Public Burning (34 page)

“Eh? Stole what?”

“Stole second, Mr. Nixon. That's how him and Sammy White scored when Umphlett singled, see…”

“Oh. Yes, I see…” I realized John had been talking for some time. Trying to tell me about that mad 17-run inning. “A good move…” While John talked, I turned to the entertainment pages, looking for some place to go Sunday on our anniversary. Washington was out, the National was closed, getting ready for
Guys and Dolls
, nothing on but
Man and Superman
and
Show Boat
. Some good boxing matches, but she'd probably never go along with that. Maybe the new
Cinerama
or one of those 3-D movies like
House of Wax
. I'd feel silly wearing those goddamn cardboard glasses, though.

“…So with the bases loaded, Jim Piersall singled and Dick Gernert homered, so that was seven runs in…”

“Izzat so?” I smiled. I'm generally very good at these one-to-one relationships.

“The pitcher come up and singled and they started the whole lineup over again. Sammy White…”

There was a new Dr. Seuss movie premiering in New York about a boy who hated piano lessons, but it looked a little childish. Mary Healy looked like she had big boobs, though. And another new one with Sylvana Pampanini in it called
O.K., Nero
—wasn't that the guy who used corpses as torches? A little heavy maybe for the season. To tell the truth, the idea of going to a movie bored the hell out of me, boobs or no boobs. I recalled the days when I was investigating the Hollywood Ten with HUAC, that proximity to the stars—in fact, I was surprised how ordinary they seemed. There were Bogart and Bacall out there, pushovers for the Reds. Cooper was a hopeless dope, I haven't been able to sit through one of his pictures since, even if he was on our side, and guys like Menjou and Disney and McCarey weren't much better. Then came the stoolies, guys like Parks—whoo…. Made me angry in a way. Of course, having lived near Hollywood all my life—and even married, as it were, into the industry—I'd never been really star-struck like other people. And besides, there was my father's eccentric habit of naming all his cows after movie stars—after you've milked Lillian Gish and remarked on her swollen blue teats, slapped Greta Garbo on the rump, and cleaned up Mary Pickford's shit, it's hard to be romantic about them.

“No kidding!” I said, since John seemed to have paused in his story.

“Right, so they bring in another pitcher, the third one this inning—and
he
can't get the ball across the plate! He walks one guy, filling the bases, then walks Gernert, forcing a run in! And then the pitcher comes up and gets another single…!”

One thing I wanted to do was go in to New York and see Arthur Miller's
The Crucible
after all I'd heard about it, but we couldn't risk giving it any kind of official sanction, and besides, Edgar was probably photographing the audience for his files. Could go and denounce it publicly, maybe. Should get a headline or two. Protocol-wise, though, the smart thing would be to take her to that film of the British coronation ceremonies which was such a surprise box-office smash. England had spent five and a half million dollars to crown the Queen and now they were going to get it all back in film royalties. Make history, make money…

“Say, uh, how much longer is this going to go on, John?”

“It's wild, ain't it, Mr. Nixon?” he laughed. I rattled the paper impatiently. “Well, so Gene Stephens singles, see, and that's his third hit of the inning, a new all-time record. Umphlett comes up and
he
singles, and Sammy White comes in, scoring his record-breaking third run of the inning. The next guy walks, filling the bases—”

“My God! Listen, I tell you what, John…”

“But then finally Kell flies out to retire the side.”

“Ah. He probably got bored and did it on purpose.”

“How's that, Mr. Nixon?”

“I said, sometimes that's how the ball bounces, John, we all have to live with our victories and defeats, only teams that believe in themselves can rise to their challenges.”

“Oh yeah. I see what you mean, Mr. Nixon…”

There was a summer ice show, “Scents and Nonsense,” on at the Hotel New Yorker, I noticed. Pat might like that, she used to be hot for ice skating before we got married, I busted my head more than once trying to keep up with her, never did get the hang of it. She was a real time-waster, dancing, skating, gadding about, it was a relief to get married and get all that over with. Better skip the ice show, she might get ambitious again. It occurred to me that I had been living with Pat for nearly thirteen years, thirteen years this Sunday, and yet in a real sense she was a complete stranger to me. Only when she was chewing me out did she become somehow real, but the rest of the time…well, it was almost as if I'd married some part of myself, and Pat was only the accidental incarnation of that part. Do we all do this? Is this what marriage is all about, finding fleshly embodiments of our ghostly selves, making ourselves whole?

