I twisted my hand around on the club: the toe turned in and tapped the ball accidentally, knocking it off the tee again.
“God may forgive sins,” Uncle Sam observed grimly, “but awkwardness has not forgiveness in heaven or earth—that’ll cost you a stroke.” He could be as cold as a New England parson sometimes. “No, guilt, real guilt, is like grace: some people got it, some don’t. These people got it. Down deep. They wear it like a coyote wears its lonesomeness or a persimmon its pucker. They are suffused with the stuff, it’s in their bones, their very acids, it’s no doubt a gift of the promptuary, even their organs are guilty, their feet are guilty, their ears and noses—”
“You mean, because…because they’re Jews?”
“Jews! What in Sam Hill has that got to do with it?” I’d missed again. I was completely lost. I coudn’t even find my goddamn tee. “Irving Kaufman’s a Jew, isn’t he? Is he guilty? Is Irving Saypol guilty? Roy Cohn? Hell, I got a touch of kike in me myself, son, not much, just enough for a little color and wile and to whet my appetite for delicatessen—shoot, I might even incarnate myself into one of ’em some day…”
I glanced up. He was as stern as ever, but there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye. My mind raced uneasily over the possibilities. I felt sure I had a good head start on all of them. I knew, too, it would help a helluva lot if I hit a decent tee shot for a change. If I could find my tee. “It’s under your right foot,” Uncle Sam said flatly.
“No, bein’ a Jew ain’t it, though it probably didn’t help them none either. Their kind of depravity is something deeper even than that, something worse. You don’t see it so much in the shape of their noses as in the way they twitch and blow them. You see it in how they shuffle and squat, how they bend, snort, and grimace. You see it in their crummy business, their greasy flat, their friends—even their crockery betrays them, their lawyers, their pajamas, their diseases. It’s no accident, son, that they’ve been nailed with such things as Jell-0 boxes, console tables, and brown paper wrappers—and it coulda just as easily been the studio couch they slept on, their record player, medicine chest, or underwear—they stink with it, boy, it’s on everything they touch!”
I knew now what he meant. It was the feeling I’d had about Alger Hiss. Others, less perceptive, had had that feeling about Whittaker Chambers. In our case, it had been pumpkins, carpets, typewriters, and teeth. Whittaker, who had smelled a little unhealthy himself for a while, had emerged aromatic as a saint. “Perjury wasn’t Hiss’s crime either,” I said. I’d been talking more or less to myself, but as soon as I said it, I knew I was on the right track at last.
“No,” Uncle Sam agreed. “That’s right.” I glanced up. He was watching me closely, fierce as a tiger and cool as a cucumber, as the Gospel says, rolling the balls around in his mighty fist as though he were peddling them to me, a gesture of such iconic depth that I felt suddenly elevated past myself.
“It wasn’t…it wasn’t even espionage or double-dealing!” I was nearly there…. “Uh…”
“They have walked in the path of the spirit of perversity,” whispered Uncle Sam hoarsely, leaning toward me like an eager schoolmaster, urging me on, “violators of the Covenant, defilers of the sanctuary…”
“Sons of Darkness!” I cried.
Uncle Sam leaned back and smiled, not a smile of self-contentment or amusement, but a smile of blessing, the smile of a life-insurance salesman who has just successfully put your affairs in order, or of a parent who has come to see you graduate from Duke Law School—or any law school, for that matter—and he set his plug hat back on his head. I knew I’d turned the corner. I began to feel I might actually hit a decent drive after all. “And what’s the reward for all them what walk in such ways?” He tossed one of the golf balls up in the air and smashed it with his putter, baseball fashion, out of sight. “A multitude of afflictions at the hands of all the angels of destruction!” Whack! “Everlastin’ perdition through the angry wrath of an avengin’ god!” Swat! “Etarnal horror and perpetual re-proach!” Smack! “Darkness throughout the vicississitudes of life in ever’ generation, doleful sorrow, boils on the ass, contumely in the opinions of Christian men, bitter misfortune and darklin’ ruin!” Slam! “And the disgrace of final annihilation in the…” splat!“…fire!”
