Fellow Travelers (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

June 19, 1954

“Drink, Skippy.”

Tim downed two inches of the highball.

“More,” commanded Fuller.

“What’s it that people say? ‘It’s a little early in the day for this’?” Tim pointed to the clock beside the radio.

“Eleven-forty-five a.m.,” said Fuller. “You think so?”

Tim drank more while Jo Stafford sang “Let’s Just Pretend.” He looked away and said, softly, “You’re nice to let me come over, Hawk.”

He’d arrived five minutes ago, in a state. He was calmer now, but even so, Fuller decided to pull him a couple of inches lower onto the couch cushions. He stroked the hair at Tim’s right temple with the side of his index finger, the way one would a cat’s whiskers. Tim turned to bury his face in the hollow of Hawkins’ neck, surprised by the comfort he could take in the smell—amazed, really, that something still so exotic and
sought
had also become familiar, longstanding.

“Start again from the beginning,” Fuller said.

“I was at my desk by five after eight, I think—even though it’s a Saturday.”

“Ah, yes, a workday. I seem to have forgotten.”

“I was working with the hearings transcript,” Tim explained. “The part from Thursday, the very last day. The
thirty-sixth
day of all that. And you know what I was realizing?” He took another swallow of the highball. “How it’s always easier to follow the printed words from the morning sessions. By the time things would get restarted in the afternoon, a lot of them had put away three drinks at lunch. The sentences would get longer and sloppier and angrier, even with Mrs. Watt cleaning up what the stenographers took down. Anyway, there I was a little while ago, typing out my boss’s closing remarks for a couple of Sunday editors who are planning to run bits of what every senator said.” Loosened by his own drink, he treated Fuller to some pompous mimicry of Potter: “‘I wish to assure the American people who are watching that this is not normal.’”

“Making fun of Citizen Canes!” said Fuller. “There’s hope for you yet.”

Tim sat up straight but still clutched one of the pillows on the couch. “And then of course there’s the big bombshell statement that got him all the headlines. ‘There is little doubt that the testimony on both sides was saturated with statements which were not truthful and which might constitute perjury in a legal sense…. The staff of the subcommittee will have to be overhauled.’ God! It’s been quoted so many times I’ve got it by heart! All the Sunday editors think it’s in the transcript, but you won’t find it there, Hawk. The ‘perjury’ and ‘overhaul’ stuff was in a statement Tommy McIntyre had me mimeograph an hour before the close of the hearings. He passed it out to the reporters without Potter ever having
seen
it, let alone composed it. McCarthy went white when he got a copy! It’s what the Democrats were hoping for all along—a Republican saying out loud they’ve got to fire Cohn! Now there’ll be a vote to do that, and Potter will join the Democrats and make it 4–3. He never would have said it on his own, and he said no such thing in the hearing itself. Tommy tricked him—but you know what? Potter kind of likes it. They’re drawing him as a lion in the cartoons. He’s a big hero of free speech and fair play now. And it’s all
phony.
” He shook his head and finished off the drink. “All
phony.
Potter was more surprised by what he said than McCarthy was.
All phony.
”

“Steady there, Skippy.” Hawkins took the empty glass and pulled Tim back down on the couch. “Tell me when you heard the rifle shot,” he said. “And tell me how you knew what it was. From all those childhood moose-hunting trips up Ninth Avenue?”

“I
didn’t
know what it was. Except that it was unbelievably loud. I checked the paper on the streetcar coming over here: the wind today is north-northeast—perfect for carrying the sound from the SOB to the Capitol. Honest, I thought the Bomb really
had
gone off.” The week had begun with Operation Alert, a ten-minute civil-defense drill that halted traffic across the city and saw white-armbanded marshals herding pedestrians into the doorways of stores and office buildings.

“Senator Hunt got there at eight-thirty,” Tim continued. “He brought the rifle from home, they’re saying, even though he always had a few guns in his office. I got all this from Miss Cook, who went over there to help out. Afterward.”

Tim’s agitation and gestures had subsided, but noticing how pale he still looked, Fuller reached over to put the fan on a higher speed. Along with its dry run for the apocalypse, Monday had brought the beginning of an early, unbearable heat wave.

