Fellow Travelers (8 page)

Schine, handsome and blond, seemed moderately intrigued by how little it took to get Roy all excited.

“Dave is essential to the operation of this commitee,” insisted Cohn. “His expertise—”

Knowing that Schine’s expertise had been demonstrated mostly by his authorship of a pamphlet about communism’s historical perfidy—an error-filled monograph that had gone into his family’s hotel rooms like the Gideon Bible—Adams quietly repeated to Cohn that Secretary Stevens would see what he could do.

“That’s your answer for everything—from clearances to Communists to KP! Which Dave is not going to be wasted doing with some bunch of goddamned hillbillies in a barracks!”

Schine put his hand on Cohn’s arm. “Roy, enough. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay.” Sotto voce, he reminded Schine of all the favors his family had done for Adams during the last couple of weeks up here in New York—the free hotel rooms, the comped theater tickets. Then, back to fortissimo, he barked out, for the whole table’s benefit, statistics on security risks and Communist sympathizers at Fort Monmouth.

McCarthy grinned nervously at Jones, as if trying to pretend to a guest that there was nothing seriously wrong with the child at the end of the table. “Tell me about yourself,” he said to the research assistant. The chairman indicated to Adams, still methodically finishing his soup, that it was okay for him to join this precinct of the conversation instead of Roy’s.

In the course of giving an abbreviated life story—from his birth in Biddeford, Maine, to his days at Bates College and in the army during the war—Jones gently clarified the fact that he was a Bob, not a Bill. Reaching the recent past, he told the chairman: “Before Potter, I worked for Senator Brewster.”

McCarthy nodded, recalling his retired Republican colleague from Maine. “Better than that old bag they’ve got in now.”

It was Jones’s turn to laugh, at McCarthy’s scornful reference to Senator Margaret Chase Smith and her now-famous “declaration of conscience” against the chairman. “Sir, she couldn’t find her bloomers, let alone her conscience. Or a Communist.”

McCarthy slapped the tablecloth in appreciation, then signaled for another Manhattan. He’d decided to skip any food. “So what’s it like working for Charlie?” he asked Jones.

After a moment’s hesitation, the research assistant answered, “Oh, he’s a fine guy.” But realizing he had nothing more to say, Jones boldly changed the subject. “Sir, can you tell me how you plan to handle Levitsky in open session?”

McCarthy, who proceeded by more or less constant improvisation, had clearly not given the matter any thought. “Got any ideas?” he asked Jones.

“Yes, I do,” said the research assistant, seizing his chance. “You need to leak what he said about Rosenberg to the press. That piece of testimony where he directly lies.”

“Actually,” said Adams, cutting into his fish, “Levitsky didn’t say that himself.”

McCarthy invited Jones to respond, which the younger man did almost immediately. “Does it matter? Greenblum
says
he said it. And at this point his word is better than some Fifth-Amendment Communist’s. If we want to sustain public interest in this, let people think Rosenberg is still influencing things from beyond the grave. That’ll scare them a lot more than one more fag at the State Department. Or at the head of the Democratic ticket.”

McCarthy waved an empty fork to get the interest of the other end of the table, as if here at last were a topic around which he could unite the whole family. “Roy,” he called, “you think there are any reporters still around the Fed building?”

Jones’s mind was moving fast. If he could make himself useful here, he’d be able to get that drunken leprechaun McIntyre off his back. Maybe even get himself out of Potter’s office and into the chairman’s own.

Tim sat in a pew at the front of St. Peter’s fifteen minutes before Saturday afternoon confessions were to begin. Nearby he could see two women who had arrived early for the sacrament: an elderly lady, perhaps eager to begin the only conversation she would have all week, and a pretty girl his own age, probably hoping to finish here in plenty of time to get ready for a date.

