Fellow Travelers (28 page)

This was the kind of story Tim wrote up for
The Com Z Cadence
, the official newspaper of the army’s Second LOC, or Line of Communication, a significant stretch of the Americans’ ever-burgeoning Cold War home away from home. Running from Verdun to Orléans to La Rochelle, the Second LOC had been established as a backstop, in the event the First LOC, strung through Germany, got overrun by the Russians. The Yanks may have come late to Verdun back in ’17, but this time they’d come to town early, manning the 7,965th Area Command in advance of the next war.

The Com Z Cadence
—the Last Voice You’ll Hear, as the staff liked to joke—specialized in morale-building local color and human interest. In the last couple of weeks Tim had done stories on the flower sellers outside the U.S. cemetery at Varennes, and the never-idle two-thousand-foot runway at Saran. His biggest accomplishment had been a story he’d freelanced to
Stars and Stripes
itself about the engineering depot at Toul, where Caesar’s legions had once camped and where their American successors, after spending a first winter in tents, had by now built a whole town of warehouses, barracks, and chapels. They’d even fielded a baseball team called the Toul-Nancy Dodgers.

The bus let the tourists off in town and continued to the base, whose horseshoe-shaped welcome arch reminded him of the neon sign greeting tourists to Reno, as he’d seen it years ago on a postcard sent by Uncle Frank. Inside the caserne, Tim shared a large room, down the hall from the First Signal Group’s cryptographers, with seven other guys. The barracks dated from just after the Franco-Prussian War—a war he’d barely heard of—and some recruits said you could still smell the stables that had once been on the ground floor. Tim’s own floor, the third, was served by a single shower, which provided a measure of hygiene hilarity for letters to Francy and Tom, communications that he kept immaculately free of the politics and religion he sent to Mary and to Woodforde.

“Un visiteur—pour vous!”
said the local woman who manned the message desk.

Tim cocked his head in disbelief.

“Oui!”
she insisted, pointing to the little excuse for a lounge down the hall and to the right. “He is here on, how do Americans say, his honey
moon
?”

For one moment, his heart pounding, he thought it might be Hawk:
to be married on Saturday, December third.
It
was
the sort of thing he would do, a show of the brazen insouciance he couldn’t live without displaying. But then he realized it had to be Jerry Baumeister, who must have made his
mariage blanc
to Beverly Phillips and come here on a side trip from Paris to show her another portion of the culture behind his now useless master’s degree.

Once inside the lounge, Tim saw that he was wrong in this guess, too.

“Paul!” he exclaimed.

The “brewer”—he could hear Hawkins saying it—extended his hand.

“Private Laughlin.”

“Where’s Mrs. Hildebrand? Congratulations. I just heard.”

“Thanks,” said Paul, who went on to explain that his wife, Marjorie, until recently his brother’s bookkeeper, was resting in town at the Hôtel Bellevue on the Avenue de Douaumont, which neither of them could really pronounce. They’d been married last Saturday, the tenth, and had come over to Paris on TWA. Even though it was a honeymoon, Marjorie wanted to see the patch of ground in Ardennes where her brother had been killed late in ’44, as well as the “Red Schoolhouse” over in Rheims, where the Germans had surrendered to the Allies. When they were through with this historical circuit, they would start making their way to London.

Tim told them he could get information from FAFLO, the French-American Fiscal Liaison Office—“we’ve got initials for everything”—about discounts for a Europabus they could take from Paris to Calais.

Paul nodded thanks.

“She never told me you were getting married,” said Tim, lowering his voice and somehow unable to say “Mary,” as if the new Marjorie Hildebrand might actually be here instead of at the hotel.

“She asked me to check up on you,” explained Paul. “Make sure you were okay.”

“I write to her more than to my sister!” Tim said, with an overhearty laugh. “She
knows
I’m fine.”

“She says you don’t talk about much except God and the Communists.”

Tim hoped his hand was covering the title of Dawson’s book. He continued speaking through simulated laughter: “She doesn’t tell
me
much, either. Like about your getting married, for instance!”

