Fellow Travelers Page 16

  Are you my brave boy? No, I am not. I need you to rescue and redeem me.

  “So Charlie Potter wants the truth,” said Matthews. “Well, maybe he’ll get it for us.”

  “Oh,” replied Tommy to the rest of the table, “he’s going to get us much more than that.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  April 30, 1954

  “So, yesterday,” asked Cecil Holland, “who was calling who queer?”

  “Whom,” said Miss McGrory in her softest voice. The Evening Star had freed her from the book page to write colorful sidebars for Holland’s regular reports on the week-old Army–McCarthy hearings, and the two of them were waiting for the Friday afternoon session to start, recalling the previous day’s exchange between McCarthy and Joseph Welch, the Boston lawyer for Secretary Stevens and John Adams. The winsome attorney had sarcastically wondered if McCarthy thought a “pixie” was responsible for cropping a photograph whose alteration McCarthy claimed to know nothing about. Pressed to define “pixie,” a creature McCarthy suggested Welch “might be an expert on,” the lawyer explained that a pixie “is a close relative to a ‘fairy.’ Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?”

  The press had given the round to Welch. Even though propriety kept them from noting his apparent, if oblique, reference to rumors of McCarthy’s homosexuality, they regarded the attorney’s innuendo as a fine achievement, whereas McCarthy’s suggestion of the same about Welch was considered a smear. All of it, thought Tim—who was trying to take pleasure in the greetings he’d just gotten from Miss McGrory and Mr. Holland—felt much the same as Robert Jones’s dead dog. Any rules of engagement, let alone any standards of personal conduct, were now laughably antique. Even the ferocious Roy Cohn, the lights in his glass house turned up high, had looked nervous during yesterday’s duel between McCarthy and Welch.

  Cohn looked a bit nervous now, too, waiting as they all were for the testimony of Private Schine. Secretary Stevens had been on the stand almost the whole week, and he’d be back after the break he was being granted today for exhaustion. In the meantime, soon, they would be hearing from the young man who, in immediate terms, this was all about: G. David Schine, either the object of Roy Cohn’s obsession, or the “hostage” of an army fearing Cohn’s scrutiny.

  The atmosphere in the Caucus Room was eerie, that of an interminable midnight Mass. The bemedaled army brass that Welch each day brought to the front row of spectators’ seats sat, brave and solid, like a mute choir in coats of different colors. To keep glare off the TV cameras, the room’s thick curtains remained closed, a purple backdrop for the cigarette smoke rising up the chamber’s great Corinthian columns. Against the front wall a large wooden bench with a high back panel made the committee table look even more like an altar, albeit one whose feet were beset with snakes from some netherworld: the television cables on the carpet.

  Once the principals had reassembled, Senator Mundt gaveled the proceedings to order. He complimented the audience on its good behavior, the way he did at the beginning of every session, as if fearing a turn to the riotous at any moment. Tim brought a stack of papers to Senator Potter’s place at the enormous table, atop which he could actually hear the slosh of McCarthy’s bourbon bottle when somebody moved his briefcase. Although everyone continued to remark on television’s influence over the proceedings, Tim had been more reminded of his old radio programs like Mr. Keen. Listening to the different speakers while his eyes concentrated on the notepads and transcript in his lap, he found himself following the alternations by changes in voice. He had learned to distinguish the loud Tennessee drawl of Ray Jenkins, the temporary counsel hired to question both sides, from the thick Arkansas locutions of Senator McClellan, whose bad mood never seemed to lift. The nasal, countrified tones of Mr. Welch, a sharpie masquerading as an innocent, actually sounded a lot like Fred Allen.

  Tim now exchanged a nod with Kenneth Woodforde in the press section, though they’d never had another conversation since the atrocities hearings (long since forgotten and still lacking a final report) back in December.

