“Don’t worry about that. Listen, you want to copyedit Armed and Dangerous? The girl doing it in New York stinks, and I’ve got a little bit left of the advance that I can pay you with. McIntyre once told me your grammar is ‘cleaner than a nun’s shaved scalp.’”
“Thanks,” Tim replied, abstractedly. “I’ll think about it. But right now I’ve got to go in the other direction. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay, take it easy, Laughlin. Everything’s going to be all right.” Woodforde watched him walk away and then called out after him: “Come Cohn or come Schine!”
Tim tramped across the city for nearly an hour, all the way up to Georgetown. Passing two little French restaurants on M Street, he proceeded farther north, making himself believe that he was headed toward Mary’s, though in fact he had another destination, a dangerous one, in mind. He wanted to see Hawkins’ daughter.
He would just glimpse her behind the incubator’s glass; no one ever had to know he’d come and gone. Since visiting hours would already be over when he arrived, this wouldn’t really be a visit; he’d find some nurse who would let him take a peek, and while he stood in front of the window, a little like Stella Dallas, he’d be able to figure out what he’d been feeling about the child’s presence in the world. The prayer he’d say for her would be made more potent by familiarity with its object.
A receptionist scolded him for showing up so late, past eight o’clock, and looked at him suspiciously before imparting the good news that Mrs. Fuller, after six nights here, had been discharged this afternoon. Moreover, the baby was thriving sufficiently to have gone home with her.
He thanked the woman and asked for directions to the chapel. She reminded him that it was late but allowed as how he could make a quick stop.
He prayed not for Susan Fuller but for himself; for steadiness. He told himself that he was just tired from the bus ride and weak from missing supper. He’d been rattled by the kind of bad news everybody has to put up with once in a while. Not getting the job might be a disappointment, but Woodforde was right: there were other ways to be useful. And while the mention of “security considerations” left him fearful, all of that might still be a mistake, or part of some generalized tightening-up that had nothing to do with him in particular.
Hawk loved him, and Hawk’s child was healthy.
He prayed that Mary’s would be healthy, too, and he promised, if he could think of a way, that he would help it, even after it had been adopted. He’d already told Mary he would take her to the airport on Wednesday, but he should ask if she wanted him to go to New Orleans, as company for the weeks ahead. He could stay at the rooming house on Dauphine Street, or even with Mr. Shaw, Tristan’s sword lying between them.
For now he would find his way to a streetcar. He would go back to the loft, and tomorrow he would pack boxes at St. Mary’s.
He would ask for no more than he already had, and things would yet be well.
CHAPTER FORTY
April 24, 1957
Mary dialed Eastern Airlines to confirm her late-afternoon nonstop to New Orleans. Seven months and two weeks was awfully late to be flying, but no one would notice anything under her boxy spring coat. Beverly and Jerry Baumeister were in the other room. They’d come to say goodbye and pick up a set of keys for the wealthy girl in Senator Douglas’s office whom Beverly had found to sublet the furnished apartment for six months. The outside date meant nothing; Mary knew that she’d never be back.
“I’ll be right out,” she called.
“Take your time, we’re fighting,” answered Beverly.
Beverly and Jerry had treated Mary to a big late breakfast and, having both taken the day off, were now deciding whether to see a lunchtime showing of Funny Face or Moulin Rouge.
Jerry had been arguing for the latter, but Beverly conceded nothing to her spouse: “It’s five years old and it’s got Zsa Zsa Gabor. Why are they bringing it back to the MacArthur now?”
“To show solidarity with the Hungarians?”
Husband and wife laughed.
“Maybe to catch the overflow of Francophiles who can’t get into Funny Face,” said Mary, entering the room.
“Come with us,” Jerry and Beverly urged in unison.
“I can’t. Really.”
