Fellow Travelers (3 page)

Should he go up to Hecht’s and get a new white shirt? The collar was frayed on the only laundered one he had left. No, too expensive, he decided; he would settle for getting his shoes shined at Union Station tonight. Walking along Fifth Street, above Indiana and D, he continued on his career-conscious train of thought, contemplating the signs for lawyers and bondsmen, knowing that the former profession was still too much to aspire to, even if the latter one, like process-serving, now resided in a realm his father had lifted the Laughlins permanently above.

He bought a pint of milk and a sandwich before reaching his room on the Hill, in the two-hundred block of Pennsylvania, one flight above a hardware store. His occupancy was illegal, the lower floors of the building being zoned only for offices, but a landlady with no vacancies a couple of blocks away had tipped him off to the nice Italian owner here, who told him he could have the room cheap and not to worry. It came with a hot plate and tiny icebox, and a hall shower one flight up, where apartments were legal.

Tim always made sure to keep the radio low; he clicked it on now and waited for the tubes to warm up while he poured his glass of milk. A promo for
One Man’s Family
became audible as he sat down and began to drink.

The job ads from Sunday’s paper were on the table, and for a few minutes he gave them a second, mostly hopeless, look. The “Situations Wanted” had a hierarchy as discernible as the legal pecking order on Fifth Street.

YOUNG MAN, COLORED
, desires evening or night work of any kind. Phone LI 8-5198.

After three months down here, the “colored” had ceased to shock; it was the “work of any kind” that now arrested his attention and made him wonder how many weeks might be left before he’d have to consider putting that phrase into an ad of his own.

YOUNG MAN
, college education, desires a responsible position. Call WO 6-8202.

Pretty vague, to say the least, but except for the telephone, which he didn’t have, it pretty much matched his own circumstances. He certainly couldn’t compete with the ad just above it:

YOUNG MAN,
27, B.A., Yale, 3 years experience legislative research. 3 yrs. formal legal training, desires position with trade assoc. or law office. Box 61-V. Star.

He wondered if Helen had taken any of these down over the phone.

Setting the paper aside in favor of the
Congressional Directory,
he decided to put a ruler over the names beneath the pictures. He would see if he could correctly distinguish, say, Prescott Bush (R-Connecticut) from Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa). At least he was familiar with his assignment’s location, having gone to St. Matthew’s last month on the Feast of the Assumption.

He wished he’d done more sightseeing this summer, or just spent a little less time in this room. He
had
gone to wait outside St. John’s Church one Sunday morning in June, hoping to catch a glimpse of Eisenhower, but a disappointed tourist had told him that Ike was out of town. Everyone waiting by the church had had to settle for watching a small group demonstrate against the Rosenbergs’ execution. There had also been an evening, back in July, when the second-string theater critic had comped him to a production of
Major Barbara.
They’d gone to see it together, and afterward the man had bought him a drink at the Hotel Washington’s rooftop bar, then walked him all the way home and given him a funny little hug, which he somehow hadn’t minded, even though the man was old enough to be his father and didn’t really live, as he’d claimed, on Capitol Hill.

Excited about tomorrow, but a little restless after half an hour with the
Directory,
Tim thought he’d like to go out to a movie, but he’d been to see
The Robe
just last night, a quasi-religious act he’d used, pretty Jesuitically, as an excuse not to go to church this morning. He realized now that Miss Beale hadn’t told him whether Senator McCarthy’s wedding would be just a short ceremony or a whole Mass. If it was the latter, he’d have a legitimate excuse to sleep a little later tomorrow instead of starting his day at the seven o’clock inside St. Peter’s on Second Street. Actually, he’d better go to St. Pete’s either way. Even if it did turn out to be a Mass at St. Matthew’s, he’d be too busy taking notes to line up for the Communion rail.

CHAPTER TWO

September 28, 1953

“Ready?” asked Hawkins Fuller, as soon as Mary Johnson entered his office.

“Ready,” she replied, noting the gray-striped pants as he swung his feet off his desk. “But aren’t you overdoing things?” Sporting a version of the foreign service’s traditional trousers seemed ridiculous here in the State Department’s boxy modern building in Foggy Bottom.