He was something to watch, all right—he had a lot of style. A lot of styles, I should say: now that of Larry Doby, next Country Slaughter, then Mel Ott, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize, Luke Appling—but though he’d organized baseball’s liturgy and had governed its episcopacy (to be sure, there was more of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in his briary nineteenth-century features than of, say, Warren Harding or Herbert Hoover), he’d never actually played it. Golf was his game, the first he’d come to, back in the capacious days of William Howard Taft, and it was still the only one he played regularly. Before that, he’d pretty much limited himself to hunting and fishing, riding, swimming, war, billiards, and the odd cockfight—indeed, the very idea of Uncle Sam wasting his time playing idle games would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. But such was the character of our twentieth-century revolution: gamesplaying was now the very pulse and purpose of the nation. It was Taft’s successor, Woody Wilson, who gave it its fateful turn: he was sometimes out on the course as early as five in the morning, even played the game in the dead of winter, using black golf balls to find them in the snow, until that awful day when the transmutation did not quite come off and left only half of Wilson still working. Now golf was part of the Presidential discipline—indeed, why else would I be out here?—and every time Uncle Sam eagled out or blasted his way mightily from a sand trap to the pin, somewhere the Phantom cringed.
I dug up my tee and set my ball on it, took a practice cut at a dandelion. “But how can you, uh, tell for sure?” I asked, and—whick!—took the head off the dandelion. Why couldn’t I hit a golf ball like that? “I mean, even Foster Dulles trusted Hiss…”
“Ah, well, the pact with the Phantom is no less consecratin’ in its dire way then gettin’ graced by Yours Truly,” said Uncle Sam, and imitating Stan Musial’s quirky stance, smacked another golf ball out over the horizon. “Ask that mackerel-snapper Joe McCarthy about the Grace su’ject!” He tossed up his last ball and belted it high in the air—in fact, I lost sight of it completely. I wondered, if it got up high enough would it just stay there? Where does gravity run out? But finally it did come down, about fifty feet from the seventh green, and lodged in the roots of a tree. I supposed he wanted to keep his hand in on approach shots. Or got a kick out of blasting trees—Burning Tree indeed! you’d think it was Ben Franklin’s private lightning lab to see the way Uncle Sam’s left the vegetation out here. Now he tucked his putter under one arm and withdrew his corncob pipe, knocked it out on the heel of one boot. “The impure, through their presumptulous contact with the sacred, are momentaneously as lit up with this force as are the pure, and it’s easy for folks to confound the two,” he said, leaning back against the bench, “as much, I might add, to the unwarranted sufferin’ of the holy as to the ephemeral quickenin’ of the nasty…” He gazed at me meaningfully…aha! so that was why I had been accused of the secret slush fund! why, in spite of everything, I was still so distrusted many people said they wouldn’t even buy a used car from me! The Philistines wouldn’t have bought a used car from Jesus either, right? Things were becoming clear now. I concentrated on the ball, sitting firm on the tee like truth itself, and took a practice backstroke, trying to keep my elbow straight. “You’re gonna top the ball, son,” Uncle Sam said gloomily.
I did. I tried my damnedest to lift the ball and I swung so hard I splintered the tea, but the ball only plopped about six feet ahead. Judas, I thought, I really hate this fucking game.
“Ya know, you’re about as handy with that durn stick,” muttered Uncle Sam irritably, tucking the pipe in his mouth, “as Adlai Stevenson is with a set of dumbbells!”
I was badly stung by this. I would be a good golfer if I had the time to play regul
arly, but a man can’t give himself to everything on this earth. And the innuendos worried me: Stevenson was a loser. I realized it was still touch and go…
Uncle Sam sucked on his empty pipe a couple of times, then blew it out, reached into his pantaloon pockets for tobacco. “There’s one thing about criminals and kings, priests and pariahs,” he said. He packed the tobacco into his pipe with one long bony finger, peering at me as though over spectacles. “They may be as unalike as a eagle to a rattlesnake, but they both got a piece a that dreadful mysterious power that generates the universe!” As he said this, he whipped a long wooden match out from behind his ear. “The difference,” he went on, “is what happens when they try to use it. The ones with the real stuff, the good guys, they achieve peace and prosperity with it—these are…” he scratched the head of the match with his thumbnail and it popped ablaze: “…the Sons of Light!” He cupped it over the pipe bowl and continued: “The other geezers, the (puff!) Phantom’s boys, well, if you (puff! puff!) don’t watch out, those squonks can haul off and (puff!) exfluncticate the…” he looked up and held the match out, still burning, then crushed it in his fist: “whole durn shootin match!”