Beverly saw that she meant it, and she nudged Jerry to get moving. “Okay,” she said, tapping her purse. “I’ll give Kay the keys tomorrow morning. I tell you, she’s right out of The Philadelphia Story. God, Mary, I thought you were sort of blue-blooded when we first met. And so beautiful. You, not her. I remember the first time you walked into the bureau.” She burst into tears.
Mary put her arm around Beverly. Jerry looked on, as hopelessly as any other male would have.
“Your baby’s going to be beautiful, too,” Beverly predicted.
“Probably fatter than Fred,” guessed Mary.
“Don’t stay down there,” Beverly insisted. “Don’t disappear as if you’re doing penance. Promise you’ll come back.”
“Back to what?”
“Back to us. And back to whoever else is just around the corner.”
“You mean Mr. Right?”
“Yes. Or Mr. Second Right.” She pointed to Jerry.
“Second right!” he cried. “I’m not just around the corner. I am the corner. Come on,” he said to his wife. “Time for Zsa Zsa, dahlink.”
He embraced Mary, and when he pulled away he, too, had tears in his eyes. They were both remembering that night at the Occidental. Do you know what they do with guys like me in Russia?
He took Beverly’s arm—all three of them were crying now—while she handed Mary a small box. “It’s a bon voyage gift, not a farewell present. And it’s for you, not for—you know.” She meant the baby, but that suddenly seemed too painful to say; the infant wouldn’t be in Mary’s possession long enough to prompt anyone’s gift-giving.
Mary nodded. “I’ll write,” she promised, kissing Beverly.
When the Baumeisters were gone, she sat down on one of the freshly vacuumed couch cushions. She was wondering whether to open the little box when the phone rang.
Fuller’s voice came through the receiver. “I never remembered to disconnect mine, either. The missus had to remind me to.”
She supposed he knew everything after all. And why should she be surprised by that? Or surprised by his having waited until the last minute to be in touch?
“I’ve switched the service over to the Vassar girl who’s moving in tomorrow,” she explained, as matter-of-factly as possible.
“Go downstairs in five minutes. A cab will be waiting to take you to me.”
“Fuller, I’m not going to the department.”
“You’re going to Quigley’s drugstore. Near GWU. I’ll be at the soda fountain.”
“Why don’t you just drive here in your Plymouth? My plane doesn’t leave for hours.”
“I know. It leaves at five-forty-five. But there is no Plymouth this week. It’s out in Alexandria at the disposal of the nurse taking care of my little girl.”
“How is she?”
“Remarkable. Very small but very calm. Quite discriminating. Standoffish, I’d say. We call her Garbo.”
I want to be alone. She almost said it, but it wasn’t true. She was all at once nervous and again wanting company, even his. “If there’s no Plymouth, why don’t you take a cab here?”
“I don’t want to be around if you have a surprise visitor, which is to say, if Skippy gets there early. Come on, head downstairs. The cabbie will be honking his horn any minute.”
She was soon at Quigley’s, on a stool, drinking the malted Fuller had already ordered for her.
He sipped a glass of seltzer, and for a minute or two they said nothing.
“So, he told you,” she finally said.
“He told me.”
“As of Friday, when I last talked to him, I’d have believed he hadn’t.”
“And you’d have been right. He never said a word until yesterday aft
ernoon. When he called the office.”
She said nothing, just wondered why Tim had told him then and not before.
“He called to ask after the baby,” Fuller explained. “And about another matter. Also, of course, to set up a rendezvous.”
“In the turret.”
“His little castle in Spain.”
She pushed away the malted and swiveled the stool, as if it were her typist’s chair, so that she could face him. “You condescending, buck-passing bastard,” she declared, as evenly as she could. “It’s your romance, too. You found the castle for it.”
“You’re right. It was my romance, too.”
Her hand went, involuntarily, to her stomach. It rested there, protectively, for a moment. “‘Was’? Does he know that?”
“No. He’s dealing with a vocational setback right now.”
