Public Burning (55 page)

His mother's words. She loved the adulation, the wealth, the power. His father loved the poet's life more than its rewards, loved controversy, loved style. True genius, he once told his young son, is to be faithful to one style, while exploring intransigently all that it contains—like making love all your life to one woman. Maybe he learned that from Ernest Hemingway. Or vice versa. T
IME
in any case has kept his father's counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he's ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, compound words, cryptic captions, middle names and parenthetical nicknames, ruthless emphasis on physical details, especially when somewhat obnoxious, extended metaphors (“slowly the ribbon of his voice unrolled/ with here and there a knot…”), alliteration, rugged verbs and mocking modifiers, and T
IME'S
own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. He called footballer Red Grange an “eel-hipped runagade” and G. K. Chesterton a “paradoxhund” before most children his age could even spell “cat.” A Charlie Chaplin movie was “a gorgeously funny example of custard-piety,” and when the Queen Mother of Spain died, he looked up the true meaning of “the Escorial,” where she was buried, and blithely penned: “They took her to the Dump.” Well, he was a youngster, he could do such things and get away with them, even the Queen Mother might have smiled. And if sometimes he strove too hard to be clever and overshot the mark (“A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon…”), if sometimes the coinages proliferated into self-parody and “backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” it was understood that such excess was a necessary flaw in any great poet: you have to take your pratfalls while you're still young—the old man who suddenly lurches into audacity late in life is a fool.

T
IME
was close to his father and deeply mourned his sudden passing—more perhaps than Mother Luce did, though she was pregnant again and so had worries of her own—and though he kept his feelings largely to himself, one could sense in him ever after a restless unconscious search for his missing father. Perhaps—he forced himself to admit this—perhaps he needed his father's death, needed the search, the inexpressible longing, in order to achieve the emotional depth and maturity essential to a Master (and let's face it, there was always something sophomoric and nihilistic about his father's influence, loving and protective as he was, something of the restless jock and compulsive boozer), perhaps in all great poets' lives there had to be these early tragedies, and this was his. His mother, though increasingly occupied with other children, took over his development for a while, and though his most important formative years were behind him, she did instill in him a stricter discipline, a wider-ranging urbanity, and a greater appreciation of intimate detail. The growing cynicism and detachment, however, were his own.

His sister F
ORTUNE
was born the week of his seventh birthday, a beautiful child, well-endowed, ultimately more brilliant and sophisticated than he, tutored by songsmiths and loved by the rich, but though she sometimes teased him and once even called him a “fascist” (admittedly he was flirting at the time with the far right, supporting Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy, picturing Haile Selassie as “squealing for protection” for his “squalling Abyssinia,” and smearing Jews and Socialists—but all that only went to show he was a lot smarter than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who'd been growing up with him), F
ORTUNE
always looked up to him as her big brother, and depended upon him, a father surrogate of sorts, for guidance and protection. As did his baby brother L
IFE
, even though he'd enjoyed a success in the art world the equal of T
IME
'
S
in literature, radio, and film. There were other children along the way, some adopted, some stillborn, others neglected and allowed to die, even a bastard called H
IGH
T
IME
, apparently engendered in a nightmare by the Phantom and quickly done away with when the truth was known; but the pride of Mother Luce, and indeed of the nation, were her three remarkable and close-knit sibling prodigies, T
IME,
L
IFE,
and F
ORTUNE
.… Or at least up till now. The old lady's been getting skittish again of late, seems to be losing interest in the arts, flushes like a schoolgirl at ballgames and boxing matches. There was a big party just a few days ago, everybody high as a kite and letting themselves go, he's pretty sure she's been knocked up again.

