Fellow Travelers (30 page)

“Anything from Radio Free Rakoczi?” asked Tim, without much hope.

Lieutenant Dillenberger sifted the most recent pile of transcript and handed Tim an appeal from the holdout station:
“We are fighting against overwhelming odds! This is our message for President Eisenhower: if during his new presidency, he stands by the oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom, he shall be blessed….”

“At least
we
know where we
are
,” said Dillenberger. “A couple of reports say some of the Russian recruits think they’re in Berlin and World War Two’s still going on. Christ, they must be dumber than the guys we get from Oklahoma.”

Tim continued reading transcript and wire-service copy, which now included the news that Mindszenty had gone to seek shelter at the American embassy in Budapest. At three p.m. Major Conroy came in to get him. The two of them were due to ride back to Verdun together. With a small movement of his head, the officer ordered Dillenberger out of the room.

“Get a grip, Corporal Laughlin.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tim, who only now realized he had tears on his face.

Major Conroy put a hand on his shoulder. “I am not General Patton. I am not about to smack you and say ‘Snap out of it.’ But snap out of it.”

Tim saluted, went off to wash his face, and five minutes later rejoined Conroy near the line of jeeps outside. It turned out—a small mercy—that they would be returning to the base in an American sedan, with the major allowing him to ride alone in the backseat. All the way to Verdun, Conroy kept up with conversation offered by the driver, a Pfc and rabid Red Sox fan; it was almost suppertime when they arrived back on the grounds of the 7,965th.

As Tim started for the office, the major had one last message for him: “You’d better eat your damn dinner, too. I don’t know what
that’s
about, but if I see you settling for a glass of milk again, I’ll report you.”

“Yes, sir.”

He went straight to his desk, piled with the
Herald-Tribune
and the London papers, all of them full of Ike’s victory. Beneath them lay a letter from Kenneth Woodforde, who must have used one of his congressional connections to get it into the air pouch. It was dated Monday afternoon, when the Soviet attack had been in full force:

Dear Laughlin,

I found Michael Larchwood (in jail for grand theft auto, by the way), and I now have a pretty good idea of what went on back in ’53 and ’54. But given what’s
now
going on, I’ve lost interest in my little historical exposé.

I never answered your question about what I was, Communist or anti-anti-Communist. Maybe I’m going to be the first anti-anti-anti-Communist. After the last two days I realize that the C’s in power are about as likely to change as your One True Church. I’ve lost my appetite in more ways than one.

So I thought I’d let you know that your indiscretion about young Larchwood is safe with me. Fact is, I couldn’t prove anything without the photo Schine’s supposed to have, but (see above) another fact is I don’t have the stomach now to pursue it.

One other thing: Fuller and his wife are expecting a child next year. I tell you this only so that you don’t hear it from McIntyre, who I suspect would derive some odd pleasure in imparting the news. I apologize for playing that card when I saw you back in May.

Woodforde

P.S. Do remember that this failed uprising was meant to be, in its own way, a
socialist
revolution. They wanted to be neutral, not “just like us.”

Tim got up and headed to the mail room, where the Frenchwoman was getting ready to go off duty. He asked if he could still send a telegram, to 3423 Mt. Eagle Place, Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.A.

7965
TH AREA COMMAND
—07
NOV
56

HAWK—

RUSZKIK HAZA!

WHEN YOU GO TO THE DEPARTMENT TOMORROW—PLEASE—IN WHATEVER WAY YOU CAN—DO SOMETHING.

T
.

The Frenchwoman asked if she correctly understood the spelling of the exclamation. “And it means what?”

“Russians go home. My two words of Hungarian.”

She nodded, and made a last quick scan of the yellow piece of paper on which he’d composed the message.

“
C’est tout?
” she asked. “Nothing to add?”

His stomach dropped; he felt himself struggle to keep from inserting the three words he’d nearly written with the pencil:
I love you.

“
Non,
” he said. “Nothing to add.”

