Fellow Travelers (27 page)

“Why isn’t the new girl doing that? We do have a receptionist now, don’t we?”

“She left early. She’s gotten engaged, as a matter of fact. Just at lunchtime. Her mother came by to take her out for a celebration.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. And the mothers seem to like it.”

“Well, my mother’s dead, Fuller.”

“So’s mine, almost.”

“Let me get your messages.”

Cold as ice, thought Fuller. Things could not be going well with the married shoemaker.

“Congressmen Lovre and Dies returned your calls,” said Mary. “And Senator Pastore’s office phoned—nothing urgent. Also, the boss has talked to C. D. Jackson, who’s come down to the White House from New York. Everything seems to be fine. Mr. Morton says there’s no need for you to see Senator Bridges, or even Welker.”

“Good,” said Fuller. “The natives aren’t restless. Ike can breathe easy in his oxygen tent.”

“Last but not least,” said Mary, “your fiancée phoned to say that she’ll be coming by the office at five-thirty. She’d like for the two of you to go out for an early dinner and a movie.”

“What’s playing?” Fuller asked.

“I highly don’t recommend
The McConnell Story.
June Allyson and Alan Ladd.”

Have you ever frequented a Washington, D.C., establishment called the Jewel Box, at the corner of Sixteenth and L streets?

The tufted purple walls. The bartender who looks a little like Alan Ladd.

“Miss Johnson, you’ll need to ring the future Mrs. Fuller and tell her that Monday is my night out with the boys.”

A day after their surprise wedding at Grossinger’s, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds were in D.C. The ceremony had been put off until Monday night, in deference to Yom Kippur. “Eddie is of the Jewish faith,” reported the wire-service story in the
New Orleans Item
. It was with a similar sense of responsibility that the bridegroom had postponed the couple’s honeymoon, so that he could keep a commitment to perform for the Coca-Cola bottlers holding their convention at Washington’s Statler Hotel.

“So, does this go in?” asked Private John Nontone, holding the Eddie-and-Debbie clipping. Though a day old, the story might still find its way onto the “Lighter Side” page of
The Kisatchian
.

“Yep,” said Tim, speaking from his experience at the
Evening Star
and almost six months here. “Eddie is a vet. He was even in Korea. I’ll rewrite it to highlight that.”

“You’re the boss,” said Nontone, a twenty-year-old from Delaware who’d arrived at the base three weeks ago.

“You want one of these?” asked Tim, offering Nontone a cookie from the package that had just arrived.

“God, they’re awful,” said Nontone, after a single bite.

“I know.”

“I hope your mother or your girl didn’t make them.”

“A friend’s girl,” Tim explained, as he went to work on a page layout. “I guess it’s the thought that counts.”

Gloria Rostwald, Kenneth Woodforde’s painter girlfriend, was the baker, and the cookies she’d produced resembled little cinderblocks. They were cookies trying hard to be something less frivolous than cookies; the gray squares wanted you to know that they would no more be caught wearing sprinkles or icing than one of their maker’s paintings would sport a representational figure.

The box they’d come in had contained no note from the baker, only one from Woodforde, written on Saturday night and urging Tim to be careful with the enclosed edibles:

Unlike Eisenhower, you might have
real
digestive problems after eating these. That was a nice little smokescreen, don’t you think? Here’s hoping Nixon, now that he’s in charge, doesn’t add a year to your enlistment. As it is, the Italians are one election away from a Communist government (yes, people do
choose
such things), so NATO may not prove much in the way of a first line of defense for the good old USA. Which I’ve started to see more than enough of in my (old) Chevrolet. The magazine has me out in the hinterlands looking for hot progressive prospects for next year’s elections. I’ll let you know who they are as soon as I find any.—KW

Once he finished answering Francy’s latest letter—ducking her exhortation that he come home for Christmas—Tim would have to send Woodforde’s girlfriend a thank-you note, maybe with a p.s. telling Woodforde himself that, if leprosy could be pushed back, then communism could, too. The sermon during Sunday’s radio Mass for shut-ins, which Tim had listened to before going to church on the post, had been all about advances being made against the disease in Dr. Schweitzer’s lab and Father Damien’s old colony. What, the radio celebrant had wondered, should Christians do when such a familiar symbol of dispossession and God’s mysterious ways became extinct? Rejoice!

