The president’s own calming statement about Suez—conceding that the British, French, and Israelis had made an “error” in attacking Egypt—seemed to be helping him at home, if not abroad. The Democratic ticket appeared to be sinking fast, swamped not only by the electorate’s instinctive rallying toward the incumbent during a crisis, but also by the Soviet premier’s kiss-of-death endorsement of Stevenson’s desire to stop testing the hydrogen bomb. By now Ike had not only Hoover’s son in his corner but one of FDR’s, too: the youngest Roosevelt, John, had come out for him. And Joe McCarthy, rising from alcoholic slumber, had announced that he would seek his old committee chairmanship if the Republicans took Congress next week along with the White House.
In truth, there wasn’t much to be done here in the bureau this afternoon. Most congressmen were out of town campaigning for their seats, and the amalgam of tension and idleness was working on Mary’s nerves. As soon as she heard Fuller getting off the phone with the secretary’s people upstairs, she went into his office.
“Any more news from the doctors?”
“Yes,” he replied. “They told us yesterday afternoon that ‘we’re’ pregnant. What started them using that pronoun? Dr. Spock?”
Mary looked at his blotter for a moment—it held the latest poll numbers on whether the U.S. should get out of the UN—before leaning down to kiss him on the cheek.
“Congratulations. To you and Lucy. How far along is she?”
“Two months. Maybe two and a half. And a nervous wreck. The doctor recommends she take up smoking.”
“What are you going to do for nerves, Papa?”
Fuller sighed. “Maybe I’ll give it up.” He looked through the doorway. “Is Hill still around?”
“Yes. You’re going to have to hang on a little longer.” She made herself smile as she walked off.
They’d not had much to say to each other these past few months, though the silence between them had itself been like a conversation, an ongoing mutual acknowledgment that she knew—up to a point—what things were like for him now, even if he was still determined to see them through. In public, he and Lucy remained on their shiny trajectory, attending the shah’s birthday bash at the Mayflower on the same day last week that Mary had been added to a group of wholesome-looking State employees chosen to accompany a Soviet delegation on a tour of Ike’s and Stevenson’s respective campaign headquarters. The Russian from the Academy of Sciences had complained about the Washington humidity and explained that having only one name on the ballot in Soviet elections was not a problem: “You can strike it out and write in another.” He allowed that this didn’t happen often.
Mary looked up at the sweeping second hand on the clock and felt nearly as exasperated as Fuller to be here. Suez did, after all, appear to be in the hands of the UN, and the Soviets did appear to be continuing their withdrawal from Hungary, despite a few confusing signs: troops and tanks were staying close to the airfields, but only, it was said, to shield the Soviet dependents being evacuated from Budapest.
The phone rang, promising a bit of relief from the tedium. She wouldn’t care if it were only some eager-beaver young GOP congressman, out on the hustings, asking for the exact answer to give about the Middle East.
“Baby.”
It was the first she’d heard from him since they’d broken things off up in New York—so amicably that, several minutes afterward, they weren’t sure they’d really done it.
“Hi, Fred.”
“I knew you’d be in.”
She could hear the excitement. He sounded like a college student who’d been up on No-Doz for a week.
“I hate to disappoint you, Fred, but from what I heard a half hour ago, Mr. Dulles is likely to be fine. And even if he doesn’t make it, Herbert Hoover, Jr., is not exactly Nixon.”
Fred didn’t seem to remember their small adventure on the night of Ike’s heart attack.
“Are you voting for him?” Mary continued. “For Ike, I mean.”
“Yes, while respectfully holding my nose.”
“Beverly’s taking me to the Statler on Tuesday, with the Bethesda Stevenson Club.”
“You’re going to have an early night.”
“I could use one.”
“How come?”
“No particular reason,” she replied.
“So are we still good-enough friends that you’ll call me with the least little thing you hear about the Baltics?”
“It amazes me that you believe somebody is going to come down the hall to tell me anything other than that the new file boxes I’ve ordered have come in.”
Fred scoffed at her modesty. “There’s a lot to be said for being near the action. Keep listening: your Mr. Hill might come down with a case of loose lips.”
“Fred, what exactly do you expect to happen in Estonia?”
“Wildfire, Mary. Think about the way it spreads. Why did the Hungarians rise up? Because five days before they did they heard about some Poles in Wroclaw dragging the Soviet flag through the gutter. Eisenhower should stop trying to calm things down. He should be fanning the flames.”
“I’ll tell that to the next Young Republican who calls.”
“Get ready for a new birth of freedom,” said Fred, more sonorously than usual.
“Fred, I need to go. Fuller wants something,” she fibbed.
She hung up the phone and put some lotion on her hands. Two months. Maybe two and a half. Counting on her moistened fingers, she calculated that Lucy’s baby would probably come in late May, only a bit earlier than her own.
IKE IN LANDSLIDE; DEMS HOLD CONGRESS
At the LOC’s Orléans headquarters, Tim worked at fleshing out the Cadence’s election edition. Even bannered as such, it would maintain the paper’s resolutely light touch and confine the political story to the front page’s left side. The three right-hand columns were being held for “7,965th Chefs Get Tips from Paris’ Best.” News from Hungary would go on page two.
