“He’ll take it,” said Alsop, perfectly certain. “From what I hear, Stevenson’s heart is in worse shape than Ike’s. If Adlai gets an electoral miracle, he won’t get an actuarial one, too. He’ll drop dead during his first year in office. That’s the way Estes will be thinking come the convention. He’ll take it.”
A young woman from the Scripps-Howard papers, appalled by such ghoulishness, shot Alsop a glance. For good measure she paid Kefauver a compliment, telling the reporter on her left: “Pretty shrewd of him to get in on the Davy Crockett craze.” She pointed to the coonskin on Miss McGrory’s lap.
Alsop groaned. “Oh, God,” he complained to Holland. “Poor little nitwit.”
Holland laughed, knowing as well as Alsop that the cap derived not from Davy Crockett but one of Kefauver’s early campaigns, during which an opposing political boss mocked him as a “pet coon.”
At the lectern, the senator was now citing assurances he’d gotten from Harry Truman himself that the former president wouldn’t block his nomination in favor of Stevenson’s, as he’d done in ’52.
Kenneth Woodforde turned around to the third row and whispered to Tommy McIntyre, one of the dozen or so Hill staffers mixed in with the press this morning: “Stevenson doesn’t need Truman now that he’s got God.” The Illinois governor’s recent move from the Unitarian to the Presbyterian Church did look calculated enough to make even the girl from Scripps-Howard roll her eyes once it was mentioned.
“He’s come to understand,” Woodforde explained to Tommy, “that the deity really is the insurance salesman down the street, not that cosmic To Whom It May Concern.”
Miss McGrory, in a voice even softer than Woodforde’s whisper, defended Stevenson. “He’s still a Unitarian. There’s no UU church near his farm in Libertyville, so he’s making do with the Presbyterians.”
“Careful, Mary,” said Cecil Holland. “I’ll have to take back Kefauver’s coonskin if you’re still so madly for Adlai.”
“Kefauver himself is a little like God,” announced Alsop, in his most mandarin way, not bothering to whisper at all. “He spends more time hearing the afflicted than in giving them relief.” He referred to all the committee investigations the Tennesseean had held since coming to the Senate in ’49—hearings on organized crime, steel prices, juvenile delinquency, boxing. Most of them had produced more television coverage than legislation.
Right now Kefauver was answering a question about which primaries he’d be entering; it was followed by another about what the polls were showing. He could not, of course, comment on the most important sounding of all, which would take place tomorrow at Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm, when Dr. Paul Dudley White put his stethoscope on the president’s chest. If all was in order, the eminent cardiologist had promised, Ike could make his own decision about whether to run for a second term.
Bored with Kefauver’s optimism, Tommy spit into a paper cup and wondered if there was a bar open anywhere in the Willard at ten-thirty a.m. He tapped Woodforde on the shoulder and asked, “Why are you wasting your time with this? You ought to go up to New York and find Welker. Write a few hundred words about the egg running off his face.”
Woodforde laughed. The Idaho reactionary and his wife, about to embark on a Caribbean cruise out of New York, had the other night been sitting in their cabin when a surprise party of revelers burst in with platters of caviar, a giant floral wreath, jeroboams of champagne—and two flashing cameras. The bon voyage bounty had all come from the hard-left longshoremen’s union, whose leaders thought they could embarrass the senator with all the gun-crazy McCarthyites who kept voting for him out there in the Wild West.
Tommy handed Woodforde a press release he’d gotten from Welker’s office this morning decrying the “obvious attempt to get even with the Senator for his outspoken criticism of communism and his personal fight against the Commies.”
Woodforde smothered some laughter over the last mimeographed word, too childishly crude for even McCarthy to use. He whispered to Tommy, “It’s usually about now that Welker starts hinting he’s up against the fags to boot. But I’m not sure that’s going to work with Tough Tony Anastasia.”
Cecil Holland leaned across Miss McGrory’s coonskin muff to remind Woodforde that the stevedores’ union was pretty full of Communists.