“Here’s another one,” said Nontone, coming back with a second clipping. “In?”

The item concerned the decision of Marie Dionne, one of the quintuplets, now past twenty, to return to the convent she’d left, homesick, the year before.

“Out,” said Tim, leery of letting Major Brillam think he was riding his own hobbyhorses onto the pages of
The Kisatchian
. Around the base he was known, cheerfully enough, as a holy roller, even if when applied to him the term meant something different from what it did in the Louisiana hamlets just beyond Fort Polk’s perimeter.

Actually, the Dionne story interested Tim quite a bit, because these days—in a way he hadn’t allowed himself in years—he was thinking a lot about the seminary, and how he might apply once he’d finished up with the army. Now that he was past Hawk, had made his renunciation and been reconciled to the Church, he was beginning to believe he might be allowed to move beyond the whole issue of his “tendencies”—as he’d so far managed to do here in the army. He didn’t know whether he had a real calling for the priesthood, but he cherished the idea that he might still receive one—a sudden, glorious annunciation that could happen anywhere, in the motor pool or even the PX.

Right now, waiting for his mail (with army logic, letters arrived more slowly than parcels), he went back to reading his biography of Cardinal Mindszenty. He had arrived at the prelate’s “Statement of November 18, 1948,” made just weeks before the Russians arrested him, forced him into a clown’s costume, and beat him with truncheons:

Such a systematic and purposeful net of propaganda lies—a hundred times disproved and yet a hundred times spread anew—has never been organized against the seventy-eight predecessors in my office. I stand for God, for the Church and for Hungary. This responsibility has been imposed upon me by the fate of my nation, which stands alone, an orphan in the whole world. Compared with the sufferings of my people, my own fate is of no importance.

Tim could feel in this pronouncement the peace and strength that certainty give, a serene immunity from persecution or even simple need. He had returned to the book a half-dozen times yesterday, and would get back to it as soon as he opened the two envelopes Nontone was now handing him.

One had been sent by his mother, who these days addressed him with the nervous politeness someone might employ in a first approach to a skittish Korean orphan. Today she was asking what he’d like to have for his birthday, still five weeks away.

The second envelope appeared to have no return address, just a Washington postmark, but there was, Tim now noticed on the back flap, a small handwritten name:
Miss Beatrice Lightfoot.
Inside, neatly cut from the Sunday
Star,
was the item
MARRIAGE OF MR. FULLER ANNOUNCED
.
The bridegroom-elect, deputy assistant chief…to be married on Saturday, December third.

Tim’s mind gave no thought to the sender, or to how she had known where to find him. The anger and despair that swept through him—worse now than that night in New Orleans—arose only from his dispossession. He was seized by a sudden, dizzying lust for Hawkins, for the long-ago smell and taste of him. He felt hollow, literally, without the man he loved inside him.

This unexpected tumult would have been a furious temptation had its object been anywhere near or obtainable. As things were, the storm of sensation could only torment Tim like a punishment without a crime, a midnight visit from the secret police. But, unlike Mindszenty, he had no peace or strength or certainty. His reconciliation with God, he knew, was just a tar paper shack, ready to be blown to bits while his cries went unheard on the wind.

He closed his eyes and prayed for help.

“From the look on your face I’m guessing you don’t like to travel.”

Major Brillam was standing over him.

“Sir?”

“You haven’t gotten your orders yet?”

“No.”

“Your unit’s headed to France. I’m going to miss you, son.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

December 16, 1955

“I therefore announce my candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination,” declared Senator Estes Kefauver. “I intend to conduct a vigorous campaign. As in 1952, I will enter a number of state primaries. I am a firm believer…”

Here in the second row of a chilly ballroom at the Willard, the
Star
’s Cecil Holland leaned over to pick up the trademark coonskin cap that had landed beside him when Senator Kefauver tossed it, for the photographers, into a nonexistent ring.

