Or he could just keep himself awake in an all-night diner, until it was light.
He took his suitcase and left the church, walking west to Ninth Avenue, where he once more rounded the corner and went north, just for a block, before aimlessly starting down Forty-third Street, back in the direction of Times Square. Halfway toward Eighth, he heard the notes of a clarinet, quite soft, coming from the top floor of an old brownstone across the street. The man playing had the instrument sticking out the open window, as if the neighbors would have no grounds for complaint so long as the sound didn’t travel from his apartment to theirs through the interior walls.
Tim recognized the tune being played as “No Love, No Nothin’,” a funny song from the war about self-imposed chastity on the home-front. But the man was playing it in such a slow and bluesy and beautiful way that it had become another song entirely. Tim put his suitcase down on the sidewalk and stood to listen, realizing now who the clarinet player was.
I had an assignation that night with a musician. Who does things you haven’t even dreamed of.
He wasn’t especially good-looking. Crew-cut and stringy, maybe somewhere between Tim’s own age and Hawk’s, he wore thick glasses and a T-shirt and probably nothing else below the line made by the windowsill.
And that’s a promise I’ll keep.
No fun with no one,
I’m gettin’ plenty of sleep.
Sleep was what Tim wanted now, to sleep beside this man, to feel inside himself the body of someone Hawk himself had been inside; to connect with his beloved, his lost, by way of a conductor, if only until morning.
Maybe the two of us can become the three of us.
He waited until the song was done before he nodded upward, appreciatively, as if to indicate that he’d be applauding if it weren’t so late and he weren’t standing so close to someone else’s curtained window. The musician nodded back and signaled with his fingers, making first a “five” and then the letter “A.”
He crossed the street, pressed the buzzer, and as he climbed the stairs he crossed himself.
EPILOGUE
OCTOBER 16, 1991
U. S. Embassy, Tallinn, Estonia
So what will happen with the black man with the problems with the sex?
The polymath minister-filmmaker had asked Fuller, when he returned to the party from his walk, about Clarence Thomas’s chances of being confirmed for the Supreme Court. And here, just past midnight, was the answer, left on Fuller’s desk by Ms. Boyle. She’d figured he might come back up to the office, late, by himself; it had become something of a habit.
The piece of teletype said that Thomas had gotten through the Senate, 52–48, about an hour ago in Washington.
“Let’s celebrate,” he might have said had Ms. Boyle still been here. “Shall we break out a can of Coke?”
No, he would not have said that. Even he didn’t make such jokes anymore.
He eyed the telephone and Mary Russell’s letter. Its stationery listed her number.
He hesitated, beginning instead to write a letter of his own, to Mrs. Susan Fuller Simonson, his daughter, telling her he bet no man had ever received Halloween cards from his grandchildren so early, surely a sign of her organizational capacities as a mother. Puzzling over what to say next, he tapped his pen on the desktop—what ever had happened to blotters?—and allowed his gaze to travel back to Mary’s letter.
He knew he was going to do it, so he might as well do it now.
He buzzed the security officer on duty and asked him to make the call; if he tried it himself, he would bollix up the long string of access and country and area codes.
“Yes, Mr. Fuller.” Like the rest of the small staff, the security man was getting accustomed to the odd hours of the number two. A moment later he was buzzing him back: “Mrs. Russell is on the line.”
“Fuller?”
The connection was astonishing. Ms. Boyle had not been exaggerating about the phones.
“Yes. Mrs. Russell?”
“Yes.”
“Russell. Where did that come from?”
The telephone transmitted her laughter from Scottsdale after a moment’s delay that, he understood, had less to do with fiber optics than the fact that even now, thirty-five years later, she was only laughing against her better judgment.
“Before you tell me,” he added, “let me give you the number on this end. It’s past midnight here, and if I lose you after the security man at the desk goes home, whoever comes on will never be able to patch me back through.”
He read off a long string of numbers from his business card, and she repeated them. “Wait,” he said. “That’s the fax. Sorry.” He then read the proper string, the one for the telephone, and she copied that down, too.
“There,” said Fuller. “So what time is it where you are?”
“Two-thirty in the afternoon. Ten hours earlier.”
“Not fourteen hours later?”
“No.”
“Well, at least you’re giving me the time of day.”
No laughter.
“You got my letter,” she said.
“Yes. So who is Russell?”
“My husband, Harry. I married him a year ago. I’m talking from his office in the house. He’s out playing golf.”
“Why did you wait so long to marry? Someone tell you the first forty years are the hardest?”
“I was married for twenty-five years, from ’64 to ’89, to Paul Hildebrand.”
“The name’s familiar.”
“The brewer.”
“Ah, yes! The lovesick brewer. How did that finally happen?”
“He came to New Orleans and found me, two years after he divorced his very nice wife and was still covered with guilt.”
“Guilt. Is that going to be the theme of this conversation?”
“I don’t know. You made the call.”
