Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  “And you, too!” cried Mrs. Mesta, this time to Senator Kerr.

  “Honey,” he replied, “you and Drew mighta been oil and water, but me and you have always been oil and oil!”

  “Oklahoma crude!” she roared back, offering their shared geographical history as confirmation.

  Senator Flanders now had competition no more than three feet away. Joseph Welch had arrived and was talking to Miss McGrory, whose last dispatch from the Caucus Room, after the attorney’s have-you-no-decency speech, had been a kind of public love letter.

  “After all this, can you really go back to Boston?” she asked.

  “My dear young lady, can you really go back to the book page?”

  Tim knew that he, too, would never again be what he had been, and he knew it even more surely once he saw Hawk enter the room, smile at him, and mouth the word “Skippy.” After smiling back, he turned and looked the other way, behind him, toward the rooftop’s railing, telling himself that if he leapt over it now he would die happy, the mortal sin of suicide just a redundant count in God’s indictment, earning him only a concurrent eternity in Hell.

  Hawk approached with an improbable entourage: Mary Johnson and the man who must be her fiancé, along with Mrs. Phillips and a fellow Tim didn’t recognize. They all took drinks from a tray, a waiter having glided instantly up to Hawk, just the way Tim remembered it had gone at the restaurant in Charlottesville. With one hand Hawkins selected a summery gin and tonic, and with the other he made a discreet wave to Joe Alsop, who, engaged in conversation with Ike’s press secretary, gave a businesslike one in return.

  “Here,” said Hawk, presenting Tim to his companions, “is the real source of your invitations.” In fact it had been a joyful, capering Tommy McIntyre who’d pressed a fistful of Mrs. Craig’s invites upon Fuller when he’d visited the office yesterday morning to talk to Senator Potter about the St. Lawrence Seaway legislation.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” said Mary Johnson, who reacquainted Tim and Beverly Phillips before introducing him to Paul Hildebrand and Jerry Baumeister.

  “Mr. Fuller,” she explained to Tim, “is making us as impolitic as he is.” Their boss, Mr. Morton, could hardly be displeased with the results of the primary, but he would have discouraged their attendance here, lest it appear that employees of the Congressional Relations bureau had taken sides in a primary election.

  Senator Gore’s chief of staff came over to greet Hawk, displacing Tim from the circle of conversation. The new vantage allowed him to watch the almost formal way in which Hildebrand held Mary Johnson’s hand—a contrast to the easy exuberance of the arm Mr. Baumeister kept draped over Mrs. Phillips’ shoulders.

  “My mother,” Baumeister was telling Miss Johnson with a loud laugh, “didn’t feel completely keen on my going out with a divorced woman.”

  Mrs. Phillips laughed, too. “Jerry is an excellent companion. A lot more fun than the widower turned out to be.”

  “And I got her a free window sash from the hardware store!”

  Hawkins pulled Tim back into the group and away from an oncoming conga line whose members were shouting the defeated candidate’s campaign slogan, but adding the unheroic last lyric of the song from which it had come: “The whole town’s talking about the Jones boy…and he’s only nine days old!” On primary day the youthful challenger had lost by five to one.

  “Yes,” said Hawkins, “the hidden vote stayed hidden.” Senator Gore’s aide replied that the only thing Mainers now had to worry about was Nixon’s plan to vacation in the state.

  “It’s usually good to keep things well hidden,” said Tim to Hawkins. He realized that his level of inebriation had caught up to that of the reporters at the railing. And being out in the open with Hawk, in a setting so much more public than even the Charlottesville restaurant, was making him giddy. Maybe he shouldn’t have said what he just did, but Hawk seemed to get his meaning and laughed over it: “There are all kinds of things hidden here.”

  Fuller pointed to the figure of G. David Schine, who had entered with an attractive girl Tim recognized as Iris Flores, one of the private’s regular girlfriends; she had been interviewed in executive session but never called upon to testify in public. In the closed hearing she had described herself as an “inventor” trying to market her latest brainstorm, a new-and-improved nylon brassiere strap.

  Joe and Jean McCarthy might be home tending their wounds, while Cohn burnt the midnight oil back in the office, but here, Tim thought, was Schine, smiling—in uniform, no less—and being mobbed, followed around by Dorothy Kilgallen, Hearst’s gossip writer, who took down his every word.

