Tommy finished the last of his 7Up, and with a tap of his index finger commanded Tim to keep going on the old-fashioned. “Oh, it’s not as if no one’s got nothing over me. Joe and Royboy know I got imposed on Charlie by the automobile fellas, to keep him voting on the straight and narrow. Yes, I gave the auto men a prior decade of sober service, in the papers and in campaigns.”
Everybody’s money comes from someplace, Senator. Everybody’s people come from someplace. Tim remembered the quick threat to Potter, the poisoned meat in the sandwich of bonhomie that McCarthy had served that afternoon last March. Tommy would have heard the remark from the outer office, where he’d decided to wait.
“But Joe and Roy don’t know I got myself imposed on Charlie for my own particular motives. And they don’t know I’ve got something far bigger on them than they’ve got on yours truly.”
There would be no further explanation tonight. Tim reached for a peppermint and kept his eyes on the tablecloth. “Why did you tell me all this?” he asked at last.
“Because I’ve seen you looking at Mr. Fuller. And I know that your life will be given to his as surely as Annie Larchwood got mine. I told you because you’ll understand.”
Tommy pushed aside the just-brought coffee and leaned into the table. His eyes shone with a brutal sympathy, letting Tim know that, from this moment on, for the foreseeable future, he lived not just in Hawkins’ clutches, but in Tommy McIntyre’s, too.
“I should go,” Tim said, weakly.
“Use it for a taxi,” said Tommy, refusing Tim’s dollar bills. “I know where you’re headed.”
When he got to I Street, his head off-kilter from the old-fashioneds, Tim looked up and saw that the apartment was dark. He wondered if he should sit on the steps and wait until Hawk returned with some weeknight conquest. For a few minutes he stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide, until he felt an enormous, unexpected surge of anger. In his mind’s eye, Hawk was bobbing atop the clean blue ocean in his pressed naval uniform, while he himself was being dragged to its weed-choked depths.
Drunk as he was, he could feel the hint of autumn in the air. A “School’s Open Drive Carefully” poster flapped against the streetlamp. NO DANCING. NO CARRYING DRINKS.
He walked up the building’s steps and, once inside the vestibule, took down the super’s posted instruction that tenants keep their new air conditioners pitched at a five-degree angle toward the street; drips were damaging rugs and seeping into floorboards. On the back of the paper, he wrote a note to leave in Hawkins’ mail slot:
You said knowledge is insurance. Against what? The chance that somebody might turn out to be what he appears to be? That somebody might not own somebody else? I’ll never own you, no matter how many times I hum “You Belong to Me” in the shower. But I belong to you—whether you like it or not.
After the cab ride, he had no money for even the streetcar. And so he walked all the way home, miles, wishing he could sing in his chains like the sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
November 10, 1954
With crowds to be controlled at both the eastern and western approaches to the city, the District of Columbia police found themselves split in two on the morning before Veterans Day. Across the Potomac, on Arlington Boulevard, Nixon was dedicating the Iwo Jima Memorial, and at Union Station trains were disgorging hundreds of riders wearing “Make Mine McCarthy!” buttons. They also carried placards (“Twenty Years of Treason!” “Joe Knows!”) that sprang to sudden, vertical life once they hit the platform and began marching to Capitol Hill. By eleven a.m. the corridors of the Senate Office Building looked more like the floor of a nominating convention. Debate on the censure resolution was at last under way, and though things appeared to be moving in Senator Flanders’ direction, he elected to remain behind locked doors.
Over in the Capitol building, two brightly colored items sat on Tim’s desktop: the emerald-covered report that was now driving the censure debate toward a vote, and an oversized birthday card for Senator Kennedy, still recovering from back surgery in New York. Festooned with greetings from the SOB, it now awaited Potter’s signature here in the Capitol.
Miss Cook approached Tim’s desk, sighing: “That colored corporal’s family is here. In the conference room.”
Tim looked at his watch. As they’d feared, Potter had failed to make it back in time from the Iwo Jima dedication.
“Plan B,” said Tim, rushing off to the House cloakroom to press Congressman Rhodes into service.
