“Chicken noodle soup.” Grateful for something to do besides stare, Tim went over to stir the pot. “There’s probably enough for two.”
He saw Fuller look at the Campbell’s can and make a face. “Why don’t you let me buy you supper someplace? You brought me a book, remember?”
“But that was to thank you. Besides,” said Tim, swallowing the last inch of a glass of milk he had on the counter, “it’s a sin to waste food.”
“Mortal or venial?” asked Fuller.
Tim looked into the pot as he resumed stirring. “In this case, I’d have to say venial.”
“What if you were to let me kiss you, Laughlin? Would that be mortal or venial?”
It was as if Father O’Connell, made somehow young and beautiful, had appeared in a dream to examine him for Confirmation.
“Mortal, I’m pretty sure.” He felt the beating of his heart. “How come a Protestant like you knows stuff like that?”
Further resembling Father O’Connell, Fuller refused to countenance any wriggling out of the matter at hand. “Would you like me to kiss you?”
Tim stopped stirring and looked down into the bubbles that began to hiss around the wooden spoon. “No, Mr. Fuller,” he made himself say.
“Well, that one’s got to be mortal.”
Tim shut off the hot plate but didn’t turn around. “What do you mean?”
“If the size of the lie figures in, that one can’t possibly be a venial sin.”
Fuller got up from the desk. He took down two bowls from the open shelf. “Spoons?”
“Who is that awful woman?” asked Paul Hildebrand.
“May Craig,” Mary told him.
“Some sort of news-hen?”
“Yes,” said Mary, who had to laugh. How could a native Washingtonian not know of this character who wrote for a handful of newspapers up in Maine but managed to attract the continual notice of presidents? Miss Craig had swept into the Mayflower’s dining room a few moments ago, around nine-thirty, having just come from New York and, before that, Morocco, where she’d spent a couple of weeks in the U.S. Air Force hospital with a touch—“a big touch,” she now squawked—of food poisoning. She continued in a near-shout: “I thought Senator You-Know-Who would still be cuddling his bride down in Nassau when I docked. But there he was, right in Foley Square!”
Somebody at the table next to Miss Craig’s asked if she’d been outside the room for “Mr. Lied-and-Cried” this afternoon.
“No,” she admitted, “but that’d be a good headline for tomorrow’s Daily News!”
Paul Hildebrand swallowed half a chicken croquette and a gulp of Cutty Sark. “God,” he said softly. “I wish she’d shut up.”
Mary looked across the table and considered her date. It pained him to make such a remark about a woman, she realized. Yes, he was old-fashioned, as was the style of his pleasant looks: the three-quarter part in the curly dark-blond hair, the slightly reddish complexion. Was there, beneath, she wondered, more of a spark than resided in her doctor?
“They were even talking about ‘Mr. Lied-and-Cried’ at the fashion show,” she finally said.
“That’s only because we’re here,” he replied. “In Washington, I mean. They wouldn’t have been talking about it in Omaha.” He mentioned the city without a trace of condescension.
“I doubt the dresses would have been as pretty there.”
“Probably not. Another?” he asked, holding up her own empty glass of Cutty Sark.
“Yes.”
As he signaled for the waiter, Mary said, “Well, I’m just praying that he flames out soon.”
Even Paul Hildebrand didn’t need to be told who “he” was, but he responded with a question: “Know what I’m praying for? Rain. The drought in the Midwest is driving the price of hops sky-high. You think the country’s really waiting around and wondering if Ike’s going to start fighting McCarthy? Mary, most of it just wants him to fire Ezra Taft Benson and get a new Agriculture secretary. You know, my brother and I are going to have to dump the brewery into the Potomac if things don’t get better soon.”
“Are you looking for a new line of work?” asked Mary.
“Not yet,” he replied. “First I’m looking for a girl to marry me.”
Fuller grabbed one of Tim’s wrists, lifted the boy’s arm, and pinned it to the pillow. Tim surmised the shift in position to be for the greater comfort of the older man in the narrow bed, until he felt Fuller kiss his armpit. He froze for a moment, but with the increasing pressure and sweep of the other man’s mouth, he felt Fuller’s avidity and abandon transferring themselves to him. He realized he was no longer caressing Fuller’s thick black hair; he was pulling it, forcefully.
The act seemed to agitate Fuller—to excite or anger him, Tim couldn’t tell for sure. But the older man, fully aroused, began to press his body more and more forcefully against him. Tim could see the damp beginnings of sweat on Fuller’s face and in the hollow of his neck, where he’d seen it two weeks ago and had thought about its being every day since. He felt an ardor in his own helplessness, recognized that what he right now most desired was to have no say in this, no word about it but yes.
By the time he was in Fuller’s mouth, and digging his clean, bitten nails into the other man’s shoulders, he could feel the tears on his own face. He became afraid of losing all physical control, of ejaculating before he was supposed to. But when, and where, was he supposed to? Would Fuller tell him? The older man seemed to sense the approaching climax and relented in his attentions; his face rose back up and smiled wordlessly into Tim’s.
And then, at Fuller’s unspoken but insistent direction, each of them was lying on his side, facing the same wall. Fuller grasped him from behind and held him close, kissing his neck and asking, “Are you my brave boy?” As Tim nodded yes, Fuller caressed one side of his face; the other side brushed the sheet. Fuller’s aroma overpowered the smell of Clorox on the linen, banishing the more familiar fragrance, the one redolent of a thousand Monday nights when Tim had fallen asleep on the results of his mother’s wash day.