Hildebrand wondered what she did and didn’t tell this kid, whom he liked well enough despite his condition, which he probably couldn’t help and might still be young enough to grow out of. Had she confided her sputtering affair with the Estonian—as she’d confided it to him? He doubted it, since in his own case Mary had almost made a present of the story, an intimate parting gift on the eve of his marriage.

“Did she tell you,” asked Paul, “that her friend Beverly has left the office?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, just a couple of weeks ago. She’s joined the staff of some Illinois congressman. She made a connection with his office when she did that charity show on the Hill. Mary says she never liked working for State after they fired her friend Jerry.”

“I came over here with some of his French books.”

Paul nodded. “Are you allowed to show me around?”

“Sure,” said Tim, pointing the way forward. They walked back toward the message center, but after several steps, more to test himself than anything else, he stopped and asked: “Did Mary go to Fuller’s wedding? On the third?”

“Yes,” said Paul, reluctantly. “In fact, I was her date.” A part of him wanted to rest his hand on the kid’s shoulder, but too much else in him was repelled by the possbility as soon as it came to his mind. “That crazy woman, the one who used to be in her office, showed up at the back of the church.”

“Oh,
her,
” said Tim, laughing.

Nine hours earlier Fuller had been traveling from Union Station to the I Street apartment in a cab that got trapped in traffic around Dupont Circle. A colored man had just leapt to his death from the top of the Connecticut Avenue underpass.

“They want to kill me! They want to kill me!” the man had shouted to the policemen urging him toward safety. The remark had been passed down two long lines of idling vehicles by a morbid pedestrian walking the sliver of space between them.

“And I suspects he’s right,” Fuller’s driver, also colored, had whispered, sadly and to no one, while his passenger thrummed his fingers on a beribboned package containing a silver bowl.

Married thirteen days ago, Fuller and Lucy had gone for their honeymoon to Acapulco, a destination that made his aunt Valerie sniff with surprise that her nephew’s old-money bride should be aping the flashy Catholic Kennedys. As it turned out, the wedding trip had been cut short several days ago by the death of Uncle Ned, whose funeral in New York Fuller was returning from today. Lucy would stay on there for one more night, then go up to Massachusetts for a few items she wished to bring with her to their new home.

He, in the meantime, would take possession of the little brick house, attached on one side, over in the Parkfairfax section of Alexandria. The development had sprung up quickly during the war, but was leafy and handsome by now, a half-time home to many younger congressmen, and, these days, if Fuller wasn’t mistaken, to Citizen Canes himself. His own possessions from I Street would go over tomorrow in a truck driven by the built Italian boy who sometimes did yard work for Andy Sorrell, and who, Andy assured him, could be had.

Lucy had been highly presentable at the funeral, never overdoing a gesture. She’d had a veil on her hat, but a small one, and it had been pulled back, off her face. She’d looked appropriately grave without shedding tears. And yet, while the money on both sides of her family was older and ampler than what had ever been on either side of Fuller’s—and although the art-historian father had put a thick patina of culture onto the Boardmans—there
was
something of the arriviste about her. She betrayed a strong, potentially useful insecurity that made her seem almost a shopgirl who felt she had to keep earning her splendid new husband. With the actual shopgirls of the world, her manners and aspect of entitlement carried the full birthright of arrogance, but in all that concerned Fuller she displayed an undisguisable nervousness. Unchecked, this might grow toward panic and make her demanding, but properly managed, it should keep her nicely off balance, Fuller reasoned, just the way she’d been in the three days between his application for the marriage license (easily revokable) and the actual wedding, which had been carried out down here, quite modestly, at St. Margaret’s Episcopal.

The phone had been ringing when he came into the apartment this afternoon: Lucy, half-teasing and half-nagging about his having neglected to get it turned off. He made a note to do so as she went on to explain how she wanted them to go hear the Yale Glee Club in Lisner Auditorium on Monday night. Her father had been a member “eons ago,” and the concert could be her and Fuller’s first trip into town together from Parkfairfax, assuming he didn’t himself want to arrive at the auditorium directly from the office.