I'd found her very gloomy at breakfast this morning for some reason. Feeling neglected maybe. I remembered the way I'd found her last night. My Wild Irish Potato. People have noted my unusual empathy with despondent people; on the other hand, Pat gets despondent all the time and this only tees me off.

Julie had greeted me at the kitchen door with a sticky strawberry-jam kiss, then had wrinkled up her nose and said: “Oh, Daddy, your
beard!”

“Don't be silly,” I'd said impatiently. “I just shaved it.” This had got to be a joke with the girls and I was a little tired of it. I wondered what would happen if Tricia and Julie grew up and met and fell in love with the Rosenberg boys. Maybe that was what was troubling Pat. Looking at her then, standing there at the stove frying bacon in her bathrobe, she had seemed like all those well-washed people from obscure little California towns and suburbs who used to come to see me in July and August when I was their Senator, shake my hand, get an autograph, talk about the weather back home or the condition of the roads or some pet theory about the Red Menace. Plain and simple people, not very bright, not very well informed, nice though, and they were voters. And they were on my side. Pat was a voter. She was on my side. But, no, it was more than that, she was the choice that gave others trust in me, earned their vote. What do the common people care about tidelands disputes or wars in Asia? The important thing to them is who you married, how you live, what kind of kids you've got. I married Pat and revealed to the world something about myself, and so became Vice President of the United States of America.

“Sit down, Dick, and eat your breakfast,” she'd said dully, munching toast. “I told John you'd be out in a few minutes. What happened to your face?”

“Eh? Nothing. An accident.” I'd dropped irritably into a chair, ducked my head in the
Congressional Record
. Why was it, whenever I was at home, I felt guilty?

“An accident?” One trouble with Pat was that when she chewed you could see the way her jaws worked.

“I, yes, well, I… I ran into some…demonstrators last night. Near the Supreme Court.” Perhaps this is true, I'd thought. After all, history is never literal. If it were, it would have no pattern at all, we'd all be lost. “They, uh…one of them hit me with a placard. Nothing, really.”

She'd looked at me like my mother used to when I came in from playing touch football in a muddy field. “Oh, Dick!” she'd scolded. I'd realized that it relaxed her to be able to scold me about something.

While I shoveled down my breakfast, conscious of my chauffeur out there waiting for me, we'd discussed where and how we'd meet if they held the Times Square executions tonight. I'd told her about my having to attend that Republican fund-raising dinner over in New Jersey afterwards, had said I was leaving her the car, she'd said she didn't really want to go to the executions, I'd said she had no choice.

“What's a eggsy-cushion, Daddy?” Tricia had asked.

“You'll find out tonight,” I'd said crisply, scraping my chair back. Some other time her question might have been cute, but I wasn't in the mood. “Julie, damn it, stop picking your nose at the table!”

Pat had sighed and turned back to the bacon. I knew she didn't like to go to these public ceremonies, I shouldn't have been peeved, but I'd felt like she'd just turned down my plans for our anniversary. Watching her there at the stove while I finished tying my shoes, I'd wondered if her bathrobe was inflammable. Ruth Greenglass had got burned once standing too close to a stove in her nightgown. Nearly killed her. And six months pregnant at the time. We'd just passed a bill about it in the Senate yesterday, the so-called “exploding sweaters” bill, which at least five Senators had voted for thinking it was an anti-pornography law. Ruth had been feverish for weeks, her whole body a mess—like a foretaste of the electric chair. This was shortly before the FBI picked up David. He'd got burned, too, trying to put out Ruth's flames. Lot of goddamn fire in this case. Everything from the Greenglass kitchen stove to talk of an atomic holocaust. Holocaust: burnt whole. Just what the Rosenbergs had to look forward to. “Flaming Reds,” the papers called them. “This infernal conspiracy.” The day's hot news story. “Gonna put their feet to the fire,” Uncle Sam had told me out at Burning Tree: “They've inflamed a lotta passions out in the world, let 'em get their own frizzed a little!” Maybe that was what my dream last night about Pat's burning bush was all about….

