Fellow Travelers (25 page)

“Leaving earlier than early, you mean.”

“Leaving now, to be precise.”

McCarthy’s Geneva resolution had sent the Bureau of Congressional Relations into action on Monday morning, but victory had proved so easy that by Wednesday there wasn’t much left to do. Now, on Friday, things were even slower, and once Fuller left, Mary decided she would answer Tim’s latest letter before going home herself. In her reply she would take care—as Tim always did—never to mention Fuller. Unnatural as this seemed, she knew it was for the best. A more difficult task would be responding to the kind of political-religious tract that Tim’s most recent letter, like the one or two before it, had started to resemble.

She at least had quiet enough in which to concentrate, Beverly having left early, too. Quite stagestruck now, Bev had a part in the Bethesda Players’ production of
The Little Foxes;
Jerry was helping to make her hoop skirt with some wire he’d brought home from the hardware store he still worked at.

Department of State
Washington, D. C.
June 24, 1955

Dear Tim,

Well, it’s a silent Friday afternoon here, befitting a world on which peace has apparently descended. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? I refer to this Molotov resolution out in San Francisco—a stroke of genius, I should say, simply to
proclaim
the arrival of “peace, cooperation and friendship.”

I can imagine what you

Someone had entered the office. With no one at any other desk—Miss Lightfoot’s replacement had left early, too—Mary got up to greet whoever it was.

The visitor, heavyset but attractive, perhaps a bit over forty, motioned for her to sit back down at her typewriter while he strode toward her.

“Miss Johnson, you don’t remember me. The name’s Fred Bell.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The last time I saw you, a couple of years ago, I was bringing you a cracker with some fish on it. At the Estonian embassy. Actually the Lithuanian. We were borrowing the place.”

“Oh,” said Mary, bits of that sad little evening coming back to her. She recalled her skirt feeling too long, and Fuller taking off into the night.

“I own some shoe factories up in Massachusetts. I’m on the deportees’ committee.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “I’m remembering something about a violinist.”

“Pretty close,” said Mr. Bell. “Oboe. My cousin. The one who gets to play music in Tallinn. The other cousin, the peasant, is still deported, still on a Soviet collective. You and me also talked about eggs. And then your handsome boss whisked you away.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Losing. Like always.” He laughed. “A bunch of us rushed down on Monday when we got word of the resolution being introduced. We were dumb enough to think we could help it pass. Real controversial, wasn’t it? ‘Please, maybe, could you just possibly, if it isn’t too rude, bring up the satellites? Oh, too provocative? Too dangerous? Sorry! We apologize!’”

Mary nodded, deciding not to mention that she’d spent two days marshaling votes against the proposal, even though she’d known in her heart that its only objectionable aspect was its toxic sponsor.

“A couple of us have stayed in town making the rounds. Without much point, as usual. But I’ve seen everybody I could on the Hill and figured I’d come over here. I still have your handsome boss’s card.” He showed it to her. “I’ve learned that barging in has more chance of success than calling ahead.”

“I’m afraid that both the handsome boss and
his
boss aren’t in.”

Mr. Bell shrugged. “More of my luck. Maybe I
should
have called ahead.” He put Fuller’s card back in his wallet. “You’re pretty handsome yourself. You can use that word with women, can’t you?”

He’d almost, Mary thought, said “dames.”

“I’m not sure I’m old enough for ‘handsome,’” she replied.

“Have dinner with me.”

“You’re married. A guess.”

“I’m married. A
good
guess.”

As if another voice were talking for her, she asked: “Where would you like to go?”

CHAPTER THIRTY

July 23–24, 1955

Tim had sweated through his first shirt on the five-hour bus ride from Fort Polk, but here in Mr. Johnson’s remarkably cool library a second one was holding up fine. He had put in for his weekend pass nearly a month ago, and Mary had promised they would have some time alone after dining with her father. Tim and Mr. Johnson had been conversing for the past ten minutes, while they waited for her to finish getting ready. About a quarter of the books in the room appeared to be bound in leather, and about half of those were in French. Mr. Johnson had explained that on his mother’s side he was a Claurin.

