I’d found her very gloomy at breakfast this morning for some reason. Feeling neglected maybe. I remembered the way I’d found her last night. My Wild Irish Potato. People have noted my unusual empathy with despondent people; on the other hand, Pat gets despondent all the time and this only tees me off.
Julie had greeted me at the kitchen door with a sticky strawberry-jam kiss, then had wrinkled up her nose and said: “Oh, Daddy, your beard!”
“Don’t be silly,” I’d said impatiently. “I just shaved it.” This had got to be a joke with the girls and I was a little tired of it. I wondered what would happen if Tricia and Julie grew up and met and fell in love with the Rosenberg boys. Maybe that was what was troubling Pat. Looking at her then, standing there at the stove frying bacon in her bathrobe, she had seemed like all those well-washed people from obscure little California towns and suburbs who used to come to see me in July and August when I was their Senator, shake my hand, get an autograph, talk about the weather back home or the condition of the roads or some pet theory about the Red Menace. Plain and simple people, not very bright, not very well informed, nice though, and they were voters. And they were on my side. Pat was a voter. She was on my side. But, no, it was more than that, she was the choice that gave others trust in me, earned their vote. What do the common people care about tidelands disputes or wars in Asia? The important thing to them is who you married, how you live, what kind of kids you’ve got. I married Pat and revealed to the world something about myself, and so became Vice President of the United States of America.
“Sit down, Dick, and eat your breakfast,” she’d said dully, munching toast. “I told John you’d be out in a few minutes. What happened to your face?”
“Eh? Nothing. An accident.” I’d dropped irritably into a chair, ducked my head in the Congressional Record. Why was it, whenever I was at home, I felt guilty?
“An accident?” One trouble with Pat was that when she chewed you could see the way her jaws worked.
“I, yes, well, I… I ran into some…demonstrators last night. Near the Supreme Court.” Perhaps this is true, I’d thought. After all, history is never literal. If it were, it would have no pattern at all, we’d all be lost. “They, uh…one of them hit me with a placard. Nothing, really.”
She’d looked at me like my mother used to when I came in from playing touch football in a muddy field. “Oh, Dick!” she’d scolded. I’d realized that it relaxed her to be able to scold me about something.
While I shoveled down my breakfast, conscious of my chauffeur out there waiting for me, we’d discussed where and how we’d meet if they held the Times Square executions tonight. I’d told her about my having to attend that Republican fund-raising dinner over in New Jersey afterwards, had said I was leaving her the car, she’d said she didn’t really want to go to the executions, I’d said she had no choice.
“What’s a eggsy-cushion, Daddy?” Tricia had asked.
“You’ll find out tonight,” I’d said crisply, scraping my chair back. Some other time her question might have been cute, but I wasn’t in the mood. “Julie, damn it, stop picking your nose at the table!”
Pat had sighed and turned back to the bacon. I knew she didn’t like to go to these public ceremonies, I shouldn’t have been peeved, but I’d felt like she’d just turned down my plans for our anniversary. Watching her there at the stove while I finished tying my shoes, I’d wondered if her bathrobe was inflammable. Ruth Greenglass had got burned once standing too close to a stove in her nightgown. Nearly killed her. And six months pregnant at the time. We’d just passed a bill about it in the Senate yesterday, the so-called “exploding sweaters” bill, which at least five Senators had voted for thinking it was an anti-pornography law. Ruth had been feverish for weeks, her whole body a mess — like a foretaste of the electric chair. This was shortly before the FBI picked up David. He’d got burned, too, trying to put out Ruth’s flames. Lot of goddamn fire in this case. Everything from the Greenglass kitchen stove to talk of an atomic holocaust. Holocaust: burnt whole. Just what the Rosenbergs had to look forward to. “Flaming Reds,” the papers called them. “This infernal conspiracy.” The day’s hot news story. “Gonna put their feet to the fire,” Uncle Sam had told me out at Burning Tree: “They’ve inflamed a lotta passions out in the world, let ’em get their own frizzed a little!” Maybe that was what my dream last night about Pat’s burning bush was all about….
“I’ll see you tonight!” I’d snapped gruffly, and stamped out of the house into the sun, struggling with my face. We lived in a nosy neighborhood. It ticked me off that she didn’t kiss me good-bye in the doorway any more.
And what if she died, I wondered: was I ready for that? Tough, of course. It would hurt. I’d be lost without Pat. It’d win a lot of votes, though. People might even, for once, vote for me, instead of against the other guy. Then maybe, later, when I’d got over it, if I ever did, a White House wedding like Grover Cleveland had. In the Blue Room, little Frances Folsom, just twenty-two years old. Tyler’d done well, too, waited two years after his wife had gone and then married a twenty-four-year-old. Woodrow Wilson, there were a lot of precedents. Maybe Uncle Sam even liked it that way, a source of energy and renewaclass="underline" keep the Incarnation’s pecker up. That was the one thing he was obsessed about: staying young. To him, a closed frontier was like a hardened artery and too much government, too much system, too much political theory, was a kind of senility. It was what made him hate socialists: “a bunch of goddamn zombies,” he called them. “Dead before they’re born!” Sometimes he frightened me with his vehemence about it. “If those lizards ever get their world revolution, it’ll be all over for ’em!” he told me one day out at Burning Tree. It must have been one of the first times I’d played golf with him. “This excitement out on the perimeter is all they’ve got. Inside, son, there’s nothin’ but old mold and fungus. They’re learnin’ the hard way what our Old West was all about, all that tumult and butchery and wild unsartinty. Two pollrumptious screamers shootin’ it out on a dusty Main Street over a saddlepack fulla gold: now them two fellers is about as alive as anybody’s ever gonna be! Socialists are skeered of this, they want everything buttoned down fair and logical and all screwin’ up antedeluvian quiet, which is to say, they don’t want nothin’ to happen! What’s there to live for in a world like that, I ask you — all them sissies runnin’ your life for you? No, the earth belongs to the livin’, boy, not to cold pickles! You can’t tame what don’t stand still and nothin’ in this universe does! Einstein put his finger on it a long time ago — oh, he’s gone off the deep end lately, I know, but listen, he knew what America was all about: don’t let the grass grow under your feet! saddle up, keep movin’, anything can happen! Ya know, people useter think of time like some kinda movin’ knife edge cuttin’ acrost the entire universe, but that was on accounta they was locked up in a room in Europe somewhere and not heedin’ what was roarin’ up over here! America was on the go — not only on horses, but on wheels, on trains, on steamships and automobiles, even into the air. Einstein seen this. And while he was skinnin’ his eyes for what this signified, it suddenly come to his attention that a movin’ clock appears to run slow set off agin an identical clock sittin’ still and the — hope I’m not too fast for you, son…?”