“Let’s say you wouldn’t do that exactly.” She looked back toward the cab, whose meter was still running. “Call me sometime before you go back home.” She accepted a kiss, against her better judgment, and got into the taxi, still carrying the copy of the Star from the candy store.
Inside her place on P Street, she made herself a drink and climbed into bed with the paper, passing up its stale front page in favor of the book reviews and wedding announcements—“the ladies’ sports pages,” Paul used to joke, though in Washington you would sometimes find the groom’s name, not the bride’s, in the headline: MR. HERBERT ENGAGED TO WED. No matter how pretty the future Mrs. Herbert might be, her fiancé’s father had been governor of Ohio, and that settled that.
There was the phenomenon again, in the upper-right-hand corner: MARRIAGE OF MR. FULLER ANNOUNCED. The news was being spread by his soon-to-be in-laws, Professor and Mrs. Chester Boardman of Wellesley, Massachusetts, parents of Lucy Catherine, the fiancée. “The bridegroom-elect, a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s bureau of congressional relations, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fuller of New York City.” The little story had everything right: St. Paul’s, the war record, Harvard, Paraguay, Oslo.
Mary put aside the paper and wondered if she’d even tease Fuller about it on Monday. No, she could no longer do that. Too many things had galloped beyond the pale, herself included maybe.
At least the item wouldn’t run anywhere near Fort Polk. She had heard from Tim only once since New Orleans, a letter full of talk about the Eucharist and the Russians’ persecution of Cardinal Mindszenty. His merry side had been there in one of the margins—an ink sketch of Major Brillam hurling an editorial thunderbolt against whatever laxness had permitted weevils to invade the mess hall—but mostly the letter shook with a febrile zeal that left her both upset and envious. Fred, too, had this electric susceptibility, this touch of true-believing that must be connected to male ardor in bed. The little Irish tiger cub: she now remembered Fuller dropping that offhand excuse when he arrived at the office even later than usual one morning.
All of them, from Hawkins Fuller to Beverly Phillips, were dangling from the world tonight, unaligned nations or shaky protectorates, struggling toward independence or falling into unwise alliance. She felt a pang for Paul and his simple marital urge. If she’d let things turn out differently, the two of them might be climbing into bed right now, turning off the television in some nice house in Alexandria.
She herself was caught between two banked fires. Her recent pursuit of passion, for all its illicit pleasures, seemed at the moment as obligatory as another person’s quest for security and the norm. If she were truly carried away by love, and Fred, she might by now be turning the handle of some basement printing press, cranking out the latest stack of Free Estonia Now pamphlets, helping her man to turn the tide. As it was, come Monday she and Fuller, if Ike remained alive, would no doubt be spreading the message of continuity, steady as she goes, to the fire-breathers on the Hill, shoring up all the caution Fred wanted to blast away with liberty’s blowtorch.
She let the Star fall to the floor, and she clicked off the light.
“You know,” Senator Goldwater reflected, “I’d ten times rather play cards with Hubert. Dick Nixon is one of the shiftiest sons of bitches I’ve met since I got here in ’52.”
Fuller smiled, even tilted his head back to accentuate amusement, though he really didn’t need to strive for effect. He liked this handsome half-Jew, half-Episcopalian from Arizona.
“May I tell that to Mr. Morton?” he asked.
“You can tell it to the goddamn New York Times, for all I care,” said Goldwater. “Though I know you won’t.”
“No, sir.”
Fuller stood up to leave, having gotten what he wanted—an assurance that Goldwater, like the other bellicose senators he had to visit, would throughout the tense coming days confine himself to supporting get-well-Ike resolutions, and not overcompensate for any appearance of governmental distraction by having America rattle its missiles in their hardened silos. So far only McCarthy was believed to be scenting opportunity within the crisis. Several reports since Saturday had him thirsting anew for politics, not just Jim Beam.
“Two more stops to make,” said Fuller, shaking Goldwater’s hand. But his progress toward Senator Hickenlooper’s office was halted in Goldwater’s reception area by the sight of Senator Charles Potter and Tommy McIntyre.
