“Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour…”
sing the multitudes massed in Times Square — they are enjoying an old-fashioned singalong, led by Oliver Allstorm and His Pentagon Patriots, a bit of commemorative showbiz hoopla to honor the setting and get the night’s entertainment under way. “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,” cries Uncle Sam, peering out on the Sons of Light from backstage. “‘Tis grand! ’tis solemn! ’tis an education of itself to look upon!” The Patriots are decked out in bright star-spangled Yankee Doodle outfits, complete with macaroni and bloody bandages, reminiscent of the uniforms worn by Nelson Eddy in The Chocolate Soldier, by George Washington in the French and Indian Wars, and by Bojangles Robinson when he danced with Shirley Temple. A bit far out maybe, like the Patriots themselves, not the sort of gear the nation is accustomed to seeing in its nightclubs and churches — you’d never catch Percy Faith and His Orchestra rigged out with so much pomp and flash — but the crowd seems to enjoy it, seems to like the excitement the Patriots generate, and they all sing along with open-faced enthusiasm, full throated and glad hearted…
“There’s a building in Noo Yawk
That’s sixteen stories high,
And every story in that house
Is full of chicken pie…!”
The starred, barred, and booted Patriots bounce merrily about the electrocution-chamber mock-up with their fifes and drums like court minstrels for a king who’s not yet come to sit his throne, leading the jubilant citizenry through the good old songs of yesteryear, songs their mothers taught them, the hands of mem’ry weaving the blissful dreams of long ago. They recall heroes and hangings, grief and grace, traitors and liars and bloody battles, city lights and purple shadows. They are ecstatic, somewhat drunk as well. They haven’t forgotten the Phantom — indeed, rumors circulate even now of riots and uprisings around the world — but somehow the rest of the world is growing more distant, there’s the feeling that it’s all happening here, here in the street where the whole world meets, on the avenue I’m takin’ you to, Forty-second Street…
“In the middle,
In the heart of little old New York,
You’ll find the crowds all there!
In the middle,
It’s a part of little old New York,
Runs into old Times Square…!”
The sun has hunkered down behind the Paramount Building on its way to Hoboken, but though elsewhere shadows fall and trees whisper day is ending, here the day seems to reverse itself and brighten again toward high noon, so starry bright is the Great White Way. It’s a real Old Glory blowout! The stage where the Patriots work (they’ve drawn together now, barbershop-fashion, and along with all the others are crooning a set of gentle oldies…“Now Is The Hour”…“The Farmer Comes to Town”…“Let the Rest of the World Go By”…) is spotlit; the VIP area, empty still, is bright as a ballpark; newsmen’s flashguns pop like Fourth of July fireworks; multicolored electric arrows dart relentlessly at floodlit theaters and hotels; and vast neon spectaculars hawk everything from Planters Peanuts to patriotism, campaign quips to Kleenex: all direct and glaring evidence of the sheer power of Uncle Sam and his Legions of Light. The name of the Square itself is picked out in lights atop the Times Tower twice, once in Old English for the origins of the nation and once for its progress in modern sans-serif, and up and down all the streets as far as the eye can see, marquees and billboards glow with apothegms from the Prophets and the Fathers…
CHEER UP, THE WORST IS YET TO COME!
WHAT THE PURITANS GAVE THE WORLD WAS NOT THOUGHT, BUT ACTION
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!
THIS WORLD IS BUT CANVAS TO OUR IMAGINATIONS!
The Paramount Building has spread an all-electric United States flag across its broad façade, incorporating its starry-digited clock in the blue field like a bittle bit of heaven, reminding oldtimers of the moonclock Al Jolson sat in with Ruby Keeler to sing to her “About a Quarter to Nine,” while over the Elpine Drinks counter on Forty-sixth Street, a gigantic flashlight, powered with Evereadies—“the battery with Nine Lives”—shines on a Kodak ad that says: “You press the button, we do the rest!”
EVERYTHING IS FUNNY AS LONG AS IT IS HAPPENING TO SOMEBODY ELSE!
The U.S. map between the two four-story-tall bodies atop the Bond store (tonight figleafed with flags: a Dixie diaper for the woman, and “Don’t Tread On Me!” coiled around the man’s joint) is bejeweled coast-to-coast with flickering red-white-and-blue bulbs, giving the appearance of an entire nation boiling over with excitement. There are no dark corners. The singing celebrants, their minds full of old revival meetings, busrides, campfires, and beer blasts of the past, stand in pools of luminous shadows, as though steadfastly afloat in a river of light, while overhead, searchlights sweep the fading sky as beacons to the gathering tribe, traditional signals of a Broadway opening, a casting out of demons, a World Premier, a Tent Chautauqua, a Night among the Stars…
“Bring the good old bugle, boys, we’ll sing another song;
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it as we used to sing it — fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia…!”
They’re all whooping their hearts out as they plunge headlong, hand-in-hand with Oliver and the Patriots, down memory lane — which is, itself, from sea to shining sea a marvelous and unending labyrinth: through the streets of Laredo, across the wide Missouri and up Springfield Mountain, over the Old Chisholm Trail on the sunny side of a winter wonderland, in and out of Chattanooga, Detroit City, honkytonk heaven and the Durant jail, up the Brazos, along the E-ri-e, and down by the old mill stream, just travelin’ along, singin’ a song, side by side…
“Some folks might say that I’m no good,
That I wouldn’t settle down if I could,
But when that open road starts to callin’ me,
There’s somethin’ o’er the hill that I gotta see!
Sometimes it’s hard but you gotta understand:
When the Lord made me, He made a ramblin’man…!”
So hand me down my walkin’ cane and let us go then, you and I, beyond the sunset, the river, and the blue, down to that crawdad hole above Cayuga’s waters, travelin’ on down the line from out the wide Pacific to the broad Atlantic shore, over hill, over dale, up a lazy river and down the road feelin’ bad, dashing through the snow on a bicycle built for two to catch the night train to Memphis, comin’ round the mountain on a wing and a prayer and tramp! tramp! tramp! leaving the Red River valley white with foam to walk in the King’s Highway down Moonlight Bay, prospecting and digging for gold…
“Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come!
‘Tis grace hath bro’t me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home…”
… where the buffalo roam and the whangdoodle sings way down upon de Swanee Ribber with the greatest of ease, then a turn to the right (every road has a turning), a little white light, and it’s off for Montan’ on the driftin’ banks of the Sacramento, up Sourwood Mountain, over the rainbow, round the rosie and Hitler’s grave mid pleasures and palaces, down to St. James’ Infirmary on the trail of the lonesome pine, and back to ole Virginny in the State of Arkansas, that toddlin’ town where sunshine turns the blue to gold in the shade of the old apple tree — then whoa, buck! open up that Golden Gate ’cause it’s back in the saddle again and glide ‘cross the floor while the dew is still on the roses, struttin’ with some barbecue up Blueberry Hill on the lone pray-ree, bound for the promised land…
“I’ve been to the East, I’ve been to the West,
I’ve traveled this wide world around,
I’ve been to the river and I’ve been baptized,
And now I’m on the hangin’ ground, oh boy!
Now I’m on the hangin’ ground…!”
And here on that ground they stand, all these natural-born ramblin’ men, traveling salesmen, driftin’ cowboys, these knights of the road and brave engineers, rovin’ gamblers, easy riders, and wayfarin’ strangers in paradise, slap up against each other as thick as hasty pudding, jiggling about in unison (they all got rhythm), elbow to elbow and belly to butt, to the beat of the Pentagon Patriots. They watch the clocks tick away the last of the Rosenbergs’ time on this earth, and, voices raised on high, feel the heat rise, the light brighten, their own pulses quicken. The political bigwigs have not come out yet, but celebrities, preachers, warriors, and millionaires are popping up all over, picked out in the roaming spots of the camera crews, and they’re greeted with tumultuous democratic cheers: he too! even he is here tonight! Dale Carnegie! Ty Cobb! Gordon Dean! Admiral Bill Halsey and Hank DuPont! Ezio Pinza, Connie Mack, Cole Porter — and America’s answer to Michelangelo, James Montgomery Flagg! Some duck shyly away when discovered, some wave, others take a turn onstage with the Patriots, now swinging into one of their Electrocution Night specials, Lu Ann Simms’s current smash hit, “It’s the End of the Line”—“It’s all over but the blues!” they groan, and the place goes wild.
Underground meanwhile, in the closed-off Times Square subway station, Uncle Sam is busily sorting out the official celebrants and lining them up for the procession to come: first the legislative branch, which passed the operant laws, then the judiciary, which has brought the convictions, and finally the executive branch, whose task it is tonight to pull the switch: not even during the frenzy of such a grand national festival as this one does Uncle Sam miss the opportunity for a little civics lesson. He glances about impatiently for the missing Vice President. “Hark! For his voice I listen and yearn; it is growing late and my boy does not return!”
“My sources indicate he was on the afternoon train,” reports J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, and Allen Dulles of the CIA concurs: “Maybe the rube got lost on the subways.”
“C-r-e-a-t-i-o-n!” growls Uncle Sam. “Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it!” He is irate, but oddly there is a frosty twinkle in his eye. Tipping his plug hat threateningly down over his eyebrows like a Marine corporal’s, he turns on the Boss of the FBI to snap: “Goddamn it, Speed, what’re ya just standin’ around here for? You better find that rapscallious young giddyfish and haul him back here in three double quick time, or cuss me if I don’t wool blue lightnin’ outa your nancy-pantsy fanny! I can drag my boots and hold the earth back a notch or two, but it’s got a slick axle and I can’t grip it to a standstill! So get that snoot in the dirt, houn’-dog! If we don’t pull that switch before the sun goes down, I wouldn’t risk a huckleberry to a persimmon that we’ll none of us see it whistle up again!”
“I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down when day is done and all de worl’ am sad and dreary,” sing the multitudes up in the Square as though in antiphonal response, but sad and dreary nothing, they’re all atremble with joy and anticipation, awaiting the climax of the ceremonies with such fierce eagerness — goldurn! it’s a big night, Maude! — that the minutes seem to crawl by like hours. The jam-up makes it hard to shift about now so the boys from City Hall are working the crowd like church ushers, passing community bottles up and down the lines. Eisenhoppers are bounding and squeaking, toy chairs smoking, Fourth of July firecrackers popping. “As John Brown once said,” says Uncle Sam, come up from below to watch the proceedings, “this is a beautiful country! Ubi libido ibi patria!” He signals and Oliver Allstorm and His Pentagon Patriots, illuminated now by weird red, white, and blue flashing lights and supported by the Radio City Rockettes, fan out across the stage to lead the people in their last big number of the night, the hit that has made the Patriots famous and assured their immortality: “Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Traitors to the U.S.A., Must Die”…
“This man and wife, this guilty pair
Must die in the Electric Chair,
So rang the Judge’s fervent Cry
These traitors are condemned to die!
And burn for treason, guilt and shame,
So let us note each traitor’s name—
Julius Rosenberg
And Ethel Rosenberg
Both tried to sell
America to
A Russian hell…”
Threading her way now through the dignitaries, comedians, musicians, evangelists, and police detachments backstage, dressed in a dark suit with lace frills, a crisp white handkerchief in her breast pocket and her graying hair neatly but not severely combed back, comes General Mills’s famous daughter Betty Crocker, hostess for the VIP processional to follow. Uncle Sam greets her with an ebullient wave of his star-spangled plug hat—“Let Grandmaw through there!” he shouts — and invites her to share his peephole.
She bends over stiffly to peer out, and what she sees out there is a terrible excitement, an impressive agitation: thousands upon thousands of people, singing at the top of their lungs, most of them well beyond either sobriety or modesty, led by a noisy group of musicians, even more rambunctious and ostentatious than Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees, and though they’re singing about “cooking” and “frying,” she certainly doesn’t recognize it as a recipe from her cookbook! Goodness! Fights are breaking out here and there in the heat of the packed masses, hard liquor is being passed about freely, girls are kicking their bare legs high in the sky, and there’s a lot of rude behavior — but there’s a positive excitement out there, too. She sees flags being unfurled everywhere, patriotic lighting displays, fireworks, Red Cross teams rushing through the crowds with bromides, film crews hovering from derricks and lifts, capturing it all for posterity, which Betty, like all Americans, believes in. Every window of every building looking out on the Square is packed with happy cheering people, even the rooftops, and the billboards and theater marquees bear impassioned messages like NEW YORK, THY NAME’S DELIRIUM! and LET NO GUILTY MAN ESCAPE! and WHAT A SWELL PARTY THIS IS! “My sakes,” she remarks, squinting out through the peephole, “it’s getting a bit wild, isn’t it?”
“Yes, honey,” laughs Uncle Sam, “there yam a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last act of the Patriots, what I greatly admire! We ain’t had so much as a skumpy lynching in this land o’ hope and glory for a year and a half, there’s a real bodacious belly-wringin’ appetite up! You feel it, too? O, it sets my heart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock…!”
“…Now should this pair outwit the law
And wriggle from death’s bloody maw;
An outraged nation with a yell
Shall drag them from their prison cell
And hang them high
Beyond life’s hope,
To swing and die
And dangle from
The Hangman’s Rope…!”
“But aren’t they a little bit…well…extreme?”
“Don’t worry,” smiles Uncle Sam, stroking her pastry-fattened thighs. “This is their big moment, but they won’t last the night out.”
“…Then, while the buzzards make a feast
On their Red flesh as on a beast;
Our natives shall rejoice and sing
And shout while these two traitors swing,
And freedom’s cry shall soar and swell
With songs that echo—’All is…’”
“Well,” quoth Uncle Sam as the Pentagon Patriots swing into their final chorus, “the ole Doomsday Clock on the wall tells me it is the hour of fate and the last full measure of devotions, so step up, all you screamers — it’s outa the strain of the Doing, and inta the peace of the Done!” Besides all the preachers, comics, and politicians crowding backstage with Uncle Sam, there are also scores of actors, dressed up as American Patriots and Presidents, Pilgrims and Pioneers, famous Warriors, Broncbusters, Prophets, Prospectors, and Railroad Barons, all part of the pageant to come. “You are about to embark upon a great crusade, my children, toward which we have strove these many months, so make sure your fly’s buttoned up and your seams are straight! I wanna see a lotta hustle tonight — when your name is called up there I want you to move! Let the catamount of the inner varmint loose and prepare the engines of vengeance, for the long looked-for day has come!”
“…So when the Rosenbergs lie dead
Wrapped in a shroud of Kremlin-red;
All future traitors should beware
They, too, will burn within the ‘chair…!’”
The Warden led me down a path through a garden by a house. His apparently, very nice. The sun was dipping low over the Hudson; not so hot now, and there was a breeze off the river. The gun towers were momentarily out of sight, and looking down through the trees toward the river, what I saw was a baseball diamond. Next to it, a tall stack was belching smoke into the pale blue sky. The trees were full of birds. There was even a prison bird-watching society, the Warden told me. Hilly and Dilly Hiss would have enjoyed themselves here, Whittaker, John McDowell, all those ornithological nuts.
“Ever see a prothonotary warbler?” I asked.
“A what?”
My stomach was still tight as a knot, but I didn’t feel all that displaced here, now that I’d made it inside. All in all, it wasn’t as hostile a place as I’d anticipated. Pleasant even, in its way. I’d always liked cells, whether it was bell towers, library cubicles, or private inner offices. A sweaty animal odor seemed to pervade the place, but you could probably get used to it after a while. Might even get to like it. Like the Whittier locker rooms, the Duke gym. I had the sensation in here of having escaped something wild and unpredictable outside, of having found a peaceful corner in a wound-up and turbulent world. On the other hand, I’d shifted rather heavily back into being the Vice President again, and was therefore beginning to have serious second thoughts about this whole project. Did I really want an out-and-out confrontation with the FBI? What did they know over there about me?
“Yes, made from marble quarried right here at the prison…”
“Ah…”
As we went along, the Warden told me about the age and peculiar architectural features of the different buildings, the improvements made, prisoner capacity, the recreational and religious facilities, famous landmarks and prisoners of the past, basic prison industries, hospital services, ideas for the future. I took it all in, smiling or scowling as seemed appropriate, asking occasional questions, but all the time working out my strategy for breaking the Rosenbergs while protecting myself. “This is a much bigger place than I’d imagined,” I said, just as a back-up plan occurred to me: if all else failed, I could attach myself to the police cavalcade south to Times Square, and thus be seen to be bringing the Rosenbergs to justice myself, as it were.
There were guards everywhere — around the gates, up in the towers, along the stone embankment that climbed the mountain to the east, on patrol here in the compound. Most of them in short-sleeved shirts, ties but no jackets, less spiffed up than Purdy’s boys or the state troopers, but just as unfriendly. The Phantom would need one hell of a disguise to get through this army, I thought. In fact, I’d nearly lost my nerve again at the gate, I’d been half afraid one of them might get trigger-happy and let me have it, but instead I’d been whisked right through to the Warden. Doors clanking open and shut like applause. Easy as pie. Just a few gestures, the right word, a nod — there was a kind of sublanguage working here, just under the surface, shared by keepers and kept alike, and if you knew the code, life was relatively easy. I’d even lucked out and escaped the attention of the newsguys. A lot of them out there knew me, but they’d been distracted by that guy coming at me as I was coming in, the one with the magazine up in front of his fedora: it had turned out that that was David Rosenberg, Julie’s brother. He’d come up for a last farewell, but too late: visiting hours were over, they hadn’t let him in. And as he’d been ushered out, the reporters and photographers had swarmed around him, missing me. It’s moments like that that convince me I lead a charmed life, even though I don’t believe in such things.
“Well, I’m afraid the Rosenbergs haven’t given you the press in their letters that you deserve,” I said as we crossed over the railroad tracks I’d just come up on from the city. We were walking toward the river, the Death House was down there, almost on the edge. Why hadn’t the Rosenbergs mentioned the river in their letters? The sounds, the smells, the images of freedom it offered up? “I suppose you’ll be glad to get rid of them.”
“Not this way,” said the Warden simply but firmly, and I felt the back of my neck flush. He could be very direct when he wanted to. Like Grandma Milhous.
“I mean, the nuisance, the, uh, constant pressures…”
“We can’t complain. They’ve been cooperative for the most part and in their own way they’ve tried to add to the life of the prison. They seem to be people who above all want to be liked and who have a very strong sense of community values. They don’t exactly fit in, but they work hard at it. They’ve kept their cells clean, almost homelike, and have been almost overeager to please. Their one real problem has been…well, something we’ve not had much experience in dealing with.”
“The argumentation. The bookishness…”
“How’s that? Bookishness? No, I don’t know what they write in their letters about that, but they don’t read very much. Less than most of our prisoners, to tell the truth. We’ve provided them with plenty of books and magazines, but they don’t seem to do much reading. In fact they don’t do much of anything for any length of time, but then this is typical of a lot of our condemned prisoners.” We seemed to be in some kind of courtyard or exercise yard, surrounded by tall buildings. There were trees, flowers, rose trellises, a huge birdbath, prisoners walking around in double file, chatting with each other, laughing, looking bored. Most of them were Negroes. J. Edgar Hoover’s crime statistics flashed to mind. “No,” sighed the Warden softly, “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways — you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something. Very strange sometimes. It’s thrown us off more than once and we haven’t always reacted the way we should. We don’t think much about history and ideological conflicts and long-range notions about the destiny of man in a place like this. We’re just ordinary working people, it’s about all we can do to get from one day to the next. So they tended to get in a certain amount of trouble at first, more than they deserved probably, doing things we just didn’t understand. But we’ve caught on to most of it now, and it’s not so bothersome. In fact, it’s almost predictable…”
“Yes, I know…” That’s the difference between us and the Socialists, I thought. Our central idea is to look for what works in an essentially open-ended situation; theirs is what’s necessary in some kind of universal and inevitable history. Free individual enterprise versus the predestined structure, social engineering. Surely the Rosenbergs could be talked out of such crap. I tried to remember the arguments Uncle Sam had used on me. The purification of politics, he’d said, is an iridescent dream. Government is—“Eh? How’s that—!?”
“I said, like they’re on stage or something.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, the way they act, the things they say — or rather how they say it…”
“Yeah. Yeah, I was, uh, thinking the same thing myself…”
“I remember when they first came here. We always ask prisoners when they arrive what led them to commit their crimes. Most of them just shrug or tell us to screw off — pardon the expression — or grunt something about being brought here on a bum rap. But the Rosenbergs made very formal and peculiar replies, almost like they were speaking to a vast audience, though in fact there were only eight or nine of us standing around, and not paying much attention at that. Mrs. Rosenberg was the first. They said she was very cheerful on the ride up, chatting about the spring weather and what not. She was wearing a pink blouse and a plaid skirt, a light coat with a kind of furry collar, a black hat — she looked like most any lady here on the streets of Ossining. But when she reached the Administration Building, her whole style changed. That’s when I first got the feeling about her being on a stage — when she stepped out of the car it was like seeing someone come out from behind the, you know — what do you call them?”
“The wings.”
“Yes. We asked her the question and she clasped her hands and with just the faintest trace of a smile said: ‘I deny guilt.’ Funny, that smile. I can still remember it. She seemed to be trying to say she forgave us for what we were unjustly doing to her. She seemed proud and sure of herself, yet frightened at the same time, squinting as though she’d just been brought out of light into darkness.”
“She’s got a lot of talent.”
“Mr. Rosenberg came up later. He looked more costumed. I remember a red tie he had on, one with some kind of leafy pattern in it, and he had a clean white handkerchief folded crisply in the breast pocket of his suit. A new suit, I think. We asked him: ‘To what do you attribute your criminal act?’ And he stood very stiffly like a soldier at attention, yet somehow disrespectful at the same time — you couldn’t keep your eye off that absurd white handkerchief in his breast pocket: ‘Neither I nor my wife is guilty,’ he said. Just like that.”
“Their lawyer probably prompted them.”
“Unh-hunh. Well, if he did, he did a good job of it. I’ve seen a lot of prisoners come here, but I don’t think I remember the arrival of any of them more clearly than these two.”
“Maybe you were keyed up, waiting for it, all the publicity…”
“Could be. I don’t remember. But I do know I didn’t feel it until they actually came through the gates. It was as though they were bringing some outside presence in with them. And it was true, you know — they were. I’m not the only one who remembers what they said. It’s been repeated everywhere, it’s part of history now.” He sighed, gazing off toward the river, which was now right in front of us. A sheen on it put down by the sun. We were facing into it, and it made the distant Cat-skills hazy and miragelike. There was a big greenhouse down there on the river bank on the other side of a heavy wire fence, a gun tower half-concealed behind it as though playing hide-and-seek. The greenhouse reminded me that I’d been meaning to bone up on farming methods for my Midwestern campaign visits. “It’s funny, isn’t it, Mr. Nixon?”
“What’s that?”
“How billions and billions of words get spoken every day, like all these we’ve been speaking on the way down here, for example, and for some reason — or for maybe no reason at all — a few of them stick, and they’re all we’ve got afterwards of everything that’s happened. Of course, you’re more used to that than I am, you’re probably always thinking of what the lasting impression is going to be…”
“What? I mean, yes!” A direct quote. Was he mocking me? “Part of the public life, Mr. Denno. You get used to it.”
“I don’t think I ever could. I can’t imagine ever saying anything that would be remembered. Or that I’d want to be remembered. The Rosenbergs have been just the opposite. Talking and acting like characters out of Aesop’s Fables or something.”
“Knowing that Aesop is around to write it down, you mean.”
“Yes,” laughed the Warden. “Right…”
We angled left. “Tell me, is there anything…uh, between them?”
“And kind of real intimacy, you mean?”
“Yes, well. Like that. I sometimes get the feeling that all of that, uh, heartthrob stuff has just been part of the, you know, the same show. Public-relations gimmick, you might say…”
“Probably. Most of it. Why do you ask?”
“Uh…oh, just looking for an angle…”
“Mm.” He pondered that. I got the idea he was becoming habituated to the idea of reading sentences more ways than one. “There is something between them, though. I don’t know what you’d call it. Despair, I guess. Even their best hopes seem colored with it. It doesn’t make them very happy, but it does create a kind of bond between them. Maybe they don’t want to be happy, I don’t know. Mrs. Rosenberg seems to feel it worse than her husband. He’s got a lot of resources finally, but she…well, she’s sort of given up. She’s become…very withdrawn.”
“I see. Uh…psycho?”
“No, not exactly. Just…well, you’ll see for yourself…”
I took it by his tone that we’d reached the Death House and I glanced up. Ah. Yes, this was it all right. Unlike any other building on campus. In the prison, I mean. We’d been strolling down the bluff past really massive cell-block buildings, at least five stories high with huge dark window areas, everything on a superhuman scale. By contrast, this small clean brick structure was all too human in its dimensions. There was a pretty semicircular garden in front of the main entrance with trimmed hedges, shaped trees, and patches of flowers, but the two-story red brick walls, aglow in the afternoon sun, were windowless. I paused at the edge of the paved walk that led up to the heavily barred front door. It reminded me of the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz. “So this is it,” I said. Already, I’d forgotten all the arguments I’d been rehearsing. Well, I was better at ad-libbing it anyway.
“Yes,” said the Warden. “This is it. Come. I’ll take you around by the back door.”
We walked along the paved pathway between the Death House and the river, the warm June sun beating down on us. At the corner there was a patch of green lawn with a birdbath in the middle of it. No birds though. “These are the, uh, Death House cell blocks…?”
“Yes, that’s right, Mr. Nixon. Twenty-four cells for men, three for women. But the Rosenbergs aren’t in there any more. They were moved this morning into the special Death Cells.”
“The Death Cells?”
“In the middle of the complex. A kind of halfway house, away from the other condemned prisoners. It’s where we get them ready.”
“Ah, I see…get them ready…” High above us loomed a gun tower, the guards in it smiling down at us. The Warden waved and they nodded, cradling their weapons. Past them, it was a clean dash to the river, only fifty steps or so. But a long swim. “Is there a…a bathroom—?”
“Here we are,” said the Warden, and he led me through a door on the south side of the complex and into a plain room with drab tan walls, a few chairs, a table. It was gloomy and sour, stifling hot. I thought I must be in the very heart of the prison, the solitary-confinement area or something, but the Warden said it was actually a meeting room for reporters and execution witnesses. “It will be filling up soon when we get ready to move the Rosenbergs. It’s probably not the best place.”
“The best place?”
“You said you wanted some place where you wouldn’t be bothered, where they wouldn’t feel watched.”
“Oh yes, right,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve (where had I left my handkerchief?). I glanced up at the clock on the wall: after 6:30 already! How much time did I have? Fifteen minutes? Thirty?
“That clock’s eight minutes fast,” the Warden explained with an apologetic smile.
“Oh, I see…” But what did I see? There was a calendar on the wall that read SATURDAY JUNE 20. Like everybody was in a hurry here. “I hope it’s not suppertime or anything, is it?” I asked irritably.
“That’s all right,” the Warden said. “It’s only scrambled eggs.”
“Scrambled eggs?”
“We didn’t have time to fix a proper last supper, I’m afraid. All this has come on us so fast…”
“That’s not your fault,” I said. Actually, scrambled eggs didn’t sound all that bad to me. I remembered I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Where does that door lead to?” I asked, wondering if maybe it was a men’s washroom.
“The death chamber.” The Warden went to open the door. I was sorry I had asked.
“That’s all right,” I said, and while he wasn’t watching ran the end of my tie around my neck, under the collar. I realized I was still wearing my sunglasses. I pocketed them.
“I’m sorry we don’t have any air-conditioning in here,” he said. He flicked a switch by the door and the room beyond exploded with light. The walls were whitewashed, which probably intensified the glare, but the lights were bright by themselves. Must be one hell of a shock to walk out of a dark cell into that. But as Uncle Sam would say: That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? “Here, you can see the setup we have. Can’t stay there in the press room anyway, not if you want privacy — it’ll soon be filling up with people.”
“Ah. Well.” I followed him hesitantly into the death chamber. As I moved toward the door, it reminded me somehow of the doorway into the downstairs bedroom off the living room in my folks’ house back in Whittier. “I, uh, don’t have much time…” Because of my brothers, I thought. Where they were laid out.
“New York was a pioneer in the use of the electric chair, you know,” the Warden was saying. “The first one was a man named William Kemmler up in Auburn Prison back in 1890. That one was pretty crude and, uh, shocked a lot of people, if you’ll pardon the expression…” The Warden chuckled loosely at his joke and I smiled weakly, staring at the cherry-colored oak chair with its leather straps and wires, amazed at all the empty space around it. I guess I’d expected a small room, private, glassed off, like the gas chambers we had out in California. There was something weird about all this space. “But we’ve made a lot of refinements over the years, and it’s not so gruesome any more. For the victim, electrolethe, as we used to call it, is probably the best way to be taken off — much faster than gassing, garroting, or hanging, surer than shooting. As far as we know, it destroys them instantaneously — the current melts the brain so fast that the nervous system probably doesn’t even have time to register any pain.” It’s not the shock itself that hurts, I thought, goddamn it, my own brain tingling, it’s the anticipation. “Of course,” smiled the Warden, “we can’t be sure, since nobody’s ever come back to tell us what it’s really like.”
“You mean, it’s that…it always…”
“Not even the guillotine has a better record, Mr. Nixon.” It looked like an ordinary high-backed dining-room armchair with leather upholstery, brass-studded, something you might find in an antique shop or up in the attic. Except for the special headrest, the thick cables, and a broad middle leg that stuck out in front like a kind of deck-chair foot-rest. The burning tree. Maybe that crossword puzzle answer wasn’t GOLF after all…. “The only near-failure we ever had was just sixty years ago this summer up at Auburn when the chair broke during the first jolt. Took over an hour to repair it, and meanwhile the prisoner, who was still semiconscious, had to be kept doped up with chloroform and morphine. The poor bugger. One wonders what dreams he was having. But here at Sing Sing we’re still batting a thousand.”
There was a large skylight overhead, the panes sooty. From the inside? The lamps in the ceiling were shaped like flowers. “Is this the first woman you’ve had to…you’ve had to put to…”
“To sleep?” The Warden seemed amused at the expression. “Oh no, she’ll be the ninth. If the sentence is carried out.” He paused. “The first one we had here was a woman named Martha Place. That was back when Teddy Roosevelt was governor. She appealed to him for clemency, and when he refused her, what she said was: ‘That soldier-man likes killing things and he is going to kill me!’ She was right enough about that…” What was the Warden trying to get at? If he wanted to accuse us of something, why didn’t he just come right out with it? “You can buy souvenir postcards of her down in the town.”
The Warden stepped into an alcove to the left of the chair and turned on a big barn-door spotlight. “This is where the electrician works,” he said. The switch was a long handle with a big knob on the end, like a gearshift lever on an old Ford. It was in full view of the chair, lit up like a special exhibit. The victim was denied nothing.
“Must be hard to find anybody to take the job,” I said.
“Last time there was an opening,” said the Warden, “there were over seven hundred applicants. That was when we hired Mr. Francel.” This seemed to prove something to me that I’d always believed, though I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. The Warden stood in the alcove, talking about volts and cycles and amperes, rheostats and dynamos, but I was thinking: the old legends about Death were closer to the truth than the ones we had now — it was a substantial reality, a kind of person, an active intervention in the endless process of life. “The current enters the body through a metal electrode lined with a wet sponge and placed on top of the head, toward the back, the hair having been shaved from this area to provide a good contact.”
