Fellow Travelers Page 5

  All this activity felt reassuring to Tim. Whatever the committee’s reported excesses, surely not even Miss McGrory, back at the Star, could object to this particular inquiry. Only three days ago the pope himself had called for new international laws against war crimes, and two years before that, Tim had heard Father Beane, the visiting priest from the Chinese missions, tell about what he and his brothers had suffered at the hands of Mao’s advancing armies. Even now he remembered the friar’s cadences and fervor, and how he himself had sat in the Church of the Epiphany, between Frances and his mother, thinking: Some “soldier of God” I am! That was, after all, what he was supposed to have become on the spring Sunday in 1944 when Bishop O’Neill confirmed him with a symbolic toughening slap to the face.

  But maybe here, in the smallest of ways, he could be helpful in the fight against godlessness and cruelty. If he went to work for Potter, he would not just be keeping Father Duffy laureled; he’d be affording protection to Father Beane as well. It might be the only soldiering he ever did. He’d never been able to think through what he’d do when the draft board got around to calling him up. Do you have homosexual tendencies? Check yes or no. When he’d registered, almost four years ago in that little office up at Fordham, he’d realized he was damned either way he answered: he could be an outcast or a liar. He’d chosen to lie, rationalizing that “tendencies” could be proved only by experience, and he’d certainly had none of that. Homosexual tendencies: had Uncle Alan, his mother’s never-married brother, kept them tucked away with his St. Christopher medal, inside the backpack he’d carried onto Corregidor? Tim had often wondered.

  Potter was making ready to adjourn, telling the military men that he’d be out on the West Coast later this month, doing some more preliminary interviews. While he was away, he expected them to keep getting ready for the open hearings in December. “We’re working toward the same purpose,” he said, with midwestern nasality and a smile. His gavel came down at 11:45 a.m.

  Everywhere in the city one could feel that autumn—the season not of death, Tim always thought, but of quickening—had finally arrived. What Drew Pearson still called the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” had, after a summer idling in the weeds, rattled to life, even without McCarthy in town to flip the switch. Yesterday Governor Warren had been sworn in as Chief Justice, while Nixon was embarking on a ten-week tour of Asia.

  Potter stood up, with a wincing, unexpected slowness, and came out from behind the committee dais. How large his head seemed in proportion to the rest of his body, Tim thought, before noticing what was seriously wrong. An aide had handed the senator two canes. From the stiffness of his gait, Tim realized that the man was walking on artificial legs—not the sort of fact that went into the tabular pages of the Congressional Directory.

  And yet, all at once this fact seemed more joking than somber. Each cane had a little electric flashlight near its top, and Potter was now playfully using one of them to signal a man three seats away from Tim.

  That man—small and gray and grudgingly groomed, with a thin face somewhere between mottled and ravaged—returned Potter’s smile. He then got up to leave the back row, nodding genially to Tim.

  “Excuse me,” said Tim, before the man could depart, “do you know where Room 80 is? I tried to locate it on my way here. I’ve got an appointment there in—”

  “That’s number 80 in the Capitol, son. Not here in the SOB. In fact, Charlie’s the only s.o.b. not housed with the other ninety-five s.o.b.s here in the SOB.”

  “I have a job interview with him. With Senator Potter, I mean.”

  “Well, come with me, young sir. I’m heading there now.”

  They trotted down the stairs to the subway that ran between the two buildings. The older man explained how the senator had his office in the Capitol to make his handicap less of an inconvenience. “Of course it’s not so damned convenient when the committee meeting is here instead of there, but it helps more often than not.”

  Tim could smell a peppermint on the man’s breath and wondered if it was there to mask a morning shot of Four Roses. He could easily imagine the two of them saying hello on Ninth Avenue, the older man having emerged from McNaughton’s saloon to slap him on the back with best wishes “for that fine woman, your Grandma Gaffney,” who would decline the wishes with a lace-curtain shudder once Timmy brought them to her kitchen.

