Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  “I’m okay,” Tim called up to him.

  “Heavens, really? We’d hate to see you when you were under the weather. You come on up here.” He pointed to an entrance that led first to a back garden and then the apartment upstairs.

  Still struggling, as he’d been for the last two hours, with the single faint image he had retained of the woman he now thought of as her, the way she’d appeared last year on the Hotel Washington’s rooftop, Tim went into the garden. Passing flowers thick and fragrant, their stems stronger-looking than the white wrought iron of the bannister and balcony, he fought off another picture, recently assembled by his imagination, in which Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins Fuller and their children sat surrounded by bicycles and wrapping paper on a Christmas morning.

  The younger man already had a drink for him. “I’m Wel, short for Jeffrey Wellison. And you are?”

  “Timothy Laughlin.”

  The older man, introduced by Wel as Mr. Shaw, extended his hand while clicking a Tums between his teeth. Tim could see a roll of the tablets lying on the tray with the pitcher of drinks. Very tall and possessed of fine posture, Mr. Shaw was probably no more than forty-five. His hair—Tim could see this close up—was more than curly; it was like coiled wire. His features had a Negro aspect, and Tim wondered if he might be an octoroon or even a mulatto, terms he knew from the movies. Whatever he was, the man’s whole manner marked him as an aristocrat.

  “And tell us,” he asked, “what brings you to New Orleans, Mr. Laughlin?”

  “I’m in the army.”

  “You’re not really!” shrieked Wel. “We would have welcomed you with trumpets if we’d known! As it is, you should sit down.”

  “Are you on a pass?” Mr. Shaw asked.

  “Yes, I’m a private, a communications specialist at Fort Polk. I go back tomorrow.”

  “Now, Clay, you heard him. He’s on a pass, so making one in his direction would be redundant.”

  Mr. Shaw laughed apologetically at his companion’s remark, and peeled another Tums from the roll. Tim found himself surprised that anyone living in this city, awash in spices, might actually suffer from heartburn.

  Wel poured a little sachet of powder into his own drink. “Atoms for peace!” he exclaimed, lifting the glass in what appeared to be a toast to himself.

  “Forgive Mr. Wellison’s flamboyance,” said Mr. Shaw. “The granules are just a sweetener.”

  “Sure they are,” said Wel, before stage-whispering the word “Benzedrine” in Tim’s direction.

  Mr. Shaw returned a bit helplessly to the notion of atoms for peace, making it the occasion for a general toast: “To the spirit of Geneva. And to Private Laughlin’s arrival in our city.”

  Tim took a sip of what he guessed was a martini. He followed it with a shrimp whose strong sauce Mr. Shaw seemed to be avoiding.

  “There is no spirit of Geneva,” said Wel. “In fact the man on the radio was saying that China’s going to attack Formosa before all the bigwigs have cleared out of Switzerland. While everybody’s distracted, the Russians won’t be able to restrain the Chinks. Not Chinks. He called them something else. Chiclets?”

  “Chicoms, I suspect,” said Mr. Shaw.

  “Is he right, honey?”

  “Yes,” said Tim.

  “Well,” said Mr. Shaw, with the slight nervousness that seemed habitual to him in Mr. Wellison’s presence, “if any world war does break out, we have Private Laughlin here to defend us.”

  “And plenty of vodka to offer the invaders!” cried Wel, suddenly agreeable.

  “I thought it was the Chinese who were coming,” said Mr. Shaw, gently.

  With a volume that startled the two older men, Tim all at once declared: “Bulganin wants the Chinese to act as ‘observers’ in Europe! Peacekeepers!”

  Mr. Shaw recovered from his surprise and shook his head, agreeing to the irony and injustice of the prospect. Wel, losing interest in the international situation, busied himself by emptying one half-full bowl of peanuts into another.

  Embarrassed by his own volubility, Tim changed the subject, asking Mr. Shaw: “What line are you in, sir?”

  “So sweet!” exclaimed Wel. “He makes you sound like a shoe salesman, Clay. And he sounds a little like Dorothy Kilgallen.”