“Things are looking up,” the older man now declared. “Never before have East and West wasted so little time reaching a deadlock.”

Ike was coming home from the Geneva conference tomorrow, having proposed joint aerial reconnaissance and the sharing of military blueprints between America and Russia. It remained doubtful that the Soviets would say yes.

Tim laughed politely before replying. “Nixon thinks the summit ‘cleared the air,’” he said, venturing toward a difference of opinion with his host. “But I think it made things worse.”

“I can’t claim the East-West bon mot as my own,” Mr. Johnson responded. “It came out of some man’s column in the
Times-Picayune.
”

Mary had warned her father about the recent overheated expressions of faith and politics in Tim’s letters, and Mr. Johnson was trying to keep the conversation light. His daughter decided that she would do the same. Entering the library, Mary declared, “I’m always happy to hear Nixon criticized. Even if it’s from all the way over on
that
side.”

More perfumed than Tim remembered, she leaned over and gave him a sisterly kiss.

“Very Audrey Hepburn, no?” she asked, touching her new shorter haircut. “That’s the intention, anyway.”

“I think I miss the style you had,” Mr. Johnson said, wistfully. “Your mother’s hair fell to her waist every night as she came into our bed.”

The phrasing jarred them all with its intimacy, and Mary wound up returning the conversation to affairs of state, explaining that the president’s cable from Geneva, describing the progress of the conference, had arrived at the State Department early Thursday afternoon, just before her departure for New Orleans on the ovenlike
Crescent.
“So I was very up-to-date. On that and other things besides. We even knew about poor Cordell Hull.” The death of FDR’s secretary of state had occurred only this afternoon, but on Thursday morning awareness of its imminence had sent some longtime employees scrambling for black crêpe to hang, once Mr. Hull was gone, from the department’s Twenty-first Street windows.

Strong spicy smells were coming from the kitchen. Josephine, a Negro woman who took care of Mary’s father during the week, had come to cook their meal. “It’s a treat to have you here,” Mr. Johnson insisted to Tim, “and it will be a treat to have Josephine’s dinner. Most weekends I subsist on something frozen that she’s left, or a plate of red beans and rice that I can manage to make myself.” He looked skeptically at Tim’s thin frame. “Are they feeding
you
well enough?”

“Oh, just fine, sir.”

“Well,” said Mary, “they’re already getting Capitol Hill ready for your return. They’ve finished the foundations on that new Senate Office Building, the one going up where that little slum on First Street used to be? They’ll have the whole thing done in a couple of years.”

She realized, suddenly, that she needed to concoct a fib. “I got all of that from Beverly. I think I wrote you about how much time she was spending on the Hill this spring.”

Tim, certain that she’d gotten this architectural update from Hawkins, who visited the Capitol twice a week, just nodded.

Mary now surmised what he was thinking, which was not at all what had made her worry. She had lied to protect a secret of her own, not Tim’s feelings. She’d seen the construction herself, during the two weekends Fred Bell had come down to Washington to see her, weekends the two of them had spent in a little room at the top of the Carroll Arms. Each Sunday afternoon, when Fred would phone his wife in Massachusetts to report on all the preparation he was doing for the next day’s lobbying, she would take a stroll around the Hill that took her past the construction site.

“I may not come back to Washington at all,” said Tim, “but if I do I’ll be your neighbor a couple of times a month. The Army Reserves in D.C. are so hard up they drill in a State Department lecture room! Right at Twenty-first and C.”

His face flushed with nostalgia for the handful of visits he’d made to Hawkins’ office. Mary saw his color rise and wondered how on earth she’d be able to tell him what she had to.

Mr. Johnson excused himself to check on Josephine.

“You’re sure you won’t stay here tonight instead?” Mary asked Tim. He’d checked into a guesthouse in the Quarter. “Dauphine Street is quieter than most, but still, it
is
a Saturday night, and—”

“You’re forgetting I grew up a few blocks from Times Square,” he said, laughing. “Trust me, this is nothing! And if you’re worried about the money, remember: I’m making seventy-eight whole dollars a month on top of three meals a day and all the milk I can drink.”

“I need to talk to you about something after dinner.”