  The man ushered him to a wicker seat on the jammed little subway. Tim could see Potter in the car ahead as the two-car train started down the monorail. While it moved, the man continued talking in a rat-a-tat-tat like Winchell’s. “It was a land mine that did it,” he explained. “January 31, 1945, Battle of the Bulge, in the Colmar Pocket. No choice but to amputate both his pins. Spent a year in Walter Reed and had to learn to walk all over again. Fella who’d once been a high jumper!”

  Tim nodded gravely in the darkness.

  “The VA calls him ‘permanently and totally disabled’!” cried the man, cackling over the clatter. “Well, it doesn’t keep him from voting on their budget.”

  “What are the lights on the canes for?” asked Tim.

  “Hailing cabs.” The man paused for a moment. “Well, we’ll soon see how ‘abled’ Charlie turns out to be among this crowd he’s in with now.” He pointed to one of the heads in the lead car. “See our boy Roy up there?”

  “Yes,” said Tim. They had reached the end of the Lilliputian tunnel, and he could make out the back of Cohn’s freshly cropped skull.

  “Don’t use the men’s toilet when he’s around, if you catch my drift. Though he tends to be enchanted by fellows a little huskier than yourself.” The man laughed as the train bucked to a stop.

  “Are you on Senator Potter’s staff?” asked Tim.

  “No,” the man answered, chuckling, as he and Tim made their way to the Capitol’s first floor. “Let’s just say I’m authorized to help him out a bit from time to time. Him and some of the other Michigan GOP men. My name’s McIntyre, Thomas McIntyre. Call me Tommy. Was a newspaperman for several eternities, down here and up in Detroit.”

  Tim shook hands and introduced himself, trying to understand what this slight, fast-moving man meant by helping the senator out, and wondering who had authorized him to do it.

  “Potter’s a good-enough egg,” said McIntyre, the heels of his unshined shoes beating a fast rhythm across the marble corridor. “He’s managed to vote for foreign aid but not forget it’s the automakers who sent him here. You know,” he continued, almost reflective, “he ought to be an interesting fellow. He was actually a social worker before he went off to the war. But he’s got one handicap worse than no legs.”

  “Really?” asked Tim, as McIntyre knocked on the door of Room 80.

  “Yeah. A permanent charley horse between his ears!”

  McIntyre was still laughing when the door to the senator’s office was opened—by a man with one arm.

  “His driver,” whispered Tommy. “No foolin’!”

  Miss Antoinette Cook, the woman Tim had spoken with on the phone, introduced him to Robert L. Jones, a still-young man who looked as if he might be Potter’s executive assistant, and whose speech carried the salt of a Maine accent. “Oh, yes, Mr. Laughlin,” he said, appearing less than pleased by Tim’s arrival, let alone McIntyre’s. “The fellow that Hawkins Fuller recommended when he was up here to defend State’s latest excessive appropriation.”

  McIntyre looked at Tim with an encouraging smile, and then alarm. “Jesus, kid, your face has gone white. It’s only a job interview. This ain’t the Depression.”

  Hawkins Fuller.

  Tim managed to nod and shake Mr. Jones’s hand, while McIntyre cheerfully took charge of the situation. “Put him to work, Jones. See what he can do. Better yet, see if he can do the bit of work I was going to do for you today. Here, son, this is a copy of what Knowland’s planning to say on the floor a couple of hours from now. I got it from his press man. It’s no different from what he said at his press conference yesterday, but it’s a cou
ple of decibels higher, and it’s going to make a splash. So why don’t you sit down at one of the Underwoods here and write a couple of paragraphs that Charlie can say in support of it?”

  Mr. Jones had already lost interest in Timothy Laughlin; he was on a phone behind Miss Cook, cupping his hand over the receiver.

  “Go on, read it, read it,” said Tommy McIntyre, as he wheeled a typist’s chair into position behind Tim.

