Public Burning (50 page)

This dogged sense of purpose, this conviction that easy wins are tainted, lay behind most of my difficulties with girls, I realized. The problem was, all the girls I met when I was young seemed to be living lives that were out of mesh with my own. Out of sync, I think they say in the movies. They seemed to be on some other plane, moving at some other angle. Not that I understood much about where I was going, I admit. I never thought about national politics, for example, didn't even vote when I was old enough, in spite of all the preaching I used to do in high-school essays about it, had no idea I'd be where I am today, nor even had any specific ambition to be here. Yet I knew instinctively that those girls weren't going where I was going. I was driving toward the center, they were spinning around on some merry-go-round out at the edges. And because of that, I was afraid of too much intimacy with them, more afraid than they were, afraid of getting lost in some maze of emotions, of surrendering my self-control, afraid of…afraid of exile. From myself. Even though I craved that surrender, ached for release from my inordinate sense of mission. Those long lonely nights up in the bell tower, dreams deep and dangerous…

My weakness, I knew, was an extreme susceptibility to love, to passion. This is not obvious, but it is true. A politician cannot display his emotions in public, this is part of the job. Nor can you enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships. You can't confide absolutely in anyone. You can't talk too much about your personal plans, your personal feelings. I believe in keeping my own counsel. It's something like wearing clothing—if you let your hair down, you feel too naked. Yet, I longed for this nakedness. My testing ground was Ola, the only steady girlfriend I had before Pat. She was pretty, lively, exciting, she brought out my more reckless side, in fact I loved her, but she wouldn't get off the merry-go-round, and I couldn't get on it. It took me six years to realize that—we went together, off and on, all through my senior year in high school, four years of college, and my first year at Duke—or maybe I realized it all the time, maybe the six years was for something else….

Ola was the daughter of the local police chief, and maybe that was why I started going with her. However far we went, I thought, it would be somehow legal. Under the arm of the law. At the same time, it seemed dangerous, dating a cop's kid like that, a challenge worthy of the class president and wingading honors man. Sometimes I walked around school feeling a little bit like Douglas Fairbanks slipping into the caliph's harem. I admit, I knew nothing about girls, I had only brothers, I didn't even know what their underside looked like or what you were supposed to do when you got there. “Menstruation” was a distant rumor. I expected holes of some kind, but I wasn't sure how many—at the burlesque shows, all you saw were tits and bottoms, and even then we were too nervous to sit down in the front rows. I didn't know what a clitoris was until years after I was married. In fact, I'm still not sure I'd know one if I saw one. Ola had no brothers, perhaps we started even, but I supposed at the time she knew everything, she was cute and popular and very self-confident. And a Democrat besides, which suggested a lot to me at the time. Also, she liked all the dangerous things—which in those days were the movies with their “jazz babies” and “red-hot mamas,” beach parties, and dancing—I was clumsy as hell at dancing, but it always made me hot, I could see why the wild people liked it.

We got off to a terrific start, playing the romantic leads in a high-school Latin Club production of
Aeneas and Dido
. There were omens in this: Dido was abandoned by Aeneas and killed herself. Not that Ola had it in her to kill herself, far from it—but she did marry a guy who locked her into that small town forever, a kind of suicide, and I've always thought she did it to spite me. On the other hand, to be accurate, it was really she who abandoned me. But that was years later; the end came slowly. At the time, the play gave me a vocabulary different from my own that I was able to use for a while with great success. And those white togas, they were like flimsy nightshirts, like bedsheets—I had to wear a jockstrap so as not to make a spectacle of myself. Those goddamn Greeks and Romans, they must have been at it all the time. I got a handful myself every time I threw myself on Queen Dido's bier at the end, best part I ever had. Everything was great—but only so long as the play lasted. Then she fell into the same clichés about me as all the other girls. Maybe they'd been talking to her too much. I fought against this, acted silly or loud or flirtatious or belligerent. I hated myself at these times. I assumed an air of possession wherever we went, looking old and already half-married, hoping she would fall into the same patterns and find herself past the barrier without remembering when she'd crossed it. She looked up to me, more than any other girl, even Pat, she went with me everywhere, said I was a man of the world and she felt so stupid around me, sometimes even almost afraid, but she wouldn't give in, stop being frivolous, and just be mine. She was even more goddamn stubborn than I was.

