Fellow Travelers (18 page)

“Gulp it, Skippy. I’ve got a date.”

Hawkins rose from the couch to put on a sport coat. After picking up his keys, he seemed to realize that this was maybe a bit much even for him. With a certain tenderness, he added: “It’s nothing, Timothy. A friend I made during Monday’s ‘air raid.’ We were escorted into the doorway of Quigley’s drugstore by one of the white armbands.”

“A wartime romance,” said Tim, picking up his own jacket.

“There you go,” said Hawkins.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

June 24, 1954

“Jesus, I can almost see Ike and Mamie. Behind the pink curtains.”

“No, that’s Kay Summersby on her knees. Mamie’s in the room next door.”

“Walking into the walls.”

“Mrs. Eisenhower does
not
drink. She has an ‘inner-ear imbalance.’”

Tim stood at the railing of the Hotel Washington’s rooftop terrace, listening to this exchange between two reporters. They were pretty plastered, and he was getting there, too. If not the life of this huge party high above Pennsylvania Avenue, he was as loose-limbed as he could reasonably be in the midst of his anxiety over whether Hawk would show up.

The night was warm but breezy; the terrace’s awning flapped, and the party’s din had banished most people’s memory of the service conducted for Lester Hunt two days ago in the Senate chamber. Still, his position at the railing prompted Tim, amidst all the drink and shouting, to recall what he’d seen looking down from the gallery on Tuesday: the impassive, straight-ahead expressions of Styles Bridges and Herman Welker, not far from the white, papery face of Hunt’s son.

The conversation in the gallery, like the whispers on the floor, had concerned not the corpse, but the count. Once Wyoming’s Republican governor picked a replacement for Hunt, the GOP would, by a single seat, have a real majority. In politics, too, it seemed to Tim, there was only excitement—and then everything else. Even at the service, the Democrats had been thrilled by new peril; the Republicans had been electric with fresh ascendancy.

The hearings’ farewell party had remained canceled, but the formidable, impromptu combination of May Craig and Perle Mesta had filled the void yesterday morning by announcing this party. The invitations to it had pictured a Maine lobster with the face of Margaret Chase Smith. Trapped in its claws was a tiny schoolboy figure meant to stand for Robert L. Jones, who had gotten his comeuppance on Tuesday night. Right now Tim could see the wide hat brims of both Miss Craig, the Maine newswoman, and Mrs. Mesta, the eternal arriviste and party-giver, clinking like martini glasses in a self-congratulatory toast, even if the guest of honor, Senator Smith, had demurely decided not to come.

Mrs. Mesta had provided her usual “mostes’”: the money and social brass that rendered political affiliation or listing in the city’s
Green Book
irrelevant to her recipe for a blowout. She and Miss Craig might both be Democrats, but they were happy to be celebrating the triumph of at least this one Republican (albeit over another). Along with Estes Kefauver and Henry Jackson from the Democratic side of the aisle, Jerry Persons and Jim Hagerty were here from the White House, and everyone seemed equally pleased about the real conquest being commemorated—Joe McCarthy’s recent self-decimation.

Red roses—Mrs. Smith’s signature flower—bloomed atop each tablecloth and drinks trolley. Posters with her winning slogan (“Don’t Change a Record for a Smear”) depended from the flaps of the awning. Standing near one of them, Tim heard Mrs. Persons and Mrs. Hagerty loudly agreeing that Clare Boothe Luce, so refined—and a
genius
, really—was a
much
better choice of female ambassador than Mrs. Mesta had been. No wonder she’d been posted to a
real
country like Italy instead of that toy one Truman had sent Perle to. Liechtenstein? Luxembourg? Knock the Eisenhowers, if you wanted: yes, purple orchids at state dinners might be putting on the dog, but did people really wish to see Bess Truman back stuffing daisies into vases she’d brought to the White House from a Woolworth’s in Kansas City?

Tim tried to lose himself in this Washington version of the conversations he remembered between the women of Ninth Avenue when they reeled in the washlines between one apartment and another. But he couldn’t keep himself from looking, every minute or two, toward the entrance.

At one door to the terrace Tim could see only Bob Kennedy, who seemed obliged to look ashamed of himself for being here at all, while his wife, Ethel, loudly imitated the bark of Mrs. Mesta’s poodle, Fifi. Kennedy began an attempt to reach the circle that had formed around one of the evening’s great catches, Vermont’s Senator Flanders, who’d continued in the past two weeks to up the ante against McCarthy. Before the hearings ended, he’d strode into the Caucus Room and, before the cameras, plunked down the text of a motion he was about to make on the floor—one that would strip McCarthy of his committee chairmanship. Flanders had explained that the warning was a courtesy; McCarthy pronounced it a combination of publicity-seeking and senility and urged that a net be dropped over the Vermonter. Senator Mundt had settled for asking Flanders to leave the room.

