Fellow Travelers (20 page)

“New York City,” said Tim.

“Ah,” replied the bartender. “A hard case.” Meaning, Tim guessed, that there was no place any bigger he could escape to, no anonymous haven where he could be himself and—as he so obviously needed to—relax.

Across the room a skinny Negro scolded his white boyfriend: “You do
so
know. My black taffeta with the pleats!”

With a tilt of his head, the bartender signaled a bouncer to eject the overexcited colored boy. Tim couldn’t hide a certain relief and maybe even his feeling that justice was being done by the regulation of such effeminacy. The bartender, he knew, could see him pining for normality, for the chance to believe he still lived with the rest of the world.

“It was more fun in here ten years ago,” the barman assured him. “Soldiers every night. Of every stripe and kind.”

The cat still had Tim’s tongue, and the bartender made one more attempt: “Let me guess. He’s married. Or ambisextrous?” Tim laughed a little.

“Bingo,” said the bartender, moving away to mix someone else’s drink. “Relax, apple pie,” he said by way of farewell. “But be careful who you talk to.”

Tim wondered about the advice: Might someone actually hurt him? Maybe there
was
a Master List? Could the Negro’s boyfriend, or even the guy with no eyebrows, actually be an informant?

He stayed only another minute. While riding the streetcar home, passing the
Star
’s building on Pennsylvania, he reached over the open window to clean his hands in the raindrops that a thundershower had left upon the glass. Then he dried himself with his handkerchief, not wanting to smudge the ink when he took Hawkins’ postcard, once more, from his pocket.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

September 8, 1954

The defense of Joe McCarthy against censure had begun presenting itself this morning, but the senator’s talented young lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, still seemed to be spending the bulk of his effort on keeping his client quiet. As to the allegation that McCarthy had abused General Zwicker during the subcommittee’s February hearings in New York, Williams had so far offered only the testimony of a salesman who’d taken a tourist’s peek at that day’s brief open session and could report that he had heard General Zwicker, under his breath, refer to the junior senator from Wisconsin as a son of a bitch. Which, it was now implied, had justified all that followed.

The censure hearing now stood in lunchtime recess, so Tim lowered the radio on his desk and ate his sandwich. He looked out the window at the Capitol lawn, still strewn with tree branches blown down the other day by Hurricane Carol. Mary Johnson’s little kitchen window, which Tim was now used to sitting beside through long, difficult conversations about Hawkins Fuller and Paul Hildebrand, had lost a pane of glass during the storm, whereas at Hawk’s apartment, where Tim spent the hurricane’s worst hours, the loud hum and rattle of the new air conditioner had blunted one’s awareness that anything unusual was happening outside.

The appliance, extravagantly extolled by Hawk, was never off. “Are we doing this just to keep warm?” Tim had laughingly asked while they had sex one unseasonably cool, but still air-conditioned, night. “That’s
always
the reason for doing this,” Hawk responded, leaving unclear whether he was referring to his own low emotional temperature or the futility of all human endeavor.

Over the past month, Tim had actually been allowed to spend the night a couple of times. On these occasions, for long stretches Hawk would hold him close, ostensibly against the air conditioner’s cold. But even so, Mrs. Mesta’s party remained the last time they’d been out in public together, and Tim still knew never to come over unannounced, or with groceries, or to answer the phone without being told to.

“Well,” said Tommy McIntyre, now hurrying into the office, “old Joe’s hand just shook when he swore the oath.”

Tim put the radio back on; the recess was over, and there would be no muzzling the defendant now that, at his own insistence, he’d taken the witness stand.

“It’s a shame the republic has any other business!” crowed Tommy, whose enjoyment of McCarthy’s travails was undiminished. “But your friend Mr. Fuller will be here a little later, about something entirely different.”

“My friend?” asked Tim, reflexively lying.

“He’s coming over with his boss, Morton. The great solon”—Tommy pointed to Potter’s office—“is on their docket once again. They’re all supposed to fret about our majority leader’s brilliant suggestion that we break off relations with Russia.” Walking away, Tommy added, in regard to Fuller: “Just thought you’d like to know. Anticipation being the pleasure it is.”

Hawkins and Mr. Morton arrived at the high point of McCarthy’s testimony about General Zwicker. The director of Congressional Relations went in to see Potter on his own, while Fuller sat down on the edge of Tim’s desk and began listening to the radio.

“Did you say ‘not fit to wear the uniform’?” asked Edward Bennett Williams.

“No,” McCarthy answered. “I said he was not fit to wear the uniform of a
general.
”

Tim cracked up. “The Jesuits would love that, Hawk!”

Fuller smiled.