To all of which he had responded, without audible irony, “Yes, dear.”

His reasons for marrying had proved stronger than ever at Ned’s funeral, held inside St. James’ Episcopal on Madison Avenue, a hell of a lot fancier than St. Margaret’s on Connecticut. Fuller’s least favorite sister had been wearing a big turquoise amulet, as if it were the latchkey to Ned’s New Mexico house. His father, now judged to have lost much of his sense ahead of his money, was mostly shunned by his own partners. And his mother, looking neither particularly resentful nor present, had worn a gold Catholic crucifix with a chunky graven image of Christ’s cadaver attached to it, the whole thing more vulgar and a lot more expensive than his sister’s necklace. Both his parents were under sixty and already doddering. Aunt Valerie, buzzing with vitality and animus, could be seen turning into some baleful family retainer out of Balzac, wondering what she was to do with these
ancien régime
characters she’d been saddled with.

A good thing old man Boardman had paid for the little wedding down here in D.C. In fact, at the subsequent funeral Fuller had found himself guessing that the new in-law might quietly be kicking in to help out with Uncle Ned’s departure, Ned having been pretty badly depleted at the close. As Fuller had listened to the tiny boys’ choir, which he’d sung in himself twenty years before, he’d wondered if either of his parents had even remembered to make the customary donation for the little angels’ high-pitched services. Probably Mother had, unless she’d recently spent that pittance, too, on Irish priests bringing the Word to South American Indians.

Now, as he poured himself a drink, the late news was murmuring out of the television, which Lucy, on her one inspection of his “bachelor apartment” had suggested might not be large enough for the place in Alexandria. Maybe he’d just give it away to the Italian boy tomorrow morning. In any case, its swan song here, now coming through the mesh, would be these dronings by Kefauver about the important work he’d done investigating juvenile delinquency.

That’s me. I’m your hoodlum, your little j.d.

Fuller looked at the kitchen chair, surprised to remember the ardent kisses of a particular morning, and the way Skippy hadn’t been able to unzip either of their pants fast enough. All in all, a much more bravura display than what he could expect from the one in the bedroom now, this sweatered college kid he’d met ice-skating on the C&O canal a couple of hours ago. He already couldn’t remember the name, only that he’d been calling him Dicky, for Dick Button, under the small bit of available moonlight. His own name would remain a convenient secret, since he’d removed the strip of paper from the doorbell down on the first floor—the one bit of packing he’d accomplished so far.

“Be right in,” Fuller called out to Dicky, who was lying on the bed, still in his sweater, as patient for his unwrapping as Lucy had been on the wedding night at the Hay-Adams.

He looked again at the kitchen chair, remembering the morning he’d been strapped to McLeod’s magic, inquisitorial machine; remembering, again, the hour before that, here.

Have you ever considered yourself to be in love with another male?

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

May 24, 1956

“Welcome to the 7,965th, sir.”

Major Conroy, the public-affairs officer, shook Senator Potter’s hand and escorted him to the small dais that had been set up at the front of the enlisted-men’s club. “I know you’re already acquainted with this fellow.”

“Hello, son,” said Potter, shaking Tim’s hand. “Good to see you in uniform.”

Tim thought Potter didn’t look entirely certain about whom he was greeting. More than a year had passed, after all, since his departure from the office. But there was no time for more than a handshake. He’d been assigned to write about this quick visit from several members of the Armed Services Committee, who were over here inspecting several American installations and were soon to leave for the LOC’s headquarters in Orléans. Potter did not have a seat on Armed Services, but as a war hero who’d escaped with his life from this region, he had been invited to junket along by Scoop Jackson, his old Democratic colleague on the McCarthy committee.

