Public Burning (63 page)

This was not idle dreaming: I knew I could do it. I felt my strength reach out to embrace the globe. I saw statues of myself in Berlin, in Seoul, in Prague, Peking, and Peoria. A universal veneration for the hardnosed but warmhearted Man of Peace, the Fighting Quaker. On horseback maybe (I seemed to feel a horse under me)—or better yet, standing, arms outstretched in a great V, in the back seat of a limousine. All done in black marble. Prizes, medals, titles, special investitures, all that shit—meaningless of course, but the people needed ceremony like they needed proteins, and I'd do my duty in this regard as in all others, even as I understood, better than any other man of my generation could, what children they were. Honorary degrees, too, from Oxford and the Sorbonne, Harvard and Heidelberg—and screw those constipated candy-asses from Duke. I would make war and rebellion physically impossible, and world commerce would flourish with an energy and elegance not seen since the first trade routes were opened up to China. Naturally I'd be loved. Priceless treasures would be heaped on me but politely refused: what did I care for the world's wealth in my selfless dedication to its welfare? Well, a special palace perhaps, not for me of course, but for Mom and Dad, a gift from the peoples of many nations. I could see it far ahead, standing high on a bluff over a sleepy river, turreted and bejeweled in the sunlight. It was something like the Mission Inn in Riverside (we'd get the best architects), only more beautiful. I seemed indeed to be riding a horse, decked out in silver armor, some kind of special ceremony no doubt, yes, I was coming home, there was a festival in my honor, bands playing, the people were pouring out into the streets, singing my praises—but, oddly, the trophy I was bringing them was a gigantic rubber cigar (or was it the pommel on the saddle?) and high above me I saw as I rode under it, a mysterious dark tower, long soft tresses streaming from it wet with blood—

I'd come to with a start: it was Sing Sing Prison I'd been staring up at! My God, where had the time gone? Must have been dozing! I'd caught just a glimpse of the place as we'd rolled under it, standing up there in the afternoon sunshine, much closer and more ordinary than I'd expected, its heavily manned guntowers looking like little yellow and green toy castles armed with thick stubby cannons (not cannons of course, but spotlights)—and then we'd shot below through a tunnel and a kind of trench and reeled with a wheeze and a screech of steel wheels on rails into Ossining Station. No time to wash up or piss as I'd planned—in fact I'd barely had time to shove my feet into my shoes, grab up my other things, hang on to my pants, and leap down before the empty train had gone lurching on out of there toward the north. I'd caught my breath, buckled my belt (this was when that Western desperado feeling had swept over me), tugged my homburg down around my ears, settled the sunglasses on my nose, and, pressing through the inrushing crowds, had stepped out into what—flattening it all out a bit and tossing in a few pepper, camphor, and loquat trees—might have passed for Whittier, California.

I stood outside the station a moment, getting my bearings, gazing up what I guessed to be the Main Street. Slightly run-down, quiet, sleepily cheerful—were it not for all the cops, it would have been a very pleasant place, just the kind of village, updated by a century or so, that old Rip might have come home to. It was no longer a village, though, not even a town, but already something new: you could almost feel the place getting pulled toward the south, sucked into the Manhattan orbit. I understood such places. The same thing had happened to Whittier: I went into the Navy from “Ye Friendly Town” and came home three years later to a piece of Los Angeles. People all over America who had lived whole lives in such towns and villages, each with its own character and integrity, were suddenly finding themselves being annexed to once-distant urban centers, tied to the fortunes of the expanding city with all its vice and corruption and foreign faces. And its riches: it was hard to resist. We'd lived through a revolution, my generation had, and here at the middle of our lives we found ourselves uneasily adrift between the poles of some ancient dispute belonging to a generation not our own. Ike's gang. Ike and I had both grown up in small communities, known the smell of pastures and cowdung, the feeling of leaving home to go “out into the world,” the hostility and perversity of the cities, but his Abilene was a simple old-fashioned village of prairie peasants, the “Cow Capital of the World,” with its legendary cowboy shootouts and its Sunday booze-ups and crapshooting joints at the edge of town, just emptiness beyond. For Eisenhower, everything rural was natural, everything urban unnatural, but my generation, however much temporary nostalgia we might feel for such simplicities, recognized that there was something wrong with this black-and-white view, just as with the contrary idea held by the big-city Brahmins and ghetto provincials that only the cities were civilized, the rest of the country untamed and barbarous. What was missing was the middle ingredient, the place in between where all the real motion took place now that the old frontier was gone: the suburbs, waystop for transients, and thus the true America. My America. Dwight Eisenhower and Julius Rosenberg would never understand each other, but I could understand—and contain—both. Was this to be my role? To urbanize the countryside and bring the wilderness back to the cities? To lead the New Revolution? To bring the suburb to all America?

