“Making fun of Citizen Canes!” said Fuller. “There’s hope for you yet.”
Tim sat up straight but still clutched one of the pillows on the couch. “And then of course there’s the big bombshell statement that got him all the headlines. ‘There is little doubt that the testimony on both sides was saturated with statements which were not truthful and which might constitute perjury in a legal sense…. The staff of the subcommittee will have to be overhauled.’ God! It’s been quoted so many times I’ve got it by heart! All the Sunday editors think it’s in the transcript, but you won’t find it there, Hawk. The ‘perjury’ and ‘overhaul’ stuff was in a statement Tommy McIntyre had me mimeograph an hour before the close of the hearings. He passed it out to the reporters without Potter ever having seen it, let alone composed it. McCarthy went white when he got a copy! It’s what the Democrats were hoping for all along—a Republican saying out loud they’ve got to fire Cohn! Now there’ll be a vote to do that, and Potter will join the Democrats and make it 4–3. He never would have said it on his own, and he said no such thing in the hearing itself. Tommy tricked him—but you know what? Potter kind of likes it. They’re drawing him as a lion in the cartoons. He’s a big hero of free speech and fair play now. And it’s all phony.” He shook his head and finished off the drink. “All phony. Potter was more surprised by what he said than McCarthy was. All phony.”
“Steady there, Skippy.” Hawkins took the empty glass and pulled Tim back down on the couch. “Tell me when you heard the rifle shot,” he said. “And tell me how you knew what it was. From all those childhood moose-hunting trips up Ninth Avenue?”
“I didn’t know what it was. Except that it was unbelievably loud. I checked the paper on the streetcar coming over here: the wind today is north-northeast—perfect for carrying the sound from the SOB to the Capitol. Honest, I thought the Bomb really had gone off.” The week had begun with Operation Alert, a ten-minute civil-defense drill that halted traffic across the city and saw white-armbanded marshals herding pedestrians into the doorways of stores and office buildings.
“Senator Hunt got there at eight-thirty,” Tim continued. “He brought the rifle from home, they’re saying, even though he always had a few guns in his office. I got all this from Miss Cook, who went over there to help out. Afterward.”
Tim’s agitation and gestures had subsided, but noticing how pale he still looked, Fuller reached over to put the fan on a higher speed. Along with its dry run for the apocalypse, Monday had brought the beginning of an early, unbearable heat wave.
“Miss Cook says he moved some pictures of his daughter and son from a bookcase to his blotter. Maybe so they’d be the last thing he saw before he pulled the trigger. He did it sitting in his desk chair. Miss Cook also says he left notes to everyone in his family and to half the staff. And that just last week he sent his papers off to the University of Wyoming archives.”
“The radio is saying it was his health. That he got bad news from Walter Reed a couple of weeks ago.” Fuller spoke matter-of-factly, making a casual effort to control Tim’s excitability—which, left to itself, veered ungovernably, they both knew, between something that charmed Fuller and repelled him. “Hunt did,” he pointed out, “quit the race for a second time. The day after his physical, I think.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?” asked Tim.
“You mean me of all people?”
“Yeah, you, who’s always knocking me off the turnip truck. An hour after it happened Hunt’s office put it out on the wire that he was going to the hospital because of a ‘heart attack’! You remember what happened with his son in Lafayette Park. How he got arrested for trying to pick up a cop? Well, Tommy says a week ago Senator Welker and Senator Bridges were letting Hunt know that if he didn’t pull out of the reelection race his son’s record would be an issue.”
Hawkins, who had never told Tim about the lie-detector test ordered up by Bridges’ protégé, Scott McLeod, pretended to laugh. “‘How to Be a Man,’” he said cryptically, getting up to make a second drink that he said they could split.
“You know what was the first thing I saw on my desk this morning?” Tim asked. “A ‘subpoena.’ They made the invitation to the farewell party look like one. Everybody was going to celebrate the end of the hearings on Monday night, all together, Democrats and the press included. I’ll bet Kenneth Woodforde would’ve been there, knocking one back with Cohn. Well, now maybe they’ll be going to a funeral instead. These stupid hearings.”
