90
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
lot like Cary Grant's. Then he takes her hand and swings it like young
lovers did in the nineteen forties to show they were happy. And then,
for a while, they are happy.
Was there ever such a time? Did they ever know a peace together
that lasted any longer than a session of sex? There was that synchronized
laughter between battles, of course, that nervous, wild wind-up or wind–
down laughter. But peace?
These days, especially if I'm with Nick, one memory looms above all
others. Not the day the police climbed up the fire escape to interrupt a
particularly dramatic "balcony scene" our parents were performing, nor
the time she burnt his uniforms and medals in the kitchen sink, nor the
winter night she sweated out streams of drugs in a hospital room and we
thought she'd die but couldn't find him anywhere, nor when years later,
mellowed by time and humbled before her power, he died contrite in
our arms and she, having had enough, wouldn't come to say good-bye.
Nor when she died, screaming and cursing like a shot soldier.
No. What comes to mind again and again for both of us is a
scorching June day at Orchard Beach. In the blistering heat, we sit on
our blanket listening to a portable radio. It's 1953 - Nicky's ten and
I'm seven. We're sure of this because the Rosenbergs arc supposed to be
electrocuted that day. We've been kept out of school so we can all be
together.
More or less the same ages as the Rosenberg kids, Nicky and I spend
a lot of our free time thinking about them and writing them letters
which offer sympathy and schemes for springing their parents from jail.
Weekly we write something along the lines of: We know how hard it
must be for you. Your parents, like our parents, just want a better world
for the working class and human race - and now this. We offer
to
meet
them down at Penn Station and take the train to Sing Sing with one of
Nick's knives or a gun, for we're sure that if push comes to shove, we'll
find our father's war pistol in one of the heaps at the back of one of
our closets. Actually, Nick writes the letters, and
I,
a prodigious speller,
proofread. Mostly, that year, though, I become religious, and secretly
pray. That our parents be taken away from us so that we too can get
to
live with a nice new family. That I be forgiven for my awful thoughts
about our mother and father, who mean no harm, and whom I love
more than life. That Julius and Ethel get to live a long natural life, ev–
erything returning to normal for them and the children.
That day the heat is too intense for much movement or thought,
and Nick and I lie there on the blanket, trying halfheartedly to fight
with each other about who will walk to the snack stand for frozen
malteds - the beach's name for soft ice cream. In the middle of our stu-
