Public Burning

  As I’d feared, I’d had a sleepless night—probably for the best, it could be stimulating at a time like this, I knew, but for the moment it made me groggy, unable to see clearly how close the shave was, I had to go by feel. I’d been pushing too hard, consuming all my reserves, making myself vulnerable. All those disturbing apparitions, those images out of a life not my own.… It was as though something had got into me last night, like an alien gene, and I’d lacked the strength to fend it off—all my Early Warning rhetoric about “boring from within”: I’d suddenly begun to understand it for the first time. It was pretty stupid, banging my face on the wall like that, but in a way it had been a good thing. It had cleared my head, and by the time I’d reached my car I’d pretty much forgotten about old lady Greenglass’s inflated belly and the chickens and traffic on Delancey Street. Soft summer night out, new moon over my shoulder: I’d rolled the windows down, turned on the car radio, tuning in a station playing old songs like “Heartaches” and “Whispering Hope,” and had cruised down Independence, taking the long way home so as to calm down some, letting my mind fill up with reassuring pictures from my own past, my boyhood vibrating in me like an old movie: the Anaheim Union ditch in Yorba Linda where I went wading, Easter eggs and May baskets, the adventures of the Gumps, Grandma’s big austere house at Christmastime and “Joy to the World” being trumpeted out from our Meeting House steeple, Lindbergh’s flight and all the little stuff we collected from it, a book I read told by an abused dog, hanging baskets of smilax ferns on sunny porches, the Four Square Gospel Temple and Ken Maynard rolling off his horse inside the Berry Grand…Goddamn! I’d thought: I’ve lived a wonderful life! I’d remembered playing railroad fireman, learning to salute the flag at school and sing “Old Black Joe,” nosing through the Books of Knowledge, memorizing stanzas of “Snowbound” and struggling with “In a Persian Market Place” on Aunt Jane’s piano, sweating in the heat of a Tucson summer, mashing potatoes for Mom. I was good at that like everything else and Mom was always pleased because I never left any lumps, using the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down like the other boys did. I’d recalled—tooling past the Smithsonian and up around the Washington obelisk—mashing those potatoes, and it was like some kind of epiphany. I’d felt like I felt one morning at Whittier College when I’d been up for nearly three straight days and everything was incredibly beautiful—or that day, not all that long ago, when I was sitting on a dilapidated rocking chair on Whittaker Chambers’s front porch in Maryland, the warm sensation sweeping over me that it was all falling into place.

  It had felt right, this feeling, I hadn’t resisted it. History working things out for me in its inexorable but friendly way: my brother had got sick and my mother, overburdened with work and worry, had sent me to live half a year with Aunt Jane. I had hated this and had felt cheated somehow. This was natural. I didn’t even like Aunt Jane. But that was where, feeling lonely, I’d learned the piano, and it had been an important part of my life ever since. Just as when I’d followed my mother over to Arizona. She’d taken Harold to a sanatorium there and was helping to pay the hospital bills by cooking and scrubbing at the sanatorium. I’d felt guilty tagging along without helping, so I’d got a job in the Prescott rodeo, cleaning out the stables. I’d been as thorough at that as I was at everything else, and so they’d asked me to be a barker for their wheel of chance. This was a come-on, I’d discovered, for the dice and poker tables in the back room, but everything out front where they’d put me was legal, the prizes were real hams and bacon, and I’d earned a dollar an hour and praise from the old guys for all the business I brought them. In many ways, in spite of the money, it had been the worst job I’d ever had, I was nervous for hours each day before I started, was scared to death of some of the people in those crowds—a complete waste of time, I’d thought…but without that experience, I would never have survived the cruelties of that whistle-stopping campaign tour last autumn when news broke about the so-called secret fund. Destiny. My Dad decided to open a gas station in 1922. He could have had a site in Santa Fe Springs, but he chose the one in East Whittier. The next year they found oil—lots of it—on the Santa Fe Springs property: we would have been millionaires. It gave my father bleeding ulcers, but for me, what was being a millionaire? Being at the center was everything, and this meant having nothing in excess to throw you off balance. Except power. Power, I knew, was something that existed in the universe like electricity. There was no reason to be a conductor. There was no reason not to be.

