Fellow Travelers (35 page)

Hawk loved him, and Hawk’s child was healthy.

He prayed that Mary’s would be healthy, too, and he promised, if he could think of a way, that he would help it, even after it had been adopted. He’d already told Mary he would take her to the airport on Wednesday, but he should ask if she wanted him to go to New Orleans, as company for the weeks ahead. He could stay at the rooming house on Dauphine Street, or even with Mr. Shaw, Tristan’s sword lying between them.

For now he would find his way to a streetcar. He would go back to the loft, and tomorrow he would pack boxes at St. Mary’s.

He would ask for no more than he already had, and things would yet be well.

CHAPTER FORTY

April 24, 1957

Mary dialed Eastern Airlines to confirm her late-afternoon nonstop to New Orleans. Seven months and two weeks was awfully late to be flying, but no one would notice anything under her boxy spring coat. Beverly and Jerry Baumeister were in the other room. They’d come to say goodbye and pick up a set of keys for the wealthy girl in Senator Douglas’s office whom Beverly had found to sublet the furnished apartment for six months. The outside date meant nothing; Mary knew that she’d never be back.

“I’ll be right out,” she called.

“Take your time, we’re fighting,” answered Beverly.

Beverly and Jerry had treated Mary to a big late breakfast and, having both taken the day off, were now deciding whether to see a lunchtime showing of
Funny Face
or
Moulin Rouge
.

Jerry had been arguing for the latter, but Beverly conceded nothing to her spouse: “It’s five years old and it’s got Zsa Zsa Gabor. Why are they bringing it back to the MacArthur
now
?”

“To show solidarity with the Hungarians?”

Husband and wife laughed.

“Maybe to catch the overflow of Francophiles who can’t get into
Funny Face,
” said Mary, entering the room.

“Come with us,” Jerry and Beverly urged in unison.

“I can’t. Really.”

Beverly saw that she meant it, and she nudged Jerry to get moving. “Okay,” she said, tapping her purse. “I’ll give Kay the keys tomorrow morning. I tell you, she’s right out of
The Philadelphia Story.
God, Mary, I thought
you
were sort of blue-blooded when we first met. And
so beautiful
. You, not her. I remember the first time you walked into the bureau.” She burst into tears.

Mary put her arm around Beverly. Jerry looked on, as hopelessly as any other male would have.

“Your
baby’s
going to be beautiful, too,” Beverly predicted.

“Probably fatter than Fred,” guessed Mary.

“Don’t
stay
down there,” Beverly insisted. “Don’t disappear as if you’re doing penance. Promise you’ll come back.”

“Back to
what
?”

“Back to
us
. And back to whoever else is just around the corner.”

“You mean Mr. Right?”

“Yes. Or Mr. Second Right.” She pointed to Jerry.

“Second right!” he cried. “I’m not just
around
the corner. I
am
the corner. Come on,” he said to his wife. “Time for Zsa Zsa, dahlink.”

He embraced Mary, and when he pulled away he, too, had tears in his eyes. They were both remembering that night at the Occidental.
Do you know what they do with guys like me in Russia?

He took Beverly’s arm—all three of them were crying now—while she handed Mary a small box. “It’s a bon voyage gift,
not
a farewell present. And it’s for
you
, not for—you know.” She meant the baby, but that suddenly seemed too painful to say; the infant wouldn’t be in Mary’s possession long enough to prompt anyone’s gift-giving.

Mary nodded. “I’ll write,” she promised, kissing Beverly.

When the Baumeisters were gone, she sat down on one of the freshly vacuumed couch cushions. She was wondering whether to open the little box when the phone rang.

Fuller’s voice came through the receiver. “I never remembered to disconnect mine, either. The missus had to remind me to.”

She supposed he knew everything after all. And why should she be surprised by that? Or surprised by his having waited until the last minute to be in touch?

“I’ve switched the service over to the Vassar girl who’s moving in tomorrow,” she explained, as matter-of-factly as possible.

“Go downstairs in five minutes. A cab will be waiting to take you to me.”

“Fuller, I’m not going to the department.”

“You’re going to Quigley’s drugstore. Near GWU. I’ll be at the soda fountain.”