Fuller was unpersuaded. “It’s true that we’re civil servants, Miss Johnson, but our FSOs are supposed to wear gray-striped trousers for daylight calls. The reception to which we’re heading constitutes a diplomatic assignment. It is now six-twenty; the reception begins at six-thirty; and sunset is not until six-fifty-five.” He flashed his smile, put on his hat, and offered her his arm. “Just paying tribute to custom.”

Out on Twenty-first Street, while they waited for a taxi, Mary reflected that on an actual foreign service officer the overcorrect pants would appear a clumsy attempt to get ahead. On Fuller they provided an opportunity to slow his own advance, to stay where he was through the prankish means of going by somebody else’s book. A man in the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs who’d known him when they were boys at St. Paul’s had told Mary the other day: “Hawk could have been a real track star, but for the small matter that he could never see the point in outrunning anybody. Pretty odd for a sixteen-year-old.”

Fuller held the cab door while she scooped up the edge of the skirt she’d shortened on her Singer last night.

“That new?” he asked.

“It’s so old it was once New Look, which in case you didn’t know is as dead as the New Deal. I miss both.”

“Really?” was all Fuller replied.

Mary knew that she wouldn’t have to elaborate on her feelings about FDR. She had never met a man, here at the job or elsewhere, more indifferent to politics than Hawkins Fuller. As for the New Look, she wasn’t going to tell him she missed its long skirts because her legs were too skinny.

The driver, looking toward the orange glow over the Potomac, had begun to thrum his fingers on the steering wheel. “Where exactly are we going?” asked Fuller.

“Twenty-six twenty-two Sixteenth Street,” said Mary, giving the address of the Lithuanian legation.

“I don’t suppose it has a sign,” said Fuller.

“I’m not even sure it has a telephone.”

The driver pulled away.

“Well,” said Fuller, “you’re a sport to be my girl for the night. I’ll take you to dinner after we sample whatever funny food they’re serving.”

Poor plump Miss Lightfoot, who had the desk next to Mary’s, had been mad with envy when she’d heard about the invitation. Women in the building, including the married ones, generally went straight to the department’s
Biographic Register
after their first sight of Hawkins Fuller. She’d done it herself, finding out that he’d been born in ’25 to a businessman father (also St. Paul’s); had performed some minor naval heroics at the end of the war; then finished Harvard in ’50, just after his twenty-fifth birthday. Before coming to the department he’d spent one year working for a branch of his father’s firm in Asunción and another on a Fulbright in Oslo.

Now he served with Mary in the department’s Bureau of Congressional Relations. Their boss, Thruston Morton, an internationally minded Republican who’d once been in Congress himself, wanted Fuller at tonight’s reception to help convince a particular congressman on HUAC that State really was serious about the captive Baltic republics and that a more aggressive approach could be expected from the still-new administration.

Mary liked Fuller, but experience and instinct left her immune to the swoonings of Miss Lightfoot and the rest of the distaff staff. Growing up in New Orleans, she’d seen any number of men, a few almost as handsome as he, making their solitary excursions into special precincts of the Quarter. She couldn’t say she’d been surprised to learn from the
Biographic Register
that Fuller had arrived in Washington without a Norwegian wife.

She felt pretty sure he had done some checking on her, too. Fuller probably knew that she had, more or less, a boyfriend, and that this romance of hers with a doctor at Columbia Women’s was, for Fuller’s own purposes, at just the right state of intensity: not so hot that Mary couldn’t accept someone else’s invitation; not so cold that she’d be expecting a second date with Hawkins Fuller.

“Nice-enough house,” he said, as the taxi reached the legation. “But not exactly the Pan-American Union building.” Tomorrow night Secretary Dulles would be giving a dinner there for the Panamanian president—a tougher ticket than one to this party being held by the Estonian government-in-exile, an institution so small it had had to borrow the Lithuanian exiles’ premises.

