“I have a friend,” said Tim, “who calls Alsop Walter Liplock.” He knew he was quoting this only for the chance to hear Hawk’s voice in his head.
“Would this friend be your friend Fuller?”
“You know Fuller?” asked Tim, trying to sound casual.
“I’ve met him once or twice. Most of what I know about him comes from your other friend, McIntyre.”
Tim rolled a peanut between his fingers.
“Which reminds me,” said Woodforde, reaching into his pocket for a note penciled in what Tim recognized as Tommy McIntyre’s hand: You should write to your friend. 3423 Mt. Eagle Place, Alexandria. He misses you.
Tim’s eyes welled with longing and rage. He knew that Tommy was sending this not because of the extreme romantic nature they supposedly shared—I told you because you’ll understand—but for the cruel pleasure of control, even more satisfying when exercised across a vast distance.
“He’s special to you, isn’t he?” asked Woodforde.
Did the soothing manner of this leading question approximate a defense attorney’s direct examination of his client? Or, Tim wondered, did it mirror the sympathy of the police detective putting queries to a distraught victim? No, he decided: it was the tone of a reporter trying to get a story.
“Why are you spending all this time with McIntyre?” he at last responded. “Have you developed a sudden interest in Potter’s position on overfishing the sea lamprey? Maybe you’re writing the senator’s biography? Legless and Dangerous: The Citizen Canes Story.”
“Easy, Laughlin,” cautioned Woodforde, still soothing, but hardly in retreat. “I go to Potter’s office to see McIntyre himself. He knows a lot, shall we say, though he does like to tantalize as much as to tell.” He looked straight at Tim. “I don’t care about you and Fuller. That’s your business.”
“What’s your business?”
“I want to know why Potter did what he did a year and a half ago, at the end of the hearings.”
“Oh, please,” said Tim, tossing the peanut to the floor. “No one cares anymore about those procedural votes.”
Woodforde replied in a good imitation of Tommy’s Irish voice: “You boys all think you’re so clever. So worldly wise, believin’ Cohn had somethin’ on McCarthy. You never ask yourselves if Schine had somethin’ on Joe.”
At this remove Tim had to ask himself if he could even remember who had had what on whom. He had tried for a year and a half to wipe from his mind the sordid revelations Tommy McIntyre had cackled into the phone line between D.C. and Madison Square Garden: how the drunk McCarthy had been tempted with Potter’s bastard son. Boys, girls, your old-maid auntie. When he’s hammered he’ll grope anything. How the photo of McCarthy succumbing had wound up in the hands of David Schine instead of Tommy. And how it had brought McCarthy low nonetheless. Dave let Joe know he had it, and from that moment on, if Royboy insisted Dave get an ice cream sundae every morning at reveille, Joe was ready to initial the request.
Tim finished his beer as Woodforde opened a second one for him, which he began drinking fast, remembering how Hawk used to say that “by the third one you could get Skippy to vote for Norman Thomas.” And that was without thirty-plus hours of fasting, which, except for a glass of milk, he’d undergone since yesterday afternoon. He’d go until midnight tonight, when he’d take a vision-seeking walk around the base perimeter.
Lightheaded, he looked at Tommy’s note—a whisper from Iago. He hated him, he decided, just as he hated being here in the army as the only way to escape his love for Hawk. He decided he would hate Woodforde, too.
“So that’s all you know?” he finally asked the writer.
“Does any of it involve Fuller?” Woodforde persisted.
Relishing a sense of power, the feeling that at last he had something to give or withhold, Tim answered: “See if you can find an eighteen-year-old punk named Michael Larchwood in Cheboygan, Michigan.”
Woodforde wrote down the name.
“See if you’re smart enough to find out what his real last name is, or ought to be.”
“Why don’t you tell it to me?”
“I’ve got to go,” said Tim, getting up, none too steadily, and starting for the door. “I’m craving the opium of the people.”
“So,” asked Fuller, “was this de Staël a White Russian with a Blue Period or a Blue Russian with a White Period?”