He turned his head far enough to plunge his face into the muscular flesh of Fuller’s chest and shoulder. In response, Fuller tousled and petted his hair, but the next words he said were inflamed, not soothing. “Who owns you?” Fuller whispered, sharply, into his ear.
It sounded like some early piece of the catechism, a cosmically important question-and-answer he had somehow missed, on the order of Who made us? God made us. But Tim’s confusion, and the desire to respond with the right answer, were lost in his own arousal. He whispered, “Hawkins Fuller,” not as an answer to the question, but simply an amazed statement of the other man’s actuality. “Hawkins Fuller,” he said, repeating this name for a discovery he felt the need to radio from one world to another, this name for a new Eden, whose recently glimpsed existence had now been fully confirmed.
CHAPTER SIX
October 17, 1953
Mary Johnson was awakened in Georgetown by a phone call from Beverly Phillips. At the first ring, she imagined she was back in her old place, a block away, which she’d shared with three other girls. There the phone had always rung early Saturday morning with someone’s request for a postmortem of someone else’s Friday-night date.
“You want details,” Mary said, once Beverly had identified herself. “There aren’t any.” Which was true. It had been a pleasant but early night whose conversation had turned only moderately flirtatious, even though she and Paul had been drinking more as if he were heir to a distillery than a beer business.
“Well,” said Beverly. “As long as there are no gruesome details, that qualifies as a good second date. I’m afraid I’ve got some gruesome details on this end.”
“Did the boys burn down the house?”
“No, but Scott McLeod’s set fire to Jerry Baumeister. Canned him.”
Rubbing her eyes, Mary tried to think. Jerry Baumeister. Office of Educational Exchange? Yes: early thirties; bow tie; made courtly
little jokes. “I hardly know him,” she told Beverly.
“Neither do I. But he’s here, and he’s coming apart.”
“At your house? At seven-thirty in the morning?”
“He practically arrived with the milkman. I think he’d been wandering around all night. Honest, I barely know him, either, Mary. A couple of lunches in the cafeteria. We’ve got divorce in common; he’s got two well-behaved daughters instead of what I’ve got. Hang on a second. Boys, pipe down! I told you to go to the playground! Sorry, Mary. Anyway, Jerry’s girls live with him. The ex-wife drinks and long ago went home to mother. Now he’s wondering how he’ll feed himself, let alone the daughters.”
“What’s he done to inflame McLeod? He’s a little young to have been in the Party, isn’t he?”
“It’s more personal than that.”
Mary paused for a moment, no more able than Beverly to use the real name for what she now realized they were talking about. “Even with two children?” She knew it was a foolish question.
“Maybe that’s why the wife drank. I don’t know. I also don’t know what to do. He’s in the next room. I’ve given him three cups of coffee and two plates of eggs. The man is sobbing, Mary. He thinks he’s going to be arrested, for God’s sake.”
“What can I do?”
“I’ve no idea. But you actually know a couple of these congressmen I’ve been typing memos to for six years. Isn’t there one of them who might apply a little humane pressure?”
“You imagine McLeod will respond to pressure? Let alone the humane kind?”
“I know, I know. There’s another half dozen they’ve just let go besides Jerry, and God knows he’s not the prepossessing type anybody’s going to make a federal case over. Mary, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I called. His panic’s getting to me. God, maybe I should marry him. He’d probably still be a better husband than what I was used to.”
“What exactly do they have on him?”
“Just some odds and ends. Rumors. A sighting of him in a bar he shouldn’t have been in. Plus things they won’t say. He’s never been convicted of anything. But he failed their lie-detector test.”
Mary looked at the thermometer outside her window and said nothing for a minute. “Beverly, give me your number and let me call you back in a little while.”
She dressed for work, agitated by Beverly’s news and almost wistful for the cacophony of those Saturday mornings with the roommates on Q Street, when she’d be hacking through the nylon kudzu dangling from the shower-curtain rod and discovering that one of the girls had walked off with her umbrella.
Once out of the house, she moved on foot through Georgetown, passing the antiques shops and little restaurants. She supposed she could understand why the neighborhood drew scorn for being home to the city’s “rich, red, and queer,” even though right now half its dowagers and old New Dealers were still just heedlessly sleeping. Soon they would awake to shop for groceries or take a stroll along the canal with the same fitful anxiety about the Bomb, no more and no less, as anyone else.
Her mind returned to Scott McLeod and the mystery of why, if the State Department was so ineffectual, everyone worried about it so. If the men only pushed cookies, what should be the harm of their doing it with limp wrists? And why must half the organization have to put in overtime to help them do it? The government’s Saturday-morning workday had been disappearing before the war; been reinstated for the duration; and then dispensed with once again. And now it was back, at least here and there, thanks to zealousness about the deficit. Mr. Morton, that bright spot of internationalism, didn’t come in himself, but the rest of the Congressional Relations staff were expected to put in an appearance, however loosely policed by the weekend time clock. With any luck, poor Beverly could keep attending to Jerry Baumeister and not be missed.
Coming into Foggy Bottom, Mary walked past the chipped Watergate bandshell and the Negroes’ gingerbread shanties, which some of State’s employees had begun to buy up and make charming. She continued past the warehouses and the gasworks, down toward the old Observatory with its shuttered dome, and, finally