On Friday night at Gawler’s funeral home, Tim had stood in a long line of the mournful, the curious, and the silently triumphant, waiting to file past the open casket in which McCarthy reposed. Despite the mortician’s art, the corpse had looked nearly as gray as his tie. Two and a half hours ago, Tim had arrived at St. Matthew’s early enough to have gotten a seat, but he had his suitcase with him, and it had seemed somehow disrespectful, not just awkward, to take it inside. So he’d stayed on the steps, watching the eight Marines bring McCarthy’s closed coffin into the church.
Senator Kennedy was now exiting, his left hand in his suit pocket, his right hand brushing back his hair. He moved fast, almost furtively, as if departing from some questionable assignation. He breezed past his colleague, Senator Saltonstall, who, a few feet from Tim, was talking with Senator Martin about how the GOP was now down to forty-six seats. Miss McGrory and Mr. Holland began moving down the steps, the better to overhear this conversation, prompting Tim to sidle into a nearby clutch of observers, lest he be spotted by his former colleagues from the Star.
Even so, he was still able to hear them.
“Jack didn’t look as banged up about all this as his papa,” observed Holland. Joseph P. Kennedy had released a statement to the press that outdid even Monsignor Cartwright in paying tribute to the deceased. But Miss McGrory and Holland agreed that for cryptic brevity nothing could top Harry Truman’s reaction to news of the senator’s death: “Too bad.”
Fred Bell, looking like a plump, boutonniered floorwalker at Hecht’s, passed in front of Tim, who recognized him from an armband with the colors of the Estonian flag, as well as from the description, half comical and half longing, that he’d been given by Mary. According to her, Fred still didn’t know he was the father of a child ready to be born in New Orleans.
Joe Alsop now marched down the steps, nodding hello to Betty Beale and looking satisfied that the unpleasant business of McCarthy’s life, however abbreviated, was over at last. Close behind him came Scott McLeod, obliging the reporter at his side with a comment: “As I said in my Senate testimony on Friday, those criticisms of my appointment that are coming from abroad represent extreme minority elements.”
“Is your work at State really done?” the reporter asked.
“To my knowledge no subversive personnel remain in the department.”
Tim had fervently wished to avoid Tommy McIntyre, yet here he came, without Senator Potter, as happy as if he’d been to a christening.
“Mr. Laughlin!” he cried. “Christ, what a send-off from all the boys in their long skirts! I counted nineteen monsignors and seventy-three priests. I am not kidding.” He showed Tim a small notebook in which he’d written down the figures.
“A page back from that—go on, flip it—you’ll find the eulogy I’m trying to put into Charlie’s mouth.”
Those who had the opportunity to be with the late senator on social occasions or when chatting with him in his office knew that, regardless of differences which might have existed on political issues, Joe was never vindictive. He was a warm, human, and exceptionally charming person.
“Didn’t you find that yourself, Timothy? Didn’t he strike you as such? He’ll be the first solon since Borah to be laid out in the chamber. A lovely touch—to follow the great Prohibitionist with a drunkard. The final seal of repeal!”
Tommy’s failure to get a rise out of Tim, whose face remained weary and blank, inspired the Irishman to more strenuous rhetorical effort. Looking like the kind of gargoyle this plain American cathedral lacked, he hardly moved his rictus as the words came forth in a cackling spray: “Of course Charlie may be too much in demand to render this paean just yet. You should have seen him Friday night at the Mayflower! Receivin’ he was the annual award of the Goodwill Industries people. ‘Outstanding Champion’ of the nation’s handicapped. I must say, even the blinking canes couldn’t compete with the other honoree, a crippled telephone operator from Florida who dials with her feet and types with her mouth.” Ready to demonstrate the latter action, Tommy stuck a pencil between his yellow teeth. Revulsion at last gave Tim the energy to move, even if the only escape route would take him past Miss McGrory.
But she was occupied fending off a fierce scolding from a woman with a big red-white-and-blue cockade stuck to her hat. “Your paper writes malicious nonsense!” the woman insisted. “There is no possibility Mrs. McCarthy’s baby will be taken from her. One-year ‘probationary period’ or not.”