The answer’s coolness was, she realized, too much even for Fuller. The display of sang-froid suggested the opposite, an agitation that had prompted him to summon her here.
“Did he not get the job?” was all she asked.
“He did not get the job.”
“That was the ‘other matter’ he called you about.”
“Yes, but he wound up chattering mostly of you. In those little grammatical torrents that issue from him when he’s nervous, as if he’s reciting the Apostles’ Creed. He was sentimental. For some reason he couldn’t bear the idea of your leaving without our saying goodbye, you and me.”
“Tell me what happened with the job.”
“Osborne sent him a letter.”
“I thought it was more or less settled, a sure thing.”
“‘Security considerations’ arose.”
“About him?”
“Yes. I mean, they’re obvious enough, aren’t they?”
“How exactly were they obvious to Osborne? Or let’s say more obvious than they would have been in February.”
Fuller didn’t answer. But when she looked at him, she knew. More than that, she knew that he wanted her to know—just as surely as Tim had once wanted to make a sincere confession to his priest, or some of Jerry’s terrified friends had tried to tell McLeod’s lie detector even more than they’d been asked to.
“You did this,” she at last whispered.
Fuller took a sip of seltzer and regarded the countertop.
“Did you decide, after all, that he was inconvenient?” she asked in a furious whisper. “This is inconvenient, Fuller.” She placed his hand on her stomach. “But it’s mine—mine at least to ease into the world. Too bad there’s no one down on F Street that you could pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars to to have Tim killed.”
For all her disgust, her sense that he had done the most despicable thing possible, another part of her felt grateful to him, because what made the act despicable also made it definitive, the surest means of ending what had to end, now or later, with Tim’s broken heart. And she knew, looking at Fuller, that his reasoning matched her own.
“You think you did this for his sake, don’t you?” she asked. “You’ve convinced yourself of that, haven’t you?”
“No, I did it for me. You’ll do the other part, the part that’s for his sake.”
“And how will I do that, Fuller?”
“By putting me beyond the pale.”
“You want me to tell him the truth.”
“Make it hard on him.”
She got down from the stool and closed her coat. A coed who was with her boyfriend smiled, enviously, in her direction. She wondered, absurdly, whether she could get a cab outside Quigley’s or would have to walk to the main entrance of the department to find one.
“What about you?” asked Fuller.
“Me?”
“Were you ever in love with me?”
He asked it with an absence of ego, just a kind of sympathetic curiosity, taking the opportunity to tie up a loose end.
“No,” she answered.
“Well, that’s one small blessing.”
“I wish it had been otherwise,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because then I’d be able to forgive you.”
She brushed past the coed, and he called out to her, with surprising gentleness: “You already have.”
The ticket agent handed Mary a complimentary flight bag for her incidentals. Reaching for it with her left arm, she thought she saw the agent noting the absence of a wedding ring on the hand of this pregnant passenger. But maybe she was imagining things. She put her small purse and Beverly’s gift inside the bag, which she left unzippered, before heading back to the departures lounge. Tim was still getting her luggage weighed—four suitcases full of separates and shirtwaists and books—and preparing to pay the overcharges.
He looked comically gallant, and sitting here, sipping her glass of sherry, she thought it ridiculous that she should need his help. She had recently decided that the essential cause of her plight, what had brought her here, was a fatal self-sufficiency, an inner chilliness that had left her unable to settle for Paul or fight for Fred. She was an engine that couldn’t turn over; the only state of mind she could fully embrace was hesitation, a conviction that to accept one man or life was to forfeit another. She couldn’t welcome or destroy even the baby that was quickening within her.
Maybe she didn’t love Fuller because he was her emotional kinsman; maybe a small part of him did love Tim, just not a large or brave enough part to rout the others standing guard over the inviolable self.
Tim returned with a glass of milk and piece of pie.
“You should be having this,” he said, offering the milk. “For Estonia’s sake.”
They tried to grin.