  Senator Knowland, the majority leader, had come home from his world tour the other day and learned of Adlai Stevenson’s call for a nonaggression pact with the Russians—a proposal that had irritated the California senator to an extreme degree. “Now watch the Koreans drag out the Panmunjom talks,” he was warning. “This will be one more sign that we need to put our house in order and our rifles at the ready. Time is not on the side of the Free World, and we don’t need Mr. Stevenson, after his massive repudiation at the polls, recommending that we play at useless diplomacy.”

  Tim had only a slight idea of how Potter spoke, but he was pretty sure the point of this writing assignment was to make him sound as implacable as Knowland. So he took up a yellow pad and made several notes for a few paragraphs of oratory. To begin with, Knowland must be extolled. To continue, Stevenson must be excoriated, for his attempt “not only to bend over backwards, but to roll out the red carpet for our adversaries of that same color.” The prose began to flow almost automatically. The defeated Democrat was proposing “a nonaggression pact with a flagrant aggressor.” To conclude, one needed to take a shot at India, a sentimental favorite of liberals, which Knowland had accused of backing the North Korean position before the peace talks had even gotten underway. “In my great automobile-making state,” wrote Tim as Potter, “we’re wary of any car or country that stays in ‘neutral’ for too long. ‘Neutral’ is what you’re in when you roll downhill.”

  After penciling in a few revisions, Tim rolled a sheet of paper into the Underwood and typed up this stentorian boilerplate. Struck by his own speed, he realized how the words—for all that he believed them, and he more or less did—seemed to be coming from neither Potter’s brain nor his own. He was speaking in another voice entirely—the way, as an altar boy during Mass, he would be saying his Latin part while still hearing the English words of whatever hymn had soared through the church a few minutes before. He proofread the little speech a second time, to make sure he hadn’t typed the words “Hawkins Fuller” somewhere in the middle of one of its sentences. Then he handed the page to Mr. McIntyre.

  “Fast fella, aren’t you?” the lined little man said with a grin, before carrying the speech to the suite’s innermost office. Before five minutes passed, he reemerged, in the company of Senator Potter and a third man. All of them, carrying their hats, headed toward Tim.

  “Another Irish wordsmith!” enthused the senator, who put both his canes in his left hand, so that his right could extend itself to Tim. “Welcome to the staff, Mr. Laughlin.”

  Tim shook Potter’s hand and realized with embarrassment that he had been looking down at the senator’s feet.

  Potter seemed pleased by the chance to alleviate an awkwardness he encountered daily.

  “I was just telling Mr. Jeffreys, my Lansing constituent here, that I’m looking forward to some duck hunting on the Upper Peninsula this winter. These days I’m able to glide around in some paper-thin galoshes my wife gave me, while my pals have to clomp and sweat in boots that weigh a ton. ‘Aren’t your feet cold?’ one of them asked me last year. ‘Not exactly!’ I told him. ‘Unless they’re feeling chilly wherever I left ’em in France!’” He paused to laugh. “Everything’s got its advantages.”

  Tim smiled, more in awe than humor. Potter clapped him on the shoulder and continued on out with McIntyre and Mr. Jeffreys. Miss Cook then presented him with two forms to be filled out. “You can bring these back with you when you start Monday morning, Mr. Laughlin.”

  Tim thanked her and everybody else still in the office. A minute or so later, halfway down the Capitol’s east steps, he paused to sit beside a huge stone pediment supporting an ornate lamppost. He closed his eyes and shook off the image of Potter’s severed feet, lost somewhere in the soil of France. It wasn’t hard to banish the picture; his mind had no room for it, or even for the fact that he could now pay the rent and write home with some good news. His mind was filled with the afternoon of McCarthy’s wedding, exactly a week ago.

  An hour after getting off the streetcar, he’d been summoned to a telephone on the other side of the city room. “A call from Capitol Hill,” he’d been told. Through the receiver had come the voice he’d heard an hour before and never expected to hear again: “Send your résumé and a letter of application to the attention of Miss Antoinette Cook. The job is a junior assistant with writing duties.”

  Dumbfounded, Tim had written down the address and phone number for Potter’s office. “Thank you,” he’d managed to say.

  “If you get the job, treat yourself to a glass of chocolate milk.”

