Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  Tim guessed that Tommy had found him through Miss Cook. He’d called the old office last week in connection with paperwork that his reserve unit required about his last salaried civilian employment. Wary of both Tommy and the clock, he now looked up and saw that it was only three, too soon to leave.

  “They’re hardly in a position to dock you,” Tommy argued. “Why don’t you take a stroll with me? The weather’s improved considerably.”

  Out on the street, walking toward the Hill, Tim felt his thoughts turning to the possibility of reconciliation. Was what he’d accomplished with Woodforde unthinkable with Tommy? Or even Hawk? Of course he and Hawk had never really quarreled, but maybe there was some subtle formula, like Father LeTour’s in New Orleans, that would bring them back into a sort of relationship, some platonic fealty he could practice without violating the worship of God. Perhaps he could exist as a neutral state, like India, between two great powers.

  At number 335 on C Street, a vaguely familiar young man, on his way out, opened the door. None of it added up. The house was not the least disordered inside, and a female voice, in quiet conversation with a man’s, could be heard coming from the second story.

  “Heading back to the office,” the young man said to Tommy. “Go in and sit down.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tim said.

  Tommy showed him a seat in the living room as if this were his own house, and then nodded toward the staircase. A male figure was descending, each step making several more inches of him visible. A belly protruded, and the gait was less than steady. Finally, the emerging head above its shoulders proved to be covered with the mottled face of Joe McCarthy. The senator was combed and freshly shaven, but for all that, like Tommy, barely pasted together. The female upstairs, presumably Jeannie, could probably claim credit for whatever physical cohesion he managed to display.

  McCarthy came forward to shake Tommy’s hand. “McIntyre.”

  “Senator, let me introduce you to another son of Ireland.”

  “We met in your office, early in ’54,” said Tim.

  McCarthy responded with a cry of comic agony: “Fifty-four! Ohhhhh!”

  Tommy and the senator warily entered into conversation about the new Congress, whose alignments Tommy was demonstrably better informed of than McCarthy. There was, Tim thought, an odd cordiality between the two men, each of whom, he had to remind himself, had something on the other and took him for an enemy. Together here they seemed comrades: each of them pained and defeated, both of them Irish and drunk.

  McCarthy made a crack about Mrs. Luce’s final departure from the embassy in Rome: “Now the only ring she’ll have to kiss is Harry’s.”

  “If not the one he’s bought for his girlfriend” came Tommy’s fast reply. Both men laughed and McCarthy got up to make drinks. Tim said he’d have a Coca-Cola.

  “So Alcorn’s now heading up the National Committee,” observed Tommy.

  “Fuck Massachusetts,” McCarthy replied. “Goddamned ‘Eisenhower Republicans.’”

  Even Tim knew that Alcorn was from Connecticut, not Massachusetts.

  “Right you are, sir,” said Tommy. “One day a man will come from out of the west and put an end to all this. Maybe Goldwater, maybe somebody we don’t even know yet.”

  McCarthy nodded at his own sagacity and finished pouring drinks. Once they were distributed and he’d settled himself in a club chair, he let Tommy take the conversation to its next topic: “Looks like my man’s going to have a tough race next year. Against this fellow Hart.”

  Unaware of Potter’s likely opponent, McCarthy asked: “Is he a Jew? ‘Hart’ and ‘Harris’ and ‘Cooper’ always are.”

  Tommy left McCarthy uninformed that Hart was a Catholic and the lieutenant governor of Michigan, adding only: “At the very least he’s going to scare the hell out of Charlie.”

  “Good!” shouted McCarthy. “But that doesn’t take much, does it?” He gulped his drink and warmed to the subject: “God, I’d love to see him get his legless ass kicked out of Congress. At least he’s off the committee.” He referred to the latter body as if it still belonged to him.

