Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  “He doesn’t write me that often, Fuller. Not as much as he used to.”

  Fuller kept looking at her, no matter how unnerved and jumpy she appeared, no matter how preoccupied—the way she so often was these days. He knew that she knew.

  “He wants to do something with the refugees,” she explained. “He doesn’t know exactly what. He takes the whole Hungarian business personally somehow. I don’t understand why.”

  Why is what she wanted to know from Fuller: Why now? Why the rekindling of interest in him? But she didn’t ask; she just broke away, relieved to greet the girl bringing Mr. Dulles’s autopen downstairs to the bureau.

  It was the secretary’s first day back in the office after a long recuperation in Key West: last month’s emergency surgery had revealed a cancerous growth on his intestine. Today Mr. Hill had prepared a letter that would go out to every congressman and all ninety-six senators, in which Mr. Dulles cheerfully announced his own return, thanked the lawmakers for their good wishes, and said how pleased he was once more to be standing with them, shoulder to shoulder, on the brink, against the Soviets.

  Fuller helped Mary to set the writing machine on a countertop near her desk.

  “I hate that dress,” he said.

  “So do I.” She’d copied the Dior pattern from one of the French magazines Jerry bought for his new wife. “It’s an ‘H-line.’”

  “It looks like an oil drum.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m trying to compliment you. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Or inside a sack.”

  She tested the autopen on a blank sheet of paper and felt glad to see Fuller disappear into his office. She was furious with herself for having let the weekend come and go without deciding what she would do. There was still not much to hide under the Dior, but in another month that wouldn’t be the case.

  There was a place way down on F Street where she could be rid of the baby for a hundred and twenty-five dollars and be back here the next day. She’d gotten the address and the price, just like the magazine with the Dior, from Beverly, who had heard of it from a girl in Senator Douglas’s office who’d been knocked up by the man who each year wrote most of the air force budget.

  Or she could go back to Louisiana and become the oldest resident of the Ursuline Sisters’ home for unwed mothers. True, she already had a high school diploma, but maybe she could at last master algebra from one of the visiting tutors. More plausibly, she’d been considering a small, discreet establishment in the Garden District, run by a wealthy Catholic woman, where older young ladies tucked themselves away during their last few months and then swiftly surrendered their babies to an orphanage—had them whisked away in a warming pan like the bastards and pretenders of historical legend. All this would shield her father’s eyes from the embarrassment, but she couldn’t shield Daddy from the whole truth. She was determined to tell it to him, unless it finally involved F Street.

  And if she chose adoption? What afterward? Perhaps she’d go teach English at Beauregard Junior High, disappearing in plain sight for the rest of her days.

  She fed the letters into the machine—Mr. Hubert B. Scudder, 1st district, California; Mr. Clair Engle, 2nd district, California; Mr. John E. Moss, Jr., 3rd district—and all at once knew that she had to get out of the office, immediately, without even telling Fuller. She put a note on the receptionist’s desk, saying she felt sick.

  “Good!” Fuller told the girl several minutes later, once she conveyed the news. “Maybe Miss Johnson will come back in one of her old New Look skirts.”

  He returned to the two documents he’d been composing—a half-finished thank-you letter to Congressman Fulton of Pennsylvania, who had taken it upon himself to defend Eisenhower’s Hungarian actions as the only prudent course, and a letter to what Fuller guessed was the administration’s leading critic among corporals of the 7,965th Area Command:

  They’ll be processing them at Camp Kilmer (I think that I shall never see…) until May. The Austrian desk, which really was just a desk until a month ago, is now two large rooms more tightly stuffed than Fibber McGee’s closet….

  Letting Skippy know that he remembered his chatter about the radio: a more shameless seduction than the one he’d carried out some weeks ago on a Catholic University junior.

  There’s all sorts of interviewing, plus clerical and “liaison” work going on in half a dozen buildings around town. If you want to do something like that, it should be easy enough for me to set it up.

  You said please do something. Well, I am—I’m passing the buck to you.