The other Democrat here was Mississippi’s John Stennis; Mrs. Smith of Maine and Styles Bridges of New Hampshire made up the Republican side of the delegation. “Stylish” Bridges, Hawk had always called the latter, who looked a little like the actor Lyle Talbot. Moving quickly to his seat, Tim didn’t shake hands with any senator besides Potter, though he felt a slightly ridiculous desire to ask Mrs. Smith if she knew what had become of Robert Jones since she’d beaten him in the primary two years ago.

“We haven’t had this much excitement here,” announced Major Conroy, “since Billy Graham dropped in last summer!” Amidst general laughter he turned the proceedings over to Senator Stennis, the senior majority member, who explained through his bad teeth and impenetrable Southern accent that the group would be winding up its fact-finding travels at the new NATO air-forces headquarters in northern Italy.

“Unfortunately,” Mrs. Smith added, “Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce won’t be there to greet us. She’s home in the States for a bit, recovering nicely from a bout of illness. I was hoping for a bit of female company, but it appears I’ll have to keep putting up with these gentlemen instead.”

“Ah, Mrs. Luce,” whispered Kenneth Woodforde. “Mother Superior as imagined by Harry Winston.”

Besides a man from the AP, who wore a button saying
FREE THE MARTONS
, Woodforde appeared to be the only American covering the delegation. Weeks ago he had sent a letter with the news that he’d be traveling with the senators, and he had laughed when Tim replied by asking if
The Nation
would be paying his way over. He was here on some money advanced to him by Harper & Row, for whom he was producing a book called
Armed and Dangerous: America’s Permanent War Footing,
an exposé of defense-contractor gluttons and their legislative ladles in both houses of Congress. It would be as strident, he promised, as the publisher would permit.

Picking up on Major Conroy’s Billy Graham remark, Senator Jackson told the recruits who’d been mustered to attend the event: “We hope that during your period of service over here you have absolutely
no
excitement whatsoever. We just want you to do your jobs in peace and then to come home in
one
piece.”

Amidst the applause and whooping, Woodforde asked Tim: “So what were you doing when they dragged you over to this show? Peeling potatoes?”

“Wrapping up a Princess Grace souvenir wedding plate to send to my mother.”

“I hear the heir she produces will look a lot like William Holden.”

“Do you have a
question
?” Senator Jackson inquired, testily, pointing to Woodforde.

“Yes, I do. Why, when the United States professes to support the United Nations as a freewheeling arena for the airing of differences, have your senatorial colleagues on the Internal Security Committee been calling for the expulsion of the Soviet delegate, Arkady Sobolev?”

Jackson replied with the kind of scorn Tim remembered him displaying once or twice in the Caucus Room. “Mr. Sobolev understands a little about expulsion himself. As you know perfectly well, five young Soviet sailors recently defected and were given asylum while they were in New York City. And not long after that some of Sobolev’s muscle men managed to hustle them onto a plane out of New York and back to Moscow. Anyone want to take bets on whether they’re still alive? You’re confusing a diplomat with a thug, Mr. Woodforde.”

Woodforde maintained a smirk as he wrote down Jackson’s response.

Senator Bridges, a natural grandstander, decided to lighten the moment with a little pandering. He pointed to the sign at the back of the enlisted-men’s club and began reciting its injunction: “‘In the eyes of foreign people, you are a mirror reflecting everything the United States looks like and stands for. By your appearance and actions, so is your country judged.’ Good advice. But I’ve got only one question for the men: How are they feeding you?”

During the derisive roar that followed, Woodforde spoke loudly into Tim’s ear: “Christ, he might as well be Bob Hope with the golf club. I’m half expecting Virginia Mayo to come out.”

When the ruckus died down, the AP man asked the senators where Estes Kefauver, a member of the committee, was today.

Mrs. Smith replied that she “shouldn’t speak for the majority” but “could only imagine he’s campaigning in Florida.” Stennis, who wished no success for Kefauver, a desegregationist from the neighboring state of Tennessee, pursed his lips. While this went on, Tim regarded Potter, the only one who’d said nothing so far—as mute as he’d typically been on the McCarthy committee. He looked absent, even lost. Perhaps his mind was back in ’45 now that he’d returned to France, but still, unless a roaring automotive economy carried him over the finish line in Michigan, he looked like a bad prospect for reelection two years from now.