  Before Schine took the oath, the senators spent yet another several minutes on the “doctored” version of a picture taken during Secretary Stevens’ visit to Fort Dix last fall, when cooperation still reigned between the army and the committee. This particular print contained only Stevens and Schine, as opposed to the original, which had included a third man. When first contested three days ago, the photo had provoked the pounding of desks and McCarthy’s barked order that handsome Senator Symington be quiet. This afternoon, however, the committee’s disagreements seemed like a weary seminar in art appreciation, full of ineffable and arcane questions about the meaning of the picture and its provenance. As Tim saw it, Stevens was looking, affably, at Schine—and no one else—in both the larger and cropped versions, although the photograph was so innocuous that either way it made no difference. On this matter, surely, Roy Cohn was right. In fact, given that McCarthy and Cohn’s “eleven memoranda” were looking more suspicious by the day, shrinking the picture seemed about the least underhanded thing the senator’s office had recently done in this case. But the press kept awarding the army points over what Welch continued to call the “shamefully cut-down” photograph, making it sound like a farm boy whose arm had been sliced off by some shoddy piece of machinery.

  At last Private G. David Schine raised his hand and swore to tell the truth. Blond, Jewish, and beautiful in a lazy way, he appeared to Tim like the corrupt young emperor from a biblical movie. When asked about the manner in which he’d delivered the vexing photograph, once it had been requested for the investigation, he said he’d brought it to George Anastos, a committee staffer, at the Colony restaurant:

  MR. JENKINS: Do you remember what you ate there that night?

  PVT. SCHINE: I had a butterscotch sundae.

  The soldier was soon pouting and talking back to the committee: “Since I have been in the army, sir, I have been subjected to many pressures. I have been called upon to do many things.” And yet, there were hints of enjoyment in his own performance. Tim had this morning heard Mrs. Watt complain to another secretary about Schine’s asking if he could expense the calls he’d made alerting friends in California to the exact time of his appearance on television. Would the hotel-chain heir, unpaid during his days on the committee staff, take the $6-per-day witness fee? Tim wondered, as he watched Cohn study the disputed picture and then Schine himself. Was this the look of love? Or did the chief counsel’s intense expression indicate only an attempt, telepathic and fervent, to will Schine into a higher articulacy than the private could accomplish on his own?

  “I have no questions,” said Senator Potter, once his turn came around. A moment later, when it came again, he declared, “I have no further questions.” Maybe he was hopeless, thought Tim, who’d lately been hearing Tommy McIntyre refer to the senator as “our pottered plant.” Even so, Tim could see no real look of displeasure on Tommy’s face as their boss for a third time let the microphone pass. Perhaps McIntyre didn’t want his plant, so carefully tended, to bloom too soon?

  An hour would expire before McCarthy exploded with a defense of Schine that he’d kept bottled up during all the inquiries into the private’s whereabouts, weekend passes, and butterscotch sundaes. His colleagues’ questions were “ridiculous,” the senator claimed; abusive even, if one considered how Stevens was being pampered with a day off. The photographers, as always, sprang into action at the first sign of Joe’s agitation, and this time one of them even managed to knock over McClellan’s water glass, earning a rebuke from Senator Jackson. Before long, Welch was suggesting it might be time for them all to adjourn—and for Schine to get himself a lawyer. With an excess of either nerve or stupidity—Schine often looked so impassive it was difficult to tell—the private asked the chairman: “Since I am in the army, sir, and since Mr. Welch is the counselor for the army, sir, doesn’t that automatically make him one of my counselors?”

  “I believe not,” Senato
r Mundt replied.

  Cohn, too, shook his head no, while allowing his gaze to linger on the handsome soldier. In the two of them Tim saw a crude Herblock cartoon of himself and Hawkins Fuller, though he felt sure nothing had ever been consummated between the lawyer and the private. And he wondered: Would he himself have been better off loving Hawkins without any physical return? Without the illusions of emotional requitement he sometimes allowed sex to impose? One heard that Schine actually liked Cohn; could anyone say that Hawkins Fuller liked Timothy Laughlin?

  Tim would never learn whether he was ready to face this last question, because at the moment he posed it to himself, he heard Hawkins whisper: “I’ve decided to forgive you, Skippy.”

  Dumbstruck, he turned around to look. Hawk’s hand was on his shoulder—a mirage brought forth by his own weeks of thirst and suffering?

