Fellow Travelers (9 page)

His girls were with his mother, who lived over in Arlington, not far from his own place. “She thinks I’ve been ‘laid off,’” he explained. “By the way, she also thinks I have a date. And she highly approved of your vital statistics, which I provided to satisfy her curiosity.”

“Well,” said Mary, “as far as dates go, I could do worse.”

“No, you couldn’t,” said Jerry. He paused for a moment, as if taken aback by his new self-loathing. “And I suppose the dear old thing has a point about my being ‘laid off.’” He joked that the federal government’s dismissal of fourteen hundred security risks was assisting the attrition through which it was supposed to shed itself of fifty thousand civilian employees by next June. “Our—your, I should say—department is certainly doing its bit. State’s getting rid of two people a week.” He had almost, Mary noted, said “perverts” instead of “people,” seeming to decide before the word’s first syllable was fully out that this was more than he could bear.

“I honestly don’t think all this would have happened under Adlai,” said Mary, sipping a Dubonnet and knowing that, in fact, she wouldn’t be the least surprised if Stevenson had felt compelled to expand the government’s security program in just the way Eisenhower had done, putting everyone’s personal quirks on the same level of importance as their loyalty.

“I voted for him, you know,” said Jerry. “Eisenhower.” He slugged back the last of a double. “Not that that matters. What matters is that I’m supposed to be ‘blackmailable.’ And ergo, I must go. You know, from my standpoint, blackmail would be better than what the past month’s been like. It would certainly be cheaper. Presumably I’d get to keep
part
of my paycheck.”

“Jerry, I can pay—”

Realizing the false signal he’d given, he raced to restore male-female economics. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, I didn’t mean
that.
I asked
you
—as soon as Beverly called me up to say that you’d done something ‘really extraordinary.’ Those were her words, though she thought the details should be left for you to explain.”

“I didn’t really do—”

He waved a hand in protest, cutting her off, as if to prolong the anticipation of good news, to keep the wonder of its existence from being disproved. “You know, I still don’t know what the ‘M’ in ‘Miscellaneous M Unit’ stands for,” he said. “Maybe just McLeod himself, though he wasn’t there for my questioning. I guess there are so many cases that he has to save himself for the big ones—Yale men, I suppose, instead of guys like me from Case Western. I wonder, though, if he knew he was getting a Lutheran with me. I suspect he thought from my name that I was just one more Jew to bother. Maybe he would have shown up if he’d realized.”

Mary wished Jerry would stop. He reminded her of a Tulane boy who’d once cried on her sorority-house porch halfway through a confession of some hazing humiliation. She feared that Jerry, already moving fast through a second double, was about to shed tears himself.

“Almost nobody actually ‘confesses,’” he continued, sounding more composed, taking on the manner of someone explaining a little-known principle of chess or bookbinding. “Though I’ve heard of one guy who, after he spilled everything, actually sent them a thank-you note.” There was a pause, which Mary took as Jerry’s invitation either to laugh or cry, before he resumed in a straightforward, insistent tone. “That I
did not do.
”

He said it with actual pride, as if by not expressing gratitude to McLeod he had managed to salvage something from the situation.

“I don’t know who that guy was,” Jerry continued, now a bit sarcastically. “You know, ‘we’ don’t all
know
one another.”

“I understand, Jerry.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound however I sounded. The sad truth is, Mary, if I’d known the name of one homosexual in the department—I mean knew it for sure—I’d have given it to them.”

She would have preferred the earlier look of pathetic pride to the expression of shame now sweeping his face.

“I’ve seen Senator Fulbright,” she at last interrupted. “He and my daddy were Rhodes scholars together. I talked to him about my troubled feelings. I didn’t mention you specifically.” Sitting across from Jerry was worse than it had been sitting across from Fulbright, who’d seemed appalled that a well-brought-up Southern girl should be aware of such things, let alone bothering him with them.

Jerry said nothing. He appeared to be waiting for the story’s climax, the miraculous news whose pleasure he had deferred. And she had nothing like that to give him.

“He really just pursed his senatorial lips, Jerry. He said he might call Mr. Morton, my boss in CR, to ask one or two ‘concerned questions’ of a general nature.”

She feared that Jerry would be crushed to realize the paltriness of her “extraordinary” action, but he now looked at her with an enormous smile—at which she felt obligated to throw cold water. “Jerry, he’s never going to make that call.”

“Oh, I know that,” he replied, his smile undiminished. “But you were swell to do what you did. When Beverly said you’d done something great, I never figured it was
this
great. It’s the first fine thing I’ve heard since I started looking for work. Which, by the way, I’ve found. At a hardware store in Falls Church. The job pays two dollars an hour. Think I’ll get to use that master’s degree in French?”