  “Mr. Fuller.” Tommy McIntyre, full of vigor and vim, gleaming with a hard nonalcoholic brightness, approached Hawkins and shook his hand. He displayed a certainty—apparent from the way he nodded at both of them—that the connection between Mr. Fuller and “Master Laughlin,” as he sometimes called him, was hardly casual.

  Hawkins did nothing to disabuse him of the idea. “So where’s the ostensible boss?” he asked, meaning Potter. Tim wanted to sink from the hotel’s rooftop to its basement.

  “Home in Arlington with the missus,” said Tommy, neither surprised nor displeased by the query.

  Tim tried not to stammer. “It would’ve been awfully hard for him to come here. After all, he hired Mr. Jones.”

  “And he fired him, too,” said Tommy. “We like Senator Potter having things both ways. It’s this flexibility that gives him a certain utility. “

  A secretary from Senator Kefauver’s office came and pulled Hawkins away. “Someone I want you to meet,” she said.

  Tommy took the opportunity to tug Tim in the opposite direction. “Look at them lappin’ it all up,” he said, tracing the whole senatorial panorama with his glass of 7Up. “Some of the girls they’ve brought along could get ’em charged under the Mann Act. Of course, their aides have to settle for simpler pleasures, with smaller penalties. Jenkins over there will be heading off any time now to the men’s room at the G Street Y.”

  Tim looked skeptically toward Lyndon Johnson’s executive assistant, a family man by all accounts.

  “Oh, yes,” said Tommy. “He’ll have time enough to make it back here after a bit of relief—even if there’s got to be an arrest, a booking, and a fifty-dollar fine in between. He’ll tell himself it was all the fault of the alcohol.”

  “I’m not doing so bad myself,” said Tim, nervously setting down his highball.

  “You look steady enough to me,” said Tommy, whose eyes were now fixed on Private G. David Schine.

  “I’m trying to remember which does what,” said Tim. “The Mann Act and the Volstead Act, I mean.”

  Tommy laughed. “The first one strives mightily to protect underaged innocence. Oh, it’s a terrible law to be caught violating.” After a pause, he added: “But set a thief to catch a thief.”

  Tim pointed toward Iris Flores. “She certainly looks twenty-one.”

  “Oh, she is,” said Tommy, baring yellow teeth as he laughed. “That’s not Schine’s problem.”

  Was it, Tim wondered, remembering Alsop’s information, someone else’s problem? Perhaps a problem Schine knew McCarthy had? Was Tommy on the verge of revelation? Tim had wondered for months why the older man kept plying him with riddles. It had to be more than Celtic fraternity or some sadistic impulse to harrow his naïveté. But still there was no answer, and as always Tommy—now making a clear-eyed beeline for Senator Flanders—was off even more quickly than he’d materialized.

  From behind, Tim heard a woman’s soft Southern voice beginning to sing “Hey There.” He felt an ice-filled glass being pressed against the back of his neck and realized it must be Mary Johnson. He turned around and smiled. “Me with the stars in my eyes,” he sang in return. “That ice felt good. Where’s Paul?”

  “At a phone, ordering us a car. He figures we’ll never get a cab downstairs.”

  “You’re leaving so soon?”

  Mary laughed.
“It’s a miracle he lasted this long.”

  Tim noticed the way she said it, as if Hildebrand’s prudential nature might be troubling her more than Hawkins’ daredevil one.

  “Would you let me make you dinner some night?” she asked.

  “Really?”

  “Really,” she assured him. “Just the two of us.”

  “Of course,” he replied, knowing there would be a third, incorporeal presence at her table. For the first time in his life he would be talking to somebody about Hawkins Fuller, saying his name, making judgments and speculations about him, offering amusing stories in which he himself figured. But were there any stories that Tim could actually tell? Ones that didn’t have nakedness and the bedroom for their costume and setting? Banishing this reverie, he spoke again at last: “Hawk got dragged away to meet someone.”

  “I know,” Mary said. “I was taken over there, too.” She pointed toward a spot by the railing.