  Tim could see where this was going: Tommy had decided it was at last time to bring down Senator Potter. His simmering rage over Annie Larchwood’s death had blazed up into something like his old fury toward McCarthy himself. This time he would reverse field and make McCarthy the instrument of Potter’s undoing. Tommy would alert the senator to the existence of the illegitimate son; then, rather than tip the press himself, he would keep his part anonymous by letting Joe spoon them the news. With a friendly wink he’d tell McCarthy it was best to make reporters believe the story had come from some loyal old gumshoe on the committee staff.

  Tim also knew why Tommy wanted him here while McCarthy learned the secret. His presence would provide the senator with a kind of confirmation, since Timothy Laughlin’s face, never able to mask anything, would testify to the story’s truth. And of course his being here would also give Tommy the pleasure of seeing “young Timothy” harrowed yet again.

  Tommy watched in silence as McCarthy took a further few sips of his drink. There was no danger the senator would ask why Tommy wanted his boss undone. There was always a reason in the world of who had what on whom, and it would be more convenient for McCarthy not to know, for him just to marinate and savor the suddenly fulfillable fantasy of seeing Potter get his comeuppance.

  When Tommy spoke again, it was to tell McCarthy, casually, that with a little help this fellow Hart might pull things off. But before McCarthy could respond to the suggestion, the sharp cry of an infant came from the second floor. “My baby!” yelled the senator, grinning broadly before bounding upstairs to the child he and Jeannie had just adopted from the New York Foundling Hospital. Cardinal Spellman, who’d seen no need to ask too many questions about the acquisition, had helped things along.

  Tim decided that this was the moment to escape the house. But McCarthy was almost immediately back in the living room, somehow managing to keep a firm, tender grip on the blanketed baby. “Jeannie says Princess Grace just had a girl of her own! The palace in Monte Carlo put it out over the radio. Ain’t that swell? Well, that little girl can’t be any prettier than this one!”

  They might all be at some post-christening shindig inside McConnell’s beer hall on Ninth Avenue. Tim wouldn’t be surprised if he were asked to favor everyone with a song.

  “Ain’t she grand?” asked McCarthy, looking more like the baby’s uncle or grandfather as he thrust it into Tommy’s arms for closer inspection. Overtaken by his own sentiments, Tommy appeared unable to resume the mission that had brought him here, and in the commotion of the baby’s transfer Tim at last managed to slip away.

  He got as far as the vestibule before he felt McCarthy’s hand on his shoulder.

  It should have been frightening, but it wasn’t. McCarthy himself looked innocently wounded, wanting to know what the hurry was. “You do look familiar,” he said.

  “We met just before the hearings, the day after Senator Potter got a copy of ‘the Adams chronology.’”

  “When Charlie was trying to get me to fire Roy!” McCarthy laughed, as if remembering some comically bad season with the company baseball team.

  “Yes,” replied Tim, at a loss for more to say as he looked for another escape route from Tommy’s vengeful world. He could feel himself being lashed to it by the telephone line that had once reached into Madison Square Garden. Boys, girls, your old-maid auntie. When he’s hammered he’ll grope anything…

  He moved for the door, but McCarthy kept coming toward him, with an enormous, devouring smile. Reaching for the handle, Tim heard himself saying, inanely, to keep the man calm: “I was also at your wedding. Helping out Miss Beale for the Star.”

  “No kidding!”

  McCarthy proceeded to smother him with a hug, to give his neck a boozy kiss and his crotch a hard locker-room squeeze.

  “We’re going to christen her Tierney!” he called out as Ti
m raced toward the street. “Come to the church!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  February 21, 1957

  Two days ago, Lyndon Johnson had complained on the Senate floor about Secretary Dulles’s lack of response to his letter protesting the administration’s apparent willingness to impose sanctions on Israel over the continued presence of her troops in Egypt.

  So now the CR Bureau had a sizable fire to put out. How odd to find all these congressional crackers and cornpones suddenly so enamored of the Jews, thought Mr. Hill, the bureau’s director, who didn’t know whether Dulles’s delay in replying reflected a deliberate stall, or a desire to insult the majority leader, or just the secretary’s protracted convalescence. The old boy was still looking awfully frail.

