Fellow Travelers (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

November 10, 1954

With crowds to be controlled at both the eastern and western approaches to the city, the District of Columbia police found themselves split in two on the morning before Veterans Day. Across the Potomac, on Arlington Boulevard, Nixon was dedicating the Iwo Jima Memorial, and at Union Station trains were disgorging hundreds of riders wearing “Make Mine McCarthy!” buttons. They also carried placards (“Twenty Years of Treason!” “Joe Knows!”) that sprang to sudden, vertical life once they hit the platform and began marching to Capitol Hill. By eleven a.m. the corridors of the Senate Office Building looked more like the floor of a nominating convention. Debate on the censure resolution was at last under way, and though things appeared to be moving in Senator Flanders’ direction, he elected to remain behind locked doors.

Over in the Capitol building, two brightly colored items sat on Tim’s desktop: the emerald-covered report that was now driving the censure debate toward a vote, and an oversized birthday card for Senator Kennedy, still recovering from back surgery in New York. Festooned with greetings from the SOB, it now awaited Potter’s signature here in the Capitol.

Miss Cook approached Tim’s desk, sighing: “That colored corporal’s family is here. In the conference room.”

Tim looked at his watch. As they’d feared, Potter had failed to make it back in time from the Iwo Jima dedication.

“Plan B,” said Tim, rushing off to the House cloakroom to press Congressman Rhodes into service.

Corporal James Borum, a young Washingtonian who had enlisted in the Marines in ’48 and died three years later in a North Korean prison camp, had no connection with Rhodes’s home state of Arizona, but once the congressman arrived in the conference room near Potter’s office, there was at least an elected official who could present a flag and decoration to the boy’s family.

Corporal Borum had no connection to Michigan, either, but from time to time Potter’s interest in North Korean atrocities still broke through the McCarthy drama like a weak, overlapping signal on the radio dial. The senator’s office had lately decided to honor this soldier, who had only this year been officially declared dead.

A grandmother, Mrs. Drumming, along with a brother and an aunt, stood mute and respectful while Rhodes read the citation, though it was apparent they would have preferred James Borum’s corpse, never released by the North Koreans, to a medal. Tim also believed he could detect in the brother’s face an awareness that the family, told Senator Potter had been caught in traffic, was somehow being honored and insulted all at once.

Tim wondered if he was supposed to say something about “a grateful nation,” but when he shook Mrs. Drumming’s hand, he wound up whispering, “I’m sorry for your trouble,” the words he’d heard murmured at every Irish wake he’d ever been to.

And with that, embarrassed and relieved, he dashed off to the Senate gallery.

The chamber was in an uproar. Desks were being pounded, as refusals to yield reached the ceiling of the packed gallery, where all eyes stayed on Jean McCarthy, sitting very straight under a statue of John Tyler. Her smile, Pepsodent bright, was the same one she’d had for the cameras the day she came back from New York with her broken leg and Robert Jones announced his Senate candidacy.

As the debate moved toward a climax, her husband moved irretrievably beyond his lawyer’s control. McCarthy’s buzzing declamations stirred the reporters’ pens and thrilled the nerves of his supporters: “It is not easy for a man to assert that he is the symbol of resistance to Communist subversion, that the nation’s fate is in some respects tied to his own fate. It is much easier, I assure you, to be coy, to play down one’s personal role in the struggle for freedom.”

No, he would not let this cup pass. He would meet his end insisting that he and freedom were one and the same. Coyness was for others; it had been for Welch; it had been for Zwicker.
Don’t be coy with me, General…“
I take it you would rather I be frank, that you would rather acknowledge and accept the fact that McCarthyism is a household word for describing a way of dealing with treason and the threat of treason.”

“And so it is,” muttered one antagonist next to Tim.

“And so I shall,” declared McCarthy.

His citizen followers, their placards checked at the door to the gallery, remained hopeful, but his dwindling corps of legislative allies was already thinking of what-might-have-beens. After the army hearings, when Eddie Williams began constructing a legal strategy, Senator Dirksen had tried to start a rehabilitation campaign, but none of the town’s best public-relations men smelled success in the client being proffered.

If the vote goes against him, Tim thought, his followers will act as if there’s been a coup d’état, and they’ll summon the whirlwind to fill the vacuum. He looked over at Jean McCarthy, whose expression had not changed, and he decided to get some air on the Capitol steps.

