Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  Father Davett: Yes?

  I was in love with a man. The memory of Tommy McIntyre’s voice—“You are in love”—had seemed to find him in yet some further abyss, a pit of lying.

  How old are you?

  Twenty-three.

  Did you have impure thoughts about this man?

  No.

  He’d said it with conviction, believing that to say yes would be bearing false witness against the ecstatic, starlit thoughts he’d always had of Hawk.

  Somehow he’d tried to keep going, to see if he could reach a merciful middle ground.

  Father Davett (confused): Did you have carnal awareness of this man?

  Yes.

  Have you ceased to?

  Yes.

  Are you sincerely sorry?

  No.

  Father Davett (exasperated): Then why are you here?

  I intend to stop. I have stopped.

  That is not enough. You must be sincerely sorry.

  I can’t be sincerely sorry.

  How could he explain? Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked Earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

  His love had been real—literally divine, if that meant inspired from above. He would now renounce—as he’d refused to, the first morning after, at St. Peter’s—but he still would not regret. Maintaining this last distinction might be the only courage he ever showed in the world.

  You must, Father Davett had finally said, be sincerely sorry. That is demanded for every mortal sin.

  As if on a diving board, he had remained unable to leap. I can’t. He’d realized that the priest thought all of this a quibble, that he would have preferred him to lie, to make a good confession by making a bad one.

  Renunciation shows consciousness of guilt. Therefore you are sorry.

  No. I can’t give that to God.

  Why not?

  It’s too much.

  Nothing is too much to give God.

  I’ve already returned to Him the best gift He ever gave me.

  What is that?

  The man I loved.

  After that, Father Davett had slid shut the screen, driving him like a moneychanger from the temple.

  Even so, even now at Fort Polk, he craved the forgiveness and release that the deep-voiced, by-the-book priest might have provided. And he knew that he would try again.

  THE NATION

  Washington, D.C., bureau

  June 22, 1955

  Dear Laughlin,

  You’re fondly remembered in Potter’s office. About an hour ago McIntyre gave me an airmail stamp and suggested I write you. “A foine idea,” as he might say.

  You’ve just missed a great show here. McCARTHY: THE COMEBACK. The audience found it so unintentionally hilarious it closed two nights after opening. The plot is easily summarized:

  A rare dry weekend had left the leading man well enough to come to the Hill on Monday morning, day before yesterday, carrying with him the text for a resolution. It insisted that President Dulles bring up the “satellite” nations when he talks to the Russians in Geneva next month.

  But the Democrats had a handy high horse to ride in opposition: “Sir, do you not sufficiently trust the President, a man from your own party, to let him negotiate with a free hand?” Before long even Knowland and Co. had to hop on. The whole bunch of them voted the thing down, 77–4, a couple of minutes ago.

  Nonetheless, for two days our Savonarola of the Dairylands must have felt alive again. He chewed up the Foreign Relations Committee calendar and had a dozen reporters following him around, as if it were the grand old days of ’53 and he’d just hounded another Jewish bookworm to the poorhouse. Every flashbulb that popped threw a smile onto his face, like he’d thrown one more jigger of bourbon down his gullet.

  Bob Stevens, Secretary Milquetoast, has resigned to go back to supervising the family fortune. (Do they allow you to include actual armed-forces news like this in that paper you’re putting out?) More significantly, Ridgway has retired, because he realizes the army he gave his life to is now obsolete. The Air Force will conduct the next war, while his old branch of the service will be left to herd radioactive civilians through the bombed city streets. (Thanks, by the way, for that touching bit of meteorology you sent, the balloon story. But put your own finger into the wind and you’ll begin to feel which way it’s really blowing. Did you somehow miss seeing the real papers the day the Warsaw Pact was formed last month?)

  McIntyre insists you’re fleeing some great sorrow, but won’t say which. Forgive me, Laughlin, but you don’t look to me as if you’re built for a life of passion.

  See you when you’re back here on a pass sometime. My new painter girlfriend will cook you a meal. She extends abstract expressionism right onto the dinner plate.

  Regards,

  Kenneth Woodforde, 4-F

  P.S. About Potter’s little burp of courage last year: can you tell me if there’s more to the story than’s been told? Strictly off the record, of course.

  “You’ve heard of Darkness at Noon, Miss Johnson?”

  “Yes, Fuller.”

  “Well, the summer solstice has given us brightness at dusk. Or at least what should be dusk. Too nice not to be out in. I’m leaving a little earlier than usual.”

  “Leaving earlier than early, you mean.”

  “Leaving now, to be precise.”

  McCarthy’s Geneva resolution had sent the Bureau of Congressional Relations into action on Monday morning, but victory had proved so easy that by Wednesday there wasn’t much left to do. Now, on Friday, things were even slower, and once Fuller left, Mary decided she would answer Tim’s latest letter before going home herself. In her reply she would take care—as Tim always did—never to mention Fuller. Unnatural as this seemed, she knew it was for the best. A more difficult task would be responding to the kind of political-religious tract that Tim’s most recent letter, like the one or two before it, had started to resemble.

