Public Burning (29 page)

Huzzahs from the crowd, beaming smiles from the gathered functionaries, who try to get as close to Uncle Sam as possible. The workmen line up and sing “Hail to the Chief,” then test out the chair by burning six or seven chimpanzees in it. And high over the Square behind Father Duffy, up where the Chevy sign used to be: the headlines from the
Newton Kansan
of exactly eighty years ago today, June the 19th, 1873:

9
.

The Vice President's Beard

Shaving that morning, I thought: I was born a hundred years too late. If I could let this damn thing grow, I'd look like Ulysses S. Grant. There'd be no more talk about shyster corporation lawyers and used-car salesmen then. I could say what I pleased, glowering over my beard, and everybody would listen. Black and bushy, like Saint Peter or Henry VIII or Whit What's-his-name. Walt Whitman. My skinned nose and forehead gave me a special ferocity this morning. I growled at myself in the bathroom mirror:
G-r-r-row-w-f-f!
Beauty and the Beast, that game I used to play with Pat before we were married, my secret self. She thought it was funny, she didn't understand. Mess up my hair, roll my eyes, shake my jowls, the good old days. I could always get a laugh then. If I'd worked at it, I might have been another Jack Benny.

I actually started a couple of beards back then, always got embarrassed, shaved them off before anyone started to notice. That drift from the focal center, which was somehow clean-cut and open-eyed—it had to do, I suspected, with the approval of old men. And fear of turning into the grizzly irresponsible red-eyed derelict I looked like after a day or two of stubble. With a beard you were expected to move differently, say different things, become more cynical and detached, I got conscious of my hands, eyebrows, lips. I could let myself look like that bent over law books on a Sunday night, but not in class on Monday morning. Then, before I knew it, I was a prosecuting attorney, had to set a community example, then an OPA civil servant in the war and soon a J.O. in the U.S. Navy, where hairiness was frowned on more even than gonorrhea, unless you wore it on your chest, and I wasn't even out of the Navy before I was running for Congress. With that, my public face was set. Change it, lose votes, I was no longer a free agent. How a candidate looks is a lot more important than what he says, and the most important thing is to look familiar. Even our rare vacations became public appearances, I put it out of my mind. Except occasionally while shaving in the morning. Maybe someday when I'm President. Like Lincoln. Have some little kid write to me and suggest it. That would solve the television makeup problem, too—I can shave thirty seconds before I go on camera and, unless I put some powder on, still have such an obvious beard that people write me letters about it. The five-o'clock phantom. My enemies will stop at nothing.

As I'd feared, I'd had a sleepless night—probably for the best, it could be stimulating at a time like this, I knew, but for the moment it made me groggy, unable to see clearly how close the shave was, I had to go by feel. I'd been pushing too hard, consuming all my reserves, making myself vulnerable. All those disturbing apparitions, those images out of a life not my own.… It was as though something had got into me last night, like an alien gene, and I'd lacked the strength to fend it off—all my Early Warning rhetoric about “boring from within”: I'd suddenly begun to understand it for the first time. It was pretty stupid, banging my face on the wall like that, but in a way it had been a good thing. It had cleared my head, and by the time I'd reached my car I'd pretty much forgotten about old lady Greenglass's inflated belly and the chickens and traffic on Delancey Street. Soft summer night out, new moon over my shoulder: I'd rolled the windows down, turned on the car radio, tuning in a station playing old songs like “Heartaches” and “Whispering Hope,” and had cruised down Independence, taking the long way home so as to calm down some, letting my mind fill up with reassuring pictures from my own past, my boyhood vibrating in me like an old movie: the Anaheim Union ditch in Yorba Linda where I went wading, Easter eggs and May baskets, the adventures of the Gumps, Grandma's big austere house at Christmastime and “Joy to the World” being trumpeted out from our Meeting House steeple, Lindbergh's flight and all the little stuff we collected from it, a book I read told by an abused dog, hanging baskets of smilax ferns on sunny porches, the Four Square Gospel Temple and Ken Maynard rolling off his horse inside the Berry Grand…Goddamn! I'd thought: I've lived a wonderful life! I'd remembered playing railroad fireman, learning to salute the flag at school and sing “Old Black Joe,” nosing through the Books of Knowledge, memorizing stanzas of “Snowbound” and struggling with “In a Persian Market Place” on Aunt Jane's piano, sweating in the heat of a Tucson summer, mashing potatoes for Mom. I was good at that like everything else and Mom was always pleased because I never left any lumps, using the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down like the other boys did. I'd recalled—tooling past the Smithsonian and up around the Washington obelisk—mashing those potatoes, and it was like some kind of epiphany. I'd felt like I felt one morning at Whittier College when I'd been up for nearly three straight days and everything was incredibly beautiful—or that day, not all that long ago, when I was sitting on a dilapidated rocking chair on Whittaker Chambers's front porch in Maryland, the warm sensation sweeping over me that it was all falling into place.