From the moment he’d reached the corner of Second and C streets and stood before the church doors, Tim had known that he would not be entering the confessional this afternoon. The church’s yellow brick tower and parapets had seemed like a papier-mâché stage set for one of Shakespeare’s sunniest Italian comedies, just as here inside, the red-and-green pattern repeating itself from one stained-glass window to the next resembled Christmas wrapping paper, the kind whose expense always provoked disapproving clucks from Grandma Gaffney before she slid her own annual gifts, unwrapped cartons of cigarettes, across the dining room table to her daughters and son. Even the plain Ionic columns here inside St. Peter’s, so different from the blood-streaked marble at St. Matthew’s, seemed ready to invite Kilroy’s signature or the crayon drawings of children.

Tim would pray, but he would not confess. He was here to make a separate peace, the way the Russians had—he’d seen it referenced in the Lodge biography—during the First World War. Rising from the pew, he headed to the little chapel, just off the altar, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He had been hiding behind her skirts his whole life, and as he knelt before the chapel’s rack of tall blue candles, he felt certain she would understand his predicament. She might not be part of the Trinity, but her ex officio position, as the intercessor who had God’s ear, had always made her something like Mrs. Roosevelt, the person to go to first.

In the
Baltimore Catechism,
the source of all Tim’s knowledge of the world above this one, the Trinity had been depicted as a shamrock—the visual analogy closest to hand for the Irish clergyman who’d written the text. But what if one added another leaf, the way one used to, with an artful graft, after hunting in vain for four-leaf clovers on the small patch of grass in the playground near Holy Cross? Tim did not plan to worship Hawkins Fuller, but why couldn’t his love for him be attached to the love he already felt for the actual Trinity? Had he not, in fact, always been in love, physically and particularly, with Christ, whose dark, haloed image on every calendar and classroom wall glowed more handsomely than any man walking His Earth? Had not Father McGuire, in the first pages of the catechism, promised a kind of divine romance?
God has been very, very good to you. He thinks more of you than He does of anything else in this world. To you alone He has given an invitation to live with Him in heaven forever.

When Hawkins had removed Tim’s shirt and seen the scapular beneath it, the older man had not seemed surprised, and he had made no joke. He had hung it, without comment, over one of the bedposts at the headboard, where, whenever Tim glimpsed it during the night, it seemed no more out of place—and no less protective—than it did when draped over his own narrow chest and back.

How many mortal sins had he committed last night? Did each separate act he and Hawkins performed constitute an individual transgression, or was their entire three hours together—until Hawkins left, after some chatter and a tousle of his hair but no actual goodbye kiss—a single offense? It didn’t matter, because either way, he, Timothy Patrick Laughlin, was dead. Mortal sin, said the catechism,
kills the life of grace in our souls. That is why the sacrament of penance is called a sacrament of the dead.
And one could not perform penance without making a confession, any more than one could make a confession without perfect contrition—which he did not feel. To his astonishment, he did not
want
to feel it, however well he had once mastered Father McGuire’s illustration of these matters.
Elizabeth says: “Anyone who commits even one mortal sin does more harm than hundreds and hundreds of earthquakes ever could do.” She is right.
As the words came back to Tim now, he pictured the ground below the 38th Parallel opening up and swallowing a thousand American soldiers.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned….
Because he could not say these words this afternoon, his heart would pound with fear tonight.
If I should die before I wake
…Could he live, for even a little while, without grace—drained of it, like the empty black milk bottle the catechism drew for a soul with mortal or Original Sin? No. And he could not take Saint Augustine’s approach, asking to be made pure but just now, because the truth—and God loves the truth—was that Timothy Laughlin had never felt so pure as he had last night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

November 10, 1953

None of the twelve televisions on display at Hecht’s had its sound up. Eleven of them, this Tuesday night, were tuned to Milton Berle, cavorting in women’s clothes and silence, while the twelfth showed Bishop Sheen returning from a commercial break to find that his blackboard had been erased, as always, by Skippy, the unseen angel he liked to claim was a member of the cherubim’s Local 20. The clean slate waited, in the silence, for a word, the name of the last theme Sheen would take up before the program ended at eight-thirty. RECONCILIATION, it turned out to be, and as soon as he’d written it, Sheen turned his elegant figure and blazing eyes to the camera.