Outside, he sat down behind a woman reading about Dr. Sheppard’s murder trial in a copy of the
Daily News
that had been discarded by one of the demonstrators from New York. Was there, Tim wondered, more eternal verity in that story—the philandering doctor who’d butchered his wife—than in this one? Weren’t Tommy McIntyre’s politics dictated and trumped by his romantic obsession?

Kenneth Woodforde, Tim suspected, was an actual Communist. But as such he would at least be a believer in
something
—as opposed to Hawk, who believed in nothing, or Senator Potter, who believed what he was told to. And as opposed to himself, a believer in contradictions: that McCarthy was the devil doing the Lord’s work; that Christ was Lord and yet His laws could be disobeyed.

Maybe real belief required imprisonment, or at least regimentation. The POWs testifying before Potter had felt their bodies transformed into organisms of certainty and faith—
Out of that many men, nobody cracked
—by the very torture that had sought to break them. General Airlie, perhaps never beaten or shot, nonetheless seemed to have a creed that had been spit-polished into honest, unwavering sureness.

Which, Tim wondered, did he himself miss more? God’s love or His authority? Where could he go—to what secular church—to turn himself in?

He looked up at the nearest flagpole on the Capitol roof. Unlike on the afternoon he’d been hired, nothing flew on it, not even momentarily; no banner for Mill Valley, none for Cheyenne. No reason to put his hand on his heart.

“Stormed at with shot and shell! Mildly they rode and—well? So much for the ten thousand six hundred.”

Raising his glass, Fuller finished this brief Tennysonian tribute to the 10,600 State Department employees around the world who had by now, according to a quote from Scott McLeod in the
Evening Star,
all been through the new security procedures.

“Yes,” said Mary, cutting into the last of her steak. “But only the most
elite
troops have been through the Miscellaneous M Unit.”

“We happy few. We band of inverted brothers.”

She winced.

“You started it,” said Fuller.

“I know, I know,” she said, returning his smile and wondering why she should be bothered by a direct admission of his being queer. She wondered, for that matter, why she was out having dinner with him here at Harvey’s. And she wondered most of all why she continued to string out her engagement to Paul, as if they were Victorian cousins waiting on an inheritance.

No, she was
not,
“in spite of everything,” in love with Fuller. She had searched her feelings, honestly, in that department. Then what was it?

“So, how are the capital’s cutest couple?” asked Hawkins.

He meant Jerry Baumeister and Beverly, who now went everywhere together.

“Inseparable,” Mary answered.

“Good for them.”

“You mean it.”

“I do. Safe, companionable, detached. An ideal situation.”

“They’re thinking of getting
married,
” she protested.

“What could be more detached than that?”

She pushed her plate away. “Speak for your own parents.”

“Okay, change of subject: How did the brewer like the party?”

The Queen Mother had come to Washington, and the British embassy had the day before given her a massive afternoon reception, with room enough on the list for even Mary Johnson and an escort. She had pressed Paul into service after Fuller mentioned that he himself was taking Lucy Boardman, the hard little Saltonstall relative who’d stayed on in the District after her summer course at the National Gallery.

“He didn’t enjoy it as much as
your
companion seemed to,” said Mary. “Anyway, it wasn’t a very hot ticket if the likes of me got to go. The crowd looked like something out of Cecil B. DeMille.”

Both of them raised their heads at the sound of another voice. “Probably even
I
could have gotten in.”

Two nights ago Mary had told Tim about her dinner plans with Fuller, but she’d never expected to see him here.

Fuller was startled, too, though he didn’t let his expression change. He pulled out a third chair from the table and, as Tim settled himself, wondered about the gleam in his eye. Back in September, Tim’s aggrieved note, left in the mail slot on I Street, could be ascribed to drunkenness and the upset caused by McIntyre’s revelations. Fuller had never mentioned it to him, just urged him to find out the rest of McIntyre’s story.

But
this
?

“He missed my birthday,” said Tim, looking at Mary and pointing to Hawk. “Eight days ago.” Then he turned to Hawk and pointed at Mary: “She remembered.” Finally, he turned back to Mary and pointed to Hawk: “Like I said,
she
forgot.”

“Maybe I’d better leave you two gentlemen alone,” said Mary.