Citizen Canes was sturdily upright, his balding head under a cheap, snap-brim Stratoliner that the missus had probably picked up at Herzog’s, thinking it would make him look snazzy. Which was not an adjective one would apply to McIntyre, with his rheumy eyes and gin-blossomed cheeks. He appeared to need a couple of canes more than Potter did.
“A pleasure, Senator,” said Fuller, extending his hand. “Even if this accidental encounter doesn’t save me any labor. There’s no need, of course, to come see you in this uncertain time. We know your instincts will be superb.”
Tommy coughed. “You’re laying it on pretty thick today.”
Fuller, tilting back his head in the same move he’d used on Goldwater, felt almost relieved that the broken-looking Irishman hadn’t lost his nasty gab.
“I appreciate the compliment,” said Potter, catching sight of the man he’d come to visit. He raised one of his canes and winked its little electric light. “Barry!”
Goldwater waved him forward.
“I’m here to pick up my model,” Potter explained to Fuller. With the excitement of a boy, he headed toward the inner office, pointing as he went to one of several plastic miniatures of the RC-121, the “flying radar station,” that were on display. Goldwater, a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, had piloted the plane over the Pacific last weekend.
Left alone with Tommy, Fuller was delayed in taking his leave by some compliments the ravaged little man had to offer. “Congratulations on your engagement. I saw mention made of it in the Star.”
“Thank you, McIntyre.”
“I’m sure she’s a beautiful girl.”
“Very.”
“I lost my girl almost a month ago.” Tommy shifted his gaze to the window. He had a look of sheer agony, and the dampness on his eyes had swollen into actual tears.
My girl? Was this, Fuller wondered, remembering Tim’s piece of the story, the drunken woman in Michigan, the labor widow supposed to be at the heart of McCarthy’s implosion?
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Tommy’s face turned angry, and not so much toward the world as toward Hawkins Fuller in particular. “One can’t count the number of women who have been betrayed by men, nor the number who will be. What’s your girl’s name again?”
“Boardman,” said Fuller. “Lucy Boardman.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” McIntyre responded, as if to suggest he was updating the police files he kept in his head. “By the way, back at the office we don’t hear nearly enough from your friend, Private Laughlin.”
“What are you hearing from the constituents? Good wishes for the president’s health, I imagine?”
“Actually,” said Tommy, “most of the wires concern the acquittal of those apes who killed the Till boy down in Mississippi. It’s nice to know more than a few people don’t believe a colored fellow should necessarily be beaten to death for whistling at a white woman.”
The remark vibrated with Tommy’s shrill sympathy for the oppressed, but it also carried a threatening whiff, an intimation that Fuller, a sexual trangressor himself, must find stories like the Till boy’s particularly unsettling.
Fuller confined himself to some cool, safe sarcasm: “‘No Negroes on the jury because none are registered to vote in the county.’ That was the official local explanation. Which I suppose we’ll report with a straight face over the Voice of America.”
“A nice part of the country for your boy to be in.”
“It’s time for me to call my office,” said Fuller. He tipped his hat to avoid
shaking Tommy’s hand, and when he got to a pay phone at the end of the corridor he rang the bureau.
Mary picked up.
“I was expecting to hear Beverly,” said Fuller.
“She’s down the hall collecting some telexes.”
“Why isn’t the new girl doing that? We do have a receptionist now, don’t we?”
“She left early. She’s gotten engaged, as a matter of fact. Just at lunchtime. Her mother came by to take her out for a celebration.”
“There’s a lot of that going around. And the mothers seem to like it.”
“Well, my mother’s dead, Fuller.”
“So’s mine, almost.”
“Let me get your messages.”
Cold as ice, thought Fuller. Things could not be going well with the married shoemaker.
“Congressmen Lovre and Dies returned your calls,” said Mary. “And Senator Pastore’s office phoned—nothing urgent. Also, the boss has talked to C. D. Jackson, who’s come down to the White House from New York. Everything seems to be fine. Mr. Morton says there’s no need for you to see Senator Bridges, or even Welker.”
