“And so a trial in the midst of all this flux and a slippery past is just one set of bolloxeratin’ sophistries agin another — or call ’em mettyfours if you like, approximations, all the same desputt humbuggery — and God shine his everlastin’ light on the prettiest ringtailed roarer in the court room! Am I right? You remember that Ayn Rand play you were in years ago: a game for actors!”
I didn’t know he knew about that. If he knew that, what didn’t he know? How could I compete? I felt like a fighter wearing sixteen-ounce gloves and bound by the Marquis of Queensberry rules, up against a bareknuckle slugger who gouged, kneed, and kicked. But life for everyone is a series of crises, I cautioned myself, it’s not just you, and with that I finally got the ball on the tee. I stood, gazed off toward the seventh green, trying to see the flag there. It was red, I knew. I was on to what this golf game was all about, all right, but I still hadn’t figured out what Uncle Sam was up to. Did he mean the Rosenbergs might be innocent? Or their crime insignificant? I addressed the ball. My brand-new golf shirt was wet with sweat. I remembered my opening line from that Ayn Rand play: Gentlemen of the jury — on the sixteenth of January — near midnight — the body of a man came hurtling through space, and crashed — a disfigured mass — at the foot of the Faulkner Building. That was just how I felt. “But you said — I mean, President Eisenhower said, and J. Edgar Hoover, Judge Kaufman, everybody: a crime that has endangered the lives of millions, maybe even the whole planet—!”
“Damn right! — and much of Madness to boot, and more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot, but we’re not just talkin’ about that little piece of technological cattle-rustlin’! Even though that’s more than enough to scrag a man all right — like Sweet Andy Carnegie used to say: upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends — but still, we all know how he got his: no, a little healthy thievin’ never hurt anybody. But real guilt, real evil — listen, son, get that right hand around there on that club, like you’re shakin’ hands with it, not jerkin’ it off!”
I twisted my hand around on the club: the toe turned in and tapped the ball accidentally, knocking it off the tee again.
“God may forgive sins,” Uncle Sam observed grimly, “but awkwardness has not forgiveness in heaven or earth — that’ll cost you a stroke.” He could be as cold as a New England parson sometimes. “No, guilt, real guilt, is like grace: some people got it, some don’t. These people got it. Down deep. They wear it like a coyote wears its lonesomeness or a persimmon its pucker. They are suffused with the stuff, it’s in their bones, their very acids, it’s no doubt a gift of the promptuary, even their organs are guilty, their feet are guilty, their ears and noses—”
“You mean, because…because they’re Jews?”
“Jews! What in Sam Hill has that got to do with it?” I’d missed again. I was completely lost. I coudn’t even find my goddamn tee. “Irving Kaufman’s a Jew, isn’t he? Is he guilty? Is Irving Saypol guilty? Roy Cohn? Hell, I got a touch of kike in me myself, son, not much, just enough for a little color and wile and to whet my appetite for delicatessen — shoot, I might even incarnate myself into one of ’em some day…”
I glanced up. He was as stern as ever, but there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye. My mind raced uneasily over the possibilities. I felt sure I had a good head start on all of them. I knew, too, it would help a helluva lot if I hit a decent tee shot for a change. If I could find my tee. “It’s under your right foot,” Uncle Sam said flatly.
“No, bein’ a Jew ain’t it, though it probably didn’t help them none either. Their kind of depravity is something deeper even than that, something worse. You don’t see it so much in the shape of their noses as in the way they twitch and blow them. You see it in how they shuffle and squat, how they bend, snort, and grimace. You see it in their crummy business, their greasy flat, their friends — even their crockery betrays them, their lawyers, their pajamas, their diseases. It’s no accident, son, that they’ve been nailed with such things as Jell-0 boxes, console tables, and brown paper wrappers — and it coulda just as easily been the studio couch they slept on, their record player, medicine chest, or underwear — they stink with it, boy, it’s on everything they touch!”
I knew now what he meant. It was the feeling I’d had about Alger Hiss. Others, less perceptive, had had that feeling about Whittaker Chambers. In our case, it had been pumpkins, carpets, typewriters, and teeth. Whittaker, who had smelled a little unhealthy himself for a while, had emerged aromatic as a saint. “Perjury wasn’t Hiss’s crime either,” I said. I’d been talking more or less to myself, but as soon as I said it, I knew I was on the right track at last.
“No,” Uncle Sam agreed. “That’s right.” I glanced up. He was watching me closely, fierce as a tiger and cool as a cucumber, as the Gospel says, rolling the balls around in his mighty fist as though he were peddling them to me, a gesture of such iconic depth that I felt suddenly elevated past myself.
“It wasn’t…it wasn’t even espionage or double-dealing!” I was nearly there…. “Uh…”
“They have walked in the path of the spirit of perversity,” whispered Uncle Sam hoarsely, leaning toward me like an eager schoolmaster, urging me on, “violators of the Covenant, defilers of the sanctuary…”
“Sons of Darkness!” I cried.
Uncle Sam leaned back and smiled, not a smile of self-contentment or amusement, but a smile of blessing, the smile of a life-insurance salesman who has just successfully put your affairs in order, or of a parent who has come to see you graduate from Duke Law School — or any law school, for that matter — and he set his plug hat back on his head. I knew I’d turned the corner. I began to feel I might actually hit a decent drive after all. “And what’s the reward for all them what walk in such ways?” He tossed one of the golf balls up in the air and smashed it with his putter, baseball fashion, out of sight. “A multitude of afflictions at the hands of all the angels of destruction!” Whack! “Everlastin’ perdition through the angry wrath of an avengin’ god!” Swat! “Etarnal horror and perpetual re-proach!” Smack! “Darkness throughout the vicississitudes of life in ever’ generation, doleful sorrow, boils on the ass, contumely in the opinions of Christian men, bitter misfortune and darklin’ ruin!” Slam! “And the disgrace of final annihilation in the…” splat!“…fire!”
He was something to watch, all right — he had a lot of style. A lot of styles, I should say: now that of Larry Doby, next Country Slaughter, then Mel Ott, Hank Greenberg, Johnny Mize, Luke Appling — but though he’d organized baseball’s liturgy and had governed its episcopacy (to be sure, there was more of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in his briary nineteenth-century features than of, say, Warren Harding or Herbert Hoover), he’d never actually played it. Golf was his game, the first he’d come to, back in the capacious days of William Howard Taft, and it was still the only one he played regularly. Before that, he’d pretty much limited himself to hunting and fishing, riding, swimming, war, billiards, and the odd cockfight — indeed, the very idea of Uncle Sam wasting his time playing idle games would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. But such was the character of our twentieth-century revolution: gamesplaying was now the very pulse and purpose of the nation. It was Taft’s successor, Woody Wilson, who gave it its fateful turn: he was sometimes out on the course as early as five in the morning, even played the game in the dead of winter, using black golf balls to find them in the snow, until that awful day when the transmutation did not quite come off and left only half of Wilson still working. Now golf was part of the Presidential discipline — indeed, why else would I be out here? — and every time Uncle Sam eagled out or blasted his way mightily from a sand trap to the pin, somewhere the Phantom cringed.