His folks’ lawyer Manny Bloch is having the same experience: he and his defense team are flinging themselves frenetically at any judge they can find at home or in chambers, but they all seem to have either vanished or gone deaf. A stone wall. Manny fires off a telegram to President Eisenhower, raising the Hugo Black point that the case has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court, but this wire is short-circuited by Special Counsel Bernie Shanley and “transmitted to the Justice Department”; Eisenhower never sees it. Bloch, who has fallen unprofessionally in love with this entire family, is beginning to lose his forensic cool and is having flashes of self-destructive temper, as the doors slam shut in his face. He and others plead for a stay of the eleven-p.m. executions tonight because of the Jewish Sabbath which begins at sundown. Kaufman, playing it close to the chest, says he has already spoken with Attorney General Brownell about that: the executions will not be carried out during the Sabbath. The lawyers take this to mean a delay is in the offing, past the weekend at least, and relax a moment: at Justice, they exchange knowing winks.
The Rosenbergs themselves, locked away in the stillness of the Sing Sing Death House, are remote from all this noisy maneuvering, but they are not unaware of it. One thing they know: they are not alone in this world. Julius even clings yet to the mad hope that justice will be done, that they will both be vindicated, these walls will come crashing down, and they will ride out of here on the shoulders of their friends, the people, but Ethel, though never more strong and serene, shares her son’s mood of grim resignation: that’s it, good-bye, good-bye. She sits with Julie, separated from him by a wire-mesh screen, composing a farewell letter to the two boys. What she wants above all is to save them from cynicism and despair, and so she speaks of the fellowship of grief and struggle and the price that must be paid to create a life on earth worth living. Julie, watching her, nods in agreement, awed by her radiant tranquillity…
…Your Daddy who is with me in the last momentous hours, sends his heart and all the love that is in it for his dearest boys. Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength.
Lovingly,
Daddy and Mommy
Julie Ethel
Julius’s mother, Sophie Rosenberg, turns up meanwhile at the gates of the White House asking to see the President, but they don’t let her even get close — her emotional behavior is notorious, and besides, she’s not in good health, and people near the end are capable of anything — so she has to do her scene in the streets. Much is happening out there. Demonstrations are building up in Washington, New York, around the world. Riots are expected and police everywhere are put on special alert. Bloch blames Judge Kaufman for stirring up all this trouble through his merciless intransigence: “Tens upon tens of millions of people in this country, in Europe, in Asia, know about this case!” The Boy Judge is not taken in: “I have been frankly hounded, pounded by vilification and by pressurists — I think that it is not a mere accident that some people have been aroused in these countries. I think it has been by design!” On a crepe-paper banner strung out above the Republic Chop Suey eatery in Times Square, Senator Frank Brandegee’s immortal rejoinder to Woody Wilson:
I AM NOT GOING TO BE BUNCOED BY ANY OLEAGINOUS LINGO ABOUT “HUMANITY” OR “MEN EVERYWHERE”
Things are heating up here in the Square: in the 80s now and still climbing. The masses moving into the area are no longer scudding through, but pressing toward the center. There’s a certain unwonted recklessness in the air, something left over from a restless night, and many merchants close shop early, fearing that American business and consumer ethics might not be taken as seriously this afternoon as they ought. Most of those arriving now are young, their elders having to finish out their workday before coming — boys in jeans and crew cuts, girls with ponytails and Woolworth pearls: the youth of America, cracking gum between their strong white teeth, jostling each other aggressively, scratching their crotches, trying to keep their bra straps from peeking out under their white summer blouses. They carry portable radios on which Nat (King) Cole sings “I’m Never Satisfied,” interrupted by newscasters who report that American Sabre Jets in Korea have bagged six more MIGs, the atom spies still refuse to talk, and B-29 Superforts have bombed Pyongyang. The boys laugh at this and elbow each other knowingly, because they think the announcer said “poontang.”
Up by the Times Tower, workmen are putting the final touches to the Death House set, refurbishing the executioner’s alcove, straightening and oiling the gurney wheels, polishing the brass studs in the leather seat of the electric chair. The props committee has come up with an old mahogany table with turned legs and center drawer to fill the empty space against the wall upstage right, just like the one at the real Death House in Sing Sing, though most people in the Square mistakenly assume this is the notorious Rosenberg console table and meant to be used for kindling. The set has no ceiling, of course, but since one of the principal features of the Sing Sing electrocution chamber is the greasy skylight above the chair, this has been ingeniously suggested by a floating glass bell, suspended on wires, which also contains, out of sight, the stage spotlights. This mock skylight will actually trap, ironically, those same fumes that the real one at Sing Sing is designed to let out, though the illusion after nightfall will be the opposite. And this, after all, is what counts, as Cecil B. De Mille explains patiently to a disturbed Warden Denno, a practical-minded man, unaccustomed to the magical razzamatazz of showbizz. “See, life and the real stuff of life aren’t always the same thing, Warden — like, one don’t always give you the other, you follow? So sometimes, to get your story across, you gotta work a different angle or two, use a few tricks, zap it up with a bit of spectacle — I mean, what’s spectacle? it’s a kind of vision, am I right?” It’s like the character Matty Burke is saying in the 3-D movie House of Wax over at the Trans-Lux. He’s the business partner of the wax-museum artist Professor Jarrod, and he doesn’t like Jarrod’s style. Too tame, too cute. He wants a Chamber of Horrors. Jarrod, who’s played by Vincent Price, argues effetely: “There are people in the world who love Beauty.” “Yeah,” snaps Burke, “but more who want sensation!”
Up and down the streets leading into Times Square, there are makeshift sideshows catering to these sensation-seekers and visionaries — a tentful of freaks from Hiroshima, the Rosenberg prison cockroach collection, the iconography of J. Edgar Hoover — even the old-time flea circus at Hubert’s Museum is enjoying a revival. The fleas have all been temporarily renamed after characters in the Rosenberg drama, and there’s a courtroom scene of the sentencing that has everybody in stitches. In one of the sideshow tents near the stage, amid Russian T-34 tank models from East Berlin, burnt and pissed-on posters from Czechoslovakia, and the ripped-off ears of a Red Brandenburg judge, a body is displayed, said to be that of the West Berlin vagrant Willi Goettling, shot by the Russians for allegedly provoking the East Berlin riots, though skepticism about the genuineness of this body is expressed by some visitors to the exhibit: something shabby and ordinary about the corpse, they say. Something, well, profane…. Skeptics everywhere. There are those who doubt the authenticity of bearded ladies and wild men from Borneo, after all, and who think levitation is done with mirrors.