“I see…”
“It leaves the body through a similar electrode strapped to the calf of the left leg. The flesh’s resistance to such a current generates a great heat and the body’s temperature shoots up as high as a hundred and forty degrees — which is enough in itself to render most of the vital organs inoperative.” The cables coiled out from under the chair like snakes, like thick turds, then disappeared into the floor somehow. There were elegantly paneled benches for the witnesses, and near them, oddly, a lavatory. For washing up? But who—? No, I thought: for throwing up in. “The body in the chair struggles convulsively against the straps — it can be pretty appalling to watch, but it’s believed to be just involuntary muscle spasms induced by the current.”
“Aha…” That’s what they said about little Arthur when he went into his meningitis death throes. I wondered if the Warden planned to remain throughout the interview. He was probably hanging around trying to find out what the fresh information was I’d mentioned earlier as an excuse for coming here. “Where does that door—?”
“That’s the corridor that leads to the Death Cells,” said the Warden. There was a sign tacked up over the door that read SILENCE. “We could isolate it for you.”
“All…all right…”
“Do you want to see both of them at the same time?”
“No! Uh…no, just one…” I think that when a third person is present, one is distracted, wondering what his reaction is. Or people sometimes show off to the third man. But if there are just two of you—
“Which…?”
“Either one. Uh, the woman.”
While I thought about that, the suddenness of my decision, the Warden led me out into the corridor and asked a guard posted there to have “C.C. 110.510” brought down. I realized that I’d been planning to talk to her first all along, since back aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special, maybe before. There were black blinds on all the windows, giving the whitewashed corridor the appearance of being somehow lit from within. Aglow. Empty except for the old steam radiators. The Last Mile. I was reminded of the Ambassador Hotel corridor in Los Angeles, the night of my Checkers speech. “It’s so, uh…polished…”
“The convicts here call it the Dance Hall,” smiled the Warden around his long cigar.
“The what—!?”
The Warden watched me a moment as though to ask me: Why are you nervous? — then said: “I think they’re coming.” And he walked away from me down the corridor to let them in.
He’d left the door into the death chamber open, but there was no time to close it now. I stared in at the electric chair, the coiled cables, the white hospital cart, the long black switch, thinking: So this is it, then. I felt suddenly like running, but my feet seemed stuck to the floor. I looked down on myself and saw the Vice President of the United States of America standing, rooted in panic, in the Sing Sing Dance Hall, awaiting the arrival of the notorious Spy Queen, Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg, and I felt just like I’d felt before the Checkers speech: I just don’t think I can go through with this one, I’d said to Pat. Of course you can, she’d said firmly, confidently. Of course you can…
I squared my shoulders and turned to face the door at the other end of the Last Mile (it is a challenging world, yes! I told myself, trying to stop my knees from shaking — but what an exciting time to be alive!) just as Ethel Rosenberg, flanked by a pair of matrons, stepped through. I nodded at the Warden and the two matrons, and they left us, pulling the door shut. We were alone.
“It’s…it’s all right,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. It’s just me, Richard Nixon.”
“And now, oh God of our fathers, we will bless Thy name forever, for we are the people of thine inheritance! With our fathers, eight score and seventeen years ago, didst Thou make a Covenant, and Thou hast confirmed and amended it with their seed throughout all Enlightened Time! Thou hast made us unto Thee an eternal people, and hast cast our lot in the portion of light, that we may evince Thy truth, and from old hast Thou charged our Angel of Light, Uncle Sam, to help us. In his hand are all works of righteousness, and all spirits of truth are under his sway. But for corruption Thou hast made the Phantom, an angel of hostility. All his dominion is in darkness, and his purpose is to bring about wickedness and guilt. All the spirits that are associated with him are but angels of destruction. But we — we are in the portion of Thy truth!”
It’s knee-bending, God-hollering, crying-in-the-chapel time in Times Square for the sons and daughters of Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler. The restless razzle-dazzle of the Pentagon Patriots and the Radio City Rockettes has been displaced on the Death House stage by the Singing Saints of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, whose eyes have seen the glory, and a spirit of communion, like half time at a big football game, has settled on the gathered masses. There’s been a moment of silent prayer (as silent as one can hope for amid so much bubbling excitement) in memory of the late U.S. Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the world-famous Nuremberg hangman; the Reverend Bob Jones, Sr., has unleashed his new sermon, “Shoving Jesus Christ Around,” and the Notre Dame Law Dean Clarence Manion of the Holy Six has blistered the so-called intellectuals of the nation for their heretical “allergy to absolutes,” their reluctance to accept the basic facts of the existence of God and the divine origin of American rights and duties:
“…For the sake of pure political hypothesis, it makes little difference whether man is a creature of God or the hind end of a happenstance. But for the sake of American freedom in its life and death struggle with Communism, it makes all the difference in the world!”
His fellow Holy Sixers — Rabbi Bill Rosenblum, Editor Dan Poling, Father Joe Moody, Presidential Aide Sam Rosenman, and Businessman Electric Charlie Wilson — join him onstage and together they reaffirm their righteous fury against the reckless Rosenberg Committee clemency seekers, who “have knowingly or unwittingly given assistance to Communist propaganda…”
…Crafty men are they;
they think base thoughts,
seek Thee with heart divided,
stand not firm in Thy truth!
With stammering tongue
and with barbarous lips
they speak unto Thy people,
seeking guilefully
to turn their deeds to delusion!
I SAY THE REAL AND PERMANENT GRANDEUR OF THESE STATES MUST BE THEIR RELIGION! says the Wrigley Chewing Gum sign, and around the Times Tower on the electric bulletin runs Reverend Phillips Brooks’s evangel: “… In thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light; the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight!”
If the hymns — even when rendered majestically by the Singing Saints and recognizably old American favorites like “It Is No Secret,” “The Christian Warfare,” and “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus”—tend to sound like party songs tonight, if Christ’s blood tastes a little like Old Grandad and crotches are more fingered than crosses, that doesn’t signify there’s been a weakening of the faith, a drift into the dominion of darkness — on the contrary, it’s as though it’s all coming together here tonight in a magical fusion, the world of the sacred locking onto the world of the profane like the two images at a 3-D movie, and all these provocative confluences are not only possible, but necessary. One visits the Hiroshima freak show and the belly of the Whale as one would walk the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, treasures stolen panties like relics of the True Cross, exchanges dirty jokes like recitations of the Seder Haggadah, knowing that every act is holy because, only so long as God be praised, it cannot be otherwise, and that, like the President says, “THE ALMIGHTY WATCHES OVER PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS.” And takes His pick.
Kate Smith comes out and sings “God Bless America,” and then out on stage comes Sister Emma Bennett Fowler, the pride of Perryton, Texas. She squares her frail shoulders, rears back, and lets fly: “God bless America has come ringin’ down the corridors of time ever since the Mayflower landed on our shores! It was in this faith that our forefathers begun to build, feelin’ their way and searchin’ for religious truth! Isaac Watts invented the steam injin, revolutionizin’ travel and much industry!” She feels her way over to the electric chair. “Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that done the work of fifty men! And Seth Thomas and his podner Eli Terry seen that by mass production they could cut the costs on clocks, enablin’ more people to buy and makin’ more money for theirselves!”
“They seen the light!”
“The Spirit was up-on ’em!”
“Tell ’em about it, Emma!”
“And so it has been through all the ages! Americans have invented thousands of machines, savin’ men and labor, enrichin’ theirselves and the Nation! And so’s it might be known to be of God,” cries Emma, “‘In God We Trust’ was lettered on our coin, and printed on our dollar bills a ‘Pyramid under the all-seein’ Eye a God.’”
“Oh yes, he’s laid us down in the green pastures, Emma!”
“The Eye of God!”
“Shine on!”
“But!” she shouts, and her demeanor suddenly changes. A hush falls. Here comes the good part. “After the First World War, Communists begun infestin’ our guvvamint, schools, and churches! They got a weird creed which they spread by bein’ fanatically inspired by Satan, whose disciples they are! It is with a missionary zeal they spread this pizen all over the world—!”
The people groan and gnash their teeth; women scream, children cry. Everybody is having a terrific time.
“We have refused to live under God’s control, and now live under guvvamint control!” cries Emma over the uproar. The sound-system engineers crank the decibels up to give Emma the power she needs to carry above the racket. “The food for which we refused to give thanks has rose to exorbitant prices! The tithes we refused God we must now pay in taxes! Besides traitors in our own guvvamint everywhere, our allies is trickin’ us and sellin’ goods and weapons to the inimy, and are beginnin’ to ridicule us in the eyes a the whole world!”
“It’s a cryin’ shame!”
“Don’t let ’em get away with it, God!”
“Throw the rascals out!”
“We cannot ignore the fact that it is our boys who have suffered all the atrocities only Satan can conceive,” Emma shrieks, “and that there are millions a Reds swarmin’ all over the world!”
“Get us outa this, God! Give ’em hell, fer Chrissake!”
“Our world is now divided into two groups,” cries Emma: “Communism with hammer and sickle, and America and Christians with cross of Christ! But we have placed ourselves where we cannot grow spiritually! God stands outside the door knockin’ with His nail-pierced hand!”
“Oh Lord, I hear him!”
“I hear him knockin’!”
Indeed, someone is knocking. It is Uncle Sam, behind the set, rapping at Emma to get on with it.
She spreads her arms out to the people. “May God’s richest blessings be upon us and our Nation! Amen!”
“Amen!” the people respond, checking their watches. “Amen!”
“I’ll second that!” affirms Uncle Sam, striding out onto the Death House stage, tipping his top hat, jabbing his finger at the multitudes in that gesture of his beloved by all Americans, draftees sometimes excepted. The people crammed into Times Square roar their welcome. “Thank you, friends and neighbors! Thank you very—!”
“The Lord lift up His countenance unto thee,” the people cry, their hands raised in praise and supplication, like bank tellers caught in a raid by audacious and handsome bandidos, “and accept the sweet savor of thy sacrifices!”
“Thanks! I’m sure He—”
“The Lord lift up His banner—”
“All right, that’s enough now, the shades of night ‘re—”
“…and do battle for thee at the head of thy thousands against this iniquitous generation! The Lord lift up His—”
“SHUT PAN AND SING DUMB, YOU BEAUTIES, BEFORE I REAR BACK AND WHOP AN INIQUITOUS BELCH OUTA YA SHARP ENOUGH TO STICK A PIG WITH!” Uncle Sam’s steely blue eyes are flashing, his red bow tie is standing on end, and his teeth are showing white as hoarfrost in a powerful mean grin. “WHEE-EE-O! I don’t care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words! It’s like the monkey remarked tryin’ to stuff the cork back in the elephant’s asshole: A little shit goes a long way! LISTEN TO ME! Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? Size me up and shudder, you scalawags! The power to tax involves the power to destroy, and don’t you forget it! I am the Thunderer, Justice the Avenger, kin to the whoopin’ cough on my mother’s side and half brother to the Abominable Snowman, a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe! WHOO-OOP! I am in earnest! I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard!”
There is a moment of awed silence — then the crowd bursts into a tumultuous frenzy of applause, whistling, wild cheering.
Uncle Sam grins, stuffs his hands in his back pockets, and rocks back and forth on the stage, acknowledging the cheers and winking at folks he recognizes. “All right, then,” he bellows, stilling the roar, “get a muzzle on your passions there, you cockabillies! I know, nothin’ great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, like the Prophet says, but now the day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings o’ Night, as a feather is wafted downward from a eagle in his fright — flight, I mean — so we gotta get crackin’, children! We gotta beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, we gotta ring down the curtain, men’s hearts wait upon us, men’s lives hang in the balance — you hear? We gotta bring the flamin’ Jubilee before the hills conceal the setting sun and stars begin a-peepin’ one by one!” Uncle Sam clamps his corncob pipe in his jaws, withdraws a match from behind his ear, and holds it halfway between the two electrodes on the electric chair — sparks fly and ignite the match, which he cups over the bowl of his pipe. “The law,” he hollers, blowing blue smoke: “it has honored us; may we honor it!”
“Ya-HOO!”
“That’s tellin’ ’em, Uncle Sam!”
“Hit ’em where they ain’t!”
“Hey, it’s really wonderful to see so many of you here tonight!” beams Uncle Sam. “It’s the biggest crowd since the hangin’ at Mount Holly in Aught-Thirty-three! And lemme say right here and now, it’s you ordinary folks who’ve made this show possible tonight! If I might quote our elusive Vice President, where’er the hairy li’l tyke might be—” a ripple of consternation passes through the crowd at this news, if news is what it was—“‘God musta loved the common people, he made so many of ’em!’ And I might add, He did a tolerable fine job of it, too!”
The people applaud themselves enthusiastically, Uncle Sam joining in. His handclaps crack and pop like rifle fire through the city streets.
“And I see a heap o’ folks not so common, too! Yes, there’s Vince Astor out there! And Charley Merrill! Jack Rockefeller — hullo, Junior! Give the folks a wave there — can you put a spot on him? We wouldn’t be here without him! Jack Rockefeller, everybody!” Uncle Sam pauses for a burst of cheering, waves at others he recognizes, tips his top hat to the ladies (underneath his hat he’s wearing one of those Dr. T beanies from the Dr. Seuss movie, and when he tips his hat, the yellow rubber fingers make naughty gestures to the ladies): “H’lo, Dinah! Duke! Dottie! Glad you could come! And there’s Jonny Wainwright and Old Man Tose and Artie Sulzberger — and whoa! I see Billy Faulkner, our Nobel Prize-winning mythomaniac! Howdy, Bill!”
“How do you do, suh!”
“How about a few dozen immortal words for us tonight, you old blatherskite?”
“Mah pleasure, suh! What about? Drinkin’ or huntin’ or—?”
“About God, Billy! About God and the Phantom and the chosen people!”
“Waal… In the beginnin’, uh… God created the earth…”
“That’s pretty good…”
“Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth.… Then God stopped.”
“He stopped?”
“Yuh see, God didn’t merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew thet man was competent fer a soul cuz he was capable of savin’ thet soul — and not only his soul but hisself…”
“Himself?”
“Yes, suh! He knew thet man was capable of teachin’ hisself to be civilized. It ain’t only man’s high destiny, but proof of his immortality, too, thet his is the choice between endin’ the world…and completin’ it!”
“Aha! A lofty bit of talknophical assumnancy there, Billy — but what about the Phantom?”
“The dark incorrigible one, yuh mean, who possessed the arrogance and pride to demand with, and the temerity to object with, and the ambition to substitute with…and the long roster of ruthless avatars — Genghis and Caesar and Stalin and Bonaparte and Huey Long—”
This mention of the Kingfish gets a big cheer. “That’s whom I mean, okay,” says Uncle Sam, stoking up his corncob pipe. “But what do we do about him, Billy? What do we do about the goddamn Phantom?”
“The answer’s very simple, suh,” says Faulkner, stroking his moustache. “Ah don’t mean easy, but simple… It begins et home.”
“At home?” Uncle Sam blows a smoke ring that floats out to hover over the Nobel laureate like a halo.
“Yup. Let us think fust of savin’ the integer we call home: not whur Ah live, but whur we live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid then rocks or citadels about the earth, so thet the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient Dark Spirit shall look and say, ‘There is nothin’ fer us here… Man — simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women — has beaten us!’”
“Sweet Genevieve, Bill! that’s pretty highfalutin’ sesquipedalian advice! When I think on this majestic jazz, mine eyes dazzle! And that word ‘integer’ was a jimdandy, too! Let’s give him a hand, folks, he’s a good ole boy! And pass him a bottle a redeye! That’s right, on the house, nothin’ too good for an old Massassip screamer — that boy can head-rassle with the worst of ’em! All them little integers swarmin’ around — WHOOPEE! you gotta be born and reared up in the swamps to think ’em up like that!” He gives a puff and the smoke halo over Faulkner’s head disintegrates with a little tinkle into a sprinkle of gold dust.
While out front, Uncle Sam picks out more celebrities in the roving spots and hands out foot-long panatellas in appreciation to all those who’ve helped make tonight’s show possible, backstage consternation over the missing Vice President is growing. Some think he might have been assassinated. Others that he’s been kidnapped, or else overslept. Or got picked up as a derelict — those who saw him on the train report that he was looking pretty scruffy. Or maybe the Phantom’s got him! Even as, from back in the wings and down in the subway station, they join Uncle Sam, the Singing Saints, and all the citizens out in the Square in singing a special Happy Birthday on this 19th of June to the Duchess of Dreamland, Bessie Wallis Warfield of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, they are thinking: Somebody may have to take his place. Maybe it’s me.
Uncle Sam hugs the birthday girl, feet dangling, high off the boards (the Duchess struggles, smiling gamely, to keep her skirt from rucking up over her knees, while out in the crowd, the Duke squirms uncomfortably among his whooping and hollering in-laws), then sets her down, roughs up her hair playfully, and presents her with one of Betty Crocker’s giant angelfood birthday cakes. Amid the huzzahs and many happy returns, Uncle Sam spots the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill — he coaxes Winnie, who is often confused in the American imagination with W. C. Fields, into coming up on the stage to belt out a few boomers from the Golden Age of the Finest Hour. The P.M. squares his shoulders, winks puckishly, ducks his fat chin in his chest, snorts like a bull, paws the ground with his spatted hooves, jumps up once and cracks his heels together, and with the dignity of pink-cheeked greatness about him commences to bellow like a bona fide blueblood: “Cor blimey! the crisis is upon us, an iron curtain has descended on the broad sunlit uplands, and like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along beyond the soft underbelly of space and time! In the past we have a light which flickered, in the present”—here he raps the chair with his walking stick and whips out a new cigar—“we have a light that flames, so do not let us speak of — darker days, death and sorrow, the quivering, precarious sinews of peace, blood, toil, tears, and bloody ‘ell, God save the Queen, upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization! DREAD NOUGHT! When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite, short words are best! Now this is not the end, everyone has his day and some days last longer than others, it is not even the beginning of the end…”
But while he’s blustering like that, Uncle Sam is filling the stage behind him and secret corners of the VIP section with Minutemen and Green Mountain Boys — suddenly they leap out and point their muskets at Winnie: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,’” they cry, spitting tobacco juice and flourishing buckets of tar and feathers, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government!”
“What? What?” roars Churchill. He puts two fingers in his mouth and lets rip a deafening whistle. People hear troops marching, singing “Yankee Doodle”—they open up to let them pass through — but wait! they’re not Americans after all, they’re Redcoats! A Patriot comes loping up ahead of them, slapping his thigh, hippety-hopping as though galloping in on an imaginary horse: it’s Paul Revere! He warns the Minutemen, and they fall into defensive formations against the attackers. “Stand your ground! Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here!” There’s musket fire! Screams! Eight Minutemen drop dead! The Redcoats march on into the center, led by the likes of Hair-Buyer Hamilton, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Lord Cornwallis, strutting like peacocks! George Washington organizes his forces and a full-scale free-for-all breaks out! Rhetoric is flying through the air like musket fire: “The die is now cast,” bellows Churchill, popping his buttons with excitement and looking for all the world like John Bull himself, “the Colonies must either submit or triumph!”
“There’s something absurd in supposin’ a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island!” snorts Uncle Sam. “Come on, boys! From the East to the West blow the trumpet to treason and make the most of it! Now is the seedtime of Continental union, faith and the clash of resounding arms, the original Merrycunt Revilusion! I know not what chorus others may take, but as for me, stick a feather in your girl and call her Maggie Rooney! Whee-oo! I must fight somethin’ or I’ll ketch the dry rot — burnt brandy won’t save me! C’mon, you varmints, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the massacree! Laxation without intoxification is tyranny, so give me Molly Stark or liberty sleeps a widder!”
Blood is splattering everywhere. Washington’s tattered troops shrink to a shivering handful. But the old vestryman of Truro Parish gathers them into a make-believe ark and, invoking Divine Providence, they paddle across one of the aisles in the VIP section and take the wassailing intruders by surprise. “A race of convicts — a pack of rascals, sir!” storms Churchill. “They are a set of tatterdemalions, there is hardly a whole pair of breeches in an entire regiment! Bugger the lot!” But it’s not to be: the swamp foxes and backwoodsmen scatter through the forest of VIP seats and pick off the Redcoats like sleeping coons, teaching Burgoyne and Cornwallis with buckshot to their retreating rears the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare. “All right, then,” says the P.M., reaching inside his siren suit to scratch his distinguished ballocks, “we have been subdued.”
Cheers erupt through the Square and beyond as Uncle Sam unveils the stone tablets of the Constitution, said to be the same ones that George Washington brought down off Bunkum Hill. All the “dead” soldiers get up and sing “Yankee Doodle” together, then step back to help guard the perimeter of the VIP area. Winston Churchill and Uncle Sam pick each other’s pockets clean, and Winnie is sent off, amid wild cheering, Uncle Sam’s Dr. T beanie on his head, its yellow rubber fingers flashing his famous V-for-Victory sign.
Then George Washington, the American Fabius, so-called, brushes himself off and leads out all the other Presidents: His Rotundity the Machiavelli of Massachusetts, Long Tom the Sage of Monticello, Withered Little Apple-John, the Last of the Cocked Hats, Old Man Eloquent, King Andrew, Little Van the Red Fox of Kinderhook, Old Tippecanoe and Turncoat Tyler, too, Young Hickory the Sly, Old Rough and Ready, the American Louis Philippe, Yankee Purse, Old Buck the Bachelor, the Illinois Baboon, Sir Veto, the Butcher, the Fraud of ‘77 and his wife Lemonade Lucy, the Evangelist, the Gentleman Boss, the Stuffed Prophet, Cold Ben, Prosperity’s Advance Agent, Tiddy the Bull Moose, High-Tariffs Fats, Dr. God-on-the-Mountain, the Mainstreeter with the Soft Heart, the American Primitive, the Great Humanitarian, Old Again and Again and Again, and Give ’em Hell Harry. As they emerge, wearing their shiny papier-mâché heads modeled from official portraits, they’re accompanied by iconic figures from the epochs they represent: Pilgrims, Pirates, Planters and Pioneers, Boston Merchants, Virginia Orators, Inventors, Southern Gentlemen and their Darkies, Canal Boatmen, Land Speculators, Powder Monkeys and Brave Engineers, Pony Express Riders, Bible Belters, Village Blacksmiths and Forty-Niners, Raftsmen and Dirt Farmers, Roving Gamblers, Lumberjacks, Johnny Rebs and Damyankees, Sheepherders and Cattle Kings, River Boat Captains, Desert Rats, Millionaires, Whalers, Cowboys and Indians and the U.S. Cavalry, Carpetbaggers and Ku Klux Klansmen, Country Fiddlers, Coalminers, Oil Barons and Outlaws, Bluebloods and Rednecks, Wall Streeters, Suffragettes, Rough Riders, Motorists, Movie Stars and Moonshiners, Stockbrokers, Shortstops and Traveling Salesmen, Gangbusters, Quarterbacks, Songwriters, Private Eyes, Self-Made Men, and more, all doing skits, singing songs, dancing in chorus lines, miming the high drama of building a nation and taking over the world. A lot of the performers are as stiff-kneed and self-conscious as those of any home-town centennial pageant — many of them are Secret Service agents in disguise and ambitious amateurs with influential relatives — but the acts flow in and over one another so fast there’s no time to notice, all watched over by a ceaselessly inventive and unpredictable Uncle Sam, who’s out there stirring up a veritable feast of Train Robberies, Famous Debates, Lynchings, Brawls, and Dust Storms, and carrying on his running patter of Yankee proverbs and prophecies, the Singing Saints humming gospel songs in the background.
“Hoo boy!” gasps Uncle Sam, ducking backstage for a second during the Battle of Gettysburg, “what I like mostes’ is showin off!” He mops his broad brow with a red-white-and-blue bandanna and conducts a hasty roll call. Some of the Senators and judges are by now too drunk to recognize their own names, but that’s hardly noticed. What does rile the old Superhero, though, is the continued absence of his Number Two Gun. “As I’m a cockeyed Christian,” he barks, “that craven, chickenbred, toad-hoppin’, duck-nosed mother’s son of a unbroke sea-horse is gonna make me slip my cable and unloose more than my matchless magnanimity around here!” He glances at his fob watch. Sundown’s at 8:31 tonight, still a couple of hours to go, but the Jewish Sabbath starts eighteen minutes before that, the period of “anticipation,” as they call it. It’ll take him five or six minutes each to fry the two thieves, so the most leeway he can allow the young maverick is, say, twelve minutes. “Awright, you bandy-shanked double-jawed desperaydos! Zero Hour is one minute after eight — he’s got better’n a hour to make it! So hustle up them epistolary numbers! We’ll stall till the last minnit with the contest, but if that monkey ain’t here by 20:01 we’re goin’ on without him!”
This epistolary-contest announcement stirs a fresh backstage jostle: Uncle Sam will be awarding silver-dollar jackpots and new top ratings to the funniest, saddest, most terrifying, etc., skits and readings from the Rosenbergs’ Death House Letters, and so all the actors in town are suddenly pressing excitedly into the wings, eager to go on for a crack at the winnings, not to mention a chance to play before this fantastic house. This audience is a dream!
Pretty dismal material, of course, these prison letters, but real professionals are never daunted by poor scripts. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, for example, are working up a dance routine around a single line from one letter of each of them…
JULIE: Honey, I sat so reserved and pent up looking at you through the screen, and all the time I wanted to take you in my arms, smother you with kisses and tell you in more than words of my consuming love for you!
ETHEL: How utterly shameless were my thoughts as gazed at your glowing face through the double barrier of screen and bar!
…in which they hold up a wire-mesh screen between them and fantasize a tender and loving future for themselves, even as they are dancing toward the chair. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have a cruder act on roughly the same theme, building their gags around the argument of who goes first. Fibber McGee and Molly are incorporating the letters into one of their familiar domestic situations (when McGee’s closet is opened a whining cacophony of Rosenberg complaints will come clattering out, and Molly’s famous line—“‘Tain’t funny, McGee!”—will take on an unsuspected moral force), while Andy Devine and Marjorie Main are going for straight drama, focusing on the erotic bits. Archie of Duffy’s Tavern intends to solo with a telephone, as does Red Skelton with a handful of hats. Ozzie and Harriet, contrarily, are bringing the entire Nelson family into their act by picking up on the periodic visits of the Rosenberg boys to the prison, and One Man’s Family is even going them yet one better by pushing for a complex fragment of the disturbing Greenglass-Rosenberg family saga.
Standing waist-high among all these characters and looking very down in the mouth is the Boy Judge, Irving Kaufman: he and Irving Saypol have been asked to reenact, as a kind of curtain raiser to the contest, some of their routines from the trial, and although he and Saypol work well together, he seems unsure of himself. He’s taken a great risk in setting up tonight’s show and preventing it from falling through — maybe too much — and the strain is beginning to tell. Discovering him like that, his old friend and former client Milton Berle, backstage with the rest of the contestants, cautions him: “Be careful, Irving, or you’ll drop the world!”
Kaufman smiles foolishly, displaying the gap between his two front teeth, then sighs profoundly. “It’s such a terrible responsibility,” is what he says, but what’s really troubling his mind is that sometimes, like now (Supreme Court Justice William Douglas has just been dragged onstage for a “spontaneous” public spanking—“Only thing not Red about this rapscallion,” Uncle Sam has shouted, “is his bottom!” and there’s a great clamor: everyone, it seems, wants to get his hands or other weapons on Judge Douglas’s posteriors, and this, Irving supposes, under other circumstances could happen to him!), he gets the feeling he’s just being used, that he’s as much a victim as the Rosenbergs. Even if now he is a National Hero…
Congressman Don Wheeler, brushing past him, rushes out onstage to announce that he’s still pressing for Douglas’s impeachment and a one-way visa to Russia — then rears back like Babe Ruth going for the fences and lands such a blow on him that it seems he might be trying to belt him over into Phantom country single-handedly. Others come out and holler about the Judge’s “arrogance” and “treason” and “villainous ambition” as they whop him, and some even fulminate against his sex life. “Last May twenty-first at a meeting of the American Law Institute,” cries Walt Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, laying into him, “Douglas said America had lost its position of moral leadership—this from a man who went vacationing for some weeks with another man’s wife!” There’s a lot of hooting and whistling out in the crowd, a tremendous agitation building up. “And from a man who some years ago stooped from the High Court to string obscenities into verses which shocked a select group of Americans, which has numbered two Presidents, a Chief Justice, admirals of the fleet, generals of the Army, Senators, governors, and lesser characters including myself! I was there when this would-be liberal spouted his filth!”
Douglas, patiently taking his licking amid all the uproar, remarks to Uncle Sam, over whose knees he’s been turned, that as a Superhero he’s really degenerating fast. “Not my fault,” says Uncle Sam with a coy wink, “I gave you a chance to save me, Billy, but you turned me down!”
“Whew!” complains the Attorney General, out for a retributive barehanded whack at Justice Douglas’s nefarious backside, “hitting this guy is like slapping an old weathered board!”
“Presidential timber, Herb,” grins Uncle Sam.
Judge Kaufman understands, of course, that every judgment is a kind of marriage, that he and the Rosenbergs needed each other to fulfill themselves, need each other still — judge and judged: two sides of the same coin…but what coin was that? He remembers the great up feeling he’d had when they were drawn together — inexorably, it had seemed then — toward that classic Passover Trial of just two years ago, the sense of being Chosen (and he was, yes, he was a Great Man now) and of being ready, the magisterial power and artistry with which he’d conducted the trial, the seemingly inevitable convictions and the Maximum Penalty drama that hovered over them…and yet, he’d not imagined that it would end this way. And how inevitable had it been really? He felt deep in his heart he had done the right and necessary thing — but could he trust his heart? Had they not been Jews would he have done the same? There were those who thanked him for putting the heat on them — but who has put the heat on whom? he wonders now, as he watches Bob, Bing, and Dottie practicing a sketch called “The Road to Radiance.” In the sketch, apparently, Crosby plays a priest who, with a lighthearted wink, sings “Goin’ My Way?” as he leads Bob and Dottie to the electric chair, while Hope, trying frantically to hide in Dottie’s sarong, gets lost (Lamour loses Hope!), only to come popping out like a champagne cork when they pull the switch on Dottie and go bounding—boing! boing! boing! — around the stage, singing “Thanks for the Memory.” He thinks: maybe those old priests at Fordham were right about invincible ignorance, after all. At the time, Irving had argued fiercely with them, supposing they were only trying to excuse his Judaism for him (it needed no excuses!), but now it’s suddenly come to him, thinking about that indivisible two-sided coin, that the one thing you could never understand was the thing you were intimately a part of; identity, they’d taught him (tried to), made modal and virtual distinctions impossible. Something like that. If he weren’t who he was on the face of that coin, if he were just a common citizen out there in the faceless crowd, he might have a better overview of the whole, but—
“Hey, Irving,” sings Uncle Miltie softly in the Judge’s ear, chucking him under his plump chin and wrapping his arm around him, “life is just a bowl of cher-ries….!”
He nods. What, after all, could he do about it? He can only be what he is: vocation is a prevenient grace. Willy-nilly, he’s bound up in a mystery. He wraps his own stubby arm around Uncle Miltie’s waist and, hoping it will get easier when he makes it to the Supreme Court, croons along with the comic: “Don’t make it serious, life’s too mysterious…!”