“They’re over, Timothy.” Hawkins returned to the couch with the second highball. “They ended with a whimper. And a bang.”
“Yeah,” said Tim, taking the first big sip. “They’re over, and they were about nothing. Or, as Welch would say, they were all about ‘the ’tis and the ’taint.’ Which puts it better than ‘Somebody is not telling the truth.’ You know what? Nobody’s been telling the truth, my boss included. And you know what else?” Tim asked, sitting up again to project a louder indignation. “You know what Jenkins said at the end?” He took a deep breath to begin a baritone imitation of the Tennessee counsel: “‘Is it askin’ too much of inscrutable Fate to hope that the paths of all of us will sometime cross again?’ Like he wants to have a reunion, or start an alumni association. What a dick.”
Hawkins laughed as loudly as Tim had ever heard him. “Now you’ll be getting amorous, Skippy, because you always do when you’re angry. And I don’t have a lot of time.”
The circles that had been under Tim’s eyes in April were gone, but Hawkins noticed that his pupils were dilated almost to the point of death. Even so, he could feel his belt being loosened. “Have you no decency?” he asked, quoting the words that had gotten Welch so many headlines and making them both laugh. “Have you at long last no decency, sir?” He caressed the back of Tim’s head, which had already gone to work on him, but after a minute he quietly withdrew, pulling Tim up beside him. “Don’t finish me off,” he whispered. “We’ll save things for another day.”
The last two words struck Tim’s ears like the gift he was never allowed to take for granted, never permitted to expect. With “another day” for once in the bank, he decided to borrow against it. “I came by looking for you last night,” he admitted. “I know I’m not supposed to.” He drank an inch of the second highball. “So where were you?” he persisted.
“Early or late?” asked Hawkins.
“Let’s say early,” Tim answered, picking what might be the easier answer to bear.
“At the Sulgrave Club. Near whose elevator, I may have told you, Joe McCarthy once kicked Drew Pearson in the balls.”
“How did McCarthy even get in the door there?” Tim experienced a short surge of ethnic fellow feeling. “A place like that must make him feel like Martin Durkin.” People still joked that Ike’s Labor secretary, a union man, had made for a cabinet of “eight millionaires and one plumber.”
Hawk leaned over and kissed him. “Ah, the pluck of the Irish.”
“So who were you with there? Some Episcopal bishop?”
“Close. Joe Alsop.”
“Pardon me.”
Fuller turned serious, made his embrace more sheltering. “You say the hearings were about nothing. Do you want to know what they were about? I’ll tell you.”
Tim looked him in the eye. “Are you saying you know what Cohn has on McCarthy? Did Alsop tell you what he was hinting at in that column?”
“Cohn holds nothing over McCarthy,” said Hawkins. “Even Alsop gets things wrong. But in the months since that column ran he’s managed to get them half right.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s what Schine has on McCarthy. Something a house detective in one of the Schine family hotels saw Joe doing. And apparently photographed.”
“Doing what?” asked Tim.
“Can’t tell you,” said Hawkins. “Because I don’t know, and neither does Alsop. But it happened last fall, during one of those committee trips to New York, when your Mr. Jones wo
uld play at being a senator, and when old Joe was getting tired of Schine’s laziness, not to mention a little wary and weary of the whole Roy-and-Dave show and the rumors in the press. He was thinking about cutting Schine loose. And then suddenly Schine—what is it that people say?—‘knew too much.’”
“Well,” said Tim, “I guess the draft notice made everything moot.”
“No, the induction made things worse. All at once Schine would be needing a slew of favors down at Fort Dix. And McCarthy was powerless to refuse. The most he could do, when Cohn kept pressing, was complain a little about Schine to Adams and some others. But he never complained about him in front of Roy.”
“Because Roy would threaten him with what Schine had.”
“No. Roy doesn’t know that Schine has anything over Joe. He thinks Joe went through two months of nationally broadcast hearings because Joe sees Schine as the same paragon he sees. Love is blind.”
“But as my grandmother still says, ‘The neighbors ain’t.’”
“Yes,” said Hawkins, “though some of them are a little too fastidious to believe what they’re seeing.”
Tim was still struggling to work out the algebra of blackmail. “How does Joe Alsop know?”