Corporal James Borum, a young Washingtonian who had enlisted in the Marines in ’48 and died three years later in a North Korean prison camp, had no connection with Rhodes’s home state of Arizona, but once the congressman arrived in the conference room near Potter’s office, there was at least an elected official who could present a flag and decoration to the boy’s family.
Corporal Borum had no connection to Michigan, either, but from time to time Potter’s interest in North Korean atrocities still broke through the McCarthy drama like a weak, overlapping signal on the radio dial. The senator’s office had lately decided to honor this soldier, who had only this year been officially declared dead.
A grandmother, Mrs. Drumming, along with a brother and an aunt, stood mute and respectful while Rhodes read the citation, though it was apparent they would have preferred James Borum’s corpse, never released by the North Koreans, to a medal. Tim also believed he could detect in the brother’s face an awareness that the family, told Senator Potter had been caught in traffic, was somehow being honored and insulted all at once.
Tim wondered if he was supposed to say something about “a grateful nation,” but when he shook Mrs. Drumming’s hand, he wound up whispering, “I’m sorry for your trouble,” the words he’d heard murmured at every Irish wake he’d ever been to.
And with that, embarrassed and relieved, he dashed off to the Senate gallery.
The chamber was in an uproar. Desks were being pounded, as refusals to yield reached the ceiling of the packed gallery, where all eyes stayed on Jean McCarthy, sitting very straight under a statue of John Tyler. Her smile, Pepsodent bright, was the same one she’d had for the cameras the day she came back from New York with her broken leg and Robert Jones announced his Senate candidacy.
As the debate moved toward a climax, her husband moved irretrievably beyond his lawyer’s control. McCarthy’s buzzing declamations stirred the reporters’ pens and thrilled the nerves of his supporters: “It is not easy for a man to assert that he is the symbol of resistance to Communist subversion, that the nation’s fate is in some respects tied to his own fate. It is much easier, I assure you, to be coy, to play down one’s personal role in the struggle for freedom.”
No, he would not let this cup pass. He would meet his end insisting that he and freedom were one and the same. Coyness was for others; it had been for Welch; it had been for Zwicker. Don’t be coy with me, General…“I take it you would rather I be frank, that you would rather acknowledge and accept the fact that McCarthyism is a household word for describing a way of dealing with treason and the threat of treason.”
“And so it is,” muttered one antagonist next to Tim.
“And so I shall,” declared McCarthy.
His citizen followers, their placards checked at the door to the gallery, remained hopeful, but his dwindling corps of legislative allies was already thinking of what-might-have-beens. After the army hearings, when Eddie Williams began constructing a legal strategy, Senator Dirksen had tried to start a rehabilitation campaign, but none of the town’s best public-relations men smelled success in the client being proffered.
If the vote goes against him, Tim thought, his followers will act as if there’s been a coup d’état, and they’ll summon the whirlwind to fill the vacuum. He looked over at Jean McCarthy, whose expression had not changed, and he decided to get some air on the Capitol steps.
Outside, he sat down behind a woman reading about Dr. Sheppard’s murder trial in a copy of the Daily News that ha
d been discarded by one of the demonstrators from New York. Was there, Tim wondered, more eternal verity in that story—the philandering doctor who’d butchered his wife—than in this one? Weren’t Tommy McIntyre’s politics dictated and trumped by his romantic obsession?
Kenneth Woodforde, Tim suspected, was an actual Communist. But as such he would at least be a believer in something—as opposed to Hawk, who believed in nothing, or Senator Potter, who believed what he was told to. And as opposed to himself, a believer in contradictions: that McCarthy was the devil doing the Lord’s work; that Christ was Lord and yet His laws could be disobeyed.
Maybe real belief required imprisonment, or at least regimentation. The POWs testifying before Potter had felt their bodies transformed into organisms of certainty and faith—Out of that many men, nobody cracked—by the very torture that had sought to break them. General Airlie, perhaps never beaten or shot, nonetheless seemed to have a creed that had been spit-polished into honest, unwavering sureness.
Which, Tim wondered, did he himself miss more? God’s love or His authority? Where could he go—to what secular church—to turn himself in?
