Robert Coover - Public Burning

I sighed, leaned back in my chair. The letters, transcripts, notes, records littered the room, but I was no longer disturbed by this, I even perceived a certain order in it — like an image of time, I thought, not knowing quite what I meant, except that by tomorrow the office would be clean again, and so, no doubt, would I. There was a special fragrance in this soft summer day blowing in through the open window that reminded me of California, the old California which was in the middle of the world, not today’s remote, statistical, old-man California over on the other side of the voting continent, and I could hear a song wafting up from the streets below, one I recognized: “Among My Souvenirs”—it was one of the few that the Rosenbergs had mentioned in their letters. Something like the memories of last night rolled over me again, but now not so much as separate strung-out recollections, but rather as a kind of concentrated mass of feeling and abstract imagery that kept swelling and receding like a sort of slow heartbeat. I wanted to hold it constant, examine it, lose myself in it — it seemed to me that the resolution to this whole problem lay concealed in it, my speech, everything, as though on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my vision — but it kept slipping away. Then I’d sit back and it would sweep over me again. It was very strange, very sweet, I could almost taste it, smell it, feel it filling my lungs, spreading through my limbs, it was warm and dusty and dense, like the heart of a garden, the heart of a city, concrete and leafy all at once. A kind of dusty summer ballpark of the spirit. It seemed almost too beautiful, too heroic, to be a real memory, it was more like…like the memory of a daydream, and not even of the dream, but of the sensation of dreaming.

On my desk lay Picasso’s doodles of the Rosenbergs. Julie resembled Ronald Colman, only more scholarly, while Ethel had a kind of Little Annie Rooney look — the lost waif. She looked like someone you could talk to. In spite of all our obvious differences, I realized, we had a lot in common. We were both second children in our families, we both had an older brother, younger brothers, both had old-fashioned kitchen-bound mothers and hard-working failure fathers, were both shy and often poor in health, I admit it, both preferred to be by ourselves except when we were showing off publicly on a stage, both found escape in books and schoolwork and music, both were honor students, activists and organizers, loved rhetoric and drama, worked hard for our parents, had few friends, never dated much and mated late, had dreams. Ethel dreamed of some glorious future as an artist or musician, a singer maybe, or actress. She entered an amateur-night competition at Loew’s Delancey Street theater one night and won second prize singing “Ciribiribin.” She was spotted by a Major Bowes talent scout, who put her on the professional amateur-night-competition circuit, and by the time she was seventeen she was all but making a living at it. She took voice and piano lessons from some lady at Carnegie Hall, paying for them out of her lunch money, and she bought a used piano and dragged it home — her finances were even better than mine, she supported herself and her family and still knew how to invest. She always kept a rigid schedule, writing it out every day, charting her consistency, always woke up at six, practiced an hour, went off to work, studied scores at lunch break, took lessons in the evening — like me plotting out my college activities program or preparing for a political campaign.

She auditioned for the Schola Cantorum at the Metropolitan Opera House and was accepted, the youngest voice the choir had ever had, it looked like her dreams were coming true. But she couldn’t go on tour with them because she couldn’t leave her job, so they dropped her. Her mother said: “If God wanted you to have lessons, God would have made them possible.” She was like the heroines in all those musicals who starve and suffer unnoticed, until one night the star gets a sore throat and can’t go on, and against the better judgment of the fat cigar-chewing manager, the heroine takes over, wins the hearts of millions. Only Ethel never took over. She wasn’t there when the star got a sore throat. She married Julius Rosenberg, typed up spy notes, and got sentenced to the electric chair instead. What happens to us in life seems, in retrospect, inevitable. And much of it is, the main patterns anyway. And yet we are full of potential, there are many patterns in us, and there are significant moments in life when we can choose among those parts of ourselves we might fulfill. What if I had met her years ago? I could have recommended her for a scholarship at Whittier, she might have studied music like Ola, they might’ve even been friends, we could have acted in plays together. She was just a year behind me, having skipped a year, she was very bright, and I was virtually running Whittier College from my freshman year on, it would have been easy — Dr. Dexter would have admired the suggestion, bringing a poor girl from the Eastern ghettos out to the clean air and warm sunshine of Southern California, I’d have probably got special mention in the yearbook for arranging it. We could have taken walks and talked about all my student activities: the fraternity, football, debate and theater, politics — she might have helped me with my studies. I didn’t really need help, but I was always getting depressed about them, and she could have kept me going.

I breathed the June air deeply, feeling the campus palm trees swaying gently overhead, and wondered if Ethel, too, a dreamer like myself breathing this same air, was being similarly moved, similarly drawn back into this trance of timelessness, on this, her last day on earth, falling in love all over again with life itself, or at least a dream of life? “Now I kneel down to a crevice in the concrete, filled with earth painstakingly accumulated from the underpart of moss, small velvety crumbs of which cling to the damp cool parts of the yard where the sun’s rays rarely penetrate. In this crevice an apple seed which I planted, and have watered patiently, is sprouting bravely. All my love, darling.” Just the thing to take root and crack up the concrete, I thought, the prison people must love it.

In the Horatio Alger novels, in spite of everything, the heroines were always saved at last by rich uncles. Ethel didn’t have a rich uncle. Neither did I, growing up — except for Grandpa Milhous’s money which put me through school, we were as poor as any other middle-class family — but later I got adopted. By teachers, businessmen, Herbert Hoover, eventually Uncle Sam himself. I was successful with old men, she wasn’t. Was this it, then? Was this the reason that that serious little curly-headed girl watering an apple seed in a prison exercise yard was going to get 2000 volts bolted through her brain tonight? A missing character, a lost “closing scene”? Or had the story taken a wrong turn somewhere, putting her beyond the reach of rich uncles? That night she got attacked by that old guy from The Valiant cast, for example, or the day they knocked her down with fire hoses on Bleecker Street.

What would I have done, I wondered — what would have become of me if they’d knocked me down with those hoses? Ethel was just sixteen years old, a sensitive little girl with a pretty voice and big dark eyes, trusting, innocent, bright and lively. She didn’t want to change the world, she wanted to love it, to sing to it, to give herself to it. Just like me. But it was 1931, the unemployed were marching on Washington, her family was wretchedly poor, and there was a job to be had: as clerk in a paper-box factory on Bleecker Street. “You’ll never get ahead!” her mother had screamed at her, pushing her out the door. “There’s no place in life for arty people!” But all right, she would get a job, share her money with the family, and still somehow save aside enough to take music lessons, maybe even go to the university, enter theater — it happened in the movies every day. But when she got to the factory, there were already a thousand people there ahead of her, trying to get the same job. I knew how she felt, I’d been through this, too, that Christmas in New York, trying to land a job with a law firm. But in her case, there was no private interview, there was a riot. The police were called and the crowds were broken up with fire hoses. Ethel was knocked down twice.