Fellow Travelers Page 4

  She waved, and watched him pass up another available cab. He continued along Sixteenth Street, toward downtown, instead of turning onto New Hampshire, which would have taken him to his apartment.

  CHAPTER THREE

  September 29, 1953

  “Our Holy Father cordially imparts to Joseph R. McCarthy and Jean Kerr on the occasion of their marriage his paternal apostolic blessing.”

  When the priest finished reading the pope’s official good wishes to Senator McCarthy and his bride—a pièce de résistance with which to end the ceremony—the crowd’s appreciative murmur turned into applause. A second later, the organist struck the first note of the recessional and the congregation snapped to its feet for the newly married couple’s walk back up the aisle.

  Joe and Jean—as even Timothy Laughlin couldn’t help but think of them at this moment—turned from facing the huge mosaics behind the altar and began their march to the cathedral’s doors. Standing near the back of the church, Tim would have to settle for imagining the McCarthys’ smiles until they were much farther along in their exit. In the meantime he gazed at the huge red-and-white marble pillars that seemed to be running with blood, and put a quarter into the poorbox: he’d taken the extra coin from his dresser when he left this morning, forgetting that, even if there was a full Mass with the wedding, there wouldn’t be a collection.

  He had just counted the twenty-four windows in the cathedral’s dome, recording the figure in his Palmer-method hand on a page of his steno pad that included the following notes:

  Mrs. Nixon next to Dulles (Allen, CIA not State)

  Jack Dempsey! (TELL DAD)

  Wilbur Johnson—family friend (Kerrs), brought bride to church

  Roy Cohen—McC committee counsel, one of ushers

  As soon as the bride and groom were out the door, Tim managed to leave the cathedral by a side exit, ahead of most of the crowd. On the church steps he was supposed to pass his notes to Miss Beale’s assistant. The wedding itself would make it into this afternoon’s paper, but coverage of the reception would have to wait until tomorrow’s. He wouldn’t need to deliver his notes on that part of things until the end of work today.

  Finding a place on the steps behind several reporters, Tim tried on the feeling of being one of them. It was a bad fit, several sizes too big. All the newsmen seemed full of knowingness, and none of them was giving his dislike of McCarthy a day off. Eisenhower’s absence—the president had claimed a conflict with the Panamanian leader’s visit—was the subject of a few satisfied jokes before the reporters quieted down to get a quote from Nixon, who was pausing briefly during his descent of the church steps.

  “A beautiful ceremony,” said the vice president, slowly enough for any pencils still competing with microphones. “The bride was lovely, but then I’ve never met a bride who wasn’t!” He snapped off a grin and quickly escorted Mrs. Nixon to the car.

  “Did he just insult Joe’s wife?” wondered a man from the Baltimore Sun. There was, Tim thought, something a little off about Nixon’s effortful remark, part of the awkwardness you could feel all over the cathedral steps. “Kiss her, Joe!” the folks on the sidewalk kept shouting. But the senator wouldn’t comply, and his expression continued to undergo the oddest alternations. For ten seconds at a time he’d look like one of Tim’s Irish uncles, the smile ready to issue a song, but then some saturnine cloud would scud across the eyes and mouth, turning McCarthy into a baleful, preoccupied spectator at his own nuptials.

  “He looks like he’s ready to push some cookies himself,” said one of the reporters, pointing to the gray-striped pants beneath McCarthy’s morning coat.

  “Did you know that Torquemada got her to convert for this?” his colleague asked. “The girl was a Presbyterian.”

  Tim scanned the faces in the crowd filling up a whole block of Rhode Island Avenue. Most of them were women, and the mood was cheerful, but here and there he could spot someone glaring up at the groom, displaying a resentment either abstract or deeply particular. These angry exceptions only added to the off-kilter feel of the whole event.

