Mary pointed to the empty chair at the side of her desk and watched him fumble for his ballpoint pen. His handwriting was so neat she could read it upside down without the least effort.
With thanks to Hawkins Fuller
(I got the job. You’re wonderful.)
Timothy Laughlin
“Does he know where to reach you?” asked Mary, trying to sound casual instead of confidential. “Is there a number you’d like to leave?”
“I’m not on the phone,” said Timothy Laughlin. A cloud rushed over the map of Ireland that was his face—mortification, Mary thought, at having used such a tenement archaism. “But I’ll put my address with it,” he added, recovering enough equilibrium to accept the index card that Mary gave him to write it on. He also removed the bookshop receipt, and asked if she could direct him back to the Twenty-first Street entrance.
After he’d gone, she prepared the envelope for another soothing letter, to Congressman Ikard of Texas. Adjusting her typewriter’s left margin, she noticed Miss Lightfoot smoothing her strawberry-blond permanent wave, and realized what close attention the woman had paid to the boy’s visit.
CHAPTER FIVE
October 16, 1953
Senator Kennedy, the radio was saying, had today called for “the development of a strategic air force with sufficient retaliatory powers to threaten a potential aggressor with havoc and ruin.” However strong his words, they could not compete with McCarthy’s announcement, just made in New York—and deemed worthy of a bulletin—that one of his Fort Monmouth witnesses had broken down crying and admitted he’d been lying to the committee. According to the announcer, the senator had rushed out of the hearing in the Federal Building, spoken to reporters, and then rushed back in to get what the witness promised would now be the truth.
After a full week in Senator Potter’s suite of offices, Tim had grown used to the radio’s steady murmur. The Fort Monmouth hearings were making so much news—lab secrets said to be going to East Germany; the alleged spies’ links to the now-dead Julius Rosenberg—that you would think they were open to the public, whereas in fact all the news they made came straight from McCarthy himself, whenever he decided to hit the microphones outside the committee room’s closed door. The senator seemed determined to justify the urgency with which he’d interrupted his honeymoon last Sunday, even though he was right now the only senator up in New York at the executive sessions. Several staffers—including Mr. Jones, for Senator Potter—were up there, too.
Still not sure what Jones’s exact position was, Tim felt it probably didn’t matter much. In practical terms, the office’s secretary, Miss Cook, a single woman who lived at the Hotel Continental, was the person who kept everyone, Potter included, hopping. She’d directed Tim to answer constituent mail this morning, and right now had him writing a speech on fishing-industry issues that the senator would deliver the next time he was home. Tim had just looked up “sea lamprey” in the encyclopedia.
The staff were encouraged to go into the galleries and listen to the floor debates as often as they liked. The Potter legend—what Tommy McIntyre called “the gimp log-cabin lore”—included the story of how, while learning to walk all over again at Walter Reed, Potter would ask to go to the House and Senate in order to observe the doings of those two august institutions in which he would later serve.
There was little enough action on the floor this week; debate had been replaced by high-pressure caucusing behind the scenes. Since the Democratic mayor of Cleveland had been named to fill the late Senator Taft’s seat, it wasn’t entirely clear which party controlled the show. At this moment there were forty-eight Democrats and forty-seven Republicans, but between Senator Morse (an Independent pledged to organize with the GOP) and Vice President Nixon, who could break a tie, Ike’s party might be able to hang on, just barely, to its committee chairmanships and agenda. “Our fellas better get some exercise and lay off the spuds,” Tommy had declared while breezing through the office a couple of days ago. “One bad heart attack and we’ll all be ordering new stationery.”
Tim now took care not to let any crumbs from Mrs. Potter’s sugar cookies fall onto the draft of the speech. Everyone agreed that the senator’s wife, who often baked for the staff in the kitchen of the Potters’ ninety-dollar-a-month Arlington apartment, was a warmhearted, if flighty, woman. Lorraine Potter’s particular part in the legend of limblessness involved her supposedly having sprung bolt upright in bed, back in Cheboygan in ’45, at the exact moment Potter stepped on the land mine in France. Her own legs, she swore, had gone numb for several minutes.