The smile was coming, Mary realized, not only from sincere gratitude, but also from his now being drunk. He put his glass down a little harder than was necessary and, with a glazed look that could almost have been construed as romantic, asked her: “Do you know what they do with guys like me in Russia?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

November 26, 1953

At seventy-seven, Grandma Gaffney remained drier and tougher than her Thanksgiving turkey. The bird’s insides were just as bad: none of the widow’s offspring could ever detect a single ingredient to her stuffing besides water, flour, and thyme. And yet no one was willing to suggest that she cede control of the dinner’s preparation and location. Even in these spacious Stuyvesant Town days, the family continued to gather in Grandma Gaffney’s Ninth Avenue railroad apartment, only a block from where the old woman had lived through the Blizzard of ’88 as a twelve-year-old girl. Her oft-told tale of sliding down the drifts that had reached the second-floor window carried no wistfulness; she’d needed to get out of the tenement any way she could, she’d explained to Timmy the first time she told him the story. She was already
working,
dressing the hair of those snotty boarding-school girls, Protestants every one, over on the East Side.

Eight other people had squeezed around her dining room table this afternoon: two daughters and two sons-in-law; her unmarried son, Alan; her grandchildren Tim and Frances; and Frances’s husband, Tom Hanrahan. Nine people if you counted the baby Frances was carrying. The child’s annunciation had been the chief news and only source of real merriment around the table, whose centerpiece consisted, as always, of a dozen celery stalks, leafy ends up, in a cut-glass vase. The windows remained covered not with lace curtains but paper shades that appeared, like so many of Grandma Gaffney’s possessions, oddly defiant.

Uncle Frank, whose three grown sons were off with their wives’ families, had made a joke about Timmy’s “falling behind” in the grandchild-producing department, which occasioned laughter from everyone but Uncle Alan, who, Tim had to concede, didn’t laugh much over anything. Frances had led the saying of grace, including in it an expression of thanksgiving for the cease-fire in Korea. Since this political development had made a call-up of Tom’s reserve unit less likely, Grandma Gaffney had allowed the prayer to proceed without any overt disapproval, though she was known to regard grace as “something the Protestants say,” and during the canned fruit–cocktail course had tried to imagine what Father Coughlin—if the Jews hadn’t forced him off the radio—would think about allowing the Communists to keep half the Korean peninsula.

Tim now busied himself washing the dishes. He normally did them with Frances but had today insisted she stay off her feet, even if she was less than two months along. His gesture allowed her to join the crush in front of the television in the small parlor. Paul and Rosemary Laughlin had a year or so ago purchased the TV for Grandma Gaffney, who had pronounced a favorite cryptic anathema on the givers—“Buy another and then stop”—before becoming intensely devoted to this latest modern wonder. Frances, arriving midmorning to face certain rejection of her offer to help with the cooking, had later sworn to Tim that Grandma’d kept the television on for the half-hour broadcast of the Gimbel’s parade from Philadelphia, and then promptly switched it off when coverage shifted to Macy’s own parade right here in New York—a demonstration of lingering resentment over a tablecloth the store had refused to take back in 1934.

Tim had grown up in an apartment almost identical to this one, but the Gorgon-like presence of his grandmother (who adored him and disliked Frances, for reasons unclear to both grandchildren) had rendered this place a sort of enchanted cave. Its heat still came from a coal furnace in the basement tended by an Italian super who had always let Tim play down there. Once he reappeared inside the apartment’s little vestibule, Grandma Gaffney would brush the dust from his hair and face and tell him he looked like Little Black Sambo.

As he scrubbed the cutlery, Tim went from remembering the coal dust to recalling the condensation on his eyeglasses that Hawk had wiped off with his handkerchief yesterday at lunchtime. There’d been a call for Tim at the office, asking that he be at the Capitol Hill apartment at twelve-fifteen. He’d raced over and found Hawk already there, inside the foyer near the radiator, standing in his Harris tweed topcoat and flipping through
Newsweek;
his car was parked out front. He would be driving to New York, he said, as soon as the two of them finished “visiting.” They had laughed at the word while racing up the stairs.

Hawk had never asked about his own Thanksgiving plans, but Tim had made haste to say that he needed to work through the afternoon and couldn’t depart D.C. until six o’clock, when he’d be getting a bus. Failure to acknowledge this impediment would have made him available to ride to New York with Hawk—an invitation he feared might not be forthcoming.

As it happened, he did have to work, making long-distance calls to two of the POWs set to testify next week. Neither turned out to be much older than himself, and each had called him “sir.” Now, a day later, plunging his hands back into the hot dishwater, he recalled the tales of horrific cold that he’d heard from one of them, whose frostbitten feet, like Senator Potter’s, had been left behind a world away.