“Good,” said Fuller. “The natives aren’t restless. Ike can breathe easy in his oxygen tent.”
“Last but not least,” said Mary, “your fiancée phoned to say that she’ll be coming by the office at five-thirty. She’d like for the two of you to go out for an early dinner and a movie.”
“What’s playing?” Fuller asked.
“I highly don’t recommend The McConnell Story. June Allyson and Alan Ladd.”
Have you ever frequented a Washington, D.C., establishment called the Jewel Box, at the corner of Sixteenth and L streets?
The tufted purple walls. The bartender who looks a little like Alan Ladd.
“Miss Johnson, you’ll need to ring the future Mrs. Fuller and tell her that Monday is my night out with the boys.”
A day after their surprise wedding at Grossinger’s, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds were in D.C. The ceremony had been put off until Monday night, in deference to Yom Kippur. “Eddie is of the Jewish faith,” reported the wire-service story in the New Orleans Item. It was with a similar sense of responsibility that the bridegroom had postponed the couple’s honeymoon, so that he could keep a commitment to perform for the Coca-Cola bottlers holding their convention at Washington’s Statler Hotel.
“So, does this go in?” asked Private John Nontone, holding the Eddie-and-Debbie clipping. Though a day old, the story might still find its way onto the “Lighter Side” page of The Kisatchian.
“Yep,” said Tim, speaking from his experience at the Evening Star and almost six months here. “Eddie is a vet. He was even in Korea. I’ll rewrite it to highlight that.”
“You’re the boss,” said Nontone, a twenty-year-old from Delaware who’d arrived at the base three weeks ago.
“You want one of these?” asked Tim, offering Nontone a cookie from the package that had just arrived.
“God, they’re awful,” said Nontone, after a single bite.
“I know.”
“I hope your mother or your girl didn’t make them.”
“A friend’s girl,” Tim explained, as he went to work on a page layout. “I guess it’s the thought that counts.”
Gloria Rostwald, Kenneth Woodforde’s painter girlfriend, was the baker, and the cookies she’d produced resembled little cinderblocks. They were cookies trying hard to be something less frivolous than cookies; the gray squares wanted you to know that they would no more be caught wearing sprinkles or icing than one of their maker’s paintings would sport a representational figure.
The box they’d come in had contained no note from the baker, only one from Woodforde, written on Saturday night and urging Tim to be careful with the enclosed edibles:
Unlike Eisenhower, you might have real digestive problems after eating these. That was a nice little smokescreen, don’t you think? Here’s hoping Nixon, now that he’s in charge, doesn’t add a year to your enlistment. As it is, the Italians are one election away from a Communist government (yes, people do choose such things), so NATO may not prove much in the way of a first line of defense for the good old USA. Which I’ve started to see more than enough of in my (old) Chevrolet. The magazine has me out in the hinterlands looking for hot progressive prospects for next year’s elections. I’ll let you know who they are as soon as I find any.—KW
Once he finished answering Francy’s latest letter—ducking her exhortation that he come home for Christmas—Tim would have to send Woodforde’s girlfriend a thank-you note, maybe with a p.s. telling Woodforde himself that, if leprosy could be pushed back, then communism could, too. The sermon during Sunday’s radio Mass for shut-ins, which Tim had listened to before going to church on the post, had been all about advances being made against the disease in Dr. Schweitzer’s lab and Father Damien’s old colony. What, the radio celebrant had wondered, should Christians do when such a familiar symbol of dispossession and God’s mysterious ways became extinct? Rejoice!
“Here’s another one,” said Nontone, coming back with a second clipping. “In?”
The item concerned the decision of Marie Dionne, one of the quintuplets, now past twenty, to return to the convent she’d left, homesick, the year before.
“Out,” said Tim, leery of letting Major Brillam think he was riding his own hobbyhorses onto the pages of The Kisatchian. Around the base he was known, cheerfully enough, as a holy roller, even if when applied to him the term meant something different from what it did in the Louisiana hamlets just beyond Fort Polk’s perimeter.