  He sealed the letter, still surprised at the ripple of unease he’d experienced writing it—an unstable mixture of desire and hesitation, with even a sense of personal fault blended in. He couldn’t quite credit the last, since the exact nature of his desire was once more to grant the protectiveness that came with ravishment, something he’d not done, or felt himself doing, since the departure of Cpl. Timothy P. Laughlin, to whom he now addressed the envelope, the ink of his fountain pen bleeding through to the onionskin inside.

  Protection: what Skippy craved; what one paid and loved the gangster for.

  Fuller put this last thought to the side of his mind, like a department memo stamped FFA, For Future Analysis. He rose from his desk and breezed past the receptionist. “Going to mail a letter,” he explained, as if there weren’t two Outgoing trays less than three feet away.

  He exited on Twenty-first Street, thinking of how the building would before long extend itself all the way to Twenty-third. Next month, if their aging hearts and bowels held out, Ike and Dulles would stand here in their homburgs slathering mortar onto the cornerstone of the addition. Fuller was pleased to anticipate the building as a labyrinth twice its already huge size. It was even now, he decided, big enough for Timothy to stay discreetly lost in, though it still might be preferable to have him beavering away in one of the department’s satellite offices somewhere else in the city.

  Fuller walked down H Street toward the Potomac, past the university’s buildings and the boys in their letter jackets. Maybe he’d keep going all the way to the river, or drop into the Foggy Bottom Wax Museum and stand with the handful of visitors fitting themselves into the goofball tableau of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Valentine’s Day: Lucy, he now recalled, wanted to go to Bermuda for it. He slid this thought, too, to the edge of his mental blotter, as the university’s terrain gave way to Foggy Bottom’s crumbling little brick houses, toy cottages attached to one another for dear life. The Negroes had made this shaky spot their own for decades, until the whites started coming back when the department relocated itself to the neighborhood after the war. What the bulldozers hadn’t gotten was now falling into the hands of renovators. Eleanor Dulles, the secretary’s sister, had herself bought and fixed up one little row of the miniature dwellings; she’d made them what the real estate ads called “darling,” and sold one or two to the sort of boys in the department who had something to fear from Scott McLeod.

  Yes, the mephitic old neighborhood, having sagged for a century with its poor drainage, ammonia factory, and tinderbox warehouses, was slowly recuperating toward a placid modernity. Where the gasworks had stood when Fuller first arrived at State, foundations were now being laid for the kind of white-brick apartment building that back home was turning stretches of Park Avenue into sets of high-rise dentures.

  He reached the corner of Twenty-fifth and H, still not having put the letter into a mailbox, when he spotted, lo and behold, the brewer, poking around the weeds and tin cans in a yard belonging to a red-brick house, just as narrow as the others, but a little taller, with a comical turret at the top.

  Paul Hildebrand caught his eye and they waved to each other. Mary’s old suitor stepped out of the yard and onto the broken sidewalk, leaving his survey of the premises to the two employees he had with him.

  “Well,” said Fuller, looking up at the turret while he shook Hildebrand’s hand, “this one is pretty bar
onial for the Bottom.”

  “A regular Taj Mahal. I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it.” Hildebrand pointed in the direction of his nearby small brewery, visible from this corner, though dwarfed by the much larger Heurich’s plant beside it. “We still own two or three of these little dumps,” he explained, pointing to the row of houses running up Twenty-fifth. “Heurich used to have most of them. They got built in the nineties, mostly for the Germans and the Irish, who all took off once the streetcar came in. No reason to actually live here when for a couple of pennies a day they could get in and out to make their living making beer. The colored have been in the houses ever since. This one’s so far gone it’s been abandoned for a year. Our accountant only realized the other day that the pittance of rent had stopped coming in. We’re here trying to decide whether to fix it up or knock it down.” He paused to take a look at some missing cornices. “I’m a little taken aback. I didn’t realize I was a slumlord.”

  Fuller watched one of the other men pulling at some branches to see whether the window behind them was whole or broken.

  “It’s a haunted house inside,” Hildebrand continued. “Cobwebs. A couple of old couches, some busted cupboards with jelly-jar glasses. Christ, a colored woman who passed by five minutes ago told me there were still privies in the alley during the war. Mrs. Roosevelt came poking around one day, shaking her head. How’s Mary?”