“Miss Cook says he moved some pictures of his daughter and son from a bookcase to his blotter. Maybe so they’d be the last thing he saw before he pulled the trigger. He did it sitting in his desk chair. Miss Cook also says he left notes to everyone in his family and to half the staff. And that just last week he sent his papers off to the University of Wyoming archives.”

“The radio is saying it was his health. That he got bad news from Walter Reed a couple of weeks ago.” Fuller spoke matter-of-factly, making a casual effort to control Tim’s excitability—which, left to itself, veered ungovernably, they both knew, between something that charmed Fuller and repelled him. “Hunt did,” he pointed out, “quit the race for a second time. The day after his physical, I think.”

“
You
don’t believe that, do you?” asked Tim.

“You mean me of all people?”

“Yeah,
you,
who’s always knocking me off the turnip truck. An hour after it happened Hunt’s office put it out on the wire that he was going to the hospital because of a ‘heart attack’!
You
remember what happened with his son in Lafayette Park. How he got arrested for trying to pick up a cop? Well, Tommy says a week ago Senator Welker and Senator Bridges were letting Hunt know that if he didn’t pull out of the reelection race his son’s record would be an issue.”

Hawkins, who had never told Tim about the lie-detector test ordered up by Bridges’ protégé, Scott McLeod, pretended to laugh. “‘How to Be a Man,’” he said cryptically, getting up to make a second drink that he said they could split.

“You know what was the first thing I saw on my desk this morning?” Tim asked. “A ‘subpoena.’ They made the invitation to the farewell party look like one. Everybody was going to celebrate the end of the hearings on Monday night, all together, Democrats and the press included. I’ll bet Kenneth Woodforde would’ve been there, knocking one back with Cohn. Well, now maybe they’ll be going to a funeral instead. These
stupid
hearings.”

“They’re over, Timothy.” Hawkins returned to the couch with the second highball. “They ended with a whimper.
And
a bang.”

“Yeah,” said Tim, taking the first big sip. “They’re over, and they were about
nothing.
Or, as Welch would say, they were all about ‘the ’tis and the ’taint.’ Which puts it better than ‘Somebody is not telling the truth.’ You know what?
Nobody’s
been telling the truth, my boss included. And you know what else?” Tim asked, sitting up again to project a louder indignation. “You know what Jenkins said at the end?” He took a deep breath to begin a baritone imitation of the Tennessee counsel: “‘Is it askin’ too much of inscrutable Fate to hope that the paths of all of us will sometime cross again?’ Like he wants to have a
reunion,
or start an alumni association. What a
dick.
”

Hawkins laughed as loudly as Tim had ever heard him. “Now you’ll be getting amorous, Skippy, because you always do when you’re angry. And I don’t have a lot of time.”

The circles that had been under Tim’s eyes in April were gone, but Hawkins noticed that his pupils were dilated almost to the point of death. Even so, he could feel his belt being loosened. “Have you no decency?” he asked, quoting the words that had gotten Welch so many headlines and making them both laugh. “Have you at long last no decency, sir?” He caressed the back of Tim’s head, which had already gone to work on him, but after a minute he quietly withdrew, pulling Tim up beside him. “Don’t finish me off,” he whispered. “We’ll save things for another day.”

The last two words struck Tim’s ears like the gift he was never allowed to take for granted, never permitted to expect. With “another day” for once in the bank, he decided to borrow against it. “I came by looking for you last night,” he admitted. “I know I’m not supposed to.” He drank an inch of the second highball. “So where were you?” he persisted.

“Early or late?” asked Hawkins.

“Let’s say early,” Tim answered, picking what might be the easier answer to bear.

“At the Sulgrave Club. Near whose elevator, I may have told you, Joe McCarthy once kicked Drew Pearson in the balls.”

“How did McCarthy even get in the door there?” Tim experienced a short surge of ethnic fellow feeling. “A place like that must make him feel like Martin Durkin.” People still joked that Ike’s Labor secretary, a union man, had made for a cabinet of “eight millionaires and one plumber.”

Hawk leaned over and kissed him. “Ah, the pluck of the Irish.”

“So who were you
with
there? Some Episcopal bishop?”

“Close. Joe Alsop.”

