“That’s not true,” said Tim. “It’s Adams who was interested in money. I think.”
“Then what is the truth?” asked Fuller. “Where Cohn is concerned.”
“Cohn is in love with Schine.” Tim was struck by the difficulty of just saying it.
“Good,” said Hawkins. “Our little boy is growing up. But read on.” He pointed to the column’s next sentence and handed the paper to Tim, who read from it aloud:
“‘This financial dependence would help to explain Cohn’s feverish desire to be of service to Schine. It does not explain the strength of Cohn’s apparent hold on McCarthy.’”
Tim looked up, confused. “It’s true,” he said, “that McCarthy doesn’t speak very well of Schine unless Cohn is around.”
“Think harder, Timothy.”
Tim put down the newspaper. “It gives me a headache. I’ve been trying to figure out what McCarthy has on McIntyre and what McIntyre has on Potter.” He walked over to Fuller and kissed him. “I know what they could all have on me.”
Hawkins lightly kissed him back and let him sit on his lap. “I could tell you what I’ve got on Joe Alsop,” he whispered, thinking of the spring day last year when the elder, unmarried brother of the columnist duo had first leered in his direction at the coat check of the Sulgrave Club. The card that came around the following morning had read more like a mash note than a luncheon invitation.
“You’re as bad as Tommy McIntyre,” said Tim, who believed Fuller was kidding. “The only thing I want to have on you are these.” He pointed to his lips, before kissing Hawk’s neck.
“Just remember, Skippy. The only thing that counts in all this is what anybody has on McCarthy. Got that?” He gently deposited him back in the desk chair, as if Tim, freshly instructed, could now return to work.
For the past week and a half, Tim had wanted to tell Hawkins about his ten minutes in McCarthy’s office. But after the night of the Murrow program, when Hawkins seemed to keep him at arm’s length, he had forced himself not to come around; he’d made himself wait for Hawkins’ appearance here. He now wanted to say “I’m glad you came over,” but it was too simple and direct, somehow even more honest than the kisses he’d planted.
“I need to believe,” he explained instead, “that there’s still at least a chance Adams and Stevens could be the worst ones in all this. Maybe they’re not worthy of the soldiers they’re in charge of. Maybe they were trying to stop the Fort Monmouth investigation—you know, because they’re bureaucrats trying to protect themselves.”
He knew, as he spoke, that his dread of McCarthy must be showing in his face, as it had started doing months ago in front of Kenneth Woodforde. He further knew, as his eyes darted to the parallel lists, that the “McCarthy Memoranda,” especially the communications from Cohn, had the too-good-to-be-true smoothness of forgery. We’ve got typewriters, too.
“Where have you been?” he asked Hawkins, willing to risk humiliation if it would extract him from the conundrum of McCarthy.
“Out with the dullest crowd imaginable.”
“Was the brewer there?” He knew that Hawkins didn’t think much of Mary Johnson’s fiancé; he also knew Hawk wasn’t about to answer for the whole last ten days.
Fuller shook his head. “No brewer. Two former classmates. Plus one wife, one girlfriend.”
“How about you?” asked Tim. “Did you go with a girl?”
“Of course,” said Fuller.
The girls never made Tim feel jealous; the ease with which they were pressed into service—like handkerchiefs taken from a drawer—only added to Hawkins’ allure.
“Did you know Schine?” The question had only now occurred to Tim. “When you were at Harvard?”
“Ever so slightly. We overlapped—so not to speak—for a year or two. He would have fit right in with tonight’s crowd.”
“He’s not your type, right?” said Tim, hoping his teasing would provoke a measure of the same.
“Nor is Cohn his. Private Schine likes the ladies. Your buddy Roy is going to wear out his lawyer’s larynx barking up that particular tree.”
“Yeah,” said Tim, amorous once more. He got up from the desk in search of a kiss. “You like them shorter, skinnier. With a few freckles. A stammer.” He buried his head against Hawkins’ shoulder.
“Easy, Timmy, it’s a school night.”