It had felt right, this feeling, I hadn't resisted it. History working things out for me in its inexorable but friendly way: my brother had got sick and my mother, overburdened with work and worry, had sent me to live half a year with Aunt Jane. I had hated this and had felt cheated somehow. This was natural. I didn't even like Aunt Jane. But that was where, feeling lonely, I'd learned the piano, and it had been an important part of my life ever since. Just as when I'd followed my mother over to Arizona. She'd taken Harold to a sanatorium there and was helping to pay the hospital bills by cooking and scrubbing at the sanatorium. I'd felt guilty tagging along without helping, so I'd got a job in the Prescott rodeo, cleaning out the stables. I'd been as thorough at that as I was at everything else, and so they'd asked me to be a barker for their wheel of chance. This was a come-on, I'd discovered, for the dice and poker tables in the back room, but everything out front where they'd put me was legal, the prizes were real hams and bacon, and I'd earned a dollar an hour and praise from the old guys for all the business I brought them. In many ways, in spite of the money, it had been the worst job I'd ever had, I was nervous for hours each day before I started, was scared to death of some of the people in those crowds—a complete waste of time, I'd thought…but without that experience, I would never have survived the cruelties of that whistle-stopping campaign tour last autumn when news broke about the so-called secret fund. Destiny. My Dad decided to open a gas station in 1922. He could have had a site in Santa Fe Springs, but he chose the one in East Whittier. The next year they found oil—lots of it—on the Santa Fe Springs property: we would have been millionaires. It gave my father bleeding ulcers, but for me, what was being a millionaire? Being at the center was everything, and this meant having nothing in excess to throw you off balance. Except power. Power, I knew, was something that existed in the universe like electricity. There was no reason to be a conductor. There was no reason not to be.

I'd skirted the Tidal Basin and wheeled around toward the Lincoln Memorial, then had followed the Potomac around to Rock Creek, letting the old tunes on the radio—“Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking”…“Me and My Shadow”—call up all the old feelings, the old scenes, the old dreams. No patterns, just a sweet nostalgic flow…the church picnics with homemade ice cream…the dense odor of the inside of my violin case… Tunney and Dempsey and the Irish Rebellion (how my father raged against it! “But aren't we Irish, too?” I'd asked him; “Not that kind!” he'd bellowed)…a beautiful print we had in our house, an advertisement I think for Edison light bulbs, called “Shedding Light,” with a boy sitting on a purple rock in a misty rose and green landscape, gazing up at the light bulb glowing in the branches of a summery tree, looking for God up there, I supposed, as I always used to do while watching the clouds go by…or maybe it was a girl sitting there, I'd forgotten exactly. Passing the locks, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” fading in and out on the distant station, I'd had sudden total recall of Fredric March's transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and back, which was nevertheless mixed up somehow with
The Best Years of Our Lives
, probably the greatest movie I'd ever seen, though I no longer remembered much of it. And so it had gone: the Armistice parade and a circus, Wallet finding a baby on his doorstep in “Gasoline Alley,” Grand Canyon through the stereoscope, the fear of Bolshevism, the strange light at Christian Endeavor meetings on Sunday nights, the 1924 World Series on our new radio and then Babe Ruth hitting sixty home runs when I was fourteen years old. But mostly school memories, ballgames, girls, clubs, bike rides, and things at home, Dad's knuckled hands on a gas pump, the way his ears stuck out when he was dressed up, Mom's smile when I brought things home from school, fights with my brother Donald, Harold's vague grin, Dad coming home one day to tell us there was a little doll over at the hospital, a real live doll—poor little Arthur, who'd died so young. I'd once written a school composition about him, a kind of threnody…“And so, when I am tired and worried, and am almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up and see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes, and curly hair; I remember the child-like prayer—If I should die before I awake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take—I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my brother Arthur…” I got an A for it. A for Arthur….