“Why don’t you just drive here in your Plymouth? My plane doesn’t leave for hours.”

“I know. It leaves at five-forty-five. But there
is
no Plymouth this week. It’s out in Alexandria at the disposal of the nurse taking care of my little girl.”

“How is she?”

“Remarkable. Very small but very calm. Quite discriminating. Standoffish, I’d say. We call her Garbo.”

I want to be alone.
She almost said it, but it wasn’t true. She was all at once nervous and again wanting company, even his. “If there’s no Plymouth, why don’t
you
take a cab here?”

“I don’t want to be around if you have a surprise visitor, which is to say, if Skippy gets there early. Come on, head downstairs. The cabbie will be honking his horn any minute.”

She was soon at Quigley’s, on a stool, drinking the malted Fuller had already ordered for her.

He sipped a glass of seltzer, and for a minute or two they said nothing.

“So, he told you,” she finally said.

“He told me.”

“As of Friday, when I last talked to him, I’d have believed he hadn’t.”

“And you’d have been right. He never said a word until yesterday afternoon. When he called the office.”

She said nothing, just wondered why Tim had told him then and not before.

“He called to ask after the baby,” Fuller explained. “And about another matter. Also, of course, to set up a rendezvous.”

“In the turret.”

“His little castle in Spain.”

She pushed away the malted and swiveled the stool, as if it were her typist’s chair, so that she could face him. “You condescending, buck-passing bastard,” she declared, as evenly as she could. “It’s your romance, too. You
found
the castle for it.”

“You’re right. It was my romance, too.”

Her hand went, involuntarily, to her stomach. It rested there, protectively, for a moment. “‘Was’? Does he know that?”

“No. He’s dealing with a vocational setback right now.”

The answer’s coolness was, she realized, too much even for Fuller. The display of
sang-froid
suggested the opposite, an agitation that had prompted him to summon her here.

“Did he not get the job?” was all she asked.

“He did not get the job.”

“That was the ‘other matter’ he called you about.”

“Yes, but he wound up chattering mostly of you. In those little grammatical torrents that issue from him when he’s nervous, as if he’s reciting the Apostles’ Creed. He was sentimental. For some reason he couldn’t bear the idea of your leaving without
our
saying goodbye, you and me.”

“Tell me what happened with the job.”

“Osborne sent him a letter.”

“I thought it was more or less settled, a sure thing.”

“‘Security considerations’ arose.”

“About
him
?”

“Yes. I mean, they’re obvious enough, aren’t they?”

“How exactly were they obvious to Osborne? Or let’s say more obvious than they would have been in February.”

Fuller didn’t answer. But when she looked at him, she knew. More than that, she knew that he
wanted
her to know—just as surely as Tim had once wanted to make a sincere confession to his priest, or some of Jerry’s terrified friends had tried to tell McLeod’s lie detector even more than they’d been asked to.

“You did this,” she at last whispered.

Fuller took a sip of seltzer and regarded the countertop.

“Did you decide, after all, that he was
inconvenient
?” she asked in a furious whisper. “
This
is inconvenient, Fuller.” She placed his hand on her stomach. “But it’s mine—mine at least to ease into the world. Too bad there’s no one down on F Street that you could pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars to to have Tim killed.”

For all her disgust, her sense that he had done the most despicable thing possible, another part of her felt grateful to him, because what made the act despicable also made it definitive, the surest means of ending what had to end, now or later, with Tim’s broken heart. And she knew, looking at Fuller, that his reasoning matched her own.

“You think you did this for
his
sake, don’t you?” she asked. “You’ve convinced yourself of that, haven’t you?”

“No, I did it for me. You’ll do the other part, the part that’s for his sake.”

“And how will I do that, Fuller?”

“By putting me beyond the pale.”

“You want me to tell him the truth.”

“Make it hard on him.”

She got down from the stool and closed her coat. A coed who was with her boyfriend smiled, enviously, in her direction. She wondered, absurdly, whether she could get a cab outside Quigley’s or would have to walk to the main entrance of the department to find one.

“What about you?” asked Fuller.

“Me?”

“Were
you
ever in love with me?”

