Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  “If the Senate votes to censure,” cried Cohn, maintaining the volume if not profanity of his private conversations, “it will be committing the blackest act in our whole history!”

  “To hell with the Hatch Act,” Hawk said into Tim’s ear, over the crowd’s screams of approval. “I should be putting this whole evening on an expense report. Look at all the useful data I can give to Morton. Names booed: Acheson, The New York Times. Names cheered: Knowland, MacArthur, McCarran.”

  “Yeah,” Tim shouted back. “It would have taken a regular Walter Lippmann to figure out who’d make each list.”

  “Skippy the Bitch!” said Hawkins. They both laughed as the crowd thundered but, mindful of the need for protective coloring, they also took care to applaud.

  How easy, Tim thought, the last three weeks had been. The rules were now plain, inviolable, the way it had been when God, not Hawkins, had been God; the way it must be behind the Iron Curtain. He told himself there was comfort in the end of aspiration, in knowing this was all one would ever be allowed. He would let this be the other Church that he was seeking, the only rules and authority he needed.

  Everyone hurrahing for McCarthy knew, in fact, that his end was near. The debating Senate had already voted cloture and would vote on censure itself anytime now. One could picture the moment when Jean McCarthy, in a sort of dewy, defiant mourning, would remove her pretty white collar and make her dress completely black.

  The Reverend Cuthbert O’Hara, once imprisoned in Red China—an older, more persecuted version of Father Beane—rose to give the benediction. Tim crossed himself, not for additional camouflage against the crowd, but with a moment’s sincere shame over his doubts and apostasy. He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy would, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists.

  As his head came up from prayer, he tapped Hawkins on the arm. “I’ve got to find a pay phone and make my call. You won’t run off?”

  He didn’t know why he’d been asked to report in immediately—to call collect, no less—rather than just give Tommy a description of the rally when he got back to the office tomorrow afternoon. But as soon as the phone in Washington picked up and he heard the older man’s voice, it was clear: Tommy wanted the peculiar thrill of hearing Tim reconstruct the futile rally in situ, amidst its actual dying roar. It was also clear that the herald’s confusion and conflictedness were exciting him in some further, cruel way.

  Tim realized that Tommy was off the wagon. Through the line he could hear the clink of a bottle and a glass, and no voice save Tommy’s own, which gleefully interrupted his paraphrase of Jean McCarthy’s remarks. “And to think it’s all because of Charlie’s little boy!” Tommy cackled.

  For a moment he thought Tommy was referring to himself. But then he understood. “You mean Senator Potter’s son?”

  “Yup, Charlie’s little bastard. The kid’s got ten fewer IQ points than his father, which is saying something, but he’s a handsome enough lad to speak to people’s weaknesses. You know what Joe’s weakness is, don’t you?”

  “Boys?” asked Tim, as flatly as he could.

  Tommy laughed loudly. “Boys, girls, your old-maid auntie. When he’s hammered he’ll grope anything—slobber over it with tender, lustful kisses.”

  This is what had happened in New York. This is what Alsop had told Hawk about.

  As the fading cries of the crowd continued to reach Tim from the Garden’s exit ramps—“THE MAN! THE ‘ISM’! McCARTHY!”—Tommy explained that the plan had been for the house detective to rescue the boy “at a point where Joe had been compromised, and photographed, yet nothing too serious had happened to the little angel.” But there’d been “a bit of a backfire. After I’d paid him my own good money, the damned house dick decided to bring the picture to his boss’s offspring, our good friend Dave Schine. Jesus Jumpin’ Christ! I didn’t realize I’d set up the little assignation on one of the Schine family properties!”

  Tim could hear Tommy pouring himself another.

  “Does the boy’s mother,” Tim asked, “know what happened?”

  “She’s too poor and too drunk to care,” answered Tommy, who went on with his story. “Yes, that was my blunder. The house dick decided the picture would fetch a higher price from the soon-to-be Private Schine than the one it commanded from me. Dave could keep the photo to protect Joe or to do him in. Either way, however he inclined, it was worth something to him.”