He felt immediate despair: if Hawk really wanted to go to bed with him, there would be, he knew, no consideration less important than the clock.
“I hate working Saturdays,” he managed to complain. “It’s only those ancient bachelors like Senator Russell who enjoy them. They get so lonely in their hotel rooms they wish everyone would come in on Sundays.” He paused, hoping that Hawk would reconsider, would sigh forbearingly, then laugh, then throw him down on the blue bedspread. But nothing. “Don’t you have to work tomorrow, too?”
Hawkins shook his head. “Middle rank has its privileges.” Since his triumph over McLeod, he’d come in fewer Saturday mornings than he’d missed. “In my case, the night is young.”
“Take me out into it.” Tim knew his smile must look as desperate as any flashed by a politician behind in the polls. “Make me the drunk version of your type. One spiked dulce de leche and the spectacles come flying off. The stammer disappears.” Be here with me at seven in the morning. Force me to stay in bed another hour. Keep me from going to Mass and being the only Catechumen there, the one who sits in the back no longer daring to take Communion.
Fuller smiled but didn’t move. After a long moment, he at last said: “All those things—skinny boy, freckles, specs, stammer—they’re certainly a part of my type.”
Tim warmed with encouragement. “I can supply the rest of it, too.”
Hawk tugged on his ear. “Let’s go find the rest of it.”
Tim looked around, comically, to his left and then right and then behind, as if trying to spot the rest of himself.
“Let’s go out and find it together,” Hawkins said, his voice lower than before. He put his arm over Tim’s shoulder. “Maybe the two of us can become the three of us.”
Tim felt the back of his neck flush.
Hawkins tried for a lighter touch. “You know,” he joked. “Like Joe and Roy and Dave. What do you say?”
Tim crossed the room and stood at the sink. “No, Mr. Fuller.” They were the words he’d said at this same spot five months ago, but this time there was no chance of their being a sin, mortal or venial; they contained no lie.
What he said next might have been a line from a movie, except for the excruciating effort it took to summon the words: “Get out and don’t come back.”
Fuller straightened the papers he’d displaced in sitting down on the desk. Ten seconds later, the door had closed and Tim could hear the ex–track star’s light, heedless descent of the stairs.
Out on the street, Fuller walked west, wondering where he could catch a cab on the deserted Hill. He passed a telephone booth and thought of calling Mary Johnson, who probably was out with the brewer, which was too bad, because he remained curious about something. He wanted to ask her what credit one got for giving something up when Lent was halfway through. Did you get more if the renunciation was meant to be for good, to go beyond Easter? I did what you told me to, he wanted to say. He’d devised the stratagem himself, but had carried it out for the reason she’d suggested. Wouldn’t sooner rather than later hurt him less?
Now that he’d done his good deed, he was—what, precisely? Angry? Sad? He dismissed the questions and kept walking, not in the direction of a bar, but toward home, where tonight, for once, he’d intended going all along.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
April 7, 1954
“Well,” said Tommy McIntyre, “there’s Jeannie, but where’s Joe?”
McCarthy’s young wife sat across the dining room of the Carroll Arms, lunching with George Sokolsky, the Hearst columnist who’d helped script her husband’s televised rebuttal of Murrow last night. The sena
tor’s reply had come late and—even Joe’s friends thought—fallen rather flat, consisting largely of references to Murrow’s left-wing friends from the 1930s, most of them respectable not only now but then.
Tommy took scornful note of the wine bottle between Sokolsky and Jean McCarthy. “They’ll probably keep at it straight until they pour themselves into a cab for dinner at the Colony.”
Tim looked at Mrs. McCarthy, pretty as a Miss America, and wondered why she hadn’t ended up with a man who looked like Hawkins Fuller instead of someone fifteen years older who was running to blotches and fat. The answer had to lie in the way she lit up, as if for a camera, each time she caught a senator or reporter, or even a staffer as junior as himself, turning an eye in her direction. Joe McCarthy was the source from which all that derived.