Mary pulled from her purse a Phillips Collection brochure about Nicolas de Staël, the exiled Russian painter who had last year committed suicide in Paris. She offered the gallery’s booklet as proof, answering the real question on Fuller’s mind, which was whether she’d in fact had a lunchtime tryst with “the Estonian.”
“I’m disappointed,” said Fuller.
“Are you living vicariously through me these days?”
He laughed and disappeared into his office, but both of them knew there was an element of truth in what she was suggesting. Since his wedding, his hours at the department had become more regular, and his phone rang far less often with calls from young men not doing government business.
A new boss had also affected his routine and behavior. Mr. Morton had left at the end of February to run for the Senate from Kentucky, and he’d been replaced by Robert C. Hill, a serious New Englander, not yet forty, who probably wouldn’t be around for long. Mr. Hill had already had the ambassadorships to Costa Rica and El Salvador and was said to be after the big prize in his region of expertise, the embassy in Mexico City. In the meantime, he was proving a tougher nut than his predecessor. Apropos of Sobolev and the sailors who’d defected, he was asking hard, almost Nixonian questions of the department’s UN liaisons, but he had also been pushing back against the department’s Senate critics, telling them they were ill-informed whenever that was the case, as it frequently was.
Hill and Fuller were not each other’s cup of tea, but the acquisition of a wife had made the latter even more socially deployable than he’d been before. On Sunday afternoon, Fuller had glamorously represented the bureau at the Afghans’ independence-week party over on Wyoming Avenue, where the top-drawer little crowd had included Justice Douglas and Senator Saltonstall, whom everyone at State was aware of as a distant relative of Fuller’s bride.
Putting away the museum brochure, Mary opened an envelope sent over by Congressman Yates’s office: from Beverly, it turned out, a sketch of the wedding dress—a sly, knee-length knockoff of Grace Kelly’s—in which she would be married next month.
Mary had begun to think of herself—without much regret, she tried to believe—as an old maid, even if her affair continued with intermittent ardor. Fred would never offer to leave his wife, and she would never ask him to. She would never have his undivided attention, and he could no longer have hers when he talked of the latest atrocity or opportunity for Estonia, as he did on the phone several times a week.
Indeed, here he was now:
“Hello, baby.”
“Hello, Fred.”
“I’d love to see you Monday, but I’ll be picketing you instead.”
She had heard about the anti-Sobolev demonstration being planned for the sidewalks outside the department. “Maybe we could manage a quick kiss behind the police van?” she offered.
“Maybe.”
“Fred, I was joking.”
“Oh,” he said. “You know, there is a way we can combine the two activities, baby.”
“Really? Tell me.”
“Late September, outside the General Assembly in New York. All the exile groups are getting together for something pretty gigantic. On a weekend. I can book us into the San Carlos Hotel; it’ll feel like a honeymoon.”
Or a farewell, she thought.
“That didn’t come out right,” he apologized. “I just meant we’d be in a different place altogether, not your city, not mine.”
She tried to imagine herself shopping for shoes on Madison Avenue while Fred carried a placard through Turtle Bay. Maybe she would feel like a wife who’d accompa
nied her husband to a convention of druggists or petroleum engineers.
“I’ll take you to My Fair Lady,” he added.
“Estonia will be free before you can get tickets. But I accept the invitation to New York.”
She could not shake the feeling that this proposed weekend, still months away, would be the end of it. But she would rather they had their goodbye scene there than here, so she wouldn’t keep running into the memory.
A moment after the two of them hung up, a delivery boy from the cleaners on Virginia Avenue entered the office. Through the cellophane bag she could see it was a tuxedo he was carrying.
“Mr. Fuller?” he asked, looking at the ticket.
Mary pointed to the right doorway, but having heard his name, Fuller was already emerging. He paid for the garment and asked the boy to hang it in his office.
“And where are you off to tonight?” asked Mary.
