Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  She’d looked at her brother and left the room, saying a prayer for him, as she was doing now, while she let the baby lick a drop of gravy from her fingertip.

  “My lung man is in the capital,” said Fuller’s uncle Ned, with some difficulty. “When I come down to see him, you and I should have lunch at the Sulgrave. We need to have a discussion.”

  Uncle Ned’s poor health was the chief reason most of the Fuller family had gathered here in New York instead of Maine for Christmas dinner. Looking at Ned’s skeletal frame, Hawkins couldn’t understand how his uncle might weather a trip to the District, let alone why he continued to keep one of his specialists down there.

  Fuller’s father was even more quiet than his brother-in-law today, and as the first round of cocktails jingled into the room on an old cart, Mrs. Fuller appeared so relieved by the distraction that she didn’t bother to check her wristwatch, as she usually did, to make sure it was at least past one.

  Her sister, Hawkins’ unmarried aunt Valerie, finally put a topic upon the air, expressing agreement with the French parliament’s decision to reject a NATO treaty that would allow the Germans to rearm. Valerie’s one great affair of the heart having occurred in Paris thirty years ago, her approval of all things French was expected to last a lifetime.

  Mrs. Fuller, an internationalist who still regarded Wendell Willkie as having been a most attractive candidate and man, wanly disagreed: “Adenauer says he’s prepared to be patient.”

  “So, in a way, was Hitler,” said Aunt Valerie. “The last time.”

  From across the room, Hawkins looked at the small tableau presented by his mother and aunt. Neither was exactly driving the holiday spirit at full throttle. By way of contrast, a picture from yesterday’s papers sprang to his mind: Mrs. Perle Mesta, surrounded by gamboling orphans at the Christmas party she’d given in her Washington apartment. The only children here above Park and Seventy-fourth were in a room down the hall with their mother, the sister Hawkins disliked only a little less than the one at Uncle Ned’s New Mexico place, over which they’d all be fighting, it now seemed, soon enough.

  Hawkins’ brother-in-law, Robert, an orthopedic surgeon whose unhappiness lay in knowing that he would never be department chief as his father had been, began a long, almost footnotable denunciation of the hospital that was allowing this situation. Robert’s disappointment hung ever more thickly on the living-room air until the girl at last called them to the table, where the food might be easier to push around than the conversation.

  Mr. Fuller sliced the ham.

  “Excellent work,” said Hawkins. “Robert’s father couldn’t have done better.” When no one laughed, he added that it was “without question a neater job than Dr. Sheppard would have managed.”

  “Hawkins, honestly,” said his mother.

  “You’re right,” he replied, retracting his reference to the Ohio surgeon who’d finally been convicted of slaughtering his wife. “He was only an osteopath, hardly fit for comparison.”

  He knew, even as she begged him to change the subject, that his mother was thanking God for the life and mischief in him, for the vitality that she, somewhere inside, still had a measure of herself—even if, except in the televised presence of Bishop Sheen, she retained no ability to display it. Mrs. Fuller was now dutifully back on the subject of German rearmament, pointing out to her sister that even Churchill was for it.

  “It will provoke the Russians,” declared Valerie.

  “And this time they’ll overrun both the Germans and the French,” said Mr. Fuller, verbal at last. “And probably our own boys over there to boot.”

  Hawkins found himself imagining the front lines of such a war, maybe a year or so from now. They’ll have to put rocks in his pockets, he thought, just to keep him from bouncing out of the jeep.

  When international affairs were exhausted, Robert got everyone to the mince pie with a renewed recitation of the hospital’s underappreciation of orthopedists. Hawkins tried to remember: Didn’t Mary’s father need to get his knee fixed? Hadn’t that also been in her Christmas card? He excused himself and went to his old room, across from the one inside which his sister’s children were still stuffed. On the desk, beneath the St. Paul’s pennant and the picture of Bill Tilden—who couldn’t have guessed that one?—Mary’s envelope still sat. It was next to a pair of whimsical mittens that the relentless Saltonstall girl had knitted. He supposed she wanted him to think of her as a spirited girl, Marie Antoinette playing the milkmaid.

