Robert Coover - Public Burning

And so we had presented to the public the facts of our case, the Rosenbergs and I, using the medium we found to hand — but where the Rosenbergs had fallen back on exaggerated postures of self-righteousness and abused innocence, I had remained humble and sincere. And objective. Where they had lathered their Death House letters with sententious generalities and vague romantic intimations of lives together that had been all sweetness and light (“Twelve glorious years we’ve spent together, always sharing, seeking together life’s joy…”), I had named names and places and times, reported specific conversations and moments of doubt and difficulty, laid bare everything I owned and owed — not just a car, but a 1950 Oldsmobile , not a bank debt, but a $4500 debt to the Riggs National Bank of Washington —it moved people to hear me pronounce that name: The Riggs National Bank of Washington . I mentioned Tricia’s age, the Hiss case, Abraham Lincoln and the common people, Pat’s maiden name and her respectable Republican cloth coat — she sat over there and modeled it for me, she looked great, even her terrible skinniness, the circles under her eyes, were a plus for me — and when I got to Checkers, I even told exactly how the dog had arrived in a crate at Union Station in Baltimore — I said that: Union Station in Baltimore . “And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it!” Now, that was very goddamn moving, it could still make me choke up a little, and it made me one of the most famous Vice Presidential candidates in American political history — it was virtually a kangaroo ticket after that, old war hero at the top or no.

Darryl Zanuck the movie mogul called me up afterwards to tell me it was “the most tremendous performance I’ve ever seen!” I’d asked for letters in my support, and over 300,000 of them came to the Washington Republican Party headquarters — they were stored for posterity in Whittier now in a box labeled “The Dead Sea Scrolls.” Ike caved in and called me “a brave man.” We created the Order of the Hound’s Tooth, my own cufflinks gang, and threw a party. Later, in Wheeling, the General embraced me and called me “my boy” and let me walk on his right side. I felt like love and death were all around me, and I remembered that moment so long ago, coming home and being kissed by little Arthur, soon to die — I couldn’t help but cry. “Good old Bill!” I’d wept, falling on Knowland’s shoulder, but what I’d really meant was: “Mom! It’s your good dog Richard! I’m home!” Clean as a hound’s tooth. Thanks to Checkers. Thirty years since I wrote that letter to Mom, pretending to be an abused dog — not that things come full circle in this world, but that in a random universe, ironical patterns are thrown up, and sometimes, as pattern, they turn and operate on the world…

My Dear Master:

The two boys that you left me with are very bad to me. Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me.

One Saturday the boys went hunting. Jim and myself went with them. While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked me in the side and we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing came out of it. I felt a pain all over. I started to run and as both of my eys were swelled shut I fell into a pond. When I got home I was very sore. I wish you would come home right now.

Your good dog

Richard

Even today that letter broke my heart — why hadn’t the Rosenbergs been able to get that kind of feeling in their correspondence? That “swarm of black thing” was more terrifying than anything they’d said in over two years of self-pitying anticipation of the electric chair. “It is incredible,” Ethel wrote to Julius on the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary and their first spent in prison, “that after 12 years of the kind of principled, constructive, wholesome living together that we did, that I should sit in a cell in Sing Sing awaiting my own legal murder.” What was more incredible to me was that she apparently could not recall a single day, a single event, from those twelve principled et cetera years worth mentioning. In all her letters, there was only one image that came to her mind from the past: that her younger boy used to call a certain kind of ice cream “Cherry-Oonilla.” The very loneliness of that image made it all the more touching. As for Julius, his recollections of the past read like the obituaries in small-town newspapers. There was not even any mention of their idyllic 1943 holiday in a rented cabin in Peekskill, where they presumably swam and hiked, chopped wood, made love in a hammock in front of their friends. Of course, it was right after this that they dropped out of overt radical activities, maybe in fact this was where they took their spy-training program, the love-play just a cover….

Nevertheless, pedantic and other-directed as they were, these letters seemed to be the most meaningful contact Julius and Ethel had with each other. Perhaps the prison setting estranged them. Maybe they feared what each knew about the other. People had claimed early on to have seen them kissing each other through the wire mesh, but this must have lost its charm pretty quick, and maybe it had been a lie. After they had meetings together or with the boys, their letters were full of apologies for their tears, bad tempers, or sullen silence. They found it easier to write to each other than to speak to each other. And behind all the rhetoric, something real did trickle through: in Julie’s case, an eagerness to please, to be admired, not only by the world, but by Ethel, too; in Ethel’s, her loneliness and her love. “Dearest Julie, I hold your dear face between my hands as I used to do so long ago and kiss you with all my heart.… I talk with you every night before I fall asleep and cry because you can’t hear me.… I see your pale drawn face, your pleading eyes, your slender boyish body and your evident suffering…. Oh, what shall I do? Hold me close to you tonight, I’m so lonely….”

Well, I knew from my own experience how love, awkward in the flesh, could blossom through the mails. Even now, I often wrote Pat letters at night for her to read in the morning. It was a way of working things out for yourself, exploring your own — then suddenly it occurred to me, what should have been obvious all along: she didn’t love him. She never had. She needed him, but she never loved him. “Daddy, I never saw you and Mommy kiss.” She had loved, yes, she was a lover, but she had no proper object for her love. I understood this. She was using his slender boyish body as I had used Pat’s cloth coat: to cop a plea. She had married Julius to fulfill something in herself, the old story, something maybe that got into her that day long ago when she got knocked down by the police fire hoses on Bleecker Street, but it was a portion of her will she had wed, not a lover: “Julie dear, I have such utter respect and regard for you; how well you know the score! Hold me close and impart to me some of your noble spirit!” Yes, a perfect marriage, and he had not disappointed her, this young activist, not up till now anyway; but she could recall nothing — or would not — of their past together, was given to confusion and tantrums when they met, even forgot their anniversary last year, though in prison she had almost nothing else to think about, and for the last few months had apparently stopped writing to Julius altogether, as though he no longer had ears to hear, or never did. And thus the deep longing in these letters mailed to the world: “Sweetheart, I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She could as well have been speaking to me.