PART FOUR

DECEMBER 1956–MAY 1957

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

December 1–3, 1956

Leaves were burning along three stretches of curb on Martha Custis Drive. Raking his front yard, Fuller glanced down the adjacent street, somehow half expecting to see Tony Bianco in his parked car. But months had passed with no sign of the part-time moving man. Fuller was free to concentrate on the smoky aroma riding the breeze. It might be December, but the crisp air and sky belonged to the October Saturdays he remembered from St. Paul’s. This was New England weather, held up at the Mason-Dixon Line for a month and a half.

The Army–Navy Game, near the end of its second quarter in Philadelphia, was playing on his new English portable radio, an anniversary present from Lucy. Knowing he’d be working outdoors this afternoon, she had decided that her husband should have the expensive gift, smart and snug in its leather case, two days early. It sat on the front steps of the house, and its reception was excellent.

Lucy now waved to Fuller from the open upstairs window. Still in her quilted yellow peignoir with its little bow at the neck, she had her sketch pad balanced on the sill. She was drawing with the expensive pens Fuller had gotten her from Fahrney’s and handed over this morning after she made her own premature gift. To show that she was indeed using them to create her tight, folksy drawings—what Grandma Moses might have produced with ink instead of oils—she raised one of the pens for her husband to see. Her other hand held a filter-tipped Salem, the brand that was helping to soothe her through a fourth month of pregnancy. She had still hardly begun to show, not even when she wore something besides this billowing nightgown.

Fuller had begun sweating through his flannel shirt. He waved back to his wife and then walked around to the side of the house to get at whatever leaves might be resting under the carriage of their new Plymouth. The car reminded him that he could, if he felt the inclination, make a quick run before dinner to the keypunch operator (dumb as a post, and with that little mustache) in the rented room off Chinatown. Or even a quick stop at Andy Sorrell’s place just over the bridge.

The radio announcer, vamping through halftime, genially mentioned that Ike had violated the customary presidential neutrality toward today’s game by telegraphing his good wishes to the Army coach. The station then cut to a Red Cross appeal for donations to ease the plight of those Hungarian refugees now reaching freedom’s shores.

PLEASE—IN WHATEVER WAY YOU CAN—DO SOMETHING
.

He had done nothing about Hungary, unless you counted pocketing a phone number from the good-looking Budapest university student who’d recently been paraded through the bureau like some kind of war trophy. Everyone
else
was doing something about Hungary; the department had been consumed by the refugee operation. An eleventh planeload of exiles had arrived the other day at Camp Kilmer up in Jersey, and before the cloyingly named Operation Mercy was finished at least twenty thousand more would be allowed in, thanks to some fancy interpretive footwork with the immigration laws.

But a hundred thousand were still in camps along the Austrian border. Nixon would be heading over to visit them in a week, and after that, Congress would start hearings on the conduct of U.S. policy (had there been one?) during the uprising. Fuller imagined that at least one of his CIA buddies would have hell to pay for the general failure to anticipate rebellion along the Danube.

RUSZKIK HAZA!

He was glad he had been the one—not Lucy—to open the door when the telegram arrived. What exactly, he’d wondered, did Skippy want done? Air strikes? Maybe just an air
lift
for all the priests the embassy in Budapest couldn’t hold? He’d also wondered why this frantic little cry—he could almost feel it being whispered into his ear, between ardent kisses of his neck—was coming only now. It could hardly have to do with just Hungary. Whatever it meant, it felt helpless, like the furtive leafleting said to be going on even now in the streets of Budapest.

Fuller lit a match and watched the leaves catch fire. He had no compelling desire this afternoon for the keypunch operator, let alone Andy Sorrell. He felt himself, unexpectedly, wanting someone and something else. The radio, filling up the rest of halftime, had begun to play some old Tommy Dorsey songs, Dorsey having choked to death on a forkful of food earlier in the week.

I’m getting sentimental over you.

Things you say and do…

He looked over his shoulder and back toward the house. On the breeze, smoke from Lucy’s cigarette joined the smoke from the leaves.