“White House Correspondents’ dinner. At the table of a UPI man, whom I’ll no doubt convince we’ve handled Sobolev and the sailors exactly right. Let me show you what you’ll be missing.” He opened Mary’s Washington Post to a photo of Patti Page and Jimmy Cagney, the evening’s entertainment, rehearsing at the Sheraton Park.
“Well, aren’t you a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Fuller pointed to Patti Page. “That doggie in the window was her reflection.”
Mary laughed hard, even while wondering whether this wasn’t a line he’d heard from the comic piano player at the Chicken Hut, one of the bars Jerry Baumeister unblushingly mentioned from time to time, the way a regular man about to forsake bachelorhood might bring up bygone nights with his buddies at the corner gin mill.
As Fuller read her the story about the evening’s dinner, she realized why she detested Lucy. It was because she herself believed in nature, in Fuller’s fulfilling what she now accepted as his own. She also had begun to feel, perhaps contradictorily, that Jerry and Beverly were fulfilling some aspect of their natures; marriage for them would be the cementing of something childlike and fraternal and curiously authentic. But Fuller’s union with Lucy was no civilized companionship, or even some piece of sophisticated realism; it was a corrupt bargain that the two of them had struck. Fuller thought he was on top of it, but Lucy’s needle was in him deeper than McLeod’s had ever been.
“Is Lucy coming here before the dinner?”
“No.”
“What about the tuxedo?”
“That’s for Monday night. Something with the Joint Chiefs. Tonight is business suits, but I will be heading back to home and hearth between here and the Sheraton Park.”
“Well, the sight of you and Lucy getting ready for a party must look like a ‘Diamond Is Forever’ ad.” She was being very polite.
“Actually, we’ll be undressing. I’ve committed to making a baby, and the calendar has been calibrated like an atomic clock. The fertility gods are supposed to be in full cry between now and seven.” He checked his watch. “I’ll be leaving early.”
“Would you like a boy or a girl?”
“I’d like a reprieve.”
He could see a look on her face that said tell me: tell me that you know it’s a mistake; tell me why you really did this; and tell me whether you aren’t really going off to meet a boy instead. But Fuller was thinking that the only mistake he’d made had been with the Italian boy. As Andy Sorrell had predicted, Tony Bianco could be had—but, as it turned out, only inconveniently. The kid had been back to Alexandria twice, without an invitation, the first time parking a block away, waiting for Fuller to pass by so that he could ask him for the price of a new set of tires. The second time he’d reappeared by mail, requesting help for his mother’s operation—for which Mrs. Hawkins Fuller charitably let her husband write a check on the joint account while she suppressed her common sense and they both silently hoped this would be the last such communication.
No, this was not the big feared slip-up that had motivated him into marriage, but it was a slip-up nonetheless, and from it Lucy had tacitly extracted the agreement to make a baby, another tie that would bind, and earlier than he’d expected.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
October 31–November 7, 1956
“Major Conroy’s looking for you.”
“Let him look,” said Tim, shooting Private Meyers a joyful look. He was hunched over one of the radios, picking up English-language transmissions out of Hungary. For the past week, these broadcasts had been more thrilling than any long-ago episode of Inner Sanctum. His mind and spirit had been sparking and overloading, as if the radio console were the source of his own electricity. It was now 9:30 a.m., and he’d been helping the operators with transcription since five o’clock.
Beginning Sunday, after fruitlessly gunning down hundreds of Hungarians who’d risen up in revolt, the Russians had been slowly withdrawing to their bases all over the country. Soviet tanks still sat in front of the parliament building in Budapest, but according to Radio Free Kossuth, a new Hungarian flag—red and white and green—was flying from the dome. The country’s Olympic team, on its way to Melbourne, had already redesigned their uniforms.
Major Conroy entered the radio room. “You’re still at it,” he told Tim, his tone somewhere between indulgence and exasperation.
“Who could leave?” was Tim’s exuberant reply.