  Once he’d handed off his notes, Tim hotfooted it two blocks to the Washington Club in Dupont Circle, where guests waiting to be let into the reception were sweltering alongside another crowd of gawkers. Twenty minutes passed before he could get inside this grand old building to make notes on the white chrysanthemums and blocks of orange ice in the bowl of nonalcoholic punch. He got as close as he could to the receiving line. If he were more aggressive, let alone taller, he might have secured a better vantage point, but even at some distance he could pick up most of what the politicians were saying in their overloud voices. Senator Hickenlooper was there—he recognized him from the Congressional Directory—along with Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Mrs. Longworth, and a Congressman Bentley from Michigan, identified with the help of a Detroit News reporter. Between jottings Tim got further glimpses of McCarthy himself, who he suspected (from long observation of his male relatives) had just managed to get hold of something more fortifying than the punch. But the drink had not resolved the alternations in his facial expression; it was speeding them up.

  “Had to settle for wearing this!” cried Joseph P. Kennedy, tugging at the lapels of his dark business suit. “My own cutaway’s not back from the cleaners.” This was understood, to general laughter, as a reference to his son Jack’s wedding, less than three weeks ago, to Miss Bouvier, the Times-Herald’s inquiring photographer. There might be no sign of Senator Kennedy here this morning, but three of his brothers and sisters were right behind the old ambassador.

  Tim kept at it until 2:05, through the bride’s vigorous toss of her bouquet—“That gal can play on my team anytime!” someone roared—and the newlyweds’ departure in a black limousine, not the red Cadillac rumored to be a wedding present from some of the senator’s Texas supporters. Back out in Dupont Circle Tim soon felt himself sweating through his blue suit. His steno pad was already soaked from his own palm; thank God, at least, for ballpoint pens. Looking at the top page of his notes, he realized he would soon be mystified by his own abbreviations unless he made a fair copy, with amplifications, right away. So once he’d bought a half-pint of milk at the big Peoples drugstore, he sat down amidst the late lunchers and sun-catchers on a bench near the Circle’s western rim. Across the expanse of grass he could hear the last of the wedding guests laughing through their departures.

  He had just finished transcribing the first page on the pad when he noticed a shadow approaching: someone also wanting to sit down. As quickly as he could, he cleared off his milk carton, napkin, and two loose steno pages from the rest of the bench. “Sorry,” he said, before he’d even had a chance to look up.

  “For what?”

  For everything, thought Tim, once he raised his head and saw the spectacular young man standing over him. Taking in the suit jacket slung over the man’s broad shoulders and the faint glistening of sweat in the hollow of his neck where he’d loosened his tie, Tim wanted to say: For being nothing like you. For being all you’ll have for company on this bench.

  “May I?” said the man.

  “Of course,” Tim finally answered.

  “Don’t they give you an office?”

  Tim laughed. “They’re not even giving me a job past Friday.” And then it all came out in a nervous, mortifying rush: his graduation from Fordham; his arrival here in June; his summer of rewrites on the Star’s city desk; his hope for a job on Capitol Hill; the chance to cover McCarthy’s wedding.

  Realizing that the man’s suit was as fine as his physique, Tim asked: “You weren’t a guest there, were you?”

  It was the most foolish question he could have posed; if this man had been inside the Washington Club, or even the cathedral, Tim would certainly have noticed.

  “No,” said the man, pointing in the direction of Massachusetts Avenue. “I was having lunch with my uncle at the Sulgrave Club.”

  Tim nodded.

  “So who was there from the State
Department?” the man asked. “Come on: name names, as the groom might say.”

  Tim flipped through the pages of his pad, as cooperatively as if he’d actually been asked to do this in the witness chair. Searching for a relevant name, he mocked his own parochial-school penmanship, feeling certain his companion must have an altogether more manly scrawl. “‘The neat handwriting of the illiterate,’” he said, nervously quoting 1984. “Here we go. Mrs. Dulles. And Mrs. Walter Bedell Smith, the undersecretary’s wife. The Spanish ambassador? That doesn’t count. Harold Stassen? Foreign operations administrator for the president? Not actually the State Department, I guess. Is that where you work?”

  “Yes. The job also brings me to the Hill every week or two. But I’m not due there today until three-thirty. By the way,” he said, taking Tim’s pad and flipping back to something he’d noticed on the first page, “there’s no ‘e’ in Roy Cohn.”