He's not jealous—why should he be? Oh, some people say she's trying to breed his successor since she fears for his life, but he doubts this: one Poet Laureate is all any mother can hope for. What does upset him, though, is that she's being drawn away from him, just like when his father died. He feels his self-confidence draining away. Tonight's events, for example: how will he cope with them? What can he hope to achieve?
MOTHERLESS
CHILDREN
HAS
A
HARD
TIME
WHEN
THE
MOTHER'S
DEAD
—he saw somebody a while ago carrying a picket with that written on it, and when he should have laughed, he shuddered. Has he lost the way? This spectacle, even as it fascinates him, frightens him with its challenges to the imagination, its dangers, its hints of hidden appositions, confrontations with the Shape-Shifting Absolute, webworks of treacherous abstractions that make his verse somehow irrelevant, unequal to the occasion, silly even. Everybody else seems to be rejuvenated by coming here, he feels years older. His instinct is to flee, forget it—it's not his mission “to exorcise the Doubt which is conquering the Western World,” his mother's already told him that, his job is to stay alive—but he is a poet (he reminds himself) and he can do no other than to stay. Art is not an idle affectation, it is a solemn calling, a penance, a manly devotion to something behind the profane world of baseball games and movie reviews. The poet is not merely an entertainer, though this would be the easy way out, not merely a celebrator of his age—he is also a prophet of religious truth, the recreator of deep tribal realities, committed “desperately, whimsically, absurdly, cockeyedly, whole-souledly” to Revelation. “T
IME
will reveal everything,” Euripides prophesied. “He is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.”

And so, though circuses and theater generally fail to move him, though he distrusts mobs and is dubious about the selection of Times Square for the executions (as Mother Luce has said: “New York is in the bloodstream of America and America flows hot through New York. But New York is not America, son… New York is the fascination of America—where vices easily become virtues and virtues vices…”), here is where he must be tonight. It is, as his mother would say, his “manifest duty.” And he is not without defenses. If worse comes to worst, he will do what he has always done. If he bursts through the scrim of phenomena and grasps the whole of tonight's events, he will celebrate them; if they overwhelm him, he will belittle them. He's a professional, after all.

19
.

All Aboard the
Look Ahead, Neighbor Special

“I been busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the nettle-rash,” stormed Uncle Sam, “copin' with riots and wars, payroll robberies, murders, and onscrofulous sabotage! Them parleyvoos, who can't even get a damn guvvamint together, are tearin' up our Embassy, the Bolsheviks are massin' for a riot in Munich, I'm exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions from within stirrin' a ‘ruption in me equal to a small arthquake, time is fast runnin' out, I need ever' able hand at my command at full strength and manly firmness—and Holy Foley! what do I find
you
doin'?!”

I stood with my back to him at the marble fireplace, flushed with shame, afraid even to look up at my own face in the mirror, trying to unjam the zipper on my fly—he'd startled me so, I'd leapt out of my swivel chair like an Eisenhopper, nearly castrating myself on the edge of the desk as I'd slammed past, and, trying desperately to yank shut my fly, had trapped my shirttail deep into the zipper.

“Remember, you shall have joy, or you shall have power,” admonished Uncle Sam, “but you cain't have both with the same hand! These repeated abuses and usurpations ain't such as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for flyin' the flag! You cain't Tippecanoe and till her, too!”

I struggled desperately with the snagged zipper, not even trying to puzzle out whose voices were leaking through him now, in fact I could hardly hear him, all my senses seemed blocked off somehow—yet I knew he was there, omnipresently there, jamming up all the corners. I longed for the privacy of the old bell tower over our store in Whittier, where things like this never happened. My trouble, I thought, is that I'm an introvert in an extrovert profession.

“So what's the matter, son? Pat pregnant again?”

“No! No, I… I don't know,” I whispered hoarsely. “It's like…like I've been going backward… I'm sorry…it's silly—backward in time! It's hard to explain…”

“Aha,” mused Uncle Sam, “backward in time, is it?” I caught a furtive glimpse of him in the mirror over my shoulder. His face was in shadows, his back to the window. He might have been giving me a look of utter disgust. Or he might have been laughing. Either way, I knew, the fat was in the fire. I'd recognized from the time I became a member of HUAC, and particularly after my participation in the Hiss case, that it was essential for me to maintain a standard of personal conduct that was above criticism, and now—ah, I had faced some problems in my life perhaps more difficult than this one, but none could approach it in terms of personal embarrassment and chagrin. “Sounds like the fortieth-birthday blues to me,” he said.