So far nothing Tim had worked on came close in importance to the paragraph of remarks he’d auditioned with, and which, so far as he could tell, Potter had never actually delivered. The little speech now sat in a file with Stevenson’s original call for a nonaggression pact, along with Knowland’s subsequent attack and reactions from several other figures. Winston Churchill himself had announced that he saw nothing terribly wrong with the idea—perhaps, Tim thought, a backhanded way of suggesting its irrelevance.
“The scourge of Adlai!” cried Tommy McIntyre, suddenly passing through the room with a cackle and a snort. The interruption made Tim happy. He hadn’t talked to anyone for an hour and a half.
“I bring you tidings from the New York Federal Building,” Tommy said.
“You mean the witness who broke down crying?”
“No,” said Tommy, smiling even wider. “Somewhat older tidings,” he said, slapping an inch-thick typescript onto Tim’s desk. “Last Thursday’s transcript. Turn to where it’s dog-eared, Mr. Laughlin.”
MR. COHN: Have you been told about any of the charges against Mr. Yamins?
MR. CORWIN (witness): No, sir, I haven’t.
MR. COHN: Was he pretty friendly with Mr. Coleman?
MR. CORWIN (witness): Well, I would say they were friendly. I don’t think they had much social contact.
MR. JONES: Friendly in what respect, then?
MR. CORWIN (witness): Well, they worked together, and it was a companionship.
MR. JONES: Scientific companionship more than a social companionship?
MR. CORWIN (witness): I would say so, yes, sir.
MR. SCHINE: Mr. Corwin, you lived with Mr. Coleman, didn’t you?
Tim looked up, worried where this transcribed colloquy (“it was a companionship”) might be headed. But Tommy, who seemed to have something different on his mind, just roared with delight and derision: “Jones and Cohn and Schine. Like three kids playing gumshoe up in their tree house! Our boy Roy even calls Schine ‘Mr. Chairman’ from time to time! Dontcha think a little adult supervision might be in order? There ain’t a single solon in the room. And look at this,” Tommy added, flipping to the title page of the binder, where he’d circled “Robert Jones, administrative assistant to Senator Potter.”
For his look of perplexity, Tim earned a playful swat with the transcript. “‘Administrative assistant’ my Aunt Fanny,” declared Tommy. “He’s a goddamn researcher, almost as low on this totem pole as you are, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Timothy.”
“Is he in trouble?” Tim asked. “Mr. Jones, I mean.”
“All in good time, all in good time. Why don’t you take this document and put it on his desk, sport? And keep it open to the dog-eared page.”
McIntyre then quickly left, no doubt headed back to the cloakroom machinations over the Republicans’ new minority majority.
Tim walked into the next room and put the transcript on Mr. Jones’s desk. He could see from some notes on the blotter that Jones, too, was trawling after statistics on the sea lamprey. But that was hardly all. The desk, even with no one in the chair behind it, appeared to be a very busy place. Even more prominent on the blotter was a cutting from last Wednesday’s Star, a small, discreet story about a twenty-five-year-old theological student’s conviction for soliciting an undercover police officer in Lafayette Square. The item wouldn’t have made the paper at all were the student not the son of S
enator Lester Hunt, a Democrat from Wyoming.
The clipping made Tim burn with a terrible feeling of foolishness. He could see himself as the hapless theological student and Hawkins Fuller as Officer John A. Constanzo of the District Police. For days now he had been imagining the contempt Fuller must be feeling for him, ever since the sentimental gesture of the book, with its unguarded inscription, had revealed Timothy Laughlin to be someone who’d gotten completely the wrong idea about a friendly chat in Dupont Circle, and completely the wrong idea about Hawkins Fuller, a normal man whose fraternal, collegial favor—a simple job-hunting tip—had been twisted by the recipient into a distasteful opportunity to seek another sort of favor entirely.