  He seemed to hope the fast elision would keep Fuller from realizing he’d mentioned her name.

  “Not herself, I’d say,” Fuller answered. “This afternoon she lacked the energy to stay on my back about something annoying I’d said.”

  Hildebrand tested a piece of wrought-iron fence that looked as if it might give way in his hand. “I wish she’d get out of there. Find something that made her happier. How’s married life?” he asked, hoping for a cordial, dishonest answer. He knew more than enough of Fuller’s story from Mary.

  “The berries. In fact, today’s my anniversary.”

  “Already?”

  “There’s a baby coming in May.”

  “Congratulations.” Hildebrand smiled and extended his hand.

  “And yourself?” asked Fuller. He couldn’t remember the name of the girl the brewer had married.

  “Things are fine. I wish business were a little better. No heir yet.”

  “Well,” said Fuller, laughing gently, “I’ve been truant long enough. I’d best be getting back to the office.”

  Hildebrand shook his hand for a third time and prepared to resume inspecting the house.

  “So what do you think you’ll decide?” asked Fuller. “About this place.”

  “I think we’ll probably knock it down. But not until summertime at the earliest. In this town it takes more permits to demolish something than it does to build.”

  “So you’ll just leave her locked up until then?”

  Hildebrand laughed at the place’s worthlessness. “What lock?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  January 22, 1957

  Tim thought Woodforde’s foot must have crunched another peanut flashbulb—there were loads of them amidst the detritus of yesterday’s inaugural parade—but a backward glance through the fog on F Street left him uncertain.

  “A Nixon poster,” Tim’s companion at last explained.

  The winds were picking up, sharpening the contrast between this morning’s weather and the sunny calm of yesterday afternoon, when Tim had watched the parade from the corner of Thirteenth and Pennsylvania. His vantage point, the pedestal of Pulaski’s statue, had been so good he was able to pick out even the types of flowers in the Nixon girls’ corsages.

  Now, less than twenty-four hours later, as he and Woodforde plodded eastward, it was hard to concentrate on anything but the thick gray mist.

  “Think of all those poor private planes,” said the writer, in mock horror. “Unable to get back to Greenwich or River Oaks before dinner.”

  “I thought you’d converted,” said Tim. “At least sort of.”

  “I am a man without an ideology. Which in our century is worse than being a man without a country.” Woodforde had sat out the inaugural parade at a one-o’clock showing of The Girl Can’t Help It.

  “You need a church,” said Tim.

  “You need an exorcism.”

  In the aftermath of the Hungarian catastrophe, the two young men had conducted a prolific and forgiving correspondence. A peculiar understanding and sexless affection had grown up between them all through November and December as their airmail envelopes traveled back and forth over the Atlantic. Before Christmas came, Woodforde was suggesting that Tim, once he got back stateside, move into a portion of the big, shabby commercial loft where the writer and his girlfriend were residing.

  He’d been living there for two weeks. His drywalled-off room took up only a small fraction of what felt like a spacious version of the 7,965th’s barracks. Five other painters besides Gloria Rostwald had their own pieces of the vast premises one block from Woodward & Lothrop’s. Not only was his landlord living in sin, Tim had written Francy; he himself and all the rest were residing illegally, against the District’s zoning regulations.

  Each of the artists, Gloria had explained, worked with acrylic paints on canvases that hadn’t been primed. They were trying to constitute an innovative “color school,” acting as if Washington were a creative destination on the order of New York or Paris (as that city had once been, Tim was careful to remember). The group’s paintings were pretty, but also gauzy and faint, he thought. Whenever he looked at them, he wished they’d come into clearer focus, the way he wished the city now would, as he and Woodforde continued marching east.

  The writer was on his way to the Hill, and Tim would accompany him as far at Fifth Street, where he’d veer off to St. Mary of God, the Hungarian church. He’d been working there on behalf of the refugees now streaming into town, taking his meals in the rectory basement and coming home with pin money for his efforts. He paid his rent to Woodforde and Gloria with what he’d saved from his army pay, which was most of it.

  “Those poor Hungarian souls,” said Woodforde, looking down Fifth Street toward Tim’s destination.

