Public Burning (88 page)

And so it had been there in Times Square: the lights had been snuffed all right, the marquees and billboards now as dead as the old city trolleys, but though it had been like peering through pea soup, I could nevertheless make out what was happening, even if nobody else could. It was awesome to look at, of course—flesh, as far as you could see, engaged in every grab-assing obscenity imaginable, a frantic all-community grope that my own privates did not entirely escape—but the dimensions had taken the excitement out of it. In fact, if anything, it had been spooky, unnerving: all that desperate weakness, that frenzied vulnerability, everybody screaming and reaching out and plunging haplessly away in one another—it was like something out of
Fantasia
or
The Book of Revelation
. I'd bobbed along on the flood, longing for the old bell tower back home, some place of refuge where I could lock myself away, think things over, work out the parameters of this new situation, get my pants back up. Maybe, I'd thought, this is what hell will be like for me: endless self-exposure. This was a Self that was not in my mother's lexicon. It was the toughest part about being a politician, the one thing I personally hated the most. I'm no shrinking violet, I'm not unduly shy or modest, but I'm a private man and always have been. Formal. When I have sex I like to do it between the sheets in a dark room. When I take a shit I lock the door. My chest is hairy but I don't show it off. I don't even like to
eat
in public and just
talking
about one's personal life embarrasses me. And now all this today—Christ, I believed in touching the pulse of the nation, but this was going too fucking far! It was probably a good thing I was all washed up.

I'd beached finally in the mouth of a whale, one of Disney's exhibits evidently. A dismal cavernous maw, dark and foreboding, but under the circumstances I'd found it inviting. I'd dragged myself inside, down the throat, away from the murky insanity of the mainstream out in the Square, clutching my poor bruised nuts and glad of any sanctuary. This has been worse than Bougainville, I'd thought. I'd wished Pat were with me and I'd wondered if I should go looking for her once I'd got my pants on—but then I'd realized I'd already seen her out there, part of her anyway (or was that a dream I'd had? it was all getting mixed up in my mind), it was really my mother I'd wished were with me. Jesus, I'd sighed, crawling along, drawn toward the belly by a distant flickering light, this has been the longest day of my life!

What had I expected to find inside the Whale? I'd seen the film with my daughters, and so had anticipated the craggy cathedral-like walls, the tremulous shadows cast by a lonely lantern, eerie digestive noises. Past that? A little benevolent magic maybe? a touch of the Mission Inn, Gepetto with a stiff drink and fried fish? Probably just a little peace and quiet where, covered in darkness, I could draw myself together, stop gesturing, jerking about, come to rest. What I certainly had
not
expected was to find my grandmother Almira Burdg Milhous sitting there in her rocking chair, gazing sternly down upon me over her rimless spectacles.

“Pull yourself together, Richard,” she'd said gravely. “Seek the soul's communion with the Eternal Mind!”

“Grandmother!” I'd gasped, unable to believe my eyes. “My God, what are you doing here?”

“No swearing, Richard. And put your trousers on.”

She'd sat there in her creaky old chair, gently rocking, her hair rolled up in a tight little bun on her head, her delicate white throat ringed round by a small lace collar, watching me with her sad deepset eyes, a melancholic smile on her lips, as I struggled with my pants, tearing them off, unknotting them, tugging them back on again. “I—I'm sorry, Grandmother!” For everything that had been happening out there, I'd meant, my own indecency included—just seeing her there, quietly juxtaposed against all that madness, had thrown it all into a new perspective: what must she think of us? I'd lost buttons and belt and the zipper didn't work: I'd had to hold my pants up with my hands.

“Where are your shoes, Richard?”

“I…uh, must have lost them! I—” But I'd reached the point where I had exhausted all my emotional reserve. Tears had rushed into my eyes, and I'd pitched forward into her lap. I'd wanted to hide myself there forever. “Good old Grandmother!” I'd wept.

“Stand up, Richard,” she'd commanded. “Remember the Four Selfs!”

“But why has this happened to me, Grandmother?” I'd wailed. “I've always been a
good
man!”

“Not always,” she'd replied matter-of-factly. “What about that time your father caught you swimming in the ditch?”