  Several feet from Hill’s office, Hawkins Fuller sat in his own, having just finished up with Mr. Jerome Duggan, chairman of the American Legion’s legislative commission. The Legion was ending a three-day conference that had included a big dinner at the Statler last night. Speaker Rayburn and Nixon had both shown, and Fuller had been there with Lucy.

  The evening’s other big affair had been staged by the International Rescue Commission for Hungarian Relief, at the Mayflower, and the Fullers had stopped off there, too. After introducing Lucy to the Goldwaters, Fuller had listened to an ex–Budapest State Opera singer perform the Hungarians’ national anthem in a moment that seemed designed to evoke the “Marseillaise” scene from Casablanca. The crowd had contained the usual charity-ball locksteppers, most of the women looking like Margaret Dumont, but there had also been many fervent, unfamiliar faces, so eager to help that they would have settled for bread and water for their twenty-five dollars.

  Fuller had listened gravely while József Kövágó—six and a half years a prisoner of the Russians, six and a half days the mayor of free Budapest—told his stirring tale to the audience, among whose nonhabitués, Fuller had suddenly noticed, sat Skippy, an honest-to-God guest at an event Betty Beale was chronicling for “Exclusively Yours.”

  Catching his eye, Fuller had nodded, as if the two of them had last seen each other five minutes before at the coat check instead of two years ago inside the New York Avenue bus depot.

  Tim had just stared back, as startled as Kovajo must have been when the door to his cell was flung open—or slammed shut.

  “Mr. Fuller, I have a Mr. Laughlin out front.”

  Yes, here he was, a day later, at four o’clock in the afternoon. Fuller had known it would happen since last night; no, since he’d gotten the telegram three months ago. Actually, he’d known it all along, since the empty milk bottle had dropped from the tower.

  He waited a minute, looking in his middle drawer for the blank job application he’d put there three weeks ago, certain even then that Skippy would come along to claim it. He set the manila envelope on the blotter and walked to the receptionist’s desk.

  Tim was reading the front page of today’s Star.

  “Hawk.”

  “Mister Laughlin?” asked Fuller, quoting the receptionist. “Not Corporal?”

  “Only on weekends.” He was flashing his fast, nervous smile.

  Fuller tousled his hair. The receptionist, new, looked at them quizzically.

  They walked back to Fuller’s office, Tim on noticeably unsteady legs.

  “Well,” said Fuller, pointing to one of the New York papers piled on a chair. “Roy Cohn is thirty years old. He gave himself a big birthday party the other night.”

  “Was Private Schine there?”

  “Home with his fiancée, according to Miss Kilgallen. She doesn’t note Roy’s feelings about the girl—only that he seems to be unhappy over Zwicker’s being promoted to major general. You can’t say he forgives and forgets.”

  The cat still had a part of Tim’s tongue.

  “Imagine,” Fuller continued, “if Zwicker were still commanding Camp Kilmer. All those poor Hungarian refugees having to get their teeth drilled by a Communist dentist.” He cleared the papers from the chair. “Here, sit down.”

  Tim had never been inside Fuller’s actual office, and he was reminded of its owner’s old apartment by the negligence of the arrangements—the tennis racket lying atop some out-of-order encyclopedia volumes, the cardboard coffee cup next to the broken thermometer on the windowsill. He felt the old desire to hoard and decode the objects in evidence. He was relieved to see no photograph of Lucy Fuller, and his heart leapt at the sight of the Lodge biography.

  “Here,” he said, handing Fuller the book he’d brought with him today, a copy of The Last Hurrah. “A birthday present. Belated.” Three weeks ago, on the first of the month, Fuller had turned thirty-two.

  For Hawk—

  This time you get the book in advance.

  I want the job.

  It would be wonderful.

  S.

  “You missed thirty and thirty-one,” said Fuller.

  I have to get over you.

