Fellow Travelers (29 page)

Tim finished his beer as Woodforde opened a second one for him, which he began drinking fast, remembering how Hawk used to say that “by the third one you could get Skippy to vote for Norman Thomas.” And that was without thirty-plus hours of fasting, which, except for a glass of milk, he’d undergone since yesterday afternoon. He’d go until midnight tonight, when he’d take a vision-seeking walk around the base perimeter.

Lightheaded, he looked at Tommy’s note—a whisper from Iago. He hated him, he decided, just as he hated being here in the army as the only way to escape his love for Hawk. He decided he would hate Woodforde, too.

“So that’s all you know?” he finally asked the writer.

“Does any of it involve Fuller?” Woodforde persisted.

Relishing a sense of power, the feeling that at last
he
had something to give or withhold, Tim answered: “See if you can find an eighteen-year-old punk named Michael Larchwood in Cheboygan, Michigan.”

Woodforde wrote down the name.

“See if you’re smart enough to find out what his real last name is, or ought to be.”

“Why don’t you tell it to me?”

“I’ve got to go,” said Tim, getting up, none too steadily, and starting for the door. “I’m craving the opium of the people.”

“So,” asked Fuller, “was this de Staël a White Russian with a Blue Period or a Blue Russian with a White Period?”

Mary pulled from her purse a Phillips Collection brochure about Nicolas de Staël, the exiled Russian painter who had last year committed suicide in Paris. She offered the gallery’s booklet as proof, answering the real question on Fuller’s mind, which was whether she’d in fact had a lunchtime tryst with “the Estonian.”

“I’m disappointed,” said Fuller.

“Are
you
living vicariously through
me
these days?”

He laughed and disappeared into his office, but both of them knew there was an element of truth in what she was suggesting. Since his wedding, his hours at the department had become more regular, and his phone rang far less often with calls from young men not doing government business.

A new boss had also affected his routine and behavior. Mr. Morton had left at the end of February to run for the Senate from Kentucky, and he’d been replaced by Robert C. Hill, a serious New Englander, not yet forty, who probably wouldn’t be around for long. Mr. Hill had already had the ambassadorships to Costa Rica and El Salvador and was said to be after the big prize in his region of expertise, the embassy in Mexico City. In the meantime, he was proving a tougher nut than his predecessor. Apropos of Sobolev and the sailors who’d defected, he was asking hard, almost Nixonian questions of the department’s UN liaisons, but he had also been pushing back against the department’s Senate critics, telling them they were ill-informed whenever that was the case, as it frequently was.

Hill and Fuller were not each other’s cup of tea, but the acquisition of a wife had made the latter even more socially deployable than he’d been before. On Sunday afternoon, Fuller had glamorously represented the bureau at the Afghans’ independence-week party over on Wyoming Avenue, where the top-drawer little crowd had included Justice Douglas and Senator Saltonstall, whom everyone at State was aware of as a distant relative of Fuller’s bride.

Putting away the museum brochure, Mary opened an envelope sent over by Congressman Yates’s office: from Beverly, it turned out, a sketch of the wedding dress—a sly, knee-length knockoff of Grace Kelly’s—in which she would be married next month.

Mary had begun to think of herself—without much regret, she tried to believe—as an old maid, even if her affair continued with intermittent ardor. Fred would never offer to leave his wife, and she would never ask him to. She would never have his undivided attention, and he could no longer have hers when he talked of the latest atrocity or opportunity for Estonia, as he did on the phone several times a week.

Indeed, here he was now:

“Hello, baby.”

“Hello, Fred.”

“I’d love to see you Monday, but I’ll be picketing you instead.”

She had heard about the anti-Sobolev demonstration being planned for the sidewalks outside the department. “Maybe we could manage a quick kiss behind the police van?” she offered.

“Maybe.”

“Fred, I was joking.”

“Oh,” he said. “You know, there
is
a way we can combine the two activities, baby.”

“Really? Tell me.”

