Fellow Travelers Page 8

  There was no time to puzzle out the incongruity, because to Jones’s astonishment, McCarthy was now walking toward him. “Bill!” called the chairman, clapping his shoulder. “Why don’t you come out to lunch with all of us at Gasner’s? After all, we don’t know how much longer Dave will be around.” The induction into the army of committee consultant G. David Schine was said to be imminent.

  Jones’s pleasure at being invited trumped any disappointment over the chairman’s forgetting that he was Bob, not Bill. There might be an opportunity to straighten that out over lunch, a prospect that looked even brighter once he got a seat next to McCarthy, with Adams across from him and Schine and Cohn at the other end of the table.

  “Senator,” Jones asked, while the waiter set down some glasses, “did you hear what Eleanor said up in Connecticut last night? She told the League of Women Voters that Roy and Dave are a bigger threat to the country than Hiss ever was.”

  McCarthy, chuckling, seemed pleased. Jones looked down the table and saw that Cohn, busy regarding Schine, had not overheard.

  “You know,” said McCarthy, grabbing a Manhattan off the waiter’s tray, “the Pentagon could use some guys like you, Bill.” The senator added, with a certain embarrassment, to avoid offending Adams: “I don’t mean you’re not all right, John.”

  Adams, efficiently ordering from the menu, gave a thin smile to indicate that no offense had been taken. But then he looked away, toward Cohn and Schine, and it was McCarthy who seemed a little hurt.

  “So,” Cohn called out, once he’d caught the army counsel’s eye, “am I going to be allowed in on Tuesday?” The committee had told Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, Adams’ boss, that it was planning a field trip to the radar operation at Fort Monmouth.

  “It’s uncertain,” said Adams. “In Stevens’ view, it’s up to the commanding officer.”

  “Communists can get in!” cried Cohn, throwing his napkin onto his plate. “Whole carpools of them can go to work there for years at a time! But not me!”

  “Roy,” McCarthy said, evenly, “hold on.”

  “I will not hold on! We’re getting nothing but excuses and obstruction. We were promised cooperation.”

  Adams crumbled some crackers into his soup. “We have been very accommodating and will continue to be—”

  “Horseshit, John,” said Cohn, who then looked at Schine and recalled that the hotel-chain heir’s family did not like swearing. “Baloney! What I want to know most is, what’s going to happen when Dave’s inducted in two weeks.”

  Adams ate a spoonful of clam chowder. “Mr. Stevens will try to find him something worthy of his talents.”

  Schine, handsome and blond, seemed moderately intrigued by how little it took to get Roy all excited.

  “Dave is essential to the operation of this commitee,” insisted Cohn. “His expertise—”

  Knowing that Schine’s expertise had been demonstrated mostly by his authorship of a pamphlet about communism’s historical perfidy—an error-filled monograph that had gone into his family’s hotel rooms like the Gideon Bible—Adams quietly repeated to Cohn that Secretary Stevens would see what he could do.

  “That’s your answer for everything—from clearances to Communists to KP! Which Dave is not going to be wasted doing with some bunch of goddamned hillbillies in a barracks!”

  Schine put his hand on Cohn’s arm. “Roy, enough. It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay.” Sotto voce, he reminded Schine of all the favors his family had done for Adams during the last couple of weeks up here in New York—the free hotel rooms, the comped theater tickets. Then, back to fortissimo, he barked out, for the whole table’s benefit, statistics on security risks and Communist sympathizers at Fort Monmouth.

  McCarthy grinned nervously at Jones, as if trying to pretend to a guest that there was nothing seriously wrong with the child at the end of the table. “Tell me about yourself,” he said to the research assistant. The chairman indicated to Adams, still methodically finishing his soup, that it was okay for him to join this precinct of the conversation instead of Roy’s.

  In the course of giving an abbreviated life story—from his birth in Biddeford, Maine, to his days at Bates College and in the army during the war—Jones gently clarified the fact that he was a Bob, not a Bill. Reaching the recent past, he told the chairman: “Before Potter, I worked for Senator Brewster.”

