For the Jewish families on our block, it was a particularly awkward and stressful time. Mrs. Lubar later revealed her shame that the Rosenbergs were Jewish, although she also felt sorry for them and didn’t think they should be executed. More conservative Jews seemed anxious to display their patriotism by vocal denunciations of the Rosenbergs. Still others distanced themselves from the entire case, fearing that discussion would trigger an antiSemitic backlash.
I didn’t know who was right, about either the crime or the penalty. All I knew was that some huge and incomprehensible force had reached out to devastate this very ordinary-appearing family. When I read that young Michael had learned that his parents were about to be executed while he was watching a Yankees-Tigers game on television, I tried to imagine what it would be like having a bulletin break up the order of a public baseball game with such crushing private news. To me, all the arguments among our neighbors meant less than the sight of young Michael in tears, confronting the loss of his parents. Michael was not only the same age as I, but the same age my father had been when both his parents had died. Surely the Rosenbergs would break down at the last minute and agree to talk in exchange for their lives, so that Michael and Robert wouldn’t be abandoned. My mother was less certain. “They see themselves as martyrs,” she explained. “They will never crack.” My mother was right. “We are innocent,” Ethel insisted right up to the end. “This is the whole truth. To forsake this truth is to pay too high a price even for the priceless gift of life—for life thus purchased we could not live out in dignity and self-respect.”
Above left: The short, plump Mrs. Rosenberg, here with Mr. Rosenberg, looked more like one of my friends’ mothers than an international spy. Above right: I hoped Michael Rosenbetg would take care of his little brother, Robbie, just as my father had cared for his sister, Marguerite, when they, too, were orphaned. Below: In the spring of 1954, I often found that my mother had set up her ironing board in front of our television set to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings.
It was hot and humid in New York on the night of Friday, June 19, 1953. The time of the executions, originally set for 11 p.m., had been moved up so they would not fall on the Jewish Sabbath. Around 8:15 p.m., radio and television shows were interrupted by the announcement that the Rosenbergs were dead. I wondered what kind of life the two children would lead and where they would go to school. I hoped Michael Rosenberg would take care of his little brother, just as my father had cared for his sister, Marguerite, when they, too, were orphaned. My reverie was broken by the insistent bleat and blare of horns as dozens of motorists cruising the streets honked their approval of the executions.
For days afterward, Elaine and I followed the story of the executions in the newspapers and on television with a ghoulish fascination. Julius, without his spectacles and with his mustache shaved off, had been the first to enter the death chamber. He was strapped into the chair, the switch was pulled, and a buzzing sound filled the room. Two more shocks were applied before he was pronounced dead.
Next, wearing a dark-green dress with white polka dots, Michael’s mother, Ethel, entered the room. As she reached the chair, she turned and embraced the matron, who choked up and left the room. The guards dropped the leather mask over her face. The first of the three standard shocks was applied at 8:11. “She seemed to fight death,” The New York Times reported. “She strained hard against the straps and her neck turned red. A thin column of grayish smoke rose from the upper side of her head. Her hands, lying limp, were now clenched like a fighter’s.” After the standard three shocks of electricity, one short and two long, doctors approached to check her heartbeat and discovered that Ethel was still alive. Her straps were readjusted and a fourth shock was applied. Once more, she strained against the straps. A fifth current was required before the doctors pronounced her dead.
“He was so meek,” a neighbor said later, “it took only a few minutes to kill him, but she was so tough, it took forever to kill her. Proves she was the mastermind behind the whole thing.”
AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, Eddie and Eileen’s parents, Julia and Arthur Rust, invited all the neighbors on the block to attend a party and watch movies of their trip to Ireland. My favorite priest, Father O’Farrell, was there, along with two doctors and about a dozen children. My mother was seated on a stool watching the movies when I noticed that she was flushed. She kept pressing her fingers against the sides of her forehead, as if to squeeze away the pain of a headache. Suddenly, and without warning, she slumped from the stool to the floor. The doctors rushed to her side while Julia Rust called the fire department. The adults tried to get the children out of the house, but I refused to budge. I overheard a doctor say that my mother had suffered a major heart attack and her condition was critical. “We should think about last rites,” one of the doctors said to Father O’Farrell. “No, no,” I cried out, afraid they were accepting my mother’s death. “You can’t, I won’t let you.” Father O’Farrell put his hand gently on my shoulder. The anointing of the sick, he reassured me, was a sacrament to give strength not only to the soul but to the body.