“You have a pass at twenty-one hundred hours,” Woodforde told Tim.

“I do?”

“Yes, the public-affairs officer seems to believe that even
The Nation
’s man can be brought around by a full display of cooperation. Everything’s supposed to be at my disposal until tomorrow morning. Including the correspondent of
The Com Z Cadence.
”

“You’re not following them to Orléans this afternoon?”

“I’ll catch up with the marionettes in Italy.”

“Okay,” said Tim, tentatively. “I’m just a little worried about time.” He was on deadline, he explained, with another story—about the Spiritualaires, a singing quintet of Negro servicemen.

“You’ve got time,” Woodforde assured him. “And I’ll bring you up to date on things back home. Your old boss, McIntyre, has all kinds of interesting matters to impart. About some of your old friends.” He looked at Tim, waiting for the last remark to register. “So where do I come by for you?”

Sure enough, when nine p.m. arrived, it became clear that Major Conroy had permitted Woodforde into even the caserne. Arriving punctually to take Tim out for a beer, the writer rolled his eyes while pointing to copies of
National Review
and
Encounter
that lay atop Tim’s footlocker.

Tim explained that the first was part of a subscription his father had gotten him, and the second a single issue he’d picked up at the English-language bookshop in Paris.

“We know,” Woodforde explained, “that
National Review
is made possible by the family money of a crazy individual. It’ll be a while before we learn where
Encounter
’s money comes from, but when we do you’ll realize it’s as much an organ of the United States government as
The Com Z Cadence.
”

“Are you ready for a drink?” Tim asked, giving him a serene smile.

The two of them walked back to the enlisted-men’s club where the Senate delegation had been presented this morning. The makeshift dais was gone, and a handful of GIs were hoisting Cokes and beers. “I’ll bet most of them spend a year in France without ever drinking a glass of wine,” Woodforde observed.

“Why didn’t you bring your girlfriend over? What painter could resist Paris?”

“No American with the least bit of talent has gone to Paris to paint in twenty years. They go to your hometown, New York City, Corporal Laughlin.”

To someone whose idea of the artist’s life remained easels and berets near the Moulin Rouge, this was a revelation like one of Hawk’s old life lessons, those ex cathedra pronouncements meant to complete what the two of them jokingly used to call his “education.”

“So,” said Woodforde, sitting down at one of the oilcloth-covered tables, “how are the Negroes?”

“You mean the Spiritualaires?” asked Tim, brightening.

“Yes. God’s Mills Brothers.”

“They’re terrific. They may even make a record.” He started to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the lowest register he could manage.

“I’m sure you’ll write them up as proud Americans happy to be serving in our color-blind army.”

Tim downed half his beer and felt merrily combative. “You know, they get an English translation of
Pravda
at the HQ in Orléans, and it sometimes makes its way up here. The last copy I saw had a story on some Young Communist League members who
want
to be sent to Siberia. To help ‘build the nation.’”

Woodforde pointed to the sign Senator Bridges had hammily quoted this morning
: You are a mirror reflecting everything the United States looks like and stands for. By your appearance and actions, so is your country judged.
“You think what your clean-living minstrels are experiencing is really so different from a little forced labor?”

“They’re not minstrels, and of course it is.”

Woodforde smiled with indulgent superiority.

“Are you a Communist?” Tim asked, sincerely. “Or just an anti-anticommunist? I’ve always wanted to know.”

“Communism hasn’t arrived,” Woodforde explained, as if it were a genre of painting that hadn’t yet made it to New York. “When it gets here, it’ll be something quite different from Stalin, though its opponents will keep waving
that
bloody shirt forever.”