“Some smart reporter who owes him a favor gave him this story that he’d half pieced together and couldn’t write because the other half was missing.”
“How do you know Alsop? I never asked you.”
“People like us always know each other.”
Tim knew that “people like us” meant wealthy Protestants and not secret homosexuals, but he still had to ask: “Is he in love with you?”
“Probably,” said Fuller. “But only enough to bat his eyes at me from the other end of the chesterfield sofa. I’m given to understand that he likes things a little rougher back in the bunkhouse.”
“What do you get out of it?”
“Excellent company,” said Hawkins. “Interesting information.”
“I guess you do have something on him,” said Tim, whose memory of their conversation about Alsop’s column, swallowed up by the rest of that catastrophic night in March, was now coming back.
“Plenty,” said Hawkins, who rested Tim’s head on his chest. He began rubbing the boy’s back with long, insistent strokes that, for all their strength, didn’t seem a prelude to anything.
“What are you doing?” Tim finally asked.
“Trying to stop your flesh from crawling.”
The answer, Tim thought, contained every part of Hawk’s feelings toward him: protectiveness, affection, distance, enforcement. “How to be a man,” Tim felt inspired to say, though he still didn’t know what Hawk had meant by the words a little while ago.
“Yes,” said Hawkins. “A man of a certain kind.”
Tim hated hearing him say this. Not because he disputed his own membership in the homosexual subspecies indicated by the phrase; only because he hated being forced to acknowledge that God had assigned Hawk to this same slum precinct in His creation.
“Well,” said Tim, eager to return the conversation to McCarthy, “I guess I now know at least the half of it.”
“Less than half,” Hawkins replied. “You still don’t know what McIntyre has on Citizen Canes.”
“That’s true.”
“Find out.”
“Why?”
“Despite whatever they taught you at St. Aloysius, knowledge isn’t power. But it is insurance. Even Schine, who’s dumb as a post, knows that much.”
“Tommy was in excelsis when things ended Thursday. But he didn’t slow down for a second. Not even this morning. It’s the last weekend of the primary campaign, and he says he’s going to keep what they’re calling Jones’s ‘hidden vote’ well hidden. He was on the phone even while the ambulance was leaving with Senator Hunt. They must have heard the siren up in Maine, through the line.”
It was at this moment, when the half hour of Jo Stafford numbers had concluded, that the radio announced the death of Wyoming’s senior senator. Tim said nothing, just picked up the second highball.
“Gulp it, Skippy. I’ve got a date.”
Hawkins rose from the couch to put on a sport coat. After picking up his keys, he seemed to realize that this was maybe a bit much even for him. With a certain tenderness, he added: “It’s nothing, Timothy. A friend I made during Monday’s ‘air raid.’ We were escorted into the doorway of Quigley’s drugstore by one of the white armbands.”
“A wartime romance,” said Tim, picking up his own jacket.
“There you go,” said Hawkins.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
June 24, 1954
“Jesus, I can almost see Ike and Mamie. Behind the pink curtains.”
“No, that’s Kay Summersby on her knees. Mamie’s in the room next door.”
“Walking into the walls.”
“Mrs. Eisenhower does not drink. She has an ‘inner-ear imbalance.’”
Tim stood at the railing of the Hotel Washington’s rooftop terrace, listening to this exchange between two reporters. They were pretty plastered, and he was getting there, too. If not the life of this huge party high above Pennsylvania Avenue, he was as loose-limbed as he could reasonably be in the midst of his anxiety over whether Hawk would show up.
The night was warm but breezy; the terrace’s awning flapped, and the party’s din had banished most people’s memory of the service conducted for Lester Hunt two days ago in the Senate chamber. Still, his position at the railing prompted Tim, amidst all the drink and shouting, to recall what he’d seen looking down from the gallery on Tuesday: the impassive, straight-ahead expressions of Styles Bridges and Herman Welker, not far from the white, papery face of Hunt’s son.
The conversation in the gallery, like the whispers on the floor, had concerned not the corpse, but the count. Once Wyoming’s Republican governor picked a replacement for Hunt, the GOP would, by a single seat, have a real majority. In politics, too, it seemed to Tim, there was only excitement—and then everything else. Even at the service, the Democrats had been thrilled by new peril; the Republicans had been electric with fresh ascendancy.
