“You mean, we just take the stuff, or…?”
He hands them the key, looking like Ulysses Grant handing his manuscript over to his publishers. “It’s already took,” he says quietly, his voice firm and gentle as Silent Cal’s. “That business used to belong to Julius Rosenberg.”
There is this peculiar quality about Uncle Sam: it’s as though his many metamorphoses since his early days as an Inspector of Government Provisions have each left, mysteriously, their mark on him. One discovers Old Tip Harrison’s long nose in the middle of his face, little Jemmy Madison’s scraggly white hair (or is it Old Zack’s or Little Van’s? certainly he’s got Zack Taylor’s craggy cheeks and rough-and-ready ways), Willie (Big Lub) Taft’s gold watchchain, old Jim Monroe’s bony rump still in its — even then — out-of-date pantaloons. Debilities have been shed, donated to museums, or else never assumed (just part of the real-time cover story) — Washington’s rhinoceros teeth and smallpox scars, F.D.R.’s shriveled legs, Cleveland’s vulcanized rubber jaw, Abe’s warts and Jim Polk’s spastic bowels — but virtues and marvels have been laid on, fortified and refortified, many times over: there’s the lean virility of Monroe, Jackson, and “Stud” Tyler, steadily augmented by passage through the likes of Long Abe, Doc Wilson, and Ike; there’s that willful hard-set jaw, shaped by every Incarnation from “54–40 or Fight” Polk to Reverend Garfield, Ugly Honest Grover Cleveland, and the Roosevelt boys, not to mention the strange subtle influences of such as Hamilton and Burr, Clay and Calhoun, Bill Borah, Harry Hopkins, and even Ed Stettinius; there’s the lofty pride of John (His Rotundity) Adams, the shrewdness of the Red Fox of Kinderhook, the Grecian mouth of Millard Fillmore, and a hand calloused by the campaign habits of everyone from Matty Van Buren and Chet Arthur, the Gentleman Boss, to affable Warren Harding, who once shook hands with 6756 people in five hours. When he cocks his head a certain poll-parrot way, he recalls Old Buck Buchanan, who had one nearsighted eye and one farsighted eye — which alone was enough to qualify him as Uncle Sam’s Incarnation. And when, as now, tracing leads, fusing wires, unbending panels, putting this electrical system back together again, he scowls in concentration through a pair of antique wire-rimmed spectacles perched halfway down his Yankee nose, one cannot help but remember Citizen Ben Franklin jotting down his scientifical notes by candlelight after successfully sucking electrical fluid down a kite string. Or the old Rough Rider himself, Teddy Roosevelt, squinting to hide his lame left eye. Abe Lincoln trying to read the program in the weak light of Ford’s Theater: “Other means may succeed,” Uncle Sam says, glancing up at these recognitions, sparks flying between his fingers, “this cannot fail!” Fsst! Sizzle! POP! “As America’s greatest Prophet once said, ‘There is always a best way of doin’ everything…’” The marquee lights dip, there’s a crackling hum on-stage and a faint glow: it is done, the chair is ready! “‘… Even if it be to bile an egg!’”
Huzzahs from the crowd, beaming smiles from the gathered functionaries, who try to get as close to Uncle Sam as possible. The workmen line up and sing “Hail to the Chief,” then test out the chair by burning six or seven chimpanzees in it. And high over the Square behind Father Duffy, up where the Chevy sign used to be: the headlines from the Newton Kansan of exactly eighty years ago today, June the 19th, 1873:
LET PATRIOTS EVERYWHERE PREPARE TO DO THE CLEAN THING
BY UNCLE SAM AND HIS BALDHEADED EAGLE!
9. The Vice President’s Beard
Shaving that morning, I thought: I was born a hundred years too late. If I could let this damn thing grow, I’d look like Ulysses S. Grant. There’d be no more talk about shyster corporation lawyers and used-car salesmen then. I could say what I pleased, glowering over my beard, and everybody would listen. Black and bushy, like Saint Peter or Henry VIII or Whit What’s-his-name. Walt Whitman. My skinned nose and forehead gave me a special ferocity this morning. I growled at myself in the bathroom mirror: G-r-r-row-w-f-f! Beauty and the Beast, that game I used to play with Pat before we were married, my secret self. She thought it was funny, she didn’t understand. Mess up my hair, roll my eyes, shake my jowls, the good old days. I could always get a laugh then. If I’d worked at it, I might have been another Jack Benny.