Certainly he has nothing to fear from this crowd: when he appears, introduced by George Sokolsky of the Washington Times-Herald (“… To the galaxy of America’s great judges can now be added the name of Irving Kaufman, servant of the law!”), the ensuing ovation ruptures the applause meter. This technical breakdown momentarily unsettles the audience (measurement is what it’s all about!), but it’s soon forgotten in all the thrills, tears, and laughter of the acts that follow: everybody from Veronica Lake and the Duke of Paducah to Yogi Berra and the Dragon Lady. Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester work a Frankenstein act with all the electrical paraphernalia, then Dean (Ethel) Martin drags Jerry (Julie) Lewis around the Death House set by his lower jaw while singing “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly in a drunken falsetto. Amos ‘n’ Andy turn it all into a blackface minstrel show, with Kingfish doing the lawyer’s part, very wily, but bungling things up as usual, and then Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore come out and play it for pathos, using the letters to the children. Out front the people glance up at the Paramount clock, their eyes filling with tears of laughter and unabashed sentiment, as Jimmy and Garry climax their skit with Jimmy sitting in the electric chair in a curly wig, playing the piano, and singing: “Oh, who will be wit’ chew when h’I’m: far h’way, when h’I’m: far h’away from H-YOU?”
“I know,” Ethel Rosenberg said calmly as the door closed behind her down at the other end of the Last Mile. She stood with her hands at her sides, utterly self-composed, unbroken. A strong woman, and brave, but there was a hardness as well, a kind of cunning: she struck me as something of an operator, like those brittle tough-talking chain-smoking girls I’d met at the OPA. “I’ve been expecting you.”
I was taken aback by this. Expecting me? I stared at her, not knowing what to say. Had she really understood who I was? Or was she already in some other world? She looked a little strange, as though she’d already left her body halfway behind. A little deranged maybe. Well, I could understand this, I’d only been living with the idea of it for a few days and had become pretty giddy myself. “It’s all right, Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said, “I just… I only want to talk.”
“Of course,” she said, smiling faintly, as though to say she forgave me, and stepped toward me down the glowing white corridor. She was shorter than I’d imagined, dumpier. Older, too. She was dressed in a simple cotton dress of no particular color, a little ragged at the seams, the skirt torn or slit on the left side. Her thighs, which I tried not to notice, were bare and rather thick. Her hair was unkempt, frazzled, as though she’d been trying to tear it out by the roots, and her face seemed shapeless, blank. But maybe it was just the distance, the strange light in this black-blinded whitewashed passageway, because as she came toward me, moving coldly, disdainfully, yet dreamily, as though remote from all this, padding along in her felt slippers and reflected in the waxed floor not as body but as shifting shimmering light, she seemed to grow in stature and her years dropped away. She walked like a good politician, simulating dignity, self-assurance, humility. Already practicing probably for the last walk to follow. But even as this thought crossed my mind, I felt a flush of guilt about it — I understood the depths of my own sincerity and integrity, so undervalued by the world at large, why did I doubt it in others? “But it’s no use, Mr. Nixon. There’s nothing more to be said.”
Her gaze drifted past my shoulder and she stopped dead in her tracks. “This…this is a very strange joke to play…!” she whispered.
“What—?” I glanced apprehensively over my shoulder, but it was only the chair she’d seen. “Oh, I, uh, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “It’s not my fault, the Warden left it open. Would you like me to—?”
“There’s no need for any pretense, Mr. Nixon. The farce is exposed. The executive arm of our government — with you as its spokesman — has become a party to murder! And now you are desperate to bury us quickly before the entire lid is blown off this stinking plot!”
“Now wait a minute,” I insisted, secretly pleased at her nomination, “let’s be fair about this!”
“Fair!” she snorted. “Do you call this fair? This is blackmail! Nazi barbarism!”
I could feel my blood rising, but I knew, if I was going to pull anything out of this goddamned hat, I had to keep my cool. Thinking of which, I removed my homburg and, clutching it by the brim by my left thigh, moved my right foot forward slightly and tilted my head as though expecting to be photographed. Or rather, expecting nothing of the sort, but recalling from other photographs that such a pose suggested alertness and vitality and clarity of vision. (She was not a photographer, she was a typist — why was I thinking of cameras? That stripper story that damned cabbie told me, probably.) “Believe me, Mrs. Rosenberg, I can understand your feelings,” I said, modulating my voice in the manner of Reverend Peale and trying to forget about the Dirty Crab, “I’ve suffered a lot of smear attacks myself, you know!”
She snorted again. It was not a very attractive gesture. I felt her contempt of me and was stung by it: was it nothing to her that the Vice President of the United States had taken a personal interest in her case? How could she recognize my power and ignore it at the same time? “I told Mr. Bennett that if the Attorney General were to send a highly placed authority to see me, even if you came just ten minutes before my execution, the plain fact of my innocence would not have changed in the slightest.” She was trying to keep her voice from pitching upwards in excitement. “But I didn’t believe, even then, you’d be cruel enough to do just that!”
“I’ve got nothing to do with Mr. Bennett! I’m here on my own! I’ve come to offer you—”
“We will not be intimitated by your fascist methods, Mr. Nixon!” she snapped. Her words were harsh, but she couldn’t hide her desperation. “We have done nothing wrong and if we must die for that, then we shall die for it!”
“If you die at all, it will be because you and your husband want to! You’ve been given a fair chance and it’s still open! You’re just doing this for your own goddamn glory!”
“Oh no! We do not wish to be martyrs or heroes, Mr. Nixon! We do not want to die!” she cried, her voice thin and defensive. “But we won’t lie to live!”
“Who’s asking you to lie? Listen, I’ve got a new—!”
“We are not the first victims of tyranny!” she ranted. I could see tears springing to the corners of her dark eyes, and her lip was trembling. I knew if I could keep attacking and counterattacking, I could break her, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Hadn’t her own lawyer said it? “She is a better lawyer than I am, no doubt!” Relatively, the Pink Lady was a pushover. “Six million of our coreligionists and millions of other victims of fascism went to the death chambers before us!”
“All this crap about fascism is a lotta hooey, and you know it!” I shouted, jabbing my homburg at her. “The only mass executions these days are on the other side of the Iron Curtain!”
“That’s not true!”
“Oh yeah? What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh? He and about ten more of your coreligionists, as you like to call them! Or the Doctors’ Plot — that was a good one! And just yesterday over in East Berlin, poor Willi Goettling, not even any goddamn trial, just dragged out and shot! And more being massacred right now!”
“Spies!” she shrieked, trying to drown me out.
“Oh,” I said calmly, dropping the homburg to my side. “That makes it okay, does it?” She flushed, trapped. I zeroed in: “And meanwhile, all century long, this country has opened its doors — its doors and its heart — to the people running away from all these tyrannies, no matter what their color, your own parents among them!”
“Yes, that’s right,” she replied, having recovered more quickly than I had expected, “until you came along — you and all those other super-patriotic demagogues and bigots who are taking this country over!”
“Now, wait a minute, don’t call me a bigot!” I stormed. “I’ve got plenty of Jewish friends! More than you have, I bet! Catholics, too, and Negroes — listen, when I was in college I helped initiate a Negro into our fraternity!” She seemed nonplussed by this — I took advantage of the point made and pressed on: “I’m a progressive, too, you know — don’t believe everything you see in Herblock’s cartoons! My ancestors fought with Cromwell in Ireland and George Washington in New Jersey, struggled against the Indians, spied on the British, operated an Underground Railroad station on the north bank of the Ohio, and got buried at Gettysburg! I’ve always believed in freedom! I personally opened up Whittier College to on-campus dances and championed the end of compulsory chapel! You don’t believe me, I’ll show you in the yearbook! I lived in a commune once and worked for the New Deal and the OPA and fought against the Axis in the South Pacific! I was at Bougainville! I might have got killed!” Christ, I realized I was getting very wrought up. She watched me somewhat agape. I didn’t know whether I was getting to her or just astonishing her. She was still very pale. Doe-eyed. Vulnerable: I could see how she must have knocked them out in that role of the condemned man’s sister. She looked like Ella Cinders. Her soft dark eyes began to narrow. I could see the shape of the argument forming up behind them, so I beat her to it: “Oh, I know what people say about me, trying to make me out like the heavy in some goddamn cowboy movie, calling me every name in the book — but it’s not my fault! It’s only because of the campaigns I’ve had to run and the legislation I’ve had to sponsor and support. I’m not any happier about a lot of it than you are, but that’s politics — a campaign diet of dishwater and milk toast doesn’t get you elected to office and you don’t achieve a national reputation by putting your name on nothing but blue-sky laws! A lot of blood gets spilled on the way to the top — where at last maybe you can do something about the world — and inevitably a lot of it is your own! Blood and mud: I’ve been accused of everything — bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole gamut of misconduct in public office, ranging from unethical to downright criminal activities — but nobody knows yet who I really am! You should understand this, Mrs. Rosenberg, you’ve caught some of it yourself! A fanatic, they’ve called you, an anti-Semite, a lousy mother, even something of a nut case — well, if you think you’ve suffered, just imagine how it’s been for me!”
She might have snorted again at this, but she didn’t. She was watching me in a new way, studying me curiously. She looks a little bit like Claudette Colbert at that, I thought. Only softer, more like one of those Italian actresses. Her dress hung loosely on her and gave you the impression it was all she had on. She poked absently into her skirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, gazing thoughtfully at me all the while. She didn’t flip a cigarette from the pack, but reached in carefully with her fingertips, plucked one out, and fitted it between her lips. Her hand was trembling faintly as she lit it.
“It’s…uh, it’s not allowed,” I said uneasily, glancing up at the NO SMOKING sign on the wall.
“No? What do you think they’ll do to me, Mr. Nixon?” she asked drily, and exhaled a lungful of smoke. She seemed almost to be pitying me. I did not object to this. I was no longer sure just what I was doing here, but it had to be for good reasons, and I knew that somehow, difficult as it might be, I would succeed. She stood close to me now, small, delicate, even fragile. I realized that I really didn’t want her to die.
“Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said as gently as I could, attempting a smile but feeling it twitch away as soon as I’d tried it, “Mrs. Rosenberg, we want to, uh, help, I want to help, Pat and I—”
“You’re wasting your time,” she said simply. “I am innocent. My husband is innocent. We know nothing about any espionage.” She kept her head up but she seemed close to tears. There was a tremor in her voice. How much time did she have left to live — seventy minutes? eighty? She took another deep drag on the cigarette, then dropped it on the floor and squashed it out with her slipper, creating an ugly black smudge in the middle of all that gleaming wax polish. She exhaled slowly, then gazed up at me again. I was touched by her great reserves of strength and serenity. “We understand these desperate moves,” she said. “You’ve made a mistake and now you’re trying to get out of it!”
“But, Mrs. Rosenberg — Ethel! You don’t understand!” She seemed surprised I’d used her first name, and with such feeling. Dumfounded even. I was surprised myself. “I tell you, Ethel, this has nothing to do with the government — I’ve run away from the government — believe me, it’s you I care about, can’t you see that?” She seemed startled, confused, disbelieving. I could hardly believe it either, it was sheer madness, but I couldn’t stop now, I’d turned some corner and there was no going back. Besides, my instincts told me I was right. “I’ve come to save you, I don’t know how, but I’ve got to get you out of this, I’ve got to get you out of here!” What did I mean? That I was going to pick her up and make a run for it? Trade clothes with her like they did in the movies? Maybe it was the utter impossibility of it all that drove me on — it couldn’t happen, so I could be all the fiercer in my insistence that it would. It reminded me of my greatest moments with Ola. “I don’t want your confession, Ethel! I don’t care about the past, it’s now I care about!”
“You…you can’t be serious!” she whispered.
“But I am!” Not serious! To question my seriousness was like questioning Ike’s smile. “I believe in you! I’ve made a careful study — I… I don’t want you to die!”
Even though she was shorter than I was, I’d felt all the while she had been gazing down on me. Now we seemed to be on the same footing, face to face. We were very close. My heart was beating wildly. I thought: there’s just the two of us left! I felt her eyes, dark with anguish and uncertainty, searching my own. I struggled, with my eyes, against her distrust. I felt I had not known such intensity since I was a boy in high school. I wanted to weep so that she would believe me and I tried to remember those lines from Bird-in-Hand: I’ve never had but one child — that’s ’er… Then suddenly she seemed almost to collapse, her knees seemed to buckle — I reached forward, gripped her arm. She did not resist. “All right,” she said weakly. “All right. Where’s Julie?”
“Julie—?”
She drew back, one hand in front of her face as though to ward off bad breath. “Did you mean you were going to save me and leave Julie to die—?!”
“But…but, Ethel—!” Why did women always expect this of me?
“So that’s it! My life is to be bargained off against his! I need only grasp the line chivalrously held out to me and leave him to drown without a backward glance!”
The metaphor betrayed her. “You’re just pretending, Ethel,” I said coldly. “You’re faking it!”
“How diabolical! Oh, I could retch with horror and revulsion! You are proposing to erect a sepulcher in which I shall live without living, and die without dying!” All of this sounded familiar. Like lines from some soap opera. I kept thinking of Aeneas and Dido, but that was absurd. Some Horatio Alger novel probably. “Over and over again, I shall sob out the last heartbroken wracking good-byes and reel—”
“Damn it, Ethel, cut that out!”
“And what of our children!” I’d forgot about the children. Yes, and it came back to me now what had happened to my handkerchief, too…. “What manner of mercy is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness?”
Perhaps, I was thinking, I should just walk out of here while there was still time. But was there still time? The state she was in, she’d probably shout it all out at the top of her voice in Times Square tonight, right in front of the whole goddamned world. And how would I explain that at Monday morning’s Cabinet meeting? I could just see old Foster staring down his nose at me, Ike peering over his spectacles, Lodge licking his chops. I wondered what Abraham Lincoln would do in this situation…
“I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon such bounty!” Ethel cried, still carrying on. “I shall not dishonor my marital vows and the felicity and integrity of the relationship we shared to play the role of harlot to political procurers!”
Political procurers—! That pissed me off. “Crap! You don’t love him, goddamn it, and you never have!” Her eyes blazed with fury, the veins in her neck throbbed, she clenched and unclenched her hands. I thought she might lash out at me, claw at my eyes, start shrieking or something, but I was no longer afraid — I was no longer afraid of anything! The worst of the crisis, I knew, was past. This was the creative phase now! “It’s all been just an act, Ethel, and you know it! Part of the strategy!”
“What…what are you saying—!”
“Who do you think you’re fooling? You even forgot your anniversary last year!”
She was trembling. I was towering over her. “You’re…you’re saying this to divide us! It’s not enough we have to die—”
“Admit it, Ethel! You’ve dreamed of love all your life! You dream of it now! I know, because I dream of it, too! But you’ve never known it, you’ve never given yourself to him, you’ve never given yourself to anybody!” My God! I was amazing!
“I… I don’t believe in bourgeois romance,” she said hoarsely, but there was no conviction in it. “That kind of love is sick, it’s selfish, we mustn’t—”
“Damn it, you know better than that! You’re an artist, Ethel, a poet! You know what love is, what it might be! All the rest is just lies!”
Her resistance crumbled. I was amazed to watch it. She turned away, lowering her head. Almost inaudibly, she whispered: “I respect him so…”
“Yes, and you needed him, I know that — when you met him you felt abused and alone, and he was kind and sympathetic. I know all this, all about the illnesses and bad luck. I know about the bastard who tried to force himself on you, know how your own family frustrated your best hopes, how they failed to understand you, and then the Depression — what a lousy future you had to look forward to! And you thought Julie could save you from it, you thought — do you know what you thought back then?”
“Please…stop…”
“You thought he could save you from a meaningless martyrdom!”
She let out a soft anguished cry. I thought she would fall. I gripped her shoulders, turned her to face me. “We’ve both been victims of the same lie, Ethel! There is no purpose, there are no causes, all that’s just stuff we make up to hold the goddamn world together — all we’ve really got is what we have right here and now: being alive! Don’t throw it away, Ethel!” Her lips parted. When she looked up at me, I saw a big soft tear welling up in her eye. “Ethel! Oh my God! I… I…” I kissed her.
She was taken unawares. So was I. I had not planned this. She tried to cry out, but I muffled her mouth with my own, keeping my eye on the door at the far end. She twisted in my grip, fought, pounded at me with her fists, but I held on. In a flush of weakness, I felt guilty about overpowering her like this, even started to release her and apologize — but no, goddamn it, that had been my trouble all my life, I didn’t know what I was doing but I did know I was through being polite, I was through being Mr. Nice Guy, I was all done with trying to outargue women, or men either, Uncle Sam included, to hell with respect and consideration, I knew better. If I’d learned anything from seven years of politics, it was that you didn’t get anything you wanted by dealing politely from weakness! The meek inherited nothing but regrets and failure in this world! And I was fighting for my political life, wasn’t I? And more! God knows what all I was fighting for! I kept my lips glued to hers, partly out of a fierce determination to succeed, partly in fear of what she might do if I let her go, and partly just for the sensation of it, not having tasted such wildness since back when I’d dated the police chief’s daughter. And this was different, very different, there was nothing frivolous and jazz-babyish about this kiss — there was blood in it, ferocity, danger! Sheba the lion’s gaping maw was one of Aunt Jane’s henpecks by comparison! There was rejection in it, too, oh yes, I could taste her scorn, her disgust, her big-city derision, but for the first time in my life I no longer felt inadequate, no longer felt embarrassed and bumpkinish, I was on top of this, I was enjoying it, it felt good, it tasted good! Not sweet — no, it was acrid even, bitter, there was the sour taste of grinding traffic in it, musty corridors and overladen elevators, sweat, steam, asphalt playgrounds, loneliness, gutter fights and sudden death — but I liked it! In fact it was terrific! I pushed my tongue between her lips as she jerked and twisted helplessly in my arms — I was glad I hadn’t shaved, I was glad it was rough for her! I felt mean and bulky like a bear (partly no doubt because my shirtsleeves were still bunched up inside my jacket) but erotically powerful at the same time. I’ll be goddamned! I thought. This was what I’d been planning to do all along! Fuck all the phony excuses I’d made to myself, this was what I’d come all the way up here for, I’d been bent upon this clinch since I’d fled the Capital, maybe before, maybe since last night already, or out at Burning Tree — this brink, this body, this mouth! And oh, this was a cold mouth to kiss, a ruthless mouth, an exciting mouth, nothing like this back in Whittier, California — I felt I had to hold on just to stay alive! At moments I felt almost swallowed up, lost, disoriented, pursued even — and frightened: what was going to happen to me now? where was this road going? what was I going to tell Pat? how high were the stakes? But I held her all the more tightly, pushing my tongue along her teeth, prying, probing, battering at the gates of her buried soul! And slowly her mouth opened, her struggling subsided, her muffled plaint faded to soft groans, her tongue touched mine, her hand reached for my shoulder, then slid upwards to grip my neck, her body pressed softly against my own, her tongue slithered past my lips, between my teeth — and now there was a new taste, a far richer taste, the fear was gone, the repulsion, the contempt, her lips became sweeter, her mouth widened and new flavors flowed forth, exotic and strange, an incredible variety, all competing with each other, many alien, yet none disagreeable, all beautiful in their diversity. The tart bite of danger was still there, the bitterness of loneliness and ruthlessness, but they were blended now with the delicacy of innocence, the tang of the unexpected, the nutty savor of playfulness, the subtlety of first encounter — in each corner of her mouth I discovered something new, under her tongue, behind each tooth, there seemed no exhausting the possibilities and I relished them all! I roamed the avenues and alleyways of her mouth, tunneled below her tongue, scaled her alveolar ridge, slipped through secret passageways, taxied down her palate, delirious with the joy of it! In my excitement, I felt somewhat like I’d felt when I came down with undulant fever back in high school. Her own tongue now searched wildly through my mouth: I opened myself to her as to no other woman in my life. One of her hands clutched at my neck, scratching at the short bristle above the nape; the other crawled inside my suit jacket, tugged at my shirt — I felt like my very roots were being pulled up! I dropped the homburg and explored her back, her breasts, her hips (I’d been right about the underwear — was this one of the rules for electrocutions?), searched for the slit on the left side of her skirt. I was breathless, desperate to inhale deeply, I pulled back, but now it was she who clung to me, her tongue darting and flashing through my mouth, her lips sucking on mine. I snuffled, snorted in her hair, lovely smell, freshly shampooed — she’d shampooed her hair for her electrocution! — and past her head (how had we got turned around? I saw the electric chair, empty, waiting, built for men twice her size, garishly lit in its bright white room. I seemed to see sparks flying already from the electrodes, but this might have been her hair which was wild and fluttery and getting in my eyes. And the time—? I couldn’t see, but I had the sensation that somehow I was holding it back by holding her. I closed my eyes: my mind seemed to expand, it was as though her hand were kneading it, stretching it, her tongue lapping its edges, her other hand now digging for its root far below. Oh what a mind! I hardly recognized it! It was full of hidden memories, astonishing thoughts, I’d never seen it like this before, a vast moving darkness and brilliant flickering pictures, new and strange, called forth by the charged explorations of our mouths and hands. Some were frightening: girls knocked down by fire hoses, men gassed in trenches and run down by police on galloping horses, villagers buried in bomb-rubble, lives blighted by disease and poverty, children monstrously deformed by radiation or eaten up by vermin — yet it was all somehow exciting, I reveled in all this experience and knew it to be good. I grasped Ethel’s bottom and saw the face of a child. He seemed to live in a great city. I couldn’t tell if he was black or white, Mexican, Italian, or Polish, but it didn’t matter. I shared his dreams: he was a poet, a scientist, a great teacher, a proud craftsman. He was America itself, everything we’ve ever hoped to be, everything we’ve dared to dream to be. But he awoke — we both awoke — to the nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair. He failed in school. He ended up on welfare. He was drafted and died in Korea. I saw all this as my tongue roamed behind Ethel’s incisors. I was weeping, but it was as if with joy, because I also saw Grandma Milhous and she was smiling. Why are you nervous? she seemed to be saying. Ethel was clawing through the hair on my chest. The child was reborn. There was peace. My peace and Grandma’s. I was trying to get both of Ethel’s breasts into one hand. I saw the villages rebuilt and the demeaned lives uplifted. I smelled Mom’s hot pies, felt my fingers moving brilliantly on the organ keys, playing “My Rosary,” heard the magical call of faraway train whistles in the night, and it was the sweetest music I’d ever heard. I saw the shackles of work gangs fall away, walls between peoples come tumbling down (I had them both in my hand for a moment, soft and firm and full — One if by land, I thought, two if by sea — then let them slip away, reaching up for her face), slum tenements emptying their multitudes into sunny green meadows. I licked feverishly at Ethel’s bruised lips and tasted fresh hot bread, stroked her throat and smelled the fragrance of roses, explored the cleft between her buttocks and felt a peace and warmth and brotherhood I had not known since those mornings we all huddled around the kitchen stove in Yorba Linda and we were still all alive. I felt I’d reached some new plateau of awareness, of consciousness, things would never be the same again, for me or for anyone else — how glad I was I’d come here! I jerked her hard into my body, trapping her hand between us: I wished to squeeze her heart and soul up into her mouth where I could get my tongue into them. I could no longer see her, I could not even open my eyes, but she had become extraordinarily beautiful, a vision almost medieval in its wholeness and purity — even her dress, wrinkling under my grip, had become soft and flowing like a Greek tunic. I couldn’t even remember the woman who had entered the corridor. The real Ethel Greenglass, childlike and exquisitely lovely — like Audrey Hepburn, I thought, whom I’d just seen on the cover of some magazine, though Ethel’s bottom was softer — had come to the surface and absorbed all other emanations (was this what the dialectics of history was all about? I wondered), and it was I who had called her out, I, Richard Milhous Nixon, who had produced this miracle, my God, I was out of my mind with the ecstasy of it! My head was full of poems and justice and unbelievable end runs. I saw millions of people running to embrace me. I thought: I am making history this evening, not for myself alone, but for all the ages!
We broke at last, gasping, groaning, sucking our battered lips, clutching each other desperately. She buried her head on my shoulder, nibbling frantically at my neck. “Oh, Richard!” she moaned. “You’re so strong, so powerful!” She tangled her fingers in the matted hair on my chest. “I feel so weak!”
I could hardly breathe for the need to, I was afraid I might have an attack of hay fever (girls’ hair often set me off), but all in all I was feeling very good, I won’t say I’d never felt better in my life, because I was already beginning to have worries about how the hell I was going to get out of here and hopefully get her out as well, but I was feeling very good. That she had called me Richard and not Dick moved me deeply. I thought: if I’d taken this direct approach more often, I might have had a lot more fun in life!
My mouth was near her ear. I realized she was waiting for me to say something. All I could think of were some lines from a play I was once in long ago: Gentlemen of the Jury! In a few moments you will be called upon to decide the fate of a woman! Is it in you to understand her? Is it in you to understand the man she loved? Who is on trial in this case? And they weren’t even my lines! “I always… I always used to admire Judge Brandeis!” I gasped. Jesus, where the hell had such a thought come from, I wondered? “And Justice, uh, Cardozo!”
“Oh, Richard!” she cried, and kissed me again. Apparently, I could do nothing wrong. Again our hands roamed, again our tongues played. I was beginning to feel at home in there, beginning to discover some tastes for the second time, and I found I enjoyed this even more than the first. She was panting hotly down my collar, clawing at my shirt and pants, ripping away buttons and safety pins, shredding what was not already shredded. I’d found the slit in the dress. Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between tyranny and freedom, I thought, there are gray areas. “Oh, Richard! You don’t know what it’s been like for me, these two years here…and…and the years before…”
“I know, Ethel. Believe me, I know…”
She gripped me tightly, rubbing her body rhythmically against mine, as though to bring to life that cabbie’s story of her Morse-code bumps and grinds. “I’m not like this! You won’t believe me, but I’ve never kissed any man but Julie in my life! Not seriously!”
“I believe you,” I whispered. “I… I haven’t either!” I pulled her close to me. “Kissed a woman, I mean.”
“Oh, Richard! What’s happening to us?”
I remembered crossing upstage a step, then again facing the jury. This was not The Trysting Place or The Dark Tower. It was not The Little Accident. This was the Night of January 16th and I was the Prosecuting Attorney, kindly in appearance but shrewd in manner. Backstage, Pat was watching me. A few months ago, that well-known figure stood with kingdoms and nations in one hand and a whip in the other. Then why should he commit suicide?
“It’s so strange…waiting to die,” Ethel said softly. It was incredible this rapport, this perfectly reflected image, it made shivers run up and down my spine. Or maybe that was her fingernail. But there was another, one whom fate had sent him for his salvation…. “I never dreamed…anything like this…”
“Listen, Ethel, maybe we can still—”
“Did you think you’d be Vice President of the United States one day?”
“What?”
“When you were a little boy, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?”
“Uh…a railroad engineer. But, Ethel—”
“I thought I was going to be a singer. A famous singer. I really believed that!”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“You know?”
“Yes. Later I wanted to be a lawyer in New York and I was in New York the night you met Julie. I was looking for a job. We might have found each other that night. Things might have been different.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be anything but what you are, Richard! I envy you your power. Your majesty. You are a great man, and I…”
“But I always wanted to be free. I wanted to be a bum.”
“I wanted to be a great actress. I dreamed of going to Hollywood. I would have had to struggle, work in soda fountains, take bit parts — but in the end everybody would have loved me. We might have met there. I might have got a job in your home town.”
“I… I gave a speech in Hollywood once. Darryl Zanuck said it was the most tremendous performance he’d ever seen.”
“Yes. I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“I was accepted for the Schola Cantorum. I was the youngest voice the choir had ever had. But I couldn’t go on tour because I couldn’t leave my job, my mother wouldn’t—” Suddenly, she burst into tears, began weeping helplessly on my shoulder.
“Ethel! My God! What is it?”
“Somebody…somebody came…” She could hardly get it out, she was breaking my heart with the struggle: “…to measure me today!”
“What? To measure—?”
“They said…they said it was for a wax museum! Oh, Richard!” She was sobbing uncontrollably now, trembling violently all over.
“Ethel…that’s…that’s terrible!” And I began to cry as well. Real tears!
“I don’t want …I don’t want to die!”
“I don’t want you to die either, Ethel!” I sobbed. It was like a dam-burst, all falling out of me. We were clutching each other desperately, completely dissolved in tears. I don’t know how we stayed on our feet. “It’s terrible! I can’t stand thinking about it!”
She squeezed me more tightly than ever. “You won’t die, Richard! Don’t be afraid!”
“Two of my brothers died!” I bawled. “I always thought… I would be next!”
“Oohh!” she wailed. “Brothers! Don’t talk about brothers!”
“It nearly killed my mother, trying to keep my brother alive! And then he died anyway!”
“My mother made fun of me! She said there was no place in life for arty people! She sent me out to work!”
“She was cruel to you!”
“She took my money! She hated me!”
“My mother sent me away to live with my aunt! She — she didn’t want me!”
“Oh, Richard!”
“Once I went all the way to Arizona to — to clean the horsepoop out of stables just to be with her and she didn’t appreciate it!”
“My mother wouldn’t let me take music lessons!”
“I nearly died of pneumonia!”
“I have terrible backaches!”
“I get hay fever in September!” We looked into each other’s faces. Tears were streaming down our cheeks. “Oh, Ethel! You’re so — so understanding!”
“Hold me close, Richard! I feel cold! Warm me with your warmth!”
We kissed again. This time languorously, purposefully, intently. The sweet salt of tears mingled with the now-familiar taste of our lips. I thought: all strength lies in giving, not taking. I wanted to serve. We held each other’s hands. In this long chaste embrace, I felt an incredible new power, a new freedom. Where did it come from? Uncle Sam? The Phantom? Both at once? From neither, I supposed. There was nothing overhead any more, I had escaped them both! I was outside guarded time! I was my own man at last! I felt like shouting for joy!
We separated. We stared at each other through our tears. We laughed. We hugged each other, stared, laughed again. We pecked playfully at each other’s lips. We patted each other’s bottoms. We rubbed noses. It was a bit prominent her nose. Of course. I liked it though: so different from Pat’s.
She cocked her head to one side and grinned. “You’ve got a funny nose,” she said. We laughed and laughed.
“I’ve never been able to let my hair down with anyone before,” I said. I licked her lips, kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her throat, caressed her breasts. “I’ve always been afraid of seeming square. But with you it’s not like that — I feel I can talk about anything with you!”
“Yes,” she said, and squeezed me happily. “I’ve always been afraid of seeming weak. Why can’t people let other people just be what they are?”
“People are always sweating about their image instead of about loving other people. Why can’t we all talk to each other, just say what we feel?”
She kissed my throat, nibbled my earlobe. “You’re so serious-minded, so sincere, Richard, I could eat you in sheer extremity of feeling!” she whispered huskily.
We kissed again. Passionately this time, and now that train was passing through Yorba Linda again, or was still passing, was forever passing and whistling, it was beautiful, I had a very warm and heartaching feeling about it, I was waving at it, the engineer was smiling and waving back, it was Herbert Hoover, I was also the engineer, smiling and waving, guiding my train through lands new, exotic, verdant, vast, my hand sure on the throttle. Everywhere I went people cheered and waved. I could actually hear them cheering! Aunt Edith. Tom Dewey. Chief Newman. Foster and Allen and Moneybags Wunder: I saw them as we went hooting past! Clickety-clock! clickety — all this motion… What was I—? “Ethel!” I gasped, breaking away, nuzzling behind her ear, trying to catch my breath. “We have to get out of here somehow! We have to think of something to tell the Warden!”
She gave me a tremulous hug, shook her head. “No,” she said breathlessly. “They’d never let me go now. Just hold me for a few more minutes. I’ve been so lonely. I don’t feel lonely any more.”
