Public Burning (69 page)

“You mean, it's that…it always…”

“Not even the guillotine has a better record, Mr. Nixon.” It looked like an ordinary high-backed dining-room armchair with leather upholstery, brass-studded, something you might find in an antique shop or up in the attic. Except for the special headrest, the thick cables, and a broad middle leg that stuck out in front like a kind of deck-chair foot-rest. The burning tree. Maybe that crossword puzzle answer wasn't
GOLF
after all…. “The only near-failure we ever had was just sixty years ago this summer up at Auburn when the chair broke during the first jolt. Took over an hour to repair it, and meanwhile the prisoner, who was still semiconscious, had to be kept doped up with chloroform and morphine. The poor bugger. One wonders what dreams he was having. But here at Sing Sing we're still batting a thousand.”

There was a large skylight overhead, the panes sooty. From the inside? The lamps in the ceiling were shaped like flowers. “Is this the first woman you've had to…you've had to put to…”

“To sleep?” The Warden seemed amused at the expression. “Oh no, she'll be the ninth. If the sentence is carried out.” He paused. “The first one we had here was a woman named Martha Place. That was back when Teddy Roosevelt was governor. She appealed to him for clemency, and when he refused her, what she said was: ‘That soldier-man likes killing things and he is going to kill me!' She was right enough about that…” What was the Warden trying to get at? If he wanted to accuse us of something, why didn't he just come right out with it? “You can buy souvenir postcards of her down in the town.”

The Warden stepped into an alcove to the left of the chair and turned on a big barn-door spotlight. “This is where the electrician works,” he said. The switch was a long handle with a big knob on the end, like a gearshift lever on an old Ford. It was in full view of the chair, lit up like a special exhibit. The victim was denied nothing.

“Must be hard to find anybody to take the job,” I said.

“Last time there was an opening,” said the Warden, “there were over seven hundred applicants. That was when we hired Mr. Francel.” This seemed to prove something to me that I'd always believed, though I couldn't remember exactly what it was. The Warden stood in the alcove, talking about volts and cycles and amperes, rheostats and dynamos, but I was thinking: the old legends about Death were closer to the truth than the ones we had now—it was a substantial reality, a kind of person, an active intervention in the endless process of life. “The current enters the body through a metal electrode lined with a wet sponge and placed on top of the head, toward the back, the hair having been shaved from this area to provide a good contact.”

“I see…”

“It leaves the body through a similar electrode strapped to the calf of the left leg. The flesh's resistance to such a current generates a great heat and the body's temperature shoots up as high as a hundred and forty degrees—which is enough in itself to render most of the vital organs inoperative.” The cables coiled out from under the chair like snakes, like thick turds, then disappeared into the floor somehow. There were elegantly paneled benches for the witnesses, and near them, oddly, a lavatory. For washing up? But who—? No, I thought: for throwing up in. “The body in the chair struggles convulsively against the straps—it can be pretty appalling to watch, but it's believed to be just involuntary muscle spasms induced by the current.”

“Aha…” That's what they said about little Arthur when he went into his meningitis death throes. I wondered if the Warden planned to remain throughout the interview. He was probably hanging around trying to find out what the fresh information was I'd mentioned earlier as an excuse for coming here. “Where does that door—?”

“That's the corridor that leads to the Death Cells,” said the Warden. There was a sign tacked up over the door that read
SILENCE
. “We could isolate it for you.”

“All…all right…”

“Do you want to see both of them at the same time?”

“No! Uh…no, just one…” I think that when a third person is present, one is distracted, wondering what
his
reaction is. Or people sometimes show off to the third man. But if there are just two of you—

“Which…?”

“Either one. Uh, the woman.”

