“So, have you heard from him?” she was suddenly moved to ask.
He brightened up as if they’d decided to go straight to dessert.
“A postcard from Bar Harbor,” he answered, reaching for it in his pocket. “‘Dear Skippy,’—that’s a nickname he has for me—‘Nothing up here but the Bucksport papers, and even they still echo with praise for Citizen Canes.’ That’s what he calls my boss. ‘I won’t return until the first, by which time an air conditioner is supposed to be installed in every front window of 2124 Eye Street. You can come over when you need to get that scapular unstuck from your overheated skin. Sheen’s TV show, by the way, doesn’t reach these parts, so Mother will have to remain in the clutches of the Reformation for a while. HF.’”
She saw his face contract with embarrassment as he finished—not because it was too much; because it was too little. Where were “love” and “wish you were here,” or even a double entendre about the lighthouse pictured on the front of the card? The scapular might suggest intimacy, but of a small, controlled sort, a rationing prompted not by fear of the postman’s prying eyes, but wariness of the boy’s ravenous heart.
She had to give him the chance to display his feelings, had to force herself to say some words that would allow that: “You must miss him.”
The gratitude on his face was immediate, though he stopped short of saying anything.
“We even miss him in the office,” she declared, helpfully. “Though, of course, he is impossible.”
“He is, isn’t he?” said Tim, whose laughter was still more nervous than relieved. As if remembering his manners—and that he ought to share such pleasure—he asked: “Is Paul impossible, too?”
Mary thought for a moment. “Paul is, I’d say, very…possible.”
Tim smiled. “Is that a compliment?”
“Possibly.” She doubled her Southern accent to keep him amused, while realizing that this was not a question she wanted to entertain. “Okay,” she said, “the hash is finally hotter than the room.” She poured a tumbler of ice water for herself, and a glass of milk for him. He reached for it quickly, as one would for a ringing telephone. “Did he tell you that? About the milk-drinking, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Mary, glad to give him this small, additional thrill, though in truth, while Fuller might be indiscreet about the boy’s existence, he never said too much about Tim himself.
She had gone as far as she could in one night. She could not take conversation about Fuller, let alone Paul, any further. But what else could she ask this boy about? He had less ambition than any young man she’d ever met in Washington. He already had a career—a vocation, she supposed—in Hawkins Fuller.
“So,” she said, resorting to a topic of the day, and a question that didn’t come out as well as it might have. “Do you think the army will make a man out of Roy Cohn?”
The Sand Bar’s piano player started in on “Some Enchanted Evening,” and Tim ordered a bottle of Senators beer. He couldn’t remember the one that Mary’s fiancé brewed, but this would do fine. And he’d be fine here. He had heard Hawk mention this place once or twice, and he’d decided to walk all the way to it from Mary’s apartment.
As exciting as it had been to talk with her about Hawk—and as grateful as he’d been for the permission—he had ended the evening feeling like a specimen, a sympathetic object of study. Mary seemed to recognize the same thing herself, and just as clearly to regret it, but her own attempts at being natural had somehow made things worse. In saying goodbye, she’d apologized for any awkwardness and expressed the hope that their dinner might be considered “a first try”—thereby heightening, once more, the atmosphere of scientific inquiry. However appealing she might be, he’d been relieved to get back out onto the streets of Georgetown, and now, a half hour later, to this bar in Thomas Circle. The place was bringing him a step closer to Hawk, the way smelling one of his shirts might do, were he only permitted entry into the I Street apartment while Hawk was away.
Two stools to his left, a slightly built man with dyed hair and plucked eyebrows nodded to him. He nodded back and, never having been by himself in a bar—let alone this kind of bar—worried that he might have just given a signal that was open to misinterpretation. As soon as his bottle of beer arrived, he got up, deciding to drink it against the wall at the other side of the room. But the man with plucked eyebrows shook his head and pointed to a sign behind the bar. NO DANCING. NO CARRYING DRINKS.
Tim mouthed the word “thanks” just as the man’s friend returned from the bathroom.
