Fellow Travelers (6 page)

Tim had only a slight idea of how Potter spoke, but he was pretty sure the point of this writing assignment was to make him sound as implacable as Knowland. So he took up a yellow pad and made several notes for a few paragraphs of oratory. To begin with, Knowland must be extolled. To continue, Stevenson must be excoriated, for his attempt “not only to bend over backwards, but to roll out the red carpet for our adversaries of that same color.” The prose began to flow almost automatically. The defeated Democrat was proposing “a nonaggression pact with a flagrant aggressor.” To conclude, one needed to take a shot at India, a sentimental favorite of liberals, which Knowland had accused of backing the North Korean position before the peace talks had even gotten underway. “In my great automobile-making state,” wrote Tim as Potter, “we’re wary of any car or country that stays in ‘neutral’ for too long. ‘Neutral’ is what you’re in when you roll downhill.”

After penciling in a few revisions, Tim rolled a sheet of paper into the Underwood and typed up this stentorian boilerplate. Struck by his own speed, he realized how the words—for all that he believed them, and he more or less did—seemed to be coming from neither Potter’s brain nor his own. He was speaking in another voice entirely—the way, as an altar boy during Mass, he would be saying his Latin part while still hearing the English words of whatever hymn had soared through the church a few minutes before. He proofread the little speech a second time, to make sure he hadn’t typed the words “Hawkins Fuller” somewhere in the middle of one of its sentences. Then he handed the page to Mr. McIntyre.

“Fast fella, aren’t you?” the lined little man said with a grin, before carrying the speech to the suite’s innermost office. Before five minutes passed, he reemerged, in the company of Senator Potter and a third man. All of them, carrying their hats, headed toward Tim.

“Another Irish wordsmith!” enthused the senator, who put both his canes in his left hand, so that his right could extend itself to Tim. “Welcome to the staff, Mr. Laughlin.”

Tim shook Potter’s hand and realized with embarrassment that he had been looking down at the senator’s feet.

Potter seemed pleased by the chance to alleviate an awkwardness he encountered daily.

“I was just telling Mr. Jeffreys, my Lansing constituent here, that I’m looking forward to some duck hunting on the Upper Peninsula this winter. These days I’m able to glide around in some paper-thin galoshes my wife gave me, while my pals have to clomp and sweat in boots that weigh a ton. ‘Aren’t your feet cold?’ one of them asked me last year. ‘Not exactly!’ I told him. ‘Unless they’re feeling chilly wherever I left ’em in France!’” He paused to laugh. “Everything’s got its advantages.”

Tim smiled, more in awe than humor. Potter clapped him on the shoulder and continued on out with McIntyre and Mr. Jeffreys. Miss Cook then presented him with two forms to be filled out. “You can bring these back with you when you start Monday morning, Mr. Laughlin.”

Tim thanked her and everybody else still in the office. A minute or so later, halfway down the Capitol’s east steps, he paused to sit beside a huge stone pediment supporting an ornate lamppost. He closed his eyes and shook off the image of Potter’s severed feet, lost somewhere in the soil of France. It wasn’t hard to banish the picture; his mind had no room for it, or even for the fact that he could now pay the rent and write home with some good news. His mind was filled with the afternoon of McCarthy’s wedding, exactly a week ago.

An hour after getting off the streetcar, he’d been summoned to a telephone on the other side of the city room. “A call from Capitol Hill,” he’d been told. Through the receiver had come the voice he’d heard an hour before and never expected to hear again: “Send your résumé and a letter of application to the attention of Miss Antoinette Cook. The job is a junior assistant with writing duties.”

Dumbfounded, Tim had written down the address and phone number for Potter’s office. “Thank you,” he’d managed to say.

“If you get the job, treat yourself to a glass of chocolate milk.”

And with that the still-nameless voice had left the line.

Hawkins Fuller.

Now, a week later, Tim sat for another moment on the steps, before he opened his eyes to see a flag being run up one of the distant poles on the Capitol’s roof. It was a familiar sight: he knew that this flag would wave for only a moment before being lowered and shipped to some elementary school in Cheyenne or Mill Valley, where the teachers could tell the students it had flown over the U.S. Capitol. But for the few seconds it was aloft, filled with what might be two new separate futures, Tim looked at it with his hand over his heart.