  Tim tried to ask himself why he was actually here. Because Tommy had dipped him back into the world of who had what on whom? Forced his head beneath its compromising sewage and tried to hold him there? But if that was the reason, had he come here seeking the poison’s antidote or its best dispenser, the beautiful Lucifer who had, after all, given him his first trip through the underworld?

  “You’re going to be a father,” he said.

  “A careless one. In May, I’ve heard.”

  Are you my brave boy?

  Tim stared at the familiar tweed overcoat lying on a table strewn with file folders, and he thought he was starting to cry. “Is there really something for me to do?” he asked, as briskly as he could.

  Fuller picked the manila envelope up from the blotter. “Come with me,” he said.

  Outside, in the aisle leading through the rest of the bureau, Tim asked: “Where is she?”

  “Miss Johnson? She took early retirement.” Fuller noted Tim’s look of surprise. “You honestly haven’t seen her?”

  “No.”

  “Or Grandma Gaffney, either, I’ll bet.”

  “No, not her, either.”

  Fuller understood how completely he governed Skippy’s world, even now, two years after the self-imposed exile. But he discarded the thought, telling himself that if he weren’t in command, then someone else would be.

  “Where is she?” asked Tim. “What happened?”

  “You’ll have to call her and find out.” And when you know, Fuller thought, maybe you can tell me; she walked out—more than two months ago—and never came back.

  Moving along the corridor outside the bureau, they passed photo-portraits of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Dulles. Tim pointed to the latter. “His son is a priest, you know. Avery. A convert.”

  “Maybe the Reformation can ransom him back with an offer of my mother, who’s still straddling the fence between Rome and Geneva. With a bank balance that these days could fulfill a vow of poverty.”

  An elevator took them down two flights and past the Miscellaneous M Unit.

  “I’m pretty sure I can get a good recommendation from Senator Potter’s office,” Tim said hopefully. “I’m not sure he’d have much to say himself, but Miss Cook will write something nice, and he’ll sign it.”

  “No florid encomium from McIntyre?”

  “I don’t ever want to speak to him again.”

  “You once said as much about me.”

  He started to stammer out a reply, but Fuller relieved him of the need for one by picking up the pace and administering a cheerful poke in the ribs. The gesture depressed Tim; it lacked the intimacy of the hair-tousling a few moments before and seemed to suggest that they were just joshing old friends. He suddenly feared that’s all they might in fact become, a fate more disrespectful to their former romance than impassioned estrangement would be.

  Entering the office that seemed to be their destination, Tim heard Fuller ask the receptionist if they could see Mr. Osborne. The girl buzzed him while Tim regarded a recently framed Time cover on the
wall behind her desk. The magazine’s Man of the Year was the Hungarian Freedom Fighter, an artist’s handsome conception of those who’d made the doomed revolution.

  Once Mr. Osborne emerged, Tim judged him to be about thirty-five. He looked athletic and a bit severe, but he greeted Fuller with a hearty clap on the shoulder. It turned out the two of them were handball partners at GWU.

  “Osborne, this is Timothy Laughlin, a veteran of the United States Army, a staunch defender of the Second Line of Communication in France, and a proud member of our underfunded reserves. You’re going to schedule an appointment with him to discuss one of those positions being set up to administer the Refugee Relief Act. He has excellent writing skills, passable French, congressional staff experience, a charming disposition, and a terrifying grandmother.”

  Apparently used to Fuller’s palaver, Leonard Osborne said only, “Sure.” Turning to Tim, he added, “If you like, you can come back right now and fill out the first of the forms.”

  “Nope,” said Fuller. “No time.”

  “Okay, then. Tommorow morning at ten o’clock. Bring a résumé,” Osborne instructed Tim. “When you get here I’ll take you three doors down the hall to the man who’s really in charge. You’ll find, I’m afraid, that nothing happens very fast around here, even when it’s an emergency.” He explained that the Refugee Relief Act, once it actually passed, would entitle anyone fleeing a Communist state to asylum.