He looked up at the nearest flagpole on the Capitol roof. Unlike on the afternoon he’d been hired, nothing flew on it, not even momentarily; no banner for Mill Valley, none for Cheyenne. No reason to put his hand on his heart.
“Stormed at with shot and shell! Mildly they rode and—well? So much for the ten thousand six hundred.”
Raising his glass, Fuller finished this brief Tennysonian tribute to the 10,600 State Department employees around the world who had by now, according to a quote from Scott McLeod in the Evening Star, all been through the new security procedures.
“Yes,” said Mary, cutting into the last of her steak. “But only the most elite troops have been through the Miscellaneous M Unit.”
“We happy few. We band of inverted brothers.”
She winced.
“You started it,” said Fuller.
“I know, I know,” she said, returning his smile and wondering why she should be bothered by a direct admission of his being queer. She wondered, for that matter, why she was out having dinner with him here at Harvey’s. And she wondered most of all why she continued to string out her engagement to Paul, as if they were Victorian cousins waiting on an inheritance.
No, she was not, “in spite of everything,” in love with Fuller. She had searched her feelings, honestly, in that department. Then what was it?
“So, how are the capital’s cutest couple?” asked Hawkins.
He meant Jerry Baumeister and Beverly, who now went everywhere together.
“Inseparable,” Mary answered.
“Good for them.”
“You mean it.”
“I do. Safe, companionable, detached. An ideal situation.”
“They’re thinking of getting married,” she protested.
“What could be more detached than that?”
She pushed her plate away. “Speak for your own parents.”
“Okay, change of subject: How did the brewer like the party?”
The Queen Mother had come to Washington, and the British embassy had the day before given her a massive afternoon reception, with room enough on the list for even Mary Johnson and an escort. She had pressed Paul into service after Fuller mentioned that he himself was taking Lucy Boardman, the hard little Saltonstall relative who’d stayed on in the District after her summer course at the National Gallery.
“He didn’t enjoy it as much as your companion seemed to,” said Mary. “Anyway, it wasn’t a very hot ticket if the likes of me got to go. The crowd looked like something out of Cecil B. DeMille.”
Both of them raised their heads at the sound of another voice. “Probably even I could have gotten in.”
Two nights ago Mary had told Tim about her dinner plans with Fuller, but she’d never expected to see him here.
Fuller was startled, too, though he didn’t let his expression change. He pulled out a third chair from the table and, as Tim settled himself, wondered about the gleam in his eye. Back in September, Tim’s aggrieved note, left in the mail slot on I Street, could be ascribed to drunkenness and the upset caused by McIntyre’s revelations. Fuller had never mentioned it to him, just urged him to find out the rest of McIntyre’s story.
But this?
“He missed my birthday,” said Tim, looking at Mary and pointing to Hawk. “Eight days ago.” Then he turned to Hawk and pointed at Mary: “She remembered.” Finally, he turned back to Mary and pointed to Hawk: “Like I said, she forgot.”
“Maybe I’d better leave you two gentlemen alone,” said Mary.
“I’m pretty much always alone,” said Tim.
“Fuller, you should take him home.”
“Home?” asked Tim. “Where would that be? Not 2124 I Street. That’s not home.”
“No,” said Fuller, calmly getting up. “But it’s where we’re heading.”
The two of them put Mary in a taxi and began walking west. Tim was unsure exactly what fate awaited him; he wanted only to say that he was sorry, that he shouldn’t have done what he just had. And yet, after the hours he’d wound up roaming Capitol Hill this afternoon, triply confused about the trinity of Hawkins, God, and McCarthy, he couldn’t help himself. How easy, almost gay, Charlottesville suddenly seemed. Right now he wanted not to be slapped, but to be thrown under the wheels of the DeSoto that was passing.
The silence, unbearable, continued as he and Hawkins turned the corner onto I Street. “I’ll go home,” Tim finally said.
Still Hawkins said nothing.
“I’ll never do that again,” Tim promised.
“No, you won’t.”
Panic seized him; he waited for the next clause to strike like an ice pick—because you’ll never be seeing me again.