Miss McGrory nodded forbearingly and explained that she harbored no desire to see Tierney McCarthy returned to the New York Foundling Hospital.
The woman wheeled around to resume her march down the cathedral’s steps, and Tim realized it was Miss Lightfoot, showing the distress of a radiation victim. He tried to move away, not because he expected to be recognized, but from pity at the garish sight of her, unglimpsed since the anticensure rally at the Garden. But her own baleful eye took him in and made the identification.
“You!” she cried, before lowering her voice to a sickening baby-talk imitation of the inscription he’d once made in the Lodge biography. “‘You’re wonderful.’ Well, your Mr. Wonderful was sitting right up near the front of the church, did you know that? With his boss, Mr. Hill. Offering their politic homage to Senator McCarthy, whom they thwarted during every single minute he was alive. And how is it Mr. Fuller even now has a boss and a job in that cesspool over there?” She pointed toward Foggy Bottom. “Because there are still people who protect his kind, McLeod or no McLeod.”
Attracted by Miss Lightfoot’s again-increasing volume, people began to stare. Tim struggled to get past her, needing to flee before Hawk, who he’d never imagined would be here, came down the steps and saw him. Tightening his grip on his suitcase, he thought he was managing to get to the other side of Miss Lightfoot when her hand was able to reach out and detain him long enough so that she could whisper, straight into his face: “Cocksucker.”
Finally at the bottom of the steps, he looked back up them like the tourist who never again expects to see the Acropolis. It was at this moment that he caught sight of Woodforde near the cathedral’s doors.
The writer noticed him, too. Concerned by the suitcase, he made a gesture that asked: “What gives?”
Tim responded with a reassuring wave, but Woodforde knew better. He cupped his hands near his mouth and forcefully called out: “Don’t.” He’d sensed that something had gone very wrong between Laughlin and Fuller—and the single suitcase could hold just about everything Tim had in his part of the loft.
“You look awful!” Woodforde called down the steps.
“Thanks!” answered Tim, hoping to sound humorous, before making a getaway down Rhode Island Avenue. He had most of the day ahead of him before his bus was scheduled to leave: he’d gotten the cheapest fare, on a coach that wouldn’t get its passengers to New York until after midnight. Even with Woodforde’s copyediting money, four months at St. Mary, Mother of God had finished off his savings; for the first time in his life he wasn’t sure where he’d be sleeping tonight. He’d not told his parents or Francy he was coming, and he couldn’t picture himself arriving on either doorstep in the middle of the night. What he would do tomorrow, once he woke up, seemed even harder to imagine.
He wished, God forgive him, that he wouldn’t wake up. Two weeks had done nothing to lessen his black realization that this time he had not renounced Hawk—oh, the noble ridiculousness of his two-year enlistment!—but that Hawk had renounced him.
He went into the Peoples drugstore to get a half pint of milk before taking his seat on the bench in Dupont Circle, where he knew he’d been heading all along.
He understood that Mary had revealed what she had at the airport—It was Fuller—to shock and toughen him, as if a bucket of the coldest water might effect his Lazarene rise from the stupor of unwise love. But he’d walked all the way home that afternoon feeling strangely certain he’d become invisible.
Yesterday he’d sat on another bench,
on the Mall, watching smoke rise a thousand feet into the air: the Johnson & Wimsatt lumber yard, down on Maine Avenue above the docks where Mary used to buy fish, had burned to the ground, requiring every fire company in the city. Remembering, as the catechism had long ago told him, that despair is a particular affront to God—the rejection of every good He might still have in store for one—he had wished he were rising on the columns of smoke, incinerated but released, upward and gone.
He had decided to leave last night, while the radio was broadcasting the arrangements for McCarthy’s funeral. He would go to St. Matthew’s on the same commemorative impulse that had taken him to Gawler’s and that had now brought him here. Before going to the church, he had made up his mind that he would stand where he’d stood after the wedding; he’d blend into the crowd and then he would go, would begin to get lost—so thoroughly he’d be untraceable even to Mr. Keen.