“Pardon
me.
”

Fuller turned serious, made his embrace more sheltering. “You say the hearings were about nothing. Do you want to know what they
were
about? I’ll tell you.”

Tim looked him in the eye. “Are you saying you know what Cohn has on McCarthy? Did Alsop tell you what he was hinting at in that column?”

“Cohn holds nothing over McCarthy,” said Hawkins. “Even Alsop gets things wrong. But in the months since that column ran he’s managed to get them half right.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s what
Schine
has on McCarthy. Something a house detective in one of the Schine family hotels saw Joe doing. And apparently photographed.”

“Doing
what
?” asked Tim.

“Can’t tell you,” said Hawkins. “Because I don’t know, and neither does Alsop. But it happened last fall, during one of those committee trips to New York, when your Mr. Jones would play at being a senator, and when old Joe was getting tired of Schine’s laziness, not to mention a little wary and weary of the whole Roy-and-Dave show and the rumors in the press. He was thinking about cutting Schine loose. And then suddenly Schine—what is it that people say?—‘knew too much.’”

“Well,” said Tim, “I guess the draft notice made everything moot.”

“No, the induction made things worse. All at once Schine would be needing a slew of favors down at Fort Dix. And McCarthy was powerless to refuse. The most he could do, when Cohn kept pressing, was complain a little about Schine to Adams and some others. But he never complained about him in front of Roy.”

“Because Roy would threaten him with what Schine had.”

“No. Roy doesn’t know that Schine has anything over Joe. He thinks Joe went through two months of nationally broadcast hearings because Joe sees Schine as the same paragon he sees. Love
is
blind.”

“But as my grandmother still says, ‘The neighbors ain’t.’”

“Yes,” said Hawkins, “though some of them are a little too fastidious to believe what they’re seeing.”

Tim was still struggling to work out the algebra of blackmail. “How does Joe Alsop know?”

“Some smart reporter who owes him a favor gave him this story that he’d half pieced together and couldn’t write because the other half was missing.”

“How do you know Alsop? I never asked you.”

“People like us always know each other.”

Tim knew that “people like us” meant wealthy Protestants and not secret homosexuals, but he still had to ask: “Is he in love with you?”

“Probably,” said Fuller. “But only enough to bat his eyes at me from the other end of the chesterfield sofa. I’m given to understand that he likes things a little rougher back in the bunkhouse.”

“What do
you
get out of it?”

“Excellent company,” said Hawkins. “Interesting information.”

“I guess you
do
have something on him,” said Tim, whose memory of their conversation about Alsop’s column, swallowed up by the rest of that catastrophic night in March, was now coming back.

“Plenty,” said Hawkins, who rested Tim’s head on his chest. He began rubbing the boy’s back with long, insistent strokes that, for all their strength, didn’t seem a prelude to anything.

“What are you doing?” Tim finally asked.

“Trying to stop your flesh from crawling.”

The answer, Tim thought, contained every part of Hawk’s feelings toward him: protectiveness, affection, distance, enforcement. “How to be a man,” Tim felt inspired to say, though he still didn’t know what Hawk had meant by the words a little while ago.

“Yes,” said Hawkins. “A man of a certain kind.”

Tim hated hearing him say this. Not because he disputed his own membership in the homosexual subspecies indicated by the phrase; only because he hated being forced to acknowledge that God had assigned Hawk to this same slum precinct in His creation.

“Well,” said Tim, eager to return the conversation to McCarthy, “I guess I now know at least the half of it.”

“Less than half,” Hawkins replied. “You still don’t know what McIntyre has on Citizen Canes.”

“That’s true.”

“Find out.”

“Why?”

“Despite whatever they taught you at St. Aloysius, knowledge isn’t power. But it is insurance. Even Schine, who’s dumb as a post, knows that much.”

“Tommy was
in excelsis
when things ended Thursday. But he didn’t slow down for a second. Not even this morning. It’s the last weekend of the primary campaign, and he says he’s going to keep what they’re calling Jones’s ‘hidden vote’ well hidden. He was on the phone even while the ambulance was leaving with Senator Hunt. They must have heard the siren up in Maine, through the line.”

It was at this moment, when the half hour of Jo Stafford numbers had concluded, that the radio announced the death of Wyoming’s senior senator. Tim said nothing, just picked up the second highball.