“If you’re so cold,” whispered Holland to Mary McGrory, “why don’t you make use of this?”

“It’s not even twenty degrees outside,” she answered softly, while assessing the fur cap’s possibilities as a muff. “It
would
be rather pretty without the tail.”

“The tail is all Kefauver’s going to be,” declared Joe Alsop, to Holland’s right. “They’ll waste him as the VP candidate on another losing run by Stevenson.”

“You think so?” whispered a man from the
Baltimore Sun.
“He just said he wouldn’t take the second spot.”

“He’ll take it,” said Alsop, perfectly certain. “From what I hear, Stevenson’s heart is in worse shape than Ike’s. If Adlai gets an electoral miracle, he won’t get an actuarial one, too. He’ll drop dead during his first year in office. That’s the way Estes will be thinking come the convention. He’ll take it.”

A young woman from the Scripps-Howard papers, appalled by such ghoulishness, shot Alsop a glance. For good measure she paid Kefauver a compliment, telling the reporter on her left: “Pretty shrewd of him to get in on the Davy Crockett craze.” She pointed to the coonskin on Miss McGrory’s lap.

Alsop groaned. “Oh, God,” he complained to Holland. “Poor little nitwit.”

Holland laughed, knowing as well as Alsop that the cap derived not from Davy Crockett but one of Kefauver’s early campaigns, during which an opposing political boss mocked him as a “pet coon.”

At the lectern, the senator was now citing assurances he’d gotten from Harry Truman himself that the former president wouldn’t block his nomination in favor of Stevenson’s, as he’d done in ’52.

Kenneth Woodforde turned around to the third row and whispered to Tommy McIntyre, one of the dozen or so Hill staffers mixed in with the press this morning: “Stevenson doesn’t need Truman now that he’s got God.” The Illinois governor’s recent move from the Unitarian to the Presbyterian Church did look calculated enough to make even the girl from Scripps-Howard roll her eyes once it was mentioned.

“He’s come to understand,” Woodforde explained to Tommy, “that the deity really
is
the insurance salesman down the street, not that cosmic To Whom It May Concern.”

Miss McGrory, in a voice even softer than Woodforde’s whisper, defended Stevenson. “He’s
still
a Unitarian. There’s no UU church near his farm in Libertyville, so he’s making
do
with the Presbyterians.”

“Careful, Mary,” said Cecil Holland. “I’ll have to take back Kefauver’s coonskin if you’re still so madly for Adlai.”

“Kefauver himself is a little like God,” announced Alsop, in his most mandarin way, not bothering to whisper at all. “He spends more time
hearing
the afflicted than in giving them relief.” He referred to all the committee investigations the Tennesseean had held since coming to the Senate in ’49—hearings on organized crime, steel prices, juvenile delinquency, boxing. Most of them had produced more television coverage than legislation.

Right now Kefauver was answering a question about which primaries he’d be entering; it was followed by another about what the polls were showing. He could not, of course, comment on the most important sounding of all, which would take place tomorrow at Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm, when Dr. Paul Dudley White put his stethoscope on the president’s chest. If all was in order, the eminent cardiologist had promised, Ike could make his own decision about whether to run for a second term.

Bored with Kefauver’s optimism, Tommy spit into a paper cup and wondered if there was a bar open anywhere in the Willard at ten-thirty a.m. He tapped Woodforde on the shoulder and asked, “Why are you wasting
your
time with this? You ought to go up to New York and find Welker. Write a few hundred words about the egg running off his face.”

Woodforde laughed. The Idaho reactionary and his wife, about to embark on a Caribbean cruise out of New York, had the other night been sitting in their cabin when a surprise party of revelers burst in with platters of caviar, a giant floral wreath, jeroboams of champagne—and two flashing cameras. The bon voyage bounty had all come from the hard-left longshoremen’s union, whose leaders thought they could embarrass the senator with all the gun-crazy McCarthyites who kept voting for him out there in the Wild West.

Tommy handed Woodforde a press release he’d gotten from Welker’s office this morning decrying the “obvious attempt to get even with the Senator for his outspoken criticism of communism and his personal fight against the Commies.”

