September 28, 2012--Chapter 9: The Dead Rosenbergs

When we heard that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been electrocuted up in Sing Sing and that their bodies would be laid out and available for viewing at the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor just six blocks away from where we lived on East 56^th Street, Heshy Perlmutter and I raced over so we could for the first time see dead people.   

In our neighborhood we had seen cats and dogs that had been run over by cars, but no dead bodies; and thus Heshy and I had developed a fascination with death itself.
But a lot of others had the same idea that sultry June night, and we wound up near the end of a line that stretched around the corner onto Linden Boulevard. Since it took forever for the line to snake toward the entrance, we learned from what we overheard that no one else shared our morbid obsession:

We were there to see some corpses; everyone else was lined up to pay their respects to these “progressive martyrs” and to protest not just their executions but the injustice of the entire American and Capitalist System. We understood little of this—the raging about Judge Kaufman, the abuse heaped on President Eisenhower who refused to stay their “murder,” and especially the fury reserved for someone named Roy Cohn, who, as a Jew, was venomously vilified for his betrayal of his “people” and role in their prosecution.


“He should rot in Hell,” we heard these dialectical materialist atheists mutter.


Heshy understood what they were feeling. His father, fellow-traverlor, Mr. Perly, devoted reader of the Daily Worker, spent his days and sleepless nights raging about the evils of capitalism, the exploitation of workers’ “surplus value,” the on-going American nightmare of racisit lynchings, the virullant anti-Semitism, and the “witchhunts” conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy which were aided and abtetted by that weasel Roy Cohn.
At least as important as Heshy’s version of Mr. Perly’s ideological lessons was the fact of his being there in line with me because, as we got closer to the door, word filtered back that to be admitted you had to be at least sixteen, and Heshy more than I could pass for sixteen.  We were a few years younger and were worried that we would have to wait two to three more years for subsequent executions before we would be allowed to see dead people. But when we got to the entrance, the man guarding the velvet rope took one skeptical look at me—though I was already almost six feet tall--and then fortunately at Heshy’s premature five-o’clock shadow. When he took note of that, he nodded and waved both of us in.

Once inside, things settled to a hush. No more sputterings about the running dogs of capitalism, just the muted sound of shuffling feet as we inched our way toward the chapel. As we moved forward, Heshy and I whispered about what we were expecting. We thought Julius and Ethel would probably look like the dead cats with which we were familiar—with stiff arms and legs and bulging eyes; but we grew increasingly nervous about how dead people who had been electrocuted would look.   We had never seen an electrocuted cat or dog.


What we knew from the Street was that when someone from Murder Incorporated went to the Chair, the next morning, screaming in black six-inch type on the front pages of the Daily News and Mirror would be the headline-- Bugsy Berkowitz Fries! And since I knew how my mother’s fried liver looked—the closest thing to shoe leather not worn on a foot—I was trepidiously expecting the dead Rosenbergs to look like slabs of fried liver in side-by-side coffins. 

We were thus rethinking the whole situation: Maybe we should wait until we were really sixteen and hope that someone would die of natural causes like a heart attack or something. That, Heshy and I were thinking, might be a better way to get started with dead bodies.


But before we could reconsider and slip out a side door, we were pushed from behind through the chapel door by an East 56^th Street neighbor, Mr. Kaplan, the shoemaker father of the Kaplan twins.  If we had thought about it, we might actually have been glad to have a shoemaker around as we approached the leathery Rosenbergs.


And then there we were face-to-face with the dead Rosenbergs whose side-by-side coffins were tipped forward for better viewing. Dead they were, but under spot lights that turned their faces orange and so blackened their hair that it looked as if it had been touched up with shoe polish.  Julius’ mustache was so dark that he appeared more a semitic Hitler than a Jew from the Bronx. It was not hard to believe, from their squirrelly looks, that they had been spies and had indeed given away to Russia the secret to the Atomic Bomb, which as a result caused us to have to practice taking cover under our desks in school in case the Reds decided to drop one on the Brooklyn Navy Yard.


