Like gongs in the mind, hinting at echoing infinities, names, names and number: Sarah Dougherty sells the 4-story 1-family dwelling at 825 Carroll Street to Mrs. Rudolphine Dick. General Van Fleet kills a 1950-pound Kodiak bear and the 1952 profit ratio for department stores is the 2nd worst in 19 years. Mangrum Posts 69. There are big numbers like the $4998732500 foreign aid bill, little numbers like the 5 tons of gravel and dirt that Jimmy Willis is buried under in Lambertsville. The 6–2 record of Vinegar Bend Mizell. The 500 Fingers of Dr. T by Dr. Seuss — You’ve got to see the 480,000-key piano hit an atomic clinker! WITH STEREOPHONIC SOUND! Allison Choate of Apawamis cards a 77, 55 Chinese are ordered out of the country, Eleanor Hortense Almond dies at 103. Volume declines to 1010000 shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The President is visited by 100 schoolchildren, and the Vice President tells Senator Taft: “I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday, Bob!” A kind of accountability, but without irrevocable consequence, gently disturbing the timestream on occasions, but never causing it to leap its banks. The Red Sox scored a record 17 runs in one inning, canteloupe is selling at 19 cents for one pound. Even the patterns are usually familiar ones, suggesting cribbage runs, the inflationary spiral, countdowns: Eighth Race: Perón arrests 7 Radicals, a 4-nation chase nets 6 thieves, the French crisis enters its 5th week, Nick Condos was Martha Raye’s 4th husband, and Willi Goettling, leaving 3 dependents, is shot between his 2 eyes by the Russians, losing his 1 life. 37 Down: Zero. NIL.
Despite all this effort at secularity, some communicants are nevertheless disturbed by these litanies, discovering in them hints of the terrible abysses beyond the tablets. The very enormity of the monument, at first thought comforting, begins to smother and overwhelm them. A few duck out. Others withdraw to a familiar corner, content to follow a recognizable time-line or two and keep their heads intact. But many begin to lose control. They twitch, lurch forward, jerk back, rush ahead, cower, circle back, then panic and race recklessly through the sanctuary as though lost in a circus or a ceremonial abattoir. Prince Karl Rudolf Marries. SOME HOPES FOR U.N. / TOO HIGH. Trouble on First Hole. HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT (if you really care…): The Goddess Strapless in fine white Push-Button Loading. DULLES’ REMARKS SHARP: Don’t Neglect Slipping FALSE liquid will help you to handle expanding demands as well as to weather adjustments Fair and a little warmer today highest temperature near 23980 entries in McCalls’ dress-your-best Candidate for the worst-dressed woman scattered with black polka dots RED PLOT! “What’s happening? Where am I?” they scream, tearing frantically through the shrine, plowing into other pilgrims, slapping up against the slabs: “Let me out!” But Papagos Sees Need for Speed and CLARK KNEW OF RHEE VIEW, all seams are bound: PHARMACISTS ELECT Michigan Assassin ‘BLIND FATHER OF 1953’ Following Crude Advance with that priceless American Quality—FRESHNESS! 19 COPIES OF THIS successful businessman keeps abreast of FAILLE LASTEX WANTED IN Mr. Divine’s imaginary atomic explosion bathing suit and bra colors *(T-T) TIMES tested! Churchill Voices Shock STEAK FOR FATHER’S DAY Wired for sun it’ll blast space helmets back to Mars and put all the cowboy hats out to pasture HOGS moderately active. HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? Sabers Down. Margaret Truman Passes. “How long has it been…?”