October 6, 1953

Dear Rep. Fish:

You may assure your Dutch-American constituent in Wappingers Falls that the Department of State views all recent violence in Indonesia with the greatest possible concern. As Secretary Dulles remarked on…

Mary Johnson proofread her letter to the New York congressman and sank into the feeling of futility that often overcame her by midafternoon. What could any of these well-meant epistolary stitchings and swabbings really do to treat the wounds of the tortured world? There was news this week that Lockheed had begun work on a nuclear-powered airplane; no doubt it would be carrying an atomic bomb as well.

Behind Mary, Miss Lightfoot was speaking to Beverly Phillips about the woman in the Office of Legal Advisors who’d just won a four-thousand-dollar car in WMAL’s “Mystery Voice” contest.

“Well,” said Mrs. Phillips, “
she
won’t have any trouble making her Community Chest contribution.”

Mary laughed. Underneath the correspondence piling up for the bureau chief’s signature lay her copy of the memo from R. W. Scott McLeod, security officer to 1,142 employees, informing all of them that if they chose not to make a Community Chest contribution this year, they must report to his office for an interview. Secretary Dulles was chairman of the department’s drive, and McLeod’s zeal to show the boss what a little extra aggression could accomplish had sparked much grumbling about the “Conformity Chest.”

“There’s nothing wrong with what McLeod is doing,” said Miss Lightfoot, in her near-chronic tone of irritation. “He’s just trying for one-hundred-percent participation. He’ll
lend
you a dollar if you can’t contribute one on your own.”

Mary turned her small swivel chair so that she and Beverly Phillips could each raise an eyebrow to the other. Miss Lightfoot also found nothing wrong with McLeod’s unceasing security-risk investigations. Indeed, she seemed disappointed with the estimate that his review of things wouldn’t reach Congressional Relations until December.

A young man carrying a book now came through the door, confusing Mary, who took him for the summer office boy from Eastern European Affairs. Hadn’t he returned to school?

“Is Mr. Fuller in?” the boy asked. He stammered over the “F” in Fuller. “I couldn’t find him on the wall directory, but the man at the front desk told me to come here.”

Mary smiled. She realized that this wasn’t the boy from EEA, though he did look a little like the lovesick Donald O’Connor in
Call Me Madam,
the only musical anyone would ever care to make about this place. And then it occurred to her. This skinny fellow
was
lovesick. She looked at him gently, filling up with annoyance toward Fuller as she did so. What new recklessness of his had made this boy venture here with a handful of pebbles to throw at Romeo’s window?

“I’m afraid he left early. To go to the Georgetown library, I believe.”

“The library at George Washington U.,” Miss Lightfoot corrected.

“Thank you,” said Mary. Her colleague, already matronly though no more than thirty-five, certainly kept track of Fuller.

“Will he be back?” the young man asked.

“I doubt it,” said Mary.

Managing not to stammer, the boy said, “I was bringing him this.” He handed Mary a new biography of the elder Henry Cabot Lodge. A receipt from Trover’s bookshop stuck out of it. An odd present to bring here, thought Mary, Lodge not exactly having been an internationalist. But it was a big and serious book—impressive, the boy had probably reasoned—and he had spent six dollars on it.

“You could leave it here,” she said. “I’ll see that Mr. Fuller gets it.”

The boy still looked crestfallen.

“You can leave a note, too,” Mary added. “So he’ll be sure to know who it’s from.”

“I’ll write one inside the book,” the young man declared, looking more hopeful.

Mary pointed to the empty chair at the side of her desk and watched him fumble for his ballpoint pen. His handwriting was so neat she could read it upside down without the least effort.

With thanks to Hawkins Fuller

(I got the job. You’re wonderful.)

Timothy Laughlin

“Does he know where to reach you?” asked Mary, trying to sound casual instead of confidential. “Is there a number you’d like to leave?”

