Fellow Travelers Read online

  “He snuck in here around eight-fifteen,” said Beverly Phillips. “An odd way to propose, no? Maybe he wants us to be cheering her on, telling her to accept.”

  “And we’ll do just that,” said Fuller. “Won’t we, Miss Lightfoot? Marriage being such a grand institution? Something everybody ought to enjoy?”

  Miss Lightfoot looked up from what she was typing to give him a thin, defiant smile, as if signaling that she would have to bear his presence here only a little while longer. Victory would be hers.

  Fuller saw Mary enter the office, and he managed to halt her near the front door. Walking her back out to the hall, he said: “You’ve got a present on your desk from Mr. Right.”

  “I’ve been expecting it,” she replied. She seemed calm, neither displeased nor especially happy.

  “You’re not going to let him take you away from all this, are you?”

  She looked straight at Fuller. “Are we on speaking terms yet?” They had exchanged hardly a word since the party on Saturday.

  “You can decide that within the next hour,” said Fuller. “I’ll be out of the office on a date with Mr. Right.”

  Mary looked puzzled.

  “McLeod. The real Mr. Right.”

  “Oh, Fuller.”

  He saw her sudden look of concern. Clearly they were speaking. “The summons arrived yesterday,” he explained.

  Revulsion crossed her face. “Miss Lightfoot?”

  He nodded. “I’m due in Room M304. I’m sure your friend Baumeister is familiar with it.”

  “Does Mr. Morton know?” she asked.

  “The boss is always the last to know. I don’t believe they tell him until after they’ve told the wife. Their idea of fair play.”

  An elevator ride and several hundred feet of waxed corridor brought him to M304, the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, whose name always sounded to Fuller like a CIA front: the little publishing house in Vienna, the art dealer in Rome. The office he entered had walls similar in color to those in his own, but there were no partitions and, it appeared, no secretary. On a small table between two chairs rested the department’s Investigative Manual and several mimeographed copies of Scott McLeod’s August 8 speech to the American Legion in Topeka: “I have attempted very frankly and honestly to face the issue of sexual perversion—the practice of sodomy—in the State Department,” he had assured his audience, promising the Legionnaires that in trying to replace those discharged from federal service, he would be looking for men “well-grounded in the moral principles which have made our democratic republic a model form of government.”

  “Mr. Fuller,” said a voice emerging from the wall intercom. “I’m Fred Traband. Please step into Room M305. And please leave your coat out there.”

  Fuller entered the inner office and shook hands with Mr. Traband, who immediately made it clear that there was nothing miscellaneous about the Miscellaneous M Unit. “I’m the special agent in charge of sexual-deviation investigations,” he said, as matter-of-factly as if he were introducing himself as a budget analyst. “We believe we have reason to ask you a series of questions,” he continued, without actually giving the reason. Miss Lightfoot’s privacy, it seemed, must be protected.

  “Sit down, Mr. Fuller, and let me be frank. Eighty percent of these sessions end with the admission of at least one proscribed behavior by the interviewee.”

  Fuller said nothing. He succeeded, without much effort, in looking courteous, as if he were listening to a purser explain the exchange rates for the next port of call.

  “Security,” said Mr. Traband, “is endangered by more than covert disloyalty, Mr. Fuller. The moral perversion and emotional immaturity inherent in homosexual behavior make those who engage in it targets of blackmail by anyone seeking to undermine the government of the United States. Moreover, that same perversion and immaturity are a danger to the homosexual’s fellow employees. As I suspect you know, the Hoey Committee, whose investigation of sodomy within the State Department led to the reconstitution of this bureau, concluded that ‘one homosexual can pollute an entire government office.’”

  Fuller neither nodded nor shook his head, though Mr. Traband looked as if he expected a flood of personal confession. When none occurred, he made a request: “Mr. Fuller, please get up and walk across the room.”

  Fuller obliged and then returned to his seat.

  “Again,” said Traband.

  When Fuller had finished his second walk, Traband gave him a newspaper and asked him to read a small story that he’d seemed to pick at random.

  Fuller recited: “‘President Eisenhower revealed in his State of the Union message last January that he favors some form of home rule for the District. The pres—’”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fuller, that’s enough.” Traband passed an open book across the desk. “This paragraph, please. The second-to-last one on the page.”

  Fuller picked up the book and looked at the spine—Of Human Bondage—before he commenced reading aloud: “‘Philip opened a large cupboard filled with dresses and, stepping in, took as many of them as he could in his arms and buried his face in them. They smelt of the scent his mother used. Then he pulled open the drawers, filled with his mother’s things, and looked at them: there were lavender bags among the linen, and their scent was fresh and pleasant. The strangeness of—’”

  “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—

&
nbsp; “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

  I am a strong believer in Purgatory.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  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. McCARTHY: 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. McCARTHY: Either your honesty or your intelligence; I can’t help impugning one or the other…

  SEN. McCARTHY: 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. McCARTHY: 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 appeti
te 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.