It would be Monday before he actually wrote the letter, and only after he got Mary to answer an important question.

“So,” Fuller asked, tapping her on the shoulder, “how much longer?”

Irritated, she swiveled around in her typist’s chair: “How much longer until
what
?”

She didn’t look well. Her face was puffy, and while it might be
le dernier cri
, the sack dress she was wearing did nothing for her but hide her figure.

“How much longer until Skippy gets home?”

She had long since stopped leaving Tim’s letters on her desk. In fact, the last time Fuller had spoken of him was nearly a year and a half ago, at the time of the engagement.
Make it easy on him.

“He’s due back after the first of the year,” she answered. “With plenty of reserve duty left to perform, since it was only a two-year enlistment.”

“Will he be performing in New York or down here?”

“Down here.”

She saw pleasure in his expression. Was it a surge of sentiment? Or appreciation of his power in having created this geographic anomaly—causing Tim to enlist in New York, but as a Washingtonian who even now would be returning to the District?

“I’m guessing,” Fuller said, “that you know what he wants to do once he’s back. Rejoin Citizen Canes’ listing ship?”

“He doesn’t write me that often, Fuller. Not as much as he used to.”

Fuller kept looking at her, no matter how unnerved and jumpy she appeared, no matter how preoccupied—the way she so often was these days. He knew that she knew.

“He wants to do something with the refugees,” she explained. “He doesn’t know exactly what. He takes the whole Hungarian business personally somehow. I don’t understand why.”

Why
is what she wanted to know from Fuller: Why
now
? Why the rekindling of interest in him? But she didn’t ask; she just broke away, relieved to greet the girl bringing Mr. Dulles’s autopen downstairs to the bureau.

It was the secretary’s first day back in the office after a long recuperation in Key West: last month’s emergency surgery had revealed a cancerous growth on his intestine. Today Mr. Hill had prepared a letter that would go out to every congressman and all ninety-six senators, in which Mr. Dulles cheerfully announced his own return, thanked the lawmakers for their good wishes, and said how pleased he was once more to be standing with them, shoulder to shoulder, on the brink, against the Soviets.

Fuller helped Mary to set the writing machine on a countertop near her desk.

“I hate that dress,” he said.

“So do I.” She’d copied the Dior pattern from one of the French magazines Jerry bought for his new wife. “It’s an ‘H-line.’”

“It looks like an oil drum.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m trying to compliment you. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Or inside a sack.”

She tested the autopen on a blank sheet of paper and felt glad to see Fuller disappear into his office. She was furious with herself for having let the weekend come and go without deciding what she would do. There was still not much to hide under the Dior, but in another month that wouldn’t be the case.

There was a place way down on F Street where she could be rid of the baby for a hundred and twenty-five dollars and be back here the next day. She’d gotten the address and the price, just like the magazine with the Dior, from Beverly, who had heard of it from a girl in Senator Douglas’s office who’d been knocked up by the man who each year wrote most of the air force budget.

Or she could go back to Louisiana and become the oldest resident of the Ursuline Sisters’ home for unwed mothers. True, she already had a high school diploma, but maybe she could at last master algebra from one of the visiting tutors. More plausibly, she’d been considering a small, discreet establishment in the Garden District, run by a wealthy Catholic woman, where older young ladies tucked themselves away during their last few months and then swiftly surrendered their babies to an orphanage—had them whisked away in a warming pan like the bastards and pretenders of historical legend. All this would shield her father’s eyes from the embarrassment, but she couldn’t shield Daddy from the whole truth. She was determined to tell it to him, unless it finally involved F Street.

And if she chose adoption? What afterward? Perhaps she’d go teach English at Beauregard Junior High, disappearing in plain sight for the rest of her days.

She fed the letters into the machine—
Mr. Hubert B. Scudder,
1
st district, California; Mr. Clair Engle,
2
nd district, California; Mr. John E. Moss, Jr.,
3
rd district—
and all at once knew that she had to get out of the office, immediately, without even telling Fuller. She put a note on the receptionist’s desk, saying she felt sick.