“I’m pretty much
always
alone,” said Tim.

“Fuller, you should take him home.”

“Home?” asked Tim. “Where would that be? Not 2124 I Street. That’s not home.”

“No,” said Fuller, calmly getting up. “But it’s where we’re heading.”

The two of them put Mary in a taxi and began walking west. Tim was unsure exactly what fate awaited him; he wanted only to say that he was sorry, that he shouldn’t have done what he just had. And yet, after the hours he’d wound up roaming Capitol Hill this afternoon, triply confused about the trinity of Hawkins, God, and McCarthy, he couldn’t help himself. How easy, almost gay, Charlottesville suddenly seemed. Right now he wanted not to be slapped, but to be thrown under the wheels of the DeSoto that was passing.

The silence, unbearable, continued as he and Hawkins turned the corner onto I Street. “I’ll go home,” Tim finally said.

Still Hawkins said nothing.

“I’ll never do that again,” Tim promised.

“No, you won’t.”

Panic seized him; he waited for the next clause to strike like an ice pick—
because you’ll never be seeing me again.

Hawkins tugged him into an alley and pushed him against a wall. “You’re right,” he said, his face inches from Tim’s. “
You
belong to
me,
and as the advertisement says, I’m the man who has everything. And I always will.”

He thought he could see Hawk having to struggle to get the words out, having to make an effort to say something this cruel, and he took a small, crazy comfort from that fact, like a man catching the scent of flowers as he plunges off a ledge.

“Take it or leave it, Skippy. You’ve got five seconds.”

“I’ll take it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

November 29, 1954

“It’s a great privilege to be with you tonight!”

At the distant podium, Jean McCarthy looked buxom but clerical, a pretty white collar showing above her plain black dress. “I only wish my husband could be here, too. I want you to know how deeply touched Joe is by the tremendous fight you are waging.”

“Dear Christ,” said Hawkins, handing his mother’s opera glasses to Tim. “Looks like yours truly isn’t the only State employee not supposed to be here tonight.” With Hawk’s finger guiding his gaze, Tim managed to see, a dozen rows down and over to the right, the figure of Miss Lightfoot, whose hat suggested a highly alert chicken. She was in full cry with the crowd of 13,000, chanting “
WHO PROMOTED PERESS?
” while applauding Jean McCarthy.

“I can’t figure out the hat,” said Tim, who had to resist admiring the zeal that had compelled this woman to flout the rules against political activity by federal workers and travel all the way from Washington for this rally in Madison Square Garden. “I think it’s maybe supposed to be an eagle,” he guessed, still staring at the headgear.

“No, it’s the cuckoo on a broken clock,” said Hawkins, who’d never told Tim about the interrogation its wearer had instigated, nearly a year ago, in Room M305.

Every courting couple that Tim knew had gone to at least one basketball game or boxing match at the Garden. In fact, Tom Hanrahan had popped the question to Frances right here during a welterweight bout. Tim supposed that tonight would be the closest he’d ever get to such an experience; he’d even joked to himself that the Garden would always be “our place” for him and Hawk, given their both having been here before, however unknown to each other, at the Draft Ike rally back in ’52.

He had certainly not expected to be with him here tonight. Tommy McIntyre had called the apartment in Stuyvesant Town on Saturday, as the Thanksgiving weekend began drawing to a close. Tim and Frances and their mother had just come back from a matinee of
Teahouse of the August Moon
(he’d been more curious to see
Tea and Sympathy
), and Tommy had asked him to stay in New York a little longer to be his eyes and ears at the anti-censure rally planned for Monday at the Garden. Tim had thought it a strange request—what could he see from these mezzanine seats that the papers wouldn’t report or the radio wouldn’t air?—but he’d said yes. And before he could think too much about it, knowing that Hawk extended every holiday weekend as far as possible, he’d picked up the phone and called the Charles Fuller residence at Park and Seventy-fourth.

Mrs. Fuller had answered, her voice almost a whisper, not at all the throaty dowager he’d been expecting. He’d almost wanted to tell her it was “Skippy,” the namesake of her Bishop Sheen’s angel, but she’d quickly handed the phone to Hawk, who explained that he was on his way out to “a little party for the Saltonstall niece thrice-removed, or whatever she is.” He’d laughed at Tim’s own invitation as soon as he heard it: “Are you trying to get me fired?” he asked, going on to explain the provisions of the Hatch Act.

