Public Burning (60 page)

The bartender glances at his fob watch. “Naw, just three hours now, old-timer, and it'll be all over.”

“Wha—?!”
Now he's sure they're finishing him off. Sonuvabitch, just when he was striking a real seam at last! He throws down the drink, stuffs the paper cup in his pocket, and decides to work his way out in the general direction of his digs, so he can at least die in his own bed like a proper gent. If he can get through—whew! his pockets are so heavy he can barely move, and he wonders confusedly if he's being treated to some unpleasant moral on the accumulation of capital. This is the worst he's ever seen it!

It's true, they're really piling in now, everybody jamming up together, old and young, great and small, of all creeds, colors, and sexes, shoulder to shoulder and butt to butt, missionaries squeezed up with mafiosos, hepcats with hottentots, pollyannas with press agents and plumbers and panty raiders—it's an ingathering of monumental proportions, which only the miracle of Times Square could contain! And more arriving every minute: workers in dungarees, millionaires in tuxedos, pilots, ballplayers, sailors, and bellboys in uniform, brokers in bowlers, bakers in white aprons tied over bare bellies. Certainly this is the place to be, and anyone who's anyone is here: all the top box-office draws and Oscar winners, all the Most Valuable Players, national champions and record holders, Heisman Trophy and Pulitzer Prize winners, blue ribbon and gold medal takers, Purple Hearts and Silver Stars, Imperial High Wizards, Hit Paraders, Hall of Famers, Homecoming Queens, and Honor Listees. The winners of small-town centennial beard-growing contests have all come, the year's commencement speakers, class valedictorians, and quiz-show winners, the entire Social Register, the secretariat of Rotary International. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Yehudi Menuhin, Punjab, Dick Button, who isn't here? Gary Cooper hoves into view up in the Claridge, wagging his shiny new Oscar from
High Noon
and doing his much-loved toe-stubbing aw-shucks Montana grin for all his admirers, both on the House Un-American Activities Committee and off—he's been one of the top ten box-office draws for thirteen years running now—only Bing Crosby has been loved so long so well. Uncle Sam has provided Coop a special position tonight in a third-floor window of the Claridge where he can both see and be seen, along with other Hollywood stars friendly these past years to HUAC's efforts to shrive and scour Movieland—good Americanists like Jack Warner, Elia Kazan, Bob Taylor, Ronnie Reagan and Larry Parks, Budd Schulberg, Ginger Rogers, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou. Others, more suspect, like Bogie and Bacall, Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel, and Edward G. Robinson (his true identity, after all, is Emanuel Goldenberg of Bucharest!), are shunted off to the periphery, where they'll be lucky, standing on tiptoes, to see a few distant sparks fly.

Harry James arrives, snaking his band through the thickening mob toward the Hotel Astor, where they've got a gig up on the Roof—their rendition of “Ciribiribin” will be featured tonight during the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. Paulette Goddard's in the crowd, José Iturbi and Consuelo Vanderbilt, John L. Lewis and George Mikan. Esther Williams turns up in her tanksuit, hand-in-hand with the Oscar-winning cat-and-mouse team, Tom and Jerry—and old Mickey Mouse himself is there, too, celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday and elbowing his way through the crowd with Minnie, Goofy, Horace, and the rest of the aging Rat Pack. It's also Eastern Airlines' twenty-fifth birthday tonight, and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker has brought four thousand of his employees to the Square to celebrate it. The deejay, from his prominence, catches a glimpse of the famous bald pate of John Reginald Halliday Christie, the polite bespectacled necrophile, brought over here from London to model for wax museums before his hanging (the Mother Country is still catching on to electricity) next month, and in his honor plays Hank Williams's “Lovesick Blues” and “I Can't Help It.” It is said that Christie—who murdered at least seven women, including his wife Ethel, and copulated with their corpses, sent an innocent man to the gallows and earned two commendations as a member of the Police War Reserve for “efficient detection in crime”—was wounded in World War I, just like tonight's Official Executioner Joseph Francel, by mustard gas. Patterns everywhere. Little Reggie, led through the Square by a brace of English bobbies, gazes gently at all the women, leaving a wake of frothy excitement. Some women are frightened, some smile, some faint, some come to orgasm. It's supposed that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, invited here tonight to pursue his celebrated studies into the effects of electrocution upon the erogenous zones, cannot be far behind.

In such a pack-up there's a natural rush on anything cold and wet. Some of the bars near the center are running out of liquor—the bottle brigades are drying up before they get all the way in, so heavy is the demand further out—and there's talk of getting Eddie Rickenbacker to fly supplies in. Ice cream vendors are being mobbed, and nobody cares any more whether it's Cherry-Oonilla or not. Fights break out, ice cream is shoved in faces, bottles shatter, people jab each other with their
I
LIKE
KIKES
buttons. Marquees read
WE
ARE
SWINGING
ROUND
THE
CIRCLE
and
THE
FIERY
TRIAL
THROUGH
WHICH
WE
PASS
WILL
LIGHT
US
DOWN
IN
HONOR
OR
DISHONOR
TO
THE
LAST
GENERATION
, while around the Times Tower in electric lights circle the oracles of the American Prophet Gil Imlay…