“But, Ethel, we could make something up, you could tell them you were drugged or brainwashed or your children would be murdered if you didn’t—”
“Did you like my letters?” she asked dreamily.
“What? What?”
“Didn’t you read—?”
“Yes! Yes, they were beautiful, Ethel! Like everything about you!” Should we use the Warden as a hostage? Or just tell him she’d confessed and walk right out? Hide somewhere until it all blows over? I glanced about but everything was bare and exposed. “And, uh…your poetry! I liked your poetry, too!”
“Do you like poetry?” she whispered, holding me close.
“I’ve… I’ve always had a feeling for literature,” I said. I knew I had to keep thinking, but it was hard to think with her tongue in my ear. “Plays especially. I’ve written some. Uh…one or two — I just had a new idea for one last night! It was—”
“You could write the plays and I could act in them! I could even sing!”
“Yes! Yes, it’s not too late!” I cried. “We’re still young, Ethel!” A vast new panorama seemed to be opening up before my eyes. We could go away! to Mexico! — the South Pacific! Why not? We looked at each other, our faces began to twist up — and we burst into tears again. Now we were both sobbing frantically, hanging on to each other for dear life. “Oh, Ethel!” I wept. “We’ve got to — we’ve got to do something!”
“It’s no use!” she bawled.
I knew deep in my heart she was right, but I didn’t want to seem to believe it. “There’s…there’s still time…!”
She was weeping as if she could never stop, her tears running down my neck in a flood. Her hand was under my shirt and trying to squeeze down behind past my belt. I was sobbing in her hair, clutching at it with one hand (a bald spot! no, shaved! for the electrode! oh my God!), clinging to her bottom with the other. I felt like Aeneas, throwing himself on Dido’s bier. I sucked in my stomach so she could push her hand down another inch or so.
“Oh, Ethel! I’d do anything for you!” I sobbed. “If we could only—!”
“Richard!” she gasped, pulling back, her dark eyes flashing through the tears. “Richard, please! You can do something! You must!”
“Yes! Yes, I—!”
“You must take me! Here!”
“Ye — what?”
“Now! Before I die! Give me a chance! It’s the one thing you can do for me!”
“But…but—here—?”
“Quickly! We only have a few minutes!”
“But what if the Warden—”
“We’ve still got time! He said thirty minutes!”
“He did?”
“Hurry!” she gasped. “Now!” She was tearing at my belt. “I’ll help you!” she whispered, and it sent fresh shivers up and down my spine. I tried to help, too, not knowing what else to do. Certainly I was ready if it came to it and if I could be quick enough… I usually was…nobody would ever know…“Two whole years, Richard! Two whole years!”
Our fingers were hopelessly engangled at the buckle. “Try…try to rush things…,” I wheezed.
It fell out through my broken fly then, as big as I’d ever seen it, throbbing like the breast of a wounded bird. I hardly recognized it. She slapped my hands away from the buckle playfully and unhooked it, whipped the belt apart, snapped my pants down to my ankles. She tried to pull them off my feet, but they were getting tangled. “We haven’t a minute to lose!” she cried, glancing anxiously over her shoulder. “Hurry! Get them off!”
“But, but—!”
“You’re not going fast enough, Richard! Get them off!”
“Th-they’re caught on my shoes!” I cried. Damn it, I was doing my best! I seemed to hear my mother getting me ready for school. You’re going to be late!
Ethel tried to help, but the pants were getting hopelessly knotted up. We were staggering about, slapping up against the walls and radiators (fortunately they were turned off), but the goddamn pants would not come off.
I sat down. The bare waxed floor felt cold and hostile to my bum. But I was still terribly excited. I wanted her to do again what she’d been doing just before. “Give a pull!” I shouted.
“We’ll never make it!” she whimpered, hauling frantically on my pants, pulling them inside out and bouncing me around the corridor on my rump in a screeching rubbery skid.
“Hey! Ethel! Ow!” I felt like I was on some kind of awful carnival ride. I was afraid of getting blisters. “You’re hurting me—!”
She caught her breath suddenly, spun toward the door. “We’re too late!” she gasped.
“Oh no!” I cried. “What is it?”
“Can’t you hear it?” It sounded like distant chains rattling. “It’s the other prisoners banging their tin cups on their bars! They’re coming! They’re coming to take me away!”
I scrambled clumsily to my feet — they’d got crossed somehow in the tangle of pants and I kept tipping over. “Help me, Ethel! What am I going to do?!”
“Quick!” she whispered. “It doesn’t matter about me! You must save yourself!” She clutched my arm, looked about wildly, spied the open door. “In there!” she cried, and pushed me toward the execution chamber. “It’s your only chance!”
I didn’t argue, I could hear the rattling getting louder, I hobbled and stumbled toward the door with her, hauling at my pants. “Well, it is…it is important for the nation…!” I stammered. She seemed to be rubbing something on my behind. “What are you—!?”
“Your bottom’s all filthy,” she explained breathlessly. “I’m just cleaning it off — now hurry! I’ll try to stall them!” She grabbed up my battered homburg and clapped it down around my ears. She must have been standing on it. The sign over the door into the electrocution chamber, I saw, said: ENTER TO GROW IN WISDOM, DEPART BETTER TO SERVE THY COUNTRY AND MANKIND.
The lights dipped. “Oh my God! What—!?”
“They’re testing the dynamos!” she cried. She spun me around, threw her arms about me, held me tight. “Don’t…don’t forget me, Richard!” she gasped.
“Ethel! I don’t know what to…” I could hardly think, the noises had got louder and I could hear footsteps now, marching up toward the far door. “You’ve been…it’s been great — meeting you, I mean!”
She took my face in her hands, kissed it. I was trying not to panic. “You will be a great man,” she said softly, speaking as though she had all the time in the world. “I have faith in you. You will unite the nation and bring peace to mankind. But above all they shall say of you: Richard Nixon was a great lover!” She kissed me again, long and passionately. “You need a shave,” she said with a shy smile, and tweaked my peter gently. There was a tear in her eye.
“Ethel!” I was afraid I was going to start crying again. I was trying to remember the lines of that play she was in. “Ethel, remember, the valiant die many — I mean, the valiant, uh, taste of death — damn it, I’ve forgotten it!” I could hear keys being shoved into the locks of the door at the other end of the corridor. The autopsy room, I thought! I can hide in there!
“Cowards die many times before their deaths,” she said, “the valiant never taste of death but once.” Was there something caustic in her tone? It came to me as though through an echo chamber. I felt terrible that I’d muffed the line.
“Ethel, forgive me!” I pleaded, backing away. I was cold and hot all at once and there was a roaring in my ears. I had the strange sensation of a body lying on the floor of the execution chamber, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. Behind Ethel, the door was opening!
I was afraid she might reach out, pull me back, try to kiss me again — she just couldn’t seem to get enough! But instead she only grinned sheepishly and winked. “I’ll be thinking of you, Richard,” she said. They were coming in behind her. I ducked back out of sight, reflecting that a man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life’s mountaintop experiences: only in losing himself does he find himself.
JACK: Now let’s see, there
must be something here in these letters I can use for the contest…
(Welcoming applause.)
JACK: A thousand dollars for first prize! I’ve got to choose something that — ah! here’s what I’m looking for: “An eternity of time is crawling along and it seems we’re in a bottomless pit with no connection to reality…” Hmmm…
DENNIS: Hello, Mr. Benny! Did you get stuck down in your vault again?
JACK: Oh, hello, Dennis…
(Laughter and welcoming applause.)
JACK: No, I did not get stuck in my vault, I was just practicing my lines for — Dennis! Why on earth are you dressed up like a cowboy? And what are you doing with that silly hat on your head?
DENNIS: Hat?
JACK: Yes, with that…that cherry on top!
(Laughter.)
DENNIS: Oh, that’s not a hat, Mr. Benny, that’s a pie crust! I’m going to enter a contest!
JACK: What contest?
DENNIS: A Tom Mix Pie contest!
(Laughter.)
JACK: A Tom Mix Pie contest! Well, I never—!
DENNIS: Bang, bang, yummy, yummy, Mr. Benny!
(Laughter, whistles, enthusiastic applause.)
DENNIS: Are you going to the contest, Mr. Benny?
JACK: Well, yes…yes, I am, Dennis. But I’m going to do a more dramatic reading, something on the order of John Barrymore…
DENNIS: Playing it for laughs, hunh?
(Laughter and applause.)
JACK: Now, stop that, Dennis, that’s quite enough—!
DENNIS: Well, I gotta go now, Mr. Benny! Betty Crocker’s waiting for me…
JACK: Betty Crocker—!
DENNIS: Yes, she’s gonna help me with my crusts, Mr. Benny. My top crust’s light and flaky, but my bottom’s a bit soggy—
JACK: Dennis—!
(Laughter, whistles, prolonged applause.)
DENNIS: So long, Mr. Benny! I’ll see you at the contest!
(Farewell applause.)
JACK: That boy! A Tom Mix Pie — that’s the silliest thing I ever heard of! It was a cute costume though…
(Light laughter.)
Probably I ought to have something…hmmm…what do spies wear, I wonder…? Oh, Rochester! Where is that—? Rochester!
ROCHESTER: Heah, boss!
(Welcoming applause.)
JACK: Rochester… Rochester, go get me those old wire-rimmed glasses, and my black gloves and…let’s see…a black eyepatch, and my old trench coat!
ROCHESTER: Trench coat? You ain’t got no trench coat, boss!
JACK: Of course I have! The one I wore in the war!
ROCHESTER: They didn’t have no trench coats in the Spanish-American War, boss!
(Laughter.)
JACK: NOW cut that out, Rochester, and go get my trench coat! The Spanish-American War—!
MARY: What coat is that, Jack?
JACK: Oh, hello, Mary…
(Welcoming applause.)
You know, Mary, the one I wore in the war…
MARY: With the gold buttons and fancy shoulder boards?
JACK: That’s right. You see, Rochester? Mary remembers the coat! Now, you—
MARY: The one that had ‘Remember the Maine!’ stitched on the collar…
(Laughter.)
JACK: Yes, it — what?
MARY: Oh, Jack, I gave that coat away to a poor old man during the last Depression!
JACK: You…gave it away?
(Laughter.)
MARY: Yes — in fact, look out there: isn’t that your coat that old panhandler is wearing?
JACK: Hmmm…yes. Well, it does look like my coat at that…
(Laughter.)
Oh, Rochester!
ROCHESTER: Yeah, boss?
JACK: Rochester, go give that man a dime and make him give you my coat back!
ROCHESTER: A whole dime, boss? Ain’t you gittin’ a little loose wit’ your change?
(Laughter.)
JACK: It’s worth it, Rochester — if I wear that coat, I’m sure to win the thousand dollars!
ROCHESTER: Well, okay, boss…
JACK: And Rochester… Rochester, tell the man that if I win the prize I’ll give him…well, I’ll… I’ll let him have the coat back!
(Laughter.)
ROCHESTER: Yassuh, boss!
JACK: Providing…
ROCHESTER: Yeah, boss?
JACK: Providing he gives me my dime back!
Out front, a hundred million mouths open wide, a hundred million sets of teeth spring apart like dental exhibits, a hundred million bellies quake, and a hundred million throats constrict and spasm, gasp and wheeze, as America laughs. At much the same things everybody laughs at everywhere: sex, death, danger, the enemy, the inevitable, all the things that hurt about growing up, something that Americans especially, suddenly caught with the whole world in their hands, are loath to do. What makes them laugh hardest, though, are jokes about sexual inadequacy — a failure of power — and the cruder the better, for crudity recalls their childhood for them: the Golden Age. Grandpa Jones delivering lines to Cousin Minnie Pearl about dammed-up passions cracks them up. So does Stan Laurel telling Oliver Hardy (sitting deadly serious in the electric chair with his suit and derby on and one of Ethel’s skirts stretched around his fat belly, split ludicrously down one side) in his soft singsong voice: “Your smile, Bunny, your warm kiss, your sweet voice and your understanding mind are my greatest treasure and pleasure!” (Oliver winces and glances irritably at Stan on hearing this last phrase, cocks his head thoughtfully, repeating the words under his breath, then resumes his pose…) Or the brash little puppet Charlie McCarthy, nothing but a small polished knurl between his wooden legs, fantasizing doing a Rosenbergs sketch with Marilyn Monroe, in which he slips into her cell at night disguised as the prison chaplain (Mortimer Snerd, the sucker, plays the husband, of course)…
BERCEN: I can’t see one little reason why we should ask Marilyn Monroe to be in this skit with us, Charlie…
CHARLIE: I can see two pretty big ones, Bergen!
BERGEN: (through the laughter) Now, Charlie…!
CHARLIE: Say, Bergen…?
BERGEN: Yes, Charlie?
CHARLIE: That chair works by electricity, doesn’t it?
BERGEN: Yes.
CHARLIE: Well, what’ll happen if it doesn’t kill ’em? They’re only singers, you know, not conductors…
(Laughter and light applause.)
BERGEN: (chuckling loosely) Well, I don’t think you have to worry about that, Charlie. Even if they did survive the chair, there are other ways…
CHARLIE: You mean, there’s more than one way to cook a crook — I mean, juice a goose…!
(Laughter and appreciative applause.)
BERGEN: Yes, Charlie, only twenty-six states use electrocution. Thirteen prefer hanging, and eight use lethal gas.
CHARLIE: I get it, Bergen: you either yoke ’em, choke ’em, or coke ’em!
(Prolonged laughter and applause.)
BERGEN: Yes, that’s the idea, Charlie. But I confess I find it rather depressing to talk about it. Somehow, ever since I passed my fortieth birthday, I—
CHARLIE: Fortieth! The last time you passed forty, Bergen, they were still using Roman numerals!
BERGEN: (through the laughter) Now, Charlie…!
CHARLIE: Well, chin up, Bergen, we all have to go some time.
BERGEN: Yes, I suppose so…
CHARLIE: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, sawdust to sawdust…
BERGEN: (through the loose laughter) Yes, well…
CHARLIE: When it comes my turn, Bergen, I hope they give me a choice. If I gotta croak, I don’t wanna be smoked, broke, soaked, or choked to death!
BERGEN: No? Then how—?
CHARLIE: I wanna be stroked to death, Bergen — by Marilyn Monroe!
BERGEN: (through the uproar) Charlie—!
The naughty boy who gets away with it, the old man who needn’t try, the dumb broad who doesn’t know what’s happened when it’s happened, plus a little danger, a little violence, anticipation and surprise: these are the things that open the Whale’s mouth. As when Buster Keaton, sitting deadpan in the electric chair, calmly turns and throws a custard pie at the Executioner just as he’s about to throw the switch: SPLAT! Some have contended that it was America’s love of pie-throwing that led the nation to develop the atomic bomb. This may or may not be true, but certainly it does help explain the country’s current panic over the possible proliferation of the bombs to unfriendly nations: it’s a cardinal rule of the act that one custard pie leads to another, and he who throws one must sooner or later face one coming from the other direction. Which is what’s happening to Buster Keaton right now, though he seems unaware of it. The Executioner, forgetting his office, has grabbed up another pie and is rearing back to hurl it at Keaton, who has meanwhile settled back in the chair to await, stonily, his electrocution. One foot, however, is loose from its strap, and after thinking about this foot for a moment, Keaton leans forward to buckle it in — just that split second before the pie would have hit him: it hits the prison chaplain instead. Buster, apparently oblivious to what’s happening at either side of him, satisfies himself that his foot is securely buckled to the chair, then sits back once more like a patient bridegroom to await the shock. But now the chaplain has a pie…
While this is going on, the countdown has begun—55 minutes to Zero Hour…54…53—and backstage there is a frenzied shuffling about as Betty Crocker, wielding a soup ladle, lines up all the bigwigs for their Grand Processional. All the major officials who are assigned, according to the Dead Sea statutes, “to attend to the burnt-offerings and the sacrifices, to set out the incense of ‘pleasant savor’ for God’s acceptance, to perform rites of atonement in behalf of His congregation, and constantly to clear away the fat ashes which lie before Him on the ‘table of glory,’” must now be introduced and guided to their respective places, and who better to set this table than America’s matron saint of the kitchen? Sprung full-formed and all buttoned up from the fat fertile head of General Mills in 1936, Betty is everything one would want in a Holy Mother: sober, efficient, old-fashioned, unblemished, bountiful, and the only undoubted virgin in all America (indeed, it’s been said she hasn’t even changed her corset since ’36), as protective as Athena, as merciful and mild as Mary, as resourceful as the pioneer women who settled America — she is, it could be said, their reincarnation. Her name, which sounds like bullfrogs burping on soft prairie nights, suggests crockery, Crockett, rocking chairs, rockets. “Betty” is a down-home version of traditional majesty, a country nickname for the Mother Country’s greatest monarch and now her newest one. A pie, flung from the stage into the wings, slaps the wall inches from her face, causing Cabinet members and their wives to shriek and duck, but Betty, unruffled, only gazes at it with her cool imperturbable blue eyes, sticks a finger in it and tastes the filling: mm, as she suspected, too much cornstarch.
Virtually every significant political figure in the nation is back here tonight, ready to go on, ready to demonstrate their wholehearted enthusiasm for Uncle Sam’s purification-by-fire spectacular…all but a few like Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Black, boycotting the show from his hospital bed, is a lousy loser, just about everybody’s given up on him long ago, but the absence of that old rocking socking Phantom-fighter and Early Warning Sentinel Dick Nixon is a more disturbing matter. Uncle Sam himself, backstage briefly during the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland act, is heard to mutter: “Maybe a boxcar of pussyfooters woulda been better after all!” Which is all Harold Stassen needs: “I say, let’s dump the sonuvabitch! Nobody likes him anyway, he just drags us all down! I don’t want anything for myself, of course — I’m only thinking of what’s good for the country…” This provokes a lot of harsh nervous laughter, and the next time a pie comes flying into the wings, everybody ducks and lets Stassen take it on the snoot.
Out front meanwhile, a lot of famous people have had a go at the prize money, but the performers who steal the show (and anything else they can get their hands on) are the fabulous Marx Brothers. Partly it’s their act, catching the mood of the night; partly it’s the deep affection felt toward these local boys, downtrodden city Jews like the Rosenbergs, but without their crybaby ways; and partly it’s simply the astonishing cartoon resemblance Groucho and Harpo bear to Julius and Ethel — so real that people gasp when they first appear onstage, Harpo (Ethel) sitting in the electric chair and writing desperate letters to Groucho (Julius), which Chico (the Executioner) reads aloud in his Jewish-Italian accent as Groucho goes stalking restlessly about the set in his famous bent-kneed crouch, puffing a cigar and bobbing his eyebrows…
CHICO: “Canna we ever forget da turbulence and struggle, da joy and beauty uvva da early years of our relationship whenna you courted me?”
GROUCHO: I dunno, but we can try…
CHICO: “Togedder we hunted down da answers to alia da seemingly insoluble riddles w’ich a complex and callous society presented.”
GROUCHO: The answer’s a cracked egg.
CHICO: “It’sa because we did’n’ hesitate to blazon fort’ dose answers datta we sit wit’in da wallsa Sing Sing!”
GROUCHO: Loudmouth…
CHICO: “It’sa incredible dat I should sit in a cell inna Sing Sing awaitin’ my own legal murder, after da twelf’ yearsa da kinda principled, connastructive, wholesome livin’ dat we did!”
GROUCHO: It ain’t incredible — that’s the reason!
CHICO: “Incidentally, da clinic doctor he examine my back lasta week and sent a report to da head doctor.”
GROUCHO: Yeah, that’s what you need all right, a head doctor!
The plot of their sketch — if anything the Marx Brothers do can be said to have a plot — turns around the American Government’s offer to commute their death sentences in exchange for information about the spy ring. Harpo can’t talk, of course, being mute, and so is strapped into the electric chair, but Groucho snaps up the offer:
GROUCHO: I’ll name anybody! My mother, my agent, even my mistress!
CHICO: Whatta you sayin’? You ain’ got a misteriss! You ain’ even got a cockyerbine!
GROUCHO: I’ll name her, too!
CHICO: Whatta you gonna name her?
GROUCHO: (singing and rolling his eyes) I think I’ll name her “Jasmine”…
CHICO: Jas’ yours?
GROUCHO: (continuing)… Cuz she’s mighty lak’a rose!
CHICO: Oh, a Pinko, eh? We’re gettin’ to da bottomma dis!
GROUCHO: You been there, too, hunh?
CHICO: She’sa da one what’s stole-a da bum’, eh?
GROUCHO: She didn’t steal it, she was born with it!
CHICO: And she gave it to da Russians?
GROUCHO: She gave it to everybody!
CHICO: Dat’sa terrible! Murder is dwarfed by comparitson!
GROUCHO: Yeah, she gave it to dwarfs, too!
CHICO: She’s gonna get da hot seat for dis!
GROUCHO: That’s no good.
CHICO: No good?
GROUCHO: She’s already got it.
CHICO: Hey, you know somet’in’? I t’ink you gotta somet’in’ to hide!
GROUCHO: Yeah, well, it ain’t nothing to brag about, I admit.
CHICO: Iff a you don’ talk, Mr. Roastenbug, we gonna givva you da chair!
GROUCHO: Okay, don’t bother to wrap it, I’ve got my car.
CHICO: I mean-a you gotta sit in dat chair and face-a da music!
GROUCHO: Face the music! That’s why you call it Sing Sing, hunh?
CHICO: Dat’sa what I say: you gotta face-a da music music!
Harpo meanwhile has been listening to all of this with goggle-eyed astonishment, and now this talk about music has aroused his curiosity. He searches about the chair and finds two loose wires. He holds one of them expectantly up to his ear: he hears nothing. He tries the other: still nothing. He frowns and rolls his eyes. He holds the two wires a few inches apart and sparks fly. He thinks about this a minute, then, smiling idiotically, sticks both wires in his ears at the same time. There’s a buzzing crackling noise and Harpo’s smile spreads. His eyes roll round and round and his lashes flutter. He seems slowly to levitate from the chair, his body aglow. Chico, the Executioner, looks up in alarm. “Hey, whatcha doin’!” he cries, and rushes to the switch to turn off the current. Harpo drops back into the chair. Groucho and Chico lift him out and stand him on his feet. He’s still grinning blissfully, his head lolling about, his eyes crossing and rolling as though unassociated with each other, his feet barely touching the floor. He makes little fluttering motions with his hands to suggest he’s been hearing music. Chico puts his ear to Harpo’s chest to listen to his heart: “It’sa Duh-four-shocksa New Worlt Sinfunny!” he cries in amazement. “It is, hunh?” says Groucho. “Well, put another nickel in, maybe the old one’s on the other side!” He leans his head in under Chico’s to have a listen, but Harpo keels over: his legs and arms twitch and shake, then collapse. “It musta been-a da las’ movement,” says Chico. “Looked more like Madame Butterfly to me!” says Groucho, bobbing his eyebrows.
CHICO: No, I mean-a he kick-a da bucket!
GROUCHO: Bucket? What bucket?
CHICO: (looking around) Ain’t dere a bucket?
GROUCHO: No! Let’s get outa here before they think we stole that, too!
43…42…Uncle Sam comes hurrying out, bobbing his stern white brows and imitating Groucho’s famous stiff-backed ass-to-the-ground stride, to garner the last burst of laughter and applause and shower crisp greenbacks like confetti on the many prize-winners, reminding all present with his freehanded beneficence of America’s greatest asset: her bottomless kitty. Then he rears up straight and tall and hollers out: “Now is the hour, fellers and citizens! Enough of this monkey business! We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” And with a grand wave of his red-white-and-blue plug hat, he brings on a Texas high-school marching band, batons flying, legs kicking, drums rolling, plumes fluttering, to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The people bellow forth, drunk enough now to try the high notes, rapturous tears springing to their eyes, their hearts beating faster…it’s coming now…40…
During the suspenseful “say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave” line, Uncle Sam suddenly whips his top hat high into the air, far out of sight, then dashes backstage, crying out to Betty Crocker: “Okay, get your sweet buns out there, dumplin’, and preparest a table before me in the presents a mine inimies!” He whacks her lovingly on her corseted butt as he flies by, popping all her stays and reminding old-timers in the wings of the slap Teddy Roosevelt laid on his favorite niece, Eleanor, as he gave her away in holy wedlock to the Great I Am, or of crusty Zack Taylor smacking Old Whitey on the rump as he sent him out to pasture on the White House lawn. And then the next time he’s seen is when he comes riding up from behind the crowd, out of the Disney menagerie tent, astride the gigantic GOP elephant, its red-white-and-blue crown studded with spangles that spell out Long Tom Jefferson’s article of faith: WE ARE ALL REPUBLICANS!
Just as the people sing, “What is that which the breeze…half conceals, half discloses,” Uncle Sam reaches far up into the darkening sky and snatches his plug hat as it comes spinning down…
“’Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
Uncle Sam pops his hat back on his head, but it doesn’t sit there — it keeps hopping up and down and seems to have little feet sticking out. He takes it off and peers inside, and with a surprised look on his face plucks out: a dove! the dove of peace! He lets it go — no, not a dove after all, it’s the famous floo-floo bird: there it goes, winging its way backwards over the crowd, squawking raucously and crumpling its tail-feathers on billboards and skyscrapers. The people cheer the bird and shout misdirections at it, fight for the coins spilling out of the pantaloon pockets of Uncle Sam, who’s now doing a handstand on the elephant’s head. The Democrats’ mascot donkey comes trailing behind, evidently excited by all this patriotic brouhaha and so bearing — besides the familiar legend you NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD! stitched on its saddle blanket — a hard-on the size of Mickey Mantle’s baseball bat. As they near the stage, it nearly gets dumped on by the Republican elephant, which chooses just the moment it’s down front to unloose its considerable bowels, making such windy plopping noises you can hardly hear the marching band now playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
ALL HAIL, THOU WESTERN WORLD! BY HEAVEN DESIGN’D
TH’ EXAMPLE BRIGHT, TO RENOVATE MANKIND!
reads the Loew’s State marquee, and down the street the Roxy announces:
A BOUNDLESS VISION GROWS UPON US…
Uncle Sam posts the elephant and donkey at either side of the Sing Sing stage and signals for the Disney Rat Pack. Mickey and Minnie, Goofy, Horace, and the rest take up prearranged aisle positions in support of the Secret Service (still in their papier-mâché heads) and to help direct the VIPs; other pageant figures line up around the periphery of the VIP section; the film crews pan their cameras around to focus on the main entrance, stage left, zooming in, and the band plays Mess Call. Which is the cue for Betty Crocker: she emerges, prim and matronly, wiping her hands on her apron, to introduce, like the ingredients for one of her famous stuffed turkeys, all the Very Important People who have come here tonight to witness the public burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
And while Uncle Sam, using his corncob pipe as a baton, conducts the band in playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” out they come, not marching, but jogging on like tensed-up ballplayers, everybody who’s anybody in the above-board American Power Structure, each one introduced by Betty in her somewhat tremulous old-lady voice (though if anything, it must be said she’s getting younger every day) and welcomed with a rousing “He’s our man!” cheer led by the Indiana University cheerleaders. The first few to lope out pull up momentarily before that unfortunate mound of elephant dung, but since there’s no way around it and no way back, they flash their vote-getting smiles, square their shoulders, and slog on through, and once a path is laid there are no further hesitations. There’s an old panhandler out there, stuffed into a thick wool overcoat like an antique shopwindow dummy from the Great Depression and seemingly rooted to the spot, who’s something of an obstacle, too, but the VIP’s jogging by merely assume he’s some kind of turnstile (couldn’t be real, after all, not in prosperous postwar America) and stuff quarters in as they pass.
The VIP area has been divided into three sections, one each for the three branches of government who together have made these executions possible, with pride of place tonight given to the judiciary, the legislative branch seated to their left and the executive to their right. A special section of box seats, decorated with flags and bunting and exhibits from the trial, has been set aside just in front of the stage for those directly associated with the Rosenberg case: the FBI director and agents who broke the case, the Judge, jury, prosecution team and witnesses, the Attorney General, and a ringside front-and-center seat for President Eisenhower, who’s never been one to settle for a side-aisle pew. The back rows of the three sections are reserved for state and local officials from around the country — legislators, judges, administrators, mayors, National Guard officers, tax collectors, Lieutenant-Governors, sheriffs, and the like — and these are the first to come out, followed by all the auxiliary personnel who serve the three federal branches, all the agencies, bureaus, departments, commissions, institutes, foundations, boards, councils, societies, administrations, appeal and claims courts, funds, organizations, banks, services, systems, committees, national centers, offices, and authorities, and all their staff, counsel, secretaries, chiefs, directors, clerks, treasurers, personnel officers, confidential assistants, managers, commissioners, auditors, recorders, consultants, editors, superintendents, chairmen, military aides, receptionists, curators, and parliamentarians. Next come all the key personnel from the major executive departments attached to Cabinet officers, the federal district judges and senior circuit judges in the appeals courts, and all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a colorful lot, and even plain-spoken self-possessed Betty Crocker gets a certain itchy pleasure out of calling out their names: Laurie Battle! Porque Patten! Zeke Gathings! Rubie Scudder! Jimmy Utt! J. Edgar Chenoweth! Prince H. Preston, Jr.! Gracie Pfost! Hamer Budge! Runt Bishop! Shepard Crumpacker! Errett P. Scrivner! Hale Boggs! Tip O’Neill! Richard B. Wigglesworth! Thaddeus M. Machrowicz! Kit Clardy! Elford A. Cederberg! Dewey Short! Morgan M. Moulder! Norris Cotton! T. Millet Hand! Jack Dempsey! Stuyvesant Wainwright! Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.! Jake Javits! Usher Burdick! James G. Polk! Page Belcher! Sam Coon! Homer D. Angelí! Wally Mumma! L. Mendel Rivers and Gerry Ford! Percy Priest! Olin E. Teague! Homer Thorn-berry! Winston Prouty! Thor C. Tollefson! Harley Staggers! Melvin Laird! Clem Zablocki!
“Gubser! Gubser! he’s our man!
If he can’t do it, Hillings can!
Hillings! Hillings! he’s our man!
If he can’t do it, Yorty can!
Yorty! Yorty…”
“Whoopee-ti-yi-yo!” laughs Uncle Sam, herding them in, “the whole dingbusted United States guvvamint is corraled in here tonight, I see, everybody from the guinea pigs at Disease Control to the coffee steward at the Pentagon! It’s a real smorgasbord! Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity, and a appetizin’ lot they are, too!” Then he suddenly starts and glances up at the sky, lost beyond the bright lights and hovering smog of Times Square. “God damn that tarnacious Phantom if he lets one fly tonight!” he mutters, and a collective gasp shakes the Square. Could it happen? “What am I sayin’? Anything he can do I can do better! I yam strong as the breezes w’ich blows down big treeses, so c’mon, get on with it, punkin, dish ’em up! In skatin’ over thin ice our safety is in our speed!”