My father, accompanied by my sister Jeanne, who was home from nursing school for the weekend, went with my mother in the ambulance to Mercy Hospital, a few miles away. When I tried to join them, my father told me with uncharacteristic abruptness that I couldn’t come. As soon as they had left, Julia Rust told Eileen to take a walk with me. We circled the block aimlessly, round and round, until we settled into my house to wait. I sat with Eileen in front of the television set, brief periods of conversation alternating with periods of silence, as I pretended to watch television. Neither of us discussed what had happened. Around midnight, my father finally came home to report that my mother was in an oxygen tent and that Jeanne was staying with her.
It was fortunate Jeanne was there that night. She knew that my mother could not tolerate heat; all summer she had kept a big fan by her chair and her bed. “It’s impossible in this tent,” my mother kept saying. “It’s unbearably hot.” Jeanne checked the tent and discovered that there was no oxygen left. When she ran to the nurses’ station with the information, she was told that more oxygen had been ordered and would arrive in several hours. “Let’s take her out of the tent until then,” my sister suggested. “There’s more oxygen outside than in that stifling tent.”
“Can’t do that,” the nurse responded. “The doctor ordered an oxygen tent for her, so we’ve got to keep her there until we get a second order.”
“That’s crazy,” my sister argued, as she unzipped the plastic sides of the tent and started moving Mother. The nurse resisted, but Jeanne promptly silenced the nurse’s protests. “Listen,” she ordered. “I’m taking her out of this tent and she will remain outside until the oxygen arrives. That’s all there is to it.”
This incident was my mother’s fourth hospitalization in three years. In 1950, she had been hospitalized at Lenox Hill for nearly a month, first to remove an internal hemorrhoid and later to remove her malfunctioning thyroid. Just before Christmas in 1952, she had suffered an unusually severe “spell” that lasted several hours. Over the next two months, she experienced an aching pain in her right hip that intensified and radiated through her leg as the day progressed. By evening, her entire leg had gone numb and she limped markedly. In February 1953, she returned to Lenox Hill, where she was diagnosed with a sciatica-type neuritis, nervousness, fatigue, and advanced arteriosclerotic heart disease.
This hospitalization at Mercy Hospital, which lasted nearly a month, was the most serious of all. Almost every night for the entire time of my mother’s stay, as I closed my eyes to go to sleep I would see my mother falling from the stool, her body on the floor, the green fields of Ireland still flickering on the screen, Father O’Farrell administering last rites. “If we are going to die,” my catechism explained, “God helps us die a holy death, but if it is better for us to get well, then He makes us better.” I tried to understand the words “if it is better for us to get well.” I couldn’t
imagine the conditions under which it wouldn’t be better for my mother to get well, and I prayed harder than ever that God would agree with me.
While my mother was away, all the neighbors helped out. Mrs. Friedle had lunch waiting for both Elaine and me when we came home from school; Mrs. Rust supplemented my father’s meager skills in the kitchen by preparing casseroles and soups; and, as always, my sister Jeanne filled in everywhere. Every day, when my father returned from work, we went together to the hospital. I brought my homework as well as books to read to my mother. In this way, we tried to give the hospital room some semblance of our family life. But it was impossible to forget where we were. As I walked through the corridors, I averted my eyes from the metal beds where patients lay so still they seemed already dead. I turned away whenever an anxious-looking patient was being wheeled down the hallway into the operating room, and I held my breath to escape the ubiquitous smell of disinfectant. Everyone tried to put on the best face possible, but for the first time I could remember, my father, always so resolutely cheerful, could not conceal his fretfulness.