“Are you getting back together with Paul?”

“No, no. But it does concern an engagement.”

“Beverly Phillips and Jerry Baumeister!”

Mr. Johnson was coming back into the library.

“No, not them,” she whispered. “It’s somebody else.”

“Josephine’s boy,” Mr. Johnson announced with a certain wonder, “wants her to take him to Disneyland.” The amusement park’s opening had been all over television last week.

Mary looked at Tim from the corner of her eye. No, he hadn’t guessed the news she had to tell him.

“Fantasyland?” he asked her father, trying to ascertain which precinct of Disneyland interested Josephine’s boy particularly. “Frontierland?”

Mary excused herself to get a pack of cigarettes from her bedroom, and once there, standing still with her left hand on the dresser, she remembered the conversation that Fuller had drawn her into on Monday afternoon, just before close of business.

Getting married?
she’d asked, incredulously.

Having children, too, no doubt
, he’d answered.

Why, Fuller?

Why not?

Because you’re—

Because I am, even so, good value for her money.

No, you’re not.

He’d said nothing, just smiled.

Why now?

A hitch in time saves nine.
He’d begun moving toward the door by that point.

Should I say anything to him?
she’d asked.
I’ll be seeing him this weekend, you know, when I’m back home.

I know. I keep reading the letters you deliberately leave open on your desk.

What should I tell him, Fuller?

That it makes no difference.
He’d already taken his hat from the clothes tree.

Of course it makes a difference,
she’d protested.

Does Mrs. Bell make a difference, Miss Johnson?

You’re a son of a bitch.

Yes, I am.
He’d then put on the hat.

No, you’re not.

No, I’m not
, he’d said, without any archness, before asking, quietly, for a simple favor:
Make it easy on him.

She now lit one of the cigarettes and returned to the library, where there seemed to be a lull in the conversation between her father and their guest.

“Tim has just finished explaining to me the difference between Frontierland and Fantasyland,” Mr. Johnson told his daughter. “But we’ve concluded that Josephine’s son wants to go to another land entirely.”

“Which is that?” asked Mary.

“Tomorrowland,” said her father.

Tim’s brown eyes were wet and huge. She could see that, in the time she’d been out of the room, he had guessed the identity of the groom.

“Hello, darlin’! Why so sad?”

He thought the voice might be a prostitute’s, like the one he’d heard on Bourbon Street a half hour ago, but here on Dauphine, a little before midnight, the words were coming not from a doorway but a low second-floor balcony, and the voice belonged to a man. There were two men, actually, near the railing. One of them had curly gray hair; the other, the one who had spoken, was somewhat younger, maybe in his thirties, but already balding.

“I’m okay,” Tim called up to him.

“Heavens,
really
? We’d hate to see you when you were under the weather. You come on up here.” He pointed to an entrance that led first to a back garden and then the apartment upstairs.

Still struggling, as he’d been for the last two hours, with the single faint image he had retained of the woman he now thought of as
her
, the way she’d appeared last year on the Hotel Washington’s rooftop, Tim went into the garden. Passing flowers thick and fragrant, their stems stronger-looking than the white wrought iron of the bannister and balcony, he fought off another picture, recently assembled by his imagination, in which Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins Fuller and their children sat surrounded by bicycles and wrapping paper on a Christmas morning.

The younger man already had a drink for him. “I’m Wel, short for Jeffrey Wellison. And you are?”

“Timothy Laughlin.”

The older man, introduced by Wel as Mr. Shaw, extended his hand while clicking a Tums between his teeth. Tim could see a roll of the tablets lying on the tray with the pitcher of drinks. Very tall and possessed of fine posture, Mr. Shaw was probably no more than forty-five. His hair—Tim could see this close up—was more than curly; it was like coiled wire. His features had a Negro aspect, and Tim wondered if he might be an octoroon or even a mulatto, terms he knew from the movies. Whatever he was, the man’s whole manner marked him as an aristocrat.

“And tell us,” he asked, “what brings you to New Orleans, Mr. Laughlin?”

“I’m in the army.”

“You’re not really!” shrieked Wel. “We would have welcomed you with
trumpets
if we’d known! As it is, you should sit down.”