While I thought about that, the suddenness of my decision, the Warden led me out into the corridor and asked a guard posted there to have “C.C. 110.510” brought down. I realized that I'd been planning to talk to her first all along, since back aboard the
Look Ahead, Neighbor Special
, maybe before. There were black blinds on all the windows, giving the whitewashed corridor the appearance of being somehow lit from within. Aglow. Empty except for the old steam radiators. The Last Mile. I was reminded of the Ambassador Hotel corridor in Los Angeles, the night of my Checkers speech. “It's so, uh…polished…”

“The convicts here call it the Dance Hall,” smiled the Warden around his long cigar.

“The what—!?”

The Warden watched me a moment as though to ask me: Why are you nervous?—then said: “I think they're coming.” And he walked away from me down the corridor to let them in.

He'd left the door into the death chamber open, but there was no time to close it now. I stared in at the electric chair, the coiled cables, the white hospital cart, the long black switch, thinking: So this is it, then. I felt suddenly like running, but my feet seemed stuck to the floor. I looked down on myself and saw the Vice President of the United States of America standing, rooted in panic, in the Sing Sing Dance Hall, awaiting the arrival of the notorious Spy Queen, Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg, and I felt just like I'd felt before the Checkers speech: I just don't think I can go through with this one, I'd said to Pat. Of course you can, she'd said firmly, confidently. Of course you can…

I squared my shoulders and turned to face the door at the other end of the Last Mile (it is a challenging world, yes! I told myself, trying to stop my knees from shaking—but what an exciting time to be alive!) just as Ethel Rosenberg, flanked by a pair of matrons, stepped through. I nodded at the Warden and the two matrons, and they left us, pulling the door shut. We were alone.

“It's…it's all right,” I said. “Don't be afraid. It's just me, Richard Nixon.”

24.

Introducing: The Sam Slick Show!

“And now, oh God of our fathers, we will bless Thy name forever, for we are the people of thine inheritance! With our fathers, eight score and seventeen years ago, didst Thou make a Covenant, and Thou hast confirmed and amended it with their seed throughout all Enlightened Time! Thou hast made us unto Thee an eternal people, and hast cast our lot in the portion of light, that we may evince Thy truth, and from old hast Thou charged our Angel of Light, Uncle Sam, to help us. In his hand are all works of righteousness, and all spirits of truth are under his sway. But for corruption Thou hast made the Phantom, an angel of hostility. All his dominion is in darkness, and his purpose is to bring about wickedness and guilt. All the spirits that are associated with him are but angels of destruction. But we—we are in the portion of Thy truth!”

It's knee-bending, God-hollering, crying-in-the-chapel time in Times Square for the sons and daughters of Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler. The restless razzle-dazzle of the Pentagon Patriots and the Radio City Rockettes has been displaced on the Death House stage by the Singing Saints of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, whose eyes have seen the glory, and a spirit of communion, like half time at a big football game, has settled on the gathered masses. There's been a moment of silent prayer (as silent as one can hope for amid so much bubbling excitement) in memory of the late U.S. Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the world-famous Nuremberg hangman; the Reverend Bob Jones, Sr., has unleashed his new sermon, “Shoving Jesus Christ Around,” and the Notre Dame Law Dean Clarence Manion of the Holy Six has blistered the so-called intellectuals of the nation for their heretical “allergy to absolutes,” their reluctance to accept the basic facts of the existence of God and the divine origin of American rights and duties:

His fellow Holy Sixers—Rabbi Bill Rosenblum, Editor Dan Poling, Father Joe Moody, Presidential Aide Sam Rosenman, and Businessman Electric Charlie Wilson—join him onstage and together they reaffirm their righteous fury against the reckless Rosenberg Committee clemency seekers, who “have knowingly or unwittingly given assistance to Communist propaganda…”

I SAY THE REAL AND PERMANENT GRANDEUR OF THESE STATES MUST BE THEIR RELIGION
! says the Wrigley Chewing Gum sign, and around the Times Tower on the electric bulletin runs Reverend Phillips Brooks's evangel: “… In thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light; the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight!”