“Yeah,” said Tommy, “ones with TVs and houses in Levittown.” Not his kind of Communists, not the ones from twenty years ago, the ones like Annie Larchwood’s husband.
Miss McGrory shooshed the males around her, and then declared: “At least Kefauver is more or less self-made.” A stenciled biography reminded the reporters here that he’d worked his way through law school waiting tables.
Ignoring Miss McGrory—the sort of genteel liberal that wearied him—Woodforde turned back once more to the combustible McIntyre. “So this defector coming home: are Potter’s constituents complaining they’ll be contaminated by having him in their midst?”
After several years in China, Richard Tenneson, a Korea POW who’d gone over to the enemy, was today returning to his family’s farm—but in Minnesota, not Michigan, Tommy corrected. “They can complain to Humphrey,” he told Woodforde.
“This guy’s not exactly one of the all-American stoics Potter had before his committee. Even now he’s not fully contrite.”
“No,” said Tommy. “If this kid had testified, Charlie would have pitched such a fit his canes would’ve shorted out.”
“And Potter’s apoplectic moments are pretty few and far between. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“Charlie doesn’t have many moments one could even call conscious,” said Tommy, spitting again into his cup. “And I don’t have to tell you that that’s off the fucking record.”
Undeterred, Woodforde got to his real question: “Then what accounted for his apoplexy, or at least high dudgeon, a year and a half ago? At the end of the army nonsense.”
The memory forced Tommy’s yellow teeth into a big smile: “You mean his burst of moral fervor?”
“Yeah,” said Woodforde, trying to make his insistence appear casual. When Tommy said nothing more, he tried another tack. “Who else knows anything about it? Besides you, that is.”
Tommy’s grin retracted itself into a wary pout. “Oh, it’s a very small circle. Like the number of Kefauver’s advisers with any sense.”
“Would it include my old acquaintance Private Laughlin?”
Tommy wheezed, phlegmily, while rising from his chair. “I think I’m allergic to that goddamned coonskin.”
“Étaient-ils Résistants?” Tim asked. He pointed to the knot of men cheering on the National Assembly candidate who’d just cited his wartime service from the steps of the Rheims city hall.
The man standing next to Tim answered in English, and with knowing laughter. “Oh, we were all resisters. Every one of us!”
With no translation for the meaning to get lost in, the remark’s tone seemed to contain equal measures of sardonic pleasure and shame. Tim decided not to press the matter, settling for self-mockery about his bad French. “Un américain évident, oui?” he asked, pointing to himself.
“Yep,” said the Frenchman, sounding the syllable like a movie cowboy. He stubbed out his Gitane, shook Tim’s hand, and obeyed a summons from his wife, who had just emerged from the bakery. The pair walked away from the mairie, indifferent to the rest of the political speech.
They were an exception. Tim and two guys from the radio unit who had passes today had been told not to wear their uniforms, since all varieties of French political passion seemed to be rising with the approach of the January 2 elections. Coming into town, Tim had had no need to consult Jerry Baumeister’s old pocket dictionary, which he’d been sent over with by Mary, to grasp the pro-Communist slogans and À BAS USA he’d seen festooning the walls and alleys. There were so many signs for so many candidates that you half expected the plaster baby in the city’s Christmas crèche to be holding one, too.
The cathedral was Tim’s destination thi
s afternoon, but he found it hard not to get caught up in the auditory duel that was starting between the orating candidate—now blaming Prime Minister Faure for the loss at Dien Bien Phu—and an opposing claque that shouted, over and over, “Salaud!” Tim could hear Gallic echoes of “Who lost China?” in the exchange, and for a moment he imagined himself back in the Senate Caucus Room a year and a half ago. The dangerous memories surrounding that time at last propelled him toward the cathedral and onto his knees, beneath the haloed carving of an unknown saint.
Some nearby votive candles looked like the pipes of an organ in flames, and the church’s chalk walls, wrested over centuries, block by block, from plains all over Champagne, bore not only the marks of the First World War’s bombardments but also scars from the French Revolution. Tim reckoned that he had been repairing his own shelter for nearly a year, starting over whenever some gust, like the news of Hawk’s engagement, knocked it down. There were times when he was beginning to believe he’d built himself a snug little chapel, but there were still those other nights when it would be blown away in an instant, and he would have to dig himself a foxhole with a few desperate prayers, hoping to stay hidden from harm until morning.
