Public Burning (71 page)

“Hoo boy!” gasps Uncle Sam, ducking backstage for a second during the Battle of Gettysburg, “what I like mostes' is
showin off!”
He mops his broad brow with a red-white-and-blue bandanna and conducts a hasty roll call. Some of the Senators and judges are by now too drunk to recognize their own names, but that's hardly noticed. What does rile the old Superhero, though, is the continued absence of his Number Two Gun. “As I'm a cockeyed Christian,” he barks, “that craven, chickenbred, toad-hoppin', duck-nosed mother's son of a unbroke sea-horse is gonna make me slip my cable and unloose more than my matchless magnanimity around here!” He glances at his fob watch. Sundown's at 8:31 tonight, still a couple of hours to go, but the Jewish Sabbath starts eighteen minutes before that, the period of “anticipation,” as they call it. It'll take him five or six minutes each to fry the two thieves, so the most leeway he can allow the young maverick is, say, twelve minutes. “Awright, you bandy-shanked double-jawed desperaydos! Zero Hour is one minute after eight—he's got better'n a hour to make it! So hustle up them epistolary numbers! We'll stall till the last minnit with the contest, but if that monkey ain't here by 20:01 we're goin' on without him!”

This epistolary-contest announcement stirs a fresh backstage jostle: Uncle Sam will be awarding silver-dollar jackpots and new top ratings to the funniest, saddest, most terrifying, etc., skits and readings from the Rosenbergs' Death House Letters, and so all the actors in town are suddenly pressing excitedly into the wings, eager to go on for a crack at the winnings, not to mention a chance to play before this fantastic house. This audience is a
dream!

Pretty dismal material, of course, these prison letters, but real professionals are never daunted by poor scripts. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, for example, are working up a dance routine around a single line from one letter of each of them…

…in which they hold up a wire-mesh screen between them and fantasize a tender and loving future for themselves, even as they are dancing toward the chair. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have a cruder act on roughly the same theme, building their gags around the argument of who goes first. Fibber McGee and Molly are incorporating the letters into one of their familiar domestic situations (when McGee's closet is opened a whining cacophony of Rosenberg complaints will come clattering out, and Molly's famous line—“‘Tain't funny, McGee!”—will take on an unsuspected moral force), while Andy Devine and Marjorie Main are going for straight drama, focusing on the erotic bits. Archie of Duffy's Tavern intends to solo with a telephone, as does Red Skelton with a handful of hats. Ozzie and Harriet, contrarily, are bringing the entire Nelson family into their act by picking up on the periodic visits of the Rosenberg boys to the prison, and One Man's Family is even going them yet one better by pushing for a complex fragment of the disturbing Greenglass-Rosenberg family saga.

Standing waist-high among all these characters and looking very down in the mouth is the Boy Judge, Irving Kaufman: he and Irving Saypol have been asked to reenact, as a kind of curtain raiser to the contest, some of their routines from the trial, and although he and Saypol work well together, he seems unsure of himself. He's taken a great risk in setting up tonight's show and preventing it from falling through—maybe too much—and the strain is beginning to tell. Discovering him like that, his old friend and former client Milton Berle, backstage with the rest of the contestants, cautions him: “Be careful, Irving, or you'll drop the world!”

Kaufman smiles foolishly, displaying the gap between his two front teeth, then sighs profoundly. “It's such a terrible responsibility,” is what he says, but what's really troubling his mind is that sometimes, like now (Supreme Court Justice William Douglas has just been dragged onstage for a “spontaneous” public spanking—“Only thing not Red about this rapscallion,” Uncle Sam has shouted, “is his
bottom!
” and there's a great clamor: everyone, it seems, wants to get his hands or other weapons on Judge Douglas's posteriors, and this, Irving supposes, under other circumstances could happen to
him!
), he gets the feeling he's just being used, that he's as much a victim as the Rosenbergs. Even if now he is a National Hero…

