Public Burning (78 page)

Distantly, out at the edge, there's a strange clackety noise, starting softly, getting louder: what is it? The prisoners banging their tin cups on their bars! rattling the gates of their cages in protest! To the frightened crowds in the Square, huddling toward the center, it sounds like the Phantom himself shaking his death chains! The Phantom's spectral image seems to appear, not only on door knockers like old Morley's in
A Christmas Carol
, but everywhere they look: in skyscraper windows, in the shadows behind the bright lights, under the stage, in the bottles they drink from! The angry clatter is punctuated by remote but heavy
whumps!
—foreign A-bomb tests! Spreading over the earth like smallpox! News reports ratatat against the periphery of the crowd like the firing of Sten guns: riots in Liverpool, Toronto, and Turin! the American Embassies besieged in Rome and Paris and Ottawa! a port strike in Genoa in protest against the executions! firing squads in East Berlin! prayer vigils for the Rosenbergs in Iceland and Israel! plane crashes and battle casualties! ten thousand Communists are massing up to riot in Munich! screams of
“Murder!”
from rioters running amok through the streets of Melbourne and London! Copenhagen and Birmingham! there are reports of Mau Maus, Vietminh, Gooks, Arabs trying to break through at the rim, to get in! to get what we've got! “You are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb!” cries a French voice above all the rest. It is Jean-Paul Sartre! “Magic, witch hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices: your country is sick with fear! Do not be astonished if we cry out from one end of Europe to the other: Watch out! America has the rabies! Cut all ties which bind us to her, otherwise we will in turn be bitten and run mad!” The French indeed seem to be going berserk: crackly on-the-scene radio reports say they're running wildly through the streets of Paris, carrying big posters of Eisenhower flashing his famous smile but with each tooth an electric chair! “We are in the midst of a cold war,” remarks Bernard Baruch dryly to a couple of the Presidents sitting beside him, his hand in his pocket, resting on his billfold as on the butt of a six-shooter, “which is getting warmer…”

A new figure, ragged and wild-eyed, now bursts into the VIP section, leaps up on a concrete balustrade, and commences to rant: “
If you are happy about the Rosenbergs, then you are rotten to the core!”
It's that Russian-born Red vagrant from L.A. who caused the day's delay, I.I. Edelman! People laugh at him and throw empty bottles, but they're frightened, too!

Julius Rosenberg's bespectacled old mother, Sophie, is pitching about in a fit of incoherent anguish! Other women are falling to their knees and sobbing and praying and beating their breasts!

The people glance up in anxiety at the clock on the Paramount Building: 19:41! Just 20 minutes to Zero Hour!

The pageant actors try to do something about all this, but fall into arguments as to which of them are Secret Service agents and which not! Some of the iconic Buckskin Militiamen, Sharecroppers, and Prohibitionists are getting hard to handle!

In the confusion, the National Rosenberg Committee has somehow managed to push an entire Clemency Float through the mobs and into the VIP aisles—or maybe they've smuggled the pieces in and assembled it here! It rolls toward the stage, carrying blow-ups of suppressed evidence, banners declaring the innocence of the Rosenbergs, pictures of the soon-to-be-orphaned sons, and signs that read
FRAME-UP
! and
CLEMENCY
MISTER
PRESIDENT
! People close their eyes, look the other way, scream for the police, or take a stiff blinding jolt from the bottles of booze still being passed around, trying to ignore the disruptions.

General Douglas MacArthur, all spit-and-polish in his full battle dress, molded hat, sun goggles, and medals, decides that enough is enough and marches forward to take over and bring some order to this society, but he hesitates at the edge of the elephant dung: the Justices are still wallowing about in there, up to their thighs and elbows in the muck, unable to see which way they're going, bumping into each other like pigs around the feeding trough, it is not an attractive sight. The General stands there, at the water's edge, so to speak, smoking his corncob pipe and musing on the inelegance of democracies. Harry Truman watches him and laughs, which makes the General's neck go red.