We had arguments. About religion, politics, friends, what to do. But we didn't argue about what was really the problem. We didn't even mention it. I tried everything. When my brother Harold died, I even suggested I might get TB too, might be dead soon… This was even less successful than the political arguments. Each day the opportunity receded. I had black moods and unhealthy imaginings—I felt she knew what was wrong and was only taunting me. And it wasn't her virginity I wanted, no, I was frightened in fact by the prospect—what I wanted was her surrender. I wanted her to
give
herself to me, utterly, abjectly, deliriously. That was all. She had nothing to fear. And perhaps much to gain. Our political arguments were surface manifestations of this deeper struggle. I thought if I could so break her self-assurance as to make a Republican of her, the rest would follow. She did not understand the importance of these arguments. She would get flippant about them, make fun of my seriousness. I would become ill-tempered and bark at her. She'd start to cry. But I wasn't being doctrinaire—all of us Quakers were for Hoover in 1932, that was natural, but I hardly noticed when Roosevelt smashed him that fall. We were in the middle of final rehearsals for
Bird-in-Hand
and I gave the greatest performance of my life on opening night, just two days after the elections (admittedly, I got a certain perverse pleasure out of the line about what kind of Conservative I was: “Governing folks as isn't fit to govern themselves!”). And then a week later I entertained my entire fraternity in Grandma Milhous's home, the whole football team was in the fraternity and the party was to celebrate the Poets' victory over Loyola, forty guys were there—Christ, what the hell did we care about politics? Couldn't Ola see this?

In the spring we even had the romantic leads in a revolutionary play about the sordid life of Scottish coal miners, a thing called
The Price of Coal
. It was mostly my idea, in fact I thought we might recapture the spirit of Aeneas and Dido, but somehow we got lost in the dialect. Also the lighting was fucked up something awful, it was a disaster. As usual, we put it on in Founders Hall. There was something wrong with that building, my whole romance was tied up in it and there were thousands of places to hide, but somehow nothing ever seemed to happen, we always ended up out in the corridors or on the benches built into the stair landings—already mine was a public life. I was running everything, arranging picnics, staging plays, bringing bands to campus, winning debates and scholarship honors, holding the fraternity together, participating in clubs, running for offices, literally working my ass off, and somehow this only made Ola laugh gaily and go off and date some other guy. I remembered walking around on that tight little stage on the second floor—it was Friday-morning chapel and everybody out front was still half asleep and bored shitless—thinking: Goddamn it, she has no sense of
value:
Jock the Miner or Aeneas the Father of the Romans, it was all the same to her, let's face it, she's too flighty, I could never marry her. But I still wished to break her down, prove to her she needed me. And then, probably, I would marry her. Back in the wings, sweating under the greasepaint smudges, aroused by the musty odors of the costume racks, I'd give her long deep looks. She'd sigh and complain about the electricians. Or glance over my shoulder and wave at a friend.

And then we got into a fight one night at a dance. I walked out on her. I expected her to follow me. She didn't. She called her folks to pick her up. That should have been the end but I kept trying. I don't give up easily. Then we suddenly had the best night we ever had together. It was the night I found out about winning the scholarship to Duke. I felt so terrific I wasn't even trying to make out—and then I almost did. I'd bought an old 1930 Ford and we rode around in it all night. I think she was really in love with me that night. But I was so in love with myself I didn't notice until it was too late. By then we'd celebrated too long and she was sleepy, wanted to go home. I didn't want to spoil anything, we were both so happy, there was always tomorrow…but there wasn't. When I went away to Duke Law School, I wrote her every week, went home on holidays to see her. Clear across country. She was going with other guys. I was desperate and tried to ignore this. But when she wouldn't even let me come see her, I lost my temper and broke it off. As I slammed the phone down, I thought I heard her giggling. Yet I was relieved. I'd been saved. I realized I'd been pursuing my passion like a career—I'd even considered throwing over law school and going back to Whittier for good!—but now I used my stifled passions as energy in my pursuit of a career in law. Oh, I never doubted I would marry, keep a woman beside me, have children, I was normal—but the law degree, I knew, was like a potent aphrodisiac, obtainable through abstinence. I remembered that history book that Aunt Edith gave me when I was ten years old: lawyers ran the world. And could have, I assumed, whomever they pleased. Even there, in that dismal unlit room in Whippoorwill Manor without toilet or running water, burning crumpled newspapers in the old sheet-metal stove to stay warm, sharing a double bed with old Bill “Boop-Boop” Perdue, listening to Brownie and On-the-Brink Freddie over in the other bed spinning off their horny tales of coquetry and conquest, worrying about the next round of exams, cold, miserable, and poorer even than Jock the Miner, I knew this mating must happen to me. And it did. In
The Dark Tower
. Not Ola, of course, but I didn't forget her. Years later, out on Green Island, I wrote a note to myself: “There's a kind of love for permanence. There's another kind that's just champagne bubbles and moonlight. It isn't meant to last but it can be something to have and look back on all your life….”

