“I’ve got nothing to do with Mr. Bennett! I’m here on my own! I’ve come to offer you—”
“We will not be intimitated by your fascist methods, Mr. Nixon!” she snapped. Her words were harsh, but she couldn’t hide her desperation. “We have done nothing wrong and if we must die for that, then we shall die for it!”
“If you die at all, it will be because you and your husband want to! You’ve been given a fair chance and it’s still open! You’re just doing this for your own goddamn glory!”
“Oh no! We do not wish to be martyrs or heroes, Mr. Nixon! We do not want to die!” she cried, her voice thin and defensive. “But we won’t lie to live!”
“Who’s asking you to lie? Listen, I’ve got a new—!”
“We are not the first victims of tyranny!” she ranted. I could see tears springing to the corners of her dark eyes, and her lip was trembling. I knew if I could keep attacking and counterattacking, I could break her, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Hadn’t her own lawyer said it? “She is a better lawyer than I am, no doubt!” Relatively, the Pink Lady was a pushover. “Six million of our coreligionists and millions of other victims of fascism went to the death chambers before us!”
“All this crap about fascism is a lotta hooey, and you know it!” I shouted, jabbing my homburg at her. “The only mass executions these days are on the other side of the Iron Curtain!”
“That’s not true!”
“Oh yeah? What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh? He and about ten more of your coreligionists, as you like to call them! Or the Doctors’ Plot — that was a good one! And just yesterday over in East Berlin, poor Willi Goettling, not even any goddamn trial, just dragged out and shot! And more being massacred right now!”
“Spies!” she shrieked, trying to drown me out.
“Oh,” I said calmly, dropping the homburg to my side. “That makes it okay, does it?” She flushed, trapped. I zeroed in: “And meanwhile, all century long, this country has opened its doors — its doors and its heart — to the people running away from all these tyrannies, no matter what their color, your own parents among them!”
“Yes, that’s right,” she replied, having recovered more quickly than I had expected, “until you came along — you and all those other super-patriotic demagogues and bigots who are taking this country over!”
“Now, wait a minute, don’t call me a bigot!” I stormed. “I’ve got plenty of Jewish friends! More than you have, I bet! Catholics, too, and Negroes — listen, when I was in college I helped initiate a Negro into our fraternity!” She seemed nonplussed by this — I took advantage of the point made and pressed on: “I’m a progressive, too, you know — don’t believe everything you see in Herblock’s cartoons! My ancestors fought with Cromwell in Ireland and George Washington in New Jersey, struggled against the Indians, spied on the British, operated an Underground Railroad station on the north bank of the Ohio, and got buried at Gettysburg! I’ve always believed in freedom! I personally opened up Whittier College to on-campus dances and championed the end of compulsory chapel! You don’t believe me, I’ll show you in the yearbook! I lived in a commune once and worked for the New Deal and the OPA and fought against the Axis in the South Pacific! I was at Bougainville! I might have got killed!” Christ, I realized I was getting very wrought up. She watched me somewhat agape. I didn’t know whether I was getting to her or just astonishing her. She was still very pale. Doe-eyed. Vulnerable: I could see how she must have knocked them out in that role of the condemned man’s sister. She looked like Ella Cinders. Her soft dark eyes began to narrow. I could see the shape of the argument forming up behind them, so I beat her to it: “Oh, I know what people say about me, trying to make me out like the heavy in some goddamn cowboy movie, calling me every name in the book — but it’s not my fault! It’s only because of the campaigns I’ve had to run and the legislation I’ve had to sponsor and support. I’m not any happier about a lot of it than you are, but that’s politics — a campaign diet of dishwater and milk toast doesn’t get you elected to office and you don’t achieve a national reputation by putting your name on nothing but blue-sky laws! A lot of blood gets spilled on the way to the top — where at last maybe you can do something about the world — and inevitably a lot of it is your own! Blood and mud: I’ve been accused of everything — bigamy, forgery, drunkenness, insanity, thievery, anti-Semitism, perjury, the whole gamut of misconduct in public office, ranging from unethical to downright criminal activities — but nobody knows yet who I really am! You should understand this, Mrs. Rosenberg, you’ve caught some of it yourself! A fanatic, they’ve called you, an anti-Semite, a lousy mother, even something of a nut case — well, if you think you’ve suffered, just imagine how it’s been for me!”
She might have snorted again at this, but she didn’t. She was watching me in a new way, studying me curiously. She looks a little bit like Claudette Colbert at that, I thought. Only softer, more like one of those Italian actresses. Her dress hung loosely on her and gave you the impression it was all she had on. She poked absently into her skirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, gazing thoughtfully at me all the while. She didn’t flip a cigarette from the pack, but reached in carefully with her fingertips, plucked one out, and fitted it between her lips. Her hand was trembling faintly as she lit it.
“It’s…uh, it’s not allowed,” I said uneasily, glancing up at the NO SMOKING sign on the wall.
“No? What do you think they’ll do to me, Mr. Nixon?” she asked drily, and exhaled a lungful of smoke. She seemed almost to be pitying me. I did not object to this. I was no longer sure just what I was doing here, but it had to be for good reasons, and I knew that somehow, difficult as it might be, I would succeed. She stood close to me now, small, delicate, even fragile. I realized that I really didn’t want her to die.
“Mrs. Rosenberg,” I said as gently as I could, attempting a smile but feeling it twitch away as soon as I’d tried it, “Mrs. Rosenberg, we want to, uh, help, I want to help, Pat and I—”
“You’re wasting your time,” she said simply. “I am innocent. My husband is innocent. We know nothing about any espionage.” She kept her head up but she seemed close to tears. There was a tremor in her voice. How much time did she have left to live — seventy minutes? eighty? She took another deep drag on the cigarette, then dropped it on the floor and squashed it out with her slipper, creating an ugly black smudge in the middle of all that gleaming wax polish. She exhaled slowly, then gazed up at me again. I was touched by her great reserves of strength and serenity. “We understand these desperate moves,” she said. “You’ve made a mistake and now you’re trying to get out of it!”
“But, Mrs. Rosenberg — Ethel! You don’t understand!” She seemed surprised I’d used her first name, and with such feeling. Dumfounded even. I was surprised myself. “I tell you, Ethel, this has nothing to do with the government — I’ve run away from the government — believe me, it’s you I care about, can’t you see that?” She seemed startled, confused, disbelieving. I could hardly believe it either, it was sheer madness, but I couldn’t stop now, I’d turned some corner and there was no going back. Besides, my instincts told me I was right. “I’ve come to save you, I don’t know how, but I’ve got to get you out of this, I’ve got to get you out of here!” What did I mean? That I was going to pick her up and make a run for it? Trade clothes with her like they did in the movies? Maybe it was the utter impossibility of it all that drove me on — it couldn’t happen, so I could be all the fiercer in my insistence that it would. It reminded me of my greatest moments with Ola. “I don’t want your confession, Ethel! I don’t care about the past, it’s now I care about!”