At the cathedral he had found half the cast of the old lights-camera-action Caucus Room. There had even been some discussion on the steps about whether a glinting head in one of the pews, visible only from the back, might belong to G. David Schine. Tommy; Miss McGrory; the lunatic Miss Lightfoot; and, as he now knew, Hawk. The two of them had been there together, each as unaware of the other as they’d been at the Draft Ike rally back in ’52.
He put a straw into the milk and looked over toward the Washington Club. Today was turning out to be as warm as the wedding day had been. It was so lovely one could imagine Jean McCarthy tossing a funeral wreath as if it were her bridal bouquet.
Closing his eyes, he realized that he’d not said so much as a single Hail Mary for the repose of McCarthy’s soul. Silently, he recited one now, and followed it with one for himself. He prayed not for forgiveness or happiness or even strength, but only to make the merest murmuring demonstration to himself that he was still alive. He went on to say a third and fourth Hail Mary and decided he would recite a whole decade, even though he lacked his beads.
As he prayed, he could see the orange light of the sun on the backs of his eyelids, and then, just beyond this interior glow, he could feel the tortoiseshell frames of his glasses being lifted from his face.
“How many fingers?”
He opened his eyes and answered: “Three.”
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
“There. You’re healed.”
Hawkins sat down and pointed to the receding figure of his boss, Mr. Hill, from whom he’d peeled away at the edge of Dupont Circle.
“Nice day for a funeral,” he continued. “McCarthy’s. We were there together, Hill and I, and decided we’d walk to our next milestone in legislative diplomacy.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Irish embassy, up near Twenty-third. I told him I’d catch up. We’re early as it is.”
“And why would you be calling on my people?”
Even now—shocked by Hawk’s sudden presence, and still smothered in despondency—he had fallen right into the old bright febrile chatter, as if he were inside the turret or back on I Street, trying to please his beloved.
“We’re going up to answer a few last questions that some Hibernian-American legislators, Democrats all, have raised about Mr. McLeod’s nomination. A small meeting at which the actual Irish will be assuring the senators they have no real objections.”
“Ah.”
Fuller pointed to the suitcase. “Do the Hungarians no longer require their cans of Reddi-Wip? Can St. Mary really afford to give you a day off from dispatching them?”
“I thought I’d go to New York.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Awhile.”
“Two visits to your sister in the space of three weeks? After no more than three in two years? She’ll be a happy woman.”
They were talking as if he’d be back, when they both knew he never would; talking as if he were unaware of what Hawk had done, when they both knew that Mary had been made the instrument through which he knew everything.
Make it hard on him.
It was Fuller.
“Here,” said Tim. “Take this.”
He withdrew a small object, covered in a handkerchief, from the pocket of his suit jacket. Putting the thing into his own coat without unwrapping it, Fuller was aware only that it had the shape of a baseball sliced in half and was surprisingly heavy.
“I hear it was a short funeral for such a high Mass,” said Tim.
“There wasn’t much to eulogize. And the corpse had to get to the Senate chamber. It’ll be getting there more punctually than it had been showing up of late, from what I hear.”
Tim stared beyond Dupont Circle toward Massachusetts Avenue and said nothing. After a moment, Fuller rose to his feet and then pulled Tim up onto his. The taller man put his arms around the shorter one and whispered, audibly this time, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” asked Tim.
Everything, thought Fuller. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
May 7, 1957
Tim bought the New York Mirror’s early-morning edition at the only newsstand still open inside the Port Authority and discovered that, a few hours after making his quick getaway from McCarthy’s funeral, Senator Kennedy had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book, Profiles in Courage.
Just a few buses were still coming in at one a.m., and none were going out. Tim sat on a bench near the terminal’s Eighth Avenue exit and read the Mirror’s coverage of the funeral services. By the time McCarthy’s body had reached the Senate chamber, Nixon was sitting in the front row and the galleries were jammed, but only one member of the president’s cabinet had shown up. Father Awalt, who had married Joe and Jean in ’53, had today said the prayers from the rostrum, while Senator Flanders bowed his head and Mrs. McCarthy watched from the cloakroom doorway. A Senate page had fainted from the drama and the heat. “You never get over your first,” Tim could imagine Hawk or Woodforde whispering.