Earlier today, at the café near the mairie, he’d had a ham sandwich and some pâté de grives, a regional specialty that the waiter eventually confessed was made from the thrushes one saw fluttering in and out of the local bushes. Tim had eaten what he could of it while reading the Herald-Tribune’s article about a Budapest AP correspondent named Marton who with his wife had just been arrested and tried as a spy. Their fate? Unknown. Tim imagined them in a cell down the hall from Cardinal Mindszenty.
These stories of freedom’s instant and complete disappearance had an ever-tighter hold on his thoughts. He’d lately been making himself read a book called Religion and the Modern State by an Englishman named Dawson. He’d acquired it on his one trip to Paris, when he’d gone looking for mystery novels in an English-language bookshop, and he was carrying it with him even today. Its thesis—that all the kingdoms of state would disappear, become useless, “as soon as the light comes”—had made him understand more exactly the nature of his patriotism. The intense attachment he felt to his own country—the world’s bulwark against totalitarianism—derived from America’s permitting him to go about his real business in the world, which was the search for a revelation so great, for a peace so absolute and ecstatic, that he would in time be lifted away from the world entirely. His own country, his own state, allowed this quest; the opposing state didn’t. And yet, if his life and everyone else’s managed to fulfill itself, then even America would subside into irrelevance. Right now one had to protect it from its enemies, but finally it would drop away like the first stage of a rocket that took one to a thoroughly different universe.
He had tried, clumsily, to explain all this in a letter to Kenneth Woodforde, who had replied with a telegram that the mail-room officer handed over with raised eyebrows: CONGRATULATIONS, LAUGHLIN, ON BECOMING A MARXIST—STOP—YOURS UNTIL THE STATE WITHERS AWAY, KW.
He had taken to praying with a fervor beyond anything he’d previously achieved in his life, and to fasting as well, at least occasionally—not for any penitential credit the effort might provide, but for the lightheadedness it brought on, the physical floating he could feel after about thirty-six hours. Longer than that, he’d joked to Woodforde, and he couldn’t do his job for the benevolent, temporary nation-state.
And yet maybe these moments of exultation were no more than spiritual dizziness, and he himself was just a “dizzy dame,” what Hawkins used to call the nightclub-obsessed boyfriend of some older man he knew. He would never be a systematic thinker or half as quick as Woodforde. In fact, along with the Dawson book he had purchased a copy of T. S. Eliot’s essays—partly to further his religious way through this dangerous, secular world, but also, he knew, because when he saw the spine he had been seared by a memory of Hawk standing naked in the dark, purring the lyrics of one of his Eartha Kitt records:
T. S. Eliot writes books for me;
Sherman Billingsley even cooks for me;
Monotonous…
The bus back to Verdun left at three-forty, and when it pulled out from the center of Rheims, Tim found himself sitting amidst several men and women in their sixties, American husbands bringing their wives back to the war they had fought four decades before. Verdun itself was a kind of giant cenotaph to the month-after-month slaughter of 1916, though that battle held none of these men’s particular memories. They had arrived with the rest of the Americans the following year, for the last of the blood and derangement, which still on occasion exploded from the region’s landscape, when some farmer’s tractor disturbed a mine that had been slumbering for forty summers.
This was the kind of story Tim wrote up for The Com Z Cadence, the official newspaper of the army’s Second LOC, or Line of Communication, a significant stretch of the Americans’ ever-burgeoning Cold War home away from home. Running from Verdun to Orléans to La Rochelle, the Second LOC had been established as a backstop, in the event the First LOC, strung through Germany, got overrun by the Russians. The Yanks may have come late to Verdun back in ’17, but this time they’d come to town early, manning the 7,965th Area Command in advance of the next war.