  Mr. Shaw made a forbearing expression: “I’m in international trade,” he explained to Tim. “Imports and exports. Mostly putting other importers and exporters together with one another.”

  “Clay’s a matchmaker,” said Wel, who was combing his hair in front of a heavily framed mirror. “When he travels the world, I feed the cat here and have his mail forwarded.”

  “How long have you been friends?” Tim asked.

  “About ten years,” Mr. Shaw explained. “Since just after the war.”

  “We’re in the ‘just friends’ stage now,” Wel added. “Sisters. It comes to that with the seven-year itch. Well, seven months in our case.” He laughed at Tim’s evident perplexity. “I don’t think he’s seen the movie, Clay. He was probably at The Seven Little Foys instead. Anywho,” Wel announced, picking up his cigarette lighter from the tray, “I’m going to leave you two and mosey back home to Chartres Street.”

  “You don’t live here?” Tim asked. The apartment wasn’t just fancy; it appeared to be enormous.

  Wel shook his head. “More convenient all around.” He gave Tim a peck on the cheek—“Say hello to all our fighting men!”—and made a fast exit.

  “May I freshen your drink, Timothy?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Shaw.”

  Without Wel, the room itself, however ornate, seemed to acquire a more masculine aspect. Mr. Shaw now appeared almost huge, more handsome and less guarded. Tim had the sense that Wel’s departure had occurred because he’d completed his work by bringing a guest here. Looking toward what seemed to be the largest bedroom, beyond a set of French doors, Tim noticed a silver crucifix attached to one of the walls. In a corner stood a black bullwhip, like something the Lone Ranger might have captured.

  Mr. Shaw, topping off their drinks, saw him looking and laughed. “Don’t be alarmed, Private Laughlin. That’s left over from Mardi Gras.”

  The martini glass, with its high center of gravity, threatened to spill. Mr. Shaw took it from his hand and set it on the table, then placed an arm over his shoulders. The exotic-looking man sighed with what seemed a craving for something deeper than sex, some wildly imbalanced alignment. Tim recognized it through an awareness of the same desire—its other, symmetrical half—within himself.

  “I think you should stay here tonight,” said Mr. Shaw. “You’ll be perfectly safe.” He pointed to the whip. “We can put that between us, like Tristan’s sword.”

  There was a brief silence, perhaps encouraging. And yet the gentlemanly Mr. Shaw soon sensed, whatever might be in the air, that his guest was too sad and nervous to go much further. So he made them both some coffee, told some army stories of his own (a Bronze Star rested not far from the crucifix), and listened to an anguished outpouring about Hawkins Fuller. After an hour or so passed, he was walking Tim to his rooming house across Dauphine Street, and telling him: “You’ll hear again and again that he’s ‘not worth it.’ And that will be true. It will also be the stupidest thing anyone ever says to you.”

  According to the Sunday-morning paper, two hundred and fifty thousand children were receiving Communion in Rio de Janeiro this weekend; Cardinal Spellman, in Brazil on a visit, had said a midnight Mass prior to the huge outdoor Eucharist.

  Sitting in the back of the cathedral in Jackson Square, Tim envied the privileged innocence of these quarter million boys and girls he’d just read about, but mostly he wondered what Saturday-night stories might be told by the tired morning-after souls in his midst, right here in New Orleans. He checked the bus ticket stuck in his missal—and then noticed a small green light go on, indicating the presence of a Father LeTour in the confessional just ten or twelve feet from the pew.

  It didn’t seem possible: all his life he had k
nown only Saturday confessions. But perhaps this city’s superabundance of temptation necessitated a few freewheeling shortcuts toward forgiveness. He noticed that three or four people had already lined up at the booth with their still-brand-new sins—lucky, shadowed souls who within a half hour would be kneeling at the altar rail, as newly innocent as any Brazilian boy or girl.

  On impulse, he acted: put his bus ticket back into the missal, marked his seat in the pew with the book, and got up to join the line, which was moving quickly. Father LeTour appeared to be passing out absolution with the speed of a chaplain on the battlefield.

