Public Burning

  “Yeah, that’s what the guard said, but she says, ‘Naw, I mean intercourse! I wanna see the nuts that’re runnin’ this country!’ Waw-haw-haw!”

  We’d stopped behind a sightseeing bus and I meant to jump out, but I couldn’t get my goddamn shoe loose from under the seat. He reached around suddenly and nearly poked me in the face with a big cigar. “Woops! Excuse me, Nick! Whaddaya doin’ down there on the floor? Here, no hard feelin’s, have a cigar! I remember how you loved to blow through these things out on Green Island, I been savin’ it for ya!”

  “Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t—”

  The bus started up. The cabbie thrust the cigar in my hand, swung around to get moving again.

  I sat back, I had to think, I had to keep my head. It would have been stupid to have jumped out there anyway, the place was full of demonstrators. No mistake about it this time: they carried pictures of the Rosenbergs with pleas for mercy printed on them. All along, I’d been noticing something peculiar about these pro-Rosenberg people, I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it, but suddenly it came to me: they were all middle-aged! There was hardly a kid among them, the young ones were all over on the other side, my side, these Rosenberg people were all…well…my age.…

  “Hey, you may not believe this, Nick,” the cabdriver said, “but I know that broad on all them posters there.”

  “Who, you mean—?”

  “Yeah, Rosenblatt, the atom spy. I went to fuckin’ school with her!”

  “You mean, uh, Rosenberg—?”

  “Yeah, she lived around the corner from me there on Whatchamacallit Street…”

  “Sheriff?”

  “That’s it! Sheriff Street! Ain’t that a laugh, Nick? Just goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, don’t it? Sheriff Street! Jumpin’ Jesus, lemme tell ya, she had a sweet ass on her, Nick! We useta sneak into the back lot there and peep in her window—”

  “But she slept on the second floor, didn’t she? I think I read—”

  “We used ladders, Nick! We climbed trees! There was a fire escape. I had a buddy in the building behind—shit, we saw everything!”

  “The other rooms, too?”

  “What other rooms, Nick?”

  “They say that sometimes, uh, prostitutes rented out—”

  “Right, Nick! It was a kinda whorehouse! Did I forget to mention that? That’s probably where she learnt her game, right? Listen, by the time she was fifteen years old, buddy, she could do more things with a banana than you and me could ever dream a’ doin’ with our dingdongs in a lifetime! She sure showed all us boys a trick or two—I mean, I’m lucky to have a cock left at all, Nick, she subverted the goddamn thing to ribbons!”

  “Really? But they always said she never even had a boyfriend until—”

  “Don’t you believe it, Nick! She was one hot little twat—all them Commies are, you know that! It’s part of their religion! Sweet Betsy, she couldn’t keep her pants on! I mean, it turned into a real act, she got famous, she went all over the fuckin’ town doin’ it in the moviehouses!”

  “You mean the Major, uh, Bowes Amateur Nights—?”

  “Haw haw! Amateur, my ass! Amateur, my ass, Nick!”

  “I… I thought she always sang ‘Ciribiribin’—”

  “She didn’t sing it, Nick—she did it! God in ass-fuckin’ star-spangled heaven, she was a sensation! They finally had to move her into the burlesque circuit to accommodate the mobs, it was worsen back there at the White House! We useta catch her act ever Saturday night. We was pretty dumb, don’t hold it against us, Nick, but we thought it was innocent—ya know, just dirty sex, twirlin’ her tits, suckin’ up quarters with her cunt, things like that. We didn’t realize she was suckin’ up a lot more than quarters, and then flushin’ it all straight to Russia! You read about it, Nick: she had A-bombs up there, Jell-O boxes, Red herrings, passport photos, Klaus Fucks, the Fifth Amendment—shit, she could probably get a whole fuckin’ P-38 up her snatch and have room for Yucca Flat and the Sixth Fleet to boot! They say there was a ray gun in her navel, a walkie-talkie hid in her G-string, and a camera stuffed up her ass—when she spread her cheeks at us, we always heard this click and thought she was blowin’ kisses at us out her rectum! What fuckin’ innocents we was, Nick! Never again, hunh? I mean, we’ve grown up, ain’t we, Nick? We’re through suckin’ Russky hind tit like babies, ain’t we? We ain’t on Green Island no more—!”

  “I don’t think this, uh, has any—”

  “You tell ’em, Nick! By God, you tell ’em! You remember that persecuter—what’s his name?”