  I’d skirted the Tidal Basin and wheeled around toward the Lincoln Memorial, then had followed the Potomac around to Rock Creek, letting the old tunes on the radio—“Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking”…“Me and My Shadow”—call up all the old feelings, the old scenes, the old dreams. No patterns, just a sweet nostalgic flow…the church picnics with homemade ice cream…the dense odor of the inside of my violin case… Tunney and Dempsey and the Irish Rebellion (how my father raged against it! “But aren’t we Irish, too?” I’d asked him; “Not that kind!” he’d bellowed)…a beautiful print we had in our house, an advertisement I think for Edison light bulbs, called “Shedding Light,” with a boy sitting on a purple rock in a misty rose and green landscape, gazing up at the light bulb glowing in the branches of a summery tree, looking for God up there, I supposed, as I always used to do while watching the clouds go by…or maybe it was a girl sitting there, I’d forgotten exactly. Passing the locks, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” fading in and out on the distant station, I’d had sudden total recall of Fredric March’s transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and back, which was nevertheless mixed up somehow with The Best Years of Our Lives, probably the greatest movie I’d ever seen, though I no longer remembered much of it. And so it had gone: the Armistice parade and a circus, Wallet finding a baby on his doorstep in “Gasoline Alley,” Grand Canyon through the stereoscope, the fear of Bolshevism, the strange light at Christian Endeavor meetings on Sunday nights, the 1924 World Series on our new radio and then Babe Ruth hitting sixty home runs when I was fourteen years old. But mostly school memories, ballgames, girls, clubs, bike rides, and things at home, Dad’s knuckled hands on a gas pump, the way his ears stuck out when he was dressed up, Mom’s smile when I brought things home from school, fights with my brother Donald, Harold’s vague grin, Dad coming home one day to tell us there was a little doll over at the hospital, a real live doll—poor little Arthur, who’d died so young. I’d once written a school composition about him, a kind of threnody…“And so, when I am tired and worried, and am almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up and see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes, and curly hair; I remember the child-like prayer—If I should die before I awake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take—I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my brother Arthur…” I got an A for it. A for Arthur….

  I’d swung off the deserted Parkway and up onto Massachusetts, better lit but just as empty, my fingers drumming on the wheel, picking out the song on the radio—Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” I think—I might have been a great jazz pianist, or a very good one anyway, if I’d had the time. This was the long part of the drive home, up past Washington Cathedral and American University, almost all the way to Maryland. But not quite all the way: we lived in Alexandria when we first came here, but now I wouldn’t live outside the District if they’d give me title to all of Montgomery County. I was dangerously close, I’d realized, to Inspiration House, headquarters for the pro-Rosenberg forces, and, wheeling around past the Naval Observatory, I’d flashed again suddenly on Ethel’s bare bottom by the kitchen stove, but I’d pushed it away before all the tenement stuff started crowding in, concentrating instead on the broad dirt streets of Yorba Linda, the scattered one-story wooden buildings, distant hills, the hair rolled tight on top of Grandma’s head, the elections I’d won, the first time I got to drive the truck alone, things I’d thought about when I was a janitor at the swimming pool. “My Wil
d Irish Rose.” The drunken Mexicans over in Jim Town. Snitching grapes. Throwing passes. Standing under the big lamp on the corner of Green-leaf and Philadelphia, talking with guys late into the night. A full moon one night that seemed to separate itself from the street lamp as I walked out from under it—it’s God! I’d thought, it’s proof!—and then a girl’s window, lit: but she was dressed, and then, unbuttoning her blouse with one hand, she pulled the blind with the other. My eyes had closed a moment, capturing that lowering shade—and I’d almost wrecked the car, two blocks from home, right on Wesley Circle. Easy, boy. Don’t let your guard down.