Mr. Johannes Kaiv, consul general at the outpost the Estonians
were
able to maintain in Rockefeller Center, greeted Mary and Fuller at the door. An assistant named Miss Horm ushered them into a parlor, pointing, as she led the Americans through a hallway, to the portrait of “our President Rei,” presumably hung this afternoon and on its way back to Rockefeller Center tomorrow morning. “He was first elected to that office in 1928,” Miss Horm told the guests, with a bittersweet smile. Fuller interrupted her recitation of all the posts Rei had held before and since to ask, “Is he here?”

“Oh, no,” answered Miss Horm. “He is in Sweden.”

“A disappointment,” said Fuller.

“Do not believe the reports of his death,” said Miss Horm, in a lower voice. “These rumors are spread all the time.”

“I’m confused,” Fuller whispered to Mary, once Miss Horm took leave of them. “Didn’t the Swedes once conquer the Estonians? Are they now buddies?”

“Sorry, I never took the foreign service exam, either. In three years I’ve gone from being a secretary in the Passport Office to being more or less a secretary to the assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations.” She had been in this new post, a few feet from Fuller’s own office, for three weeks. “It hasn’t been a meteoric rise.”

Fuller looked to see if the complaint was serious, and her smile told him that it wasn’t. Mary had come to Washington once she graduated from Sophie Newcomb and her daddy, an honest lawyer on Poydras Street who’d kept his head down during all of Huey Long, got a congressman friend to get her the job. With her striking thinness and very black hair she still looked more like the sort of coed who went to Paris than the kind who became a government girl.

The little cocktail crowd surrounding her and Fuller consisted, she soon understood, of a few exiles and a good many more high-achieving Estonian-Americans. The department, for all she knew, had an acronym for the latter, HAEAs. A series of quick introductions revealed the ones here to include a Maryland state legislator and a national officer of the VFW.

Fuller had found a seat on a couch and was now tugging at her navy-blue skirt, urging her to join him.

“We’re supposed to circulate,” she replied.

“Take a load off, Miss Johnson.” He tugged a little harder, until she sat down. He was already bored, she could see, but confident—as he had no doubt been his whole life—that people would be coming to
him,
wherever he sat. Yes, the reluctant track star: Why run the race when you’ve already won it?

And come people did, like the wife of a Standard Oil man, who told Fuller and Mary that the plundered oil shale of Estonia was now helping to run the Soviet army occupying that little country. The woman was glad to be here, “showing the flag” with her husband, who believed in “keeping his hand in.” However unlikely the Baltics’ liberation might be, “you have to have faith,” she told Fuller.

“There’s an optimist,” he said to Mary, once the woman was gone. “I’m guessing there’s more Esso than Estonian in the husband’s veins.”

“Well, it
is
faith of a kind,” Mary countered, less inspired by the woman’s display of it than she was wearied by Fuller’s insouciance. “Would you be as mocking if the faith at issue were the religious kind? The kind Dulles worries we’re losing?”

“I would never mock John Foster Dulles,” said Fuller. “My father’s colleague on the board of the American Bank Note Company?”

Mary sighed. He hadn’t, of course, answered the question, which had been about the secretary’s sense that faith was losing its power to motivate America in the world. Declining to press the point, she settled for saying: “I miss Acheson.”

“Are you always so awash in nostalgia, Miss Johnson? The New Deal? Long skirts? Retired cabinet secretaries?”

“I’ve got nothing much against the current one. But I do sometimes feel like part of the typing pool inside a big Presbyterian parsonage. With Acheson you knew you were working for a
diplomat.
” On his last day, eight months ago, she had joined the long line of employees walking through the chief’s office to shake his courtly hand:
Thank you for your good wishes, my dear young lady.

“Never met the man,” said Fuller. “When do you think we’ll get a boss
without
a mustache?” Acheson’s had been a bit reddish; Dulles’s was snow-white. “I can’t imagine growing one myself,” Fuller continued. “Or would you like me to, Miss Johnson? Do you desire
my
advancement?”