  He took a piece of stationery from the desk’s middle drawer and wrote: “Dear Skippy, I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier….”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  January 10, 1955

  “It’s hard to know what to save,” said Tim, looking at a Herblock cartoon of McCarthy as a baboon. He’d clipped it from the Post eight months ago.

  “Save yourself,” said Tommy McIntyre, who’d just approached the desk that Tim was cleaning out. “Let Uncle Sam feed you three squares a day. Put on a little flesh. Get away from all this.”

  “Oh, he’ll be back,” said Miss Cook, bustling in with Tim’s separation form. “Look at Senator Barkley!” Harry Truman’s vice president had in November been elected to his old Senate seat and the other day restored to his committee chairmanships.

  “Perhaps even ‘the Jones boy’ will one day reappear among us,” offered Tommy.

  “Where is Bob Jones?” asked Miss Cook. Seven months after the Maine primary, no one seemed to know his location or what he might be doing. With no response to her question, Miss Cook proceeded to muse on the difficulty of keeping up with all the changes on the Hill—in particular, of trying to imagine the Democrats’ Senator McClellan heading what everyone would almost certainly keep calling the McCarthy committee.

  “As hard to believe as another Roosevelt in the Congress,” said Tommy, reminding them that both branches of the family, Teddy’s and FDR’s, had for most of this century confined themselves to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But last night, Jimmy Roosevelt, the second son of the late president to be elected to the House, had stolen the show at the Congressional Club reception.

  “You take care of yourself,” said Miss Cook. “And send us a postcard.” She gave Tim a kiss, and left him alone with Mr. McIntyre.

  “You going to wait around for Charlie? To say goodbye?” asked Tommy.

  “I don’t think so,” said Tim, recalling the lie in his Christmas card home. I’ll be visiting Michigan with the boss. He hadn’t needed such embellishment, but he’d been determined, and still was, not to tell his mother and father and Frances about enlisting—not until he was irretrievably at Fort Dix. And he’d be there in less than twenty-four hours, if he could keep himself, for one last day, from tearing across town to the State Department or, even worse, the apartment on I Street.

  “But I did like Senator Potter,” he finally said. “He was nice to me.” He paused, regretfully, and added: “I could have worked harder.”

  “You worked hard enough,” Tommy assured him. “And when Charlie caught you looking out the window, he just figured you were in love.”

  “I was in love.”

  “You are in love. But don’t worry, Timothy. Charlie thinks it’s a girl, I guarantee you. You know the extent of his imagination.”

  Tim went back to filling the box. He had never admitted anything to Tommy, but never lied to him either, certainly never pretended there was a girl.

  “You won’t forget Mr. Fuller,” said Tommy, in the low tones of a fortune-teller. “Not just because you’ve started toting a rifle. Any more than I forget her by hoisting a glass.”

  “Are you hoisting one these days?”

  They were both surprised by his nerve in asking. Unlike Tommy’s questions—asked only to make plain that the asker already had the compromising answer—Tim’s was an actual inquiry, a way of learning whether there was anything he should be doing to help this cruel, loving man.

  “Yes, I am, Timothy. I am ind
eed.”

  “I could tell from the phone call I made from the rally. When you told me all that awful stuff.”

  “Awful?” countered Tommy, already again combative. “You might consider all the good that ‘awful stuff’ did.”

  “What good has it done you?”

  McCarthy had fallen but Potter was still on his prosthetic feet, and Tommy, his hunger as yet unappeased, looked to be on his way back to the Cheboygan gutter from which he’d been plucked. However sincerely Tim had asked his last question, he could feel the thrill of its aggression, a sensation similar to what he’d experienced one night a few months ago when to his astonishment Hawkins, with some wordless guidance from his hand, had insisted that Tim penetrate him. The act had ended up as another form of submission, during which he seemed to be gathered in, enfolded and protected in a different way from the usual, but for an instant, at its beginning, he had enjoyed a sense of himself as being brutally in charge.