“Late September, outside the General Assembly in New York. All the exile groups are getting together for something pretty gigantic. On a weekend. I can book us into the San Carlos Hotel; it’ll feel like a honeymoon.”

Or a farewell, she thought.

“That didn’t come out right,” he apologized. “I just meant we’d be in a different place altogether, not your city, not mine.”

She tried to imagine herself shopping for shoes on Madison Avenue while Fred carried a placard through Turtle Bay. Maybe she would feel like a wife who’d accompanied her husband to a convention of druggists or petroleum engineers.

“I’ll take you to
My Fair Lady
,” he added.

“Estonia will be free before you can get tickets. But I accept the invitation to New York.”

She could not shake the feeling that this proposed weekend, still months away, would be the end of it. But she would rather they had their goodbye scene there than here, so she wouldn’t keep running into the memory.

A moment after the two of them hung up, a delivery boy from the cleaners on Virginia Avenue entered the office. Through the cellophane bag she could see it was a tuxedo he was carrying.

“Mr. Fuller?” he asked, looking at the ticket.

Mary pointed to the right doorway, but having heard his name, Fuller was already emerging. He paid for the garment and asked the boy to hang it in his office.

“And where are you off to
tonight
?” asked Mary.

“White House Correspondents’ dinner. At the table of a UPI man, whom I’ll no doubt convince we’ve handled Sobolev and the sailors
exactly
right. Let me show you what you’ll be missing.” He opened Mary’s
Washington Post
to a photo of Patti Page and Jimmy Cagney, the evening’s entertainment, rehearsing at the Sheraton Park.

“Well, aren’t you a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Fuller pointed to Patti Page. “That doggie in the window was her reflection.”

Mary laughed hard, even while wondering whether this wasn’t a line he’d heard from the comic piano player at the Chicken Hut, one of the bars Jerry Baumeister unblushingly mentioned from time to time, the way a regular man about to forsake bachelorhood might bring up bygone nights with his buddies at the corner gin mill.

As Fuller read her the story about the evening’s dinner, she realized why she detested Lucy. It was because she herself believed in nature, in Fuller’s fulfilling what she now accepted as his own. She also had begun to feel, perhaps contradictorily, that Jerry and Beverly were fulfilling some aspect of
their
natures; marriage for them would be the cementing of something childlike and fraternal and curiously authentic. But Fuller’s union with Lucy was no civilized companionship, or even some piece of sophisticated realism; it was a corrupt bargain that the two of them had struck. Fuller thought he was on top of it, but Lucy’s needle was in him deeper than McLeod’s had ever been.

“Is Lucy coming here before the dinner?”

“No.”

“What about the tuxedo?”

“That’s for Monday night. Something with the Joint Chiefs. Tonight is business suits, but I
will
be heading back to home and hearth between here and the Sheraton Park.”

“Well, the sight of you and Lucy getting ready for a party must look like a ‘Diamond Is Forever’ ad.” She was being
very
polite.

“Actually, we’ll be
un
dressing. I’ve committed to making a baby, and the calendar has been calibrated like an atomic clock. The fertility gods are supposed to be in full cry between now and seven.” He checked his watch. “I’ll be leaving early.”

“Would you like a boy or a girl?”

“I’d like a reprieve.”

He could see a look on her face that said
tell me
: tell me that you know it’s a mistake; tell me why you really did this; and tell me whether you aren’t really going off to meet a boy instead. But Fuller was thinking that the only mistake he’d made had been with the Italian boy. As Andy Sorrell had predicted, Tony Bianco could be had—but, as it turned out, only inconveniently. The kid had been back to Alexandria twice, without an invitation, the first time parking a block away, waiting for Fuller to pass by so that he could ask him for the price of a new set of tires. The second time he’d reappeared by mail, requesting help for his mother’s operation—for which Mrs. Hawkins Fuller charitably let her husband write a check on the joint account while she suppressed her common sense and they both silently hoped this would be the last such communication.