“Uh…” Was this an excuse? It didn't sound like one. “That was five, uh, five months ago, I don't think—”

“You were busy then, Inauguration and all, it usually doesn't hit you until a few months go by…. Say, boy, you want me to give a jerk on that thing for you?”

“No!” I cried. “No, I… I have it now… I almost have it…!” But I didn't. I couldn't even see the damned thing, everything was blurred, and my hands were shaking. Heart whamming away like ninety. This crisis is worse even than the fund, I thought. “It's not my…it's just my shirttail…”

“No doubt,” snorted Uncle Sam. Hands in pockets, he kicked heedlessly across the room through the clutter of notes and documents. “Well, lemme tell you, hoss, backward in time is one place Americans don't never go, grand climacteric or no! Herbert Hoover was born a penniless orphant, but he didn't look back, and at the age of forty he was worth four million smackeroos—and he wasn't even President yet! In fact, later on, bein' a mite skittyish, he finally did look back—and got royally creamed for it, too! You know what Henry Ford done when he turned forty? He gave up small-time mechanics and went out and founded him the goddamn Ford Motor Company, that's what! Forty, yes, he was forty! Now his boy, who ain't even as old as you, is pullin' in upwards of a hundred million bucks a year, not bad for a kid, and even payin' taxes on some of it, just to show his heart's in the right place!” He picked up one of the Greenglass sketches, turned it one way, then the other, finally shrugged and tossed it back on the floor. “‘At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment'—old Ben Franklin wrote that, and passin' forty hisself, sold off his press and bought up Dr. Spence's do-it-yourself electrical kit—if he hadn't a flown that kite, we wouldn't be here today! When Paul Revere was forty, he spread the alarm through every Middlesexed village and farm, and Ulysses Grant used
his
fortieth year to put the squeeze on Vicks-burg and that ain't just another name for your old John Thomas! Now, what woulda happened if
them
snorters had opened their pants, got bird in hand, and looked backward in time?
Eh?
No, my friend, remember the Prophets: Look not mournfully into the Past, it comes not back agin!”

“It wasn't…exactly my own past exactly…more like…” Never mind. Just make matters worse. I struggled to recall that line from Shakespeare about hearts and hell that I copied down years ago when I was in the Navy, I knew it would be useful. When I was away from Pat for a while…. But it wouldn't come to me. Instead, what I did remember suddenly was the name of that old Clark Gable movie:
It Happened One Night
. This scene, however, was not in it.

“I will say to your credit, though, you're more natural at that than you are at golf or politics—if you loosened up like that out in public, might make all the difference! You'd probably be floggin' a lot fewer problems at home, too….”

“I'm not having problems!” I protested. Did he know about Pat and me? Politicians lived in glass houses, I knew, but surely there were decent limits…maybe not, though—I'd only really come under the gaze about nine months ago, I was still mapping this out. “It's…it's got nothing to do with that…”

“No?” Uncle Sam, his white locks curling down around his shoulders, was peering at me as though over the top of Ben Franklin's reading glasses. “Maybe not. But remember just the same, lad, a little wife well tilled, willed, I mean—in a word, don't keep it to yourself, boy, stand beside her and guide her, a used key is always bright along the Wabash!” His voice had softened to a throaty rumble—like that of Raymond Massey playing Abraham Lincoln. His playful fade had calmed me somewhat, and I'd managed to work a tooth or two of the zipper free from the cloth, but the rest wouldn't budge. “Listen, you're fightin' the problem, son,” he said, leaning toward me as though he might come to help.