Tim hadn’t really thought of that, but knew, once Hawk cited the prohibition, that he would say yes.

“I’m in,” Hawk had answered. “What could be more fun than a chance to see the Hottentots drunk on political firewater?”

GOD BLESS MCCARTHY
said a badge worn by the man on Tim’s right.
NO TO CENSURE, YES TO A MEDAL
said his sign. The Pledge of Allegiance, which now contained the congressionally authorized words “under God,” had already been recited twice tonight, and a roaming spotlight, on cue, had just fallen on the figure of Roy Cohn, whose illumination provoked a tremendous roar as the former committee counsel mounted the platform to give the last speech of the evening. He was played onto the stage by the Hortonville (Wisconsin) High School Band, whose members, living close by McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton, had been flown to New York earlier in the day.

“If the Senate votes to censure,” cried Cohn, maintaining the volume if not profanity of his private conversations, “it will be committing the blackest act in our whole history!”

“To hell with the Hatch Act,” Hawk said into Tim’s ear, over the crowd’s screams of approval. “I should be putting this whole evening on an expense report. Look at all the useful data I can give to Morton. Names booed: Acheson,
The New York Times.
Names cheered: Knowland, MacArthur, McCarran.”

“Yeah,” Tim shouted back. “It would have taken a regular Walter Lippmann to figure out who’d make each list.”

“Skippy the Bitch!” said Hawkins. They both laughed as the crowd thundered but, mindful of the need for protective coloring, they also took care to applaud.

How easy, Tim thought, the last three weeks had been. The rules were now plain, inviolable, the way it had been when God, not Hawkins, had been God; the way it must be behind the Iron Curtain. He told himself there was comfort in the end of aspiration, in knowing this was all one would ever be allowed. He would let this be the other Church that he was seeking, the only rules and authority he needed.

Everyone hurrahing for McCarthy knew, in fact, that his end was near. The debating Senate had already voted cloture and would vote on censure itself anytime now. One could picture the moment when Jean McCarthy, in a sort of dewy, defiant mourning, would remove her pretty white collar and make her dress completely black.

The Reverend Cuthbert O’Hara, once imprisoned in Red China—an older, more persecuted version of Father Beane—rose to give the benediction. Tim crossed himself, not for additional camouflage against the crowd, but with a moment’s sincere shame over his doubts and apostasy. He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy
would
, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists.

As his head came up from prayer, he tapped Hawkins on the arm. “I’ve got to find a pay phone and make my call. You won’t run off?”

He didn’t know why he’d been asked to report in immediately—to call collect, no less—rather than just give Tommy a description of the rally when he got back to the office tomorrow afternoon. But as soon as the phone in Washington picked up and he heard the older man’s voice, it was clear: Tommy wanted the peculiar thrill of hearing Tim reconstruct the futile rally
in situ
, amidst its actual dying roar. It was also clear that the herald’s confusion and conflictedness were exciting him in some further, cruel way.

Tim realized that Tommy was off the wagon. Through the line he could hear the clink of a bottle and a glass, and no voice save Tommy’s own, which gleefully interrupted his paraphrase of Jean McCarthy’s remarks. “And to think it’s all because of Charlie’s little boy!” Tommy cackled.

For a moment he thought Tommy was referring to himself. But then he understood. “You mean Senator Potter’s son?”

“Yup, Charlie’s little bastard. The kid’s got ten fewer IQ points than his father, which is saying something, but he’s a handsome enough lad to speak to people’s weaknesses. You know what Joe’s weakness is, don’t you?”

“Boys?” asked Tim, as flatly as he could.

Tommy laughed loudly. “Boys, girls, your old-maid auntie. When he’s hammered he’ll grope anything—slobber over it with tender, lustful kisses.”

This is what had happened in New York. This is what Alsop had told Hawk about.

As the fading cries of the crowd continued to reach Tim from the Garden’s exit ramps—
“THE MAN! THE ‘ISM’! McCARTHY!”
—Tommy explained that the plan had been for the house detective to rescue the boy “at a point where Joe had been compromised, and photographed, yet nothing too serious had happened to the little angel.” But there’d been “a bit of a backfire. After I’d paid him my own good money, the damned house dick decided to bring the picture to his boss’s offspring, our good friend Dave Schine. Jesus Jumpin’ Christ! I didn’t realize I’d set up the little assignation on one of the Schine family properties!”