  “Saypol?”

  “That’s it! Saypol! ‘Imagine a wheel,’ he says. Remember that? ‘In the center o’ the wheel, Rosenblatt, reachin’ out like the tentacles of a octopus—’”

  “Uh, Rosenberg…”

  “Right! Well, that sonuvabitch knew what he was talkin’ about, Nick, he musta caught the act! She was like Plastic Man, I shit you not! Her hair wriggled out at ya like snakes, wrappin’ ya up, ticklin’ your ear, creepin’ down your shirt, her toes jigged in all the aisles at once, she’d clip your foreskin with fingernails willowy as reeds, sock ya in the snoot with her clit!” I used to go to the burlesque in Los Angeles with my cousin. We must have gone to the wrong shows. “What an act! Her tits popped out at ya and lit up like beacons: one if by land, two if by sea—and Iemme tell ya, those weren’t the only two fuckin’ options Julie had, Nick, not with them bazooms! She’d do the Dirty Crab on her back, slappin’ out Morse-code spy messages with the cheeks of her ass and then—”

  “Did you say, uh, Julie…?”

  “Yeah, right, Juliet. Juliet Rosen—”

  “His name is Julie. Her name, uh, is Ethel.”

  “Oh…?” He looked confused, crestfallen; but there was a sly grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Musta been a different Juliet Rosenblatt…” I realized we’d been stopped in front of the Senate Office Building for some time. I reached into my pocket for some money, noticing too late that my hand was smeared with horsedung. “Forget it, Commander. It’s on the house. For old time’s sake. Anchors aweigh, Nick. Lest we forget…”

  “Oh. Well…” Some vague suspicion troubled me. Then, as I reached down to work my shoe free, I noticed for the first time the label on the cigar he’d given me: OPTIMO! I glanced up in alarm. He was gazing at me, the grin gone, his eyes dark with a kind of weariness, a kind of resignation, as though…as though he knew too much. I’ve got to keep calm, I cautioned myself. And I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

  “Look,” he said, his voice mellowing, losing its hard twang, “can’t we get past all these worn-out rituals, these stupid fuckin’ reflexes?” It wouldn’t do any good to grab him, I knew. The ungraspable Phantom. He was made of nothing solid, your hand would just slip right through, probably turn leprous forever. “They got nothin’ to do with life, you know that, life’s always new and changing, so why fuck it up with all this shit about scapegoats, sacrifices, initiations, saturnalias—?”

  “I know who you are,” I rasped. I could hardly hear myself. “The game’s up!”

  I braced myself. I expected him to flash back in fury, I expected demonic sparks to fly from his eyes, fire from his parted lips, something violent and amazing. I was ready to die. But he only sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m only a lousy cabdriver. Shit, I don’t know everything. But I think you’re on the wrong track. Easter Trials, Burning Tree, morality plays, cowtown vendettas—life’s too big, you can’t wrap it up like that!”

  Where the battle against the Phantom is concerned, victories arc never final so long as he is still able to fight. There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down. How had I let myself lose my shoe under his seat like this?

  “I seen that mess you rigged up in Times Square. It’s frivolous, Nick! You oughta burn Connie Mack and Sonja Henie up there. Or Native Dancer and Elsa Maxwell…”

  I should carry a gun in my hip pocket like Irving Saypol, I thought. But y
ou couldn’t shoot him either, bullets just go through him. I fought to tear my shoe free—was he holding onto it somehow?

  “Listen, it ain’t too late, Nick, there’s still time to turn back—forget this dumb circus, get on to something more—”

  The shoe came loose! I threw my shoulder against the door and tumbled out. “You’ll never get away with this!” I cried, shaking my shoe at him. I didn’t know exactly what I meant by this, but I needed a line for the other people on the street and this was the first one that came to me. I jumped up and brushed myself off. Chief Newman would have been proud of my form. He always said I played every scrimmage as though the championship were at stake—and now, literally, it was. My shoulder hurt like hell, though.

  He was shouting at me, something about the war, or the whore, or maybe he was hollering at me to shut the door, but I scrambled to my feet and made for the Senate Office Building—and crashed into a crowd of newsguys just coming out: Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, Elmer Davis, Bob Considine, Gabriel Heatter, the whole goddamn Fourth Estate.

  “Whoa, what’s up, Dick?” Pearson asked.

  “The Phantom!” I cried. “He tried to get me!”

