies like House of Wax . I’d feel silly wearing those goddamn cardboard glasses, though.