Nobody knows better than Betty Crocker the importance of proper timing in laying a good table, so she rushes on, bringing out the ninety-six Senators now and all their spouses and children: Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama, Carl Hayden and Barry Goldwater of Arizona, John McClellan and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, William Knowland and Thomas Kuchel of California, Edwin Johnson and Eugene Millikin of Colorado, Prescott Bush and William Purtell of Connecticut, John J. Williams and J. Allen Frear of Delaware, Spessard Holland and George Smathers of Florida, Walter George and Richard B. Russell of Georgia, Henry Dworshak and Herman Welker of Idaho, Paul Douglas and Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, Homer Capehart and William Jenner of Indiana, Bourke Hickenlooper and Guy Gillette of Iowa, Andrew Schoeppel and Frank Carlson of Kansas, Earle Clements and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, Allen Ellender and Russell B. Long of Louisiana, Margaret Chase Smith and Frederick Payne of Maine, John Butler and J. Glenn Beall of Maryland, Leverett Saltonstall and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Homer Ferguson and Charles Potter of Michigan, Edward J. Thye and Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi, Thomas Hennings and Stuart Symington of Missouri, James Murray and Mike Mansfield of Montana, Hugh Butler and Dwight Griswold of Nebraska, Pat McCarran and George Malone of Nevada, Styles Bridges and Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, H. Alexander Smith and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey, Dennis Chavez and Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, Irving Ives and Herbert Lehman of New York, Clyde Hoey and Willis Smith of North Carolina, William Langer and Milton Young of North Dakota, Robert Taft and John Bricker of Ohio, Robert Kerr and Mike Monroney of Oklahoma, Guy Cordon and Wayne Morse of Oregon, Edward Martin and James Duff of Pennsylvania, Theodore Francis Green and John Pastore of Rhode Island, Burnet Maybank and Olin Johnston of South Carolina, Karl Mundt and Francis Case of South Dakota, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee, Lyndon B. Johnson and Price Daniel of Texas, Arthur Watkins and Wallace Bennett of Utah, George Aiken and Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Harry Byrd and Willis Robertson of Virginia, Warren Magnuson and Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington, Harley Kilgore and Matthew Neely of West Virginia, Alexander Wiley and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, and Lester Hunt and Frank Barrett of Wyoming.
“Oh, when the saints go marchin’ in,
When the saints go marchin’ in,
Oh, I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marchin’in…!”
Naturally, with the entire American constituency out there as an eager audience, each one of these handsome screamers aches for a shot at the microphones as he goes galumphing grandly across the stage, past the electric chair, and down—thunk! splot! — into the elephant patties, but Styles Bridges, the President Pro Tempore and a respecter of hallowed traditions, limits the privilege to a few heroic whoopees from the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips and a blown kiss and a blessing from the Senate Elders: George, Hayden, Russell, Byrd, and McCarran. Not that this stops the precocious junior Senator from Wisconsin — Joe McCarthy doesn’t give a shit for protocol, but grabs the mike out of Bridges’ hand (some say they saw Bridges hand it to him) and lets rip with a rampagious spate of old-fashioned, breast-beating, salt-boiler drolleries: “No one can push me out of anything!” he cries, and Bridges winks as though to say: You better believe it! “I’m not retiring from the field of exposing left-wingers, New Dealers, radicals and pinkos, egg-sucking phony liberals, Communists and queers! That fight can’t abate on my part or yours until we’ve won the war, or our civilization has died!” Promising the revelation of “a conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men,” he announces hundreds of investigations that he plans to launch before the year is out into the State Department with its “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line,” the information- and teacher-exchange programs, East-West trade, the Government Printing Office, the defense industry, the Army Signal Corps (the Rosenberg spy-ring story isn’t over yet! he hints darkly), and even the Army itself: “I am going to kick the brains out of anyone who protects Communists!” The other Senators are made green with envy and flushed with embarrassment at the same time by all this public hyperbole, but the crowds love it, and even Uncle Sam seems reluctant to shut him up. Finally Joe himself remarks on all the time-wasting here tonight and demands that they get on with it: “It’s a dirty, foul, unpleasant, smelly job, but it has to be done! A rough fight is the only fight Communists understand!” He leaps gleefully down into the shit, getting a tremendous ovation — it’s a real pick-up, without him the show had begun to stall.
But time, inexorably, has been ticking away: there’s less than half an hour now to 8:01. The remaining speeches have to be scrapped and, except for the box-seat guests of honor, the rest of the VIPs — including all the senior magistrates, top military brass, forty-eight State Governors, and the official, unofficial, kitchen, golf, poker, and bedroom Cabinets, and all their families and dogs — have to come barreling out on the double, Betty Crocker, reeling off the names, sounding like one of those new slow-speed records on an ordinary turntable. Only Foster Dulles is given a brief moment at the microphone to release a few lugubrious epigrams from the doctrines of Massive Retaliation, Liberation of Captive Peoples, and Faith in Christ Jesus and the Future of Human Freedom, just to remind the citizens what these executions tonight are all about and to give Uncle Sam time to slip off and shazam himself into the President, but the rest go whipping by like tracer bullets. Betty Crocker’s voice now is just a shrieking whir of sound, like an electric beater churning through a fast-thickening pastry dough, as they come streaking out en masse, slipping and sliding, elbowing and punching, thundering right over poor Betty, scrambling frantically for their seats like they’re afraid somebody’s going to take them away from them. Most of them are well winded by the exercise, they’re not used to moving this fast, the judges especially, who are additionally handicapped by their long robes, ripping them on the doorjambs as they shoot out from the wings, tripping and falling over them, having to lift them like skirts to tippytoe at full gallop through the elephant droppings. By the time old Fred Vinson, the Supreme Court Chief Justice, hits the shit, it’s much heated up by the frenetic parade and slick as a greased skillet: woops! down he goes! He picks himself up hastily and—zzzipp! whap! — he’s down again. He proceeds more methodically the next time, placing first one foot under him, then the other, rising slowly…his feet slowly slide apart, he gropes for balance and pulls them together again, they spread fore and aft, he tips, rights himself, he’s running in place, clawing for air, he’s on one foot, the other, neither—SPLAT! His old crony Justice Tom Clark rushes to his aid, only to find himself skidding, slithering, pitching out of control, and landing with a mighty—look out, Fred! — ker-FLAP! on the Chief Justice’s hoary head, just as the old fellow was lifting himself on his hands and knees out of the muck. “That damn fool from Texas,” laughs Harry Truman. With the very honor and dignity of the United States Supreme Court at stake, Justices Robert Jackson and Sherman Minton come bounding to the rescue, as Clark and Vinson, leaning on each other, heads together as though in an embrace, butts out for balance, slowly straighten up — cautiously, hanging on, they turn to look toward their seats and what do they see but Jackson and Minton, faces white with panic and feet back-peddling frantically, bearing down on them—CRASH! they’re all down, wheeling around in the mire like the spinners of children’s board games, piling up in a heap finally under the Death House stage. They glance blearily at each other, count themselves, blanch, and duck — and sure enough, here they come: Stanley Reed and Harold Burton, feet flying, robes fluttering, arms outflung and grabbing at space — WHACK! SPLAT! Ker-SMASH! When the shit clears, the six Justices arc seen, exhausted and blinded by the muck, floundering aimlessly on their hands and knees. Dwight Eisenhower, peeping out from the wings, utters a short cry—“Christ on the mountain! what arc those monkeys doing?”—and disappears again.
Standing there backstage with his wife and sons, waiting for the three ritual knocks that will announce his second (formal) entrance as a special guest of honor, Judge Irving Kaufman has been pondering the rewards of virtue and high office, and the essentially — indeed, necessarily — divine origin of the concept of Law, and it occurs to him now, looking out on this scene and listening to one of the prison doctors beside him practicing his lines for later in the show (“I pronounce this man dead… I pronounce this woman dead… I pronounce…”), that it might behoove him to play a part in this rescue, for even if he failed and joined the rest of them down there in the dreck, it might not be the worst thing that ever happened to him. But just as he steps out, unannounced, onto the stage, he hears somebody, far off in the mob, shout his name. Eh—?! The man comes tearing through the jam-up, past the Rat Pack and pageant figures guarding the perimeter (it’s a piece of the Wild West he breaks through), and right into the VIP section. The man — it’s that damned interloping defense lawyer Dan Marshall from Nashville, up to his tricks again! — charges straight down the aisle and up to the foot of the stage: “A writ of habeas corpus!” he cries. “Hear my plea!”
The Boy Judge, unsure whose body is about to be had, turns back in retreat toward the wings, but sees there Attorney General Herb Brownell gesturing frantically, glancing nervously over his shoulder, urging Kaufman to stall until Uncle Sam gets back. “All right,” says Kaufman, trying to keep his knees from knocking together, “get along with your argument, there isn’t much time!”
“Please, try to delay the execution until I complete my argument,” cries Marshall. “It’d be terrible if I could convince Your Honor that you should grant the application and it would be too late!”
Kaufman sees through the crude tactics: a delay past sundown and the executions are not merely postponed until Monday but will have to be completely rescheduled. Which would give them time to fabricate more appeals, and who knows? the state the Supreme Court’s in right now, they might be too lame to sit for a year! “It is unfair to put that kind of burden on a judge,” he complains. “I’m aware of the tragedy involved. Now get on with it.”
While he beats off Marshall’s desperate rhetoric, he sees other defense lawyers pouring through the hole in the line at the boundaries of the VIP section—“We are counsel for the Rosenbergs! We must get through! It is an emergency!”—and squeezing into the VIP seats, grabbing at circuit judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals. Emanuel Bloch has spied Herb Brownell peeking out from the wings — he tries to scramble up onto the stage to reach him, but he’s too clumsy and all he’s getting is slivers for his pains. Brownell, insulted once too often by Bloch, refuses even to acknowledge his presence, strolling out onstage once to look out over his head and step on his fingers. Some pro-Rosenberg demonstrators have leaked through, too — Judge Kaufman’s one abiding passion has been his hatred of quasilegal pressure groups, some of his best work had been his investigation of lobbying for Tom Clark when Clark was Attorney General, and now he feels that anger welling up in him again. They’re running about through the VIP section, dodging Secret Service agents and Rat Packers, distributing “fact” sheets and clemency petitions, accusing Uncle Sam of premeditated murder, and shouting disruptive slogans like “No Secret to the A-Bomb!” and “They were convicted by the atmosphere and not by the evidence!”
Which latter is Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s notorious opinion on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and Frankfurter, perhaps flattered by this recognition, steps back from the edge of the elephant turds where he’d been about to tiptoe in and offer a helping hand to the other six, and now joins, however belatedly, Justices Douglas and Black in dissenting against yesterday’s majority opinion on the stay of execution: “Can it be said,” he asks, “that there was time to go through the process by which cases are customarily decided here?” A rhetorical question, but anyway it saves him a nasty fall. Back in the VIP seats for the House of Representatives, Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter remarks idly to a couple of his colleagues that he thinks the Supreme Court erred yesterday, having taken jurisdiction when “nothing was before it.” Justice Douglas’s act was legal and under the law the whole case now had to be returned to the lower courts, whence it must come back to the full Supreme Court via District and Appeals Courts. Walter assumes he is off-mike, but by a quirk in the acoustical system, his voice carries out over the masses and all the way up to Central Park: ‘“There is absolutely nothing in the act of 1925 that gives the Supreme Court authority to review the action of one of its Justices acting under the statutes!”
The people are getting edgy. They’d thought at first this was part of the show and had laughed at the lawyers, supposing they were clowns in disguise, but now it’s clear that something is wrong. Where is the President? Where is Uncle Sam? The Vice President? J. Edgar Hoover or Cecil B. DeMille? Nothing but confusion up there — even Judge Kaufman (what’s he doing out there on the stage?) seems unsure of himself. More demonstrators are pushing into the VIP section and others are circulating out among the common people — how did they penetrate the defenses so easily? wasn’t Monaghan supposed to contain these elements down in the ghetto somewhere? where’s the Army? where’s the National Guard? why is Betty Crocker out flat on her ass? “This is the hour of our country’s shame!” some guy is yelling. “No government has such a record of legal murders and legal lynchings as the Government of the United States in the past seven years!” There are rumors of FBI forgeries in the atom-spy trial and stacked decks, perjured witnesses. “We are here to proclaim that if the Rosenbergs die, it will be the most brutal murder ever committed in America!” they scream, seizing the microphones. “They are not traitors! It is those who want to kill them who are traitors to America!”
Distantly, out at the edge, there’s a strange clackety noise, starting softly, getting louder: what is it? The prisoners banging their tin cups on their bars! rattling the gates of their cages in protest! To the frightened crowds in the Square, huddling toward the center, it sounds like the Phantom himself shaking his death chains! The Phantom’s spectral image seems to appear, not only on door knockers like old Morley’s in A Christmas Carol, but everywhere they look: in skyscraper windows, in the shadows behind the bright lights, under the stage, in the bottles they drink from! The angry clatter is punctuated by remote but heavy whumps! — foreign A-bomb tests! Spreading over the earth like smallpox! News reports ratatat against the periphery of the crowd like the firing of Sten guns: riots in Liverpool, Toronto, and Turin! the American Embassies besieged in Rome and Paris and Ottawa! a port strike in Genoa in protest against the executions! firing squads in East Berlin! prayer vigils for the Rosenbergs in Iceland and Israel! plane crashes and battle casualties! ten thousand Communists are massing up to riot in Munich! screams of “Murder!” from rioters running amok through the streets of Melbourne and London! Copenhagen and Birmingham! there are reports of Mau Maus, Vietminh, Gooks, Arabs trying to break through at the rim, to get in! to get what we’ve got! “You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb!” cries a French voice above all the rest. It is Jean-Paul Sartre! “Magic, witch hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices: your country is sick with fear! Do not be astonished if we cry out from one end of Europe to the other: Watch out! America has the rabies! Cut all ties which bind us to her, otherwise we will in turn be bitten and run mad!” The French indeed seem to be going berserk: crackly on-the-scene radio reports say they’re running wildly through the streets of Paris, carrying big posters of Eisenhower flashing his famous smile but with each tooth an electric chair! “We are in the midst of a cold war,” remarks Bernard Baruch dryly to a couple of the Presidents sitting beside him, his hand in his pocket, resting on his billfold as on the butt of a six-shooter, “which is getting warmer…”
A new figure, ragged and wild-eyed, now bursts into the VIP section, leaps up on a concrete balustrade, and commences to rant: “If you are happy about the Rosenbergs, then you are rotten to the core!” It’s that Russian-born Red vagrant from L.A. who caused the day’s delay, I.I. Edelman! People laugh at him and throw empty bottles, but they’re frightened, too!
Julius Rosenberg’s bespectacled old mother, Sophie, is pitching about in a fit of incoherent anguish! Other women are falling to their knees and sobbing and praying and beating their breasts!
The people glance up in anxiety at the clock on the Paramount Building: 19:41! Just 20 minutes to Zero Hour!
The pageant actors try to do something about all this, but fall into arguments as to which of them are Secret Service agents and which not! Some of the iconic Buckskin Militiamen, Sharecroppers, and Prohibitionists are getting hard to handle!
In the confusion, the National Rosenberg Committee has somehow managed to push an entire Clemency Float through the mobs and into the VIP aisles — or maybe they’ve smuggled the pieces in and assembled it here! It rolls toward the stage, carrying blow-ups of suppressed evidence, banners declaring the innocence of the Rosenbergs, pictures of the soon-to-be-orphaned sons, and signs that read FRAME-UP! and CLEMENCY MISTER PRESIDENT! People close their eyes, look the other way, scream for the police, or take a stiff blinding jolt from the bottles of booze still being passed around, trying to ignore the disruptions.
General Douglas MacArthur, all spit-and-polish in his full battle dress, molded hat, sun goggles, and medals, decides that enough is enough and marches forward to take over and bring some order to this society, but he hesitates at the edge of the elephant dung: the Justices are still wallowing about in there, up to their thighs and elbows in the muck, unable to see which way they’re going, bumping into each other like pigs around the feeding trough, it is not an attractive sight. The General stands there, at the water’s edge, so to speak, smoking his corncob pipe and musing on the inelegance of democracies. Harry Truman watches him and laughs, which makes the General’s neck go red.
Behind him, crowned with laurel leaves and gliding like statues on wheels, come the renegade scientists Albert Einstein and Harold Urey, exploding the “secret weapon” issue and casting doubt on the trial verdict. The Red Parson, Dr. Bernard Loonier, leaps through the disintegrating defenses with a clemency petition, shouting: “The death sentence in this instance is an indication of our national weakness rather than our national strength! It is a reflection of our own growing hysteria, fear and insecurity!” He’s clobbered with a dead cat by a Salem Witch and stuffed down an open manhole by a gang of soused-up examiners from the Patent Office, but no sooner is he popped down than Reverend Henry Hitt Crain, the fellow-traveling Methodist preacher from Detroit, pops up: “It implies an altogether unworthy capitulation to the hysterical temper of the times and reveals a recreant willingness to resort to ‘scapegoat’ devices to appease the homicidal urges of crowd compulsion!” For Christ’s sake, the people cry, who let these dingdongs in here? What’s Herbert Philbrick doing? Where is Norman Vincent Peale, now that we need him?
18 minutes to go! General MacArthur sighs wistfully, knocks the ashes out of his corncob pipebowl, turns, and fades away, kicking Truman on the shins as he passes. “Dumb son of a bitch!” yelps Harry.
The defense lawyer Manny Bloch has collared the Assistant White House Press Secretary Murray Snyder: “Has the Court’s last decision or Ethel’s letter been read personally by the President?” he demands.
“It’s…it’s not my function to ascertain this,” stammers Snyder.
“Damn it!” roars Bloch in a red-faced rage, “people are going to die!” 17…! “Make it your function!”
Through the Square, the electric lights dip ominously!
The drum majorettes in the Texas marching band squeal with fright and leap into the arms of the boys in the band, hug them close!
Snyder falls back in alarm!
Whiskey bottles drop and crash!
The packed-up mob flinches, squeezing out of itself an airy moaning wheeze, compounded of gasps, groans, farts, curses, shrieks, belches, and woeful wails.
Judge Kaufman’s knees go soft as warm Jell-O — fortunately he’s wearing his judicial robes, and all that anybody notices is that he seems to dip with the lights. He glances backstage—at last! Here comes Uncle Sam!
The Boy Judge stretches up to his full five foot six and, glimpsing the hands on the Paramount clock just celebrating the quarter hour, flatly denies Dan Marshall’s motion, then withdraws to the wings to get his wind back. He wants to fall into somebody’s arms, but his wife, Helen, is peering down her nose into a compact mirror, and besides, he’s got an audience back here of lawyers, jurors, witnesses, and G-men. They gaze at him, standing apart. They’ll never let me let go of this thing, he thinks, staring back at them, envying their anonymity. The trial’s over, I shouldn’t even be here, it’s against every principle of American jurisprudence — but they’ll keep me here till the day I die.
Uncle Sam roars out onto the Death House set, whooping and snorting like a wild stallion with a bee up its rectum. “I have returned! And by the grace of Almighty God, I’m gonna tar up the arth and wreak a outdacious deevastation around here if I don’t see more deddycated presarvation of the sacred fire of the Liberty Tree and less petterfacted sunshine patriotism! Great Jeminy! Could I not be gone a minute, but some mischief must be doin’? We’ve had to pump lead into a kid in Paris and throw hunderds a damfools in the hoosegow all over the world — and we’ll trim the heels of a few onduly restless whippersnappers here, too, if things don’t settle out a mite less epileptic!”
The people in the Square hoot and whistle and shout out their praises to Uncle Sam. The Singing Saints regroup to sing “0 Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” which in turn inspires the security forces to make a coherent charge on the Phantom’s agents at last. Lumberjacks smash up the Clemency Float with axes, and the Rat Pack reorganizes its perimeter defense lines. The Ku Klux Klan, Invisible Empire of the South, announces they’ve paid a visit to Nashville, and children are chasing Dan Marshall toward the Whale’s mouth, screaming the Lady-bug Taunt at him:
“Shyster, shyster! fly away home!
A cross is on fire in your front lawn!”
The Supreme Court Justices are still in a lot of trouble, but Bill Douglas, who has been watching them slop about helplessly in the muck, finally shakes off his wry amusement and, being the only one who’s had the foresight to wear heavy boots and leggings, goes now to their rescue, leading them back to their seats, where Oveta Culp Hobby, whose business is health and welfare, is waiting for them with a damp rag to wash off their faces. While lawyers’ writs and briefs are grabbed, folded into paper airplanes, and sent flying, the lawyers themselves, along with the Rosenberg Committee operatives, are being rounded up, one by one, straitjacketed or simply conked, and dragged over toward Walt Disney’s giant Whale, whose belly has earlier been closed to the public and used until now to incarcerate zanies, sick drunks, and pickpockets.
“Well,” laughs Uncle Sam, “it’s a frolic scene, where work and mirth and play unite their charms to cheer the hours away!” 7:46…“This was the Phantom’s last shot, boys!” he shouts, stooping to attend to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies. “You got the bloody Barbarite by the short hairs, nothin’ more can happen now—!”
But just then Times Square breaks into an uproar!
A man is backing bareass out onto the stage from the prisoners’ entrance, his pants in a tangled puddle at his feet, a crumpled homburg down around his ears, “I AM A SCAMP” lipsticked on his butt. The man turns, hopping on one foot, blinks in amazement — why, it’s—!
Is it possible to be rational at all in crisis situations? Do crises seem to have many elements in common? Does the participant seem to learn from one crisis to another? All interesting questions which I might well have asked myself, but at the moment, finding myself unexpectedly onstage in the middle of Times Square, staring out on an amazing sea of upturned faces staring back, my shirttails bunched up in my armpits and my pants in a tangle around my ankles, my poor butt on fire from its Dance Hall skid, my shoulder aching, face stinging, stomach rumbling, sweating hands clutching my still-enflamed though fast-shriveling pecker, Uncle Sam rearing up in monstrous astonishment on my left, some woman out cold as a mackerel at my feet, and the electric chair — for some reason splattered with what looked like custard pies since I’d last seen it — standing spotlit and hot with its own latent energies on my right, flashguns popping and cameras with huge glimmering lenses dollying in at me, a band somewhere playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” accompanied by what could only have been the goddamn Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a pervasive odor of excrement in the air which I was afraid might be my own, all I could think of to say was: “Oh my God! LET US PRAY!” Which, when I’d added, dragging my voice down out of its falsetto shriek, “Let me, uh, say, uh, my fellow Americans, uh, bow our heads — let us bow our heads in a minute of silent prayer cast in terms of all our, uh, fighting boys in, uh, wherever they are and for faith, uh, in — and for our President, in a sense — and also for the victims of Communism around the world,” was pretty goddamn brilliant: it shut them all up and gave me sixty precious seconds to get my pants up while they had their heads down. Maybe, I thought, in all the excitement they haven’t even noticed…
While I struggled, sweating furiously in the hot lights, with the birds-nest of trouser legs around my feet — Judas Priest, what a mess, I couldn’t even find the cuffs, and the belt seemed to be looped into some kind of cat’s cradle! — I tried to collect my thoughts for the statement I had to make, the one I’d been working on such long hours this week, but which just now I’d thought I’d somehow got out of. But I was too confused — all those dreams, Ethel’s mouth, the train wheels rolling underneath me — I could smell still the heady fragrance of newfound freedom, new beginnings (what was it? ah! the shampoo in her hair — suddenly I felt double-crossed in every direction at once!) — Christ! I thought in a moment of numbing terror: I can’t even remember my name! I fought to recover that name, that self, even as I grappled with my trousers, hobbling about in a tight miserable circle, fought to drag myself back to myself, my old safe self, which was — who knows? — maybe not even a self at all, my frazzled mind reaching out for the old catchwords, the functional code words of the profession, but drawing a blank. I ought to quit, I knew, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I only knew how to plunge forward: no matter what the consequences — in college football, it was always the off-side penalty; now, I thought, God only knows what I’m in for! Which reminded me that I was supposed to be praying and the minute of grace was fast running out. Uh…fiscal integrity! Paramount question! Yes…ah…make no mistake about it! What this country needs is…eh…no more pussyfooting! a new departure! ragged individualism — rugged, I mean (“Tell the truth, son,” I could just hear Uncle Sam saying, “or trump — but get the trick!”) — yes, it was time to piss or cut bait, time to basically hunker down, hold the line, take off the gloves and bind up the nation’s wounds — but the gloves were off (what wasn’t off?) and if my own wounds got bound up any tighter than they were already, I wouldn’t be able to breathe (I wasn’t able to breathe!)!
I was also feeling suddenly very airy and exposed, almost like a bad wind had got up between my legs, like a French kiss in the wrong place — I glanced up and discovered that everybody in goddamn Times Square was still watching me, not a reverent sonuvabitch in the lot, they’d been watching me all the time, all except Pat, I spotted her now, she was the only one with her head down — even my daughters were gaping at me with stupid smirks on their faces. It looked as though everybody were laughing, but I couldn’t hear anything over the whumping thunder of my heart beating in my ears (my God, I can’t even let my hair down in public, much less my pants! this was worse even than the time I got diarrhea in that jeep in Bougainville!). What crazy things we do, I thought, as I lurched, grunting, wheezing, half-blind from panic and glare, squatting and bobbing about the stage in one last desperate effort to pull my pants up — it was always best, I knew, to do the unexpected if you could get away with it, but this time, damn it, I’d overreached myself. I’d forgotten all the things my Mom had taught me: Don’t make a fool of yourself, Richard, don’t stick your neck out, don’t give yourself away, don’t expose yourself! What was it led me up there, led me up here? I remembered the ticket seller’s caution: “Sure you want on that train, bud?” The cops at the Hunter Street barricades, the dissuasive phalanx of newsguys, the Warden’s curious lecture on history and the convulsive struggle: all warnings I had failed to heed — and yet I was sure I’d been right. “To be great,” Ethel had said (I think it was Ethel — was it Ethel?), “is to be misunderstood.” She was back there, I knew, standing in the wings somewhere, her head shaved for the electrodes, her own heart beating so wildly in her little breast that you could see it through that sad ragged dress she wore, and I had a sudden impulse to dash back there, grab her up, and make a run for it. But I restrained myself, or my pants did, reminding myself (I was much encouraged by the return of this thought) that I had to think of the effect of my decision on the next generation, and on the future of peace and freedom in America, and in the world. Ethel would want it that way. Courage, confidence, and perspective. Which meant that I had to carry through to the finish, whatever the personal agony it would involve — I had to fight back! No crawfishing, no whining, whimpering, or groveling — if you’re always on the defensive, take it from me, you always lose in the end — no, they were asking for it and they were going to get it! I’m a pessimist, but if I figure I’ve got a chance, I’ll fight for it, and I always figure I’ve got a chance — I think that has been a hallmark of my political career. In that respect I’m an Optimo. Optimist, I mean! (Jesus.) But how was I going to do it? Well, I’m a poker player, one of the best, and a good poker player knows it’s important to get good cards, but also that most big pots are won by a bluff. Yes, I had to let fly with everything in the arsenal, throw up a real smoke screen and let out, as Uncle Sam would say, the dark (“Cuttlefish it, boy! If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em!”) — whereupon, having intended something entirely different by such determinations, I stumbled over that old lady’s body (Judas, it was Betty Crocker!), touched my toes to keep from falling over on my head, and cracked a stupendous fart. “AMEN, BROTHER!” some dingbat bellowed, and then I did hear them — Jesus Christ, they were all howling their asses off!
What was to be done? I stared gloomily at the bespattered electric chair, the famous Sing Sing hot seat, and — my own butt on fire from shame and floor burns — listened to the mob in Times Square behind my back. The door to the Dance Hall was now closed and above it was a sign that said SILENCE. I wondered if it was a message to me. I knew that the only defense I had was offense, that I had to somehow talk my way around this humiliation without admitting to any mistakes, but if I couldn’t get my pants up past my ankles, how was I to begin? There was a white hospital cart behind the chair and it looked very comfortable, very restful. I realized I was close to breaking — a man can only take so much! — and that it was now or never. But if now, what? I didn’t know whether to point with pride, view with alarm, or just let my ass go on speaking for me. The stage itself offered no clues, only soberingly lethal realities. I was afraid to look at Uncle Sam. I tried to wargame my situation, to reduce it to some set of constants I could work with, but all I could think of was the time my old man caught me swimming in the Anaheim irrigation ditch. On that occasion, he’d picked me up and thrown me back into the ditch — that’s right: fire with fire, ditches with ditches!
“All right now!” I cried, turning on the mob at last. I was finding my way again. “You may wonder what I am doing up here with my, uh, trousers down! Well, let me just say this! We in America, we in the Free World, all of us here tonight — and let me be quite blunt about this — we have ALL been caught with our trousers down!” An inspired rhetorical ploy which had worked miracles in hundreds of debates, not to mention my famous crisis speech last fall, and which should have worked here, but it didn’t — on the contrary, they got rowdier than ever. They were all out there, I recognized them, jammed around the stage, pressing forward, lit up by the flashing lights of Broadway: Congressmen and judges, governors and celebrities, Republicans and Democrats, all sorts of weird characters dressed up in funny costumes and large papier-mâché heads, little kids, old ladies, all whooping it up and laughing to beat hell. “But this is no laughing matter!” I shouted over the racket (I saw Harold Stassen snorting and pointing, Cabot Lodge looking pleased as punch, Bill Knowland and Lyndon Johnson rolling all over each other in the aisles — even Bob Taft was splitting his crippled sides with laughter), “this is a struggle for the souls of men!” Now what the hell was so funny about that? What was the matter with these people? Were they crazy? I thought they must be nuts! “This is one of those critical moments in history that can change the world, and we need your help, and so I came here like this tonight — and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics — I came here like this to dramatize what the danger is, a mortal danger that we all face!”
“YOU TELL ’EM, STICKY DICK!” they shouted back at me, “YOU GOT THE BALLS!”
“I tell you, we are on the brink!” I screamed — I had to scream: the uproar in the Square was deafening, and on top of it radios were blaring away, bands playing, generators humming, and police helicopters were rattling overhead, taking pictures and dropping booze parcels. “Look at Korea!” I cried. “Look at China! Eastern Europe! Our own State Department! Even the Supreme Court! We’re exposed on all sides by this insidious evil! this sinister conspiracy! this deadly infection! Let me assure you, the Phantom isn’t changing! He isn’t sleeping! He is, as always, plotting, screaming, working, fighting! Scheming, I should say!” I tried to recall that lecture Uncle Sam had given me about the walleyed harbinger who thirsted for Christian blood, but I was too overwrought and afraid I’d fuck it up — I was having trouble enough working my own bromides. “We owe a solemn duty, not only to our own people but to free peoples everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to roll back the Red Tide which to date has swept everything before it! We cannot allow another Munich!” That wasn’t bad, a touch of the old Dick Nixon — I seemed to be getting off the dime at last! They were still laughing, all right, but they seemed more attentive. “It’s…it’s not easy for me to take this position,” I went on, choking up a little to show them that I was vulnerable, too, that I was as human as the next guy, or perhaps because I couldn’t help it, “—it happens that I am a Quaker!” Which for some reason set them all off again, snorting and wheezing, falling off their chairs — Foster Dulles looked like somebody had got ahold of his old Presbyterian face, which just wasn’t made for laughing with, and was wringing it out like an old dishrag: Christ! what if I killed him! “But as Abraham Lincoln once said: ‘Uh, other means may succeed: this could not fail!’” I felt good about that, coming up with that quote all by myself — Lincoln was always helpful in a tight spot, better even than Jesus or Dale Carnegie, and I’d thought he would rescue me from this one, but I might as well have been quoting Gracie Allen. Even Douglas MacArthur was chuffing away, his sun goggles tipped down over his nose, and Oveta Hobby was reared back in her chair and laughing so hard she was showing her khaki drawers. “He…he also said that the world will, uh, little remember nor long, uh, remember what we talk about here,” I pressed on desperately, “but just let me say that I think the world will never forget what, uh, the achievements of this administration here tonight!”