“You’re crazy,” said the man, resuming the argument he and his friend had evidently been having.
“I am not—I repeat not,” said the bulkier friend, “putting in for promotion.”
“You work at the Interior Department, Donald, not the Atomic Energy Commission.”
The bartender, to keep them from exploding at each other, began to sing “Don’t Fence Me In.”
“They still investigate,” said the Butch One, as Hawk would have called him.
The fairy rolled his eyebrowless eyes and said nothing.
“There’s a Master List,” the bigger one insisted. “Of us.”
“No, there’s not,” said the fairy.
“Behave,” the bartender instructed him. “He’s the daddy.”
The two of them walked off toward the jukebox, leaving their drinks where they were. The piano player was starting his break, so they put in a nickel for “How High the Moon.”
The bartender, well-muscled and weatherbeaten, pointed to the Butch One and speculated to Tim: “I guess when you’ve managed to get out of Rich Square, North Carolina, you figure you don’t need to be promoted on top of things. Where are you from?”
“New York City,” said Tim.
“Ah,” replied the bartender. “A hard case.” Meaning, Tim guessed, that there was no place any bigger he could escape to, no anonymous haven where he could be himself and—as he so obviously needed to—relax.
Across the room a skinny Negro scolded his white boyfriend: “You do so know. My black taffeta with the pleats!”
With a tilt of his head, the bartender signaled a bouncer to eject the overexcited colored boy. Tim couldn’t hide a certain relief and maybe even his feeling that justice was being done by the regulation of such effeminacy. The bartender, he knew, could see him pining for normality, for the chance to believe he still lived with the rest of the world.
“It was more fun in here ten years ago,” the barman assured him. “Soldiers every night. Of every stripe and kind.”
The cat still had Tim’s tongue, and the bartender made one more attempt: “Let me guess. He’s married. Or ambisextrous?” Tim laughed a little.
“Bingo,” said the bartender, moving away to mix someone else’s drink. “Relax, apple pie,” he said by way of farewell. “But be careful who you talk to.”
Tim wondered about the advice: Might someone actually hurt him? Maybe there was a Master List? Could the Negro’s boyfriend, or even the guy with no eyebrows, actually be an informant?
He stayed only another minute. While riding the streetcar home, passing the Star’s building on Pennsylvania, he reached over the open window to clean his hands in the raindrops that a thundershower had left upon the glass. Then he dried himself with his handkerchief, not wanting to smudge the ink when he took Hawkins’ postcard, once more, from his pocket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
September 8, 1954
The defense of Joe McCarthy against censure had begun presenting itself this morning, but the senator’s talented young lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, still seemed to be spending the bulk of his effort on keeping his client quiet. As to the allegation that McCarthy had abused General Zwicker during the subcommittee’s February hearings in New York, Williams had so far offered only the testimony of a salesman who’d taken a tourist’s peek at that day’s brief open session and could report that he had heard General Zwicker, under his breath, refer to the junio
r senator from Wisconsin as a son of a bitch. Which, it was now implied, had justified all that followed.
The censure hearing now stood in lunchtime recess, so Tim lowered the radio on his desk and ate his sandwich. He looked out the window at the Capitol lawn, still strewn with tree branches blown down the other day by Hurricane Carol. Mary Johnson’s little kitchen window, which Tim was now used to sitting beside through long, difficult conversations about Hawkins Fuller and Paul Hildebrand, had lost a pane of glass during the storm, whereas at Hawk’s apartment, where Tim spent the hurricane’s worst hours, the loud hum and rattle of the new air conditioner had blunted one’s awareness that anything unusual was happening outside.
The appliance, extravagantly extolled by Hawk, was never off. “Are we doing this just to keep warm?” Tim had laughingly asked while they had sex one unseasonably cool, but still air-conditioned, night. “That’s always the reason for doing this,” Hawk responded, leaving unclear whether he was referring to his own low emotional temperature or the futility of all human endeavor.
