Fellow Travelers Page 13

  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.”

  “I have a father, too.”

  “Are they happy together? Mother and father.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Fuller.

  “Why shouldn’t they be? Mine were.”

  “The corridors at Park and Seventy-fourth are just as quiet, and nearly as long, as the ones we have here. Mother was more or less within shouting distance of my room, to the north. Father was around the corner and far to the south.”

  “A sister,” said Mary, trying for lightness. “That’s what you need.”

  “I have two of them. A surfeit, Miss Johnson.”

  “I’m making you angry. I should go.”

  “You’re making me angry. I should go.”

  “I shouldn’t pry.”

  “As if that were the reason you anger me!” said Fuller, with a laugh.

  She suspected the real cause of his anger was his not wanting her to be a mother or a sister. A part of him—the part that hated what he was; even he couldn’t be without that—must also hate her, for the way she got under his skin, ever so slightly, while remaining, finally, irrelevant. He wasn’t angry because she knew his secrets; he was angry because she couldn’t be the way out of them. Hadn’t he looked at her, now and then, with a moment’s real interest? An interest that quickly curdled into something like contempt—for himself, for her, for his inability to follow through? She doubted she would ever tell him her own secrets, not when some part of him might take an oblique pleasure in betraying them.

  He got up from his chair, a folder in hand, and began to exit the office.

  “Are you mad at me now?” she asked.

  “Now and forever,” he replied, with a tenderness that made the answer no less true.

  Not a good day for the mimeograph machine to be on the fritz! But it was, and so once Tim cut the stencil announcing Jones’s termination, he had to trot it over to the office of Senator Goldwater, another GOP freshman and World War II veteran, whose secretary would be happy to run it off. Eager for some air, he took the outdoor route, and on the sidewalk in front of the SOB came upon a cluster of photographers. They were shouting like the crowd he remembered outside McCarthy’s wedding.

  “How about giving her
a kiss, Joe?” “How about signing the cast?”

  “I’ve already signed it,” said McCarthy, who grinned as he pointed to the plaster enclosing one of Jean McCarthy’s shapely legs. She’d broken it in a taxi accident in New York, the night before the Zwicker hearing. Joe hadn’t been injured, but his wife had spent a couple of nights by her lonesome in Flower Hill Hospital. McCarthy had just gone to Union Station to meet the train bearing his injured bride from New York. If ever there was a day when he could use a picture full of pulchritude and warmth, this was it. Jean flashed her beauty-queen smile and the cameras went in for tight shots that cut out the plainclothes policemen whose sidearms bulged beneath their coats.

  Amidst this Hollywood clamor, Tim suddenly locked eyes with Robert Jones, who looked like a man just given his dream job, not one who’d just been fired. Jones smiled broadly at the lensmen, hoping to interest one of the cameras in himself. Tim made his way into the building without their exchanging even a nod.

  A half-hour later he was down on Fourteenth Street, entering the Press Club with a hundred copies of the firing announcement under his arm. The first one went to Tommy, eating peanuts at the bar, and the second to May Craig, who sat beside him. Each already had another press release—not as neatly typed as Tim’s—resting on the bar beside their drinks. Tommy picked up that sheet, damp with ginger ale, and gave it to Tim to read.

  JONES DECLARES SENATE CANDIDACY

  Robert L. Jones of Biddeford, Maine, former legislative assistant to Sen. Charles Potter (R-Mich.), announced this afternoon that he would challenge Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith in this June’s Republican primary. Citing Sen. Smith’s “shameful reluctance to face the Communist menace for what it is…”

  “Running for office!” cried Tim. “Where will he get the money for that?” He recalled the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that Jones’s wife sent him to work with.

  “Wait till you see what Joe McCarthy’s Texas supporters pony up!” cawed Miss Craig. “Jones’ll be riding around Bangor in a red Cadillac all his own! Even so, it’s only because the liar got canned. So in the meantime,” she said, lifting her glass in a toast to McIntyre: “To the man who chopped down that miserable little cherry tree!”

  “I cannot tell a lie,” said Tommy. “’Twas I.” The gleam in his eye thanked Miss Craig, but behind its excitement, much farther back, Tim thought he could see the look of a man who knew he had entered a dark and perilous grove.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  March 3, 1954

  “Ah, seems Skippy fell into the coalpile in Grandma Gaffney’s basement.”

  Tim stood, puzzled, at the doorway to the Bureau of Congressional Relations. His Ash Wednesday had begun so early, near the crack of dawn at St. Peter’s on Second Street, that he’d forgotten the priest’s black thumbprint on his forehead. Now he remembered.

  “And to dust I shall return,” he told Fuller.

  “Come inside,” said the older man, guiding him between the desks. “Meet our ambassadresses to that foreign country where you reside. I refer, of course, to Capitol Hill. Timothy Laughlin, this is Mrs. Phillips, my right arm, and here is Miss Johnson, increasingly our left wing.” Fuller completed the roster with a reference to their Kentucky boss: “The colonel, I’m afraid, is nowhere to be found.”

  “Well,” said Beverly Phillips, “I’ve got to go find him. Excuse me, all.” On her way out, she smiled at Tim, whose October visit to the office she did not recall.

  He knew that even mild political joking was proscribed at State, but Hawk had told him how the atmosphere in the office had become much merrier since a woman named Miss Lightfoot had gotten herself transferred to the Operations office. In fact, as he went to take a phone call, Hawk told him to sit at the desk that was still awaiting her replacement. Before disappearing, he took from Tim the manila envelope that was the reason for this visit.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” said Mary. “You’re the young man who brought Mr. Fuller a book sometime back.”

