Fellow Travelers (15 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

April 7, 1954

“Well,” said Tommy McIntyre, “there’s Jeannie, but where’s Joe?”

McCarthy’s young wife sat across the dining room of the Carroll Arms, lunching with George Sokolsky, the Hearst columnist who’d helped script her husband’s televised rebuttal of Murrow last night. The senator’s reply had come late and—even Joe’s friends thought—fallen rather flat, consisting largely of references to Murrow’s left-wing friends from the 1930s, most of them respectable not only now but then.

Tommy took scornful note of the wine bottle between Sokolsky and Jean McCarthy. “They’ll probably keep at it straight until they pour themselves into a cab for dinner at the Colony.”

Tim looked at Mrs. McCarthy, pretty as a Miss America, and wondered why she hadn’t ended up with a man who looked like Hawkins Fuller instead of someone fifteen years older who was running to blotches and fat. The answer had to lie in the way she lit up, as if for a camera, each time she caught a senator or reporter, or even a staffer as junior as himself, turning an eye in her direction. Joe McCarthy was the source from which all that derived.

Sokolsky’s speech had contained one peculiar patch, a piece of hit-and-run rhetoric in which McCarthy offered up the possibility that everyone hearing his voice might soon die, and the nation itself be destroyed, because of unnamed traitors who had slowed down production of the U.S. hydrogen bomb. And now, as Tim looked into his water glass, he felt himself wishing for the prophecy’s fulfillment—a manmade Second Coming, all doom and no redemption.

Weeks without Hawkins had left him with circles under the eyes and even thinner. He now took a cigarette whenever Tommy offered an open pack, and after work crawled into the bed he’d left unmade that morning. Good Friday was nine days away and he would not be heading home to New York: longing for Hawkins had made Thanksgiving and Christmas hard enough; consciousness of banishment would be unbearable in Grandma Gaffney’s parlor.

Once he failed to make his Easter duty at the Communion rail, his estrangement from the Body of Christ would become official and another mortal sin upon his soul. Several times during the last few weeks he had come close to entering the confessional, in search not of absolution but some temporary solace. Yet what could he possibly say in the darkened booth?
Bless me, Father, for I have been unable to sin; he won’t see me.

Should he have gone looking for the third man, then gone to bed with him and Hawk? Should he send Hawk a funny, forgiveness-seeking note that made a joke about the Holy Trinity? Or just offer an abject below-stairs apology, as even his implacable grandmother must once or twice have done to the snotty boarding-school girls, lest she lose the situation on which her life depended?

Would sleeping with two men have been doubly sinful, or just “immature”—as men like himself were judged to be by even sympathetic observers? Would it have been, perhaps, no worse than joining the jerkoff circles of other boys on the rooftop over Ninth Avenue, or by the lake up near Ellenville during one of the family’s rare summer weeks outside the city? Maybe. But if he’d not been able to make himself enter those harmless groupings in the light of day, how could he now expect to lie in the dark while, with one hand, Hawk caressed him and, with the other, pleasured someone else?

Tommy hit his water glass with a knife. “Snap to it, Mr. Laughlin. There’s work to be done.”

Three other Senate aides—assistants to Mundt and Dworshak and McClellan—were at the table. All had extracted pads from briefcases, ready to focus on the ground rules for what people were already calling the Army–McCarthy hearings. Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Matthews, Mundt’s man and McClellan’s, laughed when each saw the other click open a PaperMate pen whose barrel bore the signature of Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. “He must give out five hundred of those a day,” said O’Brien.

Tommy began making energetic notes. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “let’s remember the decision from the executive session: nothing procedural about these hearings will create a precedent for any other set.”

“That’s fine with my man,” said O’Brien, whose boss, the unprepossessing Senator Mundt, would chair the sessions. “He sure isn’t going to want to do
this
again.”

Sandor Klein, assistant to Senator Dworshak, nervously sketched a little chart. His own boss’s position was the most delicate of any of the panel’s senators, McCarthy having handpicked the Idaho Republican to replace him as a voting member of the committee. McCarthy would still be allowed to cross-examine witnesses—when he wasn’t being questioned himself. “Christ,” said Klein, “how
could
this create a precedent? Joe is going to be plaintiff, prosecutor, and defendant—not to mention his own mouthpiece, when Cohn is otherwise occupied.”

Matthews recalled the laughing plea that McCarthy had made to Senator McClellan, the committee’s former chairman, when the majority shifted to the Republicans in ’52: “‘But, Jack, you’ve
got
to stay on as ranking Democrat. Who the hell else is going to keep an eye on me?’”

