Robert Coover - Public Burning

I stood with my back to him at the marble fireplace, flushed with shame, afraid even to look up at my own face in the mirror, trying to unjam the zipper on my fly — he’d startled me so, I’d leapt out of my swivel chair like an Eisenhopper, nearly castrating myself on the edge of the desk as I’d slammed past, and, trying desperately to yank shut my fly, had trapped my shirttail deep into the zipper.

“Remember, you shall have joy, or you shall have power,” admonished Uncle Sam, “but you cain’t have both with the same hand! These repeated abuses and usurpations ain’t such as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for flyin’ the flag! You cain’t Tippecanoe and till her, too!”

I struggled desperately with the snagged zipper, not even trying to puzzle out whose voices were leaking through him now, in fact I could hardly hear him, all my senses seemed blocked off somehow — yet I knew he was there, omnipresently there, jamming up all the corners. I longed for the privacy of the old bell tower over our store in Whittier, where things like this never happened. My trouble, I thought, is that I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession.

“So what’s the matter, son? Pat pregnant again?”

“No! No, I… I don’t know,” I whispered hoarsely. “It’s like…like I’ve been going backward… I’m sorry…it’s silly — backward in time! It’s hard to explain…”

“Aha,” mused Uncle Sam, “backward in time, is it?” I caught a furtive glimpse of him in the mirror over my shoulder. His face was in shadows, his back to the window. He might have been giving me a look of utter disgust. Or he might have been laughing. Either way, I knew, the fat was in the fire. I’d recognized from the time I became a member of HUAC, and particularly after my participation in the Hiss case, that it was essential for me to maintain a standard of personal conduct that was above criticism, and now — ah, I had faced some problems in my life perhaps more difficult than this one, but none could approach it in terms of personal embarrassment and chagrin. “Sounds like the fortieth-birthday blues to me,” he said.

“Uh…” Was this an excuse? It didn’t sound like one. “That was five, uh, five months ago, I don’t think—”

“You were busy then, Inauguration and all, it usually doesn’t hit you until a few months go by…. Say, boy, you want me to give a jerk on that thing for you?”

“No!” I cried. “No, I… I have it now… I almost have it…!” But I didn’t. I couldn’t even see the damned thing, everything was blurred, and my hands were shaking. Heart whamming away like ninety. This crisis is worse even than the fund, I thought. “It’s not my…it’s just my shirttail…”

“No doubt,” snorted Uncle Sam. Hands in pockets, he kicked heedlessly across the room through the clutter of notes and documents. “Well, lemme tell you, hoss, backward in time is one place Americans don’t never go, grand climacteric or no! Herbert Hoover was born a penniless orphant, but he didn’t look back, and at the age of forty he was worth four million smackeroos — and he wasn’t even President yet! In fact, later on, bein’ a mite skittyish, he finally did look back — and got royally creamed for it, too! You know what Henry Ford done when he turned forty? He gave up small-time mechanics and went out and founded him the goddamn Ford Motor Company, that’s what! Forty, yes, he was forty! Now his boy, who ain’t even as old as you, is pullin’ in upwards of a hundred million bucks a year, not bad for a kid, and even payin’ taxes on some of it, just to show his heart’s in the right place!” He picked up one of the Greenglass sketches, turned it one way, then the other, finally shrugged and tossed it back on the floor. “‘At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment’—old Ben Franklin wrote that, and passin’ forty hisself, sold off his press and bought up Dr. Spence’s do-it-yourself electrical kit — if he hadn’t a flown that kite, we wouldn’t be here today! When Paul Revere was forty, he spread the alarm through every Middlesexed village and farm, and Ulysses Grant used his fortieth year to put the squeeze on Vicks-burg and that ain’t just another name for your old John Thomas! Now, what woulda happened if them snorters had opened their pants, got bird in hand, and looked backward in time? Eh? No, my friend, remember the Prophets: Look not mournfully into the Past, it comes not back agin!”

“It wasn’t…exactly my own past exactly…more like…” Never mind. Just make matters worse. I struggled to recall that line from Shakespeare about hearts and hell that I copied down years ago when I was in the Navy, I knew it would be useful. When I was away from Pat for a while…. But it wouldn’t come to me. Instead, what I did remember suddenly was the name of that old Clark Gable movie: It Happened One Night . This scene, however, was not in it.

“I will say to your credit, though, you’re more natural at that than you are at golf or politics — if you loosened up like that out in public, might make all the difference! You’d probably be floggin’ a lot fewer problems at home, too….”

“I’m not having problems!” I protested. Did he know about Pat and me? Politicians lived in glass houses, I knew, but surely there were decent limits…maybe not, though — I’d only really come under the gaze about nine months ago, I was still mapping this out. “It’s…it’s got nothing to do with that…”

“No?” Uncle Sam, his white locks curling down around his shoulders, was peering at me as though over the top of Ben Franklin’s reading glasses. “Maybe not. But remember just the same, lad, a little wife well tilled, willed, I mean — in a word, don’t keep it to yourself, boy, stand beside her and guide her, a used key is always bright along the Wabash!” His voice had softened to a throaty rumble — like that of Raymond Massey playing Abraham Lincoln. His playful fade had calmed me somewhat, and I’d managed to work a tooth or two of the zipper free from the cloth, but the rest wouldn’t budge. “Listen, you’re fightin’ the problem, son,” he said, leaning toward me as though he might come to help.

“I’ve got it!” I cried, and in a panic gave a great yank on the zipper: it parted and my shirttail was free at last! My fly, however, would never close again. My shoulders relaxed — I began to feel the tension going out. I felt defeated and liberated at the same time. “The most virtuous hearts have a touch of hell’s own fire in them.” That was the line. Probably not Shakespeare, though. Or useful either.

“What’s that got to do with it?” demanded Uncle Sam.

I hadn’t realized I was talking out loud. I was very tired. And depressed. Shit, I thought. What a mess. Maybe I ought to get sick. “Just…just something I—”

“Cock’s body,” swore Uncle Sam, kicking through the papers on the floor, “I ain’t seen so much shit piled around in one place since we cleaned out Harry Gold’s basement! You know, I think your problem is, you been spendin’ too much time indoors. I know how much your famous Iron Butt means to you, and I reckanize it gets you more votes than your face does, but you don’t wanta get musclebound in one joint while the rest just withers away! You probably ain’t eatin’, drinkin’, eliminatin’, bathin’, whoopeein’, and sleepin’ like you ought neither — you get aholda Dr. Calver’s Ten Commandments, fella! You look worse’n John Brown’s molderin’ body!”

Maybe Napoleon said it, I thought. Or else Mark Twain. I wondered how I was going to get home in time to change into a new pair of pants before tonight — have to buy a whole new suit maybe…