Tim could see that Woodforde had been rattled, if not quite toppled over, by press reports of Khrushchev’s big “secret speech,” in which the current dictator had apparently laid out the crimes of the former one to their full, breathtaking extent. Even so, the chasm between the writer and himself was still too wide to keep shouting across, so Tim narrowed the divide to the spectator sport of domestic politics, mentioning a wire-service story he’d seen about a televised debate between Stevenson and Kefauver.

“Two wet firecrackers,” declared Woodforde. “Amusing, though, to see the great liberal Stevenson allowing the voters of Florida to believe that, race-wise, Kefauver might as well be Paul Robeson. Wait until Kefauver’s people start spreading the story of the ‘pansy party’ Adlai’s supposed to have attended over here in Paris not long ago.”

“Is that true?”

“Does it matter? Besides, when it’s all over, Joe Alsop will have been proved right. Kefauver will take the number-two spot. And then they’ll both lose together.”

Tim got a mental picture of the columnist ogling Hawk at the Sulgrave Club’s coat check—
I could tell you what I’ve got on Joe Alsop—
a picture first imparted on the awful night, a month or so before the hearings began, when Hawk had come to the Capitol Hill apartment.
Maybe the two of us can become the three of us.

“I have a friend,” said Tim, “who calls Alsop Walter Liplock.” He knew he was quoting this only for the chance to hear Hawk’s voice in his head.

“Would this friend be your friend Fuller?”

“You know Fuller?” asked Tim, trying to sound casual.

“I’ve met him once or twice. Most of what I know about him comes from your other friend, McIntyre.”

Tim rolled a peanut between his fingers.

“Which reminds me,” said Woodforde, reaching into his pocket for a note penciled in what Tim recognized as Tommy McIntyre’s hand:
You should write to your friend.
3423
Mt. Eagle Place, Alexandria. He misses you.

Tim’s eyes welled with longing and rage. He knew that Tommy was sending this not because of the extreme romantic nature they supposedly shared—
I told you because you’ll understand
—but for the cruel pleasure of control, even more satisfying when exercised across a vast distance.

“He’s special to you, isn’t he?” asked Woodforde.

Did the soothing manner of this leading question approximate a defense attorney’s direct examination of his client? Or, Tim wondered, did it mirror the sympathy of the police detective putting queries to a distraught victim? No, he decided: it was the tone of a reporter trying to get a story.

“Why are you spending all this time with McIntyre?” he at last responded. “Have you developed a sudden interest in Potter’s position on overfishing the sea lamprey? Maybe you’re writing the senator’s biography?
Legless and Dangerous: The Citizen Canes Story
.”

“Easy, Laughlin,” cautioned Woodforde, still soothing, but hardly in retreat. “I go to Potter’s office to see McIntyre himself. He
knows
a lot, shall we say, though he does like to tantalize as much as to tell.” He looked straight at Tim. “I don’t care about you and Fuller. That’s your business.”

“What’s
your
business?”

“I want to know why Potter did what he did a year and a half ago, at the end of the hearings.”

“Oh, please,” said Tim, tossing the peanut to the floor. “No one cares anymore about those procedural votes.”

Woodforde replied in a good imitation of Tommy’s Irish voice: “You boys all think you’re so clever.
So
worldly wise, believin’ Cohn had somethin’ on McCarthy. You never ask yourselves if
Schine
had somethin’ on Joe.”

At this remove Tim had to ask himself if he could even remember who had had what on whom. He had tried for a year and a half to wipe from his mind the sordid revelations Tommy McIntyre had cackled into the phone line between D.C. and Madison Square Garden: how the drunk McCarthy had been tempted with Potter’s bastard son.
Boys, girls, your old-maid auntie. When he’s hammered he’ll grope anything
. How the photo of McCarthy succumbing had wound up in the hands of David Schine instead of Tommy. And how it had brought McCarthy low nonetheless.
Dave let Joe know he had it, and from that moment on, if Royboy insisted Dave get an ice cream sundae every morning at reveille, Joe was ready to initial the request.