It’s true, I thought, he’s not exaggerating, the Rosenbergs no longer belonged to the ordinary world of men, that was obvious, you could see the sort of energy they now possessed, even though stuffed away in Sing Sing prison, in the rising fervor of world dissent—in France, the whole damned government was being shaken. I walked up to my ball, teed it up on a little hump of grass. I felt a little shaky myself. “You mean, we’re not executing them…just because…?” I poked my toe about, looking for firm footing.
“We ain’t goin’ up to Times Square just to fulfill the statutorial law, if that’s what you mean,” Uncle Sam said. He blew a smoke ring, then another and another, each inside the other, ending with a little puff of smoke for the center. “This is to be a consecration, a new charter of the moral and social order of the Western World, the precedint on which the future is to be carn-structed to ensure peace in our time!” He hacked up a gob and spit into his smoke rings, hitting the bull’s eye…. “We’re goin’ up there to wash our feet, son!” A miniature mushroom cloud welled up from the center, and the concentric rings flattened out and spread like shock waves.
I understood his question now. I turned back to my ball, dug my feet firmly into the turf. Times Square, the circus atmosphere, the special ceremonies: form, form, that’s what it always comes down to! In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that? I smiled. “Then, wouldn’t it have been better to burn them at our Inauguration?” I commenced my backswing, shifting my weight confidently onto my right foot.
“Tried that,” said Uncle Sam, “but we got knocked down with a lame duck. Anyhow, don’t matter, now we got the summer-solstice and the anniversary angles—”
“Eh—?” I was so startled my knees buckled and I sliced the ball out of bounds. “The—what?”
“Thunder and tarnation, boy! That’s four strokes already, and you ain’t even off the damn tee yet!” cried Uncle Sam.
“I… I’m sorry! I, uh, thought you said…”
“The solstice and the anniversary, soap out your ears, son!” he repeated irascibly. He had blown a smoke ring shaped like an outline map of the United States and, as it expanded, was trying to fill in the several states. “The Rosenbergs signed their dierbollical pact fourteen years ago come Thursday the eighteenth,” he muttered around puffs and rings. He was trying to squeeze the District of Columbia into his map, but it was getting very cluttered in that area. He seemed about to lose his patience. “I thought you knew that!”
“Ah…” So, it was also the Rosenbergs’ anniversary! I’d thought for a moment he’d been referring to my wedding anniversary! When Kaufman had set the date finally for the week of June 15th, I had seen that it could fall on Pat’s and my anniversary—our thirteenth!—on June 21st. And I’d seen that summer-solstice angle, too: after all, we hadn’t married on the 21st for nothing. It was the climax to our “Beauty and the Beast” game, time of the roar of Behemoth and all that. Then, when I learned that this year June 21st was also Father’s Day, it had suddenly looked like a sure thing. I’d said nothing to anyone about this, but it had worried me: if it was intentional, were they doing it as a favor, giving Pat and me something extra to commemorate? or was somebody out to get me? I’d feared the latter, usually the safest of the two assumptions when you’re in politics. But then the marshal had scheduled it officially for the 18th, and I’d forgotten about it…until now. I teed the new ball up, twitching my shoulders and wrists, trying to loosen up. I had a better understanding of things now, but it didn’t make me feel any easier. Their fourteenth! And what were we doing here on the seventh tee? “I… I guess I missed that,” I admitted frankly.