Hawkins tugged him into an alley and pushed him against a wall. “You’re right,” he said, his face inches from Tim’s. “You belong to me, and as the advertisement says, I’m the man who has everything. And I always will.”
He thought he could see Hawk having to struggle to get the words out, having to make an effort to say something this cruel, and he took a small, crazy comfort from that fact, like a man catching the scent of flowers as he plunges off a ledge.
“Take it or leave it, Skippy. You’ve got five seconds.”
“I’ll take it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
November 29, 1954
“It’s a great privilege to be with you tonight!”
At the distant podium, Jean McCarthy looked buxom but clerical, a pretty white collar showing above her plain black dress. “I only wish my husband could be here, too. I want you to know how deeply touched Joe is by the tremendous fight you are waging.”
“Dear Christ,” said Hawkins, handing his mother’s opera glasses to Tim. “Looks like yours truly isn’t the only State employee not supposed to be here tonight.” With Hawk’s finger guiding his gaze, Tim managed to see, a dozen rows down and over to the right, the figure of Miss Lightfoot, whose hat suggested a highly alert chicken. She was in full cry with the crowd of 13,000, chanting “WHO PROMOTED PERESS?” while applauding Jean McCarthy.
“I can’t figure out the hat,” said Tim, who had to resist admiring the zeal that had compelled this woman to flout the rules against political activity by federal workers and travel all the way from Washington for this rally in Madison Square Garden. “I think it’s maybe supposed to be an eagle,” he guessed, still staring at the headgear.
“No, it’s the cuckoo on a broken clock,” said Hawkins, who’d never told Tim about the interrogation its wearer had instigated, nearly a year ago, in Room M305.
Every courting couple that Tim knew had gone to at least one basketball game or boxing match at the Garden. In fact, Tom Hanrahan had popped the question to Frances right here during a welterweight bout. Tim supposed that tonight would be the closest he’d ever get to such an experience; he’d even joked to himself that the Garden
would always be “our place” for him and Hawk, given their both having been here before, however unknown to each other, at the Draft Ike rally back in ’52.
He had certainly not expected to be with him here tonight. Tommy McIntyre had called the apartment in Stuyvesant Town on Saturday, as the Thanksgiving weekend began drawing to a close. Tim and Frances and their mother had just come back from a matinee of Teahouse of the August Moon (he’d been more curious to see Tea and Sympathy), and Tommy had asked him to stay in New York a little longer to be his eyes and ears at the anti-censure rally planned for Monday at the Garden. Tim had thought it a strange request—what could he see from these mezzanine seats that the papers wouldn’t report or the radio wouldn’t air?—but he’d said yes. And before he could think too much about it, knowing that Hawk extended every holiday weekend as far as possible, he’d picked up the phone and called the Charles Fuller residence at Park and Seventy-fourth.
Mrs. Fuller had answered, her voice almost a whisper, not at all the throaty dowager he’d been expecting. He’d almost wanted to tell her it was “Skippy,” the namesake of her Bishop Sheen’s angel, but she’d quickly handed the phone to Hawk, who explained that he was on his way out to “a little party for the Saltonstall niece thrice-removed, or whatever she is.” He’d laughed at Tim’s own invitation as soon as he heard it: “Are you trying to get me fired?” he asked, going on to explain the provisions of the Hatch Act.
Tim hadn’t really thought of that, but knew, once Hawk cited the prohibition, that he would say yes.
“I’m in,” Hawk had answered. “What could be more fun than a chance to see the Hottentots drunk on political firewater?”
GOD BLESS MCCARTHY said a badge worn by the man on Tim’s right. NO TO CENSURE, YES TO A MEDAL said his sign. The Pledge of Allegiance, which now contained the congressionally authorized words “under God,” had already been recited twice tonight, and a roaming spotlight, on cue, had just fallen on the figure of Roy Cohn, whose illumination provoked a tremendous roar as the former committee counsel mounted the platform to give the last speech of the evening. He was played onto the stage by the Hortonville (Wisconsin) High School Band, whose members, living close by McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton, had been flown to New York earlier in the day.
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