He asked it with an absence of ego, just a kind of sympathetic curiosity, taking the opportunity to tie up a loose end.

“No,” she answered.

“Well, that’s one small blessing.”

“I wish it had been otherwise,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because then I’d be able to forgive you.”

She brushed past the coed, and he called out to her, with surprising gentleness: “You already have.”

The ticket agent handed Mary a complimentary flight bag for her incidentals. Reaching for it with her left arm, she thought she saw the agent noting the absence of a wedding ring on the hand of this pregnant passenger. But maybe she was imagining things. She put her small purse and Beverly’s gift inside the bag, which she left unzippered, before heading back to the departures lounge. Tim was still getting her luggage weighed—four suitcases full of separates and shirtwaists and books—and preparing to pay the overcharges.

He looked comically gallant, and sitting here, sipping her glass of sherry, she thought it ridiculous that she should need his help. She had recently decided that the essential cause of her plight, what had brought her here, was a fatal self-sufficiency, an inner chilliness that had left her unable to settle for Paul or fight for Fred. She was an engine that couldn’t turn over; the only state of mind she could fully embrace was hesitation, a conviction that to accept one man or life was to forfeit another. She couldn’t welcome or destroy even the baby that was quickening within her.

Maybe she didn’t love Fuller because he was her emotional kinsman; maybe a small part of him did love Tim, just not a large or brave enough part to rout the others standing guard over the inviolable self.

Tim returned with a glass of milk and piece of pie.

“You should be having this,” he said, offering the milk. “For Estonia’s sake.”

They tried to grin.

“Here,” said Mary, giving him twenty dollars. “For the cabs and the overcharges. You’ll need it to get home.”

“Not on your life. I’ll be working soon. Though not as soon as I’d hoped, it seems.”

She said nothing.

“The job at State fell through,” he explained. “Osborne’s office sent me a letter saying I couldn’t satisfy their ‘security considerations.’ Fuller says it’s just somebody’s bureaucratic reflex kicking in. That it’s unfair but actually means nothing. He says the whole operation will change before long, and it’s just my bad luck to be coming through before McLeod can get over to Ireland.”

“No,” Mary said firmly. “That won’t change it.”

“Honest, Mary, I don’t understand it. I lived a perfectly clean life in the army, and there isn’t a soul here besides you who knows about the way things are now between me and Hawk. Not even Woodforde. Not even Tommy McIntyre.” This last name, his own unexpected utterance of it, made him go pale for a moment. “You don’t suppose that, based just on the old days, ’53 and ’54, he could have—”

“It wasn’t McIntyre.”

“Well, it wasn’t you. There’s nobody else.”

“It was Fuller.”

“That’s not so.”

Make it hard on him.

“I saw Fuller this morning,” she declared.

“No, you didn’t. You would have told me before now.”

“They call the baby ‘Garbo.’ I’ll bet he told you the same thing.”

He clenched his fist on top of the table. She pushed aside the milk and the pie and put her hand over his.

“No” was all he said—not a denial, just a refusal of her attention. He freed his hand but made no other protest. He looked at her like a technician reading a faulty instrument, one that had reported a flat scan when everybody knew there had to be a pulse. Once more he said “No,” before getting up. He nodded at her, as if she were a stranger he’d sat down with by mistake, and he turned to go.

A strong impulse made her reach inside the flight bag and extract Beverly’s present. She handed it to him, quickly, as if it were an illegal payoff she’d been assigned to pass along.

As she pressed it on him, she could feel a mutation of the gift’s meaning. The box—she had looked inside before leaving the apartment—contained a glass paperweight, a sprig of cherry blossom suspended in colorless amber. It had been Beverly’s way of telling her to come back to Washington. Now it was her way of saying to Tim that he would never come back here, but that what had happened between him and Fuller, however finished, remained alive somewhere, as sad and frozen and perfect as the blossoms on the branch.

So would her baby, forever ungrasped and unvisited by its mother, remain somewhere alive, still remembered and still real.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

May 6, 1957

The doors of St. Matthew’s stood open, so Monsignor Cartwright’s microphoned words about the dearly departed were able to travel not only to the seated congregants but all the way to those on the steps outside.