Woodforde smothered some laughter over the last mimeographed word, too childishly crude for even McCarthy to use. He whispered to Tommy, “It’s usually about now that Welker starts hinting he’s up against the fags to boot. But I’m not sure that’s going to work with Tough Tony Anastasia.”

Cecil Holland leaned across Miss McGrory’s coonskin muff to remind Woodforde that the stevedores’ union
was
pretty full of Communists.

“Yeah,” said Tommy, “ones with TVs and houses in Levittown.” Not his kind of Communists, not the ones from twenty years ago, the ones like Annie Larchwood’s husband.

Miss McGrory shooshed the males around her, and then declared: “At least Kefauver is more or less self-made.” A stenciled biography reminded the reporters here that he’d worked his way through law school waiting tables.

Ignoring Miss McGrory—the sort of genteel liberal that wearied him—Woodforde turned back once more to the combustible McIntyre. “So this defector coming home: are Potter’s constituents complaining they’ll be contaminated by having him in their midst?”

After several years in China, Richard Tenneson, a Korea POW who’d gone over to the enemy, was today returning to his family’s farm—but in Minnesota, not Michigan, Tommy corrected. “They can complain to Humphrey,” he told Woodforde.

“This guy’s not exactly one of the all-American stoics Potter had before his committee. Even now he’s not fully contrite.”

“No,” said Tommy. “If this kid had testified, Charlie would have pitched such a fit his canes would’ve shorted out.”

“And Potter’s apoplectic moments are pretty few and far between. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“Charlie doesn’t have many moments one could even call conscious,” said Tommy, spitting again into his cup. “And I don’t have to tell you that that’s off the fucking record.”

Undeterred, Woodforde got to his real question: “Then what accounted for his apoplexy, or at least high dudgeon, a year and a half ago? At the end of the army nonsense.”

The memory forced Tommy’s yellow teeth into a big smile: “You mean his burst of moral fervor?”

“Yeah,” said Woodforde, trying to make his insistence appear casual. When Tommy said nothing more, he tried another tack. “Who else knows anything about it? Besides you, that is.”

Tommy’s grin retracted itself into a wary pout. “Oh, it’s a very small circle. Like the number of Kefauver’s advisers with any sense.”

“Would it include my old acquaintance Private Laughlin?”

Tommy wheezed, phlegmily, while rising from his chair. “I think I’m allergic to that goddamned coonskin.”

“Étaient-ils Résistants?”
Tim asked. He pointed to the knot of men cheering on the National Assembly candidate who’d just cited his wartime service from the steps of the Rheims city hall.

The man standing next to Tim answered in English, and with knowing laughter. “Oh, we were
all
resisters. Every one of us!”

With no translation for the meaning to get lost in, the remark’s tone seemed to contain equal measures of sardonic pleasure and shame. Tim decided not to press the matter, settling for self-mockery about his bad French.
“Un américain évident, oui?”
he asked, pointing to himself.

“Yep,” said the Frenchman, sounding the syllable like a movie cowboy. He stubbed out his Gitane, shook Tim’s hand, and obeyed a summons from his wife, who had just emerged from the bakery. The pair walked away from the
mairie,
indifferent to the rest of the political speech.

They were an exception. Tim and two guys from the radio unit who had passes today had been told not to wear their uniforms, since all varieties of French political passion seemed to be rising with the approach of the January 2 elections. Coming into town, Tim had had no need to consult Jerry Baumeister’s old pocket dictionary, which he’d been sent over with by Mary, to grasp the pro-Communist slogans and
À BAS USA
he’d seen festooning the walls and alleys. There were so many signs for so many candidates that you half expected the plaster baby in the city’s Christmas crèche to be holding one, too.

The cathedral was Tim’s destination this afternoon, but he found it hard not to get caught up in the auditory duel that was starting between the orating candidate—now blaming Prime Minister Faure for the loss at Dien Bien Phu—and an opposing claque that shouted, over and over,
“Salaud!”
Tim could hear Gallic echoes of “Who lost China?” in the exchange, and for a moment he imagined himself back in the Senate Caucus Room a year and a half ago. The dangerous memories surrounding that time at last propelled him toward the cathedral and onto his knees, beneath the haloed carving of an unknown saint.