  “Live and learn,” said Tim, who obediently made a correction. “Thanks.”

  “Come on. We can walk a bit and pick up the streetcar on Pennsylvania. It’ll get us both where we’re going.”

  Tim started gathering his things so quickly that the young man had to tell him, “Finish your milk. We’ve got time.”

  Taking two last pulls on his paper straw, Tim looked at the paragon beside him and hoped he wouldn’t now tighten his tie.

  “Okay, we’re off,” said the man, once Tim had trotted the waxed milk container to a trash basket. Only when he fell into step with the handsome stranger did he notice that the bench to the right of the one they’d shared had been empty all along.

  Walking across the Circle to Connecticut Avenue, no more than ten minutes into their acquaintance, the much taller man said: “And to think you used to be so talkative.”

  Thrilled at being teased, Tim replied, laughing: “I do talk too much.”

  “No, you don’t,” said the young man, giving Tim’s neck a momentary, affectionate squeeze. The touch rendered him mute, perhaps the only person in the United States who couldn’t find one more thing to say about Joe McCarthy.

  The man walking beside him broke the silence: “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is this milk-drinking a habit of yours?”

  “Sort of. I think they were always hoping it would make me taller. I didn’t rise to the full five-feet-seven you see before you until I was seventeen. I guess I developed a taste for it.”

  The man nodded. “Glasses?”

  “Two or three a day. Small ones.”

  “No, idiot. How long ago did you get those?” He tapped the right arm of the boy’s spectacles.

  “Oh!” said Tim. “Had ’em since time immemorial. I must have been eight. Farsighted. I can read a street sign a block away, but I’ve got a problem with print or even faces close up.” With his eyeglasses in place, he could see the man’s expression quite clearly, but couldn’t be sure what it indicated. A trace of pity? A flicker of real interest in what he’d been telling him? Anxious when his companion said nothing more, he went nattering on. “They’re not so bad, really. I used to have those old steel-wire frames. Got these tortoiseshells going into my junior year of college. Pretty snazzy, no?” Looking up into the man’s blue-gray eyes, Tim felt sure that they had never worn corrective lenses. His own glasses suddenly felt like an artificial limb.

  They reached the corner with the streetcar stop.

  The man tenderly removed Tim’s eyeglasses. “How many fingers?” he asked, holding up three just an inch from Tim’s eyes.

  “Three,” said Tim, just able to make them out.

  “There. You’re healed,” said the man, folding the eyeglasses and slipping them into the handkerchief pocket of Tim’s jacket.

  “You’re a riot,” said Tim, smiling as his heart pounded. He retrieved the glasses and put them back on and saw that the man was looking at him with a gaze that could only be called appraising. He wanted to give this god a playful shove, and thought he could probably get away with making it look like only that, rather than his desperate desire to touch this person whose name he didn’t even know.

  The streetcar stopped in front of them.

  “I’m Timothy Laughlin, by the way.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Timothy Laughlin.”

  Tim had time enough to see that the man was pleased, but then the doors of the streetcar opened and the most terrible thing imaginable happened. As the two of them boarded, three other people, two women and a child, got between them. Standing in the aisle of the crowded car as it went down Pennsylvania, struggling to see past those three other souls, Tim only briefly recaptured his acquaintance’s attention. The young man gave him a helpless shrug and a relaxed smile that seemed to say: Oh well, sorry about this little turn of fate.

  Tim got off—there was nothing else to do—when the car stopped in front of the Star. He waved goodbye from the sidewalk, unsure whether the man could even see him. Standing in the doorway of the newspaper’s office, he watched the streetcar continue on its eastward way, and he knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never be more in love than he was now.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  October 6, 1953

  The handful of observers at the back of Room 357 could see the shoulders of the witness stiffen. Mr. Edward J. Lyons, Jr., representing the Judge Advocate General, gamely proceeded to describe the frequency with which United Nations prisoners had been “discovered with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes gouged out. They’d been used for bayonet practice and the like.”