  One last multitudinous demand to know who promoted Peress reached Tim’s ears, while out of his left eye he noticed Hawk chatting up one of the red-white-and-blue-armbanded ushers, somebody handsome. He cupped the receiver’s mouthpiece and nearly shouted to Tommy: “What am I supposed to say? That I’m sorry you failed?”

  “Failed?” shouted Tommy. “I succeeded! I may have brought Joe down a little more slowly, a trifle less spectacularly, but coming down he is, because of those hearings. Which all derived, Master Laughlin, from what me and Charlie’s boy managed to accomplish, however inadvertently, in that hotel room. Every bit of pressure to treat Schine special in the army derived from that picture—not the goddamned nothing of a picture they wrangled over in the Caucus Room! Dave let Joe know he had it, and from that moment on, if Royboy insisted Dave get an ice cream sundae every morning at reveille, Joe was ready to initial the request.”

  “MAKE MINE McCARTHY!” The audience had dispersed to the point where the chant, like an echo of something long past, barely made it up the ramp to the pay phone, which Tim, pretending the connection had been broken, now hung up.

  He left with Hawk, walking east on Fiftieth. “I feel sick” was all he said as they reached Broadway.

  “You can’t be. You had exactly half a hot dog.”

  Tim shook his head.

  “Are you off your milk? Haven’t had any since noon?”

  If he were drunk, the way he’d been that night at O’Donnell’s, he really would be throwing up. As it was, he managed to keep in step, turning south with Hawk below the Winter Garden Theater, over which Mary Martin’s hamstrung effigy flew as Peter Pan.

  What Tommy had told him: Was it the fantasy of a revenge-crazed drunk or potentially the scoop of Kenneth Woodforde’s—maybe even Joe Alsop’s—life? If it was true, why did the thought of telling the details to Hawk now make him feel sicker than six old-fashioneds would? Because harboring someone else’s filthy secret made his own secret, his love, feel filthy as well, as if it, too, were nothing more than appetite, compulsively gratified. Telling the story would make things even worse. Hawk would claim to be as amused by McCarthy’s helplessness as he’d been by the crowd’s fervor—or as he was this minute by the city’s night crawlers, passing by with their own secrets.

  The two of them entered Times Square, where all the neon in the world could not lift the fact of night. “Surely you’re not going to walk me home?” Tim asked, as playfully as he could. “All the way down Broadway and over to Stuy Town?”

  “Nope,” said Hawkins, squeezing the back of his neck as they passed the statue of Father Duffy.

  “And surely the night is too young for Hawkins Fuller to be going home by himself?” He smiled up at Hawk, showed him, as he’d been doing for weeks, what a sport he could be.

  “Yep,” said Hawkins. “Way too early.”

  They were soon at Forty-third Street. Hawk faced west, ready to cross, and Tim realized: the clarinet player.

  Should he keep chattering and walk him there, be the ultimate good sport, as they’d imagined he’d have been if they’d encountered each other three years ago, at the Draft Ike rally?

  No, he wouldn’t, because he had just seen it, only feet away, sitting in this lurid forest of light like a cottage, its own weak, non-neon glow making it pure, a clean well-lighted place, the one he now knew he had to reach, the place where they would take him in. This was the secular Church he had been seeking.

  “Okay, Hawk, I’ll see you in the funny papers.”

/>   Already crossing the street, Fuller turned back for a second and snapped off a mischievous salute.

  Tim returned it and then walked in the opposite direction, toward the little structure nestled so oddly in Times Square, like a single cotton stitch upon a sea of sequins.

  He opened its door and entered the first of the three offices it contained. He filled out several forms, told a lie on one of them, and then, at 10:45 p.m., raised his right hand and enlisted in the Army of the United States.

  PART THREE

  DECEMBER 1954–NOVEMBER 1956

  America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

  —ALLEN GINSBERG

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  December 25, 1954

  The homily was coming from Washington’s National Cathedral, but as Mary gave half her attention to its telecast by NBC’s New Orleans affiliate, she could hear actual church bells, their sound arriving on a light wind from Jackson Square, half a mile away.