And then it was over. The body had been flown back to Wisconsin, with Johnson and Knowland leading a delegation of twenty-nine senators, by no means all of them true believers on the order of Styles Bridges, who had declared that “Joe literally gave his life to preserve freedom for all Americans.” One columnist was urging Jean—now past thirty, after all—to run for Joe’s seat and return to Washington as the colleague of all those liberal hypocrites who’d taken up half the seats on the funeral plane.
Tim was bone tired and uncertain of where he’d be spending the night, but his suitcase, fortunately, was much lighter than any Mary had taken to the airport. He’d thrown away half his things and left behind most of the rest in Ken and Gloria’s loft. So he was now still able to get out and walk, first to Ninth Avenue and then a dozen blocks north, past the Laughlins’ old apartment, as well as Grandma Gaffney’s, where the lights had been out, he calculated, for at least four hours. A glow from the building’s basement window revealed Mr. Mancuso, the super, to be up late, probably reading the sports pages beside the coal furnace there was no need to tend on a warm night like this.
Reversing direction and walking south, he reached the corner of Eighth and Fiftieth, where he spotted a fortune-teller, a crazy, gypsy-looking woman who had placed an old television tube—apparently her crystal ball—atop an upside-down wooden vegetable crate. He wondered at his own inability to stop and consult with her, as if, after all his transgressions, that one might still be too great a sacrilege.
Back on Forty-second Street, he climbed the steps of Holy Cross Church, just as he’d climbed them on the day of his First Communion and on every other day for morning Mass before classes at the school next door. The church was unlocked, and he took a seat in a pew at the back. Close to the altar sat two derelicts whose snores seemed to issue from the empty pulpit that had once vibrated with the homilies of Father Duffy himself.
He recalled being here on V-E day, at thirteen years old, a few months before transferring across town to St. Agnes’ Boys’ High
. He’d sat in his blue-and-gold school tie, listening to a priest describe the new world that was surely aborning—while somewhere far across it, in the Pacific, Hawkins Fuller must have been asleep on his boat, wondering when he’d be asked to help invade Japan. The distance that had lain between them then seemed no greater than the two hundred miles of tonight’s bus ride. If Hawk were this minute in the pew across the aisle, the distance would still measure out to the same vastness, any separation of their flesh being the distance in life that was now, forever, unbridgeable.
Tim decided that he would not pray tonight, not so much as a single “Gloria Patri”—not because he was angry at God, or too guilty to face Him, or too exhausted; only because he felt himself floating, like a dust mote in the vacuum of space, where there was no airwave to carry his cry. He looked up to the cross and the well-muscled figure of Jesus—a body that looked too strong to perish from even the suffocation that was the real cause of death by crucifixion. He remembered the Lenten seasons he’d spent in this church, all the long weeks when purple cloth wrappings turned the statues into mummies, denying their plaster beauty to the faithful. At those times he would crave the sight of Christ’s bloodied face and, even more, His arched and gleaming torso. This is my body. Every Sunday, even during Lent, he would take the Communion wafer onto his tongue and into his mouth, Christ’s actual flesh, not the mere symbolic commemoration of the Protestants. It was Christ’s body that kept him alive, kept him from Hell and darkness. Only Hawk’s flesh, which he could taste even now, could have made him abjure Christ’s during that first year together. And even then he had hungered for both. Now, with the collapse of the convenient folly he’d lived these last few months—I’m still taking Communion. Just making up my own rules!—he would be without either.
He had no idea whether the ferry sailed for Staten Island at this late hour. Francy would be sure to take him in with less alarm than his parents might display, but it might be dawn by the time he reached her. At this hour he doubted that his grandmother would open her door, not even if she recognized his voice, though maybe Mr. Mancuso would let him sleep on the cot by the furnace.
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