The undertakers moved us along quickly so we had time for just a quick but sufficient glimpse and, in truth, a sniff because all the dead cats and dogs we knew smelled awful. We were curious about that too. But the Rosenbergs smelled more like disinfectant or the science room in school, which was fitting since this whole experience was more like an experiment to us than a pilgrimage, except perhaps to Heshy who, when he got home, would be interrogated and lectured, we were certain, by Mr. Perly, about more than the Rosenbergs’ hair, painted faces, and smell.


I had entered this cult of death as the result of being responsible for taking care of the family plot in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. The Malone family at the time couldn’t afford perpetual care for the graves so unless we were willing to let them turn into on overgrown jungle, someone had to go there regularly, spring through fall, to cut the grass and pull the weeds that were indigenous to that part of Queens. As the most dexterous family member this responsibility fell to me. So clip and pull I did with barely disguised eagerness for this sacred role.


As I would work my way among the headstones that multiplied through the years, as I drifted further from the bench where my mother and aunts sat huddled, talking silently to their sainted mother and beloved father, I began to think about more than what was growing above ground. What, I wondered, was happening below? That was not a question I could openly ask about poor Uncle Herman who, I had been told, died of a heart attack before he was fifty. The weeds, by the way, were thickest at his grave.


In the spirit of experiment, when one day Chirps my parakeet died, rather than leave it to my mother to do whatever she did to dispose of our dead pet birds and guppies--I suspected the guppies got flushed away--I absconded with him, found an empty Hellmann’s Mayonnaise jar, washed and dried it thoroughly, put him inside, screwed the top back on securely, and buried him in a shallow hole of a grave in the vacant lot next door, thinking I would dig him up periodically to see what was happening to him in that jar, interred as I imagined he was, not so unlike Grandma and Grandpa at Mt. Lebanon. That would finally answer my existential question.


A week later, when I exhumed Chirps, he looked a little dried out, sort of what an apricot left too long in the sun begins to resemble, with his flesh now shrunk tight against his tiny bones. The second week it appeared that his eyes had disappeared. Where they went I could not discover—though I turned and shook the jar the eyes were clearly missing. To me this was becoming profoundly interesting, and mysterious.


But when I went to unearth Chirps for the third time, about a month after he died, I could not find him or the jar. I had marked his resting place with a distinctive stone but it too had disappeared; and without it, I couldn’t remember precisely enough where he was buried. And so over the course of the next week, I dug up virtually the entire lot, which must have been 30 feet wide and 75 feet deep.
My mother wanted to know what I was doing out there at all hours. I reminded her that in the past I had planted a successful vegetable garden there and was thinking about doing that again next spring.
She said, “But it’s November.”


And thus I gave up on Chirps, but not on my quest.


The next focus of my obsession with death and decay was Egyptian mummies. Even before I was aware of King Tut and all the stories surrounding his discovery and his treasures, from Richard Haliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, I learned about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which included the Pyramids at Giza. And how they were in reality giant tombs for the most famous pharaohs. And that the dead pharaohs, turned into mummies, were sealed in those pyramids.


So when our public school class went on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I managed to sneak away from the group and got “lost” for an hour in the labyrinth of the Egyptian Hall where, secured in glass cabinets in open coffins, what the Ancient Egyptians called sarcophagi, I could see actual mummies, dead pharaohs’ bodies that were more than 4,000 years old.

I was getting closer to the real thing. But there was still a problem—I couldn’t actually see the pharaohs’ bodies since they were so tightly wrapped in cloth shrouds. But the fact that I could sense more or less full bodies obscured within those wrappings suggested to me that Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Herman, and Chirps might still be recognizable if somehow I could only get to them. After all, if the mummies were in such good shape after 4,000 years, Grandpa and Grandma and Chirps might still be pretty much as I remembered them.


Little did I know that before very long I would have a close encounter with a dead body, right in my own family, when Aunt Madeline’s first husband, Morty, killed himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.


I barely knew him because they had been married less than six months. He seemed nice enough to me. Minimally he was the first of her husbands who wasn’t bald and, even more important to her, was taller than she and thus a better dance partner. Stories circulating in the family suggested that after living with Madeline for only a few short months, Morty took the “easy way out” by killing himself. Though he may have had enough of her, from her carrying on after his death, she appeared to have lost the love of her life.


Perhaps because of my experience weeding the family plot, I was assigned to help make arrangements for Uncle Morty’s funeral.

