I pondered this as I walked up into the town, looking for the best approach to the prison. There were wooden barricades up everywhere, even along the New York Central right-of-way, all entrances manned by Ossining City Police and New York State Troopers. All looking tough, especially the locals, Chief Purdy’s boys. I hoped that Warden Denno had spread the word. Spencer Purdy was a guy you didn’t fool with. When eight hundred New Yorkers came up here last Christmas to sing carols to the Rosenbergs, Purdy had barricaded all streets leading to the prison, had refused to allow the carolers to leave the area of the railroad station, had secreted five hundred cops, deputy sheriffs, and state troopers in an abandoned wire factory nearby with a fleet of buses assembled to convoy them to any trouble, and as much as possible had kept the demonstrators out in the open, under a bitter icy rain. He’d finally let six of them deposit in the prison parking lot a basket of flowers with a legend reading GREETINGS TO JULIE AND ETHEL FROM THE PEOPLE, but as soon as they’d gone he’d had it carted off by a garbage truck to the city dump. All of which was just a quiet little practice run compared to today’s operation. The place was like an armed camp. There were patrol cars everywhere, hundreds of sweating unhappy cops, Coast Guard helicopters rattling overhead. I couldn’t see them, but I supposed there were National Guard troops up in the hills as well, PT boats in the river. All of which made me feel very goddamn nervous. I decided to wear the moustache, after all, even if it was in pretty shoddy shape after the ride in my pocket — one side of it kept bending out away from my face.
For a while, I just walked the streets, considering alternatives, angles, practicing my Thomas Greenleaf lines for passing through the barriers (if they asked, I’d tell them I was a salesman, a traveling salesman — which was true after alclass="underline" our greatest salesman against socialism, isn’t that what the party regulars called me?), nervously trying to recall the strategy I’d planned to use on Rosenberg. Something about the FBI, a confrontation…. The local residents watched me wander by. I hoped they’d take me for a cop or a reporter. Those not running for the trains were all standing outside their houses in the June heat, listening to car radios. Something about the Rosenbergs. I tried to pick it up: “…the Rosenbergs confessed. In Congress, heavily engaged upon major legislative work, the day has been one of anxiety and suspense…”
What—? Had they talked? Was it all over? This ruins everything, I thought. Forget it. Turn back now, and you’ll still have time to make it to Times Square for the ceremonies. I jerked around and started to run back down the hill. But then I reasoned: if they had confessed, what were all these cops doing here? The Phantom would have no use for the two of them now. I tried to reconstruct the sentence. Lot of possibilities: if the Rosenbergs confessed, had the Rosenbergs confessed, whenever the Rosenbergs confessed — I spun around on my heel again and started back up the street. The moustache blew off and I had to press it on again. People were staring at me now. I tried to cool it. I knew this was the most difficult period in a crisis situation, the period of indecision: whether to fight or run away. It was important not to commit yourself irrevocably to a course of action until you absolutely have to do so. Otherwise you’re just shooting from the hip, you can miss the target and lose the battle out of sheer recklessness. On the other hand, I’d already passed through this period, hadn’t I? Back at the office? On the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special? In Penn Station? Which period was I in, then? I was very edgy and short-tempered, and I was afraid I might blow my stack and throw a tantrum or something. I thought of my old man, doing everything wrong, raging futilely against the world: I’m no better than him! I tried to tell myself that if I didn’t feel keyed up like this, it would mean I wasn’t ready, mentally and emotionally, for the conflict ahead, but I was too upset to listen to such bullshit. My stomach was boiling, my nose was running with hay fever, and my need for a toilet was getting desperate.
Back on Main Street, I spied a drugstore and crossed over to it. Get some antacids. Find a John maybe. But when I peeked inside, I saw that the place was full of troopers lounging about in their snappy but grim black and gray uniforms. I ducked my nose into a revolving rack of postcards outside the door: tinted pictures of the Calvary Baptist Church, Jug Tavern, the Half Moon, and a tombstone pierced by a cannonball in Sparta Cemetery. I was trying to think, but my mind was a blank. “Ossining is a Sint Sinck Indian word meaning ‘stone upon stone,’” said a card depicting the first prisoners setting up the original old marble cell block, said to be still standing. Maybe that was where they were. No, here was the new Death House. There were postcard portraits of famous local Revolutionary War heroes and Death House victims, complete with their last words. Cartoons, too — crude jokes about the electric chair, last meals, and manacled prisoners fantasizing, pissing on their jailers, being tortured with near-naked girls: “Okay, Miss Ladoo, that’ll be enough for today!” A prisoner pulling his pants off on one side of a screen, a visitor lifting her skirts on the other, and a cop dashing up, shouting: “Hold it, Diddlemore!”
Inside, the troopers were sucking milk shakes and horsing around with a young high-school girl behind the soda fountain, elbowing each other slyly, looking bored and horny at the same time. I recognized them. The first team. All suited up. A little kidding around, a little grab-assing, ball-tugging, just loosening up for the big game, no harm meant, no rapes intended. One of them was playing a pinball machine that said HOT STUFF along the top, and on the jukebox somebody was singing “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night.” Maybe I should risk it, I thought. They won’t even notice me come and go. A caramel milk shake might be just the thing I needed, better even than antacids. Or maybe pineapple. I adjusted my moustache and started forward, feeling uneasy, on the wrong side of things somehow — like that day long ago when I entered a strange drugstore to purchase my first packet of prophylactics and found myself face to face with a man who looked like my grandmother. That time, in panic, I’d bought a lotion for athlete’s foot instead. Today it was an old woman who looked like Herb Brownell. She met me in the doorway and said: “What’ll it be, mister?”
“Uh…this one!” I croaked, reaching blindly behind me and grabbing a card. I fished for a nickel. “And…uh…could you tell me, please, the best way up to the, uh, prison?”
“Sure, bud,” she said eyeing me suspiciously. She pointed: “Right over, uh, there: uh, Hunter Street.” Was she mocking me? Behind her, the cops had stopped joshing the little soda jerk and were staring dully out at me. I pocketed the postcard, thrust a coin at the old lady, and fled, nearly crashing into the side of a passing taxi. Behind me, I heard hard belly laughter, and it made my stomach knot up and my knees quake. But I was on the way at last.
At the entrance to Hunter Street, however, I was stopped cold: “Sorry, mac, visiting hours are over.” He was a big potbellied gray-haired cop in a short-sleeved blue shirt, wet in the armpits.