Public Burning (67 page)

So hand me down my walkin' cane and let us go then, you and I, beyond the sunset, the river, and the blue, down to that crawdad hole above Cayuga's waters, travelin' on down the line from out the wide Pacific to the broad Atlantic shore, over hill, over dale, up a lazy river and down the road feelin' bad, dashing through the snow on a bicycle built for two to catch the night train to Memphis, comin' round the mountain on a wing and a prayer and tramp! tramp! tramp! leaving the Red River valley white with foam to walk in the King's Highway down Moonlight Bay, prospecting and digging for gold…

… where the buffalo roam and the whangdoodle sings way down upon de Swanee Ribber with the greatest of ease, then a turn to the right (every road has a turning), a little white light, and it's off for Montan' on the driftin' banks of the Sacramento, up Sourwood Mountain, over the rainbow, round the rosie and Hitler's grave mid pleasures and palaces, down to St. James' Infirmary on the trail of the lonesome pine, and back to ole Virginny in the State of Arkansas, that toddlin' town where sunshine turns the blue to gold in the shade of the old apple tree—then whoa, buck! open up that Golden Gate 'cause it's back in the saddle again and glide ‘cross the floor while the dew is still on the roses, struttin' with some barbecue up Blueberry Hill on the lone pray-ree, bound for the promised land…

And here on that ground they stand, all these natural-born ramblin' men, traveling salesmen, driftin' cowboys, these knights of the road and brave engineers, rovin' gamblers, easy riders, and wayfarin' strangers in paradise, slap up against each other as thick as hasty pudding, jiggling about in unison (they all got rhythm), elbow to elbow and belly to butt, to the beat of the Pentagon Patriots. They watch the clocks tick away the last of the Rosenbergs' time on this earth, and, voices raised on high, feel the heat rise, the light brighten, their own pulses quicken. The political bigwigs have not come out yet, but celebrities, preachers, warriors, and millionaires are popping up all over, picked out in the roaming spots of the camera crews, and they're greeted with tumultuous democratic cheers: he too! even he is here tonight! Dale Carnegie! Ty Cobb! Gordon Dean! Admiral Bill Halsey and Hank DuPont! Ezio Pinza, Connie Mack, Cole Porter—and America's answer to Michelangelo, James Montgomery Flagg! Some duck shyly away when discovered, some wave, others take a turn onstage with the Patriots, now swinging into one of their Electrocution Night specials, Lu Ann Simms's current smash hit, “It's the End of the Line”—“It's all over but the blues!” they groan, and the place goes wild.

Underground meanwhile, in the closed-off Times Square subway station, Uncle Sam is busily sorting out the official celebrants and lining them up for the procession to come: first the legislative branch, which passed the operant laws, then the judiciary, which has brought the convictions, and finally the executive branch, whose task it is tonight to pull the switch: not even during the frenzy of such a grand national festival as this one does Uncle Sam miss the opportunity for a little civics lesson. He glances about impatiently for the missing Vice President. “Hark! For his voice I listen and yearn; it is growing late and my boy does not return!”

“My sources indicate he was on the afternoon train,” reports J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, and Allen Dulles of the CIA concurs: “Maybe the rube got lost on the subways.”

“C-r-e-a-t-i-o-n!” growls Uncle Sam. “Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it!” He is irate, but oddly there is a frosty twinkle in his eye. Tipping his plug hat threateningly down over his eyebrows like a Marine corporal's, he turns on the Boss of the FBI to snap: “Goddamn it, Speed, what're ya just standin' around here for? You better
find
that rapscallious young giddyfish and haul him back here in three double quick time, or cuss me if I don't wool blue lightnin' outa your nancy-pantsy fanny! I can drag my boots and hold the earth back a notch or two, but it's got a slick axle and I can't grip it to a standstill! So get that snoot in the dirt, houn'-dog! If we don't pull that switch before the sun goes down, I wouldn't risk a huckleberry to a persimmon that we'll
none
of us see it whistle up again!”

“I hate to see that evenin' sun go down when day is done and all de worl' am sad and dreary,” sing the multitudes up in the Square as though in antiphonal response, but sad and dreary nothing, they're all atremble with joy and anticipation, awaiting the climax of the ceremonies with such fierce eagerness—goldurn! it's a big night, Maude!—that the minutes seem to crawl by like hours. The jam-up makes it hard to shift about now so the boys from City Hall are working the crowd like church ushers, passing community bottles up and down the lines. Eisenhoppers are bounding and squeaking, toy chairs smoking, Fourth of July firecrackers popping. “As John Brown once said,” says Uncle Sam, come up from below to watch the proceedings, “this
is
a beautiful country!
Ubi libido ibi patria!”
He signals and Oliver Allstorm and His Pentagon Patriots, illuminated now by weird red, white, and blue flashing lights and supported by the Radio City Rockettes, fan out across the stage to lead the people in their last big number of the night, the hit that has made the Patriots famous and assured their immortality: “Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Traitors to the U.S.A., Must Die”…

Threading her way now through the dignitaries, comedians, musicians, evangelists, and police detachments backstage, dressed in a dark suit with lace frills, a crisp white handkerchief in her breast pocket and her graying hair neatly but not severely combed back, comes General Mills's famous daughter Betty Crocker, hostess for the VIP processional to follow. Uncle Sam greets her with an ebullient wave of his star-spangled plug hat—“Let Grandmaw through there!” he shouts—and invites her to share his peephole.