But they weren’t even listening. I stuffed my hand absently in my jacket pocket, reminded by the Lincoln quotes of my successful Checkers ploy (“…here it is — I jotted it down — let me read the notes…”), and felt a postcard there. It was the drowning-man syndrome all over again, but I fished it out just the same, trying to look as mysterious as I could. It was the postcard I’d grabbed off that rack in Ossining. It said HELLO FROM SING SING! across the top and showed two cartoon cops standing beside an electric chair with a privy hole and a raised toilet lid, one of them explaining to the other: “He fell through.” I stared gloomily down that black hole, thinking: the hell with it, it isn’t worth it. All this jackassery: I’d Had Enough, Stassen could have it. Pat was no longer praying, I noticed, if that was what she had been doing before. She wasn’t laughing like all the others either, but I wasn’t necessarily encouraged by that. She was just looking in my direction, her eyes crinkled up sadly and gazing as though at some point just behind my loft ear, her thin white hands twitching nervously in her lap, picking at each other. I remembered how Ethel’s big dark eyes had peered so deeply, so directly, so trustingly into mine — almost as though probing my very soul; you could almost say, rediscovering it — as she’d said: “I envy you your power, Richard. Your majesty. You are a great man!” I felt myself being drawn back into her impassioned life-giving embrace, where everything seemed possible once more, and everything possible seemed good. “I have faith in you, Richard! You will unite the nation and bring peace to mankind…!” Yes, faith — not loyalty, but faith! That’s what I needed! Not a dutiful peck on the cheeks, but full firm committed lips pressed on mine, not tight jittery haunches, but a soft yielding bottom, not thin secretive stone-cold fingers, but a warm hand tearing at my hair, kneading my—
I shook it off. Christ, I was getting excited again. I pulled my shirttail down in front and raised my arms (this did not quite work), looking for something meanwhile to cover myself with. What I saw was Uncle Sam looking like he’d just swallowed his corncob pipe and was trying to cough it up again. He was pointing frantically up at the Times Tower, whore under the time and weather clock, which told me it was nearly ten minutes to eight and eighty degrees (whoo! it felt like twice that at least!), the news getting flashed to the world was: LET US STRIVE ON TO FINISH THE WORK WE ARE IN…! Well, I thought, I can’t be too far off the track. “The issue at stake,” I cried, turning back to the mob in the Square, adopting a scowl of deadly earnestness, and recalling for some reason the night I mounted a table at the Senior Beer Bust at Duke and gave a deadpan parody of a talk on Social Insecurity (what had I said? was there something I could use?)—“The issue at stake, to put it starkly, is this: whose hand—” and here I thrust out my hand in a gesture I knew was very effective, “—whose hand will write the next several chapters of human history?” And then I saw for the first time the blood on my hand: my God, there was blood all over it! from my ass! it was coming from my ass! Oh Jesus! “Let’s — let’s not deceive ourselves!” I gasped, really frightened now: what was happening to me? “The heat is on! We have the fight of our lives on our hands! We already have seen bloodletting and…and there’ll be some more blood sp-spilled before it’s over!” No, not blood: lipstick! Oh shit, I thought, as I mopped the sweat from my brow and plunged helplessly on: “I know that this is not the last of the smears!” Needless to say, I had just — as though compulsively — wiped the sweat from my face with my lipsticked hand, a fucking mess, but I couldn’t stop myself… “I was warned that if I continued to attack the Communists and crooks in this country they would continue to smear me, and in spite of my explanation tonight, other smears will be made!” Ah, it isn’t what the facts are but what they appear to be that counts when you are under fire, I thought, as the laughter cascaded around me. Some puffy-eyed clown was trying to crawl up on the stage in front of me…familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Out of some gangster movie maybe. Like this whole goddamned mob. I realized that out in all that roiling hysteria there was one static point of reference that my eye kept coming back to: an old bearded bum standing motionless in one of the VIP aisles in a floppy hat and tattered old overcoat, his arms out at his sides like a cheap stuffed doll. A teddy bear. His pinprick eyes, not quite real, and shiny beet-red cheeks gave the impression that he’d been crying. He stood there as though planted, old boots driven into the pavement, like a fat scarecrow…or a message. The turmoil in the square raged around him, but the old bum was untouched by it. I knew him. I’d seen him in my own mirror. I felt myself being pulled back aboard the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special, rocketing north toward all those grand discoveries — about life, about myself — intimations of freedom from the Death House of politics and propriety, the possibility of a fresh start, a new life of love and adventure, instead of all this pretending…and I thought for a moment that maybe I was only dreaming, that in a minute I’d wake up again on the VIP train (and this time I’d join in, I thought, I wouldn’t hold back), or back in my office, at home, even back at Dress-Up Day at Whittier High School with Ola — but then something—whick! — stung me on my left ball, and as I clutched my nuts and doubled away in pain, only to take another one—swack! — on my poor overabused butt, I knew I was where I’d always been: front and center on the stage of human history, never mind how silly or brutalizing, a victim of my own genius and God-given resources, and nowhere to go but on…and on and on…
Well, by God, I could and I would. I think of history in terms of tragedy — but not my own. I saw Uncle Sam, his pipe coughed up at last, the stem turned into a peashooter, striding forward to cut me off, but I didn’t give him a chance. Taking my cue from the flag-leafed Bond clothing store statues I’d just glimpsed rearing chalkily above me, a bronze shield between them with the legend EXCELSIOR, I coldly turned my other cheek and, hopping to the other side of the stage, snatched the first piece of bunting I could reach (which turned out to be a flag actually, the first one, circle of thirteen stars), wrapped myself in it, and then whirled with a vengeance (which was not as easy as it sounds, hobbled as I was: I had to face them cross-legged in the end, nearly lost it again before I’d even got started) on this mindless boozed-up but malleable rabble: “My fellow Americans!” Uncle Sam stopped short, eyeing me curiously. Herb Brownell, slipping out from behind the wings with his program notes, blinked and stepped back in again, elbowing Judge Kaufman in the right eye. The Warden was back there, too, I noticed, muttering something in the ear of the skullcapped Prison Chaplain and chewing bemusedly on his long black cigar — and now out front I discovered my old man, sitting on the edge of his chair, glowering intently, just as he used to do at all my school debates — my biggest thrill in those years was to see the light in his eyes when I destroyed my opponents, and by God I was not going to let him down now. Or Mom either, seated quietly beside him, hands folded in her lap, a goddamn saint. “We live in an age of anarchy!” The mob, which had been applauding itself drunkenly, now broke into laughter again, but there were cheers and whistles as well. Let them laugh, I thought. This is a generation that wants to laugh, a generation that wants to be entertained, thanks to the movies, TV — a sea of passivity, but so much the better for us swimmers. I stared boldly out at them, mob and cameras alike, feeling very much in control of things once more, wiser than I knew…. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years!”
They were listening now, even as they continued to whoop it up. People have noticed that “peculiar sales executive charm” I have, and I poured it on, smiling, scowling, clutching the flag tight around me with one hand (though it was all hand-stitched and the seams chafed me sorely), hammering home my points with the other — not for nothing had Dick Nixon won the Reader’s Digest Southern Conference Extemporaneous Speaking Contest so many years before! I started out by laying on them a real eye-opening, tub-thumping, hackle-raising sermon on world history (I’ve always been basically a history buff): the rise, development, and — as some would argue — partial decay of the philosophy called “liberalism”; the parallel emergence of a liberal heresy called Communism; the assumption of world leadership by two superpowers, America and Russia, each wedded to a competing faith; and finally, the present confrontation of these two faiths and these two superpowers in every part of the world. “America today stands almost alone between Communism and the Free Nations of the world!” I told them, and now I was addressing myself to all the people leaning out of hotel and business block windows and the anonymous masses crammed into the distant streets and avenues all the way up to Central Park as well, Jesus, I was in good voice. “If you could lift the United States bodily off today’s globe, the rest of the world would live in sheer terror!” This was my big play, and, egged on by my father’s grins and grimaces, I swung into it with all my might. I told them we had to roll back the Phantom’s power, had to give up the negative, futile, and immoral policy of containment which abandoned countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism, and set out immediately to liberate the captive peoples. “All that is needed is the will to win — and the courage to use our power — ALL our power — NOW!” The mussed-up clown trying to crawl over the lip of the stage gasped and slipped back, clinging to the edge by his fingertips. Conscious of the cameras on me, I flashed a smile and demanded that the Russians dismantle the Iron Curtain, free the satellites, and unite Germany under free elections. I called for all-out victory in Korea: “The only way to end the war in Korea is to win it on the battlefield!”—and made it clear that we should warn the Chinese Communists that “unless they cease their aggression against Korea by a certain date, our commanders in the field will be given the authority to bomb Manchurian bases! History tells us we are on the right side! Man needs God, and Communism is atheistic, so what we must do is to act like Americans and not put our tails between our legs and run every time some Communist bully tries to bluff us!” Hoo boy, I was really wound up! I thought of things I hadn’t even thought of yet! I argued for a naval blockade of Red China, a massive invasion of Southeast Asia, and if necessary, a preventative attack against mainland China itself: “All we have to do is take a look at the map and we can see that if Formosa falls, the next frontier is the coast of California!” I bounded forward, coins and belt buckle jangling against the stage floor, and shouted that we should not be afraid to use — wherever and whenever — all the massive, mobile, retaliatory power at our disposal! “Remember, it’s a cause bigger than yourself! It’s the cause of making this the greatest nation in the world — the leader in the world — because without our leadership the world will know nothing but war, possibly starvation or worse in the years ahead! With our leadership it will know peace, it will know plenty—“
“What a shifty-eyed goddamn liar,” complained somebody in the front pew. I recognized that sour country whine. “I can’t figure out why people listen to him!”
This set off more derisive laughter from the horde, but I welcomed the challenge and wheeled to meet it: “I am not going to engage in personalities,” I cried, “but I charge that Mr. Truman is a traitor to the high principles of his own Party! I charge that the buried record will show that he and his associates, either through stupidity or political expedience, were primarily responsible for the unimpeded growth of the Communist conspiracy within the United States — the one that has led us here to this historic occasion tonight!” The crowd cheered at this and Truman took a mocking bow, but I forged on, confident now, back on the tracks once more and returning to the fold, so feeling the power wax in me. Dad was still scowling, but he seemed pleased. I caught Darryl Zanuck’s eye and he threw me a thumbs-up sign. Truman was maybe not as discomfited as I might have wished, but then I bore him no grudge, and in fact I was grateful to him for throwing me a cue. “If the Russians had been running our State Department during the seven years of Trumanism, they couldn’t have developed a better Asiatic foreign policy from the Soviet viewpoint! I say we must deal sharply but fairly with internal Communism as an idea, but with its agents as DOUBLE-DYED TRAITORS!” Some goddamn donkey had started braying in the middle of this and a lot of the crowd were heehawing along with it, including (I could hardly believe it!) my old man, but I shouted them all down: “When our administration came to Washington on January twentieth, we found in the files a blueprint for socializing America! This dangerous well-oiled scheme called for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized agriculture, socialized water and power, and perhaps most disturbing of all, socialization of America’s greatest source of power, atomic energy! For the first time in American history, the security of the nation was directly and imminently threatened!” Uncle Sam was still jumping up and down and pointing frantically up at the clock, but I wasn’t about to quit now. I was coming home, I could feel it, running up the walk from that long exile up at my aunt’s to be kissed at the front door by little Arthur just a few months before he died, stepping down from the war in my Navy whites onto U.S. soil and into Pat’s arms and Mom’s, returning to the fold of the Party and Ike’s grandfatherly embrace in Wheeling — for me, I thought, this whole thing: it’s all been for me! And as my mind cleared at last, the mad dreams fading like spent fireworks, the old familiar phrases came rolling back to me about the competitive spirit and moral values and history will be the final judge and shooting Reds like rats. “When an egg is rotten you throw it out!” I recalled Tom Paine’s times that try men’s souls and Harding’s God-given destiny of our Republic, remembered Teddy Roosevelt’s counterattack on the professional pacifists seeking to Chinafy this country and Calvin Coolidge’s American legions armed with the cross, Wilson’s summons to all honest men — and our own Great Crusade, Ike’s and mine…“The American people will be eternally grateful for the achievements of the Eisenhower administration which is kicking Communists, fellow travelers, and sex perverts out of the federal government by the thousands! The Communists conspiracy to which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg devoted themselves with such blind fanaticism is being smashed to bits by this administration!” I slapped the electric chair with my free hand for emphasis (luckily it wasn’t live) and glanced toward Uncle Sam for approval: surely now — but he was in a furious temper, his blue eyes blazing, his elbows and coattails starchily akimbo, stamping his feet and holding up eight fingers, all atremble with rage…and what was amazing was that he seemed to be holding all of them up on one hand!
What was wrong? What was he trying to say? The Paramount clock said 7:53, but all I could think of at the moment were the eight minutes on the Doomsday Clock, and I broke out in a cold sweat — though it wasn’t any goddamn international apocalpyse, which I only half believed in anyway, that I was thinking of, but my own: I was at the cliff’s edge! This was sink or swim, do or die! “Fellow citizens!” I gasped, trying to calm myself, keep the words (something about liberty, the incomparable Constitution, and shrinking violets) from disintegrating in my mouth. Would he strike me? “We must seize the moment! Complacency is dangerous! So, uh, we must stir our stumps and go to work. I remember our mother used to get up at five o’clock every morning to bake pies, and…and…what I am saying is that America is what made hard work great! Or rather…” I could feel it all breaking down inside, like wires fusing, burning at the ends, bulbs blowing: why did this always happen to me? Why could I never please him, no matter what I did? “That and a certain inner drive, and the power of prayer, and moral fiber, and, uh, moral — dignity! No, decency!” Was that right?
My head was fizzing and popping. Out front, people were shouting: “SPEAK UP! CAN’T HEAR!” A fight had broken out in the VIP section between some business types (lawyers?) and some larger-than-life Suffragettes who seemed to be trying to drag the poor bastards off to a beached whale a couple of blocks away, Harold Stassen was grimacing openly and poking Bob Bliss meaningfully in the ribs, and back in the wings Brownell, Kaufman, Saypol, and the rest were all whey-faced with some sudden terror, which so far as I could tell had something to do with the baggy-eyed character who was still trying to crawl up onto the stage in front of me — he had one elbow over the top now and was groping about for something to grab a hold of with his other hand.
“We must communicate the facts and save the American dream because it is related to the innermost striving of the whole world!” I cried desperately. “And I can promise you that we will usher in an era unbelievably prosperous with three television sets in every garage—J mean, automobiles! No…“What the hell was I talking about? What was the issue? Where was Rose — why wasn’t she getting me out of this?
“These people have stones for hearts,” the guy trying to clamber over the edge of the stage complained huskily, pausing a moment to get his wind back and peer up at me. “They have the souls of murderers!”
Aha. I understood now who he was. The Rosenbergs’ shyster Manny Bloch! I hopped forward to kick him in the face. But my feet and pants got tangled up in the flag and I went sprawling there in the puddle of stars, stripes, and inseams, engulfed yet again in belly laughs, and wondering if I could ever, like Truth, rise again. Just like the old potato-sack races at the Friends’ Sunday School picnics, I thought: my head always ahead of my feet. I’d given all I had to give, and all for nothing, it was too little and too late and now — and then it came to me what I had to do! Despite the lack of sleep or even of rest over the past six days, despite the abuse to which I had subjected my nerves and body — some way, somehow in a moment of great crisis a man calls up resources of physical, mental, and emotional power he never realized he had. This I was now able to do, because the hours and days of preparation had been for this one moment, and as I picked myself up and rose naked once more to yet another occasion (or was it the same occasion, infinite in its challenge, that I was forever rising to?), I put into it everything I had. I knew what I wanted to say, and I said it from the heart: “Now, my friends, I am going to suggest a course of conduct — and I am going to ask you to help! This is a war and we are all in it together! So I would suggest that under the circumstances, everybody here tonight should come before the American people and bare himself as I have done!” There was a moment of stunned silence. It was apparent they didn’t entirely understand me. I was frightened, of course; but basically I am fatalistic about politics. The worst may happen but it may not. Don’t worry, I counseled myself, hang in there. It’ll play. Just bring ’em down that aisle! “I want to make my position perfectly clear! We have nothing to hide! And we have a lot to be proud of! We say that no one of the 167 million Americans is a little man! The only question is whether we face up to our world responsibilities, whether we have the faith, the patriotism, the willingness to lead in his critical period! I say it is time for a new sense of dedication in this country! I ask for your support in helping to develop the national spirit, the faith that we need in order to meet our responsibilities in the world! It is a great goal! And to achieve it, I am asking everyone tonight to step forward — right now! — and drop his pants for America!”
That last pitch — the mounting rhythms, the repetitions, the “right now!” evangelical challenge — all that was straight out of Dr. Rader’s memorable Los Angeles sermon, and I looked about now for friends of the cloth — Billy Graham, Dr. Peale, Father Sheen, Ezra Benson — seeking their support and encouragement: maybe I could even get one of them up here with me! But the person who caught my eye out there in the mob was my own father: he looked like somebody had just hit him between the eyes. He blinked twice, looked around in amazement, then leapt out of his chair and, thumbing off his elastic braces, cried: “That’s tellin ’em, sonny!” Down went his baggy britches, underneath which he was wearing his old white longjohns (good old-fashioned homespun appeal in that flannel underwear, I told myself hopefully, though in fact I felt myself turning fifteen colors of the rainbow, as embarrassed for him as I was for myself), and while he fumbled with the big white buttons, others began to follow suit — or unsuit: first, friends like Bill Rogers and Bert Andrews, Mundt and O’Konski, then Bill Jenner, Tom Dewey, my brothers Donald and Edward, Homer Capehart, Strom Thurmond, George Smathers, and with that some of the Democrats, too, guys like Stennis and Rivers, Don Wheeler, Jimmy Byrnes…
“IT’S A SHOWDOWN!” they cried.
“PANTS DOWN FOR GOD AND COUNTRY!”
“PANTS DOWN FOR JESUS CHRIST!”
“WHOOPEE!”
“FOR THE COMMON MAN!”
“DEEDS NOT WORDS!”
“PANTS DOWN FOR DICK!”
It was spreading now, spreading fast, some of those larger-than-life Cowboys were dropping their chaps, the Pilgrims, Riverboat Gamblers, and Doughboys, governors and judges, secretaries and bureaucrats, and on out into the masses beyond: I saw old Joe Kennedy’s pants come down in a twinkling, Herbert Philbrick’s, too, Yehudi Menuhin’s and Hopalong Cassidy’s, Rocky Marciano’s, Sumner Pike’s — and it was even catching on among some of the left-wing radicals — Humphrey Bogart, Dean Acheson, Walter Lippmann and Herbert Lehman, Ralph Bunche, John L. Lewis — the din of crashing belt buckles and ripping zips was deafening! And women as well — Eisa Maxwell, Teresa Wright, Bess Truman, all the ladies in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — all hiking their skirts and pulling down their drawers, corsets, girdles, whatever they had up there! A few of the more fastidious types were pulling their pants all the way off, but most of them just left them in a heap around their feet, staggering about in tight little circles to cheer the others on and see what their neighbors had. There were scattered screeches of protest from the timid, a few ugly assaults by the lunatic fringe, small riots breaking out in the vicinity of Mickey Mantle, Marilyn Monroe, Captain Video, and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a major stir when Christine Jorgensen’s drawers came down, but essentially it was a great success, a real vote of confidence! Not that it wasn’t a pretty traumatic experience to see Mom with her underwear ballooning down around her feet, Dad in a ferocious Black Irish fit, still tied up in his longjohns, or Pat, the strain showing on her thin sad face from trying to hold back the tears, stoically raising her printed cotton skirt and fumbling with her garters, but I knew that, whatever the cost, I’d won the day, the victory was mine!
“I have a profound conviction,” I cried, “that with that kind of patriotism, that kind of love of country, we shall never lose sight of the American dream! And with that spirit, we shall make that dream come true! I pledge to you tonight that I shall meet—“
“Hey, dat’s ma boy, over dere, doing dat!” laughed Uncle Sam coldly, striding forward to cut me off at last. Behind him, I saw Herb Brownell and Irving Kaufman, their pants half-lowered, not knowing which way to jump. “Lo, how he urges and urges, leavin’ the masses no rest nor britches neither! Hoo boy! it takes a long cumbustificashun to throw dust in the eyes a commonal sense!” He looked outwardly cheerful, but under the forced laughter it was plain to see he was really smoldering — and for good reason: after all, if I was right about his having rigged this entire humiliation ceremony for my dubious benefit, I had turned the tables on the old coot and fucked up his timetable to boot!
I glanced coolly up at the clock: Wha—?! It still said seven minutes to eight! “Just…just let me say this last word!” I stammered. “Regardless of what happens, I–I am going to continue this fight! I am going to—.!”
“Great Beltashashur!” stormed Uncle Sam, lifting me up in the air by my collar, the dead weight of flag and pants dragging down my dangling feet. “One more last word outa you, mister, and I tell you what you’re gonna do: you’re gonna find your damfool sittin’-piece on ‘tuther side a the Great Divide! The thrill is gone, boy, every rainmaker becomes a bore at last, so zip your lip! In times like the presence, men shouldn’t utter nothin’ for which they wouldn’t willingly be responsible from here to eternity and back — you ain’t the only pebble on the beach! We got a couple burnin issues on the docket tonight, we gotta ‘sist a coupla flamin Reds, firebrands a the infernal Phantom, to see the light, and we don’t need no more of your hissin’ and blowin’ and generally discom-bobulatin’ splutterations!”
Well, I might have taken his warning to heart — true luck consists, after all, not in the cards, but in knowing just when to rise and go home, Green Island had taught me that and Uncle Sam himself had put it into words for me — if only he hadn’t blown at my shirttails (“What is that which the breeze,” he wondered aloud, “as it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?”), clucked his tongue ruefully, and with all the cameras dollying in, remarked wistfully to the mob at large: “Ah, vanished is the ancient splendor!”
“Wait a minute!” I hollered through the freshly unleashed crash of derisive laughter. “Wait just a goddamn minute!” The laughter subsided for a moment, and there was a moment of grinning silence, waiting to be filled. Even though I was still dangling by the scruff of my neck, I plunged right into it: “MY pants are down! YOUR pants are down! EVERYBODY’S pants in AMERICA are down! Everybody’‘s—EXCEPT HIS!” This stunned the Square. A deadly hush fell over everybody. That, I thought, is what you call putting a cap on it….
“You fool!” rasped Uncle Sam, dropping me back down on the stage. He glanced apprehensively up at the night sky, dark and starless. “You’re going too far!”
I was frightened (how had it got so dark so soon?), but I had passed the point of no return — it was like lurching offside in a football game and seeing the flag go down, yet having to complete the play just the same, no matter how punishing and futile: “The chips are down! If you’re not with us, you’re against us!” I cried. “And until the facts are in, a doubt will be raised!”
I had shocked everybody with my sudden challenge, but now, slowly, steadily, a chant sprang up and began to sweep through the Square: “PANTS DOWN! PANTS DOWN! PANTS DOWN!” Louder and louder it grew, spreading, swelling, more and more insistent, led now by some cheerleaders with big red “I’s” on their white sweaters (they moved slowly, dreamlike, as though in great awe of the occasion), while behind them drummers from some band thrummed a heavy augmenting beat. “PANTS DOWN! PANTS DOWN!”
“What mad project of national sooey-cide is this?” complained Uncle Sam, clearly taken aback by the spontaneous uprising — there was nothing more terrifying, I knew, than the aroused voice of the people. As they shouted, he looked slowly about him, as though at the threshold of some door or other, his blue gaze falling finally on me. A gentleness seemed to settle over him, a kind of sadness — I felt sorry for what I had done, and I wanted to take it back, but my heart was in my throat and I couldn’t speak — and then he seemed almost to grin. “Okay, son,” he said, or seemed to say, as he settled back on his heels: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools as they say’ll learn in no other.”
I stood rooted to the stage floor, petrified with terror and anticipation, my eyes glued helplessly on his strong pale hands as they pushed back his sky blue swallowtail coat, unhooked his braces and unbuttoned his fly, gripped the waistband of his red-and-white striped pantaloons, and pushed them down.
There was a blinding flash of light, a simultaneous crack of ear-splitting thunder, and then—
BLACKOUT!!
There is panic and some scream: “UNCLE SAM IS DEAD!”
“DEAD!” comes the echoing scream, and terror rips through the hooded Square like black wildfire, a seething conflagration of anti-light, enucleating the body politic: “LEMME OUT A HERE!”
Out! the people want out! — but where is out? The emptiness at the edge has inundated the heart, the center is gone, the power cut, there’s no way in or out!
“IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!”
“THE VICE PRESIDENT’S DONE IT NOW!”
“HOWLY JAYZUSS!”
It is utter madness to try to break out, worse madness to stand still — the communicants, following in the footsteps laid down by their heritage and so seized as ever by the American go-go-go mania, lurch violently in all directions at once, shackled by dread and drawers, flailing their arms about wildly, and so being wildly flailed by what, in this unnatural darkness, this nighttime of the people, seems like some mindless hundred-armed monster! like a black forest of disconnected centipede legs! OH MERCY!
“UNCLE SAM IS DEAD!”
“WHO CAN SAVE US NOW?”
And in the nighttime of the people, there is a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, just like in the old days, a million-mouthed moan more horrible than the roar of Behemoth! People cry out to God, to Christ, Ike, Con Ed, the Pope, to anyone who might listen, who might help, to the Forefathers, to the FBI, Bernard Baruch, loved ones here and gone, fearing even those they call upon, Wyatt Earp, the Statue of Liberty…
“MADRE MIA, WHOSE THIS IS THE SWEET LAND O’—HA-A-ALP!”
In the nighttime of the people, everything is moving and there is nothing to grab hold of. The very pavements seem to dissolve into an undulating quagmire, vortical and treacherous, dragging the screaming citizens by their bundled ankles into the deepest bowels of the earth! Or perhaps it is the violent restlessness of the bundled ankles that is disemboweling the earth — who, since none can see, can say?
“WHY IS IT SO DARK?”
“THEY’VE TURNED OFF THE WHOLE UNIVERSE!”
“WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BROKE THE SOUND BARRIER!”
Imbalances are unchecked and human dignity is trampled upon in the nighttime of the people. Pageant figures crash into each other, their big heads bursting like ripe melons! Anxieties scurry like vermin, manhole covers rattle underfoot, plate-glass windows explode and splinter, and behind the shouts and moans and crashes and the dreadful ticking of what can only be the Doomsday Clock can be heard the hollow evil laughter of Uncle Sam’s worst nemesis since Nimrod Wildfire….
“OH NO!”
“IT’S THE PHANTOM!”
“THE PHANTOM’S KILLT UNCLE SAM!”
“HE’S STOLE THE LIGHT!”
“HE’S FREED THE SPIES!”
“AND NOW—!”
“—HE’S AFTER US!”
Fears, in the nighttime of the people, seem almost to materialize, to rise like palpable fog from the stricken hearts of the multitude and coil into unseen but damply felt shapes, nebulous, capricious, but no less manifest than destiny itself was in a sunnier time: fears of the Russian Bolsheviks, the Chinese Reds, of cabalists and parlor pinks, Gooks, Nips, Huns and Huks, fears of Hottentots and Snollygosters, MIGs and Mau Maus, existentialists, cancer, Pusan whores and tortured truths!
“YIKES! ONE OF ’EM’S GOT ME!”
“TAKE THAT, YOU SONUVABITCH!”
“I CAN’T BREATHE!”
“AA-AR-RGH!”
In the nighttime, thus, the people wrestle with their fears and with each other, not knowing whether what they’ve got hold of is a diseased idea of the Marxist Virus, Nigger Nate’s scrotum, the mess in Washington, or their own grandmother! Principally it is their own sudden and unprecedented impotence that terrorizes them, but sometimes this fear feels like the dry rot of corruption and Communism, other times it’s got the texture of a boxcar of pussyfooters or the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!
“YECC–CH! IT STINKS!”
“IT’S ALL HAIRY!”
“IT’S GOT A MOUSTACHE!”
They feel themselves swarmed about by mousy little engineers, scabbed sheep, dirty books, and goon squads, but when they lash out, try to get a handle on what’s tormenting them, the emanations dissolve and mutate, leaving them with nothing more than a numinous armload of the March of Time, heavy water up the snoot, and a fistful of torn Jell-O boxes and sweaty pubic hair….
“MY GOD! IT’S A CREEPING SOCIALIST!”
“A FIVE PERCENTER!”
“THE FIFTH COLUMN!”
“YEE-EEEE-K!”
“THE VOICE FROM THE SEWER!”
“IT MUST BE ALGER HISS!”
“THE ANTICHRIST!”
“HOLY SMOKE!”
“BRING BACK THE LIGHT, LORD!”
“LIGHT!”
But the light does not return, and in the ever deepening nighttime of the people, the shapes of their fear are drawn from ever deepening wells, roiling visions of the imminent imbalance of terror commingling now with shades of half-forgotten nightmares from all their childhoods: V-2s and gas ovens and kamikazes, the hurricane that tore through Overlord, the holocaust at the Cocoanut Grove, gremlins and goose-steppers, malaria, unfaithful wives, starvation at Guadalcanal, TJ-boat wolfpacks and Jap snipers and warplanes over Pearl Harbor, vampires and striking workers, hoboes, infantile paralysis, bread lines, bank failures, mortgage foreclosures and dust storms, King Kong and Scarface Al, Wobblies, werewolves, anarchists, Bolsheviks and bootleggers, Filipino guerrillas and Mexican bandidos, the Tweed Ring, earth tremors, the Cross of Gold! Down they spiral into irrational panic, as upward swirl the spooks of terrors past! Chinafyers! Assassins! Jim Crow! The Wild Bunch! Robber barons and longhorns! Black Jack Ketchum, Butcher Weyler, and Rattlesnake Dick! Du Bois! Debs! The Daltons and Darwin and the lone pray-ree! Amelia Bloomer! Maria Monk! The Grangers and Youngers and Molly Maguires! Flaming crosses! Hookworm! Apaches! Carpetbaggers! Booth and Buckshot and Billy the Kid! Sherman’s Bummers! Amputation! Bleeding Kansas! Dead Man’s Gap and yellow fever! Humboldt Desert! The Alamo!
“I REMEMBER!”
“IT’S SANTY ANNY!”
“OH LORD, THEY’RE ALL AROUND US!”
“ABOLITIONISTS!”
“COMANCHES!”
“I CAIN’T HOLD ON!”
“REDCOATS!”
“THEY’RE BURNING WASHINGTON!”
“LOOK OUT!”
The shouts of the people spark and crackle in the night air as though to suggest that their own panic might somehow save them, but the sparks give off a lightless light like a child’s Fourth of July tin pinwheel, confusing them more than illuminating them, stinging their eyes, pricking their skin, and spiraling them ever deeper into the dark pit of memories and voices in their minds, like an old man driven in his dreams to suffer yet again the terrors of his boyhood passage, the night in the forest, the first wounds, the pangs of birth, the mysterious emptiness beyond conception. Their skin crawls at the chill slithering embrace of spectral Lobsterbacks and Coercive Acts, darkling waters, smallpox, cold-blooded Hessians, and lice! The pitch-black forest of flailing limbs in which they find themselves is alive with dragoons and grenadiers, witches and wolves, hunger, quitrents, mutineers, mastodons, and — obscene and naked, daub’d with various Paints — Hell’s swarthy Allies dire, with Visage foul, and horrid awful Grin! their primeval enemy, the bloody Savages, like Fiends of Hell, the very image of the Prince of Darkness—
“FLAMING EYES!”