  McCarthy nodded, recalling his retired Republican colleague from Maine. “Better than that old bag they’ve got in now.”

  It was Jones’s turn to laugh, at McCarthy’s scornful reference to Senator Margaret Chase Smith and her now-famous “declaration of conscience” against the chairman. “Sir, she couldn’t find her bloomers, let alone her conscience. Or a Communist.”

  McCarthy slapped the tablecloth in appreciation, then signaled for another Manhattan. He’d decided to skip any food. “So what’s it like working for Charlie?” he asked Jones.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the research assistant answered, “Oh, he’s a fine guy.” But realizing he had nothing more to say, Jones boldly changed the subject. “Sir, can you tell me how you plan to handle Levitsky in open session?”

  McCarthy, who proceeded by more or less constant improvisation, had clearly not given the matter any thought. “Got any ideas?” he asked Jones.

  “Yes, I do,” said the research assistant, seizing his chance. “You need to leak what he said about Rosenberg to the press. That piece of testimony where he directly lies.”

  “Actually,” said Adams, cutting into his fish, “Levitsky didn’t say that himself.”

  McCarthy invited Jones to respond, which the younger man did almost immediately. “Does it matter? Greenblum says he said it. And at this point his word is better than some Fifth-Amendment Communist’s. If we want to sustain public interest in this, let people think Rosenberg is still influencing things from beyond the grave. That’ll scare them a lot more than one more fag at the State Department. Or at the head of the Democratic ticket.”

  McCarthy waved an empty fork to get the interest of the other end of the table, as if here at last were a topic around which he could unite the whole family. “Roy,” he called, “you think there are any reporters still around the Fed building?”

  Jones’s mind was moving fast. If he could make himself useful here, he’d be able to get that drunken leprechaun McIntyre off his back. Maybe even get himself out of Potter’s office and into the chairman’s own.

  Tim sat in a pew at the front of St. Peter’s fifteen minutes before Saturday afternoon confessions were to begin. Nearby he could see two women who had arrived early for the sacrament: an elderly lady, perhaps eager to begin the only conversation she would have all week, and a pretty girl his own age, probably hoping to finish here in plenty of time to get ready for a date.

  From the moment he’d reached the corner of Second and C streets and stood before the church doors, Tim had known that he would not be entering the confessional this afternoon. The church’s yellow brick tower and parapets had seemed like a papier-mâché stage set for one of Shakespeare’s sunniest Italian comedies, just as here inside, the red-and-green pattern repeating itself from one stained-glass window to the next resembled Christmas wrapping paper, the kind whose expense always provoked disapproving clucks from Grandma Gaffney before she slid her own annual gifts, unwrapped cartons of cigarettes, across the dining room table to her daughters and son. Even the plain Ionic columns here inside St. Peter’s, so different from the blood-streaked marble at St. Matthew’s, seemed ready to invite Kilroy’s signature or the crayon drawings of children.

  Tim would pray, but he would not confess. He was here to make a separate peace, the way the Russians had—he’d seen it referenced in the Lodge biography—during the First World War. Rising from the pew, he headed to the little chapel, just off the altar, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. He had been hiding behind her skirts his whole life, and as he knelt before the chapel’s rack of tall blue candle
s, he felt certain she would understand his predicament. She might not be part of the Trinity, but her ex officio position, as the intercessor who had God’s ear, had always made her something like Mrs. Roosevelt, the person to go to first.

  In the Baltimore Catechism, the source of all Tim’s knowledge of the world above this one, the Trinity had been depicted as a shamrock—the visual analogy closest to hand for the Irish clergyman who’d written the text. But what if one added another leaf, the way one used to, with an artful graft, after hunting in vain for four-leaf clovers on the small patch of grass in the playground near Holy Cross? Tim did not plan to worship Hawkins Fuller, but why couldn’t his love for him be attached to the love he already felt for the actual Trinity? Had he not, in fact, always been in love, physically and particularly, with Christ, whose dark, haloed image on every calendar and classroom wall glowed more handsomely than any man walking His Earth? Had not Father McGuire, in the first pages of the catechism, promised a kind of divine romance? God has been very, very good to you. He thinks more of you than He does of anything else in this world. To you alone He has given an invitation to live with Him in heaven forever.