  And with that the still-nameless voice had left the line.

  Hawkins Fuller.

  Now, a week later, Tim sat for another moment on the steps, before he opened his eyes to see a flag being run up one of the distant poles on the Capitol’s roof. It was a familiar sight: he knew that this flag would wave for only a moment before being lowered and shipped to some elementary school in Cheyenne or Mill Valley, where the teachers could tell the students it had flown over the U.S. Capitol. But for the few seconds it was aloft, filled with what might be two new separate futures, Tim looked at it with his hand over his heart.

  October 6, 1953

  Dear Rep. Fish:

  You may assure your Dutch-American constituent in Wappingers Falls that the Department of State views all recent violence in Indonesia with the greatest possible concern. As Secretary Dulles remarked on…

  Mary Johnson proofread her letter to the New York congressman and sank into the feeling of futility that often overcame her by midafternoon. What could any of these well-meant epistolary stitchings and swabbings really do to treat the wounds of the tortured world? There was news this week that Lockheed had begun work on a nuclear-powered airplane; no doubt it would be carrying an atomic bomb as well.

  Behind Mary, Miss Lightfoot was speaking to Beverly Phillips about the woman in the Office of Legal Advisors who’d just won a four-thousand-dollar car in WMAL’s “Mystery Voice” contest.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Phillips, “she won’t have any trouble making her Community Chest contribution.”

  Mary laughed. Underneath the correspondence piling up for the bureau chief’s signature lay her copy of the memo from R. W. Scott McLeod, security officer to 1,142 employees, informing all of them that if they chose not to make a Community Chest contribution this year, they must report to his office for an interview. Secretary Dulles was chairman of the department’s drive, and McLeod’s zeal to show the boss what a little extra aggression could accomplish had sparked much grumbling about the “Conformity Chest.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with what McLeod is doing,” said Miss Lightfoot, in her near-chronic tone of irritation. “He’s just trying for one-hundred-percent participation. He’ll lend you a dollar if you can’t contribute one on your own.”

  Mary turned her small swivel chair so that she and Beverly Phillips could each raise an eyebrow to the other. Miss Lightfoot also found nothing wrong with McLeod’s unceasing security-risk investigations. Indeed, she seemed disappointed with the estimate that his review of things wouldn’t reach Congressional Relations until December.

  A young man carrying a book now came through the door, confusing Mary, who took him for the summer office boy from Eastern European Affairs. Hadn’t he returned to school?

  “Is Mr. Fuller in?” the boy asked. He stammered over the “F” in Fuller. “I couldn’t find him on the wall directory, but the man at the front desk told me to come here.”

  Mary smiled. She realized that this wasn’t the boy fr
om EEA, though he did look a little like the lovesick Donald O’Connor in Call Me Madam, the only musical anyone would ever care to make about this place. And then it occurred to her. This skinny fellow was lovesick. She looked at him gently, filling up with annoyance toward Fuller as she did so. What new recklessness of his had made this boy venture here with a handful of pebbles to throw at Romeo’s window?

  “I’m afraid he left early. To go to the Georgetown library, I believe.”

  “The library at George Washington U.,” Miss Lightfoot corrected.

  “Thank you,” said Mary. Her colleague, already matronly though no more than thirty-five, certainly kept track of Fuller.

  “Will he be back?” the young man asked.

  “I doubt it,” said Mary.

  Managing not to stammer, the boy said, “I was bringing him this.” He handed Mary a new biography of the elder Henry Cabot Lodge. A receipt from Trover’s bookshop stuck out of it. An odd present to bring here, thought Mary, Lodge not exactly having been an internationalist. But it was a big and serious book—impressive, the boy had probably reasoned—and he had spent six dollars on it.

  “You could leave it here,” she said. “I’ll see that Mr. Fuller gets it.”

  The boy still looked crestfallen.

  “You can leave a note, too,” Mary added. “So he’ll be sure to know who it’s from.”

  “I’ll write one inside the book,” the young man declared, looking more hopeful.