Robert Coover - Public Burning

I tried to imagine this scene, but it was confusing. I thought of the street as narrow with little restaurants and movie houses, but I knew that further east, near Lafayette Street and the Bowery, it didn’t look like this. Rows of plain dirty brick buildings, I thought, five or six stories high, a lot of fire escapes, balconies, drainpipes, green paint. The street would be clotted with trucks, not to mention the rampaging mob, yet I felt the trees around, blue sky, room to run. I could see the police springing down out of their patrol wagons, faces alert, turned up, catching the sun, hands on their sticks or at their belts, tense yet exultant, like footballers taking the field, could see the hoses uncoiling from fire trucks, connected to fire hydrants that looked like stubby circumcised peckers, could feel the hoses suddenly fattening with surging water, could sense the excitement of the crowd, men mostly, tough and angry, and big women — where was Ethel? I saw her, small, all but lost in the huge crowd, an uncertain child, wanting to run, yet drawn obediently toward the job she’d been sent to ask for, thus moving neither with the crowd nor against it, and so isolated, a tempting target, framed in the solid arched doorway of a dingy yellow brick building, a kind of warehouse or something — and the guy with the hose, blasting away at the big broads, the clumsy old men, spies her standing there, legs spread, eyes wide open, clutching a handbag to her small breasts, and slowly he bends that big gray snake of his — I run toward her: “Ethel! Look out!” She looks up — but too late, the spray hits her full in the face and down she goes, kicking against the current, the jet blasts up her skirt, driving her, skidding on her backside, to the wall — I throw myself in front of her, absorbing the brunt of the spray. It slams hard against my butt, my head, I’m thrown against her, we tumble together in the driving shower, she clutches me to hang on, I fall between her legs, but I keep my back to the spray and she manages, protected, to scramble to her feet. “Run!” I say. “Get away while you can!” She grabs my hand. “Come!” she cries. Her voice is small, almost strident. Somehow, we’re out of the spray and running free, past the milling angry crowds, wheeling vehicles — then suddenly it hits us again, from a different direction maybe, knocks our feet out from under us, she’s down and hurt, skirt up around her waist, I pick her up, plunge forward through the driving spray, duck behind a car, then around a corner: safe!

I set her down, lower her wet skirt. We stare at each other a moment, our faces blank with shock and exertion: and then we laugh. She pushes her curly hair out of her eyes, notices that my hair is curly too. We look down at our wet clothes, pasted to our bodies. She takes my hand: “My brother Sam’s got some clothes that will fit you,” she says. Her voice is gentle now, and musical. We walk south on the Bowery, past locked-up doorways, windows with junk piled high in them or cardboarded up, there in the sunshine, talking about our lives. It does not seem far. I feel at home here with her: she seems so at ease in the city. It excites me to watch her move, so self-assured. I tell her about my play, The Little Accident , and she laughs gaily, squeezes my hand. My fraternity, the Square Shooters, had just put it on in April, a “real shocker” they called it at Whittier — it was about a football star who gets benched for bringing his girl back to the dorm after eight o’clock. It had a lot of daring scenes like Coach Newman kissing his star goodnight when he tucks him in. The unique thing was that all the characters were real people, and the plot, though outlandish, was nearly true. Ethel says that’s very experimental. I tell her how I played the part of Joe Sweeney, my debating partner in real life. The Whittier News said it was “one of the cleverest skits of the year.” She is greatly amused when I tell her that the climax of the play is when the star of the team is allowed to enter the game at last, but in a final wild effort to win the game, falls on his face on the three-yard line. “Really! Well, don’t worry,” she says laughing, and pulls me along. She tells me about the settlement-house theater groups and says I should write something for them. Why not? I think. This may be my big break! She leans against me. Water is running down through the drains in the streets from the melee now far behind us. When we get near the place she lives, she makes me wait. “It’s okay,” she says when she comes back. “My mother’s out shopping, my father’s busy in the shop, and the boys are gone.”

There’s a big plate-glass window with her father’s name on it in peeling gold leaf: BARNET GREENGLASS. Two doors: one goes into the sewing-machine repair shop; we take the other and climb a steep flight of stairs. Her wet body is silhouetted against the dim daylight at the top as though it were naked. Her room is separate from the rest and opens off the hallway. It is plain but clean, a bed and a chest of drawers, some pamphlets and books, musical scores, ashtrays, a wooden chair. Right away, I want to buy her something for it, flowers maybe, or a soft doll. “Get your clothes off,” she says, “and I’ll go get you a towel.” I remember a movie in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert spent a rainy night together in a hotel room with a blanket up between them like the walls of Jericho. I try to strip the cool way Clark Gable did, but I feel more like Claudette Colbert. My shirt and pants are heavy, and I see there’s a puddle where I’ve been standing. I lay them across the windowsill.

She comes back with a towel and some clothes. A warm bath would feel good, but the only tub, I recall, is a large primitive enamel affair with a heavy wooden lid down in the kitchen by the stove. Water for it is heated on the stove, like for the big metal bath Millard Fillmore installed in the White House a century ago. She has unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it out, and now she kicks off her shoes. I’m standing near the window in my underwear, my hands crossed in front of me, but unable to hold back the bulge of my excitement. She lays her brother’s clothes out on the bed, turns toward me questioningly with the towel. I pull my undershirt over my head, feeling vulnerable. She watches as though admiring me. She rubs my back and chest hard with the towel. I know that Jewish girls have no religious restrictions against having…doing…going all the way. She peels my underpants down, kneeling as it were to the crevice — my penis, released, falls stiffly forward, brushing her cheek. “Let me get you out of those wet clothes,” I say hoarsely, pitching my voice down like Clark Gable’s. Her fingers are trembling as she unlocks the stay on her skirt. Her brassiere slips forward off her narrow shoulders. “Richard,” she whispers, “I’ve never…never…” “Neither have I,” I say softly. We stare at each other in the bare room. A warm summery breeze is blowing in through the window, a song from some radio. We kiss. I slide her wet panties down over her cool damp bottom, getting a glimpse of her black round thing, my heart beating wildly. She strokes me gently. “I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She pulls—

“Well, I see that the old flagpole still stands,” somebody said. It wasn’t Douglas MacArthur, it was Uncle Sam, who had just flown in through my open window. “You know, son, you’ll go blind playing with yourself like that,” he said. “It can make your hair fall out and your brain rot, too!”

The boatmen’s strike is over. The Iron Curtain around the Statue of Liberty is down, the sightseer ferries are running again. The jam at the south end of Times Square collapses momentarily as crowds stream away to the Battery to make the traditional birth voyage in the sunshine-yellow ferries across to Bedloe’s Island, there to enter into the Mighty Lady and reach the fount of Liberty: “Oh Mother of Exiles, merciful and mild, refuge of the tempest-tost and comfort of the wretched refuse, conceived without the stain of sin, full of grace and reinforced copper, noble couch of the three branches of government and perfect holocaust of Divine Love whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, watch over us!” But the Square soon fills up again as thousands of newcomers arrive and press toward the center, where now the Entertainment Committee is making a special announcement: to beat the Sabbath and any further postponements, the executions have been moved up from eleven p.m. to eight o’clock — the Federal Express is not only on time, she’s three hours early! The Rosenberg defense lawyers, already wild with frustration, explode in a fit of incoherent anguish and suicidally charge the Square — they’re allowed to pass through, one time, end to end, like fraternity pledges running the gauntlet, pelted with laughter and good-natured abuse as they go shrieking by, into the center and out, zooming along like their tails are on fire, into well-deserved oblivion. Or so everyone hopes.