“FACE AS BLACK AS SOOT!”
“A PAIR OF MIGHTY HORNS—“
“—AND CLOVEN FOOT!”
“LEAPIN’ LIZARDS!”
“WE’LL ALL BE KILLT!”
“EEEEY AA-AA-AHH!”
Meanwhile, over at the Martin Beck, a few candles have been lit and the cast of The Crucible is carrying on as usual, playing tonight to an audience of one: the author, slumped gloomily in the back row all by himself, his long legs stretched out over the seat in front of him, no doubt wishing he might address that mob of drunken lunatics outside in the words his character Proctor used a little while ago to the serving girl Mary Warren, discoverer of witches “come,” as she said, “to see the great doings in the world”: “I’ll show you a great doin’ on your arse one of these days!” Ah well: art…not as lethal as one might hope…. Onstage now, Elizabeth, Proctor’s wife, has just learned from Mary (“The Devil’s loose in Salem, Mr. Proctor; we must discover where he’s hiding!”) that she has herself been “somewhat mentioned” in court, and when Mary has gone, she says quietly to no one in particular: “Oh, the noose, the noose is up!” Her husband, stubbornly optimistic, disagrees, but he is wrong, and deep down, for all the brave face they put on it, they both know it. It is the Deputy-Governor Danforth who has the truth (in effect, he owns it): “We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealments!” Yes, mister, there is a prodigious guilt in the country — the town waits at the scaffold, and who weeps for these weeps for corruption! The author sighs unhappily, well aware that it was not easy for these people, the people of Salem; for the edge of the terrible wilderness was close by, full of mystery, dark and threatening, the Devil’s last preserve, as they called it, his home base and the citadel of his final stand: to the best of their knowledge, the American forest, just over their shoulders and stretching endlessly west, was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God. Which, he reflects — folding his hands solemnly before his face and wishing that, just for tonight, he might change the ending of his play (what is the power of the author, for Chrissake, if even this is denied him?) — is still true….
“STOP!”
“THEY’RE ALL OVER ME! I CAN’T GIT ’EM OFF!”
“N O-O-OO!”
“LOOK OUT, IT’S — GURGGHH!”
Whoo, it’s wilder than ever outside in Hell’s Kitchen — which now the jammed-up populace, their Breasts enrag’d still with a mighty Phrensy, take variously to be Valley Forge, Little Bighorn, Transylvania, or Nightmare Alley: the spectral presences, curling up from the bowels of the denuded celebrants like some kind of unspeakable parody of the current baby boom, have proliferated monstrously, assuming invisible but apprehensible shapes more frightening than any that have come before — for the people in their nighttime have passed through their conventional terrors and discovered that which they fear most: each other! Amid a crescendo of ticking clocks, mad diabolical laughter, shattering glass, and recurring notes of impending doo-oom, the eidola of squatters and gooney birds, frat rats and dirt farmers, puritans, populists, and brainwashed vets rise now to intermingle with those of coffinmakers and craven cowards, desperadoes and draft dodgers! What is truth? What is perversity? In the nighttime of the people it’s all one! Terrible the grim phantasms of terrorists and traitors, more terrible yet — because beloved, or thought to be — those of founding fathers, trustbusters, first ladies, and village blacksmiths! No longer able even to cry out for help (for to whom can they now cry in such utter dissolution?), the people fall about in sweaty disarray, bodies slapping frightened bodies, chairs scraping and clattering, cameras crashing, as above and betwixt them twist the swollen instable emanations of Jacobins and Rotarians, damyankees, isolationists, abstract painters, Klansmen, foxhole atheists, Two-Seed-in-Spirit Predestinarians, hanging judges and traveling salesmen! There’s Ethan Allen! Black Bart! Tom Swift! Bird and Duke and Sitting Bull! Sergeant York! Punjab! Sojourner Truth and Bet-a-Million Gates! And all as big as skyscrapers and scary as hell! Lynched Negroes, still dangling hugely from their ropes like strange bloated fruit, entwine with the gigantic ghosts of radiated Japs and bushwhacked settlers! Oh my God, it’s awful! The people thrash about helplessly amid such horrors, their manifold shrieks of terror modulating into a single eerie moan, as around them the restless shades of Joe Hill and Glenn Miller wind and weave grotesquely through those of Sacco and Valentino, Dillinger, Slovik, and Stonewall Jackson!
“Ah, what horrid scene is this, which restless, roving fancy, or something of an higher nature, presents to me; and so chills my blood! Do I see motly armies and painted Salvages spreading desolation thro’ the land, dispossessing the free-born of the inheritance received from their forefathers, this goodly patrimony ravished from them by those who never knew what property was, except by seizing that of others for an insatiable Lord — and here, where Satan’s seat was—!” Thus might the shade of the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, Poet and Patriot, rightly cry were he to peer down through the darkness with X-ray eyes upon the people locked in this blind desperate battle with their own worst fears and with each other, limbs entangled and hair on end, mouths stretched for screaming and perhaps in fact screaming, no longer distinguishable from one another as Sinclair Weeks here, Patti Page there, but all folded into a single mindless seething mass, jerking and pitching as though being shot through with erratic bursts of high-voltage current. He would discover not so much a violent disorder below him as a kind of frenzied stasis, much like a microscopic pool of excited amoebae, atoms let loose in a walled void, bingo balls in a whirling basket, and so a movement at once fervid and infinitely varied, yet at the same time in a random way rhythmic and predictable, and so imitative of the contained agitation of the universe.
And inevitably, in all this hysterical jangling around, flesh is finding flesh, mouths mouths, heat heat, and the juices, as Satchel Paige would say, is flowin’. The people are no less beset with confusion and panic, horrendous anguish and pain, like to the throes of travail, but they are also suddenly hot as firecrackers — or maybe not so suddenly, maybe it’s just the culmination of that strange randy unease they’ve been feeling all day, ever since waking this morning in their several states of suspended excitation. Now, plunged into a nighttime far deeper than that from which this morning they awoke (or thought they did), the people seek — with distraught hearts and agitated loins — a final connection, a kind of ultimate ingathering, a tribal implosion, that will either release them from this infinite darkness and doleful sorrow or obliterate them once and for all and end their misery. “What indignity is yonder offered to the matrons! and here, to the virgins! O dishonest! profane! execrable sight!” It is astounding to consider how many orifices, large and small, and how many complementary protuberances, soft and rigid, the human body possesses, all the more so when that number is raised to the nth power by jamming thousands of such bodies several layers deep into a confined space and letting everything hang out! Nor in such a wet and wretched nighttime are the people — deprived virtually of every sense but one, frantically giving and receiving with all their gaps and appurtenances, and their minds frozen with delirium, booze, terror, and the seizure of imminent orgasm — limited to other people: no, it’s an all-out strategic exchange, and any animal, vegetable, artifact, or other surface irregularity will do! The massa’s gone away, and they are really crackin’ corn! “Where! in what region! in what world am I! Is this imagination (its own busy tormentor)? Or is it something more divine? I will not, I cannot believe ‘tis prophetic vision; or that God has so far abandoned us—!”
“WAIT!”
“VOTS DOT—?”
“NOTHIN’ OUT THERE, BROTHER!”
“ITS THE END!”
“MY GOD, I’M ABOUT TO—!”
“NO. LOOK—!”
“AH—!!”
“WHA—?!”
“THRO’ THE MISTS OF THE DEEP—!”
“OH!”
“SAY, I CAN SEE!”
“I’LL BE DURNED!”
“IT’S A LIGHT!”
“A LIGHT IN THE WEST!”
“THERE IT IS!”
“I’LL BE BLESSED!”
“BUT WHAT…?’”
“IT’S A FLYING SAUCER!”
“IT’S A BOID!”
“ISSA PLENN!”
“NO! ITS…IT’S UNCLE SAM!”
Yes, it is Uncle Sam: as dawn’s early light will pierce the deepest of sleeps, so he comes now, that mighty Yankee Peddler, boring an incandescent hole through the black western sky on his return, not from the netherworld, but back from the ridge where the West commences: Yucca Flat, Nevada! — and bearing in his lean gnarled hands a new birth of freedom, a white-hot kernel of manifest destiny: a spark from the sacred flame! Onward he comes, scorching the dropped curtain of night like one of those paper horse-race games torched by the lit tips of cigarettes, leaving a glowing trail behind him which even as it turns to ash seems to let a little light leak through — or perhaps this is an illusion, an afterimage burned not into the sky but into the light-starved retinae of the people wallowing in their nighttime in the Square! Certainly the shock is there, the searing pain — it’s one thing to sing about seeing the glory, fellow saints, another actually to have the fucking stuff fry your eyeballs! For a moment Uncle Sam seems to hover flickeringly above them, his craggy features lit eerily from beneath by the fiery glimmer in his cupped hands, his coattails flapping blackly behind him — and then he plummets suddenly down upon them like a falling star! The people, interrupted in the mind-shattering throes of what might have been some ultimate orgasmic fusion, are as yet unable to cope with this new information — they cry out, shield their eyes, and fall back in slippery confusion, tumbling out of some linkages and into others, but generally shrinking back into their old isolate and terrified selves. When they open their eyes again, it is to see their Star-Spangled Superhero standing stark and solemn above them on the Death House stage, cradling freedom’s holy light in his outstretched hands and gazing down upon them with glittering eyes sunk in deeply shadowed sockets — weird this light he holds: fierce enough to blind if stared at directly, yet casting no radiance, illuminating nothing except Uncle Sam’s hands and face, as though virtually all its light were bent in upon itself! They can sense the tall buildings rearing up over them, the darkened marquees trembling perilously on their thin chains, the statues on the Bond clothing store undraped and tilting dangerously toward each other in a wild monumental grope, horrifically reminiscent of the Rosenbergs’ famous moment of unfettered passion up at Sing Sing, but they can see nothing, nothing except the ghastly deep-shadowed pallor of Uncle Sam’s gaunt face and the ball of fire in his hands. His mouth opens: they gasp and freeze…!
“In nomine Domini,” intones Uncle Sam gravely in the sudden breathless silence, “cornbread and hominy, intery mintery cutery corn! do you like jelly, punch in the belly, tumblin tumbleweeds, tattered and torn! whisko bango poker my stick, een teen tuther futher, sother lother dick! sui filiiquery nickery neck, ite ad crackabone hallibone heck! silence in the courtroom, the judge wants to spit, allie-allie-in-free: you — are — IT!”
And he slowly opens his great hands and releases the dazzling fireball!
“Philosophers have explained the world,” he cries, “it is necessary to CHANGE the world! So hang on to your hats, folks, cause jist as that old astronomicalizin Prophet Nate Ames soothsaid nigh onto two hundred years ago, the Coelestial Light directed here by the Finger of God is gonna drive out the long! long! Night of Heathenish Darkness! I shit you not! stand back! it’s the NEW New Enlightenment!”
The little orb of blinding light hovers for a moment on the palms of his hands, slowly expanding, pulsating like a living heart, so bright that even the people with their eyes squeezed shut see it there — then suddenly it flashes outward, cutting through the Square like a sheet of sun, inundating the streets and all the city and nation and oceans beyond with glaring light, with white heat, like some kind of super flashbulb, as suddenly contracts back in on itself, dragging people to their heads, knees, and elbows, and whipping them as in an orange whirlwind toward the stage, and then — WHOOSH! — the darkness lifts up off the Square like a great mushroom cloud, rising high into the lightening sky and sucking all the fears and phantasms of the people’s nighttime up with it — and a lot of the people as well, for a foot or two anyway, before dropping them back on the sweaty pavements in an exhausted bare-bottomed heap. “Whoopee!” hollers Uncle Sam gleefully, his blue coattails rising momentarily with the cloud and snapping and cracking fiercely over his head in the purifying storm: “This here light shall go clean up to Heaven — it’ll throw its beams beyond the waves and shine in the darkness there, it’ll aivaken desires and produce revvylutions and overturnin’s until the world is free like what ice are! There’s nothin’ left for us to do but to take ’em all and, in the words of Billy McKinley, uplift and civvylize and otherwise hawg-and-pester ’em till o’er the ramparts we watch they ain’t nothin’ but congenial Christians, empty shoppin’ baskets, and plentya parkin’ space! I chant the new empire, and when we Yankees has once sot our souls upon a thing, we always have it, so harness my zebras, gift of the Nubian King, boys: all I ask is a free field and no favor and a mite less indecent exposure! And somebody separate that elephant and jackass there! what’re they doin’? That’s plumb disgustin’!”
The lights have come up in Times Square on a scene, as the people now discover, of widespread madness, dissipation, and fever, an inelegant display of general indiscretion and destruction, corruption, sacrilege and sodomy, twisted camera booms, base iniquity, smashed klieg lights and shredded trousseaus, tipped and scattered chairs and pews, incest, desecration, tangled bodies, rampant nihilism, bestiality, liberated freak shows, careless love and cheating hearts, drunkenness, cock-sucking, and other fearsomely unclean abominations, all of it liberally sprinkled with soot, snot, and pigeon shit — not exactly Cotton Mather’s vision of Theopolis Americana! What a mess! There’s whiskey and blood all together, mixed with glass where they lay, not to mention sweat and tears and puddles of cum, vomit and the smashed melonheads of the pageant figures!
Well, an “orful, onnatr’l, and tarifine sight,” as Sain’t Sut would say, and as if things aren’t serious enough, it turns out that while the cops’ and secret service’s guard and pants have been down, all the pro-Rosenberg lawyers and demonstrators have escaped: Walt Disney’s Whale has been spouting them by the bellyful back into the Square, where the scoundrels have somehow recovered their pickets and legal briefs and have nearly reconstructed their Clemency Float! But Uncle Sam, spying them, whips his top hat high into the air and, when it comes down again, plucks an American bald eagle out of it: “Sic ’em, hoss!” he cries, and the eagle swoops down on the interlopers, firing off arrows of war into the backsides of the lawyers and lashing the clemency nuts with olive branches. “I wish to remark,” remarks Uncle Sam, setting his plug hat firmly back on his hoary brow, “and my langwidge is plain, that for ways that are dark and for tricks that are vain, the foe’s most abominable lop-eared lantern-jawed half-breed whiskey-soaked and generally onscropulous and haughty host do take the cake, if you don’t watch ’em! They are disgraceful, depraved, and putrescent, endowed by their Creator with certain gangrene hearts and rottin’ brains and similar unalienated blights, and given to sech public frothin and jumin’ as to wound and disease the body politic like thorns in the flesh and other eeroginous zones! But hey! if the Red slayer thinks he slays, boys, he knows not well the sub-tile ways I keeps whuppirí the she-double-I-it outen any slantindicular sidewinder what trifles with freedom, swells the caress of disunion, incites domestical inch-erections amongst us, eats out our substance, or notherwise bites the hand what lays the golden egg of peace, property, and the bottomless pork barrel! Whoopee! A nation, like a person, has got somethin’ deeper, somethin’ more permanent and pestifferous, somethin’ larger than the scum of its parts, and what this nation’s got is ME! So keep your heads down, ladies, whilst I pours out my wrath upon ’em like water!”
This bit of positive action and unabashed bullroaring rouses the people at last from their nighttime stupor, and they suddenly realize that the Phantom’s laughter has ceased entirely, the sky has brightened, and not only has the Doomsday Clock stopped beating, but the starry dial atop the Paramount Building still says 7:53! They glance at their own watches, shake them to see if they’re still ticking: yes! the sun hasn’t set after all! Nothing has really happened, they’re still okay! It’s like coming out of a scary movie — nothing but camera tricks, the illusory marvels and disasters of Cinerama and 3-D, th-th-that’s all, f-folks! Lights up and laugh!
East side, west side, all around the town, the people stagger to their feet, grapple with the clothing knotted around their ankles, hobble and lurch, boys and girls together, toward their proper places, encouraging each other to shake a leg and making a generally raucous appeal for national unity. Up on the Death House stage behind Uncle Sam, Judge Kaufman and his family, Irving Saypol and his prosecuting team, the Rosenberg jury, Herb Brownell, wives and children and prison officials, Pentagon Patriots and Singing Saints disconnect themselves from one another and creep sheepishly toward the wings, squatting and waddling like ducks, hauling on their pants and panties as they go, while out front Indians pull up their loincloths, Rat Packers their three-holed britches, Suffragettes their bloomers.
“That’s the style, fella citizens!” thunders Uncle Sam, cracking a mighty bullwhip like a ringmaster—“This is the end, so why pretend — now’s the time to strain every nerve and bend all your energies to keep well in fronta the mighty struggle for men’s minds, hearts, and raw materials! The untransacted destiny of the American people is to establish a new order in human affairs, to confirm the destiny of the human race, and to pull that switch and shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind! Men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do — who shall live up to the great trust? eh? and who’s the yaller low-lived red-mouthed pusley-gutted huckaroo who DARES FAIL TO TRY?”
None dare, of course — except for a few professional troublemakers and close-minded bellyachers, and these the bald eagle, flapping and cawing vehemently, is rounding up and driving toward the Whale’s mouth like a cowboy pushing dogies into the stockyard. One the eagle misses is the Rosenbergs’ defense lawyer, who, unnoticed in all the excitement, has finally managed to gain a purchase on the edge of the stage. He now draws himself up, lifts one leg over, and gasps: “I demand a reply to my petitions!”
“Very well,” says Uncle Sam, and he picks up Betty Crocker’s fallen dentures and bites Manny in the nose with them.
Bloch screams and falls from the stage. “What kind of animals am I dealing with?” he rages. “The actions of the Government of the United States in this case reveal to the entire world that the people who are running the Government are much more barbaric than the Nazis when they had power in Germany! I feel ashamed that I am an American today!”
The Square is rocked with hooting and hissing: the people are finding their way back now, getting the feel of things again. “I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Attorney General Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover!” shrieks Bloch insanely, and the Union County American Legion in hasty assembly demands his disbarment. Bloch is dragged away, his new suit rumpled and his career in ruins, sobbing huskily: “Please tell them I did the best I could for them! Tell them I respect and admire them! Tell them I love them…!”
But his words are drowned out by boos, his own histrionics, and sudden laughter, for just as Manny is being stuffed into the Whale’s belly, somebody else — looking as miserable as an abused dog in his crushed homburg and dirty socks — is being led out like Jonah by a stiff-backed old lady in prim rimless specs! Who is it? Smokey Bear? The Atomic Bum? No, it’s Vice President Richard (Dick) Nixon and his late great Grandma Milhous!
“Everybody’s tryin’ ta git inta da act!” snorts Uncle Sam, hands on hips, winking down over his nose at the old woman. “Awright, Granny, send that onregenerit bluebellied tatereater up here where I can take a swat at him with the flat side a the dictates a reason and justice should it come to the raskil’s imperdint mind to discomboberate us with any more surjestshuns, prayers, or other dierbolical sass!” The old lady returns Uncle Sam’s wink and gives the Vice President a whacking high-buttoned boot in his henchbone, sending him flapping forward through the untangling pack-up like a clipped goose trying to take flight. People add their own toes to his general forward endeavor, holding their noses and hollering taunts at him like “Little Dick, he was so quick,” and
“Oh you dirty beggar,
Oh you dirty crumb!
Ain’t you ashamed
To show your dirty bum!”
Uncle Sam watches these procedures with a rueful smile, then turns his attention to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies, Betty Crocker. He stuffs the false teeth back into her soft gaping jaws and revives her with a splash of six fluid ounces of Tennessee sour mash, observing as he throws that the old girl has taken quite a beating and is probably going to need a face lift once all this is over. Betty rears up, shakes her head, grabs up her rolling pin, smoothes down her skirt, wipes off her jowls with a swipe of her sleeve, snaps her choppers once just to test her grip on them, and then proceeds to lay into every dubious character in sight — not even the bureaucrats are safe, and some Congressmen are seen diving under their chairs. “Hoo-hah!” laughs Uncle Sam, watching her swing away. “I wish the Phantom could see that!”
He cracks his bullwhip over Betty’s head, snatching a couple dozen silver stars off the shirts of patrolmen and state troopers, then a couple dozen more, converts the whip into a Louisville Slugger and, tossing the badges up in the air, swats them out into the night sky (they seem to stick up there and glitter like something out of a fabulous movie they’ve all seen but can’t quite remember. Graceful is his form, and slender, and his eyes are deep and tender, as with a smile that is childlike and bland, he next turns the whip/bat into a Remington and commences to shoot the stars all down again, knocking them off like clay pigeons—crack! pop! — and splattering the heavens with glittering sprays of light like bombs bursting in air! The Singing Saints, their Mormon decorum recovered, zip up and step forward to accompany Uncle Sam’s act with their own rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory,” but before they can even get as far as the “wider still and wider shall,” Uncle Sam — glancing anxiously up at the clock, whose hands have been sliding inexorably up toward eight o’clock — cuts them off: “Whoa thar, fella patriots! Enough a this high-minded bullshit, it is rather for us to be here deddycated to the great task remainin’ before us — thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightnin’ what does the work — or as old Ben would say, when there’s a great heat on the land in a partickyular region and a passel a clouds comes by full of electrical fire — LOOK OUT BELOW! Yea, it is nigh onto Zero Hour, friends and neighbors! We got a pair of misdemeanin’ poachers back there at the settin’-off end of the Last Mile who gotta take their farewell trip to that promised land, gotta pay, as we say, the debt of nature, slip the cable and cock up their toes — and toot sweet! So an end to this foolish hurrahin’, the tea party’s over! It is time to make room on earth for a little warmth, a little zap of love’s bestowin:’ then nighty-night to them scallywags, cuz it’s rubber tire buggy, rubber tire hack, they gotta walk that lonesome valley, and they ain’t a—“
Suddenly, there is a sharp whirr-CLICK!, like gears meshing toward some final connection, and then — BONG! BONG! BONG…! — all the clocks in New York City, all the clocks in the nation, in the world, strike the fateful hour, making people gasp and bite their fingernails: it is eight o’clock! From the belly of the Whale comes a woman’s scream: “In memory of the Rosenbergs!”—and the Whale begins to rumble and tremble as though with a fearsome indigestion, an indigestion that sounds like a lot of hysterical amateurs trying to sing “Go Down, Moses!” The people shrink back—
“Hey, no flinchin’ out there!” booms Uncle Sam. “Soft-heartedness, in times like these, shows sof’ness in the upper story!” He snaps his finger and jabs it at Police Commissioner Monaghan, and George sends his Deputy Patrick Kirley scrambling in to the Whale like a gun-toting antacid to quiet things down in there: one belch and it’s over. “Come on, you doddrabited whey faced no-good varmints! Now is the hour! With firmness in the right as God gives us to see to the right, we are gonna drop the handkerchief and light a candle of understandin’ in these traitors’ hearts which shall not be put out till they’ve sizzled like a wet cat flung into a kittil of bilin’ fat! Huu-u-u WEE! Whilst the stars and stirrups floats in the breezus whar, whar in the name a Jeezus is that miserbul termatis-nosed skaley-heeled rapscallious skonk who will not, with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and skeer-provokin’ loomynations, lay hold — from one end a this continent t’ uther — the hangin’ rope!? EH?? Do you hear me, o ye that love mankind? It is time, I say, to loose the fateful lightnin to reach a fiery rod, and on Death’s fearful forehead write the autygraph a God so’s any squinty-eyed inimy can read it without his spectacles! So let the burn begin! All I got, and all that I yam, and all that I hope, in this life, I’m now ready to stake on it!” He takes a final deep puff on his corncob pipe and — precisely at one minute after the hour — produces his zinger: a huge smoke ring that rises slowly, scaling the cloudy summits of the Times Tower, hovers momentarily up there over its tip, then sinks down over it, unrolling like a condom — he blows at it and it bursts into a spectacular fireworks display, in the center of which, halfway up the tower, is the blazing message:
NOW COMES THE MYSTERY!
He flashes a final salute to his wildly cheering citizens in the Square—“I got a million of ’em!” he laughs, tipping his star-spangled plug hat forward on his stately brow in the best Broadway tradition—“And so now I bid you a welcome adoo, brave Americans all — long may our land be bright with freedom’s holy light, you may fire when you are ready, Gridley!”—and then he disappears, leaving to Betty Crocker the task of setting the final places at the table.
The first of tonight’s special guests to appear, introduced by Betty (with a nod to the National Poet Laureate) as “the nation’s number one legal hunter of top Communists,” is the chief prosecutor in the case, Irving Howard Saypol, now a State Supreme Court Judge — he strides manfully to his front-row seat with all the calm confidence, as Saint Mark would say, of a Christian with four aces, a natural winner, with a big chest, a burgeoning belly, a tough jaw, cold eyes like Uncle Sam’s, and a cocked pistol in his hip pocket. He is accompanied by his wife, his children, his chief assistants in the case, Myles Lane, Roy Marcus Cohn, Jim Kilsheimer III, and Jim Branigan, Jr., and all their loved ones. The prosecution team is followed out by the various witnesses at the trial, Betty urging them along like a schoolmarm lining up her kids at the toilet door, everyone from chubby-cheeked David Greenglass, his wife Ruth, and dapper little Harry Gold in his now-familiar pinstripe suit, which prison fare is making baggy on him, to the notorious Red Spy Queen, Elizabeth Bentley, who regrettably is not quite a Blue Angel after all (in fact she looks like a spinster librarian, the kind that tear all the naughty pages out of the books), and Jim Huggins, the immigration inspector from Laredo who helped Morty Sobell across the border. Sobell himself, no longer so tight-lipped as he was at the trial, is kept well out of sight, though his wife Helen has been seen tonight, getting herded into the Whale.
And then the Texas high-school marching band strikes up the theme song (no longer, thank heavens, recognizably Russky) from “The FBI in Peace and War.” Saypol, his team, and the carefully developed witnesses got all the headlines at the time of the trial, but of course it was the corps of hard-working agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who really cracked the case — men like Bob Lamphere and Hugh Clegg, Dick Brennan and T. Scott Miller, John Lewis, and not to forget Walt Roetting and John Harrington and all the other unsung backstage heroes of the case — and it is these men (some of them holding replicas of John Dillinger’s death mask up in front of their faces to protect their secret identities) who now march out as a unit to a thundering ovation, carrying on their broad shoulders like an archbishop or a winning football coach their world-famous boss, J. Edgar Hoover, said by many to be the most powerful man in all America. Hoover — who is still tidying up, rolling down his pantcuffs and tossing what looks like a wig and bits of clothing back to his faithful sidekick Clyde Toison, standing in the wings — is a little fatter maybe than his comic books like to show, but he is nevertheless a commanding and heroic figure, especially held way high up like that, and whenever he flashes that beloved Jimmy Cagney grimace of recognition, part menacing grin, part sharp-eyed scowl — which he does now, reaching down at the same time to slap the hand of one of the agents supporting him — you’d think from the enraptured roar of the populace out front that it was at least the Second Coming. They pass down through the honor guard to their seats in the special section, exchanging ritual winks with old acquaintances like Dick Tracy and Bruce Wayne, Steve, Daddy, Rip and Kerry, and receiving unabashedly grateful hugs from Miss Lace and Mopsy and Stupefyin’ Jones.
It is not easy, needless to say, for anyone to follow such giants, least of all the twelve ordinary middle-class citizens — simple bookkeeper types for the most part, unaccustomed to the public limelight — to whose lot it fell to be the jurors in this historic case, and to whose lot it now falls to come out, together with their wives and children, to do their turn on the stage and step down to take their seats on this one night, like Queens for a Day, with the famous and the mighty. They fumble about in the wings, pretending to be distracted, urging each other to go first, then banging into one another in their eagerness to be helpful, knocking fedoras and glasses off, tripping over each other’s feet, apologizing, smiling dismally, some finally backing on as though intending to go the other direction, others stepping out boldly only to freeze in panic when they hit the bright lights, still others getting tangled in the bunting at the edge or stumbling over the electric cables coiling out from under the chair, no one seeming to remember which way they’re supposed to go when they get out there, and so in bug-eyed desperation trailing around after each other in a dizzying welter of wrong directions. But Irving Saypol, who can operate with this jury, as Harry Gold would put it, “in the very manner that a virtuoso would play a violin,” rises opportunely from his seat in the special section to take command, focusing the jurors’ distracted attention and guiding them to their places of honor. Down they come, grateful for Saypol’s timely intervention, to the cheers of the citizenry packed up in Times Square, a veritable phalanx of stalwart middle-Americans, whom Brian Donlevy himself would have been proud to have with him on Wake Island and with whom anyone out in Times Square might identify (and who back in the anonymous jam-up does not dream of being up there in the front rows tonight?).
Then, as Betty Crocker solemnly rings her dinner bell three times in the traditional courtroom manner, out from the wings comes the Boy Judge, Irving Robert Kaufman, flanked by two FBI agents and twelve New York City policemen, his pale round face barely visible through all the thick hips and holsters, and followed by his wife, Helen Rosenberg Kaufman, and their three sons. The Judge, swathed in his flowing black robes of office, steps out briefly from under his forest of protectors to thank the FBI for watching over him and to receive, before taking his front-pew seat, a few honors from, among others, his alma mater, the American Legion, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Federation of Women’s Clubs. Then, recalling his famous farewell to the jury the day before he laid down the death sentences, he lifts one hand in a gesture both papal and pugnacious, clears his soft throat, and exclaims: “God bless you all!”
With all the principals of the case seated, Betty Crocker is left with only two 3 × 5 recipe-sized index cards in her hand. One of course is for the nation’s Chief Executive, President Dwight David Eisenhower, who will address the crowd briefly before the executions. The second is for the man she now announces: the country’s highest-ranking legal officer, Attorney General Herbert J. Brownell. It is not merely for reasons of protocol that the head of the U.S. Department of Justice has been granted the unique honor this evening of sitting at the right hand of the President of the United States — no, more importantly, it is to make public acknowledgment of the fact that, were it not for this one man, these electrocutions would never have taken place at all tonight…if ever. He has overseen the Department’s prosecution of the case in the appeals courts these past several weeks, coped with Communist threats and demonstrations, pursued the execution of the death sentences with vigor, skill, conviction, and intransigence, remaining steady as a rock when others in the Administration might have faltered, and even called the Supreme Court into a historic special session in order to protect the time plan. If any man in America can be said personally to have shepherded the Rosenbergs to their deaths tonight, it is Herbert Julius Brownell, and he it is who now, with his wife and children, steps out on the Death House stage to receive a hero’s welcome from the citizens, this cloud of admiring witnesses, in Times Square. He nods politely at all the people, now on their feet and giving him a standing ovation, but it’s not the sort of thing that the Attorney General enjoys.