  Now, as then, he subsided quickly into a renewed willingness to serve. “There’s a Father Hackett,” he told Tommy, “over at St. Peter’s on Second and C. He meets on Monday nights with people who—”

  “People who are drunks?” asked Tommy.

  “Yes.”

  “Why should you want me sober? After all these terrible things I’ve done and insisted on pouring into your ears, I should think, Timothy, you’d be glad to see me trampled by the pink elephants.”

  Tim wrote out the church’s address and Father Hackett’s name on one of Potter’s business cards. He handed it to Tommy, whose bloodshot eyes he was now close enough to see. He could also smell a peppermint fighting the whiskey on Tommy’s tongue.

  “You said it yourself,” declared Tim. “We’re alike. But I don’t have what you’ve got to fall back on.”

  “A taste for drink to prop you up?”

  “No,” said Tim. “I’m you without any anger. And I have a feeling I scare you.”

  I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.

  Here in the apartment it was even harder to decide what he should pack or throw away. He could put Hawkins’ letter into the silky cloth flap inside the suitcase lid—but what was he to do with the empty milk bottle? Bring it to Fort Dix? Should he have shipped it to Frances and Tom’s on Staten Island with the other stuff he’d sent this afternoon, which wouldn’t arrive in New York until he himself had reached Jersey?

  One suitcase was all he’d carry; he supposed its contents would fill about half the footlocker they’d give him in the barracks. Stuffing his missal in between some underwear and socks, he again resolved to make his confession before Easter. It would be too risky to let an army chaplain hear it; he would take a bus into town, or even wait till he had a pass for New York City.

  Folded inside the missal was a prayer he had clipped from the Star, a newly approved English version of the words for extreme unction, murmurs to bring the dying back from the brink or escort them safely over it. O Redeemer, we implore Thee, by the grace of the Holy Spirit cure the illness of this sick man and heal his wounds; forgive his sins; and drive away from him all pains of mind and body. In Thy Mercy, give him his health, inward and outward…. He had memorized the sentences, and he whispered them now.

  Without a knock, the door opened. Hawkins, in his Harris overcoat, came toward him, stopping inches away, looking first into his eyes and then around the room. Picking the milk bottle up from the desk, he reached into his pants for two cents, the refund for an empty. He gave Tim the pennies and put the bottle into one of his overcoat’s huge pockets.

  “Do you want the cuff links back?” Tim asked.

  Hawkins took hold of him, tightly, and pressed him against the overcoat, damp with drizzle. “You don’t need to do this,” he said.

  “Yes, I do,” said Tim. “Besides,” he added, trying to sound cheerful, “the draft will get me eventually.”

  “I’m not going to wait for you, you know.”

  It was hardly a possibility that required denial. The two of them burst out laughing.

  “Come on,” said Hawkins, tilting his head toward the front door. “Finish up.”

  They were going out? Tim didn’t think he could bear it, though it would be worse if Hawk started pushing him toward the bed, now stripped of its sheets.

  “I have a five-thirty bus to catch,” said Tim. “A.M.”

  Hawk threw the last handful of things into the suitcase before picking it up and moving him out the door.

  The night was warm and the drizzle had just stopped, and the Capitol, shiny as mercury, seemed like a spaceship ready to disgorge Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which Tim now remembered seeing one Saturday night up at Fordham with Bobby Garahan. Hawk said they would pass up the streetcar and walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, whose shabbiness, he declared, was not a disgrace but rather a gesture of humility by the strongest republic on earth. “You think so?” Tim asked, trying to keep the air crowded with chatter, dreading the wordless moments when the swish of the rattan suitcase against Hawkins’ coat was the only sound.

  “Two more blocks,” Hawk said, pointing to the Old Post Office, their destination, a gigantic Romanesque pile between Eleventh and Twelfth streets. Once there, Hawkins took them around the back to an unlocked door. “Tip from an FBI friend,” he explained.