“Are you on a pass?” Mr. Shaw asked.

“Yes, I’m a private, a communications specialist at Fort Polk. I go back tomorrow.”

“Now, Clay, you heard him. He’s
on
a pass, so making one in his direction would be
redundant
.”

Mr. Shaw laughed apologetically at his companion’s remark, and peeled another Tums from the roll. Tim found himself surprised that anyone living in this city, awash in spices, might actually suffer from heartburn.

Wel poured a little sachet of powder into his own drink. “Atoms for peace!” he exclaimed, lifting the glass in what appeared to be a toast to himself.

“Forgive Mr. Wellison’s flamboyance,” said Mr. Shaw. “The granules are just a sweetener.”

“Sure they are,” said Wel, before stage-whispering the word “Benzedrine” in Tim’s direction.

Mr. Shaw returned a bit helplessly to the notion of atoms for peace, making it the occasion for a general toast: “To the spirit of Geneva. And to Private Laughlin’s arrival in our city.”

Tim took a sip of what he guessed was a martini. He followed it with a shrimp whose strong sauce Mr. Shaw seemed to be avoiding.

“There
is
no spirit of Geneva,” said Wel. “In fact the man on the radio was saying that China’s going to attack Formosa before all the bigwigs have cleared out of Switzerland. While everybody’s distracted, the Russians won’t be able to restrain the Chinks. Not Chinks. He called them something else. Chiclets?”

“Chicoms, I suspect,” said Mr. Shaw.

“Is he right, honey?”

“Yes,” said Tim.

“Well,” said Mr. Shaw, with the slight nervousness that seemed habitual to him in Mr. Wellison’s presence, “if any world war does break out, we have Private Laughlin here to defend us.”

“And plenty of vodka to offer the invaders!” cried Wel, suddenly agreeable.

“I thought it was the Chinese who were coming,” said Mr. Shaw, gently.

With a volume that startled the two older men, Tim all at once declared: “Bulganin wants the Chinese to act as ‘observers’ in Europe! Peacekeepers!”

Mr. Shaw recovered from his surprise and shook his head, agreeing to the irony and injustice of the prospect. Wel, losing interest in the international situation, busied himself by emptying one half-full bowl of peanuts into another.

Embarrassed by his own volubility, Tim changed the subject, asking Mr. Shaw: “What line are you in, sir?”

“So sweet!” exclaimed Wel. “He makes you sound like a shoe salesman, Clay. And
he
sounds a little like Dorothy Kilgallen.”

Mr. Shaw made a forbearing expression: “I’m in international trade,” he explained to Tim. “Imports and exports. Mostly putting other importers and exporters together with one another.”

“Clay’s a
matchmaker
,” said Wel, who was combing his hair in front of a heavily framed mirror. “When he travels the world, I feed the cat here and have his mail forwarded.”

“How long have you been friends?” Tim asked.

“About ten years,” Mr. Shaw explained. “Since just after the war.”

“We’re in the ‘
just
friends’ stage now,” Wel added. “Sisters. It comes to that with the seven-year itch. Well, seven months in our case.” He laughed at Tim’s evident perplexity. “I don’t think he’s seen the movie, Clay. He was probably at
The Seven Little Foys
instead. Anywho,” Wel announced, picking up his cigarette lighter from the tray, “I’m going to leave you two and mosey back home to Chartres Street.”

“You don’t live here?” Tim asked. The apartment wasn’t just fancy; it appeared to be enormous.

Wel shook his head. “More convenient all around.” He gave Tim a peck on the cheek—“Say hello to all our fighting men!”—and made a fast exit.

“May I freshen your drink, Timothy?”

“Thank you, Mr. Shaw.”

Without Wel, the room itself, however ornate, seemed to acquire a more masculine aspect. Mr. Shaw now appeared almost huge, more handsome and less guarded. Tim had the sense that Wel’s departure had occurred because he’d completed his work by bringing a guest here. Looking toward what seemed to be the largest bedroom, beyond a set of French doors, Tim noticed a silver crucifix attached to one of the walls. In a corner stood a black bullwhip, like something the Lone Ranger might have captured.