Tim was almost able to read the bishop’s lips, which he knew would soon speak the broadcast’s weekly envoi,
God love you,
that comforting wish caught somewhere between the subjunctive and imperative.

Tim figured he could spend another half hour browsing the book department until the store closed at nine. And then, knowing that Hawkins didn’t like him showing up till past ten, he would kill another ninety minutes out on the street. In the past few weeks he’d been to the apartment on I Street four times, and before each visit, including tonight’s, he had called hours ahead from a pay phone near his own room to make sure he’d be welcome.

Exiting the store under a cloudy night sky, Tim wandered through what was left of Lincoln’s Washington: east on F Street past the Patent Office and old marble Tariff Building, then all the way down into Chinatown toward Mrs. Surratt’s boardinghouse. Turning south, he made his way to Pennsylvania Avenue, where he began to walk in the opposite direction from the one he’d traveled on the streetcar six weeks ago with the then anonymous Hawkins Fuller. Passing the White House and looking at the lights in the residence, Tim wondered if Eisenhower would be up late deciding whether to support or criticize HUAC’s subpoena of Harry Truman. All these years later, Attorney General Brownell was now insisting that the ex-president had knowingly promoted a Communist at Treasury named Harry Dexter White.

The snow from Friday’s freak blizzard was already gone. Tim now recalled setting out for Hawkins’ apartment that night, after it had started coming down. Although he’d been greeted with the gentle ministrations of a terry-cloth towel, he had even then not been asked to stay the night. Around two a.m. Hawkins had drawn attention to a lull in the storm and matter-of-factly discovered an extra pair of galoshes that would just about fit Tim.

Who, he’d wondered, had been their previous owner? But he had not asked. After all, nearly a month since their first hours in his own bed on Capitol Hill, he and Fuller had yet to take a walk together or share a meal. Hawkins
had
once shown up, unannounced, at the room above the hardware store, bearing a quart of milk (a joke) and a candy bar. They had eaten the candy bar in bed, but that hardly ranked with going out to a restaurant or making supper together.

Were he and Hawkins having an “affair”? Actually, Tim couldn’t see that the word, with its implications of brevity and furtiveness, did the situation justice. Devoid of any previous romantic experience, he had lived these three weeks as an eternity of happiness. This wasn’t, he told himself, even technically like
Back Street,
since Hawkins, thank God, had not turned out to be married. That possibility, the ne plus ultra of Tim’s imaginings about the worldly and perverse, had been lifted from his mind the first night he had walked into Fuller’s almost comically authentic bachelor apartment on the fifth floor of 2124 I.

Reentering the pale brick building tonight, Tim decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator to number 5B, partly to experience a pleasant envy of the career girls and med students who got to live in such proximity to Hawkins—but mostly to kill a last minute of time, enough to put him past ten-thirty on his graduation wristwatch.

“It’s open,” said Hawkins, above the clatter of kitchen cleanup.

In Tim went, but only past the threshhold. From that spot he stared into Hawkins’ bedroom through its half-open door. He could see the Norwegian flag, half curled up like the tin of a sardine can, a souvenir of the Fulbright year. On the floor were sneakers and a T-shirt—used, Tim supposed, late this afternoon in the twice-a-week handball game Hawkins played at the GWU gym. Tim felt an even stronger desire to take hold of the shirt, to put his face against it, than he did to rush into the kitchen and touch Hawkins himself—as if the saint’s relics would provide an equally keen, but less risky, jolt than the saint. He forced his eyes away from the shirt and sneakers, and away from the framed photograph of Hawkins’ parents, who surely couldn’t, any more than his own, imagine or tolerate what would happen tonight in this bedroom.

And then, there, all at once, wearing dark suit trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up and his arms still wet—stood Hawkins himself.

“Hi, buddy.” Hawkins’ arm fell across his shoulder, helping to lead him to the living-room couch, where, until he was encircled by both arms, there would be several minutes of conversation, during which he would probably learn another few facts of Hawkins’ life story: the name of a sister or childhood pet, the location of his boat on the day Japan surrendered. While scavenging these bits of knowledge, Tim would feign casualness, like an undercover agent in East Berlin. Desperate to avoid expulsion, he would never try the patience of his quarry by asking one question too many.

