Robert Coover - Public Burning

Outside, the grounds and streets around the White House were jammed with noisy people, tourists mostly, probably friendly, and on an ordinary day I’d enjoy emerging from an important meeting, still wreathed in authoritative sources, informed circles, those close to the center, and moving boldly into their midst, shaking hands, exchanging small talk. I have a strong emotional feeling for the problems of what I’d call ordinary people. I’ve known unemployed people, for example, and I know what their problems are. As to shaking hands, I like to do that — it brightens people’s lives to meet a celebrity, and besides, I’m rather good at it. I’m able to treat each person as an individual. As a matter of fact, I have even shaken hands with some Communists. But today I was in a hurry: my own skull was tingling with the imminence of the electrocutions and I knew I’d have to work fast to get everything sorted out. Besides, I’d had enough scary encounters with mobs for one day. There are tricks in dealing with crowds, and if they begin to press too hard, I look around for a thin spot and move hack through it toward a car. I didn’t see my own car anywhere, John apparently hadn’t got through, so I slipped through a gap in the mob created by the mounted Park Police, between the ass ends of a couple of horses, past the farmers posing for snapshots and the guys in checkered caps hustling bus tours, and grabbed a battered old Coastline cab, just clattering by. Perfect! I was buoyed up by all the excitement, I had a very “up” feeling, very positive, it was as though the day were getting under way at last, an important day: this one might mean the Presidency for me or no! “Senate Office Building,” I ordered, leaping in, “and, uh, step on it!” Just like in the old George Raft movies, I felt pleased by my luck and aplomb, the perfect timing, all I needed now was a fat black cigar, everything was clicking, I might even pick up something from the cabdriver, touch the pulse of the nation, so to speak — eight hours to go, and by God I was going to make the most of them, I was already making the most of them. The only thing that spoiled this great feeling was the pile of horseturds I’d apparently stepped in on my way past the mounted cops.

“Step on what , mac?” growled the cabdriver, rolling around to glare sourly at me. Ugly man, hard, looked foreign. Pimply, unshaven, thick dirty glasses, fat lips.

I glared back at him, keeping my cool, then hauled the door shut, but it was loose on its hinges and it just whumped up heavily against the frame and swung open again. People had turned to stare at us, some seemed to recognize me, they were moving toward the cab. I grabbed the door with both hands and yanked it hard — it slammed to with a crumping smashing noise, and the window dropped three inches, a crack branching through it like a pencil drawing of a tree.

“Nice goin’, big shot,” said the driver drily. “Ya broke it. That’ll cost ya five bucks.” He stuck out his hand at me, grubby, short-fingered. “Right now, or we don’t go no where.”

I sighed irritably. Trick window, I supposed, I was just getting taken, but what could I do about it? This was the only cab in sight and I did not want to get out there with those people again. I reached into my pocket for my billfold, pulled out a five-dollar bill. The Raft movie was over and I was into something more familiar.

He snatched the bill out of my hand with a grin, started to swing around, then turned back, wrinkled his nose, sniffed, winced at me: “Is that you makin’ that smell, chief?”

“I… I stepped in…something,” I explained.

“Yeah? Well, that’ll be another five bucks,” he said, and whipped another bill out of my wallet — it looked like a ten.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said, but he had already pitched around, shifted gears, gunned the motor, honked the horn, and was moving aggressively into the crowd. To hell with it. Cut your losses. I could probably get it back out of my office expense fund.

“Say, what’s the high muckey-mucks doin’ in there,” he asked, scowling and shaking his fist at the crowds that clotted the streets, “givin’ away free nookie?”

“The atom spies,” I replied stiffly. “The, uh, President is delivering his—”

“You mean Eisenhower?” he shouted back over his shoulder. “Hey, I hear Mamie’s askin’ for a divorce!”

“A divorce—? No, I—”

“Yeah, she says she’s gettin’ sick ’n’ tired of him doin’ to the country all the time what he oughta be doin’ to her! Haw haw haw!”

Ah, screw the pulse of the nation, I thought, sitting back, scraping the horseshit off my shoe on the back of the seat in front. The cab was edging slowly around past the Ellipse, General Sherman rearing up on my left like his pants were on fire, lumpen pioneers and the Washington obelisk holding the right. Washington had got the obelisk, Jefferson the dome and circle, Lincoln the cube, what was there left for me? I wondered. The pyramid maybe. Something modern and Western would be more appropriate, but all I could think of were the false fronts in the old cowtowns.

“Hey, speakin’ a horse manure,” the driver hollered, lurching and braking through the milling crowds, “Harry Truman got in trouble with his daughter about that! Margaret come to her old lady and complained that Harry had disgraced the family by sayin’ ‘manure’ insteada ‘fertilizer’ when he come to present the prizes at her Ladies’ Horticultural Club. ‘Hell,’ says Bess, ‘that’s okay, it’s took me thirty years to get him to say manure!’”

I humph-humphed ambivalently. A stupid joke, but it was enough to remind me that I had my own speech to think about: should I take the high road or the low road? I ran over some phrases in my mind: uh, peace in the world…reduce the danger… I cannot and will not, uh, I have determined that, reached the conclusion…uh, with the help of a mobilized public opinion…what I am suggesting, just running it out hypothetically, is that, uh, some very strong medicine…getting down frankly into the arena…moving upward strongly…

“Bess, ya know, has decided to become a model! Ycah, now that Harry’s out of a job, she’s gonna he a model for dowager styles, see? A friend asked her: ‘But whaddaya gonna do about that big ass o’ yours, Bess?’ And she says: ‘Oh, he’ll stay home on the farm!’ Hoo hah!”

Ah, some of our good partisans…many decent, uh, decent Americans…gathered here…something about, let’s see, we must, uh, we must seize the moment, yes, not just cosmetics, but…ah, on the brink, yes, I think we would he less than candid were we not to admit…

“I got three little girls, ya know — well, they ain’t so little any more, in fact they just got married the other day. All on the same day, a cute idea!”

“Oh? Yes…yes, it is…” I could get a lot fancier, of course. But people have known me too long for me to come on all of a sudden talking like Adlai Stevenson. If I’m to convince people, it’ll he in simple declarative sentences, by the force of facts.

“Yeah, and they all spent their first night in my house, see? When they come down to breakfast the next morning, I ask ’em, I says: ‘Honey, whaddaya think o’ married life?’ Well, the first one, she says: ‘Daddy, with my husband it was just like Winston Churchill, all blood, sweat, and tears!’ And the second one, she says: ‘My old man was like Roosevelt, I thought I’d never get him out — four times, before he finally died on me!’”

Roosevelt had a lot of style, all right, I thought as the cabbie jerked and wormed through the crowds. I wondered if there was something of his I could borrow for tonight. Maybe a variation on that four-freedoms idea — the freedom of the modern housewife, for example, or the freedom to hear Ike pray at the Inauguration, the freedom of television, and so on. Work the Rosenbergs in somewhere maybe. The main thing, though, was: keep it short and blunt, sound a warning note or two, and tell ’em what they want to hear. My greatest weakness was getting over-intellectual in my speeches. I’m known as an activist and an organizer, but some people have said I’m sort of an egghead in the Republican Party. It’s true, I’m more on the thought side than the action side — I’m like Wilson in that regard, except that he always overdid it. I know how to avoid that, I can tame and coddle the intellectual Dillingers as easily as I can outsmart the double domes….