I'd swung off the deserted Parkway and up onto Massachusetts, better lit but just as empty, my fingers drumming on the wheel, picking out the song on the radio—Count Basie's “One O'Clock Jump,” I think—I might have been a great jazz pianist, or a very good one anyway, if I'd had the time. This was the long part of the drive home, up past Washington Cathedral and American University, almost all the way to Maryland. But not quite all the way: we lived in Alexandria when we first came here, but now I wouldn't live outside the District if they'd give me title to all of Montgomery County. I was dangerously close, I'd realized, to Inspiration House, headquarters for the pro-Rosenberg forces, and, wheeling around past the Naval Observatory, I'd flashed again suddenly on Ethel's bare bottom by the kitchen stove, but I'd pushed it away before all the tenement stuff started crowding in, concentrating instead on the broad dirt streets of Yorba Linda, the scattered one-story wooden buildings, distant hills, the hair rolled tight on top of Grandma's head, the elections I'd won, the first time I got to drive the truck alone, things I'd thought about when I was a janitor at the swimming pool. “My Wild Irish Rose.” The drunken Mexicans over in Jim Town. Snitching grapes. Throwing passes. Standing under the big lamp on the corner of Green-leaf and Philadelphia, talking with guys late into the night. A full moon one night that seemed to separate itself from the street lamp as I walked out from under it—it's God! I'd thought, it's proof!—and then a girl's window, lit: but she was dressed, and then, unbuttoning her blouse with one hand, she pulled the blind with the other. My eyes had closed a moment, capturing that lowering shade—and I'd almost wrecked the car, two blocks from home, right on Wesley Circle. Easy, boy. Don't let your guard down.

Checkers had greeted me, threatening to wake up everybody in the house. I'd petted him roughly and cracked his nose to shut him up. The most famous dog in the nation since Fala. The goddamn spare room was still full to overflowing with dog collars, handwoven dog blankets, dog kennels and baskets, and enough dog food to feed all of Southeast Asia, sent to us by dog lovers and other lonely people. Some of them had actually thought that my Checkers speech was an appeal for charity! Thus: one more profession, if all else failed. I'd found a rib bone in the refrigerator for Checkers, a bowl of vanilla pudding, three overripe slices of tomato, a french-fried chicken back, a partial tin of Spam, a plate of soft fudge, cole slaw, a Dr. Pepper, some sour gherkins, a peach half in syrup, and a cold hamburger for myself—more or less in that order and eaten as discovered. I was very hungry and it all tasted good. There was actually some red Jell-0 in there with canned mixed fruit in it: I wasn't sure of the flavor, but I ate it up anyway, thinking: Who knows? it may be the last of its kind. I'd also cleaned up what was left of a jar of apple sauce, bottle of skimmed milk, bowl of tapioca, and tin can of cold baked beans, followed by caviar and strawberry ice cream, lit up a ceremonial pipeful of Rum and Maple, and sat down in an armchair to digest.

Foo. I'd eaten too quickly. I felt terrible. But one had to be uncomfortable, I knew, to do one's best thinking. I'd tried to think about the case again. Here at home, pull it all together, solve all the problems. What did it mean that they'd found the missing console table, that Schneider the photographer had committed perjury with FBI connivance, that Greenglass had spent six months in the Tombs with Harry Gold preparing their testimony? Nothing. The table could be any table, Schneider's alleged perjury was merely technical, witnesses are always schooled. I'd belched sourly, shifted in the chair, knocked out the pipe (why do I smoke at all? I hate the goddamn stuff), and recalled that in one of the confidential notes stolen from her lawyer's office, Ruth Greenglass had been reported admitting that her husband, David, had “a tendency to hysteria”: “Once when he had the grippe he ran nude through the hallway shrieking of ‘elephants' and ‘lead pants.'” Lead pants? Maybe he'd seen our secret research into anti-shrapnel underwear for Marines. I'd realized I was just pooping around, so I'd chased Checkers off to bed and gone that way myself.