For each of the last several nights, Tim had been unable to banish his longing for Fuller, or the stupid, unextinguished hope that the older man might yet send him a kind note, maybe when he had finished the Lodge biography. Nor could he cease dwelling on the ugly probability that the book had been thrown away, along with whatever few seconds of infinitesimal regard Fuller had had for that skinny little queer on the park bench.
It was 4:35 p.m. Tim fought the temptation to picture, for the hundredth time, what Hawkins Fuller must look like sitting at his desk in the clean aquamarine precincts of the State Department. Instead, he took one last look at the desktop in front of him and could not resist picking up the topmost letter on yet another stack of Jones’s pending concerns. It was typed with a lack of accuracy that seemed more heartfelt than sloppy:
the Chinese doctor threatened to take me to to the hospital, on account of my frostbitten feet. My two big toe bones were sticking out, and the area around them looked real decayed. I knew that 90 or 95 percent of the men who went to the hospital never came out of it, so when the doctor left the room for five minutes, I took a fingernail (all our fingernails were real long and dirty) and punched it around the bones and broke off both of my big toes. I threw them across the floor so they’d be out of sight. The Chinese doctor came back in and he said “you go to hospital” and I said “nothing doing, my feet are okay,” and he said “let me look.” And he took a look and I had the bones broke off, and the feet now didn’t look so decayed and he said “okay” and went outside the door and never bothered me again. I knew if I’d gone to the hospital I’d have never got out of it.
This letter from Sergeant Wendell Treffery, recently repatriated from Korea to the army hospital at Walton, Massachusetts, must be part of the preparations for Potter’s atrocity hearings.
A second letter in the pile came from Sergeant First Class George J. Matta, who described the shallow graves he’d seen dug for American POWs in Korea:
we would come the next time and the rain would have washed the dirt away and there would be nothing there but bones. We went back and we got on to them about it, about the people digging up the graves and taking the clothes. They tried to tell us it was the dogs that did it, that did the digging. (They must have had pretty smart dogs that could dig the graves and take the clothes off the men.) I suppose you could call that “brainwashing,” but you’ll excuse me if I tell you I think it was just typical b.s. from these monsters.
This, Tim told himself, was why he was here. Communism—and whatever could be done about it—was more important than Jones’s grandstanding, or even McCarthy’s, more important than his own being in love with some handsome phantom who must now despise him.
He lingered at Jones’s desk, reading letter after letter from hospital after hospital. He thought of Father Beane and the missionaries, and he wondered, guiltily, why his own feet should not be freezing and bleeding in the Asian snow.
“Can’t say much for the hat,” Beverly Phillips declared. “It looks like an upside-down lightbulb, don’t you think? The suit’s pretty, though.”
Mary looked hard at the hemline. “That’s still shorter than what I’ve got, I’m pretty sure. I raised the last of my old skirts a couple of weeks ago, and I’m not about to drag out the machine again.”
“Ah,” said Beverly. “Your evening with Fuller, right?” She mocked herself with a sigh: “Some of us are just barnacles on his dreamboat.”
Mary laughed. “Oh, Jesus, Beverly.”
“I’m sorry. I sound like Miss Lightfoot, God forbid. It’s none of my business, honey. I also apologize for dragging you here.” This morning Beverly had asked Mary if she’d like the second of two complimentary tickets she had for this late-afternoon fashion show at the Mayflower Hotel. During the past hour the women had finished off a plate of sandwiches and two cocktails apiece.
“Anything that’s gratis,” said Beverly. “I’m still ‘Helen Holden, Government Girl.’” When Mary’s expression showed no recognition of the old radio serial and its plucky, thrifty heroine, Beverly sighed. “You’re too young to remember. And I’m too old for the part.” Nearing forty and divorced for several years, Beverly Phillips was raising two sons, who would soon be waiting for their dinner, up in Friendship Heights.
The last pair of new outfits started down the makeshift runway. “Did you see Perle Mesta’s article this morning?” asked Mary. The city’s best-known hostess was over in Russia, filing pieces with the Washington Post on the subject of Soviet women.
“About all those butch gals wearing construction helmets and rebuilding Stalingrad?” Beverly asked.