  “What Phantom, Dick?” Pegler asked. “Where?”

  “That driver, watch out—!” But the cab was gone. I swallowed, tried to stop gulping air. Couldn’t let these bastards get the wrong impression. “There was a cab…”

  “What’d he try to do,” Pearson asked, “steal your shoe?” He was stifling a grin, bugging his eyes. Making fun. Was this the thanks I got for saving his life when Joe McCarthy tried to kill him?

  “Hmmm,” said Winchell, taking it from my hand and sniffing it. “Seems like he tried to take a crap in it.”

  “That’s pretty serious, all right,” said Elmer Davis, mock-solemnly. “Maybe we oughta tell Louella about it.” They all yuff-huff-huffed.

  “You newsguys are all the same,” I said, snatching back my shoe. I was disgusted by their cheap cynical laughter. It wasn’t me I was thinking about, it was the nation. Didn’t they understand that the Vice President of the United States of America had just been locked in a one-on-one battle with the Phantom? That the security of the whole country and the cause of free men everywhere were at stake? They were sick with their own self-importance—I knew I had to blitz them, I had to shame them. “You think you’re such big public heroes, but ultimately you’re all dupes of the Phantom!” I cried. “What do you know about the truth? It’s all sensationalism, cheap scandals, a lot of irresponsible rumor-mongering in the name of a free press!” I took out on them all of the fury and frustration that had been building up within me on the ride over. “That’s just the kind of loose fellow-traveling attitude that got us into the mess we were in in the forties! Well, just wait! The people of this country are getting fed up with hucksters like you! There’s going to be a day of reckoning—!”

  “Whoa there, Dick,” said Pegler. “If you’re gonna fling your hand around like that, use your clean one!”

  This wisecrack brought a few guilty titters, but the audience gathering around us now were there, I knew, to hear me. Opinion makers, people in all walks of life…. “The Pentagon Patriots have got you bums pegged,” I declared. “Preachers of lies, prophets of deceit, garblers of truth—”

  “Say,” said Winchell, sniffing, “did anyone ever consider that the Phantom might be a horse?”

  “Dick the Horse?”

  “Alan (the Horse) Ameche?”

  “Horace Greeley?”

  “Some donkey, more likely,” said Heatter wryly. “One of the Phantom’s more famous disguises…”

  “Can’t you SOBs take anything seriously?” I demanded. “I’m telling you, the Phantom is out to destroy this thing today! The heat is on! Look what’s happening around the world! Germany, Korea, Africa—you saw what he did up in Times Square last night! This place may be next! He’ll do anything to stop us! We have the fight of our lives on our hands! I was lucky to get away from him just now—and it’s not just me he’s after! He’s after us all! He…he even wanted to get Sonja Henie!”

  “Gee, that’s terrible, Dick,” said Pearson, winking at the others.

  “Maybe he wants to take a crap in her ice-skate,” said Winchell.

  “Ah, go to hell!” I muttered, and brushed on past them. I moved quickly, planning my next move. I was tensed up, I admit, and my shoulder was nagging me, but I still had control of my temper. The kind of treatment I was getting was pretty hard to take, but I knew the greatest mistake I could make would be to lose my head. I’d suffered these smear attacks before, I’d suffer them again. But the people on the street, I knew, were with me. Some of them applauded as I jogged away, rocking somewhat with only one shoe on, but feeling sure of myself, confident of my timing, pleased with the points I’d made. Maybe I should throw a line from Lincoln at them, I thought.

  But before I could come up with a good one. Bob Considine forced the issue: “Hey, Mr. Vice President!” he called from behind me. “Give us a hint! Who’s behind the Rosenbergs?”

  I spun around at the doorway. “I don’t know,” I said gravely, “but I do, uh, know this: you guys are so lost in your Fourth Estate fantasyland,” a good line, I thought, a damned good line, “that if he were standing right here in front of you as obvious as King Kong, you wouldn’t recognize him!”

  “Is that a clue, Dick?” asked Winchell.

  “Straight from the horse’s mouth,” said Gabriel Heatter.

  “Anyway, it explains King Kong’s five-o’clock shadow,” said Pearson.