My primary responsibility was to give the mortician a suit in which to bury him. As you might imagine, at twelve, though tall for my age, I was not fully prepared for this. So I just grabbed the first one I saw in his closet and spent the rest of my time hoping that at the service they would have an open coffin so I could at last . . .


To my considerable disappointment the casket was closed. But at the chapel, the funeral director to whom I had given Morty’s suit, pulled me aside and directed me to a private corner where he whispered so as not to disturb anyone, “Was that his suit you gave me?”


“Certainly,” I said, confused and guilty, “It was in his closet.”


“Are you sure?”


“I think so,” I stuttered, my attempt to appear certain eroding, “Why are you asking?”


“Because it looked as if it was a suit for a ten-year-old.”


I looked over to where Morty’s son was sitting and saw that he was in casual clothes. He was not wearing a suit.


The undertaker rasped in my ear, “I can’t tell you what we had to do to get it on the body.” I was cringing, “But we did,” he added with a twisted smile.


And so, on that day in 1954 when I got to see the dead Rosenbergs, I was reminded of the guilt I felt because of what I had inadvertently done to poor Morty and his hapless son.  But more, I couldn’t stop thinking about what the I.J. Morris undertakers needed to do to get Julius’ suit to fit.

My education and interests took some new directions as I began to grow into my body. And though a total failure at Hebrew School, where I was sent to receive a religious education, in spite of this, I begin to think about what one might call “spiritual things.”  Adolescent meaning-of-life questions—Where did we come from (not just the mechanics of procreation what we could learn from discussions about the facts of life)? And where were we going (and by that I didn’t mean Mt. Lebanon)?   Heshy, under the influence of Mr. Perly and his own surging hormones, was ever the materialist and said, non-biblically, that we are merely made up of atoms and molecules and thus when we die into a version of dust we shall revert.


By then I also was into atoms, but the dust-to-dust answer didn’t work for me. I had begun to think there were higher issues and meanings to being human. I saw a very different place in the world and beyond for us as compared to the fate of Chirps and my guppies.
  
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Many years later my father, well into his eighties, began to fail. He had always been a force of nature. I know to children fathers often seem to be that powerful and arbitrary, but my father was truly tectonic. When he raged, all trembled; when he commanded, all obeyed; what he expected, we did; and when he in his own coded way showed love, we all were smitten. So when his big body was being reduced by time and he could no longer move forward but was afflicted by what the medical people called “retrograde movement,” which meant he fell backwards when he attempted to move ahead, I saw this to be a metaphor for his decline—he was heading backwards, even while attempting still to cut his way forward through life.


To see him like this raised many more questions about the meaning of life, at least the meaning of a life. The answers I came up with were not comforting. Everything seemed to reduce itself to biology—eating and pissing and shitting were the final summing up. Not so different from what Heshy had been saying some years earlier.


Dad lived in Florida and we in New York; and so when my mother called to say, “Come down,” we got right on a plane to Fort Lauderdale. After landing, we lost our way from the airport to the hospital, frustrated that we would miss the end. From my mother’s voice and her deserved fame as the family “witch,” invariably perceiving the future, we knew there was very little time and every missed turn made it less likely that we would find him still alive.


But with a sense of the miraculous, the hospital appeared just as we were about to make another futile U turn. Excited, we skidded the car into the parking lot and raced up the steps afraid that even to wait for the elevator would make us fatally late. We found his room and him in bed, unconscious, breathing with obvious final distress.


I sat beside him and held his withered hand, saying what I knew would be a few last words. There was no way to know if he heard me as I attempted to sum up what I had by then come to conclude about us (contested), his life (contradictory), and life itself (still imponderable). I longed to feel even a reflexive squeeze from him and perhaps there was one or at the very least a last spasm to let me know he understood, and that was what he too had come to understand.


And then all was utter, utter stillness.


I closed his quickly cooling eyelids and put my hand to his chest as he had done so many times to me when he would say to me as child and adult, “Such a good boy. Such a lucky boy.”


And then he was no longer there. Even during his last unconscious moments it was apparent that whatever he was was present but then when he died that was gone. Just gone.


I leaned closer and peered motionlessly at him to see if I could perceive his spirit depart or if whatever was left was still him.


But all there was was just a body.