Looking at him, Tim tried to imagine Hawkins years from now, with a pipe, the two of them seated in front of the radio after dinner. It was, he knew, a fantasy more ridiculous than any plot ever featured on
Mr. Keen,
but the thought of it warmed him while debate continued over Zwicker’s uniform. Tim thought of Hawk’s old navy dress whites hanging in the closet on I Street; once or twice he’d felt the urge to put them on, not to partake of their owner’s godlike aspect but to assume the mantle of simple masculine normality, the movie-and-magazine ideal he remembered from his own, presexual World War II.

It was more fun in here ten years ago. Soldiers and sailors every night. Of every stripe and kind.

A burst of whistling issued from Tommy McIntyre. Indifferent to the business between Potter and Morton, he’d returned to the outer office and cranked up the volume of the radio. “So, are the two of you having supper together?”

“No,” Tim hastily answered.

“Good,” said Tommy, turning his face to Hawkins. “I need Mr. Laughlin to dine with me.”

“Be my guest,” said Fuller.

The response, however casual, still implied that the permission was Hawk’s to give, and the answer excited Tim all afternoon, long after Hawk had left. He was still feeling a nervous pride from the exchange when he and Tommy arrived at O’Donnell’s, down on E Street.

They ordered the filet of sole, though Friday remained two days away, and Tommy began their conversation with the news that Howard Rushmore, an ex-Communist who for a little while had been the subcommittee’s research director, had just become the editor of
Confidential
magazine. “He was always pushin’ a story about Mrs. Roosevelt and her nigger chauffeur. Well, maybe that legend of love will finally see the light of print!”

Tim stared at the tines of his fork and figured Tommy would soon get to the point of their being here.

After a long pause, the older man asked: “You know how he perspires when he walks?”

Tim knew that he meant Potter. “Yes.”

“He did even then. Years before the legs were gone. I saw him do it in ’38.”

Oh, I’ve known Mr. McIntyre for years.

“He was already trying to date Lorraine,” Tommy continued. “Her old man was a fish dealer, a big wheel in town, and Charlie wasn’t getting anywhere. Not as a potato farmer’s son who’d been working in a cannery to put himself through State Normal College in Ypsilanti. He’d wanted to go to law school, but no dough, and he’d ended up a social worker in Cheboygan.” Tommy finished off his 7Up. “I think he sweated from sheer strain, from the dull mighty
effort
he gave everything. I remember seeing him one afternoon from behind a big empty crate on Huron Street. His face was drenched.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Sleeping. Living. It was my first stay on what’s demotically known as Skid Row, though in Cheboygan I never skidded. I
stuck
to the fish paste on the sidewalk.” With a look, he indicated that there was no need for Tim to ask questions. The story would come, unbidden.

“I’d been a reporter for three papers in Detroit, at least when I wasn’t drinking. But at that point I’d been drinking since ’36, when I’d done a little work for somebody’s campaign for governor, can’t remember whose. Can’t remember any of that besides getting knocked around pretty badly by some boys from the other side.”

He told the waiter to bring Tim a second old-fashioned. “And another 7Up for myself.” Tim half understood that
he
was supposed to drink tonight, in some act of surrogacy. Tommy looked at the arriving old-fashioned in a way that suggested he was perilously close to falling off the wagon.

“Yes,” he said, crunching a bread stick with his yellow teeth, “we were both fine citizens of Cheboygan, Michigan. He stayed stuck in the social-aid bureau and got to supervising it by the time he went off to the war. But that was later.” Tommy crunched the bread stick. “In ’38 he was my caseworker, though they called it something else back then.”

“Was he unfair to you?” asked Tim, fearing the winds of what he now realized was an epic, ancient enmity.

“He was as just as Judge Hardy!” cried Tommy, with a laugh. “No, let me clarify that. He was just to
me.
” His mottled face contracted with anger. “Not to
her.
”

Tim knew he wasn’t referring to the future Mrs. Potter.

“Annie Larchwood,” said Tommy. “She’s still alive, though she barely knows it. She’s a drinker, too. Became one after her husband, Mike—an organizer, a Communist—got forced off his job on the line. Need I say, Master Timothy, that he drank as well? He walked out on her on his way to hell. Died from the stuff. I met Annie at his funeral. Amplification: I fell in love with her at his funeral.”

Tommy’s skull looked like a grenade. Tim tried to signal that he was paying close attention, as if that might keep the pin from being pulled.

“She went on relief, and soon enough got to the end of the money. To keep the checks coming, she pulled some kind of fast one, and straight-arrow Charlie, who ran
her
case, too, cut her off. But then, in a moment of weakness, when he was despairing over the fishmonger’s daughter, he put her back on the rolls. After she agreed to sleep with him.”