I pondered this as I walked up into the town, looking for the best approach to the prison. There were wooden barricades up everywhere, even along the New York Central right-of-way, all entrances manned by Ossining City Police and New York State Troopers. All looking tough, especially the locals, Chief Purdy's boys. I hoped that Warden Denno had spread the word. Spencer Purdy was a guy you didn't fool with. When eight hundred New Yorkers came up here last Christmas to sing carols to the Rosenbergs, Purdy had barricaded all streets leading to the prison, had refused to allow the carolers to leave the area of the railroad station, had secreted five hundred cops, deputy sheriffs, and state troopers in an abandoned wire factory nearby with a fleet of buses assembled to convoy them to any trouble, and as much as possible had kept the demonstrators out in the open, under a bitter icy rain. He'd finally let six of them deposit in the prison parking lot a basket of flowers with a legend reading
GREETINGS
TO
JULIE
AND
ETHEL
FROM
THE
PEOPLE
, but as soon as they'd gone he'd had it carted off by a garbage truck to the city dump. All of which was just a quiet little practice run compared to today's operation. The place was like an armed camp. There were patrol cars everywhere, hundreds of sweating unhappy cops, Coast Guard helicopters rattling overhead. I couldn't see them, but I supposed there were National Guard troops up in the hills as well, PT boats in the river. All of which made me feel very goddamn nervous. I decided to wear the moustache, after all, even if it was in pretty shoddy shape after the ride in my pocket—one side of it kept bending out away from my face.

For a while, I just walked the streets, considering alternatives, angles, practicing my Thomas Greenleaf lines for passing through the barriers (if they asked, I'd tell them I was a salesman, a traveling salesman—which was true after all: our greatest salesman against socialism, isn't that what the party regulars called me?), nervously trying to recall the strategy I'd planned to use on Rosenberg. Something about the FBI, a confrontation…. The local residents watched me wander by. I hoped they'd take me for a cop or a reporter. Those not running for the trains were all standing outside their houses in the June heat, listening to car radios. Something about the Rosenbergs. I tried to pick it up: “…the Rosenbergs confessed. In Congress, heavily engaged upon major legislative work, the day has been one of anxiety and suspense…”

What—? Had they talked? Was it all over? This ruins everything, I thought. Forget it. Turn back now, and you'll still have time to make it to Times Square for the ceremonies. I jerked around and started to run back down the hill. But then I reasoned: if they had confessed, what were all these cops doing here? The Phantom would have no use for the two of them now. I tried to reconstruct the sentence. Lot of possibilities:
if
the Rosenbergs confessed,
had
the Rosenbergs confessed,
whenever
the Rosenbergs confessed—I spun around on my heel again and started back up the street. The moustache blew off and I had to press it on again. People were staring at me now. I tried to cool it. I knew this was the most difficult period in a crisis situation, the period of indecision: whether to fight or run away. It was important not to commit yourself irrevocably to a course of action until you absolutely have to do so. Otherwise you're just shooting from the hip, you can miss the target and lose the battle out of sheer recklessness. On the other hand, I'd already passed through this period, hadn't I? Back at the office? On the
Look Ahead, Neighbor Special?
In Penn Station? Which period was I in, then? I was very edgy and short-tempered, and I was afraid I might blow my stack and throw a tantrum or something. I thought of my old man, doing everything wrong, raging futilely against the world: I'm no better than him! I tried to tell myself that if I didn't feel keyed up like this, it would mean I wasn't ready, mentally and emotionally, for the conflict ahead, but I was too upset to listen to such bullshit. My stomach was boiling, my nose was running with hay fever, and my need for a toilet was getting desperate.

