I’ve had a week to recover from my freak-out, and now the day is here. Watching my eyes spin in the mirror, I’m thinking, why isn’t there a law against having to catch a train at four in the morning?
Mom, Dad, me, Quincy, and Vic all jam our sleepy bodies and our luggage into the DeSoto. The guys in the Studebaker are elbowing each other awake. They’ll probably follow us to Newton, where we’ll catch the train—or even all the way to New York. Take a couple days’ vacation, I want to holler, ’cause there’s not much action on Oxbow Road while the menacing Rafners are on the loose.
Every mile the sky gets brighter with a spectacular sunrise light show. We’re heading east into the sun, but I can’t look away as we chug-a-chug across the plains. I guess the Rosenbergs don’t get to fry their eyeballs; no sun in Sing Sing Prison.
I hang out in the lounge car with Vic, watching lots of real estate streak by. It’s mostly wheat fields and tractor yards so far, and a few cows grazing and lapping at streams. What a boring life.
No chance Vic will get interesting soon, so I keep thinking that every mile puts us that much closer to the Yankees game Mom promised me.
By mid-morning we’ll hit Chicago, home of the White Sox, and then collect more train cars and a thousand miles, straight into Penn Station, New York City, USA. Yankees territory. Good thing about the Yanks: they don’t care who’s a pinko commie, as long as he hits homers or pitches lightning curves and fastballs.
Last night I oiled my glove and tied it around a nice seasoned baseball so it’ll be ripe and ready for my first major league game, just in case Mantle hits a homer to me, or even a foul. A minute ago I showed the mitt to Vic. His idea of sports is two guys hunched over podiums arguing about which is worse, DDT sprayed on the lettuce crop that migrant workers pick, or wormy lettuce without DDT. We’re on our thousandth game of gin in the lounge car. At every stop more passengers board, most of them Rosenberg People heading for New York to join demonstrations against the execution. Twenty days left.
Once the Rosenberg People hear that Mom is on her way to testify, presto, she’s a celeb, and they’re firing advice at her.
A couple of nuns hover close. One says, “Be stalwart and steadfast.”
The other grabs Mom’s hands and pumps them like she’s drawing water. “God will give you the strength to get through this ordeal. Remember the courage of Julius and Ethel as they walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”
Other Rosenberg People aren’t so gentle.: “Don’t give them any names,” one fiercely bearded man warns. “Swear on this bible.” He pulls Mom’s right hand on to a book so small that it’s got to be the Readers Digest condensed version.
How do you like this? It turns out to be a bound copy of the Constitution, which Mom’s always quoting like she wrote it herself.
She pulls her hand back and looks that man in the eye. “If I got into this morass by refusing to sign a loyalty oath, I must also refuse to swear on your bible, as much as I uphold its truths, my friend.”
Vic slaps cards down on the table. “That mother of yours is one stubborn lady.”
After dinner, which is all stiff white tablecloths and silvery plates, Mom and Dad turn in to get her cranked up for the hearing, or calmed down, or whatever it takes.
A girl named Janine lures us into a songfest with a new kind of candy bar called Rocky Road. One bite of that soft chocolate-covered marshmallow, and I’m hooked. I could eat thirty of ’em and probably puke all the way to New York.
Janine asks, “You know any union songs?”
“Nope.”
“Any Weavers? Guthrie? Any Paul Robeson?”
“Uh-uh.” Communists all, that’s what the newspapers say, and Milgrim and Dimple Chin would be the first to second that motion.
“That’s all right. You’ll catch on!” In a minute we’re singing in rounds, Wim-o-weh, o-wim-o-weh , wim-o-weh, o-wim-o-weh . . . in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight . . .
It doesn’t seem like a commie song, and neither does “If I Had a Hammer.” I snarf another Rocky Road.
Who’d guess it? Vic turns out to be a ham. He’s loosened his tie and he’s standing on a table warbling “Good night Irene, good night Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams . . .”
After all that wild singing, someone flips a switch. Suddenly it’s all about the Rosenbergs.
“Framed, clear and simple!” a pony-tailed woman from Seattle yells, “and nobody cares.”
“Nobody?” some guy shoots back. “There are ten thousand people in D.C. right now demonstrating against this gross miscarriage of justice. There are Rosenberg Committees in every city in America and half the countries of the world! Whaddaya mean nobody?”
“That low-down stoolpigeon, David Greenglass, how could he send his sister to the chair to save his own neck?”
“. . . the fact that the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death by one judge and no jury, why, it’s unconscionable.”
“. . . and a Jewish judge, at that,” says a man with a black yarmulke on his head.
Judge Kaufman is Jewish? Like Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg? Like us? How could he do it to one of his own? Oh, yeah, as Dad once said, “Justice is blind,” to which Mom added, “Deaf and dumb, too, in this case.”
They’re all shouting and crying and pounding each other on the back, when a man who’d been sitting quietly in the corner suddenly tosses his newspaper across the room and launches into his tirade: “I’ve heard enough of this commie-kissing claptrap. Youse each one oughta be deported to the Soviet Union and kicked by the seat of your pants into one of them Russian labor camps to rot your pinko hide for the next fifty years. Matter of fact, you can all just march alongside your traitorous Jew-martyrs, and I hope, come June 18, they’re fried as crisp as cheap bacon.”
I knock over a chair leaping to my feet. I’m gonna punch the guy’s lights out! Me, who’s never even been in a schoolyard fight.
Vic clenches my arm, shaking his head frantically. Any other group would pounce on the creep and beat him bloody. Not the Rosenberg People. They’re all about nonviolence and justice and free speech. So they let him rant his hatred and stomp out of the lounge car on his own two feet, leaving us in stunned silence.
The Seattle woman picks up his newspaper and rips it to shreds. That’s as violent as this crowd gets.
Later, tucked between the tight, starched-stiff sheets of my bunk, I try to lose that man’s vicious words behind a mess of baseball stats, which, for the first time in my life, doesn’t work. The clatter of the train rattling along the tracks reminds me that we’re getting closer to New York and Mom’s hearing.
And the scary truth is, Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg are rounding third and heading toward home, only they’re going to be tagged out. Game over.
The old question resurfaces. What if they frame Mom just like the Rosenbergs, and she goes to trial and they pin a bunch of lies on her, and she gets sentenced to death by electrocution? Fear grabs me and shakes me like a tree in a tornado.
But suddenly, rattling down the track, an odd change comes over me, as if I’ve turned a corner into a space cadet’s parallel universe. Just like this train’s coal turns to steam, that fear that’s been gripping me is converted to . . . I don’t know what to call this, how I’m feeling. It has to do with Mom’s conscience about what’s right and what’s wrong, and Dad’s determination to stand by her even though he’s mad that her loyalty oath thing got us into this big, fat black hole.
The thing is, I’m them; they’re me, their only kid. For sure, I can be spitting mad at them, but I’m also proud of the way they stick to their principles and stick by each other.
Pride, yeah, that’s what I’m feeling. We’re Team Rafner.