The deceased, everyone was assured, “had played a role which will be more and more honored as history unfolds its record.” After all, Monsignor Cartwright reminded those assembled, the “watchman of the citadel” had had “the fortitude to stand alone.”

“Never ‘alone,’” whispered Cecil Holland, out on the steps, to Mary McGrory. “Not as long as Roy was around.”

Miss McGrory flipped her pad back two or three pages. Its Gregg-shorthand squiggles had caught all the monsignor’s comfortings and regrets, including his observation that “few public figures in our time have done so much for the United States and received so many heartaches for it” as the man now on his way to eternal rest.

Joe McCarthy had died Thursday night from a “liver ailment.” Some said he’d gone peacefully, with Jean at his side, while others had him tearing at the IV tubes and bedsheets in a fit of delirium tremens. Whatever the truth, there would be three ceremonies to bid him farewell: the Mass here this morning; an afternoon service in the Senate chamber; a graveside rite in Wisconsin tomorrow.

When the first of these ended and the mourners were ready to leave St. Matthew’s, the vice president was at the front of them, descending the steps with his wife and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Spectators were hard pressed to see anyone else from the administration emerge, and Nixon took care to speak to a wire-service reporter more in the manner of a political scientist than a politician: “Years will pass before Senator McCarthy’s work can be objectively evaluated.”

On Friday night at Gawler’s funeral home, Tim had stood in a long line of the mournful, the curious, and the silently triumphant, waiting to file past the open casket in which McCarthy reposed. Despite the mortician’s art, the corpse had looked nearly as gray as his tie. Two and a half hours ago, Tim had arrived at St. Matthew’s early enough to have gotten a seat, but he had his suitcase with him, and it had seemed somehow disrespectful, not just awkward, to take it inside. So he’d stayed on the steps, watching the eight Marines bring McCarthy’s closed coffin into the church.

Senator Kennedy was now exiting, his left hand in his suit pocket, his right hand brushing back his hair. He moved fast, almost furtively, as if departing from some questionable assignation. He breezed past his colleague, Senator Saltonstall, who, a few feet from Tim, was talking with Senator Martin about how the GOP was now down to forty-six seats. Miss McGrory and Mr. Holland began moving down the steps, the better to overhear this conversation, prompting Tim to sidle into a nearby clutch of observers, lest he be spotted by his former colleagues from the
Star.

Even so, he was still able to hear them.

“Jack didn’t look as banged up about all this as his papa,” observed Holland. Joseph P. Kennedy had released a statement to the press that outdid even Monsignor Cartwright in paying tribute to the deceased. But Miss McGrory and Holland agreed that for cryptic brevity nothing could top Harry Truman’s reaction to news of the senator’s death: “Too bad.”

Fred Bell, looking like a plump, boutonniered floorwalker at Hecht’s, passed in front of Tim, who recognized him from an armband with the colors of the Estonian flag, as well as from the description, half comical and half longing, that he’d been given by Mary. According to her, Fred still didn’t know he was the father of a child ready to be born in New Orleans.

Joe Alsop now marched down the steps, nodding hello to Betty Beale and looking satisfied that the unpleasant business of McCarthy’s life, however abbreviated, was over at last. Close behind him came Scott McLeod, obliging the reporter at his side with a comment: “As I said in my Senate testimony on Friday, those criticisms of my appointment that are coming from abroad represent extreme minority elements.”

“Is your work at State really done?” the reporter asked.

“To my knowledge no subversive personnel remain in the department.”

Tim had fervently wished to avoid Tommy McIntyre, yet here he came, without Senator Potter, as happy as if he’d been to a christening.

“Mr. Laughlin!” he cried. “Christ, what a send-off from all the boys in their long skirts! I counted nineteen monsignors and seventy-three priests. I am not kidding.” He showed Tim a small notebook in which he’d written down the figures.

“A page back from that—go on, flip it—you’ll find the eulogy I’m trying to put into Charlie’s mouth.”

Those who had the opportunity to be with the late senator on social occasions or when chatting with him in his office knew that, regardless of differences which might have existed on political issues, Joe was never vindictive. He was a warm, human, and exceptionally charming person.