“Here,” said Mary, giving him twenty dollars. “For the cabs and the overcharges. You’ll need it to get home.”
“Not on your life. I’ll be working soon. Though not as soon as I’d hoped, it seems.”
She said nothing.
“The job at State fell through,” he explained. “Osborne’s office sent me a letter saying I couldn’t satisfy their ‘security considerations.’ Fuller says it’s just somebody’s bureaucratic reflex kicking in. That it’s unfair but actually means nothing. He says the whole operation will change before long, and it’s just my bad luck to be coming through before McLeod can get over to Ireland.”
“No,” Mary said firmly. “That won’t change it.”
“Honest, Mary, I don’t understand it. I lived a perfectly clean life in the army, and there isn’t a soul here besides you who knows about the way things are now between me and Hawk. Not even Woodforde. Not even Tommy McIntyre.” This last name, his own unexpected utterance of it, made him go pale for a moment. “You don’t suppose that, based just on the old days, ’53 and ’54, he could have—”
“It wasn’t McIntyre.”
“Well, it wasn’t you. There’s nobody else.”
“It was Fuller.”
“That’s not so.”
Make it hard on him.
“I saw Fuller this morning,” she declared.
“No, you didn’t. You would have told me before now.”
“They call the baby ‘Garbo.’ I’ll bet he told you the same thing.”
He clenched his fist on top of the table. She pushed aside the milk and the pie and put her hand over his.
“No” was all he said—not a denial, just a refusal of her attention. He freed his hand but made no other protest. He looked at her like a technician reading a faulty instrument, one that had reported a flat scan when everybody knew there had to be a pulse. Once more he said “No,” before getting up. He nodded at her, as if she were a stranger he’d sat down with by mistake, and he turned to go.
A strong impulse made her reach inside the flight bag and extract Beverly’s present. She handed it to him, quickly, as if it were an illegal payoff she’d been assigned to pass along.
As she pressed it on him, she could feel a mutation of the gift’s meaning. The box—she had looked inside before leaving the apar
tment—contained a glass paperweight, a sprig of cherry blossom suspended in colorless amber. It had been Beverly’s way of telling her to come back to Washington. Now it was her way of saying to Tim that he would never come back here, but that what had happened between him and Fuller, however finished, remained alive somewhere, as sad and frozen and perfect as the blossoms on the branch.
So would her baby, forever ungrasped and unvisited by its mother, remain somewhere alive, still remembered and still real.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
May 6, 1957
The doors of St. Matthew’s stood open, so Monsignor Cartwright’s microphoned words about the dearly departed were able to travel not only to the seated congregants but all the way to those on the steps outside.
The deceased, everyone was assured, “had played a role which will be more and more honored as history unfolds its record.” After all, Monsignor Cartwright reminded those assembled, the “watchman of the citadel” had had “the fortitude to stand alone.”
“Never ‘alone,’” whispered Cecil Holland, out on the steps, to Mary McGrory. “Not as long as Roy was around.”
Miss McGrory flipped her pad back two or three pages. Its Gregg-shorthand squiggles had caught all the monsignor’s comfortings and regrets, including his observation that “few public figures in our time have done so much for the United States and received so many heartaches for it” as the man now on his way to eternal rest.
Joe McCarthy had died Thursday night from a “liver ailment.” Some said he’d gone peacefully, with Jean at his side, while others had him tearing at the IV tubes and bedsheets in a fit of delirium tremens. Whatever the truth, there would be three ceremonies to bid him farewell: the Mass here this morning; an afternoon service in the Senate chamber; a graveside rite in Wisconsin tomorrow.
When the first of these ended and the mourners were ready to leave St. Matthew’s, the vice president was at the front of them, descending the steps with his wife and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Spectators were hard pressed to see anyone else from the administration emerge, and Nixon took care to speak to a wire-service reporter more in the manner of a political scientist than a politician: “Years will pass before Senator McCarthy’s work can be objectively evaluated.”
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