Klein fretted: “I don’t know how we’re going to have enough people to handle the mail this is going to generate.”

Tommy, beginning to relax a bit, smiled. “We’re short one staffer ourselves. I refer of course to Mr. Jones.” Tommy had helped to arrange a rude reception for Mrs. Smith’s challenger at the state convention in Bangor; he’d also, he now informed the table, managed to spread across Maine the story that Jones had run over his own dog and taken its still-breathing carcass to the town dump. This produced laughter all around, except from Tim, who felt ever more gray and stateless in a world of black and white. McCarthyite tactics were all right, it seemed, so long as they were applied against McCarthy.

Maybe in his despair (another mortal sin), he was taking too seriously what was just the ordinary stuff of politics. After all, Mr. O’Brien, aide to the McCarthy-supporting Mundt, was laughing louder than anyone.

A small commotion across the room caught everybody’s attention. Two tables away from Jean McCarthy, Mrs. Watt, the committee’s chief clerk and supposedly a fan of Joe’s, was sharply dismissing someone who’d set down a piece of paper and a pen beside her buttered roll.

“Ruthie looks miffed,” said Matthews.

“Timothy, go see what that’s all about. Discreetly.”

Obeying McIntyre, Tim rose from the table and got himself as close as he could to Mrs. Watt by pretending to straighten his tie in front of a mirror.

“I won’t sign it!” she repeated, loud enough for half the dining room to hear. Unnoticed in the hubbub, Tim moved even nearer to her table, then returned to his own.

“It’s a loyalty pledge,” he listlessly reported, just as his sandwich arrived. “A messenger gave it to her waiter. The committee staff are being asked to guarantee their support for Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn.”

“By whom?” asked Matthews.

“I couldn’t tell,” answered Tim.

“Well, what’s it supposed to accomplish?” Matthews inquired.

“It’s not what it will accomplish,” said Tommy McIntyre, delighted. “It’s what it signifies. A touch of desperation, I’d say. The two of them are soldering themselves a little closer together. Nice work, Timothy. We ought to reward you with another pair of those.” He pointed to Tim’s cuff links.

“FH,” said Klein, noticing the initials but reading from the right wrist to the left. “What does that stand for?”

“Fordham History,” said Tim, after taking a sip of water. “It’s the department I majored in at school.”

He could see that Tommy didn’t believe the explanation. Fine, he thought. Now you’ve got something on
me.

“With any luck,” said O’Brien, “you can win a pair of links off Joe.” He pointed with awe to Oklahoma’s Senator Kerr, who’d just entered the dining room. The richest man in the upper body was also its best card player, never going anywhere with less than five thousand in his pocket. Once or twice at the poker table he’d taken almost that much off his colleague from Wisconsin.

Tim could see Jean McCarthy coming back from the powder room, waving to the waiter who’d done his duty with the loyalty letter, whatever its ultimate lack of success. He could also now see Senator Hunt waving a swollen right hand—there were rumors of kidney problems—to greet an elderly lady near the maître d’s stand; she congratulated him on having the other day announced that he would run for another term after all.

Mr. Matthews, getting back to business with the others, elaborated upon the “musical chairs” rule that had been adopted to accommodate the cameramen who’d be televising the hearings: each day senators and lawyers around the giant table would move one seat to their right, so that the same players wouldn’t fill the screen day after day.

“Well,” said Senator Mundt’s aide, “this will give Joe a bigger microphone than he’s ever had before.”

“And you think that’ll be
good
for him?” snapped Tommy.

“McIntyre,” asked Matthews, “where is
your
man in all of this?”

“I believe,” said Tommy, “that he’d actually like to get at the truth. Poor bastard.”

Tim suspected this was true, that he and Senator Potter were in the same forlorn position, hoping the army’s executives might be lying a little more than McCarthy and Cohn. And if they weren’t? Would that invalidate everything else the committee had tried to accomplish? Would it leave Father Beane and his exemplary kind any safer from the Communists’ universal advance?

He closed his eyes and again, almost peacefully, imagined a Russian H-bomb flying toward Washington.

None of it mattered. He now knew that he himself would tell any lie, deny even Christ, for one more touch of Hawkins’ hand. These past few weeks, in his own bed several blocks from here, he had found himself unable even to masturbate. He would try, thinking of all the two of them had done, of the smell of Hawk’s hair and neck and armpit, where his own tongue had long since gotten used to going. He would manage to arouse himself, until some tender memory—
There. You’re healed
—would invade his loins and he would climax, if at all, with a strange lack of sensation, like the absence of grace.

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,” Senator 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.