And yet, here he was, his nerve and his star still rising. People now expected him to drop his motion in favor of one by which the Senate would issue a blanket censure of McCarthy. Indeed, a feeling had taken hold that the hearings might turn out to have been no more than an exercise for actors who would soon be appearing in a much larger drama.

Lyndon Johnson’s boys, Walter Jenkins and Bobby Baker, formed part of the cluster around Flanders, though Baker, about as young as Cohn, was really talking with Eddie Bennett Williams, another legal prodigy and a buddy of Scott McLeod who was thought to make a lot of money getting people security clearances. Williams was also a pal of George Sokolsky, McCarthy’s Hearst columnist, and rumor had it that he’d already been asked to undertake Joe’s defense again censure.

Bobby Baker wanted to know whether this rumor was true, but Williams’ answer was drowned out by the sudden crowing of Mrs. Mesta—“You old rascal!”—her way of reminding the just-arrived Drew Pearson that she’d forgiven him for all the nasty things he used to write about Harry Truman. The ex-president and newspaperman were now frequently in touch, not so much to bury the hatchet as to plunge it jointly into McCarthy’s back.

“And you, too!” cried Mrs. Mesta, this time to Senator Kerr.

“Honey,” he replied, “you and Drew mighta been oil and water, but me and you have always been oil and oil!”

“Oklahoma crude!” she roared back, offering their shared geographical history as confirmation.

Senator Flanders now had competition no more than three feet away. Joseph Welch had arrived and was talking to Miss McGrory, whose last dispatch from the Caucus Room, after the attorney’s have-you-no-decency speech, had been a kind of public love letter.

“After all this, can you really go back to Boston?” she asked.

“My dear young lady, can you really go back to the book page?”

Tim knew that he, too, would never again be what he had been, and he knew it even more surely once he saw Hawk enter the room, smile at him, and mouth the word “Skippy.” After smiling back, he turned and looked the other way, behind him, toward the rooftop’s railing, telling himself that if he leapt over it now he would die happy, the mortal sin of suicide just a redundant count in God’s indictment, earning him only a concurrent eternity in Hell.

Hawk approached with an improbable entourage: Mary Johnson and the man who must be her fiancé, along with Mrs. Phillips and a fellow Tim didn’t recognize. They all took drinks from a tray, a waiter having glided instantly up to Hawk, just the way Tim remembered it had gone at the restaurant in Charlottesville. With one hand Hawkins selected a summery gin and tonic, and with the other he made a discreet wave to Joe Alsop, who, engaged in conversation with Ike’s press secretary, gave a businesslike one in return.

“Here,” said Hawk, presenting Tim to his companions, “is the real source of your invitations.” In fact it had been a joyful, capering Tommy McIntyre who’d pressed a fistful of Mrs. Craig’s invites upon Fuller when he’d visited the office yesterday morning to talk to Senator Potter about the St. Lawrence Seaway legislation.

“It’s nice to see you again,” said Mary Johnson, who reacquainted Tim and Beverly Phillips before introducing him to Paul Hildebrand and Jerry Baumeister.

“Mr. Fuller,” she explained to Tim, “is making us as impolitic as he is.” Their boss, Mr. Morton, could hardly be displeased with the results of the primary, but he would have discouraged their attendance here, lest it appear that employees of the Congressional Relations bureau had taken sides in a primary election.

Senator Gore’s chief of staff came over to greet Hawk, displacing Tim from the circle of conversation. The new vantage allowed him to watch the almost formal way in which Hildebrand held Mary Johnson’s hand—a contrast to the easy exuberance of the arm Mr. Baumeister kept draped over Mrs. Phillips’ shoulders.

“My mother,” Baumeister was telling Miss Johnson with a loud laugh, “didn’t feel completely keen on my going out with a divorced woman.”

Mrs. Phillips laughed, too. “Jerry is an
excellent
companion. A lot more fun than the widower turned out to be.”

“And I got her a free window sash from the hardware store!”

Hawkins pulled Tim back into the group and away from an oncoming conga line whose members were shouting the defeated candidate’s campaign slogan, but adding the unheroic last lyric of the song from which it had come: “The whole town’s talking about the Jones boy…
and he’s only nine days old
!” On primary day the youthful challenger had lost by five to one.

