Public Burning by Robert Coover

Author:Robert Coover
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: The Public Burning
ISBN: 9781941088883
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1976-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

16.

Third Dementia

It is on. The Rosenbergs are to die at last. Television networks interrupt scheduled programs with the announcement: “President Eisenhower and the Supreme Court of the United States of America have refused to spare the lives of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” At the Bernard Bach home in Toms River, New Jersey, a small ten-year-old boy is watching the baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Detroit Tigers on Channel 11 when the announcement is made. The score is 0-0, but Yankee first-baseman Joe Collins has just beat out a drag bunt in the bottom of the fourth. It is a sunny day and the boy is thinking about going out to play baseball with friends in the neighborhood. That’s what Sonia Bach wants him to do. But he’s fascinated by the television and can’t pry himself away from it. The announcer says the executions are scheduled to take place tonight. He looks very intent and serious. The boy tries to see past him to the ballgame again, but the announcer won’t go away. “My Mommy and Daddy,” the boy whispers, feeling that someone or something is watching him. But he doesn’t know what to add. A prayer? A seventh-inning stretch? At the ballgame, nobody seems even to have noticed that the announcement has been made. Yankee outfielder Gene Woodling has come to the plate during the interruption, and he now watches a ball go by. There’s something very magical about TV, everything seems to happen at once on it, the near and the far, the funny and the sad, the real and the unreal. Tonight! Collins, taking a big lead off first base, is not thinking about this. He doesn’t care. The boy hates Collins for his cheap hit. Just like the Yankees. His Mom and Dad like the Brooklyn Dodgers; the New York Yankees are Judge Kaufman’s team. Judge Kaufman is rich and lives on Park Avenue and takes his sons to see them play. The boy feels that awful lump growing in his stomach again. His little brother is out on the front porch with Leo painting a homemade Father’s Day card with watercolors. Father’s Day is Sunday, a long time away. “That was their last chance,” the boy tells himself, trying to picture this new finality in the same way he sees the Tiger pitcher stretch, study Collins at first, then whip the ball toward the plate: ball two! Are the other guys in the neighborhood watching the game, did they hear the announcement? His Mom and Dad have told him it’s not manly to be afraid, but he is afraid, he can’t help it. He feels like there are two of himself loose in the world, one who likes to play baseball with friends and come home to Mom and Dad and sometimes push his little brother around, and another one on television and in the newspapers who is threatening to eat the other one up. Both of them, the one

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