The hearings’ farewell party had remained canceled, but the formidable, impromptu combination of May Craig and Perle Mesta had filled the void yesterday morning by announcing this party. The invitations to it had pictured a Maine lobster with the face of Margaret Chase Smith. Trapped in its claws was a tiny schoolboy figure meant to stand for Robert L. Jones, who had gotten his comeuppance on Tuesday night. Right now Tim could see the wide hat brims of both Miss Craig, the Maine newswoman, and Mrs. Mesta, the eternal arriviste and party-giver, clinking like martini glasses in a self-congratulatory toast, even if the guest of honor, Senator Smith, had demurely decided not to come.
Mrs. Mesta had provided her usual “mostes’”: the money and social brass that rendered political affiliation or listing in the city’s Green Book irrelevant to her recipe for a blowout. She and Miss Craig might both be Democrats, but they were happy to be celebrating the triumph of at least this one Republican (albeit over another). Along with Estes Kefauver and Henry Jackson from the Democratic side of the aisle, Jerry Persons and Jim Hagerty were here from the White House, and everyone seemed equally pleased about the real conquest being commemorated—Joe McCarthy’s recent self-decimation.
Red roses—Mrs. Smith’s signature flower—bloomed atop each tablecloth and drinks trolley. Posters with her winning slogan (“Don’t Change a Record for a Smear”) depended from the flaps of the awning. Standing near one of them, Tim heard Mrs. Persons and Mrs. Hagerty loudly agreeing that Clare Boothe Luce, so refined—and a genius, really—was a much better choice of female ambassador than Mrs. Mesta had been. No wonder she’d been posted to a real country like Italy instead of that toy one Truman had sent Perle to. Liechtenstein? Luxembourg? Knock the Eisenhowers, if you wanted: yes, purple orchids at state dinners might be putting on the dog, but did people really wish to see Bess Truman back stuffing daisies into vases she’d brought to
the White House from a Woolworth’s in Kansas City?
Tim tried to lose himself in this Washington version of the conversations he remembered between the women of Ninth Avenue when they reeled in the washlines between one apartment and another. But he couldn’t keep himself from looking, every minute or two, toward the entrance.
At one door to the terrace Tim could see only Bob Kennedy, who seemed obliged to look ashamed of himself for being here at all, while his wife, Ethel, loudly imitated the bark of Mrs. Mesta’s poodle, Fifi. Kennedy began an attempt to reach the circle that had formed around one of the evening’s great catches, Vermont’s Senator Flanders, who’d continued in the past two weeks to up the ante against McCarthy. Before the hearings ended, he’d strode into the Caucus Room and, before the cameras, plunked down the text of a motion he was about to make on the floor—one that would strip McCarthy of his committee chairmanship. Flanders had explained that the warning was a courtesy; McCarthy pronounced it a combination of publicity-seeking and senility and urged that a net be dropped over the Vermonter. Senator Mundt had settled for asking Flanders to leave the room.
And yet, here he was, his nerve and his star still rising. People now expected him to drop his motion in favor of one by which the Senate would issue a blanket censure of McCarthy. Indeed, a feeling had taken hold that the hearings might turn out to have been no more than an exercise for actors who would soon be appearing in a much larger drama.
Lyndon Johnson’s boys, Walter Jenkins and Bobby Baker, formed part of the cluster around Flanders, though Baker, about as young as Cohn, was really talking with Eddie Bennett Williams, another legal prodigy and a buddy of Scott McLeod who was thought to make a lot of money getting people security clearances. Williams was also a pal of George Sokolsky, McCarthy’s Hearst columnist, and rumor had it that he’d already been asked to undertake Joe’s defense again censure.
Bobby Baker wanted to know whether this rumor was true, but Williams’ answer was drowned out by the sudden crowing of Mrs. Mesta—“You old rascal!”—her way of reminding the just-arrived Drew Pearson that she’d forgiven him for all the nasty things he used to write about Harry Truman. The ex-president and newspaperman were now frequently in touch, not so much to bury the hatchet as to plunge it jointly into McCarthy’s back.
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