Some nearby votive candles looked like the pipes of an organ in flames, and the church’s chalk walls, wrested over centuries, block by block, from plains all over Champagne, bore not only the marks of the First World War’s bombardments but also scars from the French Revolution. Tim reckoned that he had been repairing his own shelter for nearly a year, starting over whenever some gust, like the news of Hawk’s engagement, knocked it down. There were times when he was beginning to believe he’d built himself a snug little chapel, but there were still those other nights when it would be blown away in an instant, and he would have to dig himself a foxhole with a few desperate prayers, hoping to stay hidden from harm until morning.

Earlier today, at the café near the
mairie,
he’d had a ham sandwich and some
pâté de grives,
a regional specialty that the waiter eventually confessed was made from the thrushes one saw fluttering in and out of the local bushes. Tim had eaten what he could of it while reading the
Herald-Tribune
’s article about a Budapest AP correspondent named Marton who with his wife had just been arrested and tried as a spy. Their fate? Unknown. Tim imagined them in a cell down the hall from Cardinal Mindszenty.

These stories of freedom’s instant and complete disappearance had an ever-tighter hold on his thoughts. He’d lately been making himself read a book called
Religion and the Modern State
by an Englishman named Dawson. He’d acquired it on his one trip to Paris, when he’d gone looking for mystery novels in an English-language bookshop, and he was carrying it with him even today. Its thesis—that all the kingdoms of state would disappear, become useless, “as soon as the light comes”—had made him understand more exactly the nature of his patriotism. The intense attachment he felt to his own country—the world’s bulwark against totalitarianism—derived from America’s permitting him to go about his real business in the world, which was the search for a revelation so great, for a peace so absolute and ecstatic, that he would in time be lifted away from the world entirely. His own country, his own state, allowed this quest; the opposing state didn’t. And yet, if his life and everyone else’s managed to fulfill itself, then even America would subside into irrelevance. Right now one had to protect it from its enemies, but finally it would drop away like the first stage of a rocket that took one to a thoroughly different universe.

He had tried, clumsily, to explain all this in a letter to Kenneth Woodforde, who had replied with a telegram that the mail-room officer handed over with raised eyebrows:
CONGRATULATIONS, LAUGHLIN, ON BECOMING A MARXIST—STOP—YOURS UNTIL THE STATE WITHERS AWAY, KW
.

He had taken to praying with a fervor beyond anything he’d previously achieved in his life, and to fasting as well, at least occasionally—not for any penitential credit the effort might provide, but for the lightheadedness it brought on, the physical floating he could feel after about thirty-six hours. Longer than that, he’d joked to Woodforde, and he couldn’t do his job for the benevolent, temporary nation-state.

And yet maybe these moments of exultation were no more than spiritual dizziness, and he himself was just a “dizzy dame,” what Hawkins used to call the nightclub-obsessed boyfriend of some older man he knew. He would never be a systematic thinker or half as quick as Woodforde. In fact, along with the Dawson book he had purchased a copy of T. S. Eliot’s essays—partly to further his religious way through this dangerous, secular world, but also, he knew, because when he saw the spine he had been seared by a memory of Hawk standing naked in the dark, purring the lyrics of one of his Eartha Kitt records:

T. S. Eliot writes books for me;

Sherman Billingsley even cooks for me;

Monotonous…

The bus back to Verdun left at three-forty, and when it pulled out from the center of Rheims, Tim found himself sitting amidst several men and women in their sixties, American husbands bringing their wives back to the war they had fought four decades before. Verdun itself was a kind of giant cenotaph to the month-after-month slaughter of 1916, though that battle held none of these men’s particular memories. They had arrived with the rest of the Americans the following year, for the last of the blood and derangement, which still on occasion exploded from the region’s landscape, when some farmer’s tractor disturbed a mine that had been slumbering for forty summers.