  “Oh, my gosh,” said Tim, “that’s Mrs. Wilson!”

  The widow of the twenty-eighth president remained plump and pretty, sitting in a white metal garden chair atop this hotel whose opening she had attended in 1917. He watched Hawk standing over the former first lady, charming her. She was playfully swatting him with a heavily ringed and braceleted hand, its adornments probably having come wholesale from her first husband, Mr. Galt, whose old jewelry store survived a few blocks away.

  “No,” said Mary. “Fuller was taken to meet the one standing next to her.”

  Tim noticed a well-tailored blond girl alternating her gaze between Hawk and Mrs. Wilson, smiling as if her life depended on it.

  “She’s pretty,” said Tim.

  “You think so?” asked Mary, who then seemed surprised by her own cattiness. “Some distant relative of Senator Saltonstall’s,” she explained. “Down from Massachusetts for a summer course at the National Gallery. Lucy something-or-other.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  July 20, 1954

  Dear Tim,

  The christening will be at Church of the Holy Rosary on S.I. (Jerome Ave.)—Sunday, Aug. 1, just after the 11:00 Mass. There will be a little party afterwards, but we’ll expect you and Mom and Dad for breakfast beforehand.

  The baby is twice the size she was when you saw her, and Mom (who I must say was a big help) has finally decided she can go back to Stuy Town. All the middle-of-the-night crying does make Tom very cross, which peeves me (since he’s not around to hear it all day), but I suppose we’ll get through this patch. (They say even Marilyn M. and DiMaggio are having their troubles.)

  What a strange Fourth of July! I was still woozy from the anesthetic when you all got here…not exactly the holiday picnic you’d been expecting when you came up from Washington. Being a week early was the last thing I’d expected, but I was so glad you were here to see Maria when she was brand-new.

  We’d missed you at Easter, and at Mother’s Day, and on Father’s Day, too. (I miss you period, brother. Or should I say “godfather”!) Even on the Fourth, I could tell through the haze I was in that you were eager to get back to the ferry and Penn Station…eager to be far away. A week ago Mom told Dad there’s a kind of veil between you and the world these days, which made me think of that flimsy old curtain (a “scrim”?) on the stage in the Holy Cross auditorium. Mom says she’s sure you leave more out of your letters than you put in.

  Grandma Gaffney heard all this between Mom and Dad and put a stop to their conversation by squawking: “If Timmy’s got something to tell you, he’ll tell you.”

  So tell us. I don’t want to pressure and pester you, but you are my baby brother, not to mention Maria’s godfather, and I worry about you. Think about clueing me in a little…even if you are a government bigshot now.

  With love from Frances, Tom, and Maria Loretta

  XXX

  P.S. Grandma G. says the baby’s name “makes her sound like a dago.”

  The pages of Francy’s letter now lay, limp with lunchtime humidity, on Tim’s office desk. Realizing he still wasn’t ready to respond, Tim folded the letter and put it into his left pants pocket, the right one already being occupied by a postcard he’d received from Maine, where Hawkins would be staying until August 1. As the baby’s godfather, he could hardly miss going up to Staten Island that day, but in truth, he’d give almost anything to remain in Washington, on the chance he might be allowed over to I Street for a first-night-back reunion.

  The approaching click of Potter’s canes, along with the high-pitched voice of Tommy McIntyre, made Tim clear the remains of a sandwich and its wax paper from his blotter. Returning from a closed lunchtime session of the subcommittee, the senator and Tommy were pulling a small entourage of reporters, including Kenneth Woodforde, into the office.

  “A Pulitzer!” Tommy cried. “A Pulitzer to the first photographer who gets a shot of Cohn saluting Zwicker!”

  McCarthy had scheduled a subcommittee meeting to investigate reports of subversion at a Boston defense contractor, but the Democrats had wrested away the agenda, and Potter, by voting with them, had just created a 4–3 majority forcing the resignation of Roy Cohn. The committee counsel was now expected to begin his own long-deferred military service in the National Guard at Camp Kilmer—under the very general that McCarthy, back in February, had pronounced “not fit to wear the uniform.”