Tommy’s contempt was total—it embraced Potter’s rectitude as much as his lapse.

“She gave in and got knocked up with the son Mike had never managed to give her. The snot-nosed little issue turned fourteen last year.”

Tim thought it an odd formulation. Last year?

“When I brought him to New York,” Tommy added. “He’s a filthy punk, though he has his uses. Drink up.”

For the moment Tommy would go no further. In the brief silence, Tim swallowed more of the old-fashioned. Then he asked: “What makes you hate McCarthy so much?” It seemed the logical next question; with his loathing for Potter now explained, Tommy could move on to the next titanic grudge inside him.

The analysis that followed turned out to be patient, almost professorial. “All of Annie Larchwood’s troubles began with the hounding of her red husband, a better man than McCarthy
or
Zwicker. All of Annie’s troubles
continued
with Charlie, who’s one of nature’s blind little do-gooders. No,” he said, noting the puzzlement on Tim’s face, “I’m not some old aggrieved Commie with a pious beef. In fact, I’d make a pretty good anarchist; I told that to Woodforde the other day.” He took a second and last forkful of fish. “What I am mostly is a drunk, whether or not I’m drinking. Same way you’re a Catholic, whether or not you’re taking Communion. Which these days, I suspect, you’re not.”

“I hate Communists,” said Tim, trying to change the subject.

“Of course you do,” said Tommy, sweetly mocking.

“Does Senator Potter know he has a son?”

“Senator Potter knows what I tell him,” barked Tommy, before resuming the mode of earnest tutelage. “Yes, I did have the pleasure of imparting that news when I began helping the staff. Let’s say that the possession of such knowledge has helped me to make our great solon somewhat useful where the junior senator from Wisconsin is concerned.”

Tommy finished the last of his 7Up, and with a tap of his index finger commanded Tim to keep going on the old-fashioned. “Oh, it’s not as if no one’s got nothing over
me.
Joe and Royboy know I got imposed on Charlie by the automobile fellas, to keep him voting on the straight and narrow. Yes, I gave the auto men a prior decade of sober service, in the papers and in campaigns.”

Everybody’s money comes from someplace, Senator. Everybody’s
people
come from someplace.
Tim remembered the quick threat to Potter, the poisoned meat in the sandwich of bonhomie that McCarthy had served that afternoon last March. Tommy would have heard the remark from the outer office, where he’d decided to wait.

“But Joe and Roy don’t know I got myself imposed on Charlie for my own particular motives. And they don’t know I’ve got something far bigger on them than they’ve got on yours truly.”

There would be no further explanation tonight. Tim reached for a peppermint and kept his eyes on the tablecloth. “Why did you tell me all this?” he asked at last.

“Because I’ve seen you looking at Mr. Fuller. And I know that your life will be given to his as surely as Annie Larchwood got mine. I told you because you’ll
understand.
”

Tommy pushed aside the just-brought coffee and leaned into the table. His eyes shone with a brutal sympathy, letting Tim know that, from this moment on, for the foreseeable future, he lived not just in Hawkins’ clutches, but in Tommy McIntyre’s, too.

“I should go,” Tim said, weakly.

“Use it for a taxi,” said Tommy, refusing Tim’s dollar bills. “I know where you’re headed.”

When he got to I Street, his head off-kilter from the old-fashioneds, Tim looked up and saw that the apartment was dark. He wondered if he should sit on the steps and wait until Hawk returned with some weeknight conquest. For a few minutes he stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide, until he felt an enormous, unexpected surge of anger. In his mind’s eye, Hawk was bobbing atop the clean blue ocean in his pressed naval uniform, while he himself was being dragged to its weed-choked depths.

Drunk as he was, he could feel the hint of autumn in the air. A “School’s Open Drive Carefully” poster flapped against the streetlamp.
NO DANCING. NO CARRYING DRINKS
.

He walked up the building’s steps and, once inside the vestibule, took down the super’s posted instruction that tenants keep their new air conditioners pitched at a five-degree angle toward the street; drips were damaging rugs and seeping into floorboards. On the back of the paper, he wrote a note to leave in Hawkins’ mail slot:

You said knowledge is insurance. Against
what
? The chance that somebody might turn out to be what he
appears
to be? That somebody might not own somebody else? I’ll
never
own you, no matter how many times I hum “You Belong to Me” in the shower. But
I
belong to
you
—whether you like it or not.

After the cab ride, he had no money for even the streetcar. And so he walked all the way home, miles, wishing he could sing in his chains like the sea.