“You wrote the letter.”
During the pause that followed, he fingered the envelope it had come in. “What ever happened to the baby?”
“She grew up to be a wonderful young woman. This morning I’m designing the leaflets for her campaign for the school board in Amarillo. Desktop publishing. I’m a whiz at computers. She was raised by fine people in Miami and five years ago, just as Paul was getting sick, she managed to find me.”
“What’s her name?”
“Barbara. But I call her Toni. Long story. How is your own daughter?”
“Raising three children back in Maryland. Making Halloween cards three weeks early. I’ve never known a girl of her generation with less ambition.”
“She got it from you.”
“I’m taking that as a compliment. There’s too much hard charging all around. Especially from the girls.”
“Is that going to be the theme of this conversation? The social decline of the world we knew when we were young?”
The brief pause Fuller took was extended, for less than a second, by the satellite carrying his words to Mary. “I assume that he died of AIDS.”
“He died of bone cancer. With considerable pain and a great deal of cheer. When he was diagnosed he sent me a note saying ‘So much for all the milk!’ I can’t imagine that he was ever infected with AIDS, Fuller.”
He lit a cigarette. Amidst all the multivitamins and bran, Lucy had never gotten him to stop smoking altogether.
“Providence, Rhode Island?”
“He never really lived anywhere else. For a little while, just after Washington, he went home to New York—in a bad way. Never finished his reserve duty. He admitted what he was and got dishonorably discharged. He more or less fell apart at his sister’s house until her parish priest found him a spot with some order in Rhode Island. He only described it to me years later—half retreat, half sanitarium. He was enough glued back together to leave in six months.”
Fuller had spent most of his life parrying questions, not asking them. The neediness of now having to do the latter bothered him, and he was certain, even without her
face before him, that Mary knew it did. The dynamics of their old friendship, across eight thousand miles and thirty-five years, had flung themselves together in an instant, like the film of a building’s demolition running on fast rewind.
“Why did he stay in Rhode Island?”
“There was no reason to be anywhere else. For fifteen or twenty years he worked in the books department of the Outlet Company, the last of the Providence department stores. When it went out of business he took a job with an antique books dealer in an old arcade just down the street. I visited him there about a dozen years ago.”
“I’m doing the math. I’m guessing he took you to a Reagan rally. Unless it was bingo at St. Aloysius’.”
She wouldn’t answer.
“What was he like?”
“He bought me a nice Italian dinner. After drinks at his small, tidy apartment. He was very nervous—not about seeing me; he was just a fragile, nervous person. And yet curiously peaceful. He would have been nearing fifty then, but for all his gray hair he looked much younger. Thin. It was easy enough to still see the boy who first walked into the bureau.”
I got the job. You’re wonderful.
“‘Peaceful’?”
“Yes, you get off easy.” She paused, letting it sink in, hoping it would wound him even as it brought relief. “I don’t think he’d given a thought to politics in twenty years, and he wasn’t the least bit religious in any ordinary way. He told me he went to Mass once in a while and never bothered with confession. But the peacefulness had come from God, I’m certain.”
“And how are you certain of that?”
“Because he told me. He told me that one day twenty years before, he’d realized, all of a sudden, while walking down a street in the city some Saturday afternoon, that he’d spent his whole life trying to make God love him—and that this didn’t matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he loved God. He told me that once he knew this he was home free.”
“Well, then, besides the milk, so much for Bishop Sheen, too. ‘God love you’—the words that threw open my mother’s checkbook.”
“He said it was the same with you.”
“What was the same with me?”
“That all that mattered was his loving you. That was enough, once he realized it.”
“And you think that was true?”
“I think there was more to it than that. I think he was too nervous to try loving anyone else. But it was true enough. And I think it’s more than you deserved.”
She could hear him putting out a cigarette, the tiny hammering on an ashtray bouncing up through space and down again.
“The fellow who’s your daughter’s father,” Fuller said. “Was he Estonian or Lithuanian? I can’t recall.”
“Estonian. They’d borrowed the Lithuanians’ embassy the night we met him.”
“I met him? I don’t remember.” He thought back to the morning’s mental calisthenics and wondered if he’d done as well as he thought.
“Fred died in ’79,” explained Mary. “He would not have believed anything that’s happened over there in the past two years, though he always claimed he could see it coming.”
“I’m going home for good in a few months.”
“Are you still with your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Right,” she said, having expected as much.
She could feel—he could feel it himself—that whatever emotions had prompted him to make the call had already subsided, that he was about to succeed one last time at doing what he had always done where Timothy Laughlin and that whole portion of his life were concerned. He had come back from it, dispensed with it; he’d closed and locked the cellar door and was climbing back up to the living room of his existence.
“He was buried wearing your cuff links,” Mary told him. “His sister found them on his night table, back at his apartment, the afternoon he died in the hospital.”
After a longer pause than the others he had taken, Fuller said: “He was a very nice boy.”
