I dug up my tee and set my ball on it, took a practice cut at a dandelion. “But how can you, uh, tell for sure?” I asked, and—whick! — took the head off the dandelion. Why couldn’t I hit a golf ball like that? “I mean, even Foster Dulles trusted Hiss…”
“Ah, well, the pact with the Phantom is no less consecratin’ in its dire way then gettin’ graced by Yours Truly,” said Uncle Sam, and imitating Stan Musial’s quirky stance, smacked another golf ball out over the horizon. “Ask that mackerel-snapper Joe McCarthy about the Grace su’ject!” He tossed up his last ball and belted it high in the air — in fact, I lost sight of it completely. I wondered, if it got up high enough would it just stay there? Where does gravity run out? But finally it did come down, about fifty feet from the seventh green, and lodged in the roots of a tree. I supposed he wanted to keep his hand in on approach shots. Or got a kick out of blasting trees — Burning Tree indeed! you’d think it was Ben Franklin’s private lightning lab to see the way Uncle Sam’s left the vegetation out here. Now he tucked his putter under one arm and withdrew his corncob pipe, knocked it out on the heel of one boot. “The impure, through their presumptulous contact with the sacred, are momentaneously as lit up with this force as are the pure, and it’s easy for folks to confound the two,” he said, leaning back against the bench, “as much, I might add, to the unwarranted sufferin’ of the holy as to the ephemeral quickenin’ of the nasty…” He gazed at me meaningfully…aha! so that was why I had been accused of the secret slush fund! why, in spite of everything, I was still so distrusted many people said they wouldn’t even buy a used car from me! The Philistines wouldn’t have bought a used car from Jesus either, right? Things were becoming clear now. I concentrated on the ball, sitting firm on the tee like truth itself, and took a practice backstroke, trying to keep my elbow straight. “You’re gonna top the ball, son,” Uncle Sam said gloomily.
I did. I tried my damnedest to lift the ball and I swung so hard I splintered the tea, but the ball only plopped about six feet ahead. Judas, I thought, I really hate this fucking game.
“Ya know, you’re about as handy with that durn stick,” muttered Uncle Sam irritably, tucking the pipe in his mouth, “as Adlai Stevenson is with a set of dumbbells!”
I was badly stung by this. I would be a good golfer if I had the time to play regularly, but a man can’t give himself to everything on this earth. And the innuendos worried me: Stevenson was a loser. I realized it was still touch and go…
Uncle Sam sucked on his empty pipe a couple of times, then blew it out, reached into his pantaloon pockets for tobacco. “There’s one thing about criminals and kings, priests and pariahs,” he said. He packed the tobacco into his pipe with one long bony finger, peering at me as though over spectacles. “They may be as unalike as a eagle to a rattlesnake, but they both got a piece a that dreadful mysterious power that generates the universe!” As he said this, he whipped a long wooden match out from behind his ear. “The difference,” he went on, “is what happens when they try to use it. The ones with the real stuff, the good guys, they achieve peace and prosperity with it — these are…” he scratched the head of the match with his thumbnail and it popped ablaze: “…the Sons of Light!” He cupped it over the pipe bowl and continued: “The other geezers, the (puff!) Phantom’s boys, well, if you (puff! puff!) don’t watch out, those squonks can haul off and (puff!) exfluncticate the…” he looked up and held the match out, still burning, then crushed it in his fist: “whole durn shootin match!”
It’s true, I thought, he’s not exaggerating, the Rosenbergs no longer belonged to the ordinary world of men, that was obvious, you could see the sort of energy they now possessed, even though stuffed away in Sing Sing prison, in the rising fervor of world dissent — in France, the whole damned government was being shaken. I walked up to my ball, teed it up on a little hump of grass. I felt a little shaky myself. “You mean, we’re not executing them…just because…?” I poked my toe about, looking for firm footing.
“We ain’t goin’ up to Times Square just to fulfill the statutorial law, if that’s what you mean,” Uncle Sam said. He blew a smoke ring, then another and another, each inside the other, ending with a little puff of smoke for the center. “This is to be a consecration, a new charter of the moral and social order of the Western World, the precedint on which the future is to be carn-structed to ensure peace in our time!” He hacked up a gob and spit into his smoke rings, hitting the bull’s eye…. “We’re goin’ up there to wash our feet, son!” A miniature mushroom cloud welled up from the center, and the concentric rings flattened out and spread like shock waves.
I understood his question now. I turned back to my ball, dug my feet firmly into the turf. Times Square, the circus atmosphere, the special ceremonies: form, form, that’s what it always comes down to! In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities — why did I keep forgetting that? I smiled. “Then, wouldn’t it have been better to burn them at our Inauguration?” I commenced my backswing, shifting my weight confidently onto my right foot.
“Tried that,” said Uncle Sam, “but we got knocked down with a lame duck. Anyhow, don’t matter, now we got the summer-solstice and the anniversary angles—”
“Eh—?” I was so startled my knees buckled and I sliced the ball out of bounds. “The—what?”
“Thunder and tarnation, boy! That’s four strokes already, and you ain’t even off the damn tee yet!” cried Uncle Sam.
“I… I’m sorry! I, uh, thought you said…”
“The solstice and the anniversary, soap out your ears, son!” he repeated irascibly. He had blown a smoke ring shaped like an outline map of the United States and, as it expanded, was trying to fill in the several states. “The Rosenbergs signed their dierbollical pact fourteen years ago come Thursday the eighteenth,” he muttered around puffs and rings. He was trying to squeeze the District of Columbia into his map, but it was getting very cluttered in that area. He seemed about to lose his patience. “I thought you knew that!”
“Ah…” So, it was also the Rosenbergs’ anniversary! I’d thought for a moment he’d been referring to my wedding anniversary! When Kaufman had set the date finally for the week of June 15th, I had seen that it could fall on Pat’s and my anniversary — our thirteenth! — on June 21st. And I’d seen that summer-solstice angle, too: after all, we hadn’t married on the 21st for nothing. It was the climax to our “Beauty and the Beast” game, time of the roar of Behemoth and all that. Then, when I learned that this year June 21st was also Father’s Day, it had suddenly looked like a sure thing. I’d said nothing to anyone about this, but it had worried me: if it was intentional, were they doing it as a favor, giving Pat and me something extra to commemorate? or was somebody out to get me? I’d feared the latter, usually the safest of the two assumptions when you’re in politics. But then the marshal had scheduled it officially for the 18th, and I’d forgotten about it…until now. I teed the new ball up, twitching my shoulders and wrists, trying to loosen up. I had a better understanding of things now, but it didn’t make me feel any easier. Their fourteenth! And what were we doing here on the seventh tee? “I… I guess I missed that,” I admitted frankly.