  Tim nodded, nervousness subsumed into pleasure over how this memory of hers certified that he had a history with Hawkins, that he was situated within his life. There was also something thrilling about the term “Mr. Fuller.”

  “Right,” said Tim. “Yesterday he left some papers at—on the Hill.”

  Within the limits of the adjusted preposition, this was not a lie. Fuller had forgotten the envelope in Tim’s apartment early last evening, when he’d come around after some late appointments in the House Office Building. Tim had meant to return the papers tonight, but Fuller had called Senator Potter’s office an hour ago to say he needed them now.

  “Did you at least manage a Mardi Gras celebration last night?” Mary pointed to the ashes on his forehead. “I should explain I’m from New Orleans.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Tim, who feared, as soon as he said it, that he’d said too much. But Miss Johnson was smiling at him, and he felt suffused with a sense of safety. He forgot about his desire to see around the doorway and into Hawkins’ office, where he’d worried about finding the Lodge biography, uncherished, lying atop a filing cabinet or beside a dying plant.

  “We’re usually a bit more busy here,” said Mary. The defeat of the Bricker Amendment the other day—owed in part to the theatrics of Lyndon Johnson, who’d brought Senator Kilgore in on a stretcher to cast the deciding vote—had been a rare piece of good news. And it had been followed by another, when Secretary Dulles unexpectedly relieved Scott McLeod of his personnel duties, confining him henceforth to security matters—an amazing, tacit declaration that the two operations were not locked together in eternal emergency. McCarthy had complained about McLeod’s diminution, but he had too many other fish frying—everyone could see something big coming—to say very much.

  “It’s nice,” said Tim. “The calm, I mean. It’s anything but calm where I am.”

  “He’s right,” said Fuller, emerging from his office. “These days poor Mr. Laughlin is even dodging bullets.”

  “You weren’t near the shootings, were you?” asked Mary.

  “No,” said Tim. “I’m on the Senate side. But I was at the hospital this morning. My boss, Senator Potter, went to see Congressman Bentley. They’re both from Michigan, and I came along for the ride.”

  It had been an odd delegation that went to Walter Reed to see Bentley, who’d been wounded by the Puerto Rican nationalists firing from the House gallery. Tim had shared the car with Potter and his one-armed driver and Tommy McIntyre, whose eyes had remained, for the past ten days, continually ablaze. As near as Tim could tell, he’d been asked along because Tommy liked having an audience for all sorts of indiscreet chatter about the committee’s impending showdown with the army. The confrontation would either break McCarthy—as Tommy tended to believe one day—or render him omnipotent, as he generally feared the next. Either way, for as long as it went on, Tommy insisted, Potter would have to be manipulated into doing the right, maybe even pivotal, thing. Robert Jones’s campaign against Margaret Chase Smith—a small, distant theater of a much bigger war—was already another arena for Tommy’s attempts at subversion. Cash was being mailed, phone calls getting made.

  These were the sorts of things Tim told Hawkins on nights they were together, eliciting laughter at naïve points in the telling.

  “Has McCarthy still got his guards?” Mary asked Tim.

  “Plainclothes, I think. You wouldn’t believe some of the mail Senator Potter gets, just from sitting at the same table with McCarthy. Which isn’t really fair,” he said, lowering his eyes toward Miss Lightfoot’s old blotter, not truly confident of what he was saying. “The Communists are the real issue, and—”

  Fuller cut him off: “I wouldn’t open any packages that arrive, even after all this is over.”

  Tim, not sure if he was being teased or protected, said nothing, while Mary Johnson pictured this boy opening a parcel with his small scrubbed fingers and getting blown to bits. His destruction was, she thought, going to occu
r in any case. She watched him watching Fuller, his face like a paper target on a firing range.

  “The rumor,” said Tim, “is that John Adams, the army’s lawyer, has a diary that lists all the pressures McCarthy and Cohn applied to get special treatment for David Schine. People also say McCarthy’s own staff has been coming back to the office late at night to cook up documents that will refute the diary.”

  He spoke the last sentence as if refusing to believe it.

  “My boss,” Tim continued, meaning McIntyre, “had me go over there the other night and look around.” He blushed at the admission. “I didn’t really see much through the frosted glass of the door.”

  “All right, Mr. Laughlin.” Fuller rose from the edge of the desktop. “We can’t waste the taxpayers’ money by keeping you here any longer.” The dismissal was performed as a burlesque of impatience, but Tim knew he was indeed meant to go, as if the two of them really were Mr. Fuller and Mr. Laughlin, strangers. The touch of Hawkins’ hand to his shoulder, for the briefest moment as they reached the door, did little to erase the impression.

  “He’s a nice boy,” said Mary Johnson, once he was gone.

  “Skippy?” asked Fuller. “Practically an angel.”

  She resumed typing thank-you letters to opponents of the Bricker Amendment.

  “You don’t approve,” said Fuller, not quite ready to reenter his own office.

  “Of what?” asked Mary.

  The ensuing silence convinced her he didn’t really mean to discuss it. “Fuller,” she finally said—a last effort—“I’m not Miss Lightfoot.”

  “I’ll tell the brewer. He’ll be relieved.”

  “But no,” said Mary. “I suppose I don’t approve. I doubt any woman really does. And you can’t expect me to: I was still getting ashes on my own head three years ago. But there are things I approve of less.”