“Didn’t you find that yourself, Timothy? Didn’t he strike you as such? He’ll be the first solon since Borah to be laid out in the chamber. A lovely touch—to follow the great Prohibitionist with a drunkard. The final seal of repeal!”

Tommy’s failure to get a rise out of Tim, whose face remained weary and blank, inspired the Irishman to more strenuous rhetorical effort. Looking like the kind of gargoyle this plain American cathedral lacked, he hardly moved his rictus as the words came forth in a cackling spray: “Of course Charlie may be too much in
demand
to render this paean just yet. You should have seen him Friday night at the Mayflower! Receivin’ he was the annual award of the Goodwill Industries people. ‘Outstanding Champion’ of the nation’s handicapped. I must say, even the blinking canes couldn’t compete with the other honoree, a crippled telephone operator from Florida who dials with her feet and types with her mouth.” Ready to demonstrate the latter action, Tommy stuck a pencil between his yellow teeth. Revulsion at last gave Tim the energy to move, even if the only escape route would take him past Miss McGrory.

But she was occupied fending off a fierce scolding from a woman with a big red-white-and-blue cockade stuck to her hat. “Your paper writes malicious nonsense!” the woman insisted. “There is
no
possibility Mrs. McCarthy’s baby will be taken from her. One-year ‘probationary period’ or not.”

Miss McGrory nodded forbearingly and explained that she harbored no desire to see Tierney McCarthy returned to the New York Foundling Hospital.

The woman wheeled around to resume her march down the cathedral’s steps, and Tim realized it was Miss Lightfoot, showing the distress of a radiation victim. He tried to move away, not because he expected to be recognized, but from pity at the garish sight of her, unglimpsed since the anticensure rally at the Garden. But her own baleful eye took him in and made the identification.

“You!” she cried, before lowering her voice to a sickening baby-talk imitation of the inscription he’d once made in the Lodge biography. “‘
You’re wonderful.’
Well, your Mr. Wonderful was sitting right up near the front of the church, did you know that? With his boss, Mr. Hill. Offering their politic homage to Senator McCarthy, whom they thwarted during every single minute he was alive. And how is it Mr. Fuller even now
has
a boss and a job in that cesspool over there?” She pointed toward Foggy Bottom. “Because there are
still
people who protect his kind, McLeod or no McLeod.”

Attracted by Miss Lightfoot’s again-increasing volume, people began to stare. Tim struggled to get past her, needing to flee before Hawk, who he’d never imagined would be here, came down the steps and saw him. Tightening his grip on his suitcase, he thought he was managing to get to the other side of Miss Lightfoot when her hand was able to reach out and detain him long enough so that she could whisper, straight into his face: “
Cocksucker.
”

Finally at the bottom of the steps, he looked back up them like the tourist who never again expects to see the Acropolis. It was at this moment that he caught sight of Woodforde near the cathedral’s doors.

The writer noticed him, too. Concerned by the suitcase, he made a gesture that asked: “What gives?”

Tim responded with a reassuring wave, but Woodforde knew better. He cupped his hands near his mouth and forcefully called out: “Don’t.” He’d sensed that something had gone very wrong between Laughlin and Fuller—and the single suitcase could hold just about everything Tim had in his part of the loft.

“You look awful!” Woodforde called down the steps.

“Thanks!” answered Tim, hoping to sound humorous, before making a getaway down Rhode Island Avenue. He had most of the day ahead of him before his bus was scheduled to leave: he’d gotten the cheapest fare, on a coach that wouldn’t get its passengers to New York until after midnight. Even with Woodforde’s copyediting money, four months at St. Mary, Mother of God had finished off his savings; for the first time in his life he wasn’t sure where he’d be sleeping tonight. He’d not told his parents or Francy he was coming, and he couldn’t picture himself arriving on either doorstep in the middle of the night. What he would do tomorrow, once he woke up, seemed even harder to imagine.

He wished, God forgive him, that he
wouldn’t
wake up. Two weeks had done nothing to lessen his black realization that this time he had not renounced Hawk—oh, the noble ridiculousness of his two-year enlistment!—but that Hawk had renounced him.