No, this was not the big feared slip-up that had motivated him into marriage, but it was a slip-up nonetheless, and from it Lucy had tacitly extracted the agreement to make a baby, another tie that would bind, and earlier than he’d expected.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

October 31–November 7, 1956

“Major Conroy’s looking for you.”

“Let him look,” said Tim, shooting Private Meyers a joyful look. He was hunched over one of the radios, picking up English-language transmissions out of Hungary. For the past week, these broadcasts had been more thrilling than any long-ago episode of
Inner Sanctum.
His mind and spirit had been sparking and overloading, as if the radio console were the source of his own electricity. It was now 9:30 a.m., and he’d been helping the operators with transcription since five o’clock.

Beginning Sunday, after fruitlessly gunning down hundreds of Hungarians who’d risen up in revolt, the Russians had been slowly withdrawing to their bases all over the country. Soviet tanks still sat in front of the parliament building in Budapest, but according to Radio Free Kossuth, a new Hungarian flag—red and white and green—was flying from the dome. The country’s Olympic team, on its way to Melbourne, had already redesigned their uniforms.

Major Conroy entered the radio room. “You’re still at it,” he told Tim, his tone somewhere between indulgence and exasperation.

“Who could leave?” was Tim’s exuberant reply.

In spite of himself, Conroy came closer to the radio and listened, while Private Meyers handed Tim a piece of transcript someone had made off a station transmitting in French from one of the southern provinces: during the night Soviet troops had sent a confusing signal by making some circular movements between Záhony and Nyíregyháza. But the new premier, Imre Nagy, whom the Soviets had been forced to accept last week, was declaring that everything remained on track. In fact, Hungary would even be leaving the Warsaw Pact!

Major Conroy begged to remind everyone that at this very minute the British and French were bombing Egypt in order to maintain control of the Suez Canal. “Don’t lose your heads.” No one had even mentioned the presidential election, six days away.

“O ye of little faith!” declared Tim, reaching for a piece of transcript he’d made while the sun was still coming up: “‘After two years of enforced silence, in the last few revolutionary days, we have formed the first Christian organization, the Christian Youth League. We have to contend with indescribable difficulties and therefore we ask you, our sister organizations abroad, to come to our assistance morally and materially.’ Major, you can send a check, or a parcel, to number 6, V. Nagy Sandor Street in Budapest.”

“Laughlin, you have an assignment today for the
Cadence.
”

“Yes, covering trick-or-treating by dependents under twelve at the Toul base. Major, come on!”

“We drive down there in half an hour. Not one minute beyond that.”

Tim shrugged with a kind of joyful hopelessness. He was not going to let anything put a crimp in the moment of deliverance.

“Half an hour,” repeated Major Conroy, as he exited.

About twenty minutes later, Private Meyers came over and tapped Tim on the shoulder: “I think you’ll want to see this.”

It was something copied off Radio Free Kossuth: “Cardinal József Mindszenty, Prince Primate, was liberated on Tuesday by our victorious revolution and arrived at his residence in Buda at 0755 this morning. Because the road seemed unsafe, the Primate was brought to Budapest in an armored car guarded by four tanks. In all the villages they passed, the people threw flowers to the Primate and the soldiers. The cardinal told the correspondent of
Magyar Honvéd:
‘I want to be better informed of the situation before I do or say more.’”

Meyers caught Tim murmuring, prayerfully.

“I guess this is a big deal for you, huh?” He shrugged. “What do I know? I’m just a Jew from Secaucus.”

Tim felt a moment’s shame: How did one put a single man’s suffering against the extermination of the Jews? But the thought, he reasoned, was an absurdity. One put Mindszenty’s persecution
with
the Jews’ sufferings, just as one day the as-yet-untallied dead within the Soviet Union would be added to the century’s mass grave. Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man in the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

“Corporal Laughlin,” called Major Conroy. “
Now.
”

“Yes, sir,” said Tim, double-timing it to the jeep. He carried the Mindszenty transcript like a relic.

