Fellow Travelers (12 page)

“Enough,” said Traband, almost as if he could no longer bear the voluptuous nonsense being inflicted on him.

Somerset Maugham? Fuller wondered. Was the interrogator expected to detect a tribal affinity between author and reader? Was it to be discerned in too much mimicry, a slightly excessive archness or lyricism in the tone of the recitation? Just as, presumably, too light a step in crossing the room might be added to his own too-expensive clothes in the bill of fairy particulars being drawn up against him?

“Mr. Fuller, I’m going to ask you to take a lie-detector test.”

Fuller looked around but saw no machine. There was also no door leading to any Room M306. There was, however, the kind of curtained screen one found in a doctor’s office, and it turned out that Traband’s assistant had been sitting behind it, beside an apparatus, all along.

Fuller was instructed to open his shirt and roll up his right sleeve. Once he did, the sensors were applied.

“Mr. Fuller,” asked Traband, “have you ever given or received presents of a romantic nature to or from another man?”

With thanks to Hawkins Fuller. (I got the job. You’re wonderful.)
“No.”

“Have you ever frequented a Washington, D.C., establishment called the Jewel Box, at the corner of Sixteenth and L streets?”

The tufted purple walls. The bartender who looks a little like Alan Ladd.
“No.”

“Have you ever been present at a Washington, D.C., establishment called the Sand Bar, in Thomas Circle?”

The old redheaded queen leaning on the big plastic anchor at two a.m., shouting to no one in particular. The piano player hammering out “Some Enchanted Evening” for the third time in two hours.
“No.”

Fuller looked at the blank far wall. Silently, he sang to himself:
You’re calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean. At least they flap their fins to express emotion.

“Mr. Fuller, who was the president of the United States when you were born?”

A “baseline” question. “Calvin Coolidge,” Fuller answered.

“Have you ever had inappropriate physical contact with a male foreign national either in the United States or while abroad?”

Behind the bicycle shop in Oslo. Lars? Who had no undershirt beneath his heavy fisherman’s sweater.
“No.”

“Have you ever engaged in sodomy or oral-genital contact with another male?”

He sometimes counted them like sheep.
What was the name of that Italian boy in San Diego? The night before we both shipped out. The one who rubbed his feet together, fast, like a puppy having a dream, when he came. And that same week, the one who claimed to have gone to Annapolis, and tried—

“Mr. Fuller, answer the question.”

“No.”

“Have you ever considered yourself to be in love with another male?”

Here, Fuller thought, was the first interesting query of the morning. He pondered it, sincerely, dropping his gaze from the wall to his lap and then his forearm, where, beneath the cuff of the machine’s main sensor he noticed a golden-colored fleck of something dried onto his skin: the tiniest bit of exuberant Tim, he realized, missed by the towel.
That’s me. I’m your hoodlum, your little j.d.
He filled up with a tender feeling, which he expelled, immediately, like a breath. “No,” he answered.

Traband nodded to the machine operator, who tore off and labeled a long piece of paper. “Mr. Fuller,” said the interrogator, “as soon as the technician removes the sensors, you may return to your office until you hear from us.”

Outside in Room M304, Fuller was confronted with the sight of Scott McLeod himself, talking to whatever subordinate he’d brought along. Picking up his suit jacket, Fuller wondered if he himself might not be a bigger fish than he’d imagined. He nodded to the security chief, whose plump pink complexion and translucent eyeglass frames nodded back, before McLeod hastened himself and his underling into the room Fuller had just exited.

McLeod’s chief patron, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, had once, around 1940, during Fuller’s time at St. Paul’s, given a speech to the students. Buttoning his jacket, Fuller could now recall its title, printed on the program passed out in the chapel: “How to Be a Man.”

Alone in Room M304, he took his time, combing his hair and shooting his cuffs. He thought of Tim clutching the pair of links an hour or so ago—and then he heard conversation begin to filter through the cheap wartime-construction door separating Room M304 from Room M305. He walked back and put his ear to it.

“Clean?” asked an agitated voice he realized must be McLeod’s.

“As a whistle,” answered Traband.