  Hoover’s Bureau now had a portion of its training academy in the building, which the Postmaster General had long ago ceded to a motley assortment of small federal agencies and government record collections. Fuller led Tim through the dim after-hours light to a bank of elevators. “Not that one,” he said, instructing Tim to wait for another car. “Number one is solely for the use of Edgar and Clyde. Or so I hear.”

  They rode to the ninth floor, as high as any of the elevators went. Stashing the suitcase by a radiator, Hawkins then piloted them through a door and into the clock tower, which rose several stories and could be scaled only by ladders attached to its stone walls. Up they climbed, past the kind of narrow windows designed for medieval archers holding off a siege. Going first, looking like a tweed-costumed Errol Flynn, Hawkins made fast acrobatic progress toward the tower’s bell-less belfry. His sudden arrival at the top, where no windows or screens enclosed the arches, startled a dozen pigeons from their nighttime roost; they clattered into flight, taking off in the direction of the White House.

  He pulled Tim up the last steps and onto the belfry’s floor, so that the two of them stood above the tower’s northern clockface, looking down on Pennsylvania Avenue and the Star’s building across the street. The sight of it, and its streetcar stop, was so painful that Tim moved to another arch, one that faced more to the east. Through it he could see the Navy Yard and the smokestacks of St. Elizabeth’s, the insane asylum still holding Ezra Pound.

  “You think I’ll wind up there?” he asked.

  “Doubtful,” Hawkins replied. “I have the higher actuarial risk. You know, the mad Mayflower type.”

  Softly, Tim said, “I have to get over you.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Then let’s take desperate measures!” Tim brightly cried, turning around to face Fuller with a smile. “Hawk,” he said, pointing to the overcoat’s pocket, “hand me that.”

  Fuller gave him the empty milk bottle, which Tim took back to the Pennsylvania Avenue arch.

  “Hold me over the ledge.” The tower’s stone shelf extended far enough out to block any view of the sidewalk below. “Just hold my ankles so I can lie on my stomach and see over.”

  Hawkins gave him a skeptical look but took hold of him above his loafers. “This may be the only part of you I’ve never touched.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” said Tim, inching forward on his stomach until he could finally see the sidewalk. No one was coming. The milk bottle, still in his right hand, caught the moonlight. Empty of gold or frankincense, it was still the most precious casket he could offer up to God, the treasured thing that he could renounce along with its original giver. He loosened his hand and let
it fall three hundred feet to the ground. The sound that came back up wasn’t glassy at all, just a small pop, the kind made by a gun that had been fitted with a silencer.

  Hawkins reeled him in and set him down. “You can keep the two cents,” he said.

  In one corner of the belfry there was a small pile of blankets, none too clean, left over from others’ trysts. Fuller moved the stack to a different corner of the tower and sat down on it. Their faces, he explained, would be awakened by the light of the sun when it rose in the east. “Don’t worry,” he said, coaxing Tim toward him. “I’ll get you to your bus.”

  As the wind rushed through the arches, Hawk held him, tenderly stroking the side of his face, trying to transfer from his own body what Tim realized, with fresh despair, was relief at his departure.

  He clenched his teeth, summoning the resolve to say it: “Promise you won’t write.”

  “I promise,” Hawkins said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  March 11, 1955

  69th Infantry Division

  Fort Dix, N.J.

  March 11, 1955

  Dear Francy,

  Well, I’m 5½ weeks into it, and maybe this time I’ll get the whole way through. “Last time, you will recall”—as one of our old serials used to say—I made it to nineteen days before that chest cold put me in the camp hospital. That got me “recycled”: everybody who drops out has to start over from the beginning, because it’s too hard to find slots in medias res. (How much Latin do you remember?)

  So, guess what? This round, for everything except knowledge of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, my first set of marks are even lower than the last. This is attributable, I guess, to natural incompetence and a tougher company commander, a second lieutenant who’s very demanding but nice enough underneath. So far he’s called me “shitbird” only twice, and he’s allowed us to perform the rifle-reassembly test in simple lights-out darkness instead of with blindfolds. (Some commanders do that—I’m not kidding.)