11. How to Handle a Bloodthirsty Mob
I was getting dizzy trying to read The New York Times on the ride in. Actually, I felt very comfortable with a newspaper in my hands, reading them was a lifetime habit of mine, I’d been an enthusiast since I was a little kid, eccentric about it in fact, but I couldn’t read anything in the back seat of a moving car. And of all the papers, the goddamn Times was the worst. Letters too small and uneven, too gray, too much crammed onto a page — what the hell do we want with all this high-minded gossip, anyway? Had to get through it, though; you never knew what you might need in the middle of a Cabinet meeting. I did know what I was likely to need on the way in, however, and so turned to the sports pages: sooner or later my chauffeur was bound to ask me about yesterday’s ballgames or tonight’s pitchers. Who are you betting on tonight, Mr. Nixon? He was a Negro and so I always tried to have something good to say about Jackie Robinson or Roy Campanella of the Dodgers. Usually this was pretty easy because both those colored boys were having terrific seasons, they were hot and the team was hot, but not yesterday: I was glad to see that they’d both gone hitless and the Cardinals had whipped the Bums’ asses, 12 to 4. On the other hand, my own team, the Washington Senators, had lost to the White Sox and dropped back into the second division, overtaken by the Boston Red Sox, who had made a complete mockery of the game by scoring seventeen runs in one inning — the goddamn seventh, needless to say — crushing Detroit, 23 to 3. My God, what’s baseball coming to? By coincidence, 23 was exactly how many Boston batters had gone to the plate in that seventh-inning outrage. And it was also, it occurred to me, the number of my football jersey back at Whittier College…23. Well, what of it? Nothing.
I leaned my head back a moment, closed my eyes for a little stomach-stroking seventh-inning stretch of my own, then braced myself and turned back to the front pages. Full of the Berlin, Rosenberg, Korean stories, the government crisis in France, the foreign-aid-bill fight in the House, the port strikes. I glanced through for my own name, noticed that Joe McCarthy was still getting a lot of headlines. That FBI agent’s hairy tale of the “goon squad” plot to assassinate Joe had made the front pages of all the papers this morning, Joe was also being widely quoted on his anti-Administration support of Rhee’s prisoner release in Korea, and there was even a long story on a new member of his staff, yet another “veteran Red-hunter.” Certainly, I wasn’t getting that kind of press these days, but this was probably for the best. I wouldn’t be running for office again for at least three years, and if I was going to create a sense of momentum, I couldn’t start from too near the peak. And I hadn’t gone hitless, they’d covered my work in the Senate yesterday, even if it was back in the middle pages, and there was even a report on my casual encounter with Bob Taft: “The Eisenhower Administration is improving its collective golf score, whatever luck it is having with its larger problems.” At first glance, I was flattered, pleased I’d pulled it off, but I began to wonder if maybe indirectly it was some kind of smear: trying to say we were out playing golf when we should be facing up to our national problems…? I didn’t care if they said that about Eisenhower, but it wasn’t fair to hit me with that one, I was only doing my goddamn duty. And then the score, too, they were obviously making fun about that: “‘I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday,’ Nixon declared, then bowed acknowledgement to Senator Taft’s congratulations. Taft was on crutches and appeared to have lost considerable weight, but was ‘gay’ as he exchanged golfing talk with Nixon.” Gay? Maybe I’d made a mistake warming up to a dying man. “Bob, I have news for you…”
I sighed. News and more news: I read that New York City was installing “Atomic Age” city lights that turned on by radio, that several teachers had been axed in New York City in apparent reprisals against Albert Einstein, and that they were letting Trotsky’s killer out of jail — thank God I wasn’t paranoid, or I’d begin to worry it was yet another goddamn anniversary gift to Pat and me. At one time in my life, I actually thought I wanted to be a journalist and took some courses in it at college, but I hated it. Only C’s I ever got all through school. It was one thing to witness an event, another to go home and make up some story about it. Anyway, if it was worth witnessing, it was worth getting into — I couldn’t just stand stupidly on the sidelines and take notes, I had to jump in and play a part. Move things around. And then, whenever I did, and chanced to glance back over my shoulder at those cynical bastards watching me, grinning, jotting it all down, making a fat living off my spent hide and life-force like some kind of cannibals, even contributing to my suffering with their niggardly reports and mud-slinging insinuations, how was I expected to respect and admire them? Besides, it’s a fact, while most publishers might be Republicans, most reporters were Democrats, or worse — look at how they’d smeared me last fall with that phony manufactured “fund crisis,” for example, hurling charges, ignoring my refutations — trial by press, that’s what it was, worse than trial by ordeal, not even Tass would have dared to do so much to damage our national prestige at home and abroad — to hell with them.