PART TWO

FEBRUARY–NOVEMBER 1954

CHAPTER TWELVE

February 22, 1954

On George Washington’s Birthday the upper body’s only piece of business—now being performed by Senator Hunt before a handful of colleagues and a full gallery of holiday tourists—was a recitation of the first president’s Farewell Address. Representative Metcalf of Montana was doing the honors in the House. According to Tommy McIntyre, the old-timers there could still remember the February tributes to Lincoln being conducted by Henry Rathbone, Republican of Illinois, son of the unfortunate fellow who’d been beside the president and knifed by Booth in the box at Ford’s.

Tim couldn’t imagine ever being an old-timer on the Hill, but after four months he no longer needed the
Congressional Directory
to recognize who came and went on the floor. He’d been able to pick out Hubert Humphrey, plump and happy and fast, as well as Senator Green of Rhode Island, frail and dusted with dandruff and said to be, like Speaker Rayburn and Senator Russell, “a lifelong bachelor.”

Senator Hunt was doing his best, but very laboriously, with Washington’s 150-year-old oratory. It was hard for Tim to believe, even as he tried peeling away the decades with his imagination, that this rumpled and tired-looking man, stolidly fixed to the carpet, had once played semipro baseball. Kenneth Woodforde could probably make some clever irony out of the way Hunt had spent much of his adult life, after baseball and before politics, as a dentist. It was, after all, another dentist bringing the Capitol to a boil right now. The building was ready to blow over the way General Ralph Zwicker had been questioned by the McCarthy committee in New York last Thursday about the promotion of Major Irving Peress, D.D.S. and onetime Communist.

It seemed obvious to everybody including Tim that Peress had gotten an extra stripe merely through the routine, unstoppable flow of army paper, with whoever had been in charge no more likely to notice the major’s politics than to spot a pebble inside a glacier. And yet, for being in command at Camp Kilmer when the promotion occurred, General Zwicker had received an absolutely livid thrashing from McCarthy. The record of the hearing had been leaked in several places on the Hill and would no doubt be in the papers tomorrow.

It was hard concentrating on George Washington’s rhetorical ghost while holding this incendiary onionskin transcript that Tommy had asked him to read. It had been typed over the weekend by Miss Cook, who’d called everybody in to the office this morning. (Tim could now get telephone messages through the hardware store below his apartment.) He’d intended to spend lunchtime on the banks of the Potomac, where, to mark the holiday, contestants in a model-plane competition would be flying tiny craft weighted with silver dollars across the river; but by 8:45 Tommy had been greeting him at the door to Room 80, informing him that they’d have to spend the day “telling Charlie what to think of all this business with the brass.”

SEN. M
c
CARTHY
: Don’t be coy with me, General.

GENERAL ZWICKER:
I am not being coy, sir.

Each translucent page was more startling than the one before. Lest Tim miss anything, Tommy had circled the worst bits with a laundry marker:

GENERAL ZWICKER:
I don’t like to have anyone impugn my honesty, which you just about did.

SEN. M
c
CARTHY:
Either your honesty or your intelligence; I can’t help impugning one or the other…

SEN. M
c
CARTHY:
I mean exactly what I asked you, General, nothing else. And anyone with the brains of a five-year-old child can understand that question.

SEN. M
c
CARTHY:
Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says, “I will protect another general who protected Communists,” is not fit to wear that uniform, General. I think it is a tremendous disgrace to the Army to have this sort of thing given to the public. I intend to give it to them.

On Friday afternoon, Zwicker, who’d stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day, had told reporters that McCarthy had treated him worse than he’d treated the actual Communist who’d been in the witness chair a few minutes earlier. Secretary of the Army Stevens, upon learning of the chairman’s tirades, had told the general not to show up for the public testimony he was supposed to give tomorrow in Washington. Stevens would come to the Capitol and answer McCarthy himself.

The army and the subcommittee were now, indisputably, at war.

Roy Cohn had returned Stevens’ fire, pronouncing “the army’s attempt to coddle and promote Communists” too important for good manners from the subcommittee. His own part in the assault on Zwicker could also be found in the transcript, where Tim spotted Jones, too, charging in like a battle-crazed bugle boy. For the past couple of months there had been amused talk in the office about how the ambitious research assistant was beginning to acquire McCarthy’s oral cadences and repetitions, those reiterated opening phrases that turned the senator’s questions into little battering rams of sound.

