Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (21 page)

Brief clips on television and in newspaper photographs made the Rosenbergs appear disturbingly familiar. The short, plump Mrs. Rosenberg looked more like one of my friends’ mothers than an international spy. A photo of the Rosenberg boys showed the older boy, Michael, who was exactly my age, with his arm around his five-year-old brother, Robert, walking along a barbed-wire fence after visiting their parents in jail. They could have been among my playmates on the block. They had “a fine time,” the article reported, running up and down the corridors of the jail. But they didn’t seem happy to me. Whenever I ate Jell-O, my favorite dessert, I was reminded of the Rosenbergs. Julius Rosenberg had reportedly torn a Jell-O box in two, giving one half to his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, who was stationed at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was built, and the other half to Harry Gold,
a now confessed Soviet spy, so the two men could identify one another.

Though the majority of our neighborhood families believed the Rosenbergs guilty, opinion was divided on whether the death penalty was appropriate. Proponents of execution agreed with Judge Irving Kaufman that, by “putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb,” the Rosenbergs were responsible for the Korean War and for the sense of doom that hung over every American. “By your betrayal, you have altered the course of history,” Kaufman told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg when he sentenced them to death. Opponents of execution believed the husband and wife were too unsophisticated to hold key positions in the spy ring and pointed to the more lenient sentences meted out to all the others involved: fourteen years for physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had been a member of the Los Alamos inner circle and had turned over atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; thirty for the courier, Harry Gold; fifteen for Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, and no prosecution for Ruth Greenglass, David’s wife. Was the discrepancy simply, they speculated, because the Rosenbergs had refused to admit their guilt?

For the Jewish families on our block, it was a particularly awkward and stressful time. Mrs. Lubar later revealed her shame that the Rosenbergs were Jewish, although she also felt sorry for them and didn’t think they should be executed. More conservative Jews seemed anxious to display their patriotism by vocal denunciations of the Rosenbergs. Still others distanced themselves from the entire case, fearing that discussion would trigger an antiSemitic backlash.

I didn’t know who was right, about either the crime or the penalty. All I knew was that some huge and incomprehensible force had reached out to devastate this very ordinary-appearing family. When I read that young Michael had learned that his parents were about to be executed while he was watching a Yankees-Tigers game on television, I tried to imagine what it would be like having a bulletin break up the order of a public baseball game with such crushing private news. To me, all the arguments among our neighbors meant less than the sight of young Michael in tears, confronting the loss of his parents. Michael was not only the same age as I, but the same age my father had been when both his parents had died. Surely the Rosenbergs would break down at the last minute and agree to talk in exchange for their lives, so that Michael and Robert wouldn’t be abandoned. My mother was less certain. “They see themselves as martyrs,” she explained. “They will never crack.” My mother was right. “We are innocent,” Ethel insisted right up to the end. “This is the whole truth. To forsake this truth is to pay too high a price even for the priceless gift of life—for life thus purchased we could not live out in dignity and self-respect.”

Above left:
The short, plump Mrs. Rosenberg, here with Mr. Rosenberg, looked more like one of my friends’ mothers than an international spy.
Above right:
I hoped Michael Rosenbetg would take care of his little brother, Robbie, just as my father had cared for his sister, Marguerite, when they, too, were orphaned.
Below:
In the spring of 1954, I often found that my mother had set up her ironing board in front of our television set to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings.

It was hot and humid in New York on the night of Friday, June 19, 1953. The time of the executions, originally set for 11 p.m., had been moved up so they would not fall on the Jewish Sabbath. Around 8:15 p.m., radio and television shows were interrupted by the announcement that the Rosenbergs were dead. I wondered what kind of life the two children would lead and where they would go to school. I hoped Michael Rosenberg would take care of his little brother, just as my father had cared for his sister, Marguerite, when they, too, were orphaned. My reverie was broken by the insistent bleat and blare of horns as dozens of motorists cruising the streets honked their approval of the executions.

For days afterward, Elaine and I followed the story of the executions in the newspapers and on television with a ghoulish fascination. Julius, without his spectacles and with his mustache shaved off, had been the first to enter the death chamber. He was strapped into the chair, the switch was pulled, and a buzzing sound filled the room. Two more shocks were applied before he was pronounced dead.

Next, wearing a dark-green dress with white polka dots, Michael’s mother, Ethel, entered the room. As she reached the chair, she turned and embraced the matron, who choked up and left the room. The guards dropped the leather mask over her face. The first of the three standard shocks was applied at 8:11. “She seemed to fight death,”
The New York Times
reported. “She strained hard against the straps and her neck turned red. A thin column of grayish smoke rose from the upper side of her head. Her hands, lying limp, were now clenched like a fighter’s.” After the standard three shocks of electricity, one short and two long, doctors approached to check her heartbeat and discovered that Ethel was still alive. Her straps were readjusted and a fourth shock was applied. Once more, she strained against the straps. A fifth current was required before the doctors pronounced her dead.