Actually, the Dionne story interested Tim quite a bit, because these days—in a way he hadn’t allowed himself in years—he was thinking a lot about the seminary, and how he might apply once he’d finished up with the army. Now that he was past Hawk, had made his renunciation and been reconciled to the Church, he was beginning to believe he might be allowed to move beyond the whole issue of his “tendencies”—as he’d so far managed to do here in the army. He didn’t know whether he had a real calling for the priesthood, but he cherished the idea that he might still receive one—a sudden, glorious annunciation that could happen anywhere, in the motor pool or even the PX.
Right now, waiting for his mail (with army logic, letters arrived more slowly than parcels), he went back to reading his biography of Cardinal Mindszenty. He had arrived at the prelate’s “Statement of November 18, 1948,” made just weeks before the Russians arrested him, forced him into a clown’s costume, and beat him with truncheons:
Such a systematic and purposeful net of propaganda lies—a hundred times disproved and yet a hundred times spread anew—has never been organized against the seventy-eight predecessors in my office. I stand for God, for the Church and for Hungary. This responsibility has been imposed upon me by the fate of my nation, which stands alone, an orphan in the whole world. Compared with the sufferings of my people, my own fate is of no importance.
Tim could feel in this pronouncement the peace and strength that certainty give, a serene immunity from persecution or even simple need. He had returned to the book a half-dozen times yesterday, and would get back to it as soon as he opened the two envelopes Nontone was now handing him.
One had been sent by his mother, who these days addressed him with the nervous politeness someone might employ in a first approach to a skittish Korean orphan. Today she was asking what he’d like to have for his birthday, still five weeks away.
The second envelope appeared to have no return address, just a Washington postmark, but there was, Tim now noticed on the back flap, a small handwritten name: Miss Beatrice Lightfoot. Inside, neatly cut from the Sunday Star, was the item MARRIAGE OF MR. FULLER ANNOUNCED. The bridegroom-elect, deputy assistant chief…to be married on Saturday, December third.
Tim’s mind gave no thought to the sender, or to how she had known where to find him. The anger and despair that swept through him—worse now than that night in New Orleans—arose only from his dispossess
ion. He was seized by a sudden, dizzying lust for Hawkins, for the long-ago smell and taste of him. He felt hollow, literally, without the man he loved inside him.
This unexpected tumult would have been a furious temptation had its object been anywhere near or obtainable. As things were, the storm of sensation could only torment Tim like a punishment without a crime, a midnight visit from the secret police. But, unlike Mindszenty, he had no peace or strength or certainty. His reconciliation with God, he knew, was just a tar paper shack, ready to be blown to bits while his cries went unheard on the wind.
He closed his eyes and prayed for help.
“From the look on your face I’m guessing you don’t like to travel.”
Major Brillam was standing over him.
“Sir?”
“You haven’t gotten your orders yet?”
“No.”
“Your unit’s headed to France. I’m going to miss you, son.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
December 16, 1955
“I therefore announce my candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination,” declared Senator Estes Kefauver. “I intend to conduct a vigorous campaign. As in 1952, I will enter a number of state primaries. I am a firm believer…”
Here in the second row of a chilly ballroom at the Willard, the Star’s Cecil Holland leaned over to pick up the trademark coonskin cap that had landed beside him when Senator Kefauver tossed it, for the photographers, into a nonexistent ring.
“If you’re so cold,” whispered Holland to Mary McGrory, “why don’t you make use of this?”
“It’s not even twenty degrees outside,” she answered softly, while assessing the fur cap’s possibilities as a muff. “It would be rather pretty without the tail.”
“The tail is all Kefauver’s going to be,” declared Joe Alsop, to Holland’s right. “They’ll waste him as the VP candidate on another losing run by Stevenson.”
“You think so?” whispered a man from the Baltimore Sun. “He just said he wouldn’t take the second spot.”
Fellow Travelers Page 27