  Her father called out from his study: “Mary, my darlin’, your gentleman is on the telephone.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She walked, hesitantly, toward the other room, feeling guilty over her father’s use of “gentleman” rather than “fiancé.” She had never told Daddy about the engagement to Paul; not when it was made, not when it was broken.

  Mr. Johnson rose from his wooden swivel chair and tilted the shade of his brass desk lamp, as if to allow his daughter a softer light in which to conduct what the look on her face indicated would be a difficult conversation.

  “Paul,” she said, taking the receiver.

  “Merry Christmas, Mary.”

  “I had the television on. I could hear Wilson’s grandson—Dean Sayre—giving the sermon in D.C.”

  “Right,” said Paul, uncomprehendingly. He had no more taste for historical trivia than for the immediate political kind.

  “Are you with your family?” Mary asked.

  “Yes, we’re just back from church. Mount Olivet Lutheran, not the cathedral.”

  “Daddy and I didn’t even make the effort. We’ve gotten to be very freethinking in the last couple of years.” She tried laughing. “Actually, his knee is bothering him. He just didn’t want to go out.”

  “Knee-thinking.”

  “I suppose.” Bless his heart. She felt a surge of affection toward Paul’s effortful wit.

  “Look, Mary,” he said, after a pause. “There’s a girl called Marjorie Wheeler. She keeps books for my brother, and I’m wondering if it’s okay for me to take her to a party next week, for New Year’s Eve.”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. It just felt funny. I wanted to check.”

  He was enough like other men to want her jealous over this—and she was jealous, a little bit—but he was also nice enough for the request to be genuine. She could picture him, a thousand miles away, looking at his shoes.

  “Honest, Paul.”

  As she said it, she felt another small wave of affection. Maybe, if he hadn’t always been so solicitous of her feelings, he might have drowned her reluctance, overwhelmed it, and floated the romance to an altar. But she’d been the same way with him; even now the two of them were left stumbling through a handful of courtesies before they could decently hang up the phone.

  She had broken the engagement three weeks ago on the illogical grounds that Paul was the marrying kind. Her attraction to that solid type depended to some extent on a belief in herself as its opposite—a girl still cut out for unusual adventures and unusual personalities, like Fuller, or even Tim Laughlin. Yes, it was time to put an end to her girlhood, but she couldn’t yet put an end to this sense of herself, or to the feeling that the man who could truly speak to it might still walk through the door of Congressional Relations or send a drink to her table at Harvey’s. To marry Paul—with whom on some days, usually bad days at the office, she felt she was in love—would be to get married for the same reason Beverly and Jerry Baumeister now seemed likely to: to find shelter from one’s particular storm.

  She went back to the living room and saw her frail-looking father reading the Times-Picayune. They usually cooked on Christmas, but today they would settle for a restaurant in the Quarter, sitting down to dinner at about the time Beverly and Jerry would be exclaiming over their hearts of lettuce with Russian dressing, the first course of the special at the Hotel Harrington, to which Beverly had said they would go with her boys after seeing the tree on the White House lawn.

  The NBC commentator, in an ecumenical spirit, was now reading Pius XII’s Christmas message, apparently composed before the pope’s collapse on December 2, the day of McCarthy’s censure—a fact, Mary suspected, that Miss Lightfoot, had she been Catholic, would no doubt have found significant. “If only,” spoke the stricken pontiff, “men knew how to live out their whole lives in that atmosphere of joy, with those feelings of goodness and peace, which Christmas pours forth on all sides, how different, how much happier the earth would be!”

  Mary also wondered what Miss Lightfoot would think of a homosexual joining this man’s army. Returning to Washington after the rally in New York, Tim at first had said nothing about his enlistment or anything else. He’d made himself scarce until she’d called his office, at which point he spoke only of how Lyndon Johnson, in preparation for the Democrats’ takeover of the Senate, was managing to overwork even the Republicans.