  He would try not to think. He would try just to do it, to get back to and then somehow past the point at which he had been refused by Father Davett. He could not live forever without God’s full presence; he could not—having last night understood that Hawkins was gone forever—accept the permanent loss of God’s grace, too.

  His mind raced with logic and analogy: McCarthy had called Geneva a “dismal failure,” since there hadn’t been any talk of the satellite countries, whose enslavement was the moral crux of the whole Cold War. That was the truth—and shouldn’t the truth be accepted even from a sinner? Furthermore, shouldn’t a sinner be accepted if he told the truth? Which was to say, couldn’t he himself be accepted back into the Church with just renunciation of what he had done, unaccompanied by any admission of regret?

  He had wanted to stay with Mr. Shaw last night. He had not been very drunk, just sad and shocked over Hawkins’ engagement. Mr. Shaw’s exotic allure, his potent combination of the hulking and effeminate, had attracted him. There had been, as they’d sipped coffee, one repelling moment—a gentle, last-ditch suggestion that he put on what appeared to be a child’s set of pajamas—but more than anything else Mr. Shaw had seemed manly and cherishing, qualities that he himself, now denied both Hawk and God, desired intensely.

  What had stopped him from getting into bed—he knew the whip would never stay in its legendary place—had been the thought of Hawk, who, he’d decided months ago, near the end, should be the only man he would ever know in this way.

  So, he now reasoned, while the person just ahead of him in line entered the confessional: if Hawk had once been sin, he was now the giver of chastity. Why couldn’t those two things cancel each other out and let Timothy Laughlin go back to being what he’d once been? Why couldn’t he, safely reunited with God, retire the active memory of his earthly love, frame it like the picture of some dead loved soldier on a mantelpiece?

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; it has been twenty-one months since my last confession.”

  No shifting, no sense of surprise from Father LeTour. The priest replied in what Tim now recognized as a Cajun accent: “Yes, young man?” The “young” sounding like “yoang.”

  Tim had so often replayed his abortive confession to Father Davett that he could now recite his own part from memory. But Father LeTour seemed to be working from a different script, or none at all. To each admission that emerged from Tim’s lips, the priest replied, merely, Mmm-hmm.

  “I intend to stop. I have stopped.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “But I can’t say ‘I’m sorry.’ I can’t give that to God. It’s too much. I’ve already returned to Him the best gift He ever gave me.”

  Father LeTour at last came to soft-spoken life. “And what was that?”

  “The man I loved.”

  “Did you give him back to God in the spirit of a gift?”

  Tim had to admit that that hadn’t been the case; his return of Hawkins to God had been grudging and desperate.

  “No, Father.”

  “Can you give him back to God in that spirit?”

  “Yes!” said Tim, well above the confessional’s normal whisper. “I can.”

  “Then say three Hail Marys and do that. God loves you.”

  A little before eleven a.m., with his two hands clutching the missal and part of his mind unable to stop wondering why Father LeTour, unlike Bishop Sheen, did not use the subjunctive—God love you—Tim walked down the cathedral’s center aisle and received the Body of Christ Our Lord.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  September 25–28, 1955

  “So, is it true?” asked Fred Bell. “Do they really stand him on a box before the cameras roll?”

  He and Mary had just seen the decidedly short Alan Ladd in The McConnell Story.

  “That’s what they say,” she answered. She hadn’t paid much attention to the picture—neither the based-on-real-life heroics of the title figure, nor the scratchy little voice of June Allyson as the air ace’s perfect wife. Truth to tell, she would have been content not to go to the movies at all, and to spend the evening as they’d spent the whole afternoon, upstairs in the Carroll Arms, in bed with just room service and each other—though minus the bottle of Hildebrand-family beer that had been standing up, accusingly, in the ice bucket.

  It was now half past twelve on Saturday night. The Sunday papers had long since reached the streets, but here in a candy store a block from the Ambassador Theater, Fred was displaying more interest in the radio than in the already-obsolete Star, for which he’d just put down his fifteen cents. A Washington news announcer was reporting on a press conference still going on out in Denver, not far from where the president had gone for a fishing vacation.