“‘The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave,’” Senator Hunt continued, to the gallery’s ever-decreasing attention. What might Woodforde make of that? Tim wondered. The Zwicker transcript was starting to upset him as much as Woodforde and Cohn had after the atrocities hearing. But even so, the larger, implacable fact remained: we
ought
to hate Russia, where people
were
slaves. China, too: the House had just gotten intelligence estimates that Mao Tse-tung had murdered more than fifteen million people. How differently, knowing of such mass slaughters, might George Washington be speaking today?

The conflict between sordid means and great ends had been gnawing at Tim—it was a kind of religious mystery beyond his powers of reckoning—and when it came to Hawkins Fuller, the last two months had been grindingly devotional. Tim realized he was practicing a kind of Trappist discipline that left him alternately exalted and exhausted. At Grandma Gaffney’s on Christmas Day he’d felt the same isolation he’d experienced at Thanksgiving—only it had been twice as strong, a physical ache that stole his appetite and left him unable to concentrate on anything but endless, repetitive thoughts of his beloved. He had kept himself from sending a postcard to the Fullers’ address in Maine, mailing one instead, pointlessly, to the empty apartment on I Street, which he’d walked past three times after returning to Washington early. He had tried to content himself with the awareness that this small, falsely cheerful expression of himself was sleeping in the mailbox of #5B, beside some unopened bills awaiting the still-absent tenant. He had finally gone to dinner at Duke Zeibert’s with Bobby Garahan, his Fordham pal—
God, Laughlin, it’s steak; how come you’re just picking at it?
—but he’d returned home early to read a library copy of the Lodge biography. He still wondered where Fuller’s inscribed one resided. At the office? In some jumbled corner of the apartment he’d never caught sight of?

Once Hawk finally came back to town, all had gone as it had in the fall, with a sort of unnerving joy, the possibility of banishment hovering over everything, more like a rival than a fate, a presence that seemed to listen in on the telephone and slip into bed between the two of them. Now, three weeks into February, Hawk had suddenly gotten busy at work. His preoccupation there was actually proving a relief to Tim: if Hawk had less time for him, there had to be less for any others as well.

A vote on the Bricker Amendment was fast approaching, with Hawk actually due to call on Potter later this week to explain the administration’s opposition. “I’ll make myself scarce when you get to the office,” Tim had assured him. Hawk, seeing the embarrassment Tim was anticipating, had only laughed. “Skippy,” he’d replied, squeezing the back of Tim’s neck, “don’t ever play poker.” More seriously, he’d added: “Make yourself stick around when I arrive. It’s good training.”

“For what?” Tim had asked.

“For the life you’ll be leading.”

A life together? He had, for a moment, allowed himself to believe that that was what Hawk meant, though he soon realized that he meant the life Tim would be living once he’d been sent, schooled in doubleness, on his way.

All at once, Tommy McIntyre was in the galley, standing over Tim. The gleam in his eye would have made anyone guess he’d gone back to drinking—“the affliction of our people,” he often told Tim in alluding to the problems of his past. But, along with a clipboard, Tommy’s right hand held only an unopened bottle of 7Up.

“You’re needed,” he said. “Badly.”

“I’m sorry,” Tim replied, quickly gathering up the loose sheets of transcript.

Tommy flung his arm over Tim’s shoulder. “There’s
nothing
to be sorry about today, Mr. Laughlin.” The gleam in the eye, Tim could see, bespoke an almost martial excitement. Tommy whistled while the two of them marched back to Room 80, which bustled with enterprise. Even Mrs. Potter was on hand, oblivious to the real drama and driving Miss Cook crazy with a display of the floral hat she’d bought to wear at Thursday’s congressional wives’ luncheon for Mamie Eisenhower and Mrs. Nixon. Everyone else in the office had already been made to inspect the hat; Senator Potter looked relieved to see McIntyre and Laughlin reappear.