Some measure of distraction from the stark, white hospital room was provided by the crackle of the radio as we huddled around my mother’s bed to share Dodger games. Fortunately, by September of ’53, it was already clear that the Dodgers would win the pennant. It had been a brilliant season: “It’s the greatest team I’ve ever managed,” Chuck Dressen crowed. “It’s a helluva outfit.” Roy Campanella won his second Most Valuable Player award with a batting average of .312, forty-one home runs, and a league-leading 142 runs batted in. Duke Snider led the team in homers with forty-two while hitting .336. Still possessed of a powerful will to win, the aging Robinson, playing mainly in left field, hit .329 with ninety-five RBIs. Gil Hodges, after a start so appalling that the Brooklyn clergy offered prayers for his revival, finished by hitting .302 with thirty-one home runs. Jim Gilliam, with his dazzling play at second, was named Rookie of the Year.
Sunday, September 6, was my father’s birthday, which we celebrated in my mother’s hospital room with cake and ice cream, listening to the Dodger game on the radio. It was a typical Dodger-Giant vendetta. In the second inning, Furillo (who had twenty-two hits in his last thirty-eight at bats, and would win the batting title that year) was hit on the wrist by a pitched ball. He picked himself off the ground, pushed two umpires and the Dodger manager out of his way, and headed toward the mound. Both dugouts emptied, and after a long interval, the game resumed. But no sooner had Furillo taken first than he turned and charged toward the Giant dugout, certain that Leo Durocher had ordered the pitcher to hit him. The pugnacious Durocher rose to meet him, and the two men converged, fists flailing. Teammates finally separated them, but in the melee a bone in Furillo’s hand was broken, putting him out of action for the rest of the season. “I’ll get him,” Furillo fumed when he went to the hospital that night for X-rays. “On the field, on the street, or anywhere else I find him. I’m only sorry I didn’t get a good sock at him. I wouldn’t care if it cost me a thousand dollars and I wasn’t worried about others ganging up on me because his own players hate him, too.”
My mother was so infuriated by Furillo’s injury that she suddenly sat up in bed and cursed Durocher in a voice more firm and spirited than I had heard from her for a long time. In a peculiar way, it became clear to me at that moment that she had turned the corner. In the days that followed, her condition began to improve, her appetite slowly returned, and she exhibited her old determination to recover her full strength.
A week later, the Dodgers clinched the pennant, earlier than any modern club, and met the Yankees in the World Series. Once again, Billy Martin was the Yankee hero, driving in eight runs on twelve hits. Even though everyone agreed the Dodgers had the better team, they lost yet again. But for the first time it didn’t seem important at all. My mother was home from the hospital. Our family was together again. There would be other seasons, other chances.
IN THE SPRING of 1954, when I came home for lunch, I often found that my mother had set up her ironing board in front of our television set to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. Indeed, all the mothers in the neighborhood were mesmerized by the dramatic confrontation between Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and the civilian chiefs of the Army. And what transfixed our mothers inevitably influenced us and, ultimately, would cast an ugly shadow over our own play.
In February 1950, with the country still stunned by the shock of the Soviet nuclear bomb and the invasion of South Korea, Joe McCarthy had burst onto the national scene when he told a Republican audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 known communists in the State Department. Although no such list was ever produced nor any actual communist unearthed, the explosive speech opened one of the most destructive chapters in American political history. For more than four years, McCarthy’s scattershot accusations of treason created an atmosphere of fear and anxiety that imperiled civil liberties, ruined reputations, disrupted careers, and destroyed countless lives. The entire panoply of congressional inquiries, executive investigations, accusations, and blacklists came to be known by the single word “McCarthyism.”
