From the moment he had allowed things to resume, Fuller had feared that Tim would end up making trouble, would become a hysterical version of Tony Bianco, threatening a scene—not for money but assurance, for some further allotment of affection. One morning he would show up on the Fullers’ suburban doorstep, wracked with anger and some fresh twist of biblical shame.
But here he was: happy, calm, wanting not so much as a second “I love you.” He had taken, it seemed, some vow of emotional poverty that he was willing to keep six days a week, if only on the seventh, or close enough, he could be released from it here. He would grow old in this city, become like all the other skinny, obedient clerks and bookshelvers keeping their heads down at the Library of Congress, the ones who’d come to town years before to escape the fists and cruelties of their fathers and the village hearties. He’d learn to cook, to go to Sunday-afternoon concerts at the Coolidge Auditorium with his chums. He’d save his money to go see the occasional musical in tryouts on its way to New York. He’d lose the political zealotry, once he finally realized politics to be no more than the widgets turned out by this particular company town. The religious quaverings would subside, too, displaced into solemn, furtive acknowledgment of “Mr. Fuller” when they passed in the corridor, and into more flamboyant weekly worship of the same in the little place off I Street, where a picture of the beloved would be kept out in a frame near the record player, except when Fuller himself or anyone other than Skippy’s fellow nelly clerks came to visit.
Timothy Laughlin would not be the big trouble that Hawkins Fuller feared, the trouble against which Lucy’s money would shield him. No, Skippy would be a grim safe harbor, one that would trap him in a domesticity even danker than the one across the river in Alexandria. The thrill of protectiveness and ravishment would be long gone, replaced with a cup of coffee and a slice of cake and an ongoing obligation to fuck the good little aging boy who had “given up everything”—the nelly clerks would start to tell him—for Hawkins Fuller.
Dressed now, Fuller lay back down on the blankets and took Tim in his arms. The two of them wriggled around until they were spooning, with Tim holding Hawk from behind, momentarily falling asleep against his back, while Fuller faced the turret’s circular wall. Unheard by Tim, he whispered: “I’m sorry.”
And he was, he thought; maybe even more than he knew.
As he started down H Street toward the office and his Plymouth, Fuller passed the worst of the neighborhood’s gingerbread shanties and wondered just how impressed the Negroes of Foggy Bottom were by the knowledge that one of their own, the State Department’s Dr. Ralph Bunche, had been dispatched to sort things out in the Middle East. Fuller imagined that the feds would eventually name a park for Bunche somewhere along here, probably once the last of the Negroes had been priced out of the area.
He entered State on Twenty-first Street and found a couple of people still in the bureau. He half hoped that Mr. Hill might be there to see him returning to his desk at such a late hour. Inside his office he hung up his tweed overcoat and then his suit jacket, both of them smelling faintly of the brewer’s condemned love nest.
The news clippings that filled his In box showed Dulles and Ike talking to Macmillan in Bermuda, where last month, lying on a chaise longue in her swimsuit, Lucy had at last begun to look pregnant. Someone had also dropped on his desk a memo announcing that Llewellyn Thompson would now move from the Austrian embassy to the Russian. No cookie pusher he, everyone agreed, though Fuller and Mr. Hill would still have to make a few mollifying visits to the SOB before he could be confirmed. Styles Bridges, for one, would almost certainly be among those claiming that Thompson had been a little too sympathetic to “our so-called Soviet allies” back when he’d been the second secretary in Moscow during the war. Someone might also note that the nominee hadn’t married until he was forty-four.
Fuller made his shirtsleeved way back out of the office and into the corridor; he then took the stairs down to Osborne’s office in Eastern European Affairs. Alas, his handball partner and everyone else in EEA had gone for the day, just as Hungary had gone from being an emergency to an ordinary geopolitical given.
Starting back for his own office, Fuller decided—all at once and instead—to travel the most direct route toward accomplishing the task he had in mind.
The door to the Miscellaneous M Unit stood open, surely a first and no doubt because of an ambassadorial appointment that would be even more widely discussed than Thompson’s: Scott McLeod’s rumored, imminent dispatch to the Dublin embassy, a reward for the years of scrubbing he’d done here and a quiet way of saying that that job might at last be done. Even so, McLeod would have his Senate enemies as surely as Thompson had his. Hence the open door: no harm showing off the friendly informality with which his operation had done its business at State.
Fred Traband was putting on his coat. “May I help you?” he asked.
“Fuller. Congressional Relations.”
“Oh, right.” Traband’s look of friendly recognition was replaced by disdain. He tried to recall any word he’d had about Fuller’s being summoned once again. Perhaps this time the Harvard man had done something so flagrant he wouldn’t be able to fool the machine.
“It’s about a fellow who’s getting close to a refugee-relief job.”
“What about him?” Traband asked.
“He’s got a few problems in the area you once questioned me about. For his sake and the department’s I think the appointment ought to be blocked right now, before some Hungarian begins blackmailing him to get asylum.”
Make it easy on him.
Traband’s expression softened. Maybe he’d been wrong about Fuller all along. Or maybe the guy had experienced the sort of behavioral conversion that the Miscellaneous M Unit always insisted was possible. He looked at his watch. “I’m running late,” he said. “But the boss is still here. Why don’t you go in and give him a word to the wise?”