Behind him, crowned with laurel leaves and gliding like statues on wheels, come the renegade scientists Albert Einstein and Harold Urey, exploding the “secret weapon” issue and casting doubt on the trial verdict. The Red Parson, Dr. Bernard Loonier, leaps through the disintegrating defenses with a clemency petition, shouting: “The death sentence in this instance is an indication of our national weakness rather than our national strength! It is a reflection of our own growing hysteria, fear and insecurity!” He's clobbered with a dead cat by a Salem Witch and stuffed down an open manhole by a gang of soused-up examiners from the Patent Office, but no sooner is he popped down than Reverend Henry Hitt Crain, the fellow-traveling Methodist preacher from Detroit, pops up: “It implies an altogether unworthy capitulation to the hysterical temper of the times and reveals a recreant willingness to resort to ‘scapegoat' devices to appease the homicidal urges of crowd compulsion!” For Christ's sake, the people cry, who let these dingdongs in here? What's Herbert Philbrick doing? Where is Norman Vincent Peale, now that we need him?

18 minutes to go! General MacArthur sighs wistfully, knocks the ashes out of his corncob pipebowl, turns, and fades away, kicking Truman on the shins as he passes. “Dumb son of a bitch!” yelps Harry.

The defense lawyer Manny Bloch has collared the Assistant White House Press Secretary Murray Snyder: “Has the Court's last decision or Ethel's letter been read
personally
by the President?” he demands.

“It's…it's not my function to ascertain this,” stammers Snyder.

“Damn it!” roars Bloch in a red-faced rage, “people are going to
die!”
17…!
“Make
it your function!”

Through the Square, the electric lights dip ominously!

The drum majorettes in the Texas marching band squeal with fright and leap into the arms of the boys in the band, hug them close!

Snyder falls back in alarm!

Whiskey bottles drop and crash!

The packed-up mob flinches, squeezing out of itself an airy moaning wheeze, compounded of gasps, groans, farts, curses, shrieks, belches, and woeful wails.

Judge Kaufman's knees go soft as warm Jell-O—fortunately he's wearing his judicial robes, and all that anybody notices is that he seems to dip with the lights. He glances backstage—
at last! Here comes Uncle Sam!

The Boy Judge stretches up to his full five foot six and, glimpsing the hands on the Paramount clock just celebrating the quarter hour, flatly denies Dan Marshall's motion, then withdraws to the wings to get his wind back. He wants to fall into somebody's arms, but his wife, Helen, is peering down her nose into a compact mirror, and besides, he's got an audience back here of lawyers, jurors, witnesses, and G-men. They gaze at him, standing apart. They'll never let me let go of this thing, he thinks, staring back at them, envying their anonymity. The trial's over, I shouldn't even
be
here, it's against every principle of American jurisprudence—but they'll keep me here till the day I die.

Uncle Sam roars out onto the Death House set, whooping and snorting like a wild stallion with a bee up its rectum. “I have returned! And by the grace of Almighty God, I'm gonna tar up the arth and wreak a outdacious deevastation around here if I don't see more deddycated presarvation of the sacred fire of the Liberty Tree and less petterfacted sunshine patriotism! Great Jeminy! Could I not be gone a minute, but some mischief must be doin'? We've had to pump lead into a kid in Paris and throw hunderds a damfools in the hoosegow all over the world—and we'll trim the heels of a few onduly restless whippersnappers here, too, if things don't settle out a mite less epileptic!”

The people in the Square hoot and whistle and shout out their praises to Uncle Sam. The Singing Saints regroup to sing “0 Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” which in turn inspires the security forces to make a coherent charge on the Phantom's agents at last. Lumberjacks smash up the Clemency Float with axes, and the Rat Pack reorganizes its perimeter defense lines. The Ku Klux Klan, Invisible Empire of the South, announces they've paid a visit to Nashville, and children are chasing Dan Marshall toward the Whale's mouth, screaming the Lady-bug Taunt at him:

The Supreme Court Justices are still in a lot of trouble, but Bill Douglas, who has been watching them slop about helplessly in the muck, finally shakes off his wry amusement and, being the only one who's had the foresight to wear heavy boots and leggings, goes now to their rescue, leading them back to their seats, where Oveta Culp Hobby, whose business is health and welfare, is waiting for them with a damp rag to wash off their faces. While lawyers' writs and briefs are grabbed, folded into paper airplanes, and sent flying, the lawyers themselves, along with the Rosenberg Committee operatives, are being rounded up, one by one, straitjacketed or simply conked, and dragged over toward Walt Disney's giant Whale, whose belly has earlier been closed to the public and used until now to incarcerate zanies, sick drunks, and pickpockets.