Half a mile into their trip to Toul, he tried speaking his mind to the major: “Eisenhower’s offering ten million dollars in aid to the new government. That’s pretty paltry, don’t you think?”

“No politics, corporal.”

“Okay. I promise to concentrate on finding vivid descriptive terms for all the Davy Crockett and Princess Summerfallwinterspring costumes I’ll be seeing.”

He closed his eyes as the jeep drove over the chalk plains still soaked with blood and salted with the bone fragments of two world wars. They continued on past the living, the wars’ survivors who were now oxidizing toward normal deaths and perhaps salvation. He believed that he was being carried at last toward transcendence and freedom, toward a solution.

“You’re muttering, Laughlin. Speak up.”

“Sir.
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio—”

Major Conroy shook his head. “At ease, Corporal.”

“Amen, sir.”

“Tranquillity is just around the corner.”

Fuller waited for her to respond and after a moment gave up. “You’re not laughing.”

“I get it, I get it,” said Mary. The reference was to Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr., now acting chief of the department while the aging John Foster Dulles underwent an emergency appendectomy at Walter Reed. Dulles had collapsed at home early this morning, a day after returning from New York, where he’d convinced the United Nations to adopt a resolution calling for the end of hostilities in the Middle East. With Hungary still unsettled and the election now only three days away, Mr. Hoover wanted all hands on deck, with no excuses made about its being a Saturday.

The president’s own calming statement about Suez—conceding that the British, French, and Israelis had made an “error” in attacking Egypt—seemed to be helping him at home, if not abroad. The Democratic ticket appeared to be sinking fast, swamped not only by the electorate’s instinctive rallying toward the incumbent during a crisis, but also by the Soviet premier’s kiss-of-death endorsement of Stevenson’s desire to stop testing the hydrogen bomb. By now Ike had not only Hoover’s son in his corner but one of FDR’s, too: the youngest Roosevelt, John, had come out for him. And Joe McCarthy, rising from alcoholic slumber, had announced that he would seek his old committee chairmanship if the Republicans took Congress next week along with the White House.

In truth, there wasn’t much to be done here in the bureau this afternoon. Most congressmen were out of town campaigning for their seats, and the amalgam of tension and idleness was working on Mary’s nerves. As soon as she heard Fuller getting off the phone with the secretary’s people upstairs, she went into his office.

“Any more news from the doctors?”

“Yes,” he replied. “They told us yesterday afternoon that ‘we’re’ pregnant. What started them using
that
pronoun? Dr. Spock?”

Mary looked at his blotter for a moment—it held the latest poll numbers on whether the U.S. should get out of the UN—before leaning down to kiss him on the cheek.

“Congratulations. To you and Lucy. How far along is she?”

“Two months. Maybe two and a half. And a nervous wreck. The doctor recommends she take up smoking.”

“What are
you
going to do for nerves, Papa?”

Fuller sighed. “Maybe I’ll give it up.” He looked through the doorway. “Is Hill still around?”

“Yes. You’re going to have to hang on a little longer.” She made herself smile as she walked off.

They’d not had much to say to each other these past few months, though the silence between them had itself been like a conversation, an ongoing mutual acknowledgment that she knew—up to a point—what things were like for him now, even if he was still determined to see them through. In public, he and Lucy remained on their shiny trajectory, attending the shah’s birthday bash at the Mayflower on the same day last week that Mary had been added to a group of wholesome-looking State employees chosen to accompany a Soviet delegation on a tour of Ike’s and Stevenson’s respective campaign headquarters. The Russian from the Academy of Sciences had complained about the Washington humidity and explained that having only one name on the ballot in Soviet elections was not a problem: “You can strike it out and write in another.” He allowed that this didn’t happen often.