  With that I really blew my stack. I just couldn’t take any more. Those vicious mudslinging irresponsible Commie-stooge idiot bastards! But even as the circuits popped and sizzled in my head, I hung onto myself, clung to the old debate discipline, bit my tongue, kept my movements in check. As best I could—I kept flashing from smiles to scowls and back faster than I would have liked. I jabbed a finger at Pearson through the ugly laughter, even though it hurt my shoulder, and cried: “All right, gentlemen, you’ve had a lot of fun with all this jackassery, but when it comes to the manure hitting the fan, let me just say this, you can give me the shaft, I expect a lot of blood to be spilled and you have a right to call it as you see it, but make no mistake, you’re not just giving me the shaft, you’re sticking it in the butt of the whole American Way of Life!” I tried to smile, scowled, found myself smiling again. “I won’t say you’re traitors to your country, but I will say I’m not known for being rough on rats for nothing, and when you go out to shoot rats, just remember, if an egg is bad, then let’s call for the hatchet!”

  I let that sink in a second, not quite sure just what I’d been saying, but trusting my reflexes, then brought my hand down to my side, chopping off any rejoinder they might have thrown back (but in fact they seemed speechless—well, they asked for it and they got it), turned sharply on my stockinged foot, and made my exit. Entrance, rather. Yet another ordeal. Fortunately, I thrive on them.

  16.

  Third Dementia

  It is on. The Rosenbergs are to die at last. Television networks interrupt scheduled programs with the announcement: “President Eisenhower and the Supreme Court of the United States of America have refused to spare the lives of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” At the Bernard Bach home in Toms River, New Jersey, a small ten-year-old boy is watching the baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Detroit Tigers on Channel 11 when the announcement is made. The score is 0-0, but Yankee first-baseman Joe Collins has just beat out a drag bunt in the bottom of the fourth. It is a sunny day and the boy is thinking about going out to play baseball with friends in the neighborhood. That’s what Sonia Bach wants him to do. But he’s fascinated by the television and can’t pry himself away from it. The announcer says the executions are scheduled to take place tonight. He looks very intent and serious. The boy tries to see past him to the ballgame again, but the announcer won’t go away. “My Mommy and Daddy,” the boy whis
pers, feeling that someone or something is watching him. But he doesn’t know what to add. A prayer? A seventh-inning stretch? At the ballgame, nobody seems even to have noticed that the announcement has been made. Yankee outfielder Gene Woodling has come to the plate during the interruption, and he now watches a ball go by. There’s something very magical about TV, everything seems to happen at once on it, the near and the far, the funny and the sad, the real and the unreal. Tonight! Collins, taking a big lead off first base, is not thinking about this. He doesn’t care. The boy hates Collins for his cheap hit. Just like the Yankees. His Mom and Dad like the Brooklyn Dodgers; the New York Yankees are Judge Kaufman’s team. Judge Kaufman is rich and lives on Park Avenue and takes his sons to see them play. The boy feels that awful lump growing in his stomach again. His little brother is out on the front porch with Leo painting a homemade Father’s Day card with watercolors. Father’s Day is Sunday, a long time away. “That was their last chance,” the boy tells himself, trying to picture this new finality in the same way he sees the Tiger pitcher stretch, study Collins at first, then whip the ball toward the plate: ball two! Are the other guys in the neighborhood watching the game, did they hear the announcement? His Mom and Dad have told him it’s not manly to be afraid, but he is afraid, he can’t help it. He feels like there are two of himself loose in the world, one who likes to play baseball with friends and come home to Mom and Dad and sometimes push his little brother around, and another one on television and in the newspapers who is threatening to eat the other one up. Both of them, the one eating and the one getting eaten, are frightened, because they both believe the world is not crazy, how could it be? and yet why is it doing these maniac things? why is it killing his Mom and Dad like this, and why is everybody so excited about it, and what is it they want with him, a plain ten-year-old boy who’s still learning his fractions and doesn’t even know how to fix a television or throw a curve ball yet. “Why don’t you go play catch with Steve?” says Sonia gently. She is being too nice to him. Like everybody else of late, even Mr. Bloch. Sometimes he feels like shouting at them: damn you all! Woodling slams a one-strike, two-balls pitch clean out of the ballpark, and the Yankees lead, 2-0. The television camera shows people cheering and waving and having a terrific time. If people really loved one another, he wonders, would the world be like this? His poor Mom! What is she thinking? How does it feel? What is love in a world where people behave like this as if it were normal? Woodling circles the bases. His little brother comes in, wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt all smeared with paint, and asks Sonia for a glass of milk. “That’s it. That’s it,” the boy says. “Good-bye. Good-bye.” Nobody’s listening.