“I’m not on the phone,” said Timothy Laughlin. A cloud rushed over the map of Ireland that was his face—mortification, Mary thought, at having used such a tenement archaism. “But I’ll put my address with it,” he added, recovering enough equilibrium to accept the index card that Mary gave him to write it on. He also removed the bookshop receipt, and asked if she could direct him back to the Twenty-first Street entrance.

After he’d gone, she prepared the envelope for another soothing letter, to Congressman Ikard of Texas. Adjusting her typewriter’s left margin, she noticed Miss Lightfoot smoothing her strawberry-blond permanent wave, and realized what close attention the woman had paid to the boy’s visit.

CHAPTER FIVE

October 16, 1953

Senator Kennedy, the radio was saying, had today called for “the development of a strategic air force with sufficient retaliatory powers to threaten a potential aggressor with havoc and ruin.” However strong his words, they could not compete with McCarthy’s announcement, just made in New York—and deemed worthy of a bulletin—that one of his Fort Monmouth witnesses had broken down crying and admitted he’d been lying to the committee. According to the announcer, the senator had rushed out of the hearing in the Federal Building, spoken to reporters, and then rushed back in to get what the witness promised would now be the truth.

After a full week in Senator Potter’s suite of offices, Tim had grown used to the radio’s steady murmur. The Fort Monmouth hearings were making so much news—lab secrets said to be going to East Germany; the alleged spies’ links to the now-dead Julius Rosenberg—that you would think they were open to the public, whereas in fact all the news they made came straight from McCarthy himself, whenever he decided to hit the microphones outside the committee room’s closed door. The senator seemed determined to justify the urgency with which he’d interrupted his honeymoon last Sunday, even though he was right now the only senator up in New York at the executive sessions. Several staffers—including Mr. Jones, for Senator Potter—were up there, too.

Still not sure what Jones’s exact position was, Tim felt it probably didn’t matter much. In practical terms, the office’s secretary, Miss Cook, a single woman who lived at the Hotel Continental, was the person who kept everyone, Potter included, hopping. She’d directed Tim to answer constituent mail this morning, and right now had him writing a speech on fishing-industry issues that the senator would deliver the next time he was home. Tim had just looked up “sea lamprey” in the encyclopedia.

The staff were encouraged to go into the galleries and listen to the floor debates as often as they liked. The Potter legend—what Tommy McIntyre called “the gimp log-cabin lore”—included the story of how, while learning to walk all over again at Walter Reed, Potter would ask to go to the House and Senate in order to observe the doings of those two august institutions in which he would later serve.

There was little enough action on the floor this week; debate had been replaced by high-pressure caucusing behind the scenes. Since the Democratic mayor of Cleveland had been named to fill the late Senator Taft’s seat, it wasn’t entirely clear which party controlled the show. At this moment there were forty-eight Democrats and forty-seven Republicans, but between Senator Morse (an Independent pledged to organize with the GOP) and Vice President Nixon, who could break a tie, Ike’s party might be able to hang on, just barely, to its committee chairmanships and agenda. “Our fellas better get some exercise and lay off the spuds,” Tommy had declared while breezing through the office a couple of days ago. “One bad heart attack and we’ll all be ordering new stationery.”

Tim now took care not to let any crumbs from Mrs. Potter’s sugar cookies fall onto the draft of the speech. Everyone agreed that the senator’s wife, who often baked for the staff in the kitchen of the Potters’ ninety-dollar-a-month Arlington apartment, was a warmhearted, if flighty, woman. Lorraine Potter’s particular part in the legend of limblessness involved her supposedly having sprung bolt upright in bed, back in Cheboygan in ’45, at the exact moment Potter stepped on the land mine in France. Her own legs, she swore, had gone numb for several minutes.

So far nothing Tim had worked on came close in importance to the paragraph of remarks he’d auditioned with, and which, so far as he could tell, Potter had never actually delivered. The little speech now sat in a file with Stevenson’s original call for a nonaggression pact, along with Knowland’s subsequent attack and reactions from several other figures. Winston Churchill himself had announced that he saw nothing terribly wrong with the idea—perhaps, Tim thought, a backhanded way of suggesting its irrelevance.

