Public Burning (16 page)

“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 goddamn 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!”

“You—?”
I croaked. “But you…you're…you can't—!”

“Die? Oh, I ain't immortal, son, I'd hate to think I was. Nothin' goes on forever, Amber, not even History itself, so why should I? Sooner or later, the Phantom gets us all!”

I was truly shaken. I caught myself staring at him the way I used to stare at my mother when I first realized that she had to die. Suddenly, everything seemed very fragile and tenuous. Brittle. “But you're so…so strong—!”

“Remember the old kings, boy, the times don't change. I'm the force what'll raise up the whole sin-besotten world, see if I don't…but I'll get et by it, too!”

“I… I don't understand…?”

“I would not live alway, I ask not to stay, loveliest of lovely things are they, on earth what soonest piss away, so long as you get your kicks in in the passin'! That's poetry, boy! Xerxes the Great did die; and so must you and I!”

Yes, I was shaken, but oddly I also felt like I was very near the center of things. There's been a point to all this, after all, I thought. I felt closer to Uncle Sam than I'd ever felt before.

“Oh, probably, after it was over, like Christ, I could come back some day…” He sighed wistfully, puffed on his pipe, blew a plume of smoke shaped like a bird—an eagle. “But it wouldn't be the same…” He added wings and it flapped off into the sun: I was blinded by the light, but as far as I could see it simply disappeared. When I looked back at Uncle Sam, he was staring at me very strangely, his blue eyes glowing as though lit from behind. “Sometimes,” he said softly, “sometimes I almost
want
to die….”

A cold chill rattled through me. My sense of Uncle Sam's presence in front of me dipped briefly, almost imperceptibly, as a candle will gutter in a faint draft—and for that fraction of a second, I seemed to have an intuitive awareness of everything happening in Uncle Sam's head. And then, as quickly, it had passed. My head ached slightly and I felt a momentary emptiness down in the marrow of my bones. Then that, too, filled up.

“Don't worry,” Uncle Sam laughed, “it ain't such a grave matter, if you'll pardon the pun, son—in fact, it's a lot more fun this way.” He put his arm around me and led me down the fairway toward my ball, his white locks blowing in the cool breeze. He seemed to have shrunk some in the last few minutes. “It's like old Tom Paine useter say, panics in some cases got their uses—we ain't had a party good as this one's gonna be since you were just a little tyke sayin' your breakfast prayers back home on Santa Gertrudes!” I felt swarmed about with fears and absences. Paradox. But I felt protected at the same time. I had a feeling that everything in America was coming together for the first time: an emergence into Destiny…. “Oh, I don't reckon we could live like this all year round,” he said, “we'd only expunctify ourselves. But we do need us an occasional peak of disorder and danger to keep things from just peterin' out, don't we?” I nodded, remembering my own peaks—the Hiss Case and the Checkers speech, and before that my school highs, debate wins, romances with Ola and Pat, the war, even my brothers' deaths—and I knew how they could light things up, make everything new again: after all, that was what light and darkness, the sacred and the diabolic, death and regeneration were all about! “Well, okay,” said Uncle Sam, pocketing his corncob pipe and clapping me on the shoulder, “let us, then, be up and doin', with a heart for any fate; still achievin', still pursuin', and though hard be the task, keep a stiff upper lip!”

“Oh, yes!” I said, flushing with pride and joy and eager to begin, for he'd just singled me out among all men: that fractured echo from the past was a piece of Longfellow's “Psalm of Life,” which Grandma Milhous penned by hand under a photo of Abe Lincoln she gave me on my thirteenth—
thirteenth
!—birthday! I kept it on the wall above my bed all through high school and college:
Learn to labor and to wait!
“I will!”

“Good boy!” he said. “I press thee to my heart as Duty's faithful childering! Be prepared for anything, for this is one a them hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold, dear! But be brave, and whatever happens, just remember the sagassitous words of that other Poor Richard long ago: ‘Fools make feasts…
and wise men eat 'em!'
So whet up that
appetite!”
He hugged me, then gave me his club to swing with, saying: “Now, listen here, a golf ball is propelled forward by the verlocity imparted to it by a club-head, see—this is physics, now, my boy—and it's kept aloft by under-rotation or backspin, which producifies a cushion of air, and this is what gives the ball lift. To get this backspin, the clubhead's gotta travel
downward
, right swat whippety-snap through the
center
of the ball, and this is where you been goin' wrong. You think you gotta lift the ball up, and this is makin' you pull your swing…”

“Ah…”

“Actually the uplift is projectorated by the spin, and the spin is got by hittin'
down
and
through
, you got it? Now, another problem is movin' your maximum verlocity back to six inches…”

Down and through, got it. I took a practice swing, keeping my shoulder down, my eye on the ball—then, because when I looked up I realized that people were staring at me (got to watch it, can't let my guard down like that), swung on up into a friendly wave at a carload of Senators disembarking the subway car. “See ya, Dick!” “Don't miss the show!” “Not for the world!” “Take it easy!” Down and through. And out and up, back to the office, get rid of this goddamn thing. With maximum verlocity.

6
.

The Phantom's Hour

The curtain rises upon the Warden's office, a large old unfriendly apartment, with bare floors and staring whitewashed walls, furnished only with the Warden's flat-topped desk and swivel chair, a few straight-backed chairs, and an eight-day clock. On the Warden's desk are a telephone instrument, a row of electric bell-buttons, and a bundle of forty or fifty letters. There are two large windows, crossed with heavy bars, at the back of the room, and doors left and right. The Warden is verging toward sixty, and his responsibilities have printed themselves in italics upon his countenance. With him, staring out the window, is the Prison Chaplain, dressed in slightly shabby clericals. The Chaplain's face, normally calm, intellectual, and inspiring, is presently depressed. The Warden blows a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, drums on the desk, and peers over his shoulder at the Chaplain. He clears his throat and speaks brusquely: “Has it started raining?” “Yes, it has,” says the Chaplain, without turning around. The Warden glares at his long thin cigar and impatiently tosses it aside. He is wearing a dark brown suit, open shirt, and black string tie. “It
would
rain tonight,” he complains.