Over the past month, Tim had actually been allowed to spend the night a couple of times. On these occasions, for long stretches Hawk would hold him close, ostensibly against the air conditioner’s cold. But even so, Mrs. Mesta’s party remained the last time they’d been out in public together, and Tim still knew never to come over unannounced, or with groceries, or to answer the phone without being told to.
“Well,” said Tommy McIntyre, now hurrying into the office, “old Joe’s hand just shook when he swore the oath.”
Tim put the radio back on; the recess was over, and there would be no muzzling the defendant now that, at his own insistence, he’d taken the witness stand.
“It’s a shame the republic has any other business!” crowed Tommy, whose enjoyment of McCarthy’s travails was undiminished. “But your friend Mr. Fuller will be here a little later, about something entirely different.”
“My friend?” asked Tim, reflexively lying.
“He’s coming over with his boss, Morton. The great solon”—Tommy pointed to Potter’s office—“is on their docket once again. They’re all supposed to fret about our majority leader’s brilliant suggestion that we break off relations with Russia.” Walking away, Tommy added, in regard to Fuller: “Just thought you’d like to know. Anticipation being the pleasure it is.”
Hawkins and Mr. Morton arrived at the high point of McCarthy’s testimony about General Zwicker. The director of Congressional Relations went in to see Potter on his own, while Fuller sat down on the edge of Tim’s desk and began listening to the radio.
“Did you say ‘not fit to wear the uniform’?” asked Edward Bennett Williams.
“No,” McCarthy answered. “I said he was not fit to wear the uniform of a general.”
Tim cracked up. “The Jesuits would love that, Hawk!”
Fuller smiled.
Looking at him, Tim tried to imagine Hawkins years from now, with a pipe, the two of them seated in front of the radio after dinner. It was, he knew, a fantasy more ridiculous than any plot ever featured on Mr. Keen, but the thought of it warmed him while debate continued over Zwicker’s uniform. Tim thought of Hawk’s old navy dress whites hanging in the closet on I Street; once or twice he’d felt the urge to put them on, not to partake of their owner’s godlike aspect but to assume the mantle of simple masculine normality, the movie-and-magazine ideal he remembered from his own, presexual World War II.
It was more fun in here ten years ago. Soldiers and sailors every night. Of every stripe and kind.
A burst of whistling issued from Tommy McIntyre. Indifferent to the business between Potter and Morton, he’d returned to the outer office and cranked up the volume of the radio. “So, are the two of you having supper together?”
“No,” Tim hastily answered.
“Good,” said Tommy, turning his face to Hawkins. “I need Mr. Laughlin to dine with me.”
“Be my guest,” said Fuller.
The response, however casual, still implied that the permission was Hawk’s to give, and the answer excited Tim all afternoon, long after Hawk had left. He was still feeling a nervous pride from the exchange when he and Tommy arrived at O’Donnell’s, down on E Street.
They ordered the filet of sole, though Friday remained two days away, and Tommy began their conversation with the news that Howard Rushmore, an ex-Communist who for a little while had been the subcommittee’s research director, had just become the editor of Confidential magazine. “He was always pushin’ a story about Mrs. Roosevelt and her nigger chauffeur. Well, maybe that legend of love will finally see the light of print!”
Tim stared at the tines of his fork and figured Tommy would soon get to the point of their being here.
After a long pause, the older man asked: “You know how he perspires when he walks?”
Tim knew that he meant Potter. “Yes.”
“He did even then. Years before the legs were gone. I saw him do it in ’38.”
Oh, I’ve known Mr. McIntyre for years.
“He was already trying to date Lorraine,” Tommy continued. “Her old man was a fish dealer, a big wheel in town, and Charlie wasn’t getting anywhere. Not as a potato farmer’s son who’d been working in a cannery to put himself through State Normal College in Ypsilanti. He’d wanted to go to law school, but no dough, and he’d ended up a social worker in Cheboygan.” Tommy finished off his 7Up. “I think he sweated from sheer strain, from the dull mighty effort he gave everything. I remember seeing him one afternoon from behind a big empty crate on Huron Street. His face was drenched.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Sleeping. Living. It was my first stay on what’s demotically known as Skid Row, though in Cheboygan I never skidded. I stuck to the fish paste on the sidewalk.” With a look, he indicated that there was no need for Tim to ask questions. The story would come, unbidden.