“Can you stand some more?” asked Lieutenant Dillenberger, who had noticed Tim’s grief-stricken demeanor when he’d arrived here yesterday afternoon from Verdun.
“Sure. I like pain.”
Everything in the stack of dispatches and transcript was awful, as it had been for the last three days, ever since the Soviets began using bombers and tanks to crush the uprising. The rebels were now mere resisters, trying to hold on with Molotov cocktails and paving stones. Refugees were crossing the border into Austria, some of them carrying pots of Hungarian soil. A Soviet puppet named Kadar had replaced Nagy, and Sobolev, the Russians’ UN delegate, was saying that the U.S.S.R. would just ignore any resolutions on Hungary the General Assembly might finally decide to pass. Meanwhile, Premier Bulganin had made the novel suggestion that the U.S. and Soviet Union intervene together in the Middle East—against the British and the French.
And here was the latest from Radio Budapest, which had resumed toeing the Soviet line: “In these difficult hours let us remember the great Socialist revolution of October 1917. Now, in the light of the open excesses of the counterrevolutionaries, the tremendous significance of October 1917 becomes even clearer to us. The Soviet peoples have set the world an example.”
“Anything from Radio Free Rakoczi?” asked Tim, without much hope.
Lieutenant Dillenberger sifted the most recent pile of transcript and handed Tim an appeal from the holdout station: “We are fighting against overwhelming odds! This is our message for President Eisenhower: if during his new presidency, he stands by the oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom, he shall be blessed….”
“At least we know where we are,” said Dillenberger. “A couple of reports say some of the Russian recruits think they’re in Berlin and World War Two’s still going on. Christ, they must be dumber than the guys we get from Oklahoma.”
Tim continued reading transcript and wire-service copy, which now included the news that Mindszenty had gone to seek shelter at the American embassy in Budapest. At three p.m. Major Con
roy came in to get him. The two of them were due to ride back to Verdun together. With a small movement of his head, the officer ordered Dillenberger out of the room.
“Get a grip, Corporal Laughlin.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tim, who only now realized he had tears on his face.
Major Conroy put a hand on his shoulder. “I am not General Patton. I am not about to smack you and say ‘Snap out of it.’ But snap out of it.”
Tim saluted, went off to wash his face, and five minutes later rejoined Conroy near the line of jeeps outside. It turned out—a small mercy—that they would be returning to the base in an American sedan, with the major allowing him to ride alone in the backseat. All the way to Verdun, Conroy kept up with conversation offered by the driver, a Pfc and rabid Red Sox fan; it was almost suppertime when they arrived back on the grounds of the 7,965th.
As Tim started for the office, the major had one last message for him: “You’d better eat your damn dinner, too. I don’t know what that’s about, but if I see you settling for a glass of milk again, I’ll report you.”
“Yes, sir.”
He went straight to his desk, piled with the Herald-Tribune and the London papers, all of them full of Ike’s victory. Beneath them lay a letter from Kenneth Woodforde, who must have used one of his congressional connections to get it into the air pouch. It was dated Monday afternoon, when the Soviet attack had been in full force:
Dear Laughlin,
I found Michael Larchwood (in jail for grand theft auto, by the way), and I now have a pretty good idea of what went on back in ’53 and ’54. But given what’s now going on, I’ve lost interest in my little historical exposé.
I never answered your question about what I was, Communist or anti-anti-Communist. Maybe I’m going to be the first anti-anti-anti-Communist. After the last two days I realize that the C’s in power are about as likely to change as your One True Church. I’ve lost my appetite in more ways than one.
So I thought I’d let you know that your indiscretion about young Larchwood is safe with me. Fact is, I couldn’t prove anything without the photo Schine’s supposed to have, but (see above) another fact is I don’t have the stomach now to pursue it.
One other thing: Fuller and his wife are expecting a child next year. I tell you this only so that you don’t hear it from McIntyre, who I suspect would derive some odd pleasure in imparting the news. I apologize for playing that card when I saw you back in May.
Woodforde
P.S. Do remember that this failed uprising was meant to be, in its own way, a socialist revolution. They wanted to be neutral, not “just like us.”
Tim got up and headed to the mail room, where the Frenchwoman was getting ready to go off duty. He asked if he could still send a telegram, to 3423 Mt. Eagle Place, Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.A.
7965TH AREA COMMAND—07 NOV 56
HAWK—
RUSZKIK HAZA!
WHEN YOU GO TO THE DEPARTMENT TOMORROW—PLEASE—IN WHATEVER WAY YOU CAN—DO SOMETHING.
T.
The Frenchwoman asked if she correctly understood the spelling of the exclamation. “And it means what?”
“Russians go home. My two words of Hungarian.”
She nodded, and made a last quick scan of the yellow piece of paper on which he’d composed the message.
“C’est tout?” she asked. “Nothing to add?”
His stomach dropped; he felt himself struggle to keep from inserting the three words he’d nearly written with the pencil: I love you.
“Non,” he said. “Nothing to add.”