  She at least had quiet enough in which to concentrate, Beverly having left early, too. Quite stagestruck now, Bev had a part in the Bethesda Players’ production of The Little Foxes; Jerry was helping to make her hoop skirt with some wire he’d brought home from the hardware store he still worked at.

  Department of State

  Washington, D. C.

  June 24, 1955

  Dear Tim,

  Well, it’s a silent Friday afternoon here, befitting a world on which peace has apparently descended. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? I refer to this Molotov resolution out in San Francisco—a stroke of genius, I should say, simply to proclaim the arrival of “peace, cooperation and friendship.”

  I can imagine what you

  Someone had entered the office. With no one at any other desk—Miss Lightfoot’s replacement had left early, too—Mary got up to greet whoever it was.

  The visitor, heavyset but attractive, perhaps a bit over forty, motioned for her to sit back down at her typewriter while he strode toward her.

  “Miss Johnson, you don’t remember me. The name’s Fred Bell.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “The last time I saw you, a couple of years ago, I was bringing you a cracker with some fish on it. At the Estonian embassy. Actually the Lithuanian. We were borrowing the place.”

  “Oh,” said Mary, bits of that sad little evening coming back to her. She recalled her skirt feeling too long, and Fuller taking off into the night.

  “I own some shoe factories up in Massachusetts. I’m on the deportees’ committee.”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “I’m remembering something about a violinist.”

/>   “Pretty close,” said Mr. Bell. “Oboe. My cousin. The one who gets to play music in Tallinn. The other cousin, the peasant, is still deported, still on a Soviet collective. You and me also talked about eggs. And then your handsome boss whisked you away.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Losing. Like always.” He laughed. “A bunch of us rushed down on Monday when we got word of the resolution being introduced. We were dumb enough to think we could help it pass. Real controversial, wasn’t it? ‘Please, maybe, could you just possibly, if it isn’t too rude, bring up the satellites? Oh, too provocative? Too dangerous? Sorry! We apologize!’”

  Mary nodded, deciding not to mention that she’d spent two days marshaling votes against the proposal, even though she’d known in her heart that its only objectionable aspect was its toxic sponsor.

  “A couple of us have stayed in town making the rounds. Without much point, as usual. But I’ve seen everybody I could on the Hill and figured I’d come over here. I still have your handsome boss’s card.” He showed it to her. “I’ve learned that barging in has more chance of success than calling ahead.”

  “I’m afraid that both the handsome boss and his boss aren’t in.”

  Mr. Bell shrugged. “More of my luck. Maybe I should have called ahead.” He put Fuller’s card back in his wallet. “You’re pretty handsome yourself. You can use that word with women, can’t you?”

  He’d almost, Mary thought, said “dames.”

  “I’m not sure I’m old enough for ‘handsome,’” she replied.

  “Have dinner with me.”

  “You’re married. A guess.”

  “I’m married. A good guess.”

  As if another voice were talking for her, she asked: “Where would you like to go?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  July 23–24, 1955

  Tim had sweated through his first shirt on the five-hour bus ride from Fort Polk, but here in Mr. Johnson’s remarkably cool library a second one was holding up fine. He had put in for his weekend pass nearly a month ago, and Mary had promised they would have some time alone after dining with her father. Tim and Mr. Johnson had been conversing for the past ten minutes, while they waited for her to finish getting ready. About a quarter of the books in the room appeared to be bound in leather, and about half of those were in French. Mr. Johnson had explained that on his mother’s side he was a Claurin.

  “Things are looking up,” the older man now declared. “Never before have East and West wasted so little time reaching a deadlock.”

  Ike was coming home from the Geneva conference tomorrow, having proposed joint aerial reconnaissance and the sharing of military blueprints between America and Russia. It remained doubtful that the Soviets would say yes.

  Tim laughed politely before replying. “Nixon thinks the summit ‘cleared the air,’” he said, venturing toward a difference of opinion with his host. “But I think it made things worse.”

  “I can’t claim the East-West bon mot as my own,” Mr. Johnson responded. “It came out of some man’s column in the Times-Picayune.”

  Mary had warned her father about the recent overheated expressions of faith and politics in Tim’s letters, and Mr. Johnson was trying to keep the conversation light. His daughter decided that she would do the same. Entering the library, Mary declared, “I’m always happy to hear Nixon criticized. Even if it’s from all the way over on that side.”

  More perfumed than Tim remembered, she leaned over and gave him a sisterly kiss.

  “Very Audrey Hepburn, no?” she asked, touching her new shorter haircut. “That’s the intention, anyway.”

  “I think I miss the style you had,” Mr. Johnson said, wistfully. “Your mother’s hair fell to her waist every night as she came into our bed.”

  The phrasing jarred them all with its intimacy, and Mary wound up returning the conversation to affairs of state, explaining that the president’s cable from Geneva, describing the progress of the conference, had arrived at the State Department early Thursday afternoon, just before her departure for New Orleans on the ovenlike Crescent. “So I was very up-to-date. On that and other things besides. We even knew about poor Cordell Hull.” The death of FDR’s secretary of state had occurred only this afternoon, but on Thursday morning awareness of its imminence had sent some longtime employees scrambling for black crêpe to hang, once Mr. Hull was gone, from the department’s Twenty-first Street windows.