Sokolsky’s speech had contained one peculiar patch, a piece of hit-and-run rhetoric in which McCarthy offered up the possibility that everyone hearing his voice might soon die, and the nation itself be destroyed, because of unnamed traitors who had slowed down production of the U.S. hydrogen bomb. And now, as Tim looked into his water glass, he felt himself wishing for the prophecy’s fulfillment—a manmade Second Coming, all doom and no redemption.
Weeks without Hawkins had left him with circles under the eyes and even thinner. He now took a cigarette whenever Tommy offered an open pack, and after work crawled into the bed he’d left unmade that morning. Good Friday was nine days away and he would not be heading home to New York: longing for Hawkins had made Thanksgiving and Christmas hard enough; consciousness of banishment would be unbearable in Grandma Gaffney’s parlor.
Once he failed to make his Easter duty at the Communion rail, his estrangement from the Body of Christ would become official and another mortal sin upon his soul. Several times during the last few weeks he had come close to entering the confessional, in search not of absolution but some temporary solace. Yet what could he possibly say in the darkened booth? Bless me, Father, for I have been unable to sin; he won’t see me.
Should he have gone looking for the third man, then gone to bed with him and Hawk? Should he send Hawk a funny, forgiveness-seeking note that made a joke about the Holy Trinity? Or just offer an abject below-stairs apology, as even his implacable grandmother must once or twice have done to the snotty boarding-school girls, lest she lose the situation on which her life depended?
Would sleeping with two men have been doubly sinful, or just “immature”—as men like himself were judged to be by even sympathetic observers? Would it have been, perhaps, no worse than joining the jerkoff circles of other boys on the rooftop over Ninth Avenue, or by the lake up near Ellenville during one of the family’s rare summer weeks outside the city? Maybe. But if he’d not been able to make himself enter those harmless groupings in the light of day, how could he now expect to lie in the dark while, with one hand, Hawk caressed him and, with the other, pleasured someone else?
Tommy hit his water glass with a knife. “Snap to it, Mr. Laughlin. There’s work to be done.”
Three other Senate aides—assistants to Mundt and Dworshak and McClellan—were at the table. All had extracted pads from briefcases, ready to focus on the ground rules for what people were already calling the Army–McCarthy hearings. Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Matthews, Mundt’s man and McClellan’s, laughed when each saw the other click open a PaperMate pen whose barrel bore the signature of Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. “He must give out five hundred of those a day,” said O’Brien.
Tommy began making energetic notes. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “let’s remember the decision from the executive session: nothing procedural about these hearings will create a precedent for any other set.”
“That’s fine with my man,” said O’Brien, whose boss, the unprepossessing Senator Mundt, would chair the sessions. “He sure isn’t going to want to do this again.”
Sandor Klein, assistant to Senator Dworshak, nervously sketched a little chart. His own boss’s position was the most delicate of any of the panel’s senators, McCarthy having handpicked the Idaho Republican to replace him as a voting member of the committee. McCarthy would still be allowed to cross-examine witnesses—when he wasn’t being questioned himself. “Christ,” said Klein, “how could this create a precedent? Joe is going to be plaintiff, prosecutor, and defendant—not to mention his own mouthpiece, when Cohn is otherwise occupied.”
Matthews recalled the laughing plea that McCarthy had made to Senator McClellan, the committee’s former chairman, when the majority shifted to the Republicans in ’52: “‘But, Jack, you’ve got to stay on as ranking Democrat. Who the hell else is going to keep an eye on me?’”
Klein fretted: “I don’t know how we’re going to have enough people to handle the mail this is going to generate.”
Tommy, beginning to relax a bit, smiled. “We’re short one staffer ourselves. I refer of course to Mr. Jones.” Tommy had helped to arrange a rude reception for Mrs. Smith’s challenger at the state convention in Bangor; he’d also, he now informed the table, managed to spread across Maine the story that Jones had run over his own dog and taken its still-breathing carcass to the town dump. This produced laughter all around, except from Tim, who felt ever more gray and stateless in a world of black and white. McCarthyite tactics were all right, it seemed, so long as they were applied against McCarthy.