  “Go tell them you’re sick and have to leave right now. Don’t wait for the gavel. Meet me in ten minutes on the southwest corner.”

  He made it there in eight, after lying to Tommy McIntyre, racing back to Potter’s office in the Capitol, shutting his desk lamp, and, once he saw Hawkins’ big green Buick waiting for him outside the SOB, wondering if he’d left any lights burning at home. He realized now that they were going away. To Charlottesville, for the weekend, Hawk explained.

  He sat in silence all the way over the Memorial Bridge and through the red-bricked garden apartments of Arlington, offering no argument or banter, nothing that began “You’re forgiving me?” He said nothing at all, as if, unlike the doubtful Private Schine, he really were a hostage, one who at any moment might be thrown out upon the open road. Hawkins, too, all the way to Manassas with the radio off, said nothing.

  But no, this could only be good, could only be another miracle on the order of Hawkins’ telephone call to the Star last September.

  “A hundred minutes ago,” Tim finally said, as they passed the battlefield cemetery, “I’d have been wishing I were lying there.”

  “Having to look at Karl Mundt will do that, I’m sure,” said Hawkins, never taking his eyes from the road.

  Tim struggled to keep from fishing, from begging for reassurance: You know what I meant.

  “A hundred years ago,” said Hawkins, “you would have been here, freshly dead. While your Grandma Gaffney was out rioting against the draft that stole you for a drummer boy.”

  “Before I died I would have had a case on you, in your fancy uniform at the head of a Zouave regiment.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. You’d never have met me. I’d have bought my way out of conscription for three hundred dollars, so that I could still be eating oysters at Delmonico’s while you were cracking your poor Irish teeth on hardtack.”

  Tim smiled and rested his head against the backseat. A minute later he fell asleep, exhausted with relief as they continued riding westward. He slept until the beginning of a bright orange sunset made itself felt through his closed eyelids and woke him to the sight of a hundred pink flowering trees, the smell of their blossoms rushing through the car’s open windows like the surge of violins on one of his sister’s Puccini records. He burst into sobs.

  “I can’t—” said Hawkins.

  “I know,” said Tim, recovering as quickly as he could. “I know. You can’t have this.”

  In fact Fuller was thinking: No, what I can’t do is even tell you why I came across town—how it was the television picture I saw of you emptying Potter’s ashtray, looking gaunt and desperate, the circles under your eyes as dark as the ones under McCarthy’s. And because of the glimpse I caught of that cold-eyed prick Bob Kennedy, no different from the way he was at Harvard a half dozen years ago, glancing at you while you fussed over the ashtray, annoyed that this hardworking little fairy was cluttering up a piece of history in the making.

  That was what he wanted to say and couldn’t. But, yes, he did want Tim to stop crying now, and he was wishing he’d resisted the impulse to drive across town and get him. He was wishing he were right now back with the uncomplicated cracker kid he’d had the other night, a rawboned boy who no more considered it sick to mess around with another man than it might be to eat a bowl of ice cream between two helpings of cotton candy.

  He wished he weren’t putting them both through this.

  And yet, for all that, he wanted to hear Tim’s chatter, wanted the intermittent pleasure of protecting him; and wanted to fuck him on the floor of the car once it was dark enough to pull over into the woods.

  They stopped to buy him a toothbrush and underwear and a second shirt, and then had dinner on King Street before browsing the used bookstore a block away and walking along the colonnade of rooms on the university lawn, where they looked out of place with their un-crewcut hair and made jokes about the white-bucked college boys, even jokes about taking one of them back to the hotel.

  When they checked into their room, Tim’s tears came again, from some borderless place between anguish and joy, where he was struggling to believe that the two of them had actually been visible together, out in public, in a restaurant and a store. “Do you know what? It’s the same question!” he cried, laughing and shaking. “The same question! The one I was asking myself when you wouldn’t come back to me and the one I’ve been asking myself all night, when you’ve made me happier than I’ve ever been! What did I do to deserve this? The same question!”