He went into the Peoples drugstore to get a half pint of milk before taking his seat on the bench in Dupont Circle, where he knew he’d been heading all along.

He understood that Mary had revealed what she had at the airport—
It was Fuller
—to shock and toughen him, as if a bucket of the coldest water might effect his Lazarene rise from the stupor of unwise love. But he’d walked all the way home that afternoon feeling strangely certain he’d become invisible.

Yesterday he’d sat on another bench, on the Mall, watching smoke rise a thousand feet into the air: the Johnson & Wimsatt lumber yard, down on Maine Avenue above the docks where Mary used to buy fish, had burned to the ground, requiring every fire company in the city. Remembering, as the catechism had long ago told him, that despair is a particular affront to God—the rejection of every good He might still have in store for one—he had wished he were rising on the columns of smoke, incinerated but released, upward and gone.

He had decided to leave last night, while the radio was broadcasting the arrangements for McCarthy’s funeral. He would go to St. Matthew’s on the same commemorative impulse that had taken him to Gawler’s and that had now brought him here. Before going to the church, he had made up his mind that he would stand where he’d stood after the wedding; he’d blend into the crowd and then he would go, would begin to get lost—so thoroughly he’d be untraceable even to Mr. Keen.

At the cathedral he had found half the cast of the old lights-camera-action Caucus Room. There had even been some discussion on the steps about whether a glinting head in one of the pews, visible only from the back, might belong to G. David Schine. Tommy; Miss McGrory; the lunatic Miss Lightfoot; and, as he now knew, Hawk. The two of them had been there together, each as unaware of the other as they’d been at the Draft Ike rally back in ’52.

He put a straw into the milk and looked over toward the Washington Club. Today was turning out to be as warm as the wedding day had been. It was so lovely one could imagine Jean McCarthy tossing a funeral wreath as if it were her bridal bouquet.

Closing his eyes, he realized that he’d not said so much as a single Hail Mary for the repose of McCarthy’s soul. Silently, he recited one now, and followed it with one for himself. He prayed not for forgiveness or happiness or even strength, but only to make the merest murmuring demonstration to himself that he was still alive. He went on to say a third and fourth Hail Mary and decided he would recite a whole decade, even though he lacked his beads.

As he prayed, he could see the orange light of the sun on the backs of his eyelids, and then, just beyond this interior glow, he could feel the tortoiseshell frames of his glasses being lifted from his face.

“How many fingers?”

He opened his eyes and answered: “Three.”

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

“There. You’re healed.”

Hawkins sat down and pointed to the receding figure of his boss, Mr. Hill, from whom he’d peeled away at the edge of Dupont Circle.

“Nice day for a funeral,” he continued. “McCarthy’s. We were there together, Hill and I, and decided we’d walk to our next milestone in legislative diplomacy.”

“Where’s that?”

“The Irish embassy, up near Twenty-third. I told him I’d catch up. We’re early as it is.”

“And why would you be calling on
my
people?”

Even now—shocked by Hawk’s sudden presence, and still smothered in despondency—he had fallen right into the old bright febrile chatter, as if he were inside the turret or back on I Street, trying to please his beloved.

“We’re going up to answer a few last questions that some Hibernian-American legislators, Democrats all, have raised about Mr. McLeod’s nomination. A small meeting at which the actual Irish will be assuring the senators they have no real objections.”

“Ah.”

Fuller pointed to the suitcase. “Do the Hungarians no longer require their cans of Reddi-Wip? Can St. Mary really afford to give you a day off from dispatching them?”

“I thought I’d go to New York.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. Awhile.”

“Two visits to your sister in the space of three weeks? After no more than three in two years? She’ll be a happy woman.”

They were talking as if he’d be back, when they both knew he never would; talking as if he were unaware of what Hawk had done, when they both knew that Mary had been made the instrument through which he knew everything.

Make it hard on him.

It was Fuller.

“Here,” said Tim. “Take this.”

He withdrew a small object, covered in a handkerchief, from the pocket of his suit jacket. Putting the thing into his own coat without unwrapping it, Fuller was aware only that it had the shape of a baseball sliced in half and was surprisingly heavy.