In spite of himself, Conroy came closer to the radio and listened, while Private Meyers handed Tim a piece of transcript someone had made off a station transmitting in French from one of the southern provinces: during the night Soviet troops had sent a confusing signal by making some circular movements between Záhony and Nyíregyháza. But the new premier, Imre Nagy, whom the Soviets had been forced to accept last week, was declaring that everything remained on track. In fact, Hungary would even be leaving the Warsaw Pact!
Major Conroy begged to remind everyone that at this very minute the British and French were bombing Egypt in order to maintain control of the Suez Canal. “Don’t lose your heads.” No one had even mentioned the presidential election, six days away.
“O ye of little faith!” declared Tim, reaching for a piece of transcript he’d made while the sun was still coming up: “‘After two years of enforced silence, in the last few revolutionary days, we have formed the first Christian organization, the Christian Youth League. We have to contend with indescribable difficulties and therefore we ask you, our sister organizations abroad, to come to our assistance morally and materially.’ Major, you can send a check, or a parcel, to number 6, V. Nagy Sandor Street in Budapest.”
“Laughlin, you have an assignment today for the Cadence.”
“Yes, covering trick-or-treating by dependents under twelve at the Toul base. Major, come on!”
“We drive down there in half an hour. Not one minute beyond that.”
Tim shrugged with a kind of joyful hopelessness. He was not going to let anything put a crimp in the moment of deliverance.
“Half an hour,” repeated Major Conroy, as he exited.
About twenty minutes later, Private Meyers came over and tapped Tim on the shoulder: “I think you’ll want to see this.”
It was something copied off Radio Free Kossuth: “Cardinal József Mindszenty, Prince Primate, was liberated on Tuesday by our victorious revolution and arrived at his residence in Buda at 0755 this morning. Because the road seemed unsafe, the Primate was brought to Budapest in an armored car guarded by four tanks. In all the villages they passed, the people threw flowers to the Primate and the soldiers. The cardinal told the correspondent of Magyar Honvéd: ‘I want to be better informed of the situation before I do or say more.’”
Meyers caught Tim murmuring, prayerfully.
“I guess this is a big deal for you, huh?” He shrugged. “What do I know? I’m just a Jew from Secaucus.”
Tim felt a moment’s shame: How did one put a single man’s suffering against the extermination of the Jews? But the thought, he reasoned, was an absurdity. One put Mindszenty’s persecution with the Jew
s’ sufferings, just as one day the as-yet-untallied dead within the Soviet Union would be added to the century’s mass grave. Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man in the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.
“Corporal Laughlin,” called Major Conroy. “Now.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tim, double-timing it to the jeep. He carried the Mindszenty transcript like a relic.
Half a mile into their trip to Toul, he tried speaking his mind to the major: “Eisenhower’s offering ten million dollars in aid to the new government. That’s pretty paltry, don’t you think?”
“No politics, corporal.”
“Okay. I promise to concentrate on finding vivid descriptive terms for all the Davy Crockett and Princess Summerfallwinterspring costumes I’ll be seeing.”
He closed his eyes as the jeep drove over the chalk plains still soaked with blood and salted with the bone fragments of two world wars. They continued on past the living, the wars’ survivors who were now oxidizing toward normal deaths and perhaps salvation. He believed that he was being carried at last toward transcendence and freedom, toward a solution.
“You’re muttering, Laughlin. Speak up.”
“Sir. Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio—”
Major Conroy shook his head. “At ease, Corporal.”
“Amen, sir.”
“Tranquillity is just around the corner.”
Fuller waited for her to respond and after a moment gave up. “You’re not laughing.”
“I get it, I get it,” said Mary. The reference was to Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr., now acting chief of the department while the aging John Foster Dulles underwent an emergency appendectomy at Walter Reed. Dulles had collapsed at home early this morning, a day after returning from New York, where he’d convinced the United Nations to adopt a resolution calling for the end of hostilities in the Middle East. With Hungary still unsettled and the election now only three days away, Mr. Hoover wanted all hands on deck, with no excuses made about its being a Saturday.
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