Fellow Travelers (36 page)

“I hear it was a short funeral for such a high Mass,” said Tim.

“There wasn’t much to eulogize. And the corpse had to get to the Senate chamber. It’ll be getting there more punctually than it had been showing up of late, from what I hear.”

Tim stared beyond Dupont Circle toward Massachusetts Avenue and said nothing. After a moment, Fuller rose to his feet and then pulled Tim up onto his. The taller man put his arms around the shorter one and whispered, audibly this time, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” asked Tim.

Everything,
thought Fuller. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

May 7, 1957

Tim bought the
New York Mirror
’s early-morning edition at the only newsstand still open inside the Port Authority and discovered that, a few hours after making his quick getaway from McCarthy’s funeral, Senator Kennedy had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book,
Profiles in Courage.

Just a few buses were still coming in at one a.m., and none were going out. Tim sat on a bench near the terminal’s Eighth Avenue exit and read the
Mirror
’s coverage of the funeral services. By the time McCarthy’s body had reached the Senate chamber, Nixon was sitting in the front row and the galleries were jammed, but only one member of the president’s cabinet had shown up. Father Awalt, who had married Joe and Jean in ’53, had today said the prayers from the rostrum, while Senator Flanders bowed his head and Mrs. McCarthy watched from the cloakroom doorway. A Senate page had fainted from the drama and the heat. “You never get over your first,” Tim could imagine Hawk or Woodforde whispering.

And then it was over. The body had been flown back to Wisconsin, with Johnson and Knowland leading a delegation of twenty-nine senators, by no means all of them true believers on the order of Styles Bridges, who had declared that “Joe literally gave his life to preserve freedom for all Americans.” One columnist was urging Jean—now past thirty, after all—to run for Joe’s seat and return to Washington as the colleague of all those liberal hypocrites who’d taken up half the seats on the funeral plane.

Tim was bone tired and uncertain of where he’d be spending the night, but his suitcase, fortunately, was much lighter than any Mary had taken to the airport. He’d thrown away half his things and left behind most of the rest in Ken and Gloria’s loft. So he was now still able to get out and walk, first to Ninth Avenue and then a dozen blocks north, past the Laughlins’ old apartment, as well as Grandma Gaffney’s, where the lights had been out, he calculated, for at least four hours. A glow from the building’s basement window revealed Mr. Mancuso, the super, to be up late, probably reading the sports pages beside the coal furnace there was no need to tend on a warm night like this.

Reversing direction and walking south, he reached the corner of Eighth and Fiftieth, where he spotted a fortune-teller, a crazy, gypsy-looking woman who had placed an old television tube—apparently her crystal ball—atop an upside-down wooden vegetable crate. He wondered at his own inability to stop and consult with her, as if, after all his transgressions, that one might still be too great a sacrilege.

Back on Forty-second Street, he climbed the steps of Holy Cross Church, just as he’d climbed them on the day of his First Communion and on every other day for morning Mass before classes at the school next door. The church was unlocked, and he took a seat in a pew at the back. Close to the altar sat two derelicts whose snores seemed to issue from the empty pulpit that had once vibrated with the homilies of Father Duffy himself.

He recalled being here on V-E day, at thirteen years old, a few months before transferring across town to St. Agnes’ Boys’ High. He’d sat in his blue-and-gold school tie, listening to a priest describe the new world that was surely aborning—while somewhere far across it, in the Pacific, Hawkins Fuller must have been asleep on his boat, wondering when he’d be asked to help invade Japan. The distance that had lain between them then seemed no greater than the two hundred miles of tonight’s bus ride. If Hawk were this minute in the pew across the aisle, the distance would still measure out to the same vastness, any separation of their flesh being the distance in life that was now, forever, unbridgeable.