Congressman Don Wheeler, brushing past him, rushes out onstage to announce that he's still pressing for Douglas's impeachment and a one-way visa to Russia—then rears back like Babe Ruth going for the fences and lands such a blow on him that it seems he might be trying to belt him over into Phantom country single-handedly. Others come out and holler about the Judge's “arrogance” and “treason” and “villainous ambition” as they whop him, and some even fulminate against his sex life. “Last May twenty-first at a meeting of the American Law Institute,” cries Walt Trohan of the
Chicago Tribune
, laying into him, “Douglas said America had lost its position of moral leadership—
this from a man who went vacationing for some weeks with another man's wife!”
There's a lot of hooting and whistling out in the crowd, a tremendous agitation building up. “And from a man who some years ago stooped from the High Court to string obscenities into verses which shocked a select group of Americans, which has numbered two Presidents, a Chief Justice, admirals of the fleet, generals of the Army, Senators, governors, and lesser characters including myself!
I was there when this would-be liberal spouted his filth!”

Douglas, patiently taking his licking amid all the uproar, remarks to Uncle Sam, over whose knees he's been turned, that as a Superhero he's really degenerating fast. “Not my fault,” says Uncle Sam with a coy wink, “I gave you a chance to save me, Billy, but you turned me down!”

“Whew!” complains the Attorney General, out for a retributive barehanded whack at Justice Douglas's nefarious backside, “hitting this guy is like slapping an old weathered board!”

“Presidential timber, Herb,” grins Uncle Sam.

Judge Kaufman understands, of course, that every judgment is a kind of marriage, that he and the Rosenbergs needed each other to fulfill themselves, need each other still—judge and judged: two sides of the same coin…but what coin was that? He remembers the great up feeling he'd had when they were drawn together—inexorably, it had seemed then—toward that classic Passover Trial of just two years ago, the sense of being Chosen (and he was, yes, he was a Great Man now) and of being
ready
, the magisterial power and artistry with which he'd conducted the trial, the seemingly inevitable convictions and the Maximum Penalty drama that hovered over them…and yet, he'd not imagined that it would end this way. And how inevitable had it been really? He felt deep in his heart he had done the right and necessary thing—but could he trust his heart? Had they not been Jews would he have done the same? There were those who thanked him for putting the heat on them—but who has put the heat on whom? he wonders now, as he watches Bob, Bing, and Dottie practicing a sketch called “The Road to Radiance.” In the sketch, apparently, Crosby plays a priest who, with a lighthearted wink, sings “Goin' My Way?” as he leads Bob and Dottie to the electric chair, while Hope, trying frantically to hide in Dottie's sarong, gets lost (Lamour loses Hope!), only to come popping out like a champagne cork when they pull the switch on Dottie and go bounding—
boing! boing! boing!
—around the stage, singing “Thanks for the Memory.” He thinks: maybe those old priests at Fordham were right about invincible ignorance, after all. At the time, Irving had argued fiercely with them, supposing they were only trying to excuse his Judaism for him (it needed no excuses!), but now it's suddenly come to him, thinking about that indivisible two-sided coin, that the one thing you could never understand was the thing you were intimately a part of; identity, they'd taught him (tried to), made modal and virtual distinctions impossible. Something like that. If he weren't who he was on the face of that coin, if he were just a common citizen out there in the faceless crowd, he might have a better overview of the whole, but—

“Hey, Irving,” sings Uncle Miltie softly in the Judge's ear, chucking him under his plump chin and wrapping his arm around him,
“life is just a bowl of cher-ries….!”

He nods. What, after all, could he do about it? He can only be what he is: vocation is a prevenient grace. Willy-nilly, he's bound up in a mystery. He wraps his own stubby arm around Uncle Miltie's waist and, hoping it will get easier when he makes it to the Supreme Court, croons along with the comic:
“Don't make it serious, life's too mysterious
…
!”