“I’d been a reporter for three papers in Detroit, at least when I wasn’t drinking. But at that point I’d been drinking since ’36, when I’d done a little work for somebody’s campaign for governor, can’t remember whose. Can’t remember any of that besides getting knocked around pretty badly by some boys from the other side.”
He told the waiter to bring Tim a second old-fashioned. “And another 7Up for myself.” Tim half understood that he was supposed to drink tonight, in some act of surrogacy. Tommy looked at the arriving old-fashioned in a way that suggested he was perilously close to falling off the wagon.
“Yes,” he said, crunching a bread stick with his yellow teeth, “we were both fine citizens of Cheboygan, Michigan. He stayed stuck in the social-aid bureau and got to supervising it by the time he went off to the war. But that was later.” Tommy crunched the bread stick. “In ’38 he was my caseworker, though they called it something else back then.”
“Was he unfair to you?” asked Tim, fearing the winds of what he now realized was an epic, ancient enmity.
“He was as just as Judge Hardy!” cried Tommy, with a laugh. “No, let me clarify that. He was just to me.” His mottled face contracted with anger. “Not to her.”
Tim knew he wasn’t referring to the future Mrs. Potter.
“Annie Larchwood,” said Tommy. “She’s still alive, though she barely knows it. She’s a drinker, too. Became one after her husband, Mike—an organizer, a Communist—got forced off his job on the line. Need I say, Master Timothy, that he drank as well? He walked out on her on his way to hell. Died from the stuff. I met Annie at his funeral. Amplification: I fell in love with her at his funeral.”
Tommy’s skull looked like a grenade. Tim tried to signal that he was paying close attention, as if that might keep the pin from being pulled.
“She went on relief, and soon enough got to the end of the money. To keep the checks coming, she pulled some kind of fast one, and straight-arrow Charlie, who ran her case, too, cut her off. But then, in a moment of weakness, when he was despairing over the fishmonger’s daughter, he put h
er back on the rolls. After she agreed to sleep with him.”
Tommy’s contempt was total—it embraced Potter’s rectitude as much as his lapse.
“She gave in and got knocked up with the son Mike had never managed to give her. The snot-nosed little issue turned fourteen last year.”
Tim thought it an odd formulation. Last year?
“When I brought him to New York,” Tommy added. “He’s a filthy punk, though he has his uses. Drink up.”
For the moment Tommy would go no further. In the brief silence, Tim swallowed more of the old-fashioned. Then he asked: “What makes you hate McCarthy so much?” It seemed the logical next question; with his loathing for Potter now explained, Tommy could move on to the next titanic grudge inside him.
The analysis that followed turned out to be patient, almost professorial. “All of Annie Larchwood’s troubles began with the hounding of her red husband, a better man than McCarthy or Zwicker. All of Annie’s troubles continued with Charlie, who’s one of nature’s blind little do-gooders. No,” he said, noting the puzzlement on Tim’s face, “I’m not some old aggrieved Commie with a pious beef. In fact, I’d make a pretty good anarchist; I told that to Woodforde the other day.” He took a second and last forkful of fish. “What I am mostly is a drunk, whether or not I’m drinking. Same way you’re a Catholic, whether or not you’re taking Communion. Which these days, I suspect, you’re not.”
“I hate Communists,” said Tim, trying to change the subject.
“Of course you do,” said Tommy, sweetly mocking.
“Does Senator Potter know he has a son?”
“Senator Potter knows what I tell him,” barked Tommy, before resuming the mode of earnest tutelage. “Yes, I did have the pleasure of imparting that news when I began helping the staff. Let’s say that the possession of such knowledge has helped me to make our great solon somewhat useful where the junior senator from Wisconsin is concerned.”
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