Tim decided that he would not pray tonight, not so much as a single “
Gloria Patri
”—not because he was angry at God, or too guilty to face Him, or too exhausted; only because he felt himself floating, like a dust mote in the vacuum of space, where there was no airwave to carry his cry. He looked up to the cross and the well-muscled figure of Jesus—a body that looked too strong to perish from even the suffocation that was the real cause of death by crucifixion. He remembered the Lenten seasons he’d spent in this church, all the long weeks when purple cloth wrappings turned the statues into mummies, denying their plaster beauty to the faithful. At those times he would crave the sight of Christ’s bloodied face and, even more, His arched and gleaming torso.
This is my body.
Every Sunday, even during Lent, he would take the Communion wafer onto his tongue and into his mouth, Christ’s actual flesh, not the mere symbolic commemoration of the Protestants. It was Christ’s body that kept him alive, kept him from Hell and darkness. Only Hawk’s flesh, which he could taste even now, could have made him abjure Christ’s during that first year together. And even then he had hungered for both. Now, with the collapse of the convenient folly he’d lived these last few months—
I’m still taking Communion. Just making up my own rules!
—he would be without either.

He had no idea whether the ferry sailed for Staten Island at this late hour. Francy would be sure to take him in with less alarm than his parents might display, but it might be dawn by the time he reached her. At this hour he doubted that his grandmother would open her door, not even if she recognized his voice, though maybe Mr. Mancuso would let him sleep on the cot by the furnace.

Or he could just keep himself awake in an all-night diner, until it was light.

He took his suitcase and left the church, walking west to Ninth Avenue, where he once more rounded the corner and went north, just for a block, before aimlessly starting down Forty-third Street, back in the direction of Times Square. Halfway toward Eighth, he heard the notes of a clarinet, quite soft, coming from the top floor of an old brownstone across the street. The man playing had the instrument sticking out the open window, as if the neighbors would have no grounds for complaint so long as the sound didn’t travel from his apartment to theirs through the interior walls.

Tim recognized the tune being played as “No Love, No Nothin’,” a funny song from the war about self-imposed chastity on the home-front. But the man was playing it in such a slow and bluesy and beautiful way that it had become another song entirely. Tim put his suitcase down on the sidewalk and stood to listen, realizing now who the clarinet player was.

I had an assignation that night with a musician. Who does things you haven’t even dreamed of
.

He wasn’t especially good-looking. Crew-cut and stringy, maybe somewhere between Tim’s own age and Hawk’s, he wore thick glasses and a T-shirt and probably nothing else below the line made by the windowsill.

And that’s a promise I’ll keep.

No fun with no one,

I’m gettin’ plenty of sleep.

Sleep was what Tim wanted now, to sleep beside this man, to feel inside himself the body of someone Hawk himself had been inside; to connect with his beloved, his lost, by way of a conductor, if only until morning.

Maybe the two of us can become the three of us.

He waited until the song was done before he nodded upward, appreciatively, as if to indicate that he’d be applauding if it weren’t so late and he weren’t standing so close to someone else’s curtained window. The musician nodded back and signaled with his fingers, making first a “five” and then the letter “A.”

He crossed the street, pressed the buzzer, and as he climbed the stairs he crossed himself.

So what will happen with the black man with the problems with the sex?

The polymath minister-filmmaker had asked Fuller, when he returned to the party from his walk, about Clarence Thomas’s chances of being confirmed for the Supreme Court. And here, just past midnight, was the answer, left on Fuller’s desk by Ms. Boyle. She’d figured he might come back up to the office, late, by himself; it had become something of a habit.

The piece of teletype said that Thomas had gotten through the Senate, 52–48, about an hour ago in Washington.

“Let’s celebrate,” he might have said had Ms. Boyle still been here. “Shall we break out a can of Coke?”

No, he would not have said that. Even he didn’t make such jokes anymore.

He eyed the telephone and Mary Russell’s letter. Its stationery listed her number.

He hesitated, beginning instead to write a letter of his own, to Mrs. Susan Fuller Simonson, his daughter, telling her he bet no man had ever received Halloween cards from his grandchildren so early, surely a sign of her organizational capacities as a mother. Puzzling over what to say next, he tapped his pen on the desktop—what ever had happened to blotters?—and allowed his gaze to travel back to Mary’s letter.

He knew he was going to do it, so he might as well do it now.

He buzzed the security officer on duty and asked him to make the call; if he tried it himself, he would bollix up the long string of access and country and area codes.