“The…the others dared me!”

“And you used to smoke cornsilks, steal grapes and watermelons, don't tell me you didn't, and you were mean to your brother Donny!”

“He was a smart aleck, he asked for it!” Why was she challenging me like this?

“You were jealous of poor Harold and didn't really care when he died.”

“I
did!”
I'd protested, drawing back, and had shed some more tears just to prove it. “And I was
really
sorry when Arthur died!”

The tears were real now, but she'd pressed on mercilessly: “Why didn't you ever have any friends? Why did you go off by yourself at our picnics and not join in the fun? What's the matter with you, Richard? Why have you always been so moody and proud and selfish and standoffish?”

“I had friends! They voted for me! But in politics—”

“Politics! Yes, I heard about that, too, Richard. All those naughty tricks you played on poor Jerry Voorhis and Mrs. Douglas and that nice Mr. Warren—”

“Nice, my foot! The world is rough, Grandmother, and when they hit you, you have to hit them back, and the best way to do that is to hit them before they hit you! I don't apologize for that—I'm a political animal, Grandmother, and—”

“Yes, and you smell like one, too,” she'd sniffed. “You've lost your Quaker spirit, Richard.”

“Only on domestic issues, Grandmother! I'm still a Quaker on foreign issues!”

“Drinking, smoking, swearing, cheating, telling untruths and tricking people—tsk tsk! You never talk about God or Jesus any more, Richard—and you play cards and take money from people—”

“Not for myself!” I'd insisted. “I don't take anything for myself!”

“And all those paragraphs about you in the college yearbooks—you wrote them yourself!”

“Not—not my senior year, I didn't, Grandmother!”

“‘Great things are expected…' My my! You should be ashamed, Richard!”

“Well, you…you have to be conceited in this business…”

“And what did you do up in that bell tower all by yourself? You know, Richard, your mother and father used to wonder if perhaps you weren't a bit disturbed. You were a very strange boy. I used to defend you, just as I defended all the boys, but…”

“I… I like to go my own way, Grandmother, keep my own counsel. That's the way I am, and one thing I always have to be—”

“You used to peck up the hired girls' skirts. You even tried to peek up
my
skirts!”

“I…did—?!”

“And you harbored wicked thoughts about little Ola and Marjorie and those burlesque dancers you used to go see with your cousin—”

“That was a long time ago, Grandmother, before I was married. I—”

“Oh yes? What about that secretary at the OPA, that nurse out in the Pacific Ocean—”

“I… I was lonely—”

“And this afternoon? Were you lonely this afternoon?”

“Wha—?! How…how did you—?”

“‘Oh, Ethel! I'd do anything for you!' Shame, shame, Richard! No wonder they've been punishing you!”

“I… I was just pretending! It's true! I'd gone up there to—Grandmother! Why are you writing all this down?”

“Ah…the, uh, better to counsel you with, my dear,” she'd replied with a faint tight-lipped smile.

It was about this time that I'd begun to recall all those notes to myself about letting down too soon after crisis. For one thing, my Grandmother Milhous was dead, had been for years. For another, there
hadn't
been any secretary at the OPA, that had just been—and then it had come to me, like the punch line of an old joke heard a thousand times over, who it was:
“Edgar! You!”

“You know, Dick,” he'd smiled, chucking me under the chin, “the reason you've never been any good at making out is that you talk too much about yourself!”

“Goddamn you, Edgar!”
I'd stormed, slapping his hand away.
“It's been you all along!”

There were noises out in the Square now and crowds of hostile people were being shoved toward us into the Whale. “Come on, Dick,” Hoover had said, smoothing down his heavy skirts, “I'd better get you out of here before the choice between the quick and the dead goes the wrong way for you….”

Ah, why should an honest man enter public life and submit himself and his family to this kind of thing? Of course, a man who goes voluntarily into the political arena must expect some wounds in the battles in which he engages, but it seemed to me I suffered more than I deserved to. Both Pat and I had perhaps what one might describe as an overdeveloped sense of privacy. I know, people in political life have to live in a fishbowl. Every public figure, whose most important asset is his reputation, is at the mercy of the smear artists and the rumormongers, that's politics, but no matter how often you tell yourself that “this is part of the battle,” or that “an attack is a compliment because your adversaries never bother taking on someone who amounts to nothing,” there are times when you wonder if you shouldn't chuck the whole business.