How to Be a Man, thought Fuller, in the last seconds before he shook hands with Scott McLeod.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
April 21–22, 1957
The Laughlins’ Easter dinner was taking place in Stuyvesant Town, Grandma Gaffney having at last ceded her holiday territory with the proviso that this was her absolute limit: she would never get on a ferry to Staten Island.
“Those damned priests take advantage of you every whichaway,” she was now telling her grandson. She did not like the idea that Tim was working for sandwiches and pocket money.
“It’s charity,” Francy explained for her brother. “It’s something good.” In fact she did think it strange that Tim had been doing unpaid church work for three solid months.
“Don’t think of it as charity, Grandma,” said Tim in his own defense. “Think of it as a good investment, like those two shares of AT&T stock that Grandpa used to have, the ones that kept splitting.”
He was the only one allowed to tease her, but while the others all laughed, she just stared at him, a vision of the prodigal, and wished through her tight-set lips that Francy’s horrible little daughter would stop romping around the room.
For everyone at the table, Tim’s return had been more the focus of the day than their new outfits from Gimbel’s or even the turkey. Finally moist, now that its preparation had shifted to Mrs. Laughlin, it still owed its presence on the table to Grandma Gaffney, who insisted that ham was something the Protestants served on Easter. “Does she know she’s aligning herself with the Jews?” Francy had whispered to her brother when the porkless platter emerged from the kitchen.
“I wish you were still working for Joe!” declared Uncle Frank, who’d never fully conceded the fact that his nephew had actually worked for Senator Potter. “He’ll be back yet, you wait and see! They say he’s going to be leading the charge for this fellow McLeod. The English papers are supposed to be up in arms because we’re sending the Irish a ‘cop’ for an ambassador. They seem to think his methods are a little too tough—that he’s been spreadin’
all that fear through the precious State Department. For them to complain about anyone being unworthy of Ireland! Let’s talk about the methods they’ve used over there for three hundred years. You don’t, by the way, hear the Irish themselves complaining about McLeod, now do you?”
Rosemary Laughlin touched Tim’s hand and remarked, feelingly, upon the “perfect weather for a perfect Easter.” Still shy with her son after such a long separation, she asked him about the Egg Roll on the White House lawn. “You’d like to be there, wouldn’t you?” she said to little Maria Loretta.
Tim explained that the Eisenhowers were actually spending the weekend in Georgia.
“Speaking of eggs,” declared Uncle Frank. “He needs to be a little more hard-boiled.”
The men at the table, even Uncle Alan, had grown more and more impatient with the chief executive. They seemed to be waiting for Nixon the way Fred Bell was, according to Mary; the prospect of an Irish alternative held no interest for them. “For Christ’s sake,” Uncle Frank had said a little earlier of John Kennedy, “his father went to Harvard.” Nixon, Protestant though he might be, suggested the solid strivers who’d sat beside Paul Laughlin on all those nights and Saturdays he’d studied for his accounting certificate from LaSalle.
Tim scooped up Maria Loretta on one of her passes through the room. “You don’t need the White House lawn,” he said, “but I’ll bet you would like all the cherry and dogwood blossoms that are out.” He stroked the girl’s shiny brown hair and agreed with her that dogwood was a funny name for a tree.
And as he looked at her he thought of Hawkins Fuller’s daughter.
On Tuesday, he and Hawk had had plans to meet in the Foggy Bottom house at four-thirty, after Hawk got through on the Hill trying to shame a House committee into giving the Voice of America the full hundred and forty million dollars Ike had requested for it. But when Tim got to the turret, he found a note that Hawk had left atop the blankets only minutes before: “Catching cab to Georgetown U Hospital following premature birth of Susan Lydia Boardman Fuller. Barely five pounds. Say your beads for her.”
Tim had spent part of this morning’s Mass praying for the baby, whose sudden existence fascinated and repelled him. He felt glad that this extension of Hawkins Fuller into the world was a girl: a boy would have somehow made for a dilution of Hawk himself. Susan’s being female allowed Tim to think that the baby belonged really to her, to Lucy, in the way a child’s Jewishness was said to be passed to it through the mother. And yet, truth required him to admit that Hawk had helped to put this life into the world; its creation was something the two of them, he and Hawk, could never achieve together.
As he worried his way through all this once more, Francy tried to keep her eyes off her brother. But she thought she saw his mood taking one of the several dips it had in the hours since her arrival here this morning. She got up to clear the dishes.
Tim meanwhile tried to cheer himself with the thought that Hawk had also brought life back to him. The adultery they were committing was their creation, a sin the two of them were building together, and from which Lucy was forever excluded. This morning in church he’d prayed not just that Hawk’s daughter be healthy, but that the lurid new light burning within himself not be scuppered like the last candle after the last Mass.