She bends over stiffly to peer out, and what she sees out there is a terrible excitement, an impressive agitation: thousands upon thousands of people, singing at the top of their lungs, most of them well beyond either sobriety or modesty, led by a noisy group of musicians, even more rambunctious and ostentatious than Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees, and though they're singing about “cooking” and “frying,” she certainly doesn't recognize it as a recipe from
her
cookbook! Goodness! Fights are breaking out here and there in the heat of the packed masses, hard liquor is being passed about freely, girls are kicking their bare legs high in the sky, and there's a lot of rude behavior—but there's a
positive
excitement out there, too. She sees flags being unfurled everywhere, patriotic lighting displays, fireworks, Red Cross teams rushing through the crowds with bromides, film crews hovering from derricks and lifts, capturing it all for posterity, which Betty, like all Americans, believes in. Every window of every building looking out on the Square is packed with happy cheering people, even the rooftops, and the billboards and theater marquees bear impassioned messages like
NEW
YORK,
THY
NAME'S
DELIRIUM
! and
LET
NO
GUILTY
MAN
ESCAPE
! and
WHAT
A
SWELL
PARTY
THIS IS!
“My sakes,” she remarks, squinting out through the peephole, “it's getting a bit wild, isn't it?”

“Yes, honey,” laughs Uncle Sam, “there yam a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last act of the Patriots, what I greatly admire! We ain't had so much as a skumpy lynching in this land o' hope and glory for a year and a half, there's a real bodacious belly-wringin' appetite up! You feel it, too? O, it sets my heart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock…!”

“But aren't they a little bit…well…extreme?”

“Don't worry,” smiles Uncle Sam, stroking her pastry-fattened thighs. “This is their big moment, but they won't last the night out.”

“Well,” quoth Uncle Sam as the Pentagon Patriots swing into their final chorus, “the ole Doomsday Clock on the wall tells me it is the hour of fate and the last full measure of devotions, so step up, all you screamers—it's outa the strain of the Doing, and inta the peace of the Done!” Besides all the preachers, comics, and politicians crowding backstage with Uncle Sam, there are also scores of actors, dressed up as American Patriots and Presidents, Pilgrims and Pioneers, famous Warriors, Broncbusters, Prophets, Prospectors, and Railroad Barons, all part of the pageant to come. “You are about to embark upon a great crusade, my children, toward which we have strove these many months, so make sure your fly's buttoned up and your seams are straight! I wanna see a lotta hustle tonight—when your name is called up there I want you to
move!
Let the catamount of the inner varmint loose and prepare the engines of vengeance,
for the long looked-for day has come!”

23.

The Warden's Guided Tour

The Warden led me down a path through a garden by a house. His apparently, very nice. The sun was dipping low over the Hudson; not so hot now, and there was a breeze off the river. The gun towers were momentarily out of sight, and looking down through the trees toward the river, what I saw was a baseball diamond. Next to it, a tall stack was belching smoke into the pale blue sky. The trees were full of birds. There was even a prison bird-watching society, the Warden told me. Hilly and Dilly Hiss would have enjoyed themselves here, Whittaker, John McDowell, all those ornithological nuts.

“Ever see a prothonotary warbler?” I asked.

“A what?”

My stomach was still tight as a knot, but I didn't feel all that displaced here, now that I'd made it inside. All in all, it wasn't as hostile a place as I'd anticipated. Pleasant even, in its way. I'd always liked cells, whether it was bell towers, library cubicles, or private inner offices. A sweaty animal odor seemed to pervade the place, but you could probably get used to it after a while. Might even get to like it. Like the Whittier locker rooms, the Duke gym. I had the sensation in here of having escaped something wild and unpredictable outside, of having found a peaceful corner in a wound-up and turbulent world. On the other hand, I'd shifted rather heavily back into being the Vice President again, and was therefore beginning to have serious second thoughts about this whole project. Did I really want an out-and-out confrontation with the FBI? What did they know over there about
me?

“Yes, made from marble quarried right here at the prison…”

“Ah…”

As we went along, the Warden told me about the age and peculiar architectural features of the different buildings, the improvements made, prisoner capacity, the recreational and religious facilities, famous landmarks and prisoners of the past, basic prison industries, hospital services, ideas for the future. I took it all in, smiling or scowling as seemed appropriate, asking occasional questions, but all the time working out my strategy for breaking the Rosenbergs while protecting myself. “This is a much bigger place than I'd imagined,” I said, just as a back-up plan occurred to me: if all else failed, I could attach myself to the police cavalcade south to Times Square, and thus be seen to be bringing the Rosenbergs to justice myself, as it were.

There were guards everywhere—around the gates, up in the towers, along the stone embankment that climbed the mountain to the east, on patrol here in the compound. Most of them in short-sleeved shirts, ties but no jackets, less spiffed up than Purdy's boys or the state troopers, but just as unfriendly. The Phantom would need one hell of a disguise to get through this army, I thought. In fact, I'd nearly lost my nerve again at the gate, I'd been half afraid one of them might get trigger-happy and let me have it, but instead I'd been whisked right through to the Warden. Doors clanking open and shut like applause. Easy as pie. Just a few gestures, the right word, a nod—there was a kind of sublanguage working here, just under the surface, shared by keepers and kept alike, and if you knew the code, life was relatively easy. I'd even lucked out and escaped the attention of the newsguys. A lot of them out there knew me, but they'd been distracted by that guy coming at me as I was coming in, the one with the magazine up in front of his fedora: it had turned out that that was David Rosenberg, Julie's brother. He'd come up for a last farewell, but too late: visiting hours were over, they hadn't let him in. And as he'd been ushered out, the reporters and photographers had swarmed around him, missing me. It's moments like that that convince me I lead a charmed life, even though I don't believe in such things.