“Yes,” said Hawkins, “the hidden vote stayed hidden.” Senator Gore’s aide replied that the only thing Mainers now had to worry about was Nixon’s plan to vacation in the state.

“It’s
usually
good to keep things well hidden,” said Tim to Hawkins. He realized that his level of inebriation had caught up to that of the reporters at the railing. And being out in the open with Hawk, in a setting so much more public than even the Charlottesville restaurant, was making him giddy. Maybe he shouldn’t have said what he just did, but Hawk seemed to get his meaning and laughed over it: “There are all
kinds
of things hidden here.”

Fuller pointed to the figure of G. David Schine, who had entered with an attractive girl Tim recognized as Iris Flores, one of the private’s regular girlfriends; she had been interviewed in executive session but never called upon to testify in public. In the closed hearing she had described herself as an “inventor” trying to market her latest brainstorm, a new-and-improved nylon brassiere strap.

Joe and Jean McCarthy might be home tending their wounds, while Cohn burnt the midnight oil back in the office, but here, Tim thought, was Schine, smiling—in uniform, no less—and being
mobbed,
followed around by Dorothy Kilgallen, Hearst’s gossip writer, who took down his every word.

“Mr. Fuller.” Tommy McIntyre, full of vigor and vim, gleaming with a hard nonalcoholic brightness, approached Hawkins and shook his hand. He displayed a certainty—apparent from the way he nodded at both of them—that the connection between Mr. Fuller and “Master Laughlin,” as he sometimes called him, was hardly casual.

Hawkins did nothing to disabuse him of the idea. “So where’s the ostensible boss?” he asked, meaning Potter. Tim wanted to sink from the hotel’s rooftop to its basement.

“Home in Arlington with the missus,” said Tommy, neither surprised nor displeased by the query.

Tim tried not to stammer. “It would’ve been awfully hard for him to come here. After all, he hired Mr. Jones.”

“And he fired him, too,” said Tommy. “We
like
Senator Potter having things both ways. It’s this flexibility that gives him a certain
utility.
“

A secretary from Senator Kefauver’s office came and pulled Hawkins away. “Someone I want you to meet,” she said.

Tommy took the opportunity to tug Tim in the opposite direction. “Look at them lappin’ it all up,” he said, tracing the whole senatorial panorama with his glass of 7Up. “Some of the girls they’ve brought along could get ’em charged under the Mann Act. Of course, their aides have to settle for simpler pleasures, with smaller penalties. Jenkins over there will be heading off any time now to the men’s room at the G Street Y.”

Tim looked skeptically toward Lyndon Johnson’s executive assistant, a family man by all accounts.

“Oh, yes,” said Tommy. “He’ll have time enough to make it back here after a bit of relief—even if there’s got to be an arrest, a booking, and a fifty-dollar fine in between. He’ll tell himself it was all the fault of the alcohol.”

“I’m not doing so bad myself,” said Tim, nervously setting down his highball.

“You look steady enough to me,” said Tommy, whose eyes were now fixed on Private G. David Schine.

“I’m trying to remember which does what,” said Tim. “The Mann Act and the Volstead Act, I mean.”

Tommy laughed. “The first one strives mightily to protect underaged innocence. Oh, it’s a terrible law to be caught violating.” After a pause, he added: “But set a thief to catch a thief.”

Tim pointed toward Iris Flores. “She certainly
looks
twenty-one.”

“Oh, she is,” said Tommy, baring yellow teeth as he laughed. “That’s not
Schine’s
problem.”

Was it, Tim wondered, remembering Alsop’s information, someone
else’s
problem? Perhaps a problem Schine knew McCarthy had? Was Tommy on the verge of revelation? Tim had wondered for months why the older man kept plying him with riddles. It had to be more than Celtic fraternity or some sadistic impulse to harrow his naïveté. But still there was no answer, and as always Tommy—now making a clear-eyed beeline for Senator Flanders—was off even more quickly than he’d materialized.

From behind, Tim heard a woman’s soft Southern voice beginning to sing “Hey There.” He felt an ice-filled glass being pressed against the back of his neck and realized it must be Mary Johnson. He turned around and smiled. “Me with the stars in my eyes,” he sang in return. “That ice felt good. Where’s Paul?”

“At a phone, ordering us a car. He figures we’ll never get a cab downstairs.”

“You’re leaving so soon?”

Mary laughed. “It’s a miracle he lasted this long.”

Tim noticed the way she said it, as if Hildebrand’s prudential nature might be troubling her more than Hawkins’ daredevil one.