“She says even the expensive dresses look like junk compared to what you can get over here for five dollars at Woodie’s.”
“Well, the one that came past me a minute ago cost forty-five bucks, and I’m not a big enough capitalist for that.”
“Are you sure you won’t join us?” asked Mary. After agreeing to go to the fashion show, she had phoned her date and told him to meet her here at the Mayflower.
“Don’t be silly,” said Beverly. “I never mind being a fifth wheel, but if I don’t get going soon the boys are likely to burn down the house. So where’s he taking you?”
“We’ll probably wind up having dinner here. Maybe the movies afterward, though I think the poster for From Here to Eternity scares him a little.”
“The shy type? I like that. In fact, I’d rather have that than Burt Lancaster. Who is this non-beast?”
“His name’s Paul Hildebrand. His family owns one of the breweries along the river.”
“What happened to young Dr. Malone?”
“He’s been operating a little slowly for my taste.”
“So how’d you meet the brewer?”
“It’s embarrassing. Millie Brisson, the secretary to the congressman who got me my first job—that friend of my father’s—fixed it up. The poor woman must feel I’ve got her on a lifetime retainer.”
Beverly reached for her gloves. “Mary, you’re a catch. And I, personally, would kill to be—what are you, twenty-eight? Anyway, are things with this guy promising?”
“I’ve got no idea. It’s only a second date.”
“Okay,” said Beverly, a strong believer in realism in these matters, “when and where was the first date?”
“About ten days ago. The last of those outdoor Watergate concerts, on the river. He’s been traveling since then.”
“See?” said Mrs. Phillips. “You’re keeping track. You are interested.”
“He hates politics,” Mary added.
“Grab him,” said Mrs. Phillips.
The temperature was supposed to drop into the forties tonight, so Tim opened up the window to coax in whatever cool breeze might be on its way. After work he had stopped into church, and back here he’d fallen asleep on the couch. He had awakened only a few minutes ago and changed into a T-shirt and dungarees. Keeping the radio low, he now listened to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, as he opened up a can of soup. With most of his old programs turning into television shows or disappearing altogether, it was nice to know that this one could still be found on the air at eight o’clock on Friday nights.
He added water to the pot and decided that once he got past a couple of paydays, he would call Bobby Garahan and agre
e to that dinner at Duke Zeibert’s. His old Fordham friend was now working for an insurance company down here and thought the two of them ought to go out one night and act like big knife-and-fork men to celebrate being grown-up wage earners who lived away from home. Bobby was sort of dull, but it might be some time before Tim made friends at work, given how the location of Senator Potter’s office put him so far from all the other Hill rats over in the SOB. Maybe when the subcommittee got back from New York, he’d get to spend more time over there.
Mr. Keen’s voice was giving way to the announcer’s pitch for tooth powder when Tim heard a knock on the door. He turned off the radio. Could there really have been a complaint from someone? He was wearing socks, after all, and had hardly stepped off the thick braided rug. He moved quietly toward the door, which had no peephole—another sign of the apartment’s illegality—and cautiously opened it up.
“You’re not ‘on the phone,’” said Hawkins Fuller, who placed his hands high on each side of the doorframe. A head taller than Tim, he smiled down as if from a crucifix.
“I’m not even on the lease.” Tim could feel his face getting very red. He imagined he was smiling, but wasn’t sure.
“Ah,” said Fuller, “a desperado.” He took his hands from the doorframe and put them on Tim’s shoulders, moving the smaller man aside so that he himself could enter the room. He sat down on the desktop and motioned for Tim to take the chair next to the hot plate.
“Hey,” said Tim, laughing. “Whose place is this, anyway?”
“Not yours, apparently.”
“You’re right. But as long as I lie low, and don’t have any visitors…”
On the desk beside one of Fuller’s flanneled thighs, Tim noticed the Star’s radio listings. Why couldn’t it be the serious novel that was open but unnoticeable at the foot of the neatly made bed?
“What’s in there?” asked Fuller, pointing toward the hot plate.
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