My Dear Master:
The two boys that you left me with are very bad to me. Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me.
One Saturday the boys went hunting. Jim and myself went with them. While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked me in the side and we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing came out of it. I felt a pain all over. I started to run and as both of my eys were swelled shut I fell into a pond. When I got home I was very sore. I wish you would come home right now.
Your good dog
Richard
Even today that letter broke my heart — why hadn’t the Rosenbergs been able to get that kind of feeling in their correspondence? That “swarm of black thing” was more terrifying than anything they’d said in over two years of self-pitying anticipation of the electric chair. “It is incredible,” Ethel wrote to Julius on the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary and their first spent in prison, “that after 12 years of the kind of principled, constructive, wholesome living together that we did, that I should sit in a cell in Sing Sing awaiting my own legal murder.” What was more incredible to me was that she apparently could not recall a single day, a single event, from those twelve principled et cetera years worth mentioning. In all her letters, there was only one image that came to her mind from the past: that her younger boy used to call a certain kind of ice cream “Cherry-Oonilla.” The very loneliness of that image made it all the more touching. As for Julius, his recollections of the past read like the obituaries in small-town newspapers. There was not even any mention of their idyllic 1943 holiday in a rented cabin in Peekskill, where they presumably swam and hiked, chopped wood, made love in a hammock in front of their friends. Of course, it was right after this that they dropped out of overt radical activities, maybe in fact this was where they took their spy-training program, the love-play just a cover….
Nevertheless, pedantic and other-directed as they were, these letters seemed to be the most meaningful contact Julius and Ethel had with each other. Perhaps the prison setting estranged them. Maybe they feared what each knew about the other. People had claimed early on to have seen them kissing each other through the wire mesh, but this must have lost its charm pretty quick, and maybe it had been a lie. After they had meetings together or with the boys, their letters were full of apologies for their tears, bad tempers, or sullen silence. They found it easier to write to each other than to speak to each other. And behind all the rhetoric, something real did trickle through: in Julie’s case, an eagerness to please, to be admired, not only by the world, but by Ethel, too; in Ethel’s, her loneliness and her love. “Dearest Julie, I hold your dear face between my hands as I used to do so long ago and kiss you with all my heart.… I talk with you every night before I fall asleep and cry because you can’t hear me.… I see your pale drawn face, your pleading eyes, your slender boyish body and your evident suffering…. Oh, what shall I do? Hold me close to you tonight, I’m so lonely….”
Well, I knew from my own experience how love, awkward in the flesh, could blossom through the mails. Even now, I often wrote Pat letters at night for her to read in the morning. It was a way of working things out for yourself, exploring your own — then suddenly it occurred to me, what should have been obvious all along: she didn’t love him. She never had. She needed him, but she never loved him. “Daddy, I never saw you and Mommy kiss.” She had loved, yes, she was a lover, but she had no proper object for her love. I understood this. She was using his slender boyish body as I had used Pat’s cloth coat: to cop a plea. She had married Julius to fulfill something in herself, the old story, something maybe that got into her that day long ago when she got knocked down by the police fire hoses on Bleecker Street, but it was a portion of her will she had wed, not a lover: “Julie dear, I have such utter respect and regard for you; how well you know the score! Hold me close and impart to me some of your noble spirit!” Yes, a perfect marriage, and he had not disappointed her, this young activist, not up till now anyway; but she could recall nothing — or would not — of their past together, was given to confusion and tantrums when they met, even forgot their anniversary last year, though in prison she had almost nothing else to think about, and for the last few months had apparently stopped writing to Julius altogether, as though he no longer had ears to hear, or never did. And thus the deep longing in these letters mailed to the world: “Sweetheart, I draw you close into loving arms and warm you with my warmth.” She could as well have been speaking to me.
I sighed, leaned back in my chair. The letters, transcripts, notes, records littered the room, but I was no longer disturbed by this, I even perceived a certain order in it — like an image of time, I thought, not knowing quite what I meant, except that by tomorrow the office would be clean again, and so, no doubt, would I. There was a special fragrance in this soft summer day blowing in through the open window that reminded me of California, the old California which was in the middle of the world, not today’s remote, statistical, old-man California over on the other side of the voting continent, and I could hear a song wafting up from the streets below, one I recognized: “Among My Souvenirs”—it was one of the few that the Rosenbergs had mentioned in their letters. Something like the memories of last night rolled over me again, but now not so much as separate strung-out recollections, but rather as a kind of concentrated mass of feeling and abstract imagery that kept swelling and receding like a sort of slow heartbeat. I wanted to hold it constant, examine it, lose myself in it — it seemed to me that the resolution to this whole problem lay concealed in it, my speech, everything, as though on the tip of my tongue, at the edge of my vision — but it kept slipping away. Then I’d sit back and it would sweep over me again. It was very strange, very sweet, I could almost taste it, smell it, feel it filling my lungs, spreading through my limbs, it was warm and dusty and dense, like the heart of a garden, the heart of a city, concrete and leafy all at once. A kind of dusty summer ballpark of the spirit. It seemed almost too beautiful, too heroic, to be a real memory, it was more like…like the memory of a daydream, and not even of the dream, but of the sensation of dreaming.
On my desk lay Picasso’s doodles of the Rosenbergs. Julie resembled Ronald Colman, only more scholarly, while Ethel had a kind of Little Annie Rooney look — the lost waif. She looked like someone you could talk to. In spite of all our obvious differences, I realized, we had a lot in common. We were both second children in our families, we both had an older brother, younger brothers, both had old-fashioned kitchen-bound mothers and hard-working failure fathers, were both shy and often poor in health, I admit it, both preferred to be by ourselves except when we were showing off publicly on a stage, both found escape in books and schoolwork and music, both were honor students, activists and organizers, loved rhetoric and drama, worked hard for our parents, had few friends, never dated much and mated late, had dreams. Ethel dreamed of some glorious future as an artist or musician, a singer maybe, or actress. She entered an amateur-night competition at Loew’s Delancey Street theater one night and won second prize singing “Ciribiribin.” She was spotted by a Major Bowes talent scout, who put her on the professional amateur-night-competition circuit, and by the time she was seventeen she was all but making a living at it. She took voice and piano lessons from some lady at Carnegie Hall, paying for them out of her lunch money, and she bought a used piano and dragged it home — her finances were even better than mine, she supported herself and her family and still knew how to invest. She always kept a rigid schedule, writing it out every day, charting her consistency, always woke up at six, practiced an hour, went off to work, studied scores at lunch break, took lessons in the evening — like me plotting out my college activities program or preparing for a political campaign.