Robert Coover - Public Burning

I yawned. I was drifting. It was a beautiful day out, lush and warm, the kind of day to get out the old glove and toss the ball around. Probably be good for my sore shoulder, get the kink out. Stupid as hell to hit the door like that. Yes, go out and shag a few, the Capitol outfielder. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg often did that: went up on the Death House roof to toss a ball around. Not both at the same time, of course — give them half a chance and they went at each other like animals. Maybe one of them was up there now…warming up in the bullpen, as it were, loosening up for the big one. “At lunch,” Ethel once wrote, “the up and coming athletic star of this jail went up on the roof and hit three home runs. It is wonderful to punch a ball and run and enjoy wind and sun.” I supposed a home run was when you knocked the ball off the roof. Dangerous place to chase a fly, there were probably a lot of homers. In fact, the matrons playing with her were probably a little peed off that the aggressive little wat kept knocking the damned ball away. “Come on, Mrs. Rosenberg, play nice.”

The Rosenbergs were Brooklyn Dodger fans. Or pretended to be. They talked about it in their letters. Of course, I understood the emotional and political motives, it was rhetorically sound, I’d used much the same techniques myself — but what was wrong with the Rosenbergs’ appeal was that it was obvious they didn’t know the first thing about baseball, had no feel for the game at all. The Dodgers had won three pennants in the last six years and were a close second so far this year, and the only thing that excited the Rosenbergs was the fact that Brooklyn had broken the color barrier when they brought up Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. As Ethel wrote, after allegedly “chewing her nails” over a boring 10-0 rout: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to the eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.” Now, I ask you, what kind of baseball talk is that? Maybe they called it “beizbol” now that the Russians had laid claim to inventing it. This, after all, was part of their defense. The National Guardian had argued that, just as the Russians had invented everything first, including baseball, they also knew all along how to build atomic weapons, but humanistic considerations had deterred them from doing so.

True, some of our own eggheads were contending much the same thing, Harold Urey for example: that there was no secret to the A-bomb, and that the Russians could have got more out of a Flash Gordon comic strip than out of Greenglass’s famous diagrams. It was Urey’s argument, and that of other offbeat scientists like him, that anyone could figure out how to build the Bomb, the important thing being to have the wherewithal to put what you knew into hardware. The Russians were presumably slow in developing the A-bomb because their industrial establishment had been wiped out by World War II. Well, Urey was a Nobel Prize winner and all that, but he had heavy water on the brain. Even if he was telling the truth, it was interesting that he had waited until now to spring it on us — he and his buddies had built up a profitable and very private sinecure for themselves on the assumption all this time that there was a secret. Even their goddamn budgets were so highly classified that in Congress we rarely had any idea what we were giving them money for. For all we knew, we were buying them retirement homes in Odessa. And anyway, it wasn’t likely Urey was telling the truth. J. Edgar Hoover had said there was a secret, and so had Truman and Eisenhower, it was on the record. Even the Rosenbergs and their lawyer obviously believed there was such a secret, this much they’d effectively confessed to. I remembered from my days at HUAC that Urey had had a long association with fronts for the Phantom, had even helped to launch a few. Maybe he was even one of the mystery spies behind the Rosenbergs. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Albert Einstein. Paul Robeson. The Hollywood Ten. I gazed down at the demonstrators parading in the sun. Only a few years ago, there were 1,157,172 people in this country willing to vote for Henry Wallace. Who were those people? Where were they now? Why hadn’t we done something about them? Old Wallace…might have been President. But he didn’t have it. Got too near the sacred fire and went berserk. Risks of the game…

I turned away from the window. I was running like a dry creek. Very sleepy. My personal desire was to sack out, but it was not a question of what I personally wanted to do, but what was best for the Party and the nation as well. I stood and gazed down on all the documents and records scattered about the room, trying to get an overview. What a mess. I didn’t even know where to begin. Even so, I had to keep moving. Confidence in crisis depended in great part, I knew, on adequacy of preparation — where preparation was possible. The Boy Scouts were right about this. And it had been my experience that once the final period of intense preparation for battle began, it was not wise to break it. It always took me a certain period of time to “warm up” to the point where my mind was working, and it was important to keep the juices flowing. The natural tendency was to procrastinate, because the body and the mind rebel at being driven at a faster pace than usual over any long period of time, like now, for example. But there was never a period when it was safe to let up in the battle with our Communist opponents. They were out to win, and one of the tactics they used was to keep the pressure on. They tried to wear us out. To keep them from winning and to win ourselves, we had to have more stamina and more determination than they had. I squeezed my mouth shut around a yawn and leaned my head back. I realized I was sunk down in my chair again.

I dragged myself to my feet, jangled around a little, shaking myself awake. I had less than seven hours, the day was racing past, I had to keep my mind on this thing, what was the matter with me anyhow? I thought about the Hiss case, how I broke it. What had I done then that I was forgetting about now? Well, for one thing, the lines had seemed less blurred: Chambers was an honest Quaker, Hiss an Ivy League smart-ass, I knew what I was doing. Greenglass was as fat as Chambers and even less stable, and Rosenberg was skinny like Hiss, but Greenglass lacked Whittaker’s wit and vocabulary — Checkers was probably brighter — and Rosenberg was poor, like me, thick-tongued, and dressed ten years behind the times. Hiss had been the millionaire gone sour in the Horatio Alger novels, the evil nephew trying to con his rich uncle out of his cousin’s inheritance, the wily traitor in a plain respectable man’s troubled business. Rosenberg, on the other hand, had been born into a true Horatio Alger family, poor but honest, he should have made a fortune. He’d even sold penny candy on the streets during the Depression, earning as much as eighty cents a day. But somehow something went wrong. The boat did not come in. The rich patron with the sweet tooth did not materialize. There was no happy ending.

So where was I to find my bearings? And Ethel Rosenberg, how did she fit in, what was I to do with her? It was Eisenhower’s contention that she was the prime mover, but according to the testimony, she was mainly guilty of typing up notes. Irving Saypol had made as much of this as he could: “This description of the atom bomb, destined for delivery to the Soviet Union, was typed up by the defendant Ethel Rosenberg that afternoon at her apartment at 10 Monroe Street. Just so had she on countless other occasions sat at the typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.” Blow by blow. The whole argument reminded me a little too much of my high-school debate: “Resolved: Girls are no good.” But maybe Saypol and the President knew something I didn’t.