“Good!” Fuller told the girl several minutes later, once she conveyed the news. “Maybe Miss Johnson will come back in one of her old New Look skirts.”

He returned to the two documents he’d been composing—a half-finished thank-you letter to Congressman Fulton of Pennsylvania, who had taken it upon himself to defend Eisenhower’s Hungarian actions as the only prudent course, and a letter to what Fuller guessed was the administration’s leading critic among corporals of the 7,965th Area Command:

They’ll be processing them at Camp Kilmer
(I think that I shall never see…)
until May. The Austrian desk, which really
was
just a desk until a month ago, is now two large rooms more tightly stuffed than Fibber McGee’s closet….

Letting Skippy know that he remembered his chatter about the radio: a more shameless seduction than the one he’d carried out some weeks ago on a Catholic University junior.

There’s all sorts of interviewing, plus clerical and “liaison” work going on in half a dozen buildings around town. If you want to do something like that, it should be easy enough for me to set it up.

You said please do something. Well, I am—I’m passing the buck to you.

He sealed the letter, still surprised at the ripple of unease he’d experienced writing it—an unstable mixture of desire and hesitation, with even a sense of personal fault blended in. He couldn’t quite credit the last, since the exact nature of his desire was once more to grant the protectiveness that came with ravishment, something he’d not done, or felt himself doing, since the departure of
Cpl. Timothy P. Laughlin,
to whom he now addressed the envelope, the ink of his fountain pen bleeding through to the onionskin inside.

Protection
: what Skippy craved; what one paid and loved the gangster for.

Fuller put this last thought to the side of his mind, like a department memo stamped FFA, For Future Analysis. He rose from his desk and breezed past the receptionist. “Going to mail a letter,” he explained, as if there weren’t two Outgoing trays less than three feet away.

He exited on Twenty-first Street, thinking of how the building would before long extend itself all the way to Twenty-third. Next month, if their aging hearts and bowels held out, Ike and Dulles would stand here in their homburgs slathering mortar onto the cornerstone of the addition. Fuller was pleased to anticipate the building as a labyrinth twice its already huge size. It was even now, he decided, big enough for Timothy to stay discreetly lost in, though it still might be preferable to have him beavering away in one of the department’s satellite offices somewhere else in the city.

Fuller walked down H Street toward the Potomac, past the university’s buildings and the boys in their letter jackets. Maybe he’d keep going all the way to the river, or drop into the Foggy Bottom Wax Museum and stand with the handful of visitors fitting themselves into the goofball tableau of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Valentine’s Day: Lucy, he now recalled, wanted to go to Bermuda for it. He slid this thought, too, to the edge of his mental blotter, as the university’s terrain gave way to Foggy Bottom’s crumbling little brick houses, toy cottages attached to one another for dear life. The Negroes had made this shaky spot their own for decades, until the whites started coming back when the department relocated itself to the neighborhood after the war. What the bulldozers hadn’t gotten was now falling into the hands of renovators. Eleanor Dulles, the secretary’s sister, had herself bought and fixed up one little row of the miniature dwellings; she’d made them what the real estate ads called “darling,” and sold one or two to the sort of boys in the department who had something to fear from Scott McLeod.

Yes, the mephitic old neighborhood, having sagged for a century with its poor drainage, ammonia factory, and tinderbox warehouses, was slowly recuperating toward a placid modernity. Where the gasworks had stood when Fuller first arrived at State, foundations were now being laid for the kind of white-brick apartment building that back home was turning stretches of Park Avenue into sets of high-rise dentures.

He reached the corner of Twenty-fifth and H, still not having put the letter into a mailbox, when he spotted, lo and behold, the brewer, poking around the weeds and tin cans in a yard belonging to a red-brick house, just as narrow as the others, but a little taller, with a comical turret at the top.

Paul Hildebrand caught his eye and they waved to each other. Mary’s old suitor stepped out of the yard and onto the broken sidewalk, leaving his survey of the premises to the two employees he had with him.