Certainly he has nothing to fear from this crowd: when he appears, introduced by George Sokolsky of the
Washington Times-Herald
(“… To the galaxy of America's great judges can now be added the name of Irving Kaufman, servant of the law!”), the ensuing ovation ruptures the applause meter. This technical breakdown momentarily unsettles the audience (measurement is what it's all about!), but it's soon forgotten in all the thrills, tears, and laughter of the acts that follow: everybody from Veronica Lake and the Duke of Paducah to Yogi Berra and the Dragon Lady. Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester work a Frankenstein act with all the electrical paraphernalia, then Dean (Ethel) Martin drags Jerry (Julie) Lewis around the Death House set by his lower jaw while singing “One Fine Day” from
Madame Butterfly
in a drunken falsetto. Amos ‘n' Andy turn it all into a blackface minstrel show, with Kingfish doing the lawyer's part, very wily, but bungling things up as usual, and then Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore come out and play it for pathos, using the letters to the children. Out front the people glance up at the Paramount clock, their eyes filling with tears of laughter and unabashed sentiment, as Jimmy and Garry climax their skit with Jimmy sitting in the electric chair in a curly wig, playing the piano, and singing: “Oh,
who
will be wit' chew when h'I'm:
far
h'way, when h'I'm:
far
h'away from
H-YOU?”

25.

A Taste of the City

“I know,” Ethel Rosenberg said calmly as the door closed behind her down at the other end of the Last Mile. She stood with her hands at her sides, utterly self-composed, unbroken. A strong woman, and brave, but there was a hardness as well, a kind of cunning: she struck me as something of an operator, like those brittle tough-talking chain-smoking girls I'd met at the OPA. “I've been expecting you.”

I was taken aback by this. Expecting me? I stared at her, not knowing what to say. Had she really understood who I was? Or was she already in some other world? She looked a little strange, as though she'd already left her body halfway behind. A little deranged maybe. Well, I could understand this, I'd only been living with the idea of it for a few days and had become pretty giddy myself. “It's all right, Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said, “I just… I only want to talk.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling faintly, as though to say she forgave me, and stepped toward me down the glowing white corridor. She was shorter than I'd imagined, dumpier. Older, too. She was dressed in a simple cotton dress of no particular color, a little ragged at the seams, the skirt torn or slit on the left side. Her thighs, which I tried not to notice, were bare and rather thick. Her hair was unkempt, frazzled, as though she'd been trying to tear it out by the roots, and her face seemed shapeless, blank. But maybe it was just the distance, the strange light in this black-blinded whitewashed passageway, because as she came toward me, moving coldly, disdainfully, yet dreamily, as though remote from all this, padding along in her felt slippers and reflected in the waxed floor not as body but as shifting shimmering light, she seemed to grow in stature and her years dropped away. She walked like a good politician, simulating dignity, self-assurance, humility. Already practicing probably for the last walk to follow. But even as this thought crossed my mind, I felt a flush of guilt about it—I understood the depths of my own sincerity and integrity, so undervalued by the world at large, why did I doubt it in others? “But it's no use, Mr. Nixon. There's nothing more to be said.”

Her gaze drifted past my shoulder and she stopped dead in her tracks. “This…this is a very strange joke to play…!” she whispered.

“What—?” I glanced apprehensively over my shoulder, but it was only the chair she'd seen. “Oh, I, uh, I'm sorry about that,” I said. “It's not my fault, the Warden left it open. Would you like me to—?”

“There's no need for any pretense, Mr. Nixon. The farce is exposed. The executive arm of our government—with you as its spokesman—has become a party to murder! And now you are desperate to bury us quickly before the entire lid is blown off this stinking plot!”

“Now wait a minute,” I insisted, secretly pleased at her nomination, “let's be fair about this!”

“Fair!” she snorted. “Do you call this fair? This is blackmail! Nazi barbarism!”

I could feel my blood rising, but I knew, if I was going to pull anything out of this goddamned hat, I had to keep my cool. Thinking of which, I removed my homburg and, clutching it by the brim by my left thigh, moved my right foot forward slightly and tilted my head as though expecting to be photographed. Or rather, expecting nothing of the sort, but recalling from other photographs that such a pose suggested alertness and vitality and clarity of vision. (She was not a photographer, she was a typist—why was I thinking of cameras? That stripper story that damned cabbie told me, probably.) “Believe me, Mrs. Rosenberg, I can understand your feelings,” I said, modulating my voice in the manner of Reverend Peale and trying to forget about the Dirty Crab, “I've suffered a lot of smear attacks myself, you know!”