By the time Tim joined everyone in the parlor, the television was flickering with images of the Salvation Army dinner for bums on the Bowery. Political discussion overrode the TV’s picture and sound. Ethel Rosenberg’s brother had just yesterday given the committee a written statement about how spying might
still
be going on at Fort Monmouth, a speculation to which Uncle Frank now gave loud assent. Tim worried that this mention of the Rosenbergs would soon have Grandma Gaffney unleashing a fusillade of complaints against the “sheenies,” the most arcane of her many terms for the Jews. When he had been a little boy, and the TV-star bishop just another voice on the radio, Tim had surmised the word to be a name for the followers of Fulton J. Sheen. If Grandma Gaffney came out with it now, Uncle Frank would be sure to laugh, while Paul and Rosemary Laughlin would remain silently disapproving—not from any real moral opprobrium they attached to the word, but only a sense of its being a crude immigrant relic, like the coal pile in the basement or Grandma Gaffney’s bad teeth, something with which their newly middle-class children shouldn’t be saddled.

“So, Timmy,” Uncle Frank fairly shouted, “did you have a hand in that speech the other night?” He meant McCarthy’s eleven-p.m. radio-and-TV address. It had been billed as an equal-time rebuttal to Truman’s broadcast on the Harry Dexter White case, though in the event, McCarthy had spent more time attacking the current president than the former one, with a claim that Ike was “batting zero” against Communists in government.

Tim politely shook his head. “Uncle Frank, except for his wedding, I’ve never even
seen
McCarthy. He’s mostly been up here in New York.” The committee, Tim explained, had the other week done a little investigation of General Electric, before returning its attention to Fort Monmouth. But such details didn’t matter to Uncle Frank: Tim’s work for Charles Potter gave him in the eyes of everyone here, even Frances, an admirable proximity to the senator from Wisconsin. However much Tim tried to correct them, his family regarded him as a lucky oblate to an all-powerful monsignor.

The White case—with the once-more-front-page Truman calling the attorney general a liar, and J. Edgar Hoover branding Truman a liar in return—had all the elements to sustain long discussion, save one. “Where’s McCarthy in all of this?” Uncle Alan asked Tim, at a decibel level low enough to indicate actual curiosity. “I mean aside from that speech.”

“It’s really HUAC’s show,” explained Tim, who realized with a touch of shame that he was tossing off such lingo to convey the very insiderliness he’d been trying to disclaim at dinner. But he
had
heard Tommy McIntyre remark that the White story was “making old Joe emerald with envy” each day it gobbled up the lion’s share of column inches in the papers.

Political news soon gave way to neighborhood reminiscence. Talk of the Donahues, who’d recently moved from Fiftieth Street to Mineola, ushered the family toward a collective sleepiness. The television was at last turned off, and Tim began to hear the tick of the clock near the old radio cabinet, a kind of telegraph tapping out the unvaried existence of Uncle Alan and Grandma Gaffney, who sometimes seemed more married than his own parents. He noticed the thickness of the paint—another layer added by the landlord every five years—on the square strip of molding that ornamented the room’s plaster walls. And he also regarded the telephone, which had come into the apartment only a few years before the TV.
I’m not on the phone.

With the same finger he’d yesterday used to trace circles on Hawkins’ bare chest, he could right now, if he chose, dial the Charles Fuller family, who were in the Manhattan book. What might be going on in those rooms at Seventy-fourth and Park, high above the doorman and flower-filled lobby that Tim could picture? Behavior there could scarcely be more specified or formal than here. Even now, Tim and his father and uncles had yet to loosen their ties, pride in their white collars supplementing a deference both to the day and to the family matriarch.

As conversation grew more intermittent, Tim’s discomfort increased, as if, without much else on their minds and tongues, his parents and uncles and aunts would somehow be able to see images, like stigmata beginning to bleed, of his naked hour with Hawkins Fuller.

“Grandma,” he said, too nervous to sit still any longer, “I’m going to wrap up some of the leftovers and take them to the church. The icebox won’t hold everything.”

“All right, Timmy,” she replied, all but adding “if you must.” She tended to view charity not as a corporal work of mercy but a species of busybodiedness, and yet, as a “nice boy”—her designation, seeming to signify a handicap that made certain actions unavoidable—Timmy “did such things.”

Out on the street, carrying a bag of waxed-papered turkey and asparagus spears, Tim drew a great cleansing breath of the city’s dirty air. He passed the corner of Forty-third Street and looked down to the old building where he knew Hawkins’ clarinet player—the one from the day of the Draft Ike rally—must still have his apartment. Closing his eyes, he thought of yesterday, when Hawk had been inside him, and he wondered if he weren’t now really more closely connected to this musician—at just one physical remove—than to everyone still sitting back in the parlor.

He found himself saying aloud a couple of lines from Dylan Thomas, the ones Tommy McIntyre had come into the office reciting the other day:

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

The Welsh poet had died in mid-bender here in New York only a couple of weeks ago. “Ah,” Tommy had said with Irish reverence and envy, “he should have been one of ours, Mr. Tim. He should have been one of ours.”

The lines of verse vanished onto the breeze racing down Ninth Avenue ahead of Tim, just as yesterday, in the apartment on Capitol Hill, his own whispering of the words “I love you,” barely but deliberately audible, had disappeared into the pillow and walls, unanswered except for two gentle pats on the back of his head.