“I'll see you tonight!” I'd snapped gruffly, and stamped out of the house into the sun, struggling with my face. We lived in a nosy neighborhood. It ticked me off that she didn't kiss me good-bye in the doorway any more.

And what if she died, I wondered: was I ready for that? Tough, of course. It would hurt. I'd be lost without Pat. It'd win a lot of votes, though. People might even, for once, vote
for
me, instead of against the other guy. Then maybe, later, when I'd got over it, if I ever did, a White House wedding like Grover Cleveland had. In the Blue Room, little Frances Folsom, just twenty-two years old. Tyler'd done well, too, waited two years after his wife had gone and then married a twenty-four-year-old. Woodrow Wilson, there were a lot of precedents. Maybe Uncle Sam even liked it that way, a source of energy and renewal: keep the Incarnation's pecker up. That was the one thing he was obsessed about: staying young. To him, a closed frontier was like a hardened artery and too much government, too much system, too much political theory, was a kind of senility. It was what made him hate socialists: “a bunch of goddamn zombies,” he called them. “Dead before they're born!” Sometimes he frightened me with his vehemence about it. “If those lizards ever get their world revolution, it'll be all over for 'em!” he told me one day out at Burning Tree. It must have been one of the first times I'd played golf with him. “This excitement out on the perimeter is all they've got. Inside, son, there's nothin' but old mold and fungus. They're learnin' the hard way what our Old West was all about, all that tumult and butchery and wild unsartinty. Two pollrumptious screamers shootin' it out on a dusty Main Street over a saddlepack fulla gold: now them two fellers is about as alive as anybody's ever
gonna
be! Socialists are skeered of this, they want everything buttoned down fair and logical and all screwin' up antedeluvian
quiet
, which is to say, they don't want nothin' to
happen!
What's there to live for in a world like that, I ask you—all them sissies runnin' your life for you? No, the earth belongs to the livin', boy, not to cold pickles! You can't tame what don't stand still and nothin' in this universe does! Einstein put his finger on it a long time ago—oh, he's gone off the deep end lately, I know, but listen, he knew what America was all about: don't let the grass grow under your feet! saddle up, keep movin', anything can happen! Ya know, people useter think of time like some kinda movin' knife edge cuttin' acrost the entire universe, but that was on accounta they was locked up in a room in Europe somewhere and not heedin' what was roarin' up over here! America was on the go—not only on horses, but on wheels, on trains, on steamships and automobiles, even into the air. Einstein seen this. And while he was skinnin' his eyes for what this signified, it suddenly come to his attention that a movin' clock appears to run slow set off agin an identical clock sittin' still and the—hope I'm not too fast for you, son…?”

“No! No, I…”

“Bodies in motion just don't age as fast, that's what it boils down to. America, by stayin' off its ass, was stayin' young! No surprise Albert come to live here when he got his chance! This here's a country of beginnin's, of projects, of vast designs and expectations! It's got no past; all has an onward and prospective look! The fountain of youth! Lookit me!” he'd cried, and had rolled off a few lively cartwheels, flipped over his golf cart, and done a handstand on a putter, while clicking his boot heels so hard he drew sparks.

“What's that, John?” I asked.

“I said, there's supposed to be twelve thousand of them here today, Mr. Nixon,” my chauffeur said.

I realized we'd been slowed to a crawl, and there was a terrific traffic jam up ahead of us around Dupont Circle. I clutched my newspaper. “Twelve thousand what?”

“Demonstrators. You know, the atom spies…”

I saw them now, moving down Connecticut toward the White House. “Can't we—can't we do something—?”

“I can try to cut north up toward Howard University, then down Capitol…”

Howard was a Negro university and there were a lot of those people in the pro-Rosenberg movement. I felt a sudden twinge of distrust: was John leading me into a trap? “We don't have time to go to the office now,” I snapped. “We'd better get straight to the White House!”