“Yes, Mr. Fuller.” Like the rest of the small staff, the security man was getting accustomed to the odd hours of the number two. A moment later he was buzzing him back: “Mrs. Russell is on the line.”

“Fuller?”

The connection was astonishing. Ms. Boyle had not been exaggerating about the phones.

“Yes. Mrs. Russell?”

“Yes.”

“Russell. Where did
that
come from?”

The telephone transmitted her laughter from Scottsdale after a moment’s delay that, he understood, had less to do with fiber optics than the fact that even now, thirty-five years later, she was only laughing against her better judgment.

“Before you tell me,” he added, “let me give you the number on this end. It’s past midnight here, and if I lose you after the security man at the desk goes home, whoever comes on will never be able to patch me back through.”

He read off a long string of numbers from his business card, and she repeated them. “Wait,” he said. “That’s the fax. Sorry.” He then read the proper string, the one for the telephone, and she copied that down, too.

“There,” said Fuller. “So what time is it where you are?”

“Two-thirty in the afternoon. Ten hours earlier.”

“Not fourteen hours later?”

“No.”

“Well, at least you’re giving me the time of day.”

No laughter.

“You got my letter,” she said.

“Yes. So who is Russell?”

“My husband, Harry. I married him a year ago. I’m talking from his office in the house. He’s out playing golf.”

“Why did you wait so long to marry? Someone tell you the first forty years are the hardest?”

“I was married for twenty-five years, from ’64 to ’89, to Paul Hildebrand.”

“The name’s familiar.”

“The brewer.”

“Ah, yes! The lovesick brewer. How did that finally happen?”

“He came to New Orleans and found me, two years after he divorced his very nice wife and was still covered with guilt.”

“Guilt. Is that going to be the theme of this conversation?”

“I don’t know. You made the call.”

“You wrote the letter.”

During the pause that followed, he fingered the envelope it had come in. “What ever happened to the baby?”

“She grew up to be a wonderful young woman. This morning I’m designing the leaflets for her campaign for the school board in Amarillo. Desktop publishing. I’m a whiz at computers. She was raised by fine people in Miami and five years ago, just as Paul was getting sick, she managed to find me.”

“What’s her name?”

“Barbara. But I call her Toni. Long story. How is your own daughter?”

“Raising three children back in Maryland. Making Halloween cards three weeks early. I’ve never known a girl of her generation with less ambition.”

“She got it from you.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment. There’s too much hard charging all around.
Especially
from the girls.”

“Is
that
going to be the theme of this conversation? The social decline of the world we knew when we were young?”

The brief pause Fuller took was extended, for less than a second, by the satellite carrying his words to Mary. “I assume that he died of AIDS.”

“He died of bone cancer. With considerable pain and a great deal of cheer. When he was diagnosed he sent me a note saying ‘So much for all the milk!’ I can’t imagine that he was ever infected with AIDS, Fuller.”

He lit a cigarette. Amidst all the multivitamins and bran, Lucy had never gotten him to stop smoking altogether.

“Providence, Rhode Island?”

“He never really lived anywhere else. For a little while, just after Washington, he went home to New York—in a bad way. Never finished his reserve duty. He admitted what he was and got dishonorably discharged. He more or less fell apart at his sister’s house until her parish priest found him a spot with some order in Rhode Island. He only described it to me years later—half retreat, half sanitarium. He was enough glued back together to leave in six months.”

Fuller had spent most of his life parrying questions, not asking them. The neediness of now having to do the latter bothered him, and he was certain, even without her face before him, that Mary knew it did. The dynamics of their old friendship, across eight thousand miles and thirty-five years, had flung themselves together in an instant, like the film of a building’s demolition running on fast rewind.

“Why did he stay in Rhode Island?”

“There was no reason to be anywhere else. For fifteen or twenty years he worked in the books department of the Outlet Company, the last of the Providence department stores. When it went out of business he took a job with an antique books dealer in an old arcade just down the street. I visited him there about a dozen years ago.”

“I’m doing the math. I’m guessing he took you to a Reagan rally. Unless it was bingo at St. Aloysius’.”

She wouldn’t answer.

“What was he like?”