Backstage, Uncle Sam, fresh arrived from his containment exercises out in the receding world, is watching all this ravishment and dignity through a peephole cut in the set for the purpose, the profane muscles of his face in tune for laughter and a merry twinkle in his steel-blue eyes. “Great balls of fire!” he whoops. “This may be the biggest thing since we struck oil at Titusville!” With him are some of the night's key performers, due to go onstage any moment for the early part of the show, as well as a few of the heavyweights up from the VIP subway shelter for a sneak peek at the congregation. Which in its glow and vigor is getting a bit unruly. They seem to have been invaded by a certain anxiety out there, a certain exultation now that the sun has slipped behind the skyscrapers, a giddy sense of being at the edge of something terrific—like a striptease or the end of gravity or an invasion from Mars. There are whoops and screams and loud laughter. People are pressing into the sideshows not so much to see as to join them. Teetotalers elbow frantically toward the bars, shy clerks pinch bottoms and make naughty remarks, tourists forget their cameras, businessmen toss off their jackets, empty their pockets. The police are still managing to keep a semblance of order, but they can't help being a little excited themselves—no matter which way they turn, or how quickly they whirl about, there's always somebody behind them they can't see, goosing them with electric shockers.

The Secretary of Agriculture, up for a glimpse of the festivities, objects piously to all this sensuality. “Pshaw! We need it, Ez—sex'll cause the flame to grow,” retorts Uncle Sam. “You gotta plow up a field before you can grow something in it—what in tarnation did you think agriculture was all about, my friend?”

Messengers arrive from the subway station below with roll-call lists: most of the Supreme Court has arrived, as well as hundreds of Congressional leaders and State governors, the members of HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, the Rosenberg prosecution team and jury, J. Edgar Hoover and his boys, the Executioner and Guest Speakers. “Sir, before God and his chilluns, I believe the hour is come,” grins Uncle Sam, glancing over the rolls, “to hot up the brandin' arns, open up the gates, and get this ro-
day
-oh under way! Yessirree bob! my judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is flat in it!
I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-lookin
'
varmints to my side!”

There's an excited backstage hustle and bustle, rippling all the way down into the station below. Ties are straightened, pants hitched, drinks drained, hair primped, crotches fiddled, lips licked, brows wiped nervously. This is it.

“Hey, wait a minute!” someone calls out. “Where's Dick Nixon?”

21
.

Something Truly Dangerous

The sun was slipping off toward the western horizon, dipping down over the Catskills, as I stepped off the empty train and into the streets of Ossining. I felt a little like one of those beardy desperadoes arriving at a dusty Hollywood cowtown for the final showdown. On the other hand, it was like coming home. Not to Sing Sing, of course, hunkering up on the bluff to my right like some impenetrable medieval fortress, ringed round with its high turreted ramparts (or else like a cluster of friendly red-brick schoolhouses sitting in a sunlit playground—everything seemed double-edged like that since my sudden decision to come here, full of promise and danger at the same time), but to this familiar suburban Main Street with its squat three-story buildings, its scattered fleet of dented Fords and Chevies, its shops and billboards promoting all the recognizable brand names. I didn't know whether I was going to be met by the Sheriff or by Mom and Dad. Or which was the more threatening prospect. The very familiarity of this place could be a kind of bait, I recognized. An elaborate trap. Maybe Mom
was
the Sheriff. Not literally, of course, but she was the one I'd turned away from back there in Penn Station, and if I was walking with either of them now, it was the rebellious and hot-blooded old man, not her. The people streaming past me into the station, rushing for tickets on the southbound trains, might well have been found on the streets of Whittier, all right: middle-aged men in shirtsleeves and suspenders, ladies in unfashionable summer dresses, low-hemmed and sleeves to the elbows, a lone Negro—a trusty maybe—idly sweeping out the station. We had a Negro in Whittier, too. What we didn't have out there, though, were all these cops—they were all over the place, it was like a goddamn military occupation. All this protection was a relief in a way. But also unnerving, given the reason for my being here. They might not all agree I was on their side. Some boys were playing marbles down by the tracks. That was what Tyler was doing, I recalled, when the Incarnation hit him: playing marbles. Yes, anything could happen. Or nothing. Very scary, but there was no turning back. Courage and confidence, I told myself. The valiant never etc. The choice has been made: now live with it.

I hadn't reached this decision in the calmest of circumstances. In fact it was just when the horseplay aboard the
Look Ahead, Neighbor Special
had really started to peak that it had come to me what it was I had to do. But this was to be expected: in a critical situation it wasn't supposed to be easy, and I often got my best ideas just when the going was toughest. We hadn't crashed, as I'd feared, but we hadn't slowed either—if anything, we'd started screaming along faster than ever, and the closer we'd drawn to New York, the sicker I'd become and the wilder the scene around me. The songs had got dirtier, the laughter louder, people were wandering around a lot, exchanging flasks and getting very playful with each other. A couple of young legal assistants up at the other end of the car had got into a scuffle that no one had seemed to want to break up. Girls were squealing giddily. A plump prissy clerk from the General Accounting Office, strutting fruitily up and down the aisle in crushed field hat, sunglasses, and corncob pipe, and singing “Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fly Away!”, had slipped on some spilt booze and crashed into the arms of T
IME'S
showman kid brother L
IFE,
launching what had showed every sign of becoming an outrageous romance. Anything to keep L
IFE
busy. The sonuvabitch had been snapping a lot of pictures, probably for one of those anthropological features, “L
IFE
Goes to a Party,” and the popping flashgun had been making me very goddamned edgy. The few drunks with any voice left were singing “Roll Your Leg Over”…