Public Burning (46 page)

“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 whispers, 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.

His folks' lawyer Manny Bloch is having the same experience: he and his defense team are flinging themselves frenetically at any judge they can find at home or in chambers, but they all seem to have either vanished or gone deaf. A stone wall. Manny fires off a telegram to President Eisenhower, raising the Hugo Black point that the case has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court, but this wire is short-circuited by Special Counsel Bernie Shanley and “transmitted to the Justice Department”; Eisenhower never sees it. Bloch, who has fallen unprofessionally in love with this entire family, is beginning to lose his forensic cool and is having flashes of self-destructive temper, as the doors slam shut in his face. He and others plead for a stay of the eleven-p.m. executions tonight because of the Jewish Sabbath which begins at sundown. Kaufman, playing it close to the chest, says he has already spoken with Attorney General Brownell about that: the executions will not be carried out during the Sabbath. The lawyers take this to mean a delay is in the offing, past the weekend at least, and relax a moment: at Justice, they exchange knowing winks.

The Rosenbergs themselves, locked away in the stillness of the Sing Sing Death House, are remote from all this noisy maneuvering, but they are not unaware of it. One thing they know: they are not alone in this world. Julius even clings yet to the mad hope that justice will be done, that they will both be vindicated, these walls will come crashing down, and they will ride out of here on the shoulders of their friends, the people, but Ethel, though never more strong and serene, shares her son's mood of grim resignation: that's it, good-bye, good-bye. She sits with Julie, separated from him by a wire-mesh screen, composing a farewell letter to the two boys. What she wants above all is to save them from cynicism and despair, and so she speaks of the fellowship of grief and struggle and the price that must be paid to create a life on earth worth living. Julie, watching her, nods in agreement, awed by her radiant tranquillity…

Julius's mother, Sophie Rosenberg, turns up meanwhile at the gates of the White House asking to see the President, but they don't let her even get close—her emotional behavior is notorious, and besides, she's not in good health, and people near the end are capable of anything—so she has to do her scene in the streets. Much is happening out there. Demonstrations are building up in Washington, New York, around the world. Riots are expected and police everywhere are put on special alert. Bloch blames Judge Kaufman for stirring up all this trouble through his merciless intransigence: “Tens upon tens of millions of people in this country, in Europe, in Asia, know about this case!” The Boy Judge is not taken in: “I have been frankly hounded, pounded by vilification and by pressurists—I think that it is not a mere accident that some people have been aroused in these countries.
I think it has been by design!”
On a crepe-paper banner strung out above the Republic Chop Suey eatery in Times Square, Senator Frank Brandegee's immortal rejoinder to Woody Wilson:

Things are heating up here in the Square: in the 80s now and still climbing. The masses moving into the area are no longer scudding through, but pressing toward the center. There's a certain unwonted recklessness in the air, something left over from a restless night, and many merchants close shop early, fearing that American business and consumer ethics might not be taken as seriously this afternoon as they ought. Most of those arriving now are young, their elders having to finish out their workday before coming—boys in jeans and crew cuts, girls with ponytails and Woolworth pearls: the youth of America, cracking gum between their strong white teeth, jostling each other aggressively, scratching their crotches, trying to keep their bra straps from peeking out under their white summer blouses. They carry portable radios on which Nat (King) Cole sings “I'm Never Satisfied,” interrupted by newscasters who report that American Sabre Jets in Korea have bagged six more MIGs, the atom spies still refuse to talk, and B-29 Superforts have bombed Pyongyang. The boys laugh at this and elbow each other knowingly, because they think the announcer said “poontang.”

Up by the Times Tower, workmen are putting the final touches to the Death House set, refurbishing the executioner's alcove, straightening and oiling the gurney wheels, polishing the brass studs in the leather seat of the electric chair. The props committee has come up with an old mahogany table with turned legs and center drawer to fill the empty space against the wall upstage right, just like the one at the real Death House in Sing Sing, though most people in the Square mistakenly assume this is the notorious Rosenberg console table and meant to be used for kindling. The set has no ceiling, of course, but since one of the principal features of the Sing Sing electrocution chamber is the greasy skylight above the chair, this has been ingeniously suggested by a floating glass bell, suspended on wires, which also contains, out of sight, the stage spotlights. This mock skylight will actually trap, ironically, those same fumes that the real one at Sing Sing is designed to let out, though the illusion after nightfall will be the opposite. And this, after all, is what counts, as Cecil B. De Mille explains patiently to a disturbed Warden Denno, a practical-minded man, unaccustomed to the magical razzamatazz of showbizz. “See, life and the real stuff of life aren't always the same thing, Warden—like, one don't always give you the other, you follow? So sometimes, to get your story across, you gotta work a different angle or two, use a few tricks, zap it up with a bit of spectacle—I mean, what's spectacle? it's a kind of
vision
, am I right?” It's like the character Matty Burke is saying in the 3-D movie
House of Wax
over at the Trans-Lux. He's the business partner of the wax-museum artist Professor Jarrod, and he doesn't like Jarrod's style. Too tame, too cute. He wants a Chamber of Horrors. Jarrod, who's played by Vincent Price, argues effetely: “There are people in the world who love Beauty.” “Yeah,” snaps Burke, “but more who want sensation!”