Hawkins poured them both an inch of rye whiskey from the bottle on the coffee table—a real drink, not the
dulce de leche
(another milk joke, out of
Guys and Dolls
) that he’d been offered his first time here. Tim hardly needed the alcohol to be unlocked like Sister Sarah, but he knew a shot of it would complete his abandonment, would make him crave and even ask for whatever piece of action or technique Hawkins had last time had to coax him toward with a soothing interrogative or sharp, warning whisper.

Tim looked past the coffee table at
See It Now.
The television was barely louder than the ones in Hecht’s, and Hawkins now made it clear he hadn’t actually been waiting for Edward R. Murrow to come on with the latest about Trieste and Harry Dexter White. “The thing’s been running since
Pantomime Quiz,
” Hawkins informed him, as if the television were just some curiously animate table on which he’d rested two Lena Horne records and his hat. Tim nodded, his eyes leaving Murrow in order to proceed with his usual inventory: the extra alarm clock; the Harvard diploma; the necktie from Saltz Brothers draped over the diploma’s frame.

“I’m sure you can read more of it than I can,” said Hawkins, pointing to the diploma’s Latin text.

Tim smiled. “Do you really think there’s not a
single
Communist on their faculty?” Harvard’s new president had declared exactly that, yesterday, in response to McCarthy.

“Harvard doesn’t
need
Communists,” said Fuller. “The Ivy League undergraduate mentality is already more collective than anything you’d find on a Soviet wheat farm.” He made some robotic rowing movements that had Tim laughing just before the telephone rang.

The caller was somewhere so noisy that Fuller tried covering his free ear to hear him better. “You sound like you’re down at the Jewel Box,” he shouted over the apparent din on the other end. “You
are
?” he asked, laughing, his voice higher than usual. “Well, let me get back to you tomorrow.” A second call, almost immediately after the first, was from Fuller’s mother; he told her, too, that he would ring back the next day.

“Mother is bored with Father,” said Hawkins, returning to the couch and once more putting his arm around Tim. “She needs a new cause. Getting Eisenhower nominated wasn’t much of one, and it’s been made obsolete by its own success.”

“I did my own small bit for that,” said Tim, knowing he was setting himself up to be teased. He told Hawkins of how, while at Fordham, he had worked part-time, mostly running errands, for Tex McCrary’s public relations firm. “You weren’t aware of my proximity to the famous, were you?” he asked, hoping to provoke some laughter and roughhousing. “I had to pass out leaflets at the big Draft Ike rally in Madison Square Garden. My father wanted Taft, and he was
not
pleased.”

“Neither was mine,” said Hawkins. “I was at the rally, too.”

“You’re kidding,” said Tim, almost wheeling out of his embrace.

“Accompanying my mother. And thereby annoying my father, who reminded me that a State Department employee shouldn’t be at such a gathering.”

Tim’s mind was far away from politics and the Hatch Act. He had soared into the realm of romance and fate, and before he could stop himself, he asked: “I wonder what would have happened if we’d met there, that day, instead of in Dupont Circle.” He winced as soon as the words—too presumptuous—were out of his mouth.

Hawkins grinned from his well-defended battlement. “You’d have been sorely disappointed.”

“How so?” said Tim, the whiskey putting him in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Because I had an assignation that night with a musician. Who,” Hawkins said, pulling Tim close enough for whispering, “does things you haven’t even dreamed of.” He pulled back in time to catch the blush he knew this would raise. “A clarinet player in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“I’d have walked you to his apartment,” said Tim, after only a few seconds’ hesitation. “On the way I’d have shown you where I used to go to school and church.”