“The scourge of Adlai!” cried Tommy McIntyre, suddenly passing through the room with a cackle and a snort. The interruption made Tim happy. He hadn’t talked to anyone for an hour and a half.

“I bring you tidings from the New York Federal Building,” Tommy said.

“You mean the witness who broke down crying?”

“No,” said Tommy, smiling even wider. “Somewhat older tidings,” he said, slapping an inch-thick typescript onto Tim’s desk. “Last Thursday’s transcript. Turn to where it’s dog-eared, Mr. Laughlin.”

MR. COHN:
Have you been told about any of the charges against Mr. Yamins?

MR. CORWIN
(witness): No, sir, I haven’t.

MR. COHN:
Was he pretty friendly with Mr. Coleman?

MR. CORWIN
(witness): Well, I would say they were friendly. I don’t think they had much social contact.

MR. JONES:
Friendly in what respect, then?

MR. CORWIN
(witness): Well, they worked together, and it was a companionship.

MR. JONES:
Scientific companionship more than a social companionship?

MR. CORWIN
(witness): I would say so, yes, sir.

MR. SCHINE:
Mr. Corwin, you lived with Mr. Coleman, didn’t you?

Tim looked up, worried where this transcribed colloquy (“it was a companionship”) might be headed. But Tommy, who seemed to have something different on his mind, just roared with delight and derision: “Jones and Cohn and Schine. Like three kids playing gumshoe up in their tree house! Our boy Roy even calls Schine ‘Mr. Chairman’ from time to time! Dontcha think a little adult supervision might be in order? There ain’t a single solon in the room. And look at this,” Tommy added, flipping to the title page of the binder, where he’d circled “Robert Jones, administrative assistant to Senator Potter.”

For his look of perplexity, Tim earned a playful swat with the transcript. “‘Administrative assistant’ my Aunt Fanny,” declared Tommy. “He’s a goddamn researcher, almost as low on this totem pole as
you
are, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Timothy.”

“Is he in trouble?” Tim asked. “Mr. Jones, I mean.”

“All in good time, all in good time. Why don’t you take this document and put it on his desk, sport? And keep it open to the dog-eared page.”

McIntyre then quickly left, no doubt headed back to the cloakroom machinations over the Republicans’ new minority majority.

Tim walked into the next room and put the transcript on Mr. Jones’s desk. He could see from some notes on the blotter that Jones, too, was trawling after statistics on the sea lamprey. But that was hardly all. The desk, even with no one in the chair behind it, appeared to be a very busy place. Even more prominent on the blotter was a cutting from last Wednesday’s
Star,
a small, discreet story about a twenty-five-year-old theological student’s conviction for soliciting an undercover police officer in Lafayette Square. The item wouldn’t have made the paper at all were the student not the son of Senator Lester Hunt, a Democrat from Wyoming.

The clipping made Tim burn with a terrible feeling of foolishness. He could see himself as the hapless theological student and Hawkins Fuller as Officer John A. Constanzo of the District Police. For days now he had been imagining the contempt Fuller must be feeling for him, ever since the sentimental gesture of the book, with its unguarded inscription, had revealed Timothy Laughlin to be someone who’d gotten completely the wrong idea about a friendly chat in Dupont Circle, and completely the wrong idea about Hawkins Fuller, a normal man whose fraternal, collegial favor—a simple job-hunting tip—had been twisted by the recipient into a distasteful opportunity to seek another sort of favor entirely.

For each of the last several nights, Tim had been unable to banish his longing for Fuller, or the stupid, unextinguished hope that the older man might yet send him a kind note, maybe when he had finished the Lodge biography. Nor could he cease dwelling on the ugly probability that the book had been thrown away, along with whatever few seconds of infinitesimal regard Fuller had had for that skinny little queer on the park bench.