  Checkers had greeted me, threatening to wake up everybody in the house. I’d petted him roughly and cracked his nose to shut him up. The most famous dog in the nation since Fala. The goddamn spare room was still full to overflowing with dog collars, handwoven dog blankets, dog kennels and baskets, and enough dog food to feed all of Southeast Asia, sent to us by dog lovers and other lonely people. Some of them had actually thought that my Checkers speech was an appeal for charity! Thus: one more profession, if all else failed. I’d found a rib bone in the refrigerator for Checkers, a bowl of vanilla pudding, three overripe slices of tomato, a french-fried chicken back, a partial tin of Spam, a plate of soft fudge, cole slaw, a Dr. Pepper, some sour gherkins, a peach half in syrup, and a cold hamburger for myself—more or less in that order and eaten as discovered. I was very hungry and it all tasted good. There was actually some red Jell-0 in there with canned mixed fruit in it: I wasn’t sure of the flavor, but I ate it up anyway, thinking: Who knows? it may be the last of its kind. I’d also cleaned up what was left of a jar of apple sauce, bottle of skimmed milk, bowl of tapioca, and tin can of cold baked beans, followed by caviar and strawberry ice cream, lit up a ceremonial pipeful of Rum and Maple, and sat down in an armchair to digest.

  Foo. I’d eaten too quickly. I felt terrible. But one had to be uncomfortable, I knew, to do one’s best thinking. I’d tried to think about the case again. Here at home, pull it all together, solve all the problems. What did it mean that they’d found the missing console table, that Schneider the photographer had committed perjury with FBI connivance, that Greenglass had spent six months in the Tombs with Harry Gold preparing their testimony? Nothing. The table could be any table, Schneider’s alleged perjury was merely technical, witnesses are always schooled. I’d belched sourly, shifted in the chair, knocked out the pipe (why do I smoke at all? I hate the goddamn stuff), and recalled that in one of the confidential notes stolen from her lawyer’s office, Ruth Greenglass had been reported admitting that her husband, David, had “a tendency to hysteria”: “Once when he had the grippe he ran nude through the hallway shrieking of ‘elephants’ and ‘lead pants.’” Lead pants? Maybe he’d seen our secret research into anti-shrapnel underwear for Marines. I’d realized I was just pooping around, so I’d chased Checkers off to bed and gone that way myself.

  In the bedroom, I’d seen that Pat had got tangled in the sheets, her bottom exposed: was she trying to tell me something, I’d wondered? Such a lean pale spiny rear, yet slack and inviting at the same time. Calvinist but charitable. I’d struggled, grunting, into pajamas, had slipped into bed feeling very heavy. Hot, too—I could afford an air-conditioner now, why hadn’t I bought one? Residue of that goddamn campaign. Pat needed a new coat, too, but I still couldn’t risk it. Of course, thirteenth wedding anniversary: the proper gift for that was furs and textiles, wasn’t it? Might be the occasion. Now that I was lying still, my face had started to sting again where I’d hit it on the wall, and I’d felt a throbbing ache in the small of my back from sitting too long on my office floor. I’d remembered that Ethel Rosenberg had suffered from back pains all her life because of a ricketic curvature of the spine. This was supposed to explain a lot of things. I could see how it could make you cranky, all right. I couldn’t get comfortable. I’d tossed about, sweating, conscious of Pat’s butt, reminded of the time I’d got nauseous working as a handyman in a packing house and had had to quit. What a miserable job. It had been like some kind of seasickness, all that meat, everything churning and hammering—I’d been too chicken to quit right away and had stuck it out for sixteen weeks, worst time in my life. Too dogged and persevering to quit, I mean. Oh man, why the hell did I eat all that junk? There were awful moments in the Navy, too, and in cars—about the only thing I dreaded about becoming President was having to take the Presidential yacht out from time to time. Pat had complained softly in her sleep, and I’d got up, opened a bottle of beer, and moved to a couch.