I yawned. I was drifting. It was a beautiful day out, lush and warm, the kind of day to get out the old glove and toss the ball around. Probably be good for my sore shoulder, get the kink out. Stupid as hell to hit the door like that. Yes, go out and shag a few, the Capitol outfielder. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg often did that: went up on the Death House roof to toss a ball around. Not both at the same time, of course—give them half a chance and they went at each other like animals. Maybe one of them was up there now…warming up in the bullpen, as it were, loosening up for the big one. “At lunch,” Ethel once wrote, “the up and coming athletic star of this jail went up on the roof and hit three home runs. It is wonderful to punch a ball and run and enjoy wind and sun.” I supposed a home run was when you knocked the ball off the roof. Dangerous place to chase a fly, there were probably a lot of homers. In fact, the matrons playing with her were probably a little peed off that the aggressive little wat kept knocking the damned ball away. “Come on, Mrs. Rosenberg, play nice.”

The Rosenbergs were Brooklyn Dodger fans. Or pretended to be. They talked about it in their letters. Of course, I understood the emotional and political motives, it was rhetorically sound, I'd used much the same techniques myself—but what was wrong with the Rosenbergs' appeal was that it was obvious they didn't know the first thing about baseball, had no feel for the game at all. The Dodgers had won three pennants in the last six years and were a close second so far this year, and the only thing that excited the Rosenbergs was the fact that Brooklyn had broken the color barrier when they brought up Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. As Ethel wrote, after allegedly “chewing her nails” over a boring 10-0 rout: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to the eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.” Now, I ask you, what kind of baseball talk is that? Maybe they called it “beizbol” now that the Russians had laid claim to inventing it. This, after all, was part of their defense. The
National Guardian
had argued that, just as the Russians had invented everything first, including baseball, they also knew all along how to build atomic weapons, but humanistic considerations had deterred them from doing so.

True, some of our own eggheads were contending much the same thing, Harold Urey for example: that there was no secret to the A-bomb, and that the Russians could have got more out of a Flash Gordon comic strip than out of Greenglass's famous diagrams. It was Urey's argument, and that of other offbeat scientists like him, that anyone could figure out how to build the Bomb, the important thing being to have the wherewithal to put what you knew into hardware. The Russians were presumably slow in developing the A-bomb because their industrial establishment had been wiped out by World War II. Well, Urey was a Nobel Prize winner and all that, but he had heavy water on the brain. Even if he was telling the truth, it was interesting that he had waited until now to spring it on us—he and his buddies had built up a profitable and very private sinecure for themselves on the assumption all this time that there
was
a secret. Even their goddamn budgets were so highly classified that in Congress we rarely had any idea what we were giving them money for. For all we knew, we were buying them retirement homes in Odessa. And anyway, it wasn't likely Urey was telling the truth. J. Edgar Hoover had said there was a secret, and so had Truman and Eisenhower, it was on the record. Even the Rosenbergs and their lawyer obviously believed there was such a secret, this much they'd effectively confessed to. I remembered from my days at HUAC that Urey had had a long association with fronts for the Phantom, had even helped to launch a few. Maybe he was even one of the mystery spies behind the Rosenbergs. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Albert Einstein. Paul Robeson. The Hollywood Ten. I gazed down at the demonstrators parading in the sun. Only a few years ago, there were 1,157,172 people in this country willing to vote for Henry Wallace. Who were those people? Where were they now? Why hadn't we done something about them? Old Wallace…might have been President. But he didn't have it. Got too near the sacred fire and went berserk. Risks of the game…