Herb works the anxious-glance-at-the-watch ploy to still the crowd, then signals for the Singing Saints, who lead the congregated in singing Irving Berlin’s sacred classic, “I Like Ike.” And as the chorus mounts to a thundering climax, into it ambles, in that familiar easygoing yet brassy-hoofed putting-green stride, grinning affably but shyly, his grandpa’s belly pushing softly against a brand-new single-breasted suit and his blue eyes twinkling merrily: the 34th President of the United States of America, Dwight David (the Iron-Hewer) Eisenhower! His left arm is raised in a friendly open-handed salute to the screaming, stomping, chanting masses; on his right, smiling graciously: the 30th First Lady of the Land and the prettiest in a coon’s age, the saucy pride of the Hawk-eye State and belle of officers’ clubs these past forty years from one end of the world to the other: Mamie! The place is going wild! America has seen nothing like this man since the day it was born — it is indeed, no fooling, as though George Washington himself were back on earth, alive and well once more and whacking out bogies at Burning Tree! And who knows? it may be so! Ike and Mamie bask briefly in the adulation of the people; then, while the First Lady is escorted by General Jerry Persons to her place in the front pew, the President steps forward, both arms raised as though having his chest measured by a tailor, to address the gathered community, remarking to no one in particular but loud enough for everyone to hear and smile: “I had no idea that our host had such a party as this!”
When things have quieted down enough for him to speak, he assumes a country-philosopher double-chinned pose and, speaking with blurred haste like a man with a mouthful of saltwater taffy, loose teeth, and a hundred things to talk about if he could just remember them, says: “My friends, before I begin the espression of those thoughts that I deem appopriate to this mo-ment I want to say: this one thing — of course, huh! there are a lot of things in a big country such as ours and the kind of world, that we are living in that make interesting subjecks, for conversation and very naturally, I wouldn’t make a serious decoration on such a sujject — supject — uh, at this mo-ment but there are a few thoughts, that crowd into my mind with your permission and I will attempt to utter them in a very informal and homely way…” There is widespread applause at this remark. He tucks one hand awkwardly in his jacket pocket, managing to look bemused, humble, and very important all at the same time. “In many sets — segs — sections of the country in every area, let me say, I have said these things before — and to some of you that are here tonight, some of you here — I hate to be insulting — who I would call contemptries of mine. Whom. What I came to — what I came to repeat — and they are given a new, a sharp meaning by the nature of the tension tormending our whole world and so I don’t mind, repeating what I have said as often as I have spoken pubbick — uh, plubicly, about this sub…ject. What I should like to point out, and I am talking plain common sense — and let me intercheck, whatever the answer be, let it be plainly spoken, I don’t want to sound like Saint Peter. It would be fooling — uh, foolish, to give anything that would appear to be an authoritative conclusion, and certainly I did not come over in the role of a professor to give you a lecher, but I would say this: it is a question that I will not answer, ladies and gentlemen, without a bit more pepprer — uh, pepperation on the thing, of course, I have never thought I had quite all the answers, it’s a damn thorn in the side, but certainly, we can hope for the best — the formula matters less than the fete — faith…”
Thus he yatters on a moment, telling them how he got struck by lightning himself once back in 1917 and recounting in his own inimitable way the saga of the A-bomb theft: “Finally, my friends, we have here this evening to duscuss with you our problems of keeping the internal house. Uh, secure against the boring of subversies and that sort of thing. Now as late as 1949 certain imminent scientists…” But slowly, even as they watch, Eisenhower the happy-go-lucky bumbling oaf gives way to the World Hero, the Man of Destiny: Ike the Divine. Even physically he seems to grow in stature and poise, his voice taking on a new authority and depth as he speaks of the national desire to “stamp out all traces of Communism” and the “power in the Federal Government to defend itself against any kind of internal disease, if it wants to put its heart into it,” the loose charming twaddle fading away, and in its stead: his celebrated “Vision of the War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness”: “The shadow of fear has darkly lengthened across the world!” he thunders, and in awe they listen. “We sense with all our faculties that forces of Good and Evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history!”
While he lays it on them, smacking his lips and cracking his jaws like a Dallas radio preacher, ten men slip out quietly from the door downtage right, unheralded and unapplauded, to take up their assigned positions for the final act in tonight’s program. Four of the men — U.S. Marshal William Carroll, Sing Sing Warden Wilfred Denno, and prison doctors George McCracken and H. V. Kipp — line up just inside the door through which they have entered. The official Executioner, Joseph P. Francel, moves upstage past them into his special alcove, and the other five — Marshal Carroll’s deputy Thomas Farley, three FBI agents (technically, the Rosenbergs will be able to confess right up to the last moment, though this is not anticipated; the real hope is that, because God is good, some clue, some word or name, will fly involuntarily like sparks from their charged tongues at the moment of their deaths), and a prison attendant — cross the stage left in front of the electric chair to line up by the disconnected radiator along the wall, just downstage of the Dance Hall door, through which the Rosenbergs are scheduled presently to enter. The prison attendant is carrying a bucket of ammonia with a dark brown sponge floating in it, which he deposits on the floor beside the death chair as he crosses over.
“It is, friends, a spiritual struggle!” the President is declaiming. Dr. Kipp’s stethoscope is showing; he tucks it inside his suit jacket, holding his hand over the button. “And at such a time in history, we who are free must proclaim anew our faith: we are called as a people to give testimony in the sight of the world to our faith that the future shall belong to the free!” Executioner Francel flicks on the spotlight in his alcove, checks the switches, wiring, ammeters, voltmeters, rheostats, flicks the light off again. “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid — we must be ready to dare all for our country! Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America!” The Marshal and the Warden clasp their hands behind their backs, feet slightly apart, a formal at-ease position the others on the stage emulate. Two of the FBI agents tip their heads toward each other. One of them glances at the chair, at the Executioner’s alcove, back at the other agent, who nods somberly as though in agreement. “I know of nothing I can add to make plainer the sincere purpose of the United States!” the President declares.
The stage lights gradually come up and throughout Times Square the houselights dim, casting the people in soft shadows, as Eisenhower moves toward the prayerful climax of his Vision, asking all Americans to beseech “Gawt’s guidance” and pray never to be proven guilty of “the one capital offense against freedom, a lack of staunch faith!” Whereupon, avoiding the nettlesome dilemma of choosing amongst the various schisms — priest, preacher, or rabbi — imported from Europe, he calls upon his own Guardian of the Harvests, Ezra Taft Benson of the Council of Twelve Apostles, former missionary for both the Boy Scouts of America and the Salt Lake Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to give the Invocation to the Electric Chair. “For now, good-bye! It has been wonderful to meet you! I will see you again!” he says, and steps down to take his seat, front and center, in the pew beside Mamie — what seat there is left: during his address, Joe McCarthy has managed to elbow his way up into the front row in between Herb Brownell and Helen Rosenberg Kaufman, and Ike only has room on the pew for one cheek. A ripple of unconcealed disgust passes briefly over Eisenhower’s face as he squeezes into his slot, having to alternate between Herb’s lap and Mamie’s, but he can’t seem to bring himself to ask Joe to move.
The stage lights are up full now in a darkened Square and the Death House set is bathed in a glaring white light as Brother Ezra, in the name of Jehovah, Jesus, and Joseph Smith, leads the people in blessing those whose duty it is “to shed the blood of those who are destined to be slain in consequence of their guilt…. For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts….” But even before he has finished, another voice can be heard back in the wings, saying: “Julius, follow me!” It is not Jesus; it is the young prison chaplain, Rabbi Irving Koslowe. Distantly, like something out of “Inner Sanctum,” a cell door rattles open. The antiphon dies away and after a brief gust of anxious shushing, unwinding from the center out to the edge like a dying cyclone, a respectful hush settles over Times Square: they are about to see a man die….
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” intones Rabbi Koslowe, his voice echoing eerily down the concrete corridor of the Dance Hall, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters…” Hollow footsteps accompany the rabbi’s voice, falling with measured tread like dripping water. It is as though they are all emerging from some deep cave, the steps striking ever firmer ground as they approach, the voice filling out, losing its damp resonance, until suddenly, as the rabbi, fitted out in a black robe, prayer shawl, and yarmulke, and reading from a prayer book held stiffly out in front of him, enters through the door in the corner upstage left under the sign that reads SILENCE, the footsteps disappear and his voice abruptly flattens out, becomes ordinary, muffled, a bit nasal: “He restoreth my soul, He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake…” He is followed through the door by two dark-suited prison guards and, wedged between them, a third man, a skinny young scruffy-headed fellow incongruously underdressed in a plain white T-shirt and wrinkled khaki pants and looking somehow like Harry Langdon — maybe it’s the white face, the ludicrous flopping slippers on his feet, or perhaps the way he peers around the set in exaggerated astonishment, blinking at the bright lights, his knees sagging when he spies the electric chair: the clown who has stumbled into the wrong room somehow and got mistaken for somebody else who’s been expected. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” says the rabbi, “I will fear no evil, for thou art with me!” The four men pause at the chair. “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…” The door is closed. No one else has come through it. This then must be that one they have been waiting for: the Master Spy, the Big Thumb, C.C. 110,649, the murderer of millions, the man who, alone with his wife, destabilized the whole world, the mortal enemy of the entire human race — this must be—! A soft gasp of amazement flutters through the Square: he’s so…so small! And young! Julius Rosenberg and Rabbi Koslowe are known to be both the same age, both thirty-five, but the rabbi looks at least a generation older! What is it? the short rumpled hair maybe, the scrawny neck—
“You have no moustache!” shrieks a child’s voice, shrill and sudden, making people jump. “What happened to your moustache? You look different!” The wire-rimmed glasses are gone, too, the patterned neckties, the padded shoulders…. “You must come home!” screams another little voice. “Every day there is a lump in my stomach, even when I go to bed!” The crowds in the Square glance up at the night sky in search of the voices’ source, clutch their programs tightly in their sweating hands, edge forward on their seats if they have one, stretch up on tiptoe if not, striving to see what’s happening up there on the stage.
The two guards, joined now by the prison attendant who brought in the bucket, have turned Rosenberg around, away from the chair, to face the people out in Times Square. He stands there, fragile and rubbery-limbed, staring chalkily out at all the shadowy multitudes staring back, but either he sees nothing out there, being blind with fear, or disbelieves what he sees. His T-shirt hangs loosely on his softly heaving chest — his little boys have T-shirts like that, too, they’ve been wearing them in all the photographs, only theirs have DODGERS stamped on them. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” the rabbi says, as gently the guards press the prisoner Julius Rosenberg down into the brown-stained oak-and-leather chair. He does not resist; but he does not help them either. His body continues to function, but at some remove from his mind, as though he has already disowned it, while keeping it operative like some kind of visible metaphor for his anguish: not quite real any more, but something to be admired and pitied at the same time. Against their will, the people in fact admire and pity it, even as they fear it: this frailness — the Phantom’s last weapon!
The official Executioner comes out of his alcove to help the three prison attendants, as together, like a team of efficient airline stewardesses, they belt Julius Rosenberg in for his execution: chest, groin, legs, arms — he seems to want to sit upright and must be pushed back into the slight recline of the chair. The chest straps are tightened and secured, but still he cranes his head upward. His hands, clenched tightly in his lap as though holding on to something precious, must be pried apart by the four men and forced into the leather straps on the chair arms. His long slender fingers, scratching for a grip, seize on the ends of the chair arms and squeeze till the knuckles go shiny white. “Thou anointest my head with oil,” says the rabbi gravely, as indeed one of the guards dips his finger into a jar and slaps a dab of conductive paste on the little bald patch, freshly shaved, at the back of the condemned man’s head. He winces like a child shrinking from the cool touch of the alcohol-soaked cotton swab that precedes an inoculation.
“My cup runneth over,” continues the rabbi, but his voice seems to be fading, overtaken now by another voice, a woman’s, small but resonant and musical, riding in over the goodness and mercy shall follow like descant variations on a plainchant: “…sitting here and fighting for breath in an ever-narrowing circle of tightening time — oh darling, what a ghastly farce we are compelled to endure! I can’t believe it yet!” Not a majestic voice, but sweet and lyrical, the sort of voice one hears in church on the Sabbath singing Gounod’s “Ave Maria” or “En Kalohenu” or joining in on the “Alleluia Chorus.” In accompaniment, high above the Square on the Roof of the Astor, the lonely bugle grieves….“I feel so inadequate in the sight of your need! If only I could truly comfort you, dearest one, but I can only sit here and weep bitterly for you and the children and our devastated lives — oh my God, I’m so unhappy!” The prisoner’s canvas-slippered feet are lifted onto the footrest and locked into place. He looks like a seasick traveler being tucked into a deck chair. A guard stoops and rips open a pantleg, which has been previously slit, then sewn together loosely so it wouldn’t flap indecorously on the last walk, and rubs in more of the same ointment used on the head. Metal electrodes with wet sponges are attached by the Executioner to these two oiled-up places. “…My heart aches for the children! I looked at my photo of Mike with his hair falling down over his forehead and his tie awry, and thought I should burst with longing! The horrible idea that we may never be with them again drives relentlessly through me and my brain reels, picturing their terror — oh Julie, how greedy I am for life and living…!” The prisoner’s head is forced back against the leather headrest and strapped in. His eyes are squeezed shut and he is breathing rapidly, his teeth bared. The song that the trumpeter is playing is “Ciribiribin.” “What shall I do? I am lashed by the most tremendous kind of longing! Oh, I love you so very dearly — kiss me goodnight, the way you used to, my dear husband! How much dearer to me you are than you have ever been…!” His eyes blink open momentarily as though for a last look as the leather hood is fitted over his head and then dropped down over his face — but the hood, far from muffling the voice, seems to amplify it…. “How precious were those last few hours I was permitted to spend with you! It is when you cross the distance that separates us and call out your cheery greeting that I come alive and know that I am still my own self and not some fantastic being from another realm! How happy I am then — the very air changes and the heaviness lifts, and the will to live and work and fight is mine! There comes to me such an abiding sense of faith and joy, such a sure knowledge of the rich meaning our lives hold, my heart sings its refrain, ‘I am loved, I am loved!’ and within me there begins to develop the profoundest kind of belief that somehow, somewhere…” Two of the guards exit, the third returning to his place by the wall. Warden Denno steps out, glances perfunctorily at the straps and connections, then up at Executioner Francel, who nods and returns to his alcove. “… I shall find that courage, confidence and perspective I shall need to see me through the bottomless horror, the tortured screams I may not utter, the frenzied longings I must deny! Your faith alone builds my confidence, restores me to my rightful place in my own eyes…’ Executioner Francel positions himself before his switch. He moves with the deliberate precision of a man who knows what he is doing. “… Then, after you were gone, the loneliness closed around me — it’s all so strange without you! Oh bunny dear, hold me close to you tonight, be strong for me I need you so to be strong for me…!” The Warden raises his hand. Francel grasps the switch, wrapping his hand firmly around the big handle. “Whatever might be involved, I love you dear one, as I love my very own life! I kiss you good night with all my heart, draw you close into loving—“
Julius Rosenberg’s body is straining suddenly against the straps as though trying to burst from the chair. Air hisses from his lungs. His neck thickens as though swallowing something whole. The leather straps creak and there is a staticky crackling whine in the Square reminiscent of the classic mad-doctor movies — only more close up. The loose clothes flutter and his limbs shake. Greasy yellow-gray smoke plumes from the top of his head like a cast-out devil. Then, abruptly, the whine stops. The body falls back into the chair, limp as a rag. There is a deathly breath-held silence in Times Square. Before it can be broken, the Executioner methodically pulls a switch a second time and again the body leaps from its seat to heave and labor against its shackles. By the time the third charge is delivered, there are still a lot of gaping mouths and bulging eyeballs out front — some of the Holy Six in particular, close enough to smell the smoke, are looking a little green around the gills — but on the whole, the worst is past: they’ve seen it now and know what to expect. Most of them anyway — some have closed their eyes, a few have turned away. Mamie Eisenhower, for example, is whispering something over her shoulder to Georgie Patton’s widow, and seems to have missed the whole thing. Her husband’s eyelids have already started to droop, as they always do when his part is over; he crosses his arms and legs, lifting his right ham into Herb’s lap, and glances dismally down the row at Joe McCarthy, who, having caught a deep wheezing breath and crossed himself, now uncorks a hip flask and takes a long reviving snort. Irving Saypol sits cool as custard, erect yet relaxed, his long bespectacled face betraying no emotion whatsoever, his assistants Lane, Cohn, Kil-sheimer, and Branigan doing their best to emulate him. Judge Kaufman is partly screened by his long-necked wife, leaning across in front of him to whisper with Mamie Eisenhower, but behind her short-bobbed hair, his thick lips have pulled back to reveal the gap in his upper incisors, and there is a tic popping away in the thick white pouch of flesh in front of his left ear. Some of his jurors still seem a bit shaken as well (is this what they voted for?), and G-man Hoover’s bulldog scowl looks more like a case of severe heartburn right now than mere righteous indignation, but for the most part the picture is one of a general release from tension with each successive charge, a return, in the words of Warren Harding, to normalcy. The best index of this is the behavior of all the children out front: fascinated by the first two jolts, they are now bored by the third; they squirm in their seats as Julius’s body whips and snaps in its bonds, covering up their ears against the crackling whine, asking “What’s history?” and complaining that they want to go home or go see Mickey Mouse or use the toilet.
When Francel has opened the switch and the body has collapsed for the third time, the two prison doctors walk over and rip the T-shirt down the front. Dr. McCracken puts his stethescope to the bared chest, nods to the others, and, wiping the sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand, says: “I pronounce this man dead.” Whereupon, Julius Rosenberg, taking Judge Irving Kaufman and the U.S. Department of Justice with him, enters the record books as the first American citizen ever executed by a civil court for espionage. More records are set to be broken when Ethel Rosenberg takes her turn in the chair, but this one belongs to Julius alone, and, as such things appeal to Americans, it is duly cheered — less enthusiastically up front, where the disquieting presence of Death can still be felt like a sticky malodorous fog, more warmly as it spreads out toward the periphery, traveling like a happy rumor, merging finally into a drunken exultant uproar out at the far edges, where everyone is having a terrific time without exactly knowing why.
Guards unbuckle Rosenberg’s corpse, offering the public a quick sensational glimpse of his blue tongue, wildly distorted facial muscles, and fractured eyeballs, then they heave the sacklike thing up onto the white-sheeted gurney, grunting as they work. While the cadaver is being wheeled offstage to the autopsy room, the attendant who brought in the ammonia bucket mops up the puddle beneath the electric chair and sponges off the soiled seat, working with self-conscious fastidiousness, aware of all the eyes upon him. The audience with gentle good humor applauds him — he smiles sheepishly, wiping his hands on his pants, and ducks back to his position beside the wall, stage left.
Cecil B. De Mille, meanwhile, using the Paramount Building as a kind of giant magic lantern, the Claridge Hotel as a screen, has commenced to project Uncle Sam’s documentary film on the Rosenberg boys, the idea being to augment the pathos (Americans, as he knows, go ape over sentiment) and to restore a certain monumentality to the event, a bit diminished by the actual human size of the principals and the loss during the blackout of the larger-than-life pageant icons — but they are running behind now with the executions, the Sabbath is rushing up on them, and so hardly has the film faded into the initial first-reel prison encounter between parents and children, the littlest son greeting his mother with “You look much smaller, Mama!” (“No, it is you who are growing bigger!”), when Rabbi Koslowe’s voice can again be heard down at the echoey far end of the Last Mile, gravely reciting, as cell doors clang and steps once more approach, the 15th Psalm: “Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in Thy holy hill…?”
Yet, though it begins much the same as the one before, this is, as the people soon realize, no mere repeat performance — no, this is a true second act, a topper, they can feel it, even before Ethel Rosenberg has made her appearance through the Dance Hall door: something very different is about to happen! Maybe it’s simply because she’s a woman — it’s a rare thing to watch a woman being put to death, Uncle Sam was probably thinking of that when he set up the order; or maybe it’s the way they walk this time, the rustling of starched skirts, the click of hard heels coming down the corridor; or the flickering images on the Claridge perhaps, the little Rosenberg boys up there, several stories high, playing horsey on their parents’ backs; or David’s provocative description, recited by the rabbi but chosen by Ethel, of a citizen of Zion: “He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour!” This is not a prayer, it is an accusation! She is challenging them all, just as she challenged the press and public with her defiantly political Death House letters, or the President with her unyielding mercy pleas, or the Judge with heated quotations from Shaw’s Saint Joan: “You damn yourself,” she told him, “because it feels grand to throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper! But when it is brought home to you; when you see the thing you have done; when it’s blinding your eyes, stifling your nostrils, tearing your heart, then — then — O God, take away this sight from me! O Christ! deliver me from this fire that is consuming me!”
By the time they pass under the SILENCE sign and into the heat and stench and glare of the Death House stage, Rabbi Koslowe has moved on to Ethel’s second selection, the 31st Psalm: “… Thou hast set my feet in a large room. Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble: mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly!” But if Ethel Rosenberg — driving force behind the Master Spy, willing slave of a conspiracy against all humanity, and typist for the Crime of the Century — is consumed by grief, it is not obvious in the way she makes her entrance, walking buoyantly between two white-frocked prison matrons, her hands clasped in front of her, her head held high and her eyes sparkling, her face lit with a serene smile, declaring by her very presence that, unlike Shaw’s Saint Joan, she will not be burned offstage — indeed, even had this been the plan, she would not have allowed it.
She is dressed simply in a green cotton dress with white polka dots and loafer-type terrycloth slippers, her hair close-cropped on top, a tiny creature, just five feet tall, pert, full-breasted, and disturbingly pretty, with none of the puffy puckery-mouthed sag of the newspaper photos — maybe it’s the haircut, the loose springlike dress, the color in her cheeks; probably, though, it’s just her commanding style. There are some out in the audience who have been feeling they’ve seen all there is to see the first time around — you just plug them in, they twitch and jerk awhile and shit their pants, then you unplug them and cart them off, ho hum — and who have become a bit restless, distracted, looking ahead already to the Bobo Olson-Paddy Young bout to follow, laying their bets, getting into arguments, or else, especially if they’ve got their kids with them, contemplating the quickest route out of the pack-up — but Ethel’s entrance has changed all that. She’s got every one of them on the edge of their seats or the balls of their feet. President Eisenhower sits hunched forward, his eyes wide open for a change, and Mamie too is watching now. Vice President Nixon is white as a sheet, gripping the seat of his chair, sweating profusely. Julius shared his terror with them all, and so they were able to sympathize with him, get inside and suffer what he suffered, then survive — but Ethel is insisting on being herself, forcing them to think about something or someone other than themselves, which is both disquieting and exciting. She gazes around the set and out into Times Square with a kind of fierce delight, enjoying what she sees, meeting each of her accusers with a bold steady stare, smiling at the people beyond, daring them all to watch and listen…. “For I have heard the slander of many,” reads the rabbi, “fear was on every side: while they took counsel together against me, they devised to take away my life!” Her husband’s voice enters almost as though, with a flick of her short curls, she has cued it—“It’s the warmth and comradeship of decent people, it is the compassionate heart of good people and the fraternal solidarity of mankind — this is what is really worthwhile and this is what is good in the world!”—but at the same time, though her lips remain closed in their gently taunting smile, her own voice is present, too: “All my heart I send to all who hold me dear — I am not alone — and I die ‘with honor and with dignity’—knowing my husband and I must be vindicated by history!” Joe McCarthy is grinning broadly in frank admiration, and even Darryl Zanuck seems impressed. “Let the lying lips be put to silence,” reads the rabbi, “which speak grievous things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous!” She has not only stolen the atom bomb—she has stolen the Bible as well!
The two matrons accompanying her — Helen Evans and Lucy Many — hesitate. Ethel turns to them, smiles warmly, shakes Mrs. Evans’s hand and kisses her cheek, shakes Mrs. Many’s hand — they flee, genuinely touched, dabbing at their eyes with clutched handkerchiefs. Then, unassisted, Ethel walks directly to the electric chair and plumps herself down in it with all the familiarity of a daily commuter taking her seat in the subway. Her husband’s voice meanwhile, accompanied by friendly street noises from the Lower East Side of their childhood, is speaking of June and love and how happy they were as young radicals, first as lovers and students, then as man and wife…. “I look up at the calendar and June 18th catches my eye — hoir vividly I remember that lovely Sunday in June! We were so full of joie de vivre, so happy and so much in love — I never dreamed I could love anyone so much! Remember the photos from our honeymoon at Spring Glen? In many ways, my bunny, you are prettier and lovelier now even than then!” She shifts her body to make it easier for the guards strapping her in, helping them place the leather bands across her chest and lap, smiling at their embarrassed awkwardness. She is so tiny she had to scoot down in the seat for her feet to reach the footrests and the electrode there. “And the many wonderful summers we spent together — do you recall our summer vacations with the boys? Can you picture all of us together in the country or at the beach? You carrying Robbie on your back and Michael on my back, and the big race was on. Do you remember the procession when it came time for the little one to be put to bed? You led the way holding his feet. I held his shoulders and Michael marched in the middle with his brother’s back resting on his head. By now it seems so far away, but the beauty of it lingers…. Gosh, how sad without you…” Up on the Claridge, Julius is zooming the little one through the prison visiting room like an airplane. Ethel tips her head to one side to help the Executioner attach the electrode to the shaved place on her scalp, wincing briefly when the wet sponge touches it. Her husband’s voice has begun to whine…. “The days are lonely, sweetheart, and the dark long nights are empty without you. Many times during the day I ask myself over and over why and I have to put it out of my mind because it doesn’t make sense. Somehow it seems so long ago that I saw you and everything is strange and distant. An empty feeling grips me and everything seems so unreal and out of focus. Tears fill my eyes as I—” She shakes her head as though shuddering and interrupts him. When his voice returns, it is once again deep and proud and reassuring: “You and I must steel ourselves, my love, although our hearts are breaking: the approaching darkest hour of our trial and the grave peril that threatens us require every effort on our part to avoid hysterics and false heroics! We will have to call on the great strength of the solid union of our hearts and souls to find the stamina to face what is in store for us!” Her smile returns. She watches the guards strap her arms in, flexing her fingers to show them she’s comfortable. “We can face the lies, the pain and even death, as long as we are united in heart and soul, in love and truth. What we are and all that we have no one can take away from us even though they keep us apart and threaten us with death. And come what may I am sure that our name will eventually be cleared….” She looks straight ahead at all the people in the special section down front as the black strap is placed across her mouth, gazing at them above the leather gag without hatred, without malice, but not letting them forget either what they are doing to her. Her eyes are open and shining brightly as the black leather hood comes down, covering her face. “Be of good courage,” the rabbi is saying huskily, “and He shall strengthen your heart.” Above her Julius and the boys are looking through a barred window at a tugboat pulling a string of barges on the Hudson River. “Nobody welcomes suffering, honey, but as long as we do the right thing by our children and the good people of the world, nothing else matters!” The guards exit. Warden Denno checks the connections. Up on the Claridge, her sons are being taken to a baseball game. Executioner Francel returns to his alcove. “Oh my darling, how beautiful you look! I want to sit beside you, my love, stroke your hair, I want to look into your eyes while I hold your hands in mine. Ethel, you are just my girl and nothing on earth can change that. I can only say that life has been worthwhile because you have been beside me. Good night, sweet woman! I caress you tenderly and send all my love. I am happy that you have made my life so—“
There is a sudden harsh metallic rattle, as before, and Ethel leaps against the straps, her body lifting clear of the seat, her dress fluttering as though caught in a wind, her hands balling into fists. Again there’s the odor of burning meat and smoke curling up from her scalp, as her body temperature pitches up to 140 degrees. Francel opens the switch and she falls back into the chair like a soft Raggedy Ann doll with its face wiped away. Before the crowds can swallow and catch their breath, Francel pulls the long handle again, holds it, releases it, then pulls it down again, her delicate white throat gorged twice over by the driving current, her body plunging against the leather straps each time, the air filled with a fierce crackling whine: they’ve heard it six times now, but it’s not something you can get used to. Then, as suddenly, it is over. Her body slaps limply back into the chair, all its poise, all its proud strength and compelling tension expunged.
Executioner Francel glances out briefly at the body from his alcove. Then, wiping his hands with a dustcloth, he makes a cursory examination of his switch panel and prepares to shut the system down. A guard steps forward, brushes his hand in front of his face as though sweeping away something unpleasant, and unbuckles the black leather strap binding Ethel’s breasts. She’s fallen so limp now: she seems almost childlike. While a second guard proceeds to unstrap her arms and legs, the two prison doctors approach, extracting their stethoscopes. Out front, there is a soft rustle and a deep communal sigh, as the people settle back, gazing around them as though in some surprise at finding themselves where they are, exchanging perfunctory but sympathetic church-lawn smiles, murmured remarks, a few whispered jokes — just to loosen up a little — about what they have seen, or think they might have seen. Someone points up at the clock on the Paramount Building and they all watch the second hand sweep past the uppermost star: 8:13. Just in time. The Sabbath has begun. You have to credit Uncle Sam, they all agree. The houselights are already starting to come up. Newsmen have left their places and arc running, as they have been assigned to do, toward the bank of telephones inside the Times Tower to cable their stories in, although above them the news of Ethel’s death is already being flashed around the tower in moving lights. Up at the far ends of the VIP aisles, Paddy and Bobo are already in their fighting togs, puffing and snorting and punching the air, warming up for the big fight due to begin shortly.
The guard unstrapping Ethel’s limbs apologizes to the doctors for holding them up and steps out of their way, leaving one leg still bound. Dr. Kipp routinely rips her dress open down the front, and Dr. Mc-Cracken applies his stethescope to her bare chest. It seems to take him longer than usual. He frowns and asks Dr. Kipp to have a listen.
What’s happening? An uneasy murmur ripples through the crowd. Warden Denno and Marshal Carroll look startled. Herb Brownell is on his feet, Irving Saypol as well, Tom Clark, some of the jurors — the President gropes absently for his field glasses and, not finding them, grabs Brownell’s elbow instead: what’s wrong? The people look up at the images of the Rosenberg boys being projected onto the Claridge, but the film has got caught in the projector, and all they see is a frozen shot of Ebbetts Field with a gaping hot hole in the center, melting its way horrifically out toward the edges—
“This woman,” gasps the doctor, “is still alive!”
Now they’re all up on their feet! This is impossible! Executioner Francel steps out of his alcove scratching his head in stupid bewilderment. “Want another?” he asks, but he seems confused, indecisive. The Warden, too, seems to have lost the initiative, and the doctors, thrown into this ad lib situation, are lost. There’s but a moment’s hesitation — long enough to reflect perhaps that it’s too late, the Sabbath has already begun — and then, as a gaunt hoary figure rises up from the front-and-center section in his familiar star-spangled plug hat to cry, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg!”, they all rush forward, led by young Dick Nixon, followed by Joe McCarthy, Herb Brownell, Bill Knowland, Lyndon Johnson, Foster Dulles and Allen, Engine Charlie, and Estes Kefauver, virtually the entire VIP section, scrambling up over the side of the stage, fighting for position as though their very future depended on it, racing for the switch — it’s hard to tell who gets his hands on it first, maybe the Vice President with his head start, maybe Francel himself, or young Senator Kennedy, more athletic than most, or perhaps all of them at once, but whoever or how many, they throw themselves on it with such force they snap the thing clean off! The guard nearest the chair, seeing what was about to happen, has been frantically trying to belt Ethel up again, but he only gets one of the straps done up, and loosely at that, when the charge hits, hurling him backwards off the stage and cutting a wide swath through the VIPs as he flies by. Ethel Rosenberg’s body, held only at head, groin, and one leg, is whipped like a sail in a high wind, flapping out at the people like one of those trick images in a 3-D movie, making them scream and duck and pray for deliverance. Her body, sizzling and popping like firecrackers, lights up with the force of the current, casting a flickering radiance on all those around her, and so she burns — and burns — and burns — as though held aloft by her own incandescent will and haloed about by all the gleaming great of the nation—