It was 4:35 p.m. Tim fought the temptation to picture, for the hundredth time, what Hawkins Fuller must look like sitting at his desk in the clean aquamarine precincts of the State Department. Instead, he took one last look at the desktop in front of him and could not resist picking up the topmost letter on yet another stack of Jones’s pending concerns. It was typed with a lack of accuracy that seemed more heartfelt than sloppy:

the Chinese doctor threatened to take me to to the hospital, on account of my frostbitten feet. My two big toe bones were sticking out, and the area around them looked real decayed. I knew that 90 or 95 percent of the men who went to the hospital never came out of it, so when the doctor left the room for five minutes, I took a fingernail (all our fingernails were real long and dirty) and punched it around the bones and broke off both of my big toes. I threw them across the floor so they’d be out of sight. The Chinese doctor came back in and he said “you go to hospital” and I said “nothing doing, my feet are okay,” and he said “let me look.” And he took a look and I had the bones broke off, and the feet now didn’t look so decayed and he said “okay” and went outside the door and never bothered me again. I knew if I’d gone to the hospital I’d have never got out of it.

This letter from Sergeant Wendell Treffery, recently repatriated from Korea to the army hospital at Walton, Massachusetts, must be part of the preparations for Potter’s atrocity hearings.

A second letter in the pile came from Sergeant First Class George J. Matta, who described the shallow graves he’d seen dug for American POWs in Korea:

we would come the next time and the rain would have washed the dirt away and there would be nothing there but bones. We went back and we got on to them about it, about the people digging up the graves and taking the clothes. They tried to tell us it was the dogs that did it, that did the digging. (They must have had pretty smart dogs that could dig the graves and take the clothes off the men.) I suppose you could call that “brainwashing,” but you’ll excuse me if I tell you I think it was just typical b.s. from these monsters.

This, Tim told himself, was why he was here. Communism—and whatever could be done about it—was more important than Jones’s grandstanding, or even McCarthy’s, more important than his own being in love with some handsome phantom who must now despise him.

He lingered at Jones’s desk, reading letter after letter from hospital after hospital. He thought of Father Beane and the missionaries, and he wondered, guiltily, why his own feet should not be freezing and bleeding in the Asian snow.

“Can’t say much for the hat,” Beverly Phillips declared. “It looks like an upside-down lightbulb, don’t you think? The suit’s pretty, though.”

Mary looked hard at the hemline. “That’s
still
shorter than what I’ve got, I’m pretty sure. I raised the last of my old skirts a couple of weeks ago, and I’m not about to drag out the machine again.”

“Ah,” said Beverly. “Your evening with Fuller, right?” She mocked herself with a sigh: “
Some
of us are just barnacles on his dreamboat.”

Mary laughed. “Oh, Jesus, Beverly.”

“I’m sorry. I sound like Miss Lightfoot, God forbid. It’s none of my business, honey. I also apologize for dragging you here.” This morning Beverly had asked Mary if she’d like the second of two complimentary tickets she had for this late-afternoon fashion show at the Mayflower Hotel. During the past hour the women had finished off a plate of sandwiches and two cocktails apiece.

“Anything that’s gratis,” said Beverly. “I’m still ‘Helen Holden, Government Girl.’” When Mary’s expression showed no recognition of the old radio serial and its plucky, thrifty heroine, Beverly sighed. “You’re too young to remember. And I’m too old for the part.” Nearing forty and divorced for several years, Beverly Phillips was raising two sons, who would soon be waiting for their dinner, up in Friendship Heights.

The last pair of new outfits started down the makeshift runway. “Did you see Perle Mesta’s article this morning?” asked Mary. The city’s best-known hostess was over in Russia, filing pieces with the
Washington Post
on the subject of Soviet women.

“About all those butch gals wearing construction helmets and rebuilding Stalingrad?” Beverly asked.

“She says even the expensive dresses look like junk compared to what you can get over here for five dollars at Woodie’s.”

“Well, the one that came past me a minute ago cost forty-five bucks, and I’m not a big enough capitalist for that.”

“Are you sure you won’t join us?” asked Mary. After agreeing to go to the fashion show, she had phoned her date and told him to meet her here at the Mayflower.

“Don’t be silly,” said Beverly. “I never mind being a fifth wheel, but if I don’t get going soon the boys are likely to burn down the house. So where’s he taking you?”

“We’ll probably wind up having dinner here. Maybe the movies afterward, though I think the poster for
From Here to Eternity
scares him a little.”