The scenario was ridiculous, and yet so likely that both men laughed. Even so, Tim was soon feeling bad about himself: pride might be a sin, but self-mortification, detached from penance, could be one, too. He reached for the tumbler of rye, his arm knocking into Fuller’s, which he realized had raised itself, tenderly, in order to caress his face. There was a softness, a sense of pathos and protection in Hawkins’ expression, that he had never seen. But the collision of their two arms caused Hawkins to withdraw the gesture and replace the look on his face with one of relief—the look of a man who was, upon further reflection, pleased not to have given away something he didn’t need to.

Swallowing more whiskey, Tim asked: “Does your mother ever fix you up with girls?” His own parents, curiously tactful, never seemed to try. Hawkins said nothing. Tim bit down on an ice cube and tried to blunt the query with playfulness: “She’s probably too busy beating them away from the door.”

Hawkins unbuttoned his own shirt. “She does do a little matchmaking for yours truly. And of course she’ll succeed at it one of these days.”

Tim tried to hide the revulsion and fear coming over him by pressing his face against Hawkins’ now bare chest.

“But that doesn’t amount to a terribly compelling crusade,” said Hawkins, as he removed Tim’s eyeglasses. “What she should really carry the banner for is religion. You know, she’s more than a little attracted to
your
people. I think she imagines herself as Loretta Young or Mrs. Luce, converting herself at the feet of Fulton J. Sheen.”

“I was watching him tonight, on a TV at Hecht’s.” Tim was relieved to think they might be finding their way back to the more usual precincts of raillery.

“Well, Mother was no doubt watching it up on Seventy-fourth and Park. I’ve seen it with her several times myself. I’m sure what she really wishes is that we still had an Irish maid she could Lady-Bountifully invite to join her on the sofa.”

“You’re talking about your
mother,
” said Tim, poking Hawkins’ thigh.

“No, we’re talking about you,” said Fuller, drawing Tim up so that their two faces were only inches apart. “Tell me, Skippy, how’d
you
escape Local 20 of the cherubim? Why didn’t they make you into a priest?”

For the same reason you should never be a husband,
he wanted to say.

“Maybe because I like doing
this
too much instead,” he settled for answering. He kissed Hawkins’ neck, receiving in return only a familiar, opaque smile, as if “this,” and all it signified, did not even register. Was Hawkins ever really conscious, Tim wondered, of their doing anything at all? Or had he somehow made “this” into an automatic, harmlessly recurring condition, like sleepwalking?

Hawkins lifted him from the couch, and turned off the television. Once they were in the bedroom and he was removing the last of his clothes, the older man finally said, “Of course, there’s my father’s great dilemma to consider, too.”

Tim propped himself up on the pillow, surprised at what seemed to be a waiver of the rules. He prepared for the imparting of real, personal information, unprompted by any risky question of his own.

Hawkins flopped onto the bed, holding a shiny brochure. “The old man is deciding whether he can permit himself to drive an automatic transmission—or whether that’s something that was never meant to be, like filter tips.” He climbed on top of Tim and, between kisses, began a comic recitation of the advertisement. “‘Now your hand, foot, and mind are completely free from all gear-shifting work,’” he whispered. Tim remembered to laugh, but this transposition of the brochure’s promises, accompanied by Hawkins’ insistent touch, was ludicrously thrilling, a smoothly narrated trip into the helplessness he sought. “‘Masters the steepest grades without asking a thing of you,’” said Hawkins, who shut the light and placed one hand under the small of his back. “‘Instant response to throttle.’”

When they were through, Tim held on to Hawkins in the dark for as long as he could, knowing he would soon hear the serious joke about this being a school night, and how he ought to get home so that come morning he would be fresh for “Citizen Canes,” as Hawkins liked to call Potter. But for the moment he could feel the beating of their hearts, at different rates, and recognize in Hawkins’ touch a fondness, an attachment, that was sanctioned only by the dark.

At that same hour, a mile or so away, Mary Johnson was sitting down to a late supper with Jerry Baumeister at the Occidental. She’d already had an early one with Paul Hildebrand, whom she was now seeing happily enough almost every other night, but Jerry’s invitation had been urgent. His thin, ordinarily pleasant face seemed pallid. He had picked, she noted, the most brightly lit corner of the most respectable place imaginable, close by the Willard Hotel and White House.