  For a second, Tim’s mind went longingly back to General Airlie and the rest of the spectating brass that Mr. Welch used to assemble in the Caucus Room, but another burst of glee from Tommy put an end to any daydreaming. “Dave and Royboy will be wearing the same shade of khaki now!” he shouted. Senator Potter tried to project dignity against Tommy’s merriment, concluding whatever remarks he’d been making to Woodforde by stressing “the importance of getting back to serious investigations, ones that will respect people’s rights while uncovering the truth. You know, Mr. Woodforde, these Communists are real.”

  “Since you acknowledge their reality,” Woodforde asked, “does that mean you’re now ready to recognize Red China?”

  Potter looked baffled.

  “Wise guy,” said Tommy.

  “Can’t blame me for trying,” replied Woodforde, who closed his notebook and let the two other reporters proceed without him to Potter’s inner office.

  “There’s more of them to recognize all the time,” said Tim, once he realized he’d been left alone with Woodforde. “Communists, I mean.”

  “Thanks to magazines like The Nation?” asked Woodforde.

  “Well, yeah, actually. It looks as if we’ve now got twelve million more to recognize in Indochina.” A peace conference at Geneva, following the Communist victory at Dien Bien Phu, was about to divide Vietnam in two.

  “You mean those twelve million people who’d be so much happier and freer being ruled by the French?”

  “Yeah, those,” answered Tim, trying to speak with a smile. “The ones who are having their new country designed by Molotov.”

  “Two new countries,” Woodforde reminded him.

  “Right. Korea, Germany, China, now Vietnam. All those big half loaves, and the Communists always stay hungry.”

  “The Communists will be evacuating South Vietnam within ten months,” said Woodforde, reciting what had been pledged at Geneva.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” asked Tim. “Or that they won’t kill any more French priests in the meantime?”

  “None that don’t have it coming.”

  Tim shook his head and turned on the radio, not in any real display of anger, just to make plain that he couldn’t continue a conversation in this vein.

  Over the airwaves, the voice of Roy Cohn was explaining the toll that this past year had taken on his parents in the Bronx. Senator Potter, tape-recorded ten minutes earlier, was wishing him well. A statement from McCarthy’s office, just released and now being read by the announcer, struck a less forgiving note: “The resignation of Roy Cohn must bring great satisfaction to the Communists and fellow travelers. The smears and
pressures to which he has been subjected make it clear that an effective anticommunist cannot long survive on the Washington scene.”

  Woodforde was smiling—over this formulation that might soon become McCarthy’s epitaph for himself—when a colleague from U.S. News stuck his head in the door: “Come on down. Flanders is starting his speech.”

  Woodforde waved for Tim to join them in the gallery. “Here’s something we can all agree on, no?”

  Still uncertain about the censure movement, Tim nonetheless felt glad of a truce and agreed to accompany the two reporters. He fell in step beside Woodforde, wondering as they double-timed it down the corridor why some part of him felt drawn to this left-wing provocateur.

  The gallery was more crowded than the floor. Democrats—worried about appearing overeager—were thin on the carpeted ground below press and spectators. But rhetoric was soon off to the races. Flanders invited his colleagues to consider “the Senator as Führer,” even if that role had come to McCarthy “without conscious intention on his part.” A chance for Joe to change his ways was being offered, the Vermonter insisted, “in a spirit of Christian charity.”

  “See,” Woodforde whispered to Tim. “Even the priests approve.”

  “Paul says it’s over a hundred degrees in St. Louis.”

  “I guess we shouldn’t complain,” said Tim.

  Mary Johnson, who’d had to persuade the boy to remove his seersucker jacket, fluffed the chicken hash on the burner and disagreed. “Oh, sure we should complain.”

  “Doesn’t it get even more steamy than this in New Orleans?” Tim asked.

  “They know how to build shade there. We used to spend half the day in the dark, behind the shutters.”

  She looked at him as he set out the plates and napkins, and had trouble believing he would spend half his life like that, hiding in shadows. He reminded her a little of Lon McCallister, that slight, sweet actor who’d had to kiss Katharine Cornell in Stage Door Canteen and had just walked away from the movies at thirty. Right now she herself felt a little like the grand Miss Cornell, or at least Our Miss Brooks, though she couldn’t be more than a few years older than Tim.