  I’d thought, stretching out: I must do what I always do, I must consider all the worst alternatives as cold-bloodedly as I can, and reach an analytical conclusion. But instead I’d dozed off and found myself in bed with the guy I slept with at Duke. He had been studying so hard he’d set his ass on fire, and he was trying to show me the burns. Curiously, he had a thin black moustache and wire-rimmed glasses, was wearing a double-breasted suit jacket, white shirt, and tie. “Don’t be embarrassed,” I said as I pried the cheeks of his butt apart to see what was the matter. We didn’t have any electricity in that place and it was dark, but by peering closely I could tell that the whole area was festering and badly inflamed. It was almost like somebody had taken a meat cleaver to it. I felt nauseous and sorry for what I’d done. I wanted to comfort her but I was worried what the lasting impression would be. Dad came in and suggested a poultice of hot mustard. He didn’t seem to understand the problem. I shouted: “Summer solstice, not poultice!” He seemed utterly abashed and ashamed of himself. I was ashamed, too, because I knew he’d never finished school. Pat lay naked on the bed, her eyes closed, moaning softly, literally shedding light. I was at the sink. Perhaps I’d been washing the dishes, or else I’d been vomiting. “She’s the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” Dad said solemnly. He was dressed up for church and his ears stuck out. I went outside, thinking: Didn’t they know I could die, too?

  I’d awakened, vaguely recalling a warm sunny scene, very attractive and soothing, as though from some pastoral painting: green hills, a brook, the house receding… I’d drifted back trying to recapture it, but found myself instead giving a guided tour of the Coney Island boardwalk to gruff old men in flat straws and red suspenders. There was something before this about shit. Maybe it was something about cleaning the stables at the rodeo in Prescott. Except the shit was from people who were frightened or made sick by the carnival rides. I was still wearing my pajamas and an old woman with cheap spectacles came over to feel the cloth. The fly on the pants gaped and my peter kept flopping out. The old woman was Jewish and had hairs poking out her nostrils. She didn’t seem interested in my peter, only the pajamas. Her fingernails were long and scratched at my skin. I was afraid the old men would walk away. I knew everything depended on them. I was trying to sell them a ride on the Whip, and I made some kind of joke about going round and round instead of up and down, which didn’t go over at all. They became angry and grumbled in some foreign language. The old woman—my God, I realized, it’s Bob Taft!—looked up at me and winked, then shrank away. This was because I was getting bigger. And I realized my face was changing—rough clumps of hair were sprouting on my forehead and nose. I felt crude and ugly. I smelled bad. I seemed to be getting tangled up in the roller coaster. I was afraid of the wires. I woke up and realized that Checkers had crawled up and was sleeping with his head on my belly. I seemed to remember a rifle range, and near it a lady carrying a parasol and a white handbag, girls lying on the beach in candy-striped swimsuits. The pool was closed and I was sweeping out the girls’ changing room: smell of chlorine and damp wool. I thought of places I could hide in here to watch the girls dress. I dreamed of discovering secret things while sweeping up, but all I ever found was a pair of wet cotton socks. I peed once in the girls’ toilet and was frightened by my own face in a mirror. I woke again. Or had I been sleeping? I had an erection and needed to use the bathroom. Peeing, I realized that the scene in the girls’ toilet at the swimming pool was not a
dream at all, but a true memory from a job I had in high school. The sweeping, the mirror, the guilt. I’d turned the socks in to “Lost and Found,” feeling virtuous. Then what about the rifle range at Coney Island? I looked in the mirror and saw that I’d given my face quite a whack on that wall. I put some cold cream on it. I looked puffy and hairy, I hardly recognized myself, some kind of monster. I seemed to see Uncle Sam’s face behind me, his blue eye glinting with amusement. Or fury. I can only do my best, I thought. What more does he want of me? Later, I dreamt of tomatoes with big dark bruises on them. I couldn’t find a good one in the lot. This seemed to justify an old proverb: There is no little enemy. I had to struggle to remember this proverb—at first it kept reading: There is no little enema. I thought I could make the best of the situation by making juice out of them, start a business. I took the rotten tomatoes to an electronics shop. The sign over the shop door said: OPTIMO CIGARS. Taxicabs went by with tires mounted in their right fenders. I thought: Somebody could get killed! The man in the cigar store said: “I don’t know nothing about pressing tomatoes, mister, I’m in underwear machines.” He seemed frightened. There were children huddled around a radiator that was hissing like a snake. “I come from Julius Caesar,” I said. A woman was putting bread on a table. The children seemed to resent me. I was wide awake, not dreaming at all. “David gave me your number,” I explained helplessly. I thought I must be going mad.