Tim could hear Tommy pouring himself another.

“Does the boy’s mother,” Tim asked, “know what happened?”

“She’s too poor and too drunk to care,” answered Tommy, who went on with his story. “Yes, that was my blunder. The house dick decided the picture would fetch a higher price from the soon-to-be Private Schine than the one it commanded from me. Dave could keep the photo to protect Joe or to do him in. Either way, however he inclined, it was worth something to him.”

One last multitudinous demand to know who promoted Peress reached Tim’s ears, while out of his left eye he noticed Hawk chatting up one of the red-white-and-blue-armbanded ushers, somebody handsome. He cupped the receiver’s mouthpiece and nearly shouted to Tommy: “What am I supposed to say? That I’m sorry you failed?”

“
Failed?
” shouted Tommy. “I
succeeded
! I may have brought Joe down a little more
slowly,
a trifle less
spectacularly,
but coming down he is, because of those hearings. Which all derived, Master Laughlin, from what me and Charlie’s boy managed to accomplish, however inadvertently, in that hotel room. Every bit of pressure to treat Schine special in the army derived from that picture—not the goddamned nothing of a picture they wrangled over in the Caucus Room! Dave let Joe know he had it, and from that moment on, if Royboy insisted Dave get an ice cream sundae every morning at reveille, Joe was ready to initial the request.”

“
MAKE MINE McCARTHY!
” The audience had dispersed to the point where the chant, like an echo of something long past, barely made it up the ramp to the pay phone, which Tim, pretending the connection had been broken, now hung up.

He left with Hawk, walking east on Fiftieth. “I feel sick” was all he said as they reached Broadway.

“You can’t be. You had exactly half a hot dog.”

Tim shook his head.

“Are you off your milk? Haven’t had any since noon?”

If he were drunk, the way he’d been that night at O’Donnell’s, he really would be throwing up. As it was, he managed to keep in step, turning south with Hawk below the Winter Garden Theater, over which Mary Martin’s hamstrung effigy flew as Peter Pan.

What Tommy had told him: Was it the fantasy of a revenge-crazed drunk or potentially the scoop of Kenneth Woodforde’s—maybe even Joe Alsop’s—life? If it was true, why did the thought of telling the details to Hawk now make him feel sicker than six old-fashioneds would? Because harboring someone else’s filthy secret made his
own
secret, his love, feel filthy as well, as if it, too, were nothing more than appetite, compulsively gratified. Telling the story would make things even worse. Hawk would claim to be as amused by McCarthy’s helplessness as he’d been by the crowd’s fervor—or as he was this minute by the city’s night crawlers, passing by with their own secrets.

The two of them entered Times Square, where all the neon in the world could not lift the fact of night. “Surely you’re not going to walk me home?” Tim asked, as playfully as he could. “All the way down Broadway and over to Stuy Town?”

“Nope,” said Hawkins, squeezing the back of his neck as they passed the statue of Father Duffy.

“And surely the night is too young for Hawkins Fuller to be going home by himself?” He smiled up at Hawk, showed him, as he’d been doing for weeks, what a sport he could be.

“Yep,” said Hawkins. “Way too early.”

They were soon at Forty-third Street. Hawk faced west, ready to cross, and Tim realized:
the clarinet player.

Should he keep chattering and walk him there, be the ultimate good sport, as they’d imagined he’d have been if they’d encountered each other three years ago, at the Draft Ike rally?

No, he wouldn’t, because he had just seen it, only feet away, sitting in this lurid forest of light like a cottage, its own weak, non-neon glow making it pure,
a clean well-lighted place,
the one he now knew he had to reach, the place where they would take him in.
This
was the secular Church he had been seeking.

“Okay, Hawk, I’ll see you in the funny papers.”

Already crossing the street, Fuller turned back for a second and snapped off a mischievous salute.

Tim returned it and then walked in the opposite direction, toward the little structure nestled so oddly in Times Square, like a single cotton stitch upon a sea of sequins.

He opened its door and entered the first of the three offices it contained. He filled out several forms, told a lie on one of them, and then, at 10:45 p.m., raised his right hand and enlisted in the Army of the United States.