Public Burning (15 page)

“Yes, but… I thought—”

“You
thought!
Cry-eye, look out when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet, we're all in for it! I'm tellin' you, son, the past is a bucket of cold ashes: rake through it and all you'll get is dirty! A lousy situation, but dese, as the man says,
are de conditions dat prevail!”

I felt my neck flush, so, to cover up, I stooped and concentrated on teeing up my golf ball, grunting to kill time. My hand was shaking and the ball kept falling off. I seemed to see my father down in the front row at a school debate, flushing with rage as I disgraced myself with a weak rebuttal.

“And so a trial in the midst of all this flux and a slippery past is just one set of bolloxeratin' sophistries agin another—or call 'em mettyfours if you like, approximations, all the same desputt humbuggery—and God shine his everlastin' light on the prettiest ringtailed roarer in the court room! Am I right? You remember that Ayn Rand play you were in years ago: a game for actors!”

I didn't know he knew about that. If he knew that, what didn't he know? How could I compete? I felt like a fighter wearing sixteen-ounce gloves and bound by the Marquis of Queensberry rules, up against a bareknuckle slugger who gouged, kneed, and kicked. But life for everyone is a series of crises, I cautioned myself, it's not just you, and with that I finally got the ball on the tee. I stood, gazed off toward the seventh green, trying to see the flag there. It was red, I knew. I was on to what this golf game was all about, all right, but I still hadn't figured out what Uncle Sam was up to. Did he mean the Rosenbergs might be innocent? Or their crime insignificant? I addressed the ball. My brand-new golf shirt was wet with sweat. I remembered my opening line from that Ayn Rand play:
Gentlemen of the jury—on the sixteenth of January—near midnight—the body of a man came hurtling through space, and crashed—a disfigured mass—at the foot of the Faulkner Building
. That was just how I felt. “But you said—I mean, President Eisenhower said, and J. Edgar Hoover, Judge Kaufman, everybody: a crime that has endangered the lives of millions, maybe even the whole planet—!”

“Damn right!—and much of Madness to boot, and more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot, but we're not just talkin' about that little piece of technological cattle-rustlin'! Even though that's more than enough to scrag a man all right—like Sweet Andy Carnegie used to say: upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends—but still, we all know how he got his: no, a little healthy thievin' never hurt anybody. But real guilt, real evil—listen, son, get that right hand around there on that club, like you're shakin' hands with it, not jerkin' it off!”

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 regularly, 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.