If the hymns—even when rendered majestically by the Singing Saints and recognizably old American favorites like “It Is No Secret,” “The Christian Warfare,” and “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus”—tend to sound like party songs tonight, if Christ's blood tastes a little like Old Grandad and crotches are more fingered than crosses, that doesn't signify there's been a weakening of the faith, a drift into the dominion of darkness—on the contrary, it's as though it's all coming together here tonight in a magical fusion, the world of the sacred locking onto the world of the profane like the two images at a 3-D movie, and all these provocative confluences are not only possible, but necessary. One visits the Hiroshima freak show and the belly of the Whale as one would walk the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, treasures stolen panties like relics of the True Cross, exchanges dirty jokes like recitations of the Seder Haggadah, knowing that every act is holy because, only so long as God be praised, it cannot be otherwise, and that, like the President says, “THE ALMIGHTY WATCHES OVER PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONS.” And takes His pick.

Kate Smith comes out and sings “God Bless America,” and then out on stage comes Sister Emma Bennett Fowler, the pride of Perryton, Texas. She squares her frail shoulders, rears back, and lets fly: “God bless America has come ringin' down the corridors of time ever since the
Mayflower
landed on our shores! It was in this faith that our forefathers begun to build, feelin' their way and searchin' for religious truth! Isaac Watts invented the steam injin, revolutionizin' travel and much industry!” She feels her way over to the electric chair. “Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that done the work of fifty men! And Seth Thomas and his podner Eli Terry seen that by mass production they could cut the costs on
clocks
, enablin' more people to buy and makin' more money for theirselves!”

“They seen the light!”

“The Spirit was up-
on
'em!”

“Tell 'em about it, Emma!”

“And so it has been through all the ages! Americans have invented thousands of machines, savin' men and labor, enrichin' theirselves and the Nation! And so's it might be
known
to be of God,” cries Emma, “‘In God We Trust' was lettered on our coin, and printed on our dollar bills a ‘Pyramid under the all-seein' Eye a God.'”

“Oh yes, he's laid us down in the green pastures, Emma!”

“The Eye of God!”

“Shine on!”

“But!”
she shouts, and her demeanor suddenly changes. A hush falls. Here comes the good part. “After the First World War, Communists begun infestin' our guvvamint, schools, and churches! They got a weird creed which they spread by bein' fanatically inspired by Satan, whose disciples they are! It is with a missionary zeal they spread this pizen all over the world—!”

The people groan and gnash their teeth; women scream, children cry. Everybody is having a terrific time.

“We have refused to live under God's control, and now live under guvvamint control!” cries Emma over the uproar. The sound-system engineers crank the decibels up to give Emma the power she needs to carry above the racket. “The food for which we refused to give thanks has rose to exorbitant prices! The tithes we refused God we must now pay in taxes! Besides traitors in our own guvvamint everywhere, our allies is trickin' us and sellin' goods and weapons to the inimy, and are beginnin' to ridicule us in the eyes a the whole world!”

“It's a cryin' shame!”

“Don't let 'em get away with it, God!”

“Throw the rascals out!”

“We cannot ignore the fact that it is our boys who have suffered all the atrocities only Satan can conceive,” Emma shrieks, “and that there are millions a Reds swarmin' all over the world!”

“Get us outa this, God! Give 'em hell, fer Chrissake!”

“Our world is now divided into two groups,” cries Emma: “Communism with hammer and sickle, and America and Christians with cross of Christ! But we have placed ourselves where we cannot grow spiritually! God stands outside the door knockin' with His nail-pierced hand!”

“Oh Lord, I hear him!”

“I hear him knockin'!”

Indeed, someone is knocking. It is Uncle Sam, behind the set, rapping at Emma to get on with it.

She spreads her arms out to the people. “May God's richest blessings be upon us and our Nation! Amen!”

“Amen!”
the people respond, checking their watches.
“Amen!”