“He bought me a nice Italian dinner. After drinks at his small, tidy apartment. He was very nervous—not about seeing me; he was just a fragile, nervous person. And yet curiously peaceful. He would have been nearing fifty then, but for all his gray hair he looked much younger. Thin. It was easy enough to still see the boy who first walked into the bureau.”

I got the job. You’re wonderful.

“‘Peaceful’?”

“Yes, you get off easy.” She paused, letting it sink in, hoping it would wound him even as it brought relief. “I don’t think he’d given a thought to politics in twenty years, and he wasn’t the least bit religious in any ordinary way. He told me he went to Mass once in a while and never bothered with confession. But the peacefulness had come from God, I’m certain.”

“And how are you certain of that?”

“Because he told me. He told me that one day twenty years before, he’d realized, all of a sudden, while walking down a street in the city some Saturday afternoon, that he’d spent his whole life trying to make God love him—and that this didn’t matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he loved God. He told me that once he knew this he was home free.”

“Well, then, besides the milk, so much for Bishop Sheen, too. ‘God love you’—the words that threw open my mother’s checkbook.”

“He said it was the same with you.”

“What was the same with me?”

“That all that mattered was his loving you. That was enough, once he realized it.”

“And you think
that
was true?”

“I think there was more to it than that. I think he was too nervous to try loving anyone else. But it was true enough. And I think it’s more than you deserved.”

She could hear him putting out a cigarette, the tiny hammering on an ashtray bouncing up through space and down again.

“The fellow who’s your daughter’s father,” Fuller said. “Was he Estonian or Lithuanian? I can’t recall.”

“Estonian. They’d borrowed the Lithuanians’ embassy the night we met him.”

“I met him? I don’t remember.” He thought back to the morning’s mental calisthenics and wondered if he’d done as well as he thought.

“Fred died in ’79,” explained Mary. “He would not have believed anything that’s happened over there in the past two years, though he always claimed he could see it coming.”

“I’m going home for good in a few months.”

“Are you still with your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” she said, having expected as much.

She could feel—he could feel it himself—that whatever emotions had prompted him to make the call had already subsided, that he was about to succeed one last time at doing what he had always done where Timothy Laughlin and that whole portion of his life were concerned. He had come back from it, dispensed with it; he’d closed and locked the cellar door and was climbing back up to the living room of his existence.

“He was buried wearing your cuff links,” Mary told him. “His sister found them on his night table, back at his apartment, the afternoon he died in the hospital.”

After a longer pause than the others he had taken, Fuller said: “He was a very nice boy.”

I’m pleased to meet you, Timothy Laughlin.

“Goodbye, Fuller.” She said it tenderly and hung up the phone.

He sat there for several minutes, attempting to think about the young man he’d eyed on his walk near the walled Old City tonight. He tried once more to figure out the best route to the Carnegie Endowment from this house in Chevy Chase that Lucy was still determined to buy. And he wondered if he might yet persuade her to have one couple, no more, over for the White Nights.

All at once he heard a whistling sound, like an electronic teakettle. The fax machine, he realized; it disgorged things only infrequently and usually when Ms. Boyle was here. But a paper was now coming out of it, insidiously, as if from an intruder who’d scurried away before he could be detected slipping it under the door.

Fuller got up to take it from the machine’s tray. The small type at the top rim of the page said
HARRY RUSSELL
and showed the area code 602. Beneath that, he saw Mary’s handwriting: “He sent me this sketch two weeks before he died. The house is still there. Paul never tore it down. It survived the brewery and is all fixed up.”

The drawing was in Skippy’s style, as recognizable as Mary’s penmanship. He had done it, it seemed, from memory: the narrow, three-story brick house topped by its turret with two windows. Inside one of them a candle burned; behind the other, on the sill, stood a milk bottle. Below the sketch was a note from Tim to Mary:

Let him know that I was happy enough. Make it easy on him.

T.

Fuller returned to his desk with the paper, which he brushed once with his hand, before putting it on a small stack of State Department forms held down by a glass paperweight, inside of which a sprig of cherry blossom floated. It had traveled with him for many years, from one country to another, throughout a world grown unexpectedly, and increasingly, free.