“Here’s the drill,” said Tommy to the senator and Tim, as if both occupied the same rung on the staff. “The hearing with Stevens has been postponed until Thursday. And our Democratic friends have decided to come back to the committee.” Potter seemed as much taken aback by this as Tim, who was now told why he’d been fetched. “All right, my boy,” said Tommy. “Sit yourself down and compose a nice noble statement for our friends in the press about why we’ve just fired your colleague Mr. Jones.”

Tim turned quickly to Senator Potter, who looked down, abashed, at his own artificially filled shoes. “I’m afraid,” the lawmaker said, “that on Friday, without any authorization, Bob put out a statement in my name. It was just like Cohn’s, all about how the treatment of General Zwicker was justified by the gravity of the matter under investigation. Apparently a couple of papers up in Maine, Bob’s home state, went and ran it. I just can’t have that.”

“Nor,” said Tommy, “can the senator have Mr. Jones engaging in impersonation at the hearings themselves. I’ve just shown him a couple of transcripts from last fall.”

“I wish I’d known before,” said Potter, who still seemed more perplexed than outraged.

“Well, Senator, better late than never. Don’t you agree, Timothy?”

Earlier, thought Tim, would surely have been better still. Why, he wondered, had Tommy months ago shown him, but not Potter, the transcripts that had Jones playing senator along with Cohn and Schine?

“Bring the statement ’round to me at the Press Club an hour from now,” instructed Tommy.

And why, Tim wondered, wasn’t Tommy himself handling this crucial and clearly relished piece of business? Only, it seemed, because he had too much to do. From the way he proceeded to direct the senator back to his own desk, it appeared evident that Thomas McIntyre—this Johnny-on-the-spot, this come-and-go fixer—was now everybody’s boss, Potter’s included.

Fuller, too, had been called into the office this morning, no matter the holiday. Dulles, just back from Berlin, had scheduled a conference for congressional leaders. It was going on right now, and its participants included South Dakota’s Senator Mundt, second to McCarthy on the subcommittee, who in the course of a lobbying session against the Bricker bill just the other day had demonstrated no real interest in talking to Fuller about the legislation.

“He preferred to squawk about all the commotion Marilyn Monroe’s been allowed to cause in front of our boys in Korea,” Fuller now explained to Mary. “It seems the army is in hot water it doesn’t even know about.”

“Diamonds should be
this
girl’s best friend,” said Mary, still cross about having had to come in today.

“You’ve
got
a diamond.” Fuller pointed to the modest ring from Paul Hildebrand, whose stone Mary now twisted around to the hidden side of her finger.

“Is that or is it not an engagement ring?” asked Fuller.

Both realized that he had just fallen into mimicry of the Christmas-week interrogration they’d never talked about once it was over.

“The rumor is you passed their lie-detector test,” said Mary.

“Yes, and I haven’t yet had my raise.”

“How’s your French, Fuller?”

“Not as good as it would be if I’d had nuns teaching it to me in New Orleans.”

“Do you know the difference between
sang-froid
and recklessness?”

“Yeah, that I grasp.”

“No, you don’t.
Sang-froid
is what you must have shown in front of the machine. In here you’ve just been reckless.”

Fuller leaned back in his chair, daring her to elaborate.

“The ever-more-frequent personal phone calls. The louder laughter whenever you take them. The ever-shorter hours. It all adds up to a certain triumphalism. Dangerous, I’d say.”

“Is she not gone from our midst?” asked Fuller, palms upward.

“Yes, she is.” Another rumor had it that, before her disappearance into the Operations office, Miss Lightfoot had tried and failed to get herself transferred to McLeod’s domain. But the handing over of Fuller had proved a poor audition for any job in the Miscellaneous M Unit.

“Well, there you go,” said Fuller.

“Our real triumph is supposed to be over Senator Bricker,” said Mary, as politely as she could. “I’m not sure that Mr. Morton’s patience will last forever.”

“I guarantee you that I’ll fail upward. Even if every now and then I have to hide behind your old New Look skirts.”

“So it’s mothering you want from me?” She was embarrassed once she asked the question—it sounded as if she were fishing for some surprise romantic answer—and she did her best to withdraw it. “You still have a mother. Which is more than I can say for myself.”