Ethel's aria had faded and in its place, somewhere in the distance, far beyond the bedroom window, I seemed to hear somebody whistling, and what they were whistling was: “Happy Days Are Here Again!”
My song!
Oh my God! I knew who it was—was he coming here? I shrank back, panting wheezily, my heart in my throat, tears springing to my eyes. I felt like I used to feel whenever I'd hear my old man approaching in a rage, clutching his razor strap. Even if it wasn't for me. Things would sort of light up and get reddish all around me, inside as well as out, and that was what happened now. I squeezed my eyes shut: oh shit, hadn't I suffered enough? And when I opened them again, sure enough, there he was: standing in front of me near the fluttering curtains, his eyes glittering with animal menace, a cold sneer on his lips, the pallid gray light falling through the open window on his goateed face making him look suddenly old and ugly.

“Come here, boy,” he said, smiling frostily and jabbing his recruitment finger at me with one hand, unbuttoning his striped pantaloons with the other: “
I want YOU!”

“But—!”

“Speech me no speeches, my friend, I had a bcllyfulla baloney—what I got a burnin' yearnin' for now is a little humble toil, heavenward duty, and onmittygated cornholin' whoopee! So jes' drap your drawers and bend over, boy—you been ee-LECK-ted”

“Wha—?!”

“You heerd me!” he roared. “E pluribus the ole anum, buster, and on the double!” He dragged me backwards into the light, whipped my pants down, gave my ass a cracking caress: “Ah, an old old sight, you scamp, and yet somehow so young—aye, and not changed a wink since first I seen it! Bless me, you look purtier'n a tree frog on a fence rail with the wind up!”

“Please!” I whimpered. “I can't—!”

“I'll help you,” he whispered girlishly, tickling my rectum. “Come on, loosen up, Nick! unlock the ole Snack Shack and impart to me summa your noble spirit, like, eh, like the lady says…”

But I scrambled out of his grip while he was fumbling with his braces, bounded back into the blankets and dog biscuits. “My God, you've—
gasp!
—just killed her!” I cried, cowering in a dark corner. “How can you make fun of her like that, she's not even cold yet—!”

“Cause I'se wicked, I is,” he replied with a wolfish grin, flashing his incisors. The air seemed thick with a heavy doggy stink, but I didn't know if it came from him, me, or Checkers's gear. “I'se mighty wicked, anyhow, I can't help it—she's part a me now, both her and her brave engineer, just as much as Pocahontas, Billy the Kid, or Bambi—”

“You didn't have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You're a…a butcher! a beast!
You're no better than the Phantom!”

“Aw fidgety fudge, them two raskils was lucky—”

“Lucky!”

“Sure! It ain't easy holdin' a community together, order ain't what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin' to pretend it is, that's how the game is played—but not many of 'em gets a chance to have it done to 'em onstage in Times Square!”

I knew that what he was telling me was the truth—but what about the way I
felt?
He wasn't telling me everything, I thought…. “All they wanted was what you promised them, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration—”

“Bah! The wild oats of youth! Listen, bein' young and rearin' up agin the old folks makes you fotch up a lotta hootin' and hollerin' you live to regret—puritanism! whoo, worse'n acne! It's great for stirrin' up the jism when you're nation-breedin', but it ain't no way to live a life!”

“You've…you've changed,” I said, my voice shaking. “You're not the same as when I was a boy!”

He laughed softly and reached into the darkness to snatch me by the nape in his viselike grip. “You're forty years old, son: time you was weaned!”

“No!”
I begged.
“Please—!”

“You wanta make it with me,” he panted, dragging me brutally out of the shadows and spinning me around, “you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin' hustler and tooth-'n'-claw tamer of the heathen wilderness, lusty and in everthing a screamin' meddler, novus ball-bustin' ordo seclorum, that's me, boy—and goodnight Mrs. Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way!” He licked his finger.