“No,” Mary answered. “All I want is that you save me from this.” A burly man of about forty, carrying two fish-topped crackers, was moving toward her at considerable speed. An honest-to-God Estonian, she surmised. Before Fuller could act, however, the gentleman introduced himself as Fred Bell, born on the Lower East Side to immigrant parents, but completely American himself, down to his changed name. A veteran of D-Day who now owned three shoe factories in Massachusetts. Even so, he was part of an exiles’ committee, and nothing in the world could have made him miss the opportunity to come down here and say something about the situation.

“Miss Horm back there told me you were with the State Department, ma’am.
Fifty thousand deportations
since the takeover. Including my cousin, just a peasant, who these days has to work on a Russian collective. My other cousin over there’s a musician. The oboe. He gets to stay in Tallinn and play bad music.”

“Why did they deport the peasant?” Mary asked, feeling foolish using the word.

“Because the peasants resist collectivization. Estonians are natural businessmen, ma’am. Very independent. You know, my relatives used to
vote.
Now they’re impoverished and relocated, or just
gone.
” In his anxiety to make the most of the few moments he imagined he was having in the presence of officialdom, Mr. Bell ate both of the hors d’oeuvres he had carried across the room. His eyes, Mary noticed, were watering. “We’re a
colony.
Stripped of our machinery, forced to feed
them
with
our
crops. Did you know you used to be able to get eggs from Estonia in
New York City
? So good they were exported all that way! What we need is a general strike, something that with a little encouragement from abroad might spread to the railway workers in Russia. If
they
went out, there’s no telling how soon the whole system might collapse!”

Mary looked at him, apologetically. Despite the supposedly tough new policy that had dispatched her and Fuller to this party, they were still required, she knew, to speak the department’s soothing Esperanto of noncommittal clucks and nods. She found herself urging Mr. Bell to contact the Office of Eastern European Affairs with his views—but then she couldn’t remember the name of the Assistant Secretary for that particular bureau.

She turned to her companion, who’d been busy talking to a retired languages professor. Fuller saw, and misinterpreted, her desire for assistance.

“You’re right,” he said, rising. “We’ve got to go. Don’t know how I lost track of the time.
Tere!
” he said to Mr. Bell, giving him his card and propelling Mary toward the door.

“See what I learned?” he asked. “It means ‘Pleased to meet you.’”

“Actually, what I wanted—”

“I suppose ‘Next year in Tallinn’ would have been better, but for just a few minutes’ work with the languages prof, ‘
tere
’ isn’t so bad.”

Mary turned around and saw Mr. Bell, half ancient mariner and half modern PR man, already importuning someone else.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Fuller. “There’s no sign of Congressman HUAC, in any case.”

“We can’t decently leave yet.”

But Mary saw that they couldn’t accomplish anything, either. A few minutes later—so soon after sunset that Fuller’s trousers remained almost appropriate—the two of them were back out on Sixteenth Street. He put his arm around her waist as they began walking south. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Scrambled eggs, by my lonesome, at home.” Mary could only imagine what Miss Lightfoot would say to her turning down dinner with Hawkins Fuller.

“Well, there’s something to be said for an early night,” he observed.

“Do you have them?” she asked. “Early nights?”

“Tonight I will,” he answered. “I’m having lunch tomorrow at the Sulgrave with my mother’s childless brother. Have to look sharp. I need to stay in his good graces.”

Mary looked at him, but for a moment said nothing further.

“The pants are one thing,” he declared. “But you don’t think I bought these shoes on my salary, do you? Or that I want his winter place in New Mexico to go to one of my
sisters
?”

“How about other nights? Early or late?”

Fuller just smiled, and clasped her waist a little tighter. “What do you put on your eggs, Miss Johnson? Ketchup?”

He was not, she knew, doubling back to attempt a forward pass; he had no intention of pursuing an invitation to her place, though she now recalled the almost pro forma advance he’d made in the cafeteria two weeks ago, on her third day in Congressional Relations. He’d been pleased, she thought, when it was blocked. Had she said yes, he would probably have followed through, happily enough—all the way from third base to home if she’d let him—but she had allowed him, she felt sure, to return to more ardent matters elsewhere.