Back on Main Street, I spied a drugstore and crossed over to it. Get some antacids. Find a John maybe. But when I peeked inside, I saw that the place was full of troopers lounging about in their snappy but grim black and gray uniforms. I ducked my nose into a revolving rack of postcards outside the door: tinted pictures of the Calvary Baptist Church, Jug Tavern, the Half Moon, and a tombstone pierced by a cannonball in Sparta Cemetery. I was trying to think, but my mind was a blank. “Ossining is a Sint Sinck Indian word meaning ‘stone upon stone,'” said a card depicting the first prisoners setting up the original old marble cell block, said to be still standing. Maybe that was where they were. No, here was the new Death House. There were postcard portraits of famous local Revolutionary War heroes and Death House victims, complete with their last words. Cartoons, too—crude jokes about the electric chair, last meals, and manacled prisoners fantasizing, pissing on their jailers, being tortured with near-naked girls: “Okay, Miss Ladoo, that'll be enough for today!” A prisoner pulling his pants off on one side of a screen, a visitor lifting her skirts on the other, and a cop dashing up, shouting: “Hold it, Diddlemore!”

Inside, the troopers were sucking milk shakes and horsing around with a young high-school girl behind the soda fountain, elbowing each other slyly, looking bored and horny at the same time. I recognized them. The first team. All suited up. A little kidding around, a little grab-assing, ball-tugging, just loosening up for the big game, no harm meant, no rapes intended. One of them was playing a pinball machine that said
HOT
STUFF
along the top, and on the jukebox somebody was singing “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night.” Maybe I should risk it, I thought. They won't even notice me come and go. A caramel milk shake might be just the thing I needed, better even than antacids. Or maybe pineapple. I adjusted my moustache and started forward, feeling uneasy, on the wrong side of things somehow—like that day long ago when I entered a strange drugstore to purchase my first packet of prophylactics and found myself face to face with a man who looked like my grandmother. That time, in panic, I'd bought a lotion for athlete's foot instead. Today it was an old woman who looked like Herb Brownell. She met me in the doorway and said: “What'll it be, mister?”

“Uh…this one!” I croaked, reaching blindly behind me and grabbing a card. I fished for a nickel. “And…uh…could you tell me, please, the best way up to the, uh, prison?”

“Sure, bud,” she said eyeing me suspiciously. She pointed: “Right over, uh, there: uh, Hunter Street.” Was she mocking me? Behind her, the cops had stopped joshing the little soda jerk and were staring dully out at me. I pocketed the postcard, thrust a coin at the old lady, and fled, nearly crashing into the side of a passing taxi. Behind me, I heard hard belly laughter, and it made my stomach knot up and my knees quake. But I was on the way at last.

At the entrance to Hunter Street, however, I was stopped cold: “Sorry, mac, visiting hours are over.” He was a big potbellied gray-haired cop in a short-sleeved blue shirt, wet in the armpits.

“The Warden's expecting me,” I said as gruffly and matter-of-factly as I could. “Greenleaf…uh, Thomas—”

“Sure he is, sure he is,” said the cop sourly, staring vaguely over the top of my head, as though I were too insignificant to be seen. He had a thick hairy nose and small pale eyes: a German, I supposed.

“Listen,” I said, “believe me—”

But the cop was busy with two guys who had come up behind me, wearing straw hats down over their noses, unknotted ties, and carrying big Speed Graphics. They flashed some kind of pass, press cards probably, and the cop let them through. I didn't have one. The next guy did have one, though, and he still didn't get through. “I'm sorry, bud, but we're just too crowded.” The man shrugged, we exchanged commiserating smiles.

“Hey, you know that guy?” snapped the fat cop, squinting darkly at me, one hand on his pistol butt.

“Wha—? N-no!” I gasped. I felt like I used to feel around Ola's old man: shabby, obsequious, guilty.

“Who was it?” asked another cop, wandering by with a walkie-talkie.

“Fuckin'
Daily Worker
reporter. He had a lotta fuckin' nerve.”