“It seems to be you missed just about everything!” snapped Uncle Sam. “You don’t know no more about this case than a goose knows about rib stockings!” He had given up on the map and with a flick of his finger had drawn the Canadian border up to a straight perpendicular line, the Great Lakes clustering like a knot, turning the whole thing into a kind of gigantic hangman’s noose. “Do you know what law the Rosenbergs were actually convicted under? Do you know who the Clark House Players were? Sarah O’Ken? Helen Rosenberg? Catharine Slip? Do you know why they called David Greenglass ‘Little Doovey’ or what Julius Rosenberg’s secret Talmudic name was? Why was Julius born in Harlem? How is it that Roy Cohn was working for Irving Saypol? What were the Rosenbergs doing in Peekskill in 1943 or Irving Kaufman in Washington in 1948? Eh? Did you even know that Ethel Rosenberg played the Major Bowes talent rackets? that Julius read Horatio Alger and Tom Swift and took to the stumps against the National Biscuit Company? or that Emanuel Bloch’s marriage is on the rocks? And who’s that screamer workin’ for anyway?”
“I thought you…you said the past was a pot of lies…”
“We ain’t talkin’ about trials now, boy, stay awake, we’re talkin about the sacraments!”
“I… I’m sorry,” I said, and stepped up to the ball. I felt like I’d been stepping up to this goddamn ball all afternoon. Roy Cohn once mentioned that Saypol used to be a really rotten golfer himself, but that he read almost every book ever written on the subject, and it improved his game immeasurably. Maybe that was what I ought to do.
Uncle Sam raved on and on about the case; most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about. I tried to pay attention, I knew it was important, but the coincidence of anniversaries and my own stupid panic about it when he brought it up were still troubling me. “And what about the CCNY Class of ’39? Why was J. Parnell Thomas sent to the same jail as Ring Lardner, Jr., of the Hollywood Ten? What the hell’s a proximity fuse? Should we feed ’em on cheese and barley cakes and beat ’em with fig branches? Why does that Russian astronomer now say that the vegetation on Mars is blue? Eh? Eh?” Of course, June, a lot of people get married that month, Eisenhower’s own anniversary was just another ten days away, wasn’t it? It wasn’t all that improbable. But it was all tied up somehow with those generational vibrations which were exercising such a grip on me these days—how many other parallels might there be? I was afraid to find out. Maybe it was because I’d just passed forty, things like this happened to people when they reached forty, I supposed. Uncle Sam was trying to explain why it was the Rosenbergs, why the Lower East Side, the Foley Square Courthouse (another link to the Hiss case! my subcommittee met there, it was just before I finally nailed the bastard!), Sing Sing, and now Times Square, why Nelson Eddy and Bernard Baruch had to be there, Louella Parsons and Dr. Kinsey, why an electric chair instead of sending them out to sea in a leaking boat as in the old days, and why just now, this week…. “I mean, McCarthy’s got such a cactus up his cornhole, he’s bound to blow it soon, and now that we’ve laid the threat of a A-bomb attack on them heathen Chinks, they gotta fold their hand any day now, and what with Stalin dead the whole go
ddamn mood could change—this may be our last chance to kill these people! And what if the Phantom squeezes an extra day out somewhere? Have you thought about that? That hodag’s known to have a lotta contacts in the jew-dishiary—then what? If we had to go through the Fourth without them atom spies burnt or burning, the whole shebang could come unhinged like a hog shed in a Okie twister!”
“That’s…that’s true,” I agreed, vaguely aware of the wind commencing to blow across Burning Tree, but unaware at the time how prophetic he’d been—or had he been telling me something I should have picked up on? Should I have got Edgar to put a watch on Douglas right then? I was too distracted to think about it—a few days to play with, a couple of days’ delay: then Pat and I could still get hit with it!
“This week, son! We gotta move!”
“Yessir!” I cried, and took a violent swing at the ball, topping it again and sending it skittering this time into the rough about a hundred yards away. Well, shit, at least I was off the tee.
“Damn it all, boy!” thundered Uncle Sam, rearing up off the bench, brandishing his putter like a saber and stomping forward like Ulysses Grant debouching from his field tent. “The brave man inattentive to his duty and who don’t keep his eye on the ball is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger! Life is real! Life is earnest! You gotta get on top of this thing! You gotta get your ass in gear!”
“I’m sorry… I just can’t seem to get the hang—”
“That’s just it! We gotta get the hang! We gotta exsect these vinimous critters this week or our name is shit with a capital mud! This ain’t just another ballgame, johnny, we are gonna have to fight for the reestablishment of our national character, and we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth—namely, me!”