In 1954, his reckless arrogance swollen by political success, McCarthy went after the United States Army. His starting point was the refusal of Major Irving Peress, an Army dentist, to answer questions about his alleged membership in the American Labor Party. Though Peress was no longer in the Army, he had been promoted to major before his discharge. “Who promoted Peress?” McCarthy demanded day after day, until the question became a refrain. He called for the Army’s personnel files so he could determine who was involved in this “conspiracy” to promote and protect a “known communist.” Army Secretary Robert Stevens refused McCarthy’s demands until leaders of the Republican administration, fearing the issue was dividing and weakening the party, urged him to furnish the records. Stevens’ seeming capitulation set off a storm of protest around the world. The London press said that McCarthy had accomplished what General Burgoyne and Cornwallis had never achieved—the surrender of the United States Army.
Stung by the criticism, Stevens fought back. He denied that he had surrendered, refused to give up the files, and insisted that he would never allow Army personnel to be browbeaten or humiliated by a congressional committee. The stage was set for a showdown. There followed an unprecedented trial by congressional committee on television, in which the Army responded to McCarthy’s charges with accusations of its own, claiming that McCarthy and Roy Cohn, his chief investigator, had tried to extort favors from the Army on behalf of a former subcommittee consultant, David Schine, who had been drafted.
The hearing supplanted even the soap operas as our mothers went about their daily routine to the clangorous accompaniment of lawyers, senators, Army officers, and the coarse interruptions of Senator McCarthy. In the evenings, our fathers were filled in on the events of the day. And, not understanding what was at stake, we made a game of our own out of McCarthyism, a child’s version of accusation, personal attack, and bitter dispute.
As the hearings progressed, even those somewhat sympathetic to McCarthy began to turn against the senator. A growing revulsion was fed, not simply by the absurdity of his attack on the patriotism of the U.S. Army, but through television’s pitiless daily exposure of his coarsely abusive manner and his reckless disregard for facts. The inevitable end came in an exchange between McCarthy and Army counsel Joseph Welch, a patrician Boston lawyer. Angered and frustrated by Welch’s persistent cross-examination of Roy Cohn, McCarthy charged that Welch had planned to bring a young communist from his Boston law firm to work with him on the hearings. When Welch disregarded the attack, McCarthy named the young man, Frederick Fisher, and charged that Fisher had been a member of the Lawyers Guild. In fact, after discussing Fisher’s law-school membership in the Lawyers Guild, both Welch and Fisher had decided it would be best for the young man to stay behind. And now, for no compelling reason, out of the purest malice, McCarthy was trying to destroy him.
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Stunned by the unexpected accusation and close to tears, Welch turned to McCarthy: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir? If there is a God in heaven, [this attack] will do neither you nor your cause any good.” When Welch finished his eloquent and emotional riposte, the crowded hearing room burst into applause. Reporters rushed to the counsel’s table, where McCarthy sat alone, his head in his hands. “What did I do?” he asked, a look of bewilderment on his face. What he had done was to reveal himself to the entire nation as a savage and self-aggrandizing bully. The hearings continued for a few more days, but McCarthy was finished. His blistering attacks would no longer find a sympathetic audience in the nation at large.
Our children’s version of McCarthyism would come to a similar end. We had begun by transforming our living rooms into a counterpart of the Senate chamber. We set up a table facing a single chair in the middle of the room. The person designated as the accused sat in the chair while the rest of us asked questions and made charges from behind the table. As our accused fidgeted uneasily on the stand, we grew increasingly hostile, interrupting explanations with points of order, claiming we had documents and proof to back up our accusations. We shouted and argued just as we had seen the counsel do on television. Day after day we played the treacherous game, even though one of us usually ended up running from the room in tears. We accused one another of being poor sports, of cheating at games. We exposed statements of the “accused” which denigrated others. Marilyn Greene accused Elaine of saying that the new girl on our block, Natalie, was fat; Elaine accused Marilyn of saying that Eileen was a crybaby. I accused Elaine of whining that Eileen always took the role of mother in our games of house. Eddie accused Eileen of complaining that Elaine was too bossy. Often these charges were true. We did, indeed, talk behind one another’s backs, but we had never imagined that our slurring words, bad-mouthed comments, and hurtful language would be made known to others.