PART FOUR
DECEMBER 1956–MAY 1957
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
—W. H. AUDEN,
“THE MORE LOVING ONE” (1957)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
December 1–3, 1956
Leaves were burning along three stretches of curb on Martha Custis Drive. Raking his front yard, Fuller glanced down the adjacent street, somehow half expecting to see Tony Bianco in his parked car. But months had passed with no sign of the part-time moving man. Fuller was free to concentrate on the smoky aroma riding the breeze. It might be December, but the crisp air and sky belonged to the October Saturdays he remembered from St. Paul’s. This was New England weather, held up at the Mason-Dixon Line for a month and a half.
The Army–Navy Game, near the end of its second quarter in Philadelphia, was playing on his new English portable radio, an anniversary present from Lucy. Knowing he’d be working outdoors this afternoon, she had decided that her husband should have the expensive gift, smart and snug in its leather case, two days early. It sat on the front steps of the house, and its reception was excellent.
Lucy now waved to Fuller from the open upstairs window. Still in her quilted yellow peignoir with its little bow at the neck, she had her sketch pad balanced on the sill. She was drawing with the expensive pens Fuller had gotten her from Fahrney’s and handed over this morning after she made her own premature gift. To show that she was indeed using them to create her tight, folksy drawings—what Grandma Moses might have produced with ink instead of oils—she raised one of the pens for her husband to see. Her other hand held a filter-tipped Salem, the brand that was helping to soothe her through a fourth month of pregnancy. She had still hardly begun to show, not even when she wore something besides this billowing nightgown.
Fuller had begun sweating through his flannel shirt. He waved back to his wife and then walked around to the side of the house to get at whatever leaves might be resting under the carriage of their new Plymouth. The car reminded him that he could, if he felt the inclination, make a quick run before dinner to the keypunch operator (dumb as a post, and with that little mustache) in the rented room off Chinatown. Or even a quick stop at Andy Sorrell’s place just over the bridge.
The radio announcer, vamping through halftime, genially mentioned that Ike had violated the customary presidential neutrality toward today’s game by telegraphing his good wishes to the Army coach. The station then cut to a Red Cross appeal for donations to ease the plight of those Hungarian refugees now reaching freedom’s shores.
PLEASE—IN WHATEVER WAY YOU CAN—DO SOMETHING.
He had done nothing about Hungary, unless you counted pocketing a phone number from the good-looking Budapest university student who’d recently been paraded through the bureau like some kind of war trophy. Everyone else was doing something about Hungary; the department had been consumed by the refugee operation. An eleventh planeload of exiles had arrived the other day at Camp Kilmer up in Jersey, and before the cloyingly named Operation Mercy was finished at least twenty thousand more would be allowed in, thanks to some fancy interpretive footwork with the immigration laws.
But a hundred thousand were still in camps along the Austrian border. Nixon would be heading over to visit them in a week, and after that, Congress would start hearings on the conduct of U.S. policy (had there been one?) during the uprising. Fuller imagined that at least one of his CIA buddies would have hell to pay for the general failure to anticipate rebellion along the Danube.
RUSZKIK HAZA!
He was glad he had been the one—not Lucy—to open the door when the telegram arrived. What exactly, he’d wondered, did Skippy want done? Air strikes? Maybe just an airlift for all the priests the embassy in Budapest couldn’t hold? He’d also wondered why this frantic little cry—he could almost feel it being whispered into his ear, between ardent kisses of his neck—was coming only now. It could hardly have to do with just Hungary. Whatever it meant, it felt helpless, like the furtive leafleting said to be going on even now in the streets of Budapest.
Fuller lit a match and watched the leaves catch fire. He had no compelling desire this afternoon for the keypunch operator, let alone Andy Sorrell. He felt himself, unexpectedly, wanting someone and something else. The radio, fil
ling up the rest of halftime, had begun to play some old Tommy Dorsey songs, Dorsey having choked to death on a forkful of food earlier in the week.
I’m getting sentimental over you.
Things you say and do…
He looked over his shoulder and back toward the house. On the breeze, smoke from Lucy’s cigarette joined the smoke from the leaves.
It would be Monday before he actually wrote the letter, and only after he got Mary to answer an important question.
“So,” Fuller asked, tapping her on the shoulder, “how much longer?”
Irritated, she swiveled around in her typist’s chair: “How much longer until what?”
She didn’t look well. Her face was puffy, and while it might be le dernier cri, the sack dress she was wearing did nothing for her but hide her figure.
“How much longer until Skippy gets home?”
She had long since stopped leaving Tim’s letters on her desk. In fact, the last time Fuller had spoken of him was nearly a year and a half ago, at the time of the engagement. Make it easy on him.
“He’s due back after the first of the year,” she answered. “With plenty of reserve duty left to perform, since it was only a two-year enlistment.”
“Will he be performing in New York or down here?”
“Down here.”
She saw pleasure in his expression. Was it a surge of sentiment? Or appreciation of his power in having created this geographic anomaly—causing Tim to enlist in New York, but as a Washingtonian who even now would be returning to the District?
“I’m guessing,” Fuller said, “that you know what he wants to do once he’s back. Rejoin Citizen Canes’ listing ship?”
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