“Well,” laughs Uncle Sam, “it's a frolic scene, where work and mirth and play unite their charms to cheer the hours away!” 7:46…“This was the Phantom's last shot, boys!” he shouts, stooping to attend to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies. “You got the bloody Barbarite by the short hairs, nothin' more can happen now—!”

But just then Times Square breaks into an uproar!

A man is backing bareass out onto the stage from the prisoners' entrance, his pants in a tangled puddle at his feet, a crumpled homburg down around his ears, “I AM A SCAMP” lipsticked on his butt. The man turns, hopping on one foot, blinks in amazement—why, it's—!

27.

Letting Out the Dark: The Prodigal Son Returns

Is it possible to be rational at all in crisis situations? Do crises seem to have many elements in common? Does the participant seem to learn from one crisis to another? All interesting questions which I might well have asked myself, but at the moment, finding myself unexpectedly onstage in the middle of Times Square, staring out on an amazing sea of upturned faces staring back, my shirttails bunched up in my armpits and my pants in a tangle around my ankles, my poor butt on fire from its Dance Hall skid, my shoulder aching, face stinging, stomach rumbling, sweating hands clutching my still-enflamed though fast-shriveling pecker, Uncle Sam rearing up in monstrous astonishment on my left, some woman out cold as a mackerel at my feet, and the electric chair—for some reason splattered with what looked like custard pies since I'd last seen it—standing spotlit and hot with its own latent energies on my right, flashguns popping and cameras with huge glimmering lenses dollying in at me, a band somewhere playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” accompanied by what could only have been the goddamn Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a pervasive odor of excrement in the air which I was afraid might be my own, all I could think of to say was:
“Oh my God! LET US PRAY!”
Which, when I'd added, dragging my voice down out of its falsetto shriek,
“Let me, uh, say, uh, my fellow Americans, uh, bow our heads—let us bow our heads in a minute of silent prayer cast in terms of all our, uh, fighting boys in, uh, wherever they are and for faith, uh, in—and for our President, in a sense—and also for the victims of Communism around the world,”
was pretty goddamn brilliant: it shut them all up and gave me sixty precious seconds to get my pants up while they had their heads down. Maybe, I thought, in all the excitement they haven't even noticed…

While I struggled, sweating furiously in the hot lights, with the birds-nest of trouser legs around my feet—Judas Priest, what a mess, I couldn't even find the cuffs, and the belt seemed to be looped into some kind of cat's cradle!—I tried to collect my thoughts for the statement I had to make, the one I'd been working on such long hours this week, but which just now I'd thought I'd somehow got out of. But I was too confused—all those dreams, Ethel's mouth, the train wheels rolling underneath me—I could smell still the heady fragrance of newfound freedom, new beginnings (what was it? ah! the shampoo in her hair—suddenly I felt double-crossed in every direction at once!)—Christ! I thought in a moment of numbing terror:
I can't even remember my name!
I fought to recover that name, that self, even as I grappled with my trousers, hobbling about in a tight miserable circle, fought to drag myself back to myself, my old safe self, which was—who knows?—maybe not even a self at all, my frazzled mind reaching out for the old catchwords, the functional code words of the profession, but drawing a blank. I ought to quit, I knew, but I couldn't. I didn't know how. I only knew how to plunge forward: no matter what the consequences—in college football, it was always the off-side penalty; now, I thought, God only knows what I'm in for! Which reminded me that I was supposed to be praying and the minute of grace was fast running out. Uh…fiscal integrity! Paramount question! Yes…ah…make no mistake about it! What this country needs is…eh…no more pussyfooting! a new departure! ragged individualism—rugged, I mean (“Tell the truth, son,” I could just hear Uncle Sam saying, “or trump—but get the trick!”)—yes, it was time to piss or cut bait, time to basically hunker down, hold the line, take off the gloves and bind up the nation's wounds—but the gloves
were
off (what
wasn't
off?) and if my own wounds got bound up any tighter than they were already, I wouldn't be able to breathe (I
wasn't
able to breathe!)!