“He was so meek,” a neighbor said later, “it took only a few minutes to kill him, but she was so tough, it took forever to kill her. Proves she was the mastermind behind the whole thing.”

A
T THE END OF THE SUMMER
, Eddie and Eileen’s parents, Julia and Arthur Rust, invited all the neighbors on the block to attend a party and watch movies of their trip to Ireland. My favorite priest, Father O’Farrell, was there,
along with two doctors and about a dozen children. My mother was seated on a stool watching the movies when I noticed that she was flushed. She kept pressing her fingers against the sides of her forehead, as if to squeeze away the pain of a headache. Suddenly, and without warning, she slumped from the stool to the floor. The doctors rushed to her side while Julia Rust called the fire department. The adults tried to get the children out of the house, but I refused to budge. I overheard a doctor say that my mother had suffered a major heart attack and her condition was critical. “We should think about last rites,” one of the doctors said to Father O’Farrell. “No, no,” I cried out, afraid they were accepting my mother’s death. “You can’t, I won’t let you.” Father O’Farrell put his hand gently on my shoulder. The anointing of the sick, he reassured me, was a sacrament to give strength not only to the soul but to the body.

My father, accompanied by my sister Jeanne, who was home from nursing school for the weekend, went with my mother in the ambulance to Mercy Hospital, a few miles away. When I tried to join them, my father told me with uncharacteristic abruptness that I couldn’t come. As soon as they had left, Julia Rust told Eileen to take a walk with me. We circled the block aimlessly, round and round, until we settled into my house to wait. I sat with Eileen in front of the television set, brief periods of conversation alternating with periods of silence, as I pretended to watch television. Neither of us discussed what had happened. Around midnight, my father finally came home to report that my mother was in an oxygen tent and that Jeanne was staying with her.

It was fortunate Jeanne was there that night. She knew that my mother could not tolerate heat; all summer she had kept a big fan by her chair and her bed. “It’s impossible in this tent,” my mother kept saying. “It’s unbearably hot.”
Jeanne checked the tent and discovered that there was no oxygen left. When she ran to the nurses’ station with the information, she was told that more oxygen had been ordered and would arrive in several hours. “Let’s take her out of the tent until then,” my sister suggested. “There’s more oxygen outside than in that stifling tent.”

“Can’t do that,” the nurse responded. “The doctor ordered an oxygen tent for her, so we’ve got to keep her there until we get a second order.”

“That’s crazy,” my sister argued, as she unzipped the plastic sides of the tent and started moving Mother. The nurse resisted, but Jeanne promptly silenced the nurse’s protests. “Listen,” she ordered. “I’m taking her out of this tent and she will remain outside until the oxygen arrives. That’s all there is to it.”

This incident was my mother’s fourth hospitalization in three years. In 1950, she had been hospitalized at Lenox Hill for nearly a month, first to remove an internal hemorrhoid and later to remove her malfunctioning thyroid. Just before Christmas in 1952, she had suffered an unusually severe “spell” that lasted several hours. Over the next two months, she experienced an aching pain in her right hip that intensified and radiated through her leg as the day progressed. By evening, her entire leg had gone numb and she limped markedly. In February 1953, she returned to Lenox Hill, where she was diagnosed with a sciatica-type neuritis, nervousness, fatigue, and advanced arteriosclerotic heart disease.

This hospitalization at Mercy Hospital, which lasted nearly a month, was the most serious of all. Almost every night for the entire time of my mother’s stay, as I closed my eyes to go to sleep I would see my mother falling from the stool, her body on the floor, the green fields of Ireland still flickering on the screen, Father O’Farrell administering
last rites. “If we are going to die,” my catechism explained, “God helps us die a holy death, but if it is better for us to get well, then He makes us better.” I tried to understand the words “if it is better for us to get well.” I couldn’t imagine the conditions under which it wouldn’t be better for my mother to get well, and I prayed harder than ever that God would agree with me.

While my mother was away, all the neighbors helped out. Mrs. Friedle had lunch waiting for both Elaine and me when we came home from school; Mrs. Rust supplemented my father’s meager skills in the kitchen by preparing casseroles and soups; and, as always, my sister Jeanne filled in everywhere. Every day, when my father returned from work, we went together to the hospital. I brought my homework as well as books to read to my mother. In this way, we tried to give the hospital room some semblance of our family life. But it was impossible to forget where we were. As I walked through the corridors, I averted my eyes from the metal beds where patients lay so still they seemed already dead. I turned away whenever an anxious-looking patient was being wheeled down the hallway into the operating room, and I held my breath to escape the ubiquitous smell of disinfectant. Everyone tried to put on the best face possible, but for the first time I could remember, my father, always so resolutely cheerful, could not conceal his fretfulness.