  When Hawkins had removed Tim’s shirt and seen the scapular beneath it, the older man had not seemed surprised, and he had made no joke. He had hung it, without comment, over one of the bedposts at the headboard, where, whenever Tim glimpsed it during the night, it seemed no more out of place—and no less protective—than it did when draped over his own narrow chest and back.

  How many mortal sins had he committed last night? Did each separate act he and Hawkins performed constitute an individual transgression, or was their entire three hours together—until Hawkins left, after some chatter and a tousle of his hair but no actual goodbye kiss—a single offense? It didn’t matter, because either way, he, Timothy Patrick Laughlin, was dead. Mortal sin, said the catechism, kills the life of grace in our souls. That is why the sacrament of penance is called a sacrament of the dead. And one could not perform penance without making a confession, any more than one could make a confession without perfect contrition—which he did not feel. To his astonishment, he did not want to feel it, however well he had once mastered Father McGuire’s illustration of these matters. Elizabeth says: “Anyone who commits even one mortal sin does more harm than hundreds and hundreds of earthquakes ever could do.” She is right. As the words came back to Tim now, he pictured the ground below the 38th Parallel opening up and swallowing a thousand American soldiers.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…. Because he could not say these words this afternoon, his heart would pound with fear tonight. If I should die before I wake…Could he live, for even a little while, without grace—drained of it, like the empty black milk bottle the catechism drew for a soul with mortal or Original Sin? No. And he could not take Saint Augustine’s approach, asking to be made pure but just now, because the truth—and God loves the truth—was that Timothy Laughlin had never felt so pure as he had last night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  November 10, 1953

  None of the twelve televisions on display at Hecht’s had its sound up. Eleven of them, this Tuesday night, were tuned to Milton Berle, cavorting in women’s clothes and silence, while the twelfth showed Bishop Sheen returning from a commercial break to find that his blackboard had been erased, as always, by Skippy, the unseen angel he liked to claim was a member of the cherubim’s Local 20. The clean slate waited, in the silence, for a word, the name of the last theme Sheen would take up before the program ended at eight-thirty. RECONCILIATION, it turned out to be, and as soon as he’d written it, Sheen turned his elegant figure and blazing eyes to the camera.

  Tim was almost able to read the bishop’s lips, which he knew would soon speak the broadcast’s weekly envoi, God love you, that comforting wish caught somewhere between the subjunctive and imperative.

  Tim figured he could spend another half hour browsing the book department until the store closed at nine. And then, knowing that Hawkins didn’t like him showing up till past ten, he would kill another ninety minutes out on the street. In the past few weeks he’d been to the apartment on I Street four times, and before each visit, including tonight’s, he had called hours ahead from a pay phone near his own room to make sure he’d be welcome.

  Exiting the store under a cloudy night sky, Tim wandered through what was left of Lincoln’s Washington: east on F Street past the Patent Office and old marble Tariff Building, then all the way down into Chinatown toward Mrs. Surratt’s boardinghouse. Turning south, he made his way to Pennsylvania Avenue, where he began to walk in the opposite direction from the one he’d traveled on the streetcar six weeks ago with the then anonymous Hawkins Fuller. Passing the White House and looking at the lights in the residence, Tim wondered if Eisenhower would be up late deciding whether to support or criticize HUAC’s subpoena of Harry Truman. All these years later, Attorney General Brownell was now insisting that the ex-president had knowingly promoted a Communist at Treasury named Harry Dexter White.

  The snow from Friday’s freak blizzard was already gone. Tim now recalled setting out for Hawkins’ apartment that night, after it had started coming down. Although he’d been greeted with the gentle ministrations of a terry-cloth towel, he had even then not been asked to stay the night. Around two a.m. Hawkins had drawn attention to a lull in the storm and matter-of-factly discovered an extra pair of galoshes that would just about fit Tim.