I’m pleased to meet you, Timothy Laughlin.
“Goodbye, Fuller.” She said it tenderly and hung up the phone.
He sat there for several minutes, attempting to think about the young man he’d eyed on his walk near the walled Old City tonight. He tried once more to figure out the best route to the Carnegie Endowment from this house in Chevy Chase that Lucy was still determined to buy. And he wondered if he might yet persuade her to have one couple, no more, over for the White Nights.
All at once he heard a whistling sound, like an electronic teakettle. The fax machine, he realized; it disgorged things only infrequently and usually when Ms. Boyle was here. But a paper was now coming out of it, insidiously, as if from an intruder who’d scurried away before he could be detected slipping it under the door.
Fuller got up to take it from the machine’s tray. The small type at the top rim of the page said HARRY RUSSELL and showed the area code 602. Beneath that, he saw Mary’s handwriting: “He sent me this sketch two weeks before he died. The house is still there. Paul never tore it down. It survived the brewery and is all fixed up.”
The drawing was in Skippy’s style, as recognizable as Mary’s penmanship. He had done it, it seemed, from memory: the narrow, three-story brick house topped by its turret with two windows. Inside one of them a candle burned; behind the other, on the sill, stood a milk bottle. Below the sketch was a note from Tim to Mary:
Let him know that I was happy enough. Make it easy on him.
T.
Fuller returned to his desk with the paper, which he brushed once with his hand, before putting it on a small stack of State Department forms held down by a glass paperweight, inside of which a sprig of cherry blossom floated. It had traveled with him for many years, from one country to another, throughout a world grown unexpectedly, and increasingly, free.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Having more than once described the writing of historical fiction as being a relief from the self, I was aware as I worked on Fellow Travelers of venturing further than usual into my own life’s preoccupations and fundamentals, however refracted they might be here by time and geography. I have, while writing this book, felt continually grateful to my parents, Arthur and Carol Mallon, and to my teachers, especially George Doolittle, Fran Walker, Elmer Blistein, and Robert Kiely.
Down the street from me in present-day Foggy Bottom, I must thank Steve Trachtenberg, Bill Frawley, and Faye Moskowitz of George Washington University, who contrived to keep the doors of Gelman Library open to me when I left teaching at GWU for a stint in the government. Most of this book was written in Gelman’s sixth-floor reading room, after many hours with the microfilmed Washington Evening Star a few stories below.
In obtaining and understanding transcripts of both the executive sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the open sessions of the Army–McCarthy hearings, I had the help of Dick Baker and Don Ritchie, longtime historians of the U. S. Senate, as well as Brian McLaughlin of the U.S. Senate Library. Sara Schoo, reference librarian at the Department of State, was also generous with her time. And thanks to Joe Mohr for a superbly informative tour of the Old Post Office tower on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Of the many dozens of histories and biographies I’ve consulted, I would single out the special importance of David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago, 2004). Professor Rick Ewig’s article on the life and death of Senator Lester Hunt was helpful, as was the Web site of the History Office of the United States Army in Europe (USAREUR). Also on the Web: Richard A. Johnson’s recollections of basic training at Fort Dix.
I would like to thank Mel Levine, formerly of the U.S. State Department, for advice about Hawkins Fuller’s career path, and my friend Priscilla McMillan, whose writings and conversation have illuminated my knowledge of the 1950s and much else. And I’m grateful to Jim Steen for local Washington lore.
&n
bsp; I hasten to point out—to those mentioned above and to the reader—that I have taken my usual small liberties with historical fact, and more than my usual license with historical figures.
My editor, Dan Frank, has again bolstered and challenged me in all the ways I’ve tried not to take for granted in our long association. He has my deepest gratitude. The enthusiasm shown toward this project by Sloan Harris, my agent, has been both sustaining and delightful.
Chris Bull has been my own proof of the axiom—and showtune lyric—that if you become a teacher by your pupils you’ll be taught. In two decades of argument about politics, sex, and culture, he has usually outshone me in logic, and always in bravery.
I cannot imagine life in Washington without John McConnell, the gold standard for public service and devoted friendship.
And I cannot imagine life anywhere without Bill Bodenschatz.
THOMAS MALLON
Washington, D.C.
November 13, 2006
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Mallon is the author of seven novels, including Bandbox, Henry and Clara, and Dewey Defeats Truman. Among his nonfiction books are studies of diaries (A Book of One’s Own), plagiarism (Stolen Words), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage). A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines, he lives in Washington, D.C.
BOOKS BY THOMAS MALLON
FICTION
Arts and Sciences
Aurora 7
Henry and Clara
Dewey Defeats Truman
Two Moons
Bandbox
Fellow Travelers
NONFICTION
Edmund Blunden
A Book of One’s Own
Stolen Words
Rockets and Rodeos
In Fact
Mrs. Paine’s Garage
Fellow Travelers Page 38