  So much for the “digestive upset” that had been reported this morning! The doctors were now admitting that Ike had had a heart attack and was in an oxygen tent, and that Vice President and Mrs. Nixon had “gone into seclusion, leaving their young daughters at home on Tilden Street in the care of a trusted secretary.”

  “Fred,” said Mary. “There’s a radio back in the hotel.” Which she hoped he wouldn’t listen to once they got there. Fred might be only the third lover she’d had, but of that small sample he was far and away the best, full of ardor and eye contact; she was eager to get back to doing just what June Allyson and Paul, staring at her through the Hildebrand label, would no doubt disapprove of.

  At last she felt Fred’s hand on the small of her back, urging her out of the store and onto Eighteenth Street.

  “Taxi!” he called.

  But once the Diamond cab arrived at the curb, she heard him ask not for the Carroll Arms but for Tilden Street.

  “Where on Tilden?” the driver asked.

  “Just drive down the three-thousand blocks. Past the embassies.”

  “What are we doing?” asked Mary.

  Fred continued instructing the driver. “I don’t know the exact number, but there’ll be a little crowd on the lawn, newsmen and so forth.”

  “We’re going to the Nixons’,” said Mary, having just remembered Tilden Street from the radio.

  “Yeah,” said Fred. “To stand outside the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if this is the moment, I want to be there.”

  “The moment when Ike dies?”

  “The moment when we get a president who’ll actually fight, who’ll roll them back.” He proceeded to review for her the vice president’s steely anticommunist credentials. Sure, Nixon sometimes had to say things against McCarthy or in favor of Geneva, but everybody knew that the man who’d brought down Hiss and Helen Douglas would stand up to the Russians—if he were blessed with his own presidency.

  “Blessed?” asked Mary, looking at Fred’s excited profile while a string of Connecticut Avenue streetlamps flashed their glow onto and off his skin. He appeared even more aroused than he’d been behind the heavy curtains of their room in the Carroll Arms.

  The car radio was explaining just how Nixon had learned the seriousness of Ike’s condition, when the taxi caught up with the twenty or so reporters and gawkers on the vice president’s front lawn. At an upstairs window, behind sheer curtains, the silhouettes of two small girls, delighted by the commotion, were jumping up and down on a bed.

  Fred told the cab to wait, and once on the sidewalk with Mary he put some questions to a man with a microphone and a w
alkie-talkie. No, he learned, there really wasn’t any news. The press conference in Denver had just ended, and a heart specialist had flown out to Colorado, but that was about it.

  Mary took Fred’s arm and drew him back to the curb. “I want to ask you something. Are you hoping that the president of the United States will die?”

  Fred paused for a moment’s thought before replying. “I’m hoping the president will fight.”

  “The current president,” Mary insisted. “You want to see the hero of D-Day die for Estonia?”

  He looked straight at her. “I landed on Utah Beach eleven years, three months, and nineteen days ago. I do the arithmetic every morning when I brush my teeth.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that; she looked longingly at the cab.

  “Maybe you should take it,” said Fred. “I’m too keyed up. I’ve got to stay awhile more.”

  “All right.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “No. Confused maybe.”

  He was already looking for a way to make it up to her. “How about I pick you up for church?”

  “No, thanks,” she said, laughing from sheer surprise. “I’m not going by myself, and I’m not going with you, either.”

  “Come on,” he cajoled, smiling in the mischievous way he ought to be smiling back at the Carroll Arms, coaxing her over some new threshold of adventurousness. “There’s a Polish church on Thirty-sixth Street,” he explained. “Father Kaminsky does the eleven-o’clock Mass, and he’s a spellbinder. I guarantee you he’ll have something to say tomorrow morning.”

  She looked at him disbelievingly, but he persisted, as if she were only displaying a customer’s last bit of resistance toward the product being offered: “I went to hear him once with a guy from the Polish group that sometimes makes the rounds with us down here.”

  “Fred, I am not going to Mass to pray for the ill health of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t do that, either.”