  While still in charge in Korea, General MacArthur had been determined to do things differently from the way they’d been done during World War II. Rather than waiting for victory—or, as it appeared to be turning out this time, negotiated stalemate—he’d begun investigating North Korean atrocities as soon as anyone got wind of them. The evidence of torture and brainwashing was plentiful and compelling, and Senator Charles Potter (R-Michigan) appeared to relish running this hearing that had been convened to discuss it.

  McCarthy had not finished honeymooning down in Nassau, but the atrocities task force of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was Potter’s responsibility, and he seemed determined to make the most of it. There were no cameras or reporters here at this closed executive session in the Senate Office Building, and public hearings on the subject wouldn’t come until December, but even so, Potter remained energetic—no matter that the Democrats, who’d months ago quit the committee in protest of McCarthy’s tactics, refused to come back even for this; no matter, in fact, that Potter was the only senator, amidst several staff members, to have shown up this morning. He still looked bent on getting to the bottom of something awful.

  For most of the grim testimony it was hard to remember that this was the McCarthy committee. But there came a point, in the midst of eliciting information from Lieutenant Colonel J. W. Whitehorne III, when Potter made the mistake of thinking out loud: “I am curious about the twenty-three Americans who are still over there, whom apparently Communist propaganda got the best of. Or maybe they went into the service as pro-Communists. Is there any check being made as to the background of the men still there?”

  Once Colonel Whitehorne declared that information on the defectors was indeed available, Roy Cohn, as if hearing a whistle, sprang from a midmorning slumber: “What was the answer on that? Did any of those people have Communist backgrounds?”

  “Some of them had leftist leanings,” said Colonel Whitehorne.

  “Would we be able to get some documentation?” asked Cohn, more in the imperative than the interrogative. All at once he was in possession of the hearing, which now seemed, more familiarly, to be concerning itself with domestic subversion.

  Tim Laughlin had a much better view of Cohn than he had had at McCarthy’s wedding last week. He wasn’t sure whether to take him for a mobster or a boy wearing his first suit. The dark, hooded eyes; the scar down the nose; the slicked-down hair—all these fea
tures fought against the committee counsel’s improbable, extreme youth. Twenty-six, Cecil Holland, back at the Star, had said.

  Tim could see the concern that Cohn’s line of questioning had provoked on the high, creased forehead of the army’s new counsel, John Adams. But Tim was looking more closely at Potter, to whom he might actually be talking once the hearing reached its conclusion. Yesterday afternoon he’d called the senator’s office to confirm his appointment and been told by the secretary that he might like to get a glimpse of Potter in action before coming in for an interview.

  With his horn-rim glasses and balding brow, he reminded Tim of the lay teachers in math and science at St. Agnes’ Boys’ High. He would have been surprised by Potter’s own youth if he hadn’t looked him up in the Congressional Directory during his last afternoon at the Star. Only thirty-six, and already in the upper body after three terms in the House! In addition to his regular committee assignments, the senator served on the Battle Monuments Commission, a fact that somehow appealed to Tim, who last night had imagined getting the job and making phone calls that would spruce up the cannon at Bull Run or the statue of Father Duffy in Times Square.

  But the crisp zeal Potter was again showing, now that Cohn had subsided, had to do with far-more-distant battlefields that had barely cooled. None of the POWs who’d been rescued or exchanged—in a mental condition more frightening than their physical one—was seated here this morning. Only the brass were at the witness table, and it was painful enough hearing the descriptions of torture filtered through them. Tim could only guess what the impact would be when the victims themselves testified in a couple of months. Cecil Holland had told him how McCarthy liked to perform a sleight of hand between the committee’s executive and public sessions. When pink witnesses who’d been subpoenaed to reveal their former Communist ties showed any instinct to fight back during the closed session, they most likely wouldn’t get called for the open hearing, where McCarthy preferred to display the timid and guilty-looking. Things would operate with a strange similarity in this case, Tim imagined. The more shaky the repatriated prisoners, the more powerful Senator Potter’s point would be.