I actually started a couple of beards back then, always got embarrassed, shaved them off before anyone started to notice. That drift from the focal center, which was somehow clean-cut and open-eyed — it had to do, I suspected, with the approval of old men. And fear of turning into the grizzly irresponsible red-eyed derelict I looked like after a day or two of stubble. With a beard you were expected to move differently, say different things, become more cynical and detached, I got conscious of my hands, eyebrows, lips. I could let myself look like that bent over law books on a Sunday night, but not in class on Monday morning. Then, before I knew it, I was a prosecuting attorney, had to set a community example, then an OPA civil servant in the war and soon a J.O. in the U.S. Navy, where hairiness was frowned on more even than gonorrhea, unless you wore it on your chest, and I wasn’t even out of the Navy before I was running for Congress. With that, my public face was set. Change it, lose votes, I was no longer a free agent. How a candidate looks is a lot more important than what he says, and the most important thing is to look familiar. Even our rare vacations became public appearances, I put it out of my mind. Except occasionally while shaving in the morning. Maybe someday when I’m President. Like Lincoln. Have some little kid write to me and suggest it. That would solve the television makeup problem, too — I can shave thirty seconds before I go on camera and, unless I put some powder on, still have such an obvious beard that people write me letters about it. The five-o’clock phantom. My enemies will stop at nothing.
As I’d feared, I’d had a sleepless night — probably for the best, it could be stimulating at a time like this, I knew, but for the moment it made me groggy, unable to see clearly how close the shave was, I had to go by feel. I’d been pushing too hard, consuming all my reserves, making myself vulnerable. All those disturbing apparitions, those images out of a life not my own.… It was as though something had got into me last night, like an alien gene, and I’d lacked the strength to fend it off — all my Early Warning rhetoric about “boring from within”: I’d suddenly begun to understand it for the first time. It was pretty stupid, banging my face on the wall like that, but in a way it had been a good thing. It had cleared my head, and by the time I’d reached my car I’d pretty much forgotten about old lady Greenglass’s inflated belly and the chickens and traffic on Delancey Street. Soft summer night out, new moon over my shoulder: I’d rolled the windows down, turned on the car radio, tuning in a station playing old songs like “Heartaches” and “Whispering Hope,” and had cruised down Independence, taking the long way home so as to calm down some, letting my mind fill up with reassuring pictures from my own past, my boyhood vibrating in me like an old movie: the Anaheim Union ditch in Yorba Linda where I went wading, Easter eggs and May baskets, the adventures of the Gumps, Grandma’s big austere house at Christmastime and “Joy to the World” being trumpeted out from our Meeting House steeple, Lindbergh’s flight and all the little stuff we collected from it, a book I read told by an abused dog, hanging baskets of smilax ferns on sunny porches, the Four Square Gospel Temple and Ken Maynard rolling off his horse inside the Berry Grand…Goddamn! I’d thought: I’ve lived a wonderful life! I’d remembered playing railroad fireman, learning to salute the flag at school and sing “Old Black Joe,” nosing through the Books of Knowledge, memorizing stanzas of “Snowbound” and struggling with “In a Persian Market Place” on Aunt Jane’s piano, sweating in the heat of a Tucson summer, mashing potatoes for Mom. I was good at that like everything else and Mom was always pleased because I never left any lumps, using the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down like the other boys did. I’d recalled — tooling past the Smithsonian and up around the Washington obelisk — mashing those potatoes, and it was like some kind of epiphany. I’d felt like I felt one morning at Whittier College when I’d been up for nearly three straight days and everything was incredibly beautiful — or that day, not all that long ago, when I was sitting on a dilapidated rocking chair on Whittaker Chambers’s front porch in Maryland, the warm sensation sweeping over me that it was all falling into place.