  Strong spicy smells were coming from the kitchen. Josephine, a Negro woman who took care of Mary’s father during the week, had come to cook their meal. “It’s a treat to have you here,” Mr. Johnson insisted to Tim, “and it will be a treat to have Josephine’s dinner. Most weekends I subsist on something frozen that she’s left, or a plate of red beans and rice that I can manage to make myself.” He looked skeptically at Tim’s thin frame. “Are they feeding you well enough?”

  “Oh, just fine, sir.”

  “Well,” said Mary, “they’re already getting Capitol Hill ready for your return. They’ve finished the foundations on that new Senate Office Building, the one going up where that little slum on First Street used to be? They’ll have the whole thing done in a couple of years.”

  She realized, suddenly, that she needed to concoct a fib. “I got all of that from Beverly. I think I wrote you about how much time she was spending on the Hill this spring.”

  Tim, certain that she’d gotten this architectural update from Hawkins, who visited the Capitol twice a week, just nodded.

  Mary now surmised what he was thinking, which was not at all what had made her worry. She had lied to protect a secret of her own, not Tim’s feelings. She’d seen the construction herself, during the two weekends Fred Bell had come down to Washington to see her, weekends the two of them had spent in a little room at the top of the Carroll Arms. Each Sunday afternoon, when Fred would phone his wife in Massachusetts to report on all the preparation he was doing for the next day’s lobbying, she would take a stroll around the Hill that took her past the construction site.

  “I may not come back to Washington at all,” said Tim, “but if I do I’ll be your neighbor a couple of times a month. The Army Reserves in D.C. are so hard up they drill in a State Department lecture room! Right at Twenty-first and C.”

  His face flushed with nostalgia for the handful of visits he’d made to Hawkins’ office. Mary saw his color rise and wondered how on earth she’d be able to tell him what she had to.

  Mr. Johnson excused himself to check on Josephine.

  “You’re sure you won’t stay here tonight instead?” Mary asked Tim. He’d checked into a guesthouse in the Quarter. “Dauphine Street is quieter than most, but still, it is a Saturday night, and—”

  “You’re forgetting I grew up a few blocks from Times Square,” he said, laughing. “Trust me, this is nothing! And if you’re worried about the money, remember: I’m making seventy-eight whole dollars a month on top of three meals a day and all the milk I can drink.”

  “I need to talk to you about something after dinner.”

  “Are you getting back together with Paul?”

  “No, no. But it does concern an engagement.”

  “Beverly Phillips and Jerry Baumeister!”

  Mr. Johnson was coming back into the library.

  “No, not them,” she whispered. “It’s somebody else.”

  “Josephine’s boy,” Mr. Johnson announced with a certain wonder, “wants her to take him to Disneyland.” The amusement park’s opening had been all over television last week.

  Mary looked at Tim from the corner of her eye. No, he hadn’t guessed the news she had to tell him.

  “Fantasyland?” he asked her father, trying to ascertain which precinct of Disneyland interested Josephine’s boy particularly. “Frontierland?”

  Mary excused herself to get a pack of cigarettes from her bedroom, and once there, standing still with her left hand on the dresser, she remembered the conversation that Fuller had drawn her into on Monday
afternoon, just before close of business.

  Getting married? she’d asked, incredulously.

  Having children, too, no doubt, he’d answered.

  Why, Fuller?

  Why not?

  Because you’re—

  Because I am, even so, good value for her money.

  No, you’re not.

  He’d said nothing, just smiled.

  Why now?

  A hitch in time saves nine. He’d begun moving toward the door by that point.

  Should I say anything to him? she’d asked. I’ll be seeing him this weekend, you know, when I’m back home.

  I know. I keep reading the letters you deliberately leave open on your desk.

  What should I tell him, Fuller?

  That it makes no difference. He’d already taken his hat from the clothes tree.

  Of course it makes a difference, she’d protested.

  Does Mrs. Bell make a difference, Miss Johnson?

  You’re a son of a bitch.

  Yes, I am. He’d then put on the hat.

  No, you’re not.

  No, I’m not, he’d said, without any archness, before asking, quietly, for a simple favor: Make it easy on him.

  She now lit one of the cigarettes and returned to the library, where there seemed to be a lull in the conversation between her father and their guest.

  “Tim has just finished explaining to me the difference between Frontierland and Fantasyland,” Mr. Johnson told his daughter. “But we’ve concluded that Josephine’s son wants to go to another land entirely.”

  “Which is that?” asked Mary.

  “Tomorrowland,” said her father.

  Tim’s brown eyes were wet and huge. She could see that, in the time she’d been out of the room, he had guessed the identity of the groom.

  “Hello, darlin’! Why so sad?”

  He thought the voice might be a prostitute’s, like the one he’d heard on Bourbon Street a half hour ago, but here on Dauphine, a little before midnight, the words were coming not from a doorway but a low second-floor balcony, and the voice belonged to a man. There were two men, actually, near the railing. One of them had curly gray hair; the other, the one who had spoken, was somewhat younger, maybe in his thirties, but already balding.