  “You wouldn’t believe what some of them have been through.”

  “Exactly. Ten days of Kate Smith records and apple pie at Camp Kilmer. Makes you shudder.”

  “See you later,” said Tim, clapping Woodforde’s shoulder and dashing off into the fog, his heart almost light with purpose.

  Since arriving back in the U.S., he had still not seen his family. Francy and Tom were threatening to come down from Staten Island if he didn’t get up to them soon, but the lack so far of any reunion didn’t seem strange—not when he hadn’t seen Hawkins, either.

  Why, he’d asked himself a hundred times, had he ever sent the telegram? Had he succumbed to a simple moment of weakness while he was angry at God over Hungary? Had a loss of faith in Him prompted a return to that other object of worship, Hawk?

  The letter of reply from Alexandria had arrived when he was packing up his things inside the barracks. He had not responded to it in turn, since, strictly speaking, he didn’t have to. I’m passing the buck, Hawk had admitted, allowing any suggestion of a job to remain nonspecific. Even so, Tim could now feel Hawk’s presence across town, like the golden chalice behind the tabernacle’s curtain.

  He had told himself—was telling himself even now—that he could not go through all that again, not after having made himself right with God, who was allowing him to feel useful in a small way with the refugees. The country had already turned its attention away from the exiles, but there had been no slackening of zeal inside the rectory at St. Mary, Mother of God, where a few minutes after leaving Woodforde Tim was busy with money orders, cans of cling peaches, and pediatrican referrals.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before Father Molnar’s secretary came to tell him he had a visitor.

  In a wrinkled suit and stained tie, Tommy McIntyre looked as if he’d
barely managed to pull himself together for someone’s funeral. Tim wondered for a moment how he kept himself from being fired, but of course there was no mystery to that: Tommy could still, at any time, use his knowledge of Potter’s son against the senator. With the approach of next year’s election, the boy’s existence would be an even more potent fact than it had been in ’53. Michael Larchwood’s being in jail was a bonus cartridge in Tommy’s ammunition belt.

  “Sir,” said Tim.

  “Sir,” replied Tommy, with the comic courtliness each had sometimes displayed toward the other in better days.

  Tim abruptly stumbled into sympathy: “I heard that Mrs. Larchwood died. I should have written you.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Tommy. “I suppose you heard all about it from the left-wing scribe. He doesn’t come by much anymore.”

  Tommy looked around at all the sorting and packing, seeming to admire its efficiency, before he added: “I suppose he told you about the scion.”

  “He mentioned that he stole a car and went to jail.”

  “Yes,” said Tommy, affecting a sentimental sigh. “Impetuous youth. I had a visit from the lad shortly before his little scrape.”

  “Woodforde didn’t tell me.”

  “Woodforde didn’t know. Master Larchwood’s a somewhat rougher character than the one we saw in ’53. A faintly threatening presence this time ’round. It seems he labors under the delusion that those of us in the employ of America’s lawmakers are rather wealthier than we are. I disappointed him with the news that I had no more cash to give him than I did three years ago, back at that excellent Schine-family hotel.”

  Tim knew that Tommy would any minute be bringing up Hawk, seeking the peculiar pleasure of watching Timothy Laughlin squirm at the suggestion that he and Tommy McIntyre had hopeless love in common. To forestall this, he made a nervous joke: “Have you come to offer a donation?”

  “No,” said Tommy, straight-faced. “I’ve come on a mission of mercy.”

  He asked Tim to accompany him to the house of an old friend on the Hill—a worse drunk than himself, he swore. “I’ve been encouraging the fellow to quit. Friendly advice from the pot to the kettle.” He paused for a second or two while Tim scrutinized his face. “I did go myself, a couple of times, to the father confessor you recommended at St. Pete’s, but it didn’t quite take. So I’m wondering if you’d give the pitch to my pal. My own skepticism would be a little too evident, I’m afraid, but he might be susceptible to an angel of charity like yourself.” Tommy gestured toward the wooden crate that Tim was packing with boxes of powdered milk and Nestlé’s Quik. “Or at least to a more sober voice than my own,” the Irishman added.