The Com Z Cadence—the Last Voice You’ll Hear, as the staff liked to joke—specialized in morale-building local color and human interest. In the last couple of weeks Tim had done stories on the flower sellers outside the U.S. cemetery at Varennes, and the never-idle two-thousand-foot runway at Saran. His biggest accomplishment had been a story he’d freelanced to Stars and Stripes itself about the engineering depot at Toul, where Caesar’s legions had once camped and where their American successors, after spending a first winter in tents, had by now built a whole town of warehouses, barracks, and chapels. They’d even fielded a baseball team called the Toul-Nancy Dodgers.
The bus let the tourists off in town and continued to the base, whose horseshoe-shaped welcome arch reminded him of the neon sign greeting tourists to Reno, as he’d seen it years ago on a postcard sent by Uncle Frank. Inside the caserne, Tim shared a large room, down the hall from the First Signal Group’s cryptographers, with seven other guys. The barracks dated from just after the Franco-Prussian War—a war he’d barely heard of—and some recruits said you could still smell the stables that had once been on the ground floor. Tim’s own floor, the third, was served by a single shower, which provided a measure of hygiene hilarity for letters to Francy and Tom, communications that he kept immaculately free of the politics and religion he sent to Mary and to Woodforde.
“Un visiteur—pour vous!” said the local woman who manned the message desk.
Tim cocked his head in disbelief.
“Oui!” she insisted, pointing to the little excuse for a lounge down the hall and to the right. “He is here on, how do Americans say, his honeymoon?”
For one moment, his heart pounding, he thought it might be Hawk: to be married on Saturday, December third. It was the sort of thing he would do, a show of the brazen insouciance he couldn’t live without displaying. But then he realized it had to be Jerry Baumeister, who must have made his mariage blanc to Beverly Phillips and come here on a side trip from Paris to show her another portion of the culture behind his now useless master’s degree.
Once inside the lounge, Tim saw that he was wrong in this guess, too.
“Paul!” he exclaimed.
The “brewer”—he could hear Hawkins saying it—extended his hand.
“Private Laughlin.”
“Where’s Mrs. Hildebrand? Congratulations. I just heard.”
“Thanks,” said Paul, who went on to explain that his wife, Marjorie, until recently his brother’s bookkeeper, was resting in town at the Hôtel Bellevue on the Avenue de Douaumont, which neither of them could really pronounce. They’d been married last Saturday, the tenth, and had come over to Paris on TWA. Even though it was a honeymoon, Marjorie wanted to see the patch
of ground in Ardennes where her brother had been killed late in ’44, as well as the “Red Schoolhouse” over in Rheims, where the Germans had surrendered to the Allies. When they were through with this historical circuit, they would start making their way to London.
Tim told them he could get information from FAFLO, the French-American Fiscal Liaison Office—“we’ve got initials for everything”—about discounts for a Europabus they could take from Paris to Calais.
Paul nodded thanks.
“She never told me you were getting married,” said Tim, lowering his voice and somehow unable to say “Mary,” as if the new Marjorie Hildebrand might actually be here instead of at the hotel.
“She asked me to check up on you,” explained Paul. “Make sure you were okay.”
“I write to her more than to my sister!” Tim said, with an overhearty laugh. “She knows I’m fine.”
“She says you don’t talk about much except God and the Communists.”
Tim hoped his hand was covering the title of Dawson’s book. He continued speaking through simulated laughter: “She doesn’t tell me much, either. Like about your getting married, for instance!”
Hildebrand wondered what she did and didn’t tell this kid, whom he liked well enough despite his condition, which he probably couldn’t help and might still be young enough to grow out of. Had she confided her sputtering affair with the Estonian—as she’d confided it to him? He doubted it, since in his own case Mary had almost made a present of the story, an intimate parting gift on the eve of his marriage.
“Did she tell you,” asked Paul, “that her friend Beverly has left the office?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, just a couple of weeks ago. She’s joined the staff of some Illinois congressman. She made a connection with his office when she did that charity show on the Hill. Mary says she never liked working for State after they fired her friend Jerry.”
“I came over here with some of his French books.”
Fellow Travelers Page 28