  Who, he’d wondered, had been their previous owner? But he had not asked. After all, nearly a month since their first hours in his own bed on Capitol Hill, he and Fuller had yet to take a walk together or share a meal. Hawkins had once shown up, unannounced, at the room above the hardware store, bearing a quart of milk (a joke) and a candy bar. They had eaten the candy bar in bed, but that hardly ranked with going out to a restaurant or making supper together.

  Were he and Hawkins having an “affair”? Actually, Tim couldn’t see that the word, with its implications of brevity and furtiveness, did the situation justice. Devoid of any previous romantic experience, he had lived these three weeks as an eternity of happiness. This wasn’t, he told himself, even technically like Back Street, since Hawkins, thank God, had not turned out to be married. That possibility, the ne plus ultra of Tim’s imaginings about the worldly and perverse, had been lifted from his mind the first night he had walked into Fuller’s almost comically authentic bachelor apartment on the fifth floor of 2124 I.

  Reentering the pale brick building tonight, Tim decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator to number 5B, partly to experience a pleasant envy of the career girls and med students who got to live in such proximity to Hawkins—but mostly to kill a last minute of time, enough to put him past ten-thirty on his graduation wristwatch.

  “It’s open,” said Hawkins, above the clatter of kitchen cleanup.

  In Tim went, but only past the threshhold. From that spot he stared into Hawkins’ bedroom through its half-open door. He could see the Norwegian flag, half curled up like the tin of a sardine can, a souvenir of the Fulbright year. On the floor were sneakers and a T-shirt—used, Tim supposed, late this afternoon in the twice-a-week handball game Hawkins played at the GWU gym. Tim felt an even stronger desire to take hold of the shirt, to put his face against it, than he did to rush into the kitchen and touch Hawkins himself—as if the saint’s relics would provide an equally keen, but less risky, jolt than the saint. He forced his eyes away from the shirt and sneakers, and away from the framed photograph of Hawkins’ parents, who surely couldn’t, any more than his own, imagine or tolerate what would happen tonight in this bedroom.

  And then, there, all at once, wearing dark suit trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up and his arms still wet—stood Hawkins himself.

  “Hi, buddy.” Hawkins’ arm fell across his shoulder, helping to lead him to the living-room couch, where, until he was encircled by both arms, there would be several minutes of conversation, during which he would probably learn another few fac
ts of Hawkins’ life story: the name of a sister or childhood pet, the location of his boat on the day Japan surrendered. While scavenging these bits of knowledge, Tim would feign casualness, like an undercover agent in East Berlin. Desperate to avoid expulsion, he would never try the patience of his quarry by asking one question too many.

  Hawkins poured them both an inch of rye whiskey from the bottle on the coffee table—a real drink, not the dulce de leche (another milk joke, out of Guys and Dolls) that he’d been offered his first time here. Tim hardly needed the alcohol to be unlocked like Sister Sarah, but he knew a shot of it would complete his abandonment, would make him crave and even ask for whatever piece of action or technique Hawkins had last time had to coax him toward with a soothing interrogative or sharp, warning whisper.

  Tim looked past the coffee table at See It Now. The television was barely louder than the ones in Hecht’s, and Hawkins now made it clear he hadn’t actually been waiting for Edward R. Murrow to come on with the latest about Trieste and Harry Dexter White. “The thing’s been running since Pantomime Quiz,” Hawkins informed him, as if the television were just some curiously animate table on which he’d rested two Lena Horne records and his hat. Tim nodded, his eyes leaving Murrow in order to proceed with his usual inventory: the extra alarm clock; the Harvard diploma; the necktie from Saltz Brothers draped over the diploma’s frame.

  “I’m sure you can read more of it than I can,” said Hawkins, pointing to the diploma’s Latin text.

  Tim smiled. “Do you really think there’s not a single Communist on their faculty?” Harvard’s new president had declared exactly that, yesterday, in response to McCarthy.