  During all the coltish kisses with which he always sought Hawkins’ attentions, he had never asked for a specific pleasure or gratification, taking care always to follow Hawk’s direction, maximizing his beloved’s satisfaction and thus, he thought, his own. But tonight, physically spent before he had opened a single shirt button, he walked over to the wall, shut the light switch, and in the darkness, well above a whisper, said, “Hit me.”

  Hawkins looked at him for several seconds. And then, not for excitement, and not from vexation, but only because he thought he understood and had been asked for a tenderness he could actually express, he raised his open hand and struck Tim once across the face.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  May 12, 1954

  “He sounds a little like Mr. Peepers,” said Beverly Phillips. “You know, whatsisname, Wally Cox.”

  Listening to John Adams’ clipped, nasal tones on a television set in the State Department cafeteria, Hawkins Fuller and Mary Johnson couldn’t disagree with her. The two of them and Beverly were having a mid-afternoon cup of coffee amidst a few dozen other employees who were generally delighted by the embarrassment the hearings had caused State’s senatorial nemesis, Joe McCarthy.

  The committee’s special counsel, Ray Jenkins, had become even more theatrical than Welch, thought Mary. He clearly relished what Senator Mundt called his “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde role” of conducting both the direct and cross-examinations of whoever might be in the witness chair. This afternoon it was Adams, the army counsel, who seemed exasperated by almost everything—especially, Mary thought, the way Jenkins kept calling Schine “this boy.” Instead of helping to establish what Adams suggestively called Cohn’s “extreme interest” in the private, its effect was to make Schine seem just another all-American draftee who couldn’t possibly have stirred up such a fuss.

  Adams was now trying to rebut Cohn’s charge that back in December he had offered to trade some juicy leads about homosexual activity on several navy and air force bases—surely a good subject for the McCarthy committee to investigate—in exchange for Cohn’s pledge to drop the Fort Monmouth inquiry.

  “I never made such an offer,” Adams now declared. “I never would make such an offer. I never had such information to offer.”

  Beverly and Mary avoided each other’s glance. Fuller added another teaspoon of sugar to his coffee.

  What, Adams said, he had mentioned to Cohn—without ever suggesting a “trade”—was an ongoing investigation of homosexuality, by Secretary Stevens’ office, at a single army base, in the South. That was all.

  MR. JENKINS: It wasn’t in Tennessee, Mr. Adams, was it?r />
  MR. ADAMS: No, sir; it wasn’t.

  SENATOR McCLELLAN: A point of order. Let’s exclude Arkansas.

  MR. ADAMS: I can do that, sir.

  SENATOR MUNDT: The Chair would like to raise a point of order in behalf of South Dakota, which might also be included in the South.

  MR. ADAMS: I can include all of the states of the members of this committee.

  The camera panned the room to show the loud, prolonged laughter that was filling it. Roy Cohn’s participation in the merriment, visible for a second or two, was hearty enough that viewers might reasonably think he would now, at this moment of relaxed male fellowship, extend his hand across the table and ask Adams to bury the hatchet.

  “That,” said Fuller, “would be a hearing worth hearing. Shining a light on Camp Pink Palmetto. I’d say this current show lacks the really dire elements of the committee’s best work.” He went on to tell the tale of how a witness in one of McCarthy’s investigations, accidentally subpoenaed for 10:30 p.m. instead of a.m.—a clerk’s typo—had shown up anyway, trembling before the night watchman.

  Mary guessed he’d gotten this story from Tim. She and Fuller spoke of him infrequently, but enough for her to be aware of the Lenten attempt at renunciation and how temporary it had proved. She was surprised that the boy remained in the picture amidst the comings and goings of so many others, attributing his survival to what must be his own desperate persistence.

  Adams now spoke of a visit he’d made to the McCarthys’ apartment in mid-January, when things had begun to fray badly between the army and the committee. Jeannie McCarthy had sat at some distance from the two men and claimed to be writing thank-you cards; in fact, Adams felt sure she’d been taking notes on his conversation with her husband. The army lawyer was proud of how, during months of “being pounded and pounded and hounded and hounded about where Schine was going,” he’d had the temerity to tell Cohn that the private, like ninety percent of all draftees, would likely be spending some time overseas.