Mary looked up at the sweeping second hand on the clock and felt nearly as exasperated as Fuller to be here. Suez did, after all, appear to be in the hands of the UN, and the Soviets did appear to be continuing their withdrawal from Hungary, despite a few confusing signs: troops and tanks were staying close to the airfields, but only, it was said, to shield the Soviet dependents being evacuated from Budapest.

The phone rang, promising a bit of relief from the tedium. She wouldn’t care if it were only some eager-beaver young GOP congressman, out on the hustings, asking for the exact answer to give about the Middle East.

“Baby.”

It was the first she’d heard from him since they’d broken things off up in New York—so amicably that, several minutes afterward, they weren’t sure they’d really done it.

“Hi, Fred.”

“I
knew
you’d be in.”

She could hear the excitement. He sounded like a college student who’d been up on No-Doz for a week.

“I hate to disappoint you, Fred, but from what I heard a half hour ago, Mr. Dulles is likely to be fine. And even if he doesn’t make it, Herbert Hoover, Jr., is not exactly Nixon.”

Fred didn’t seem to remember their small adventure on the night of Ike’s heart attack.

“Are you voting for him?” Mary continued. “For Ike, I mean.”

“Yes, while respectfully holding my nose.”

“Beverly’s taking me to the Statler on Tuesday, with the Bethesda Stevenson Club.”

“You’re going to have an early night.”

“I could use one.”

“How come?”

“No particular reason,” she replied.

“So are we still good-enough friends that you’ll call me with the least little thing you hear about the Baltics?”

“It amazes me that you believe somebody is going to come down the hall to tell me anything other than that the new file boxes I’ve ordered have come in.”

Fred scoffed at her modesty. “There’s a lot to be said for being near the action. Keep listening: your Mr. Hill might come down with a case of loose lips.”

“Fred, what exactly do you expect to happen in Estonia?”

“
Wildfire,
Mary. Think about the way it spreads. Why did the Hungarians rise up? Because five days before they did they heard about some Poles in Wroclaw dragging the Soviet flag through the gutter. Eisenhower should stop trying to calm things down. He should be fanning the flames.”

“I’ll tell that to the next Young Republican who calls.”

“Get ready for a new birth of freedom,” said Fred, more sonorously than usual.

“Fred, I need to go. Fuller wants something,” she fibbed.

She hung up the phone and put some lotion on her hands.
Two months. Maybe two and a half.
Counting on her moistened fingers, she calculated that Lucy’s baby would probably come in late May, only a bit earlier than her own.

IKE IN LANDSLIDE; DEMS HOLD CONGRESS

At the LOC’s Orléans headquarters, Tim worked at fleshing out the
Cadence
’s election edition. Even bannered as such, it would maintain the paper’s resolutely light touch and confine the political story to the front page’s left side. The three right-hand columns were being held for “7,965th Chefs Get Tips from Paris’ Best.” News from Hungary would go on page two.

“Can you stand some more?” asked Lieutenant Dillenberger, who had noticed Tim’s grief-stricken demeanor when he’d arrived here yesterday afternoon from Verdun.

“Sure. I like pain.”

Everything in the stack of dispatches and transcript was awful, as it had been for the last three days, ever since the Soviets began using bombers and tanks to crush the uprising. The rebels were now mere resisters, trying to hold on with Molotov cocktails and paving stones. Refugees were crossing the border into Austria, some of them carrying pots of Hungarian soil. A Soviet puppet named Kadar had replaced Nagy, and Sobolev, the Russians’ UN delegate, was saying that the U.S.S.R. would just ignore any resolutions on Hungary the General Assembly might finally decide to pass. Meanwhile, Premier Bulganin had made the novel suggestion that the U.S. and Soviet Union intervene
together
in the Middle East—against the British and the French.

And here was the latest from Radio Budapest, which had resumed toeing the Soviet line:
“In these difficult hours let us remember the great Socialist revolution of October
1917
. Now, in the light of the open excesses of the counterrevolutionaries, the tremendous significance of October
1917
becomes even clearer to us. The Soviet peoples have set the world an example.”