They had met only once since the afternoon when “These Foolish Things” had played on the radio. It had been a rushed encounter, Hawk acting the way Tim could remember from some mornings three years before—studiously brisk; lustful and withdrawn all at once. He had ascribed the behavior to worry over Lucy’s increasingly difficult pregnancy. The premature birth had convinced him of it. The remoteness was inevitable, and nothing much to worry about. Think, too, of the note Hawk had left in the turret: for him to have been mindful of their afternoon rendezvous even at a time like that!
As he retold himself all this, his spirits came back up. “I’m going to do the dishes with Francy,” he announced. “See, Grandma? Everything’s exactly the same. Even here in Stuyvesant Town.”
It was Tim’s father who replied to this observation. Though he was the family striver, the agent of its transformative ascent, Paul Laughlin now declared, with a sudden wistfulness, “Nothing stays the same. Did you hear the pope this morning? Talking about atomic energy?”
He had been relieved to see his son, though he suspected that Tim was traveling on thin ice, carrying secrets that looked even now, while the boy walked to the kitchen, as if they might make the floor give way beneath him.
At the sink Tim washed and Francy dried, and the ventilating fan blew the last of the kitchen’s cooking smells into the Stuyvesant Oval.
“You wouldn’t let me do this a few Christmases back,” Francy recalled. “I was pregnant with Maria. You may even have mentioned my ‘condition.’”
“Did I?” Tim asked, laughing. “Well, it was a productive worry. See how healthy she turned out?”
“I hope the next one will, too.” She rapped the wooden board beneath the dish drainer.
“Are you?”
“Yes, and believe me, in our neighborhood, you go three years without dropping another, people think something’s very wrong.”
“Do you want to sit down?” He pointed to a stool by the broom closet.
“Don’t be ridiculous. But let’s sit down together.” She turned the faucets off.
“Lent’s over,” she said, handing him a cigarette as they settled themselves at the small table. “Talk to me.”
“Bless me, Sister, for I have…”
“That’s not a bad beginning. Keep going.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been telling me that for three years now.”
She reached back to the counter and picked up the cuff links he’d removed from his shirt when he started on the dishes. She pressed them into his hand. “I still don’t know who ‘Hawkins Fuller’ is, but one of these Christmases or Easters that old lady will finally be dead”—she pointed back to the living room and Grandma Gaffney—“and while she’s down there complaining about too few Jews being in Hell—”
Tim began to laugh, evasively. Francy pressed the cuff links harder against the palm of his hand.
“—I’ll finally be cooking the dinner on Staten Island, where there’ll be two children, no more, and my sullen son of a bitch of a husband.” Over her brother’s nervous, lighthearted protest, she continued: “And I want you to know that whoever this person is”—she pressed the cuff links even harder into Tim’s hand—“he’s always welcome in my house.”
Tim spent the next morning in the city, shopping with his mother at Gristede’s and then having an early lunch in midtown with his father. He talked to each of them about the job he still expected to come through before long. They asked him no questions that could be deemed personal, though he suspected Francy had urged them to. As it was, he took their reticence to be a manifestation of love, not self-protection.
He had, God forgive him, deflected Francy’s own proffering of love. Forcing the cuff links into his palm had been a kind of secret handshake, and it had spooked him. Ending their conversation with a joke about the stigmata, he’d given her a peck on the cheek and turned the faucets back on.
His money had started running low, but after lunch with his father he went into Brentano’s and bought James Michener’s The Bridge at Andau. Amazed that a book about Hungary could be brought out so fast, like a magazine, he carried it aboard his bus at the Port Authority, where he looked north toward Forty-third Street and wondered whether Hawk’s clarinet player could still be living there five years after Ike’s rally at the Garden.
He was halfway through Michener’s book by the time the Greyhound pulled into the District. Inside the doorway beneath Ken and Gloria’s loft, he collected his mail and took it upstairs, his heart hammering at the sight of the State Department envelope, and pounding even harder once he tore it open and, above the signature “Leonard F. Osborne,” saw the words “regret” and “due to security c
onsiderations” and “unable to offer you.”
He stuffed the letter into his pocket and raced back downstairs, not knowing where he was going. He wanted to call Hawk at the office, but he couldn’t bother him while the baby might still be in jeopardy. Besides, it was now past six; Hawk had probably left for home, and even for something as bad as this, Tim would not break his vow never to dial the number in Alexandria.
At the door to the street he found Woodforde, lighting a cigarette on his way out. A queasy, dyspeptic look played across the writer’s face. “If I marry this girl,” he said, “I’m going to wind up skinnier than you.”
They started down F Street together.
“I didn’t get the job,” said Tim, thunderstruck all over again by verbalizing the news.
He couldn’t tell Woodforde about the “security considerations,” which, after all, had to be about that. True, Woodforde had expressed his own belief in the inconsequence of such things—I don’t care about you and Fuller, that’s your own business—but it was still too shaming to admit to himself, let alone anyone else, that he might be a security risk. He realized that he felt guilty, not angry, and he wondered helplessly how Osborne’s people could have known.
“Sorry, kid,” said Woodforde, sincerely. “You know, there are a hundred ways for you to help out the Hungarians and get paid for it without having to be inside Dulles’s closed shop.”
Tim counterfeited some cheer. “You’re right. And I’d better find at least one of them if I’m going to make my—I should say your—rent.”
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