Maybe in his despair (another mortal sin), he was taking too seriously what was just the ordinary stuff of politics. After all, Mr. O’Brien, aide to the McCarthy-supporting Mundt, was laughing louder than anyone.
A small commotion across the room caught everybody’s attention. Two tables away from Jean McCarthy, Mrs. Watt, the committee’s chief clerk and supposedly a fan of Joe’s, was sharply dismissing someone who’d set down a piece of paper and a pen beside her buttered roll.
“Ruthie looks miffed,” said Matthews.
“Timothy, go see what that’s all about. Discreetly.”
Obeying McIntyre, Tim rose from the table and got himself as close as he could to Mrs. Watt by pretending to straighten his tie in front of a mirror.
“I won’t sign it!” she repeated, loud enough for half the dining room to hear. Unnoticed in the hubbub, Tim moved even nearer to her table, then returned to his own.
“It’s a loyalty pledge,” he listlessly reported, just as his sandwich arrived. “A messenger gave it to her waiter. The committee staff are being asked to guarantee their support for Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn.”
“By whom?” asked Matthews.
“I couldn’t tell,” answered Tim.
“Well, what’s it supposed to accomplish?” Matthews inquired.
“It’s not what it will accomplish,” said Tommy McIntyre, delighted. “It’s what it signifies. A touch of desperation, I’d say. The two of them are soldering themselves a little closer together. Nice work, Timothy. We ought to reward you with another pair of those.” He pointed to Tim’s cuff links.
“FH,” said Klein, noticing the initials but reading from the right wrist to the left. “What does that stand for?”
“Fordham History,” said Tim, after taking a sip of water. “It’s the department I majored in at school.”
He could see that Tommy didn’t believe the explanation. Fine, he thought. Now you’ve got something on me.
“With any luck,” said O’Brien, “you can win a pair of links off Joe.” He pointed with awe to Oklahoma’s Senator Kerr, who’d just entered the dining room. The richest man in the upper body was also its best card player, never going anywhere with less than five thousand in his pocket. Once or twice at the poker table he’d taken almost that much off his colleague from Wisconsin.
Tim could see Jean McCarthy coming back from the powder room, waving to the waiter who’d done his duty with the loyalty letter, whatever its ultimate lack of success. He could also now see Senator Hunt waving a swollen right hand—there were rumors of kidney problems—to greet an elderly lady near the maître d’s stand; she congratulated him o
n having the other day announced that he would run for another term after all.
Mr. Matthews, getting back to business with the others, elaborated upon the “musical chairs” rule that had been adopted to accommodate the cameramen who’d be televising the hearings: each day senators and lawyers around the giant table would move one seat to their right, so that the same players wouldn’t fill the screen day after day.
“Well,” said Senator Mundt’s aide, “this will give Joe a bigger microphone than he’s ever had before.”
“And you think that’ll be good for him?” snapped Tommy.
“McIntyre,” asked Matthews, “where is your man in all of this?”
“I believe,” said Tommy, “that he’d actually like to get at the truth. Poor bastard.”
Tim suspected this was true, that he and Senator Potter were in the same forlorn position, hoping the army’s executives might be lying a little more than McCarthy and Cohn. And if they weren’t? Would that invalidate everything else the committee had tried to accomplish? Would it leave Father Beane and his exemplary kind any safer from the Communists’ universal advance?
He closed his eyes and again, almost peacefully, imagined a Russian H-bomb flying toward Washington.
None of it mattered. He now knew that he himself would tell any lie, deny even Christ, for one more touch of Hawkins’ hand. These past few weeks, in his own bed several blocks from here, he had found himself unable even to masturbate. He would try, thinking of all the two of them had done, of the smell of Hawk’s hair and neck and armpit, where his own tongue had long since gotten used to going. He would manage to arouse himself, until some tender memory—There. You’re healed—would invade his loins and he would climax, if at all, with a strange lack of sensation, like the absence of grace.
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