  Things had certainly not been busy in CR—it was easier selling Ike’s foreign policy to the midterm-triumphant Democrats than it had been to some of the former Republican majority—and so Mary had at last insisted on Tim’s joining her for a long weekday lunch at Reeves’ cafeteria, where over ice cream sodas he admitted that he was due to report for basic training at Fort Dix on January 11.

  She’d insisted on knowing why, and he’d responded with unconvincing declarations about anticommunism and doing his bit and putting his money where his mouth was, refusing all the while to admit that volunteering was his extreme means of breaking with Fuller. Mostly he’d concentrated on his ice cream soda, which he may have hoped would get his weight above the minimum required by the induction physical.

  Even now she didn’t know why he’d joined, though she imagined that he would have the self-discipline to get through it. He had been able at Reeves’, after all, to resist asking her about Fuller, the cherished topic of their every previous conversation. She gathered that he’d not even seen him since the night he’d signed up in Times Square.

  He didn’t tell her the enlistment was a secret, but she’d kept it one until leaving Washington three nights ago, when she air-mailed a Christmas card to Fuller at his parents’ apartment in New York: Can’t you do something about this? Or undo it?

  In fact, she’d been hoping, when the phone rang just before, that it might be Fuller instead of Paul.

  Frances’s baby reached for the celery stalks in the cut-glass centerpiece and shrieked when she was thwarted. Uncle Alan, his nerves even now a little raw from the war, winced at the sound. Apologizing with a glance, Frances tried to soothe her daughter with a tiny spoonful of mashed turnips.

  Except for little Maria Loretta, the Christmas dinner table had fallen silent, Grandma Gaffney having made it clear she blamed her own daughter and son-in-law for her grandson Timothy’s absence. Frances’s attempt to explain it had only made things worse.

  “What did you say was the name of that place?” asked Grandma Gaffney.

  “Fides.”

  “Sounds like a dog.”

  “It’s a Catholic settlement house in Washington,” Frances noted once again. “On Eighth Street,” she added, not that the address meant anything to anyone around the table. “Tim told me in his card that he’d spend Christmas Eve giving out food baskets to the poor, and that afterward he’d go to midnight Mass.”

  Grandma Gaffney, who had not been to church in forty years and who found pious Catholics more irritating than the Jews, once more frowned.

  “I’ll bet Tim’s just
trying to save his money,” offered Paul Laughlin, knowing his mother-in-law would find this explanation more tolerable than any involving charity.

  “You could have sent him a bus ticket,” said Grandma Gaffney.

  “He didn’t seem all that happy to be here at Thanksgiving,” Tim’s mother pointed out. She’d been crumpling a paper napkin in her right hand. Uncle Alan wasn’t the only one with nerves.

  “I’ll bet he’s just too damned busy down there,” suggested Uncle Frank. “That’s a big job he’s got, for a kid. Though I wish he was working for McCarthy and not this Potter guy. You watch,” he added, wiping up some cranberry sauce with a slice of bread, “Joe’ll bounce back.”

  Tom Hanrahan, while hardly a foe of McCarthy’s, scoffed at the possibility. “I read that Joe commissioned a poll about running for president in ’56. I think he got three percent.”

  “Tim is fine,” said Paul Laughlin, changing back the subject. “Our card said he’ll soon be taking a couple of trips to Michigan with the boss, but that even so he’ll get up to New York before Easter. He promises.”

  No, thought Frances, he hadn’t been happy here at Thanksgiving. She could remember when they’d gotten home from Teahouse of the August Moon and she’d found him in their parents’ bedroom, his sleeves rolled up, talking on the phone with that Irishman he’d mentioned from his office. When the call ended, she’d asked about the cuff links he’d set down on a doily. “HF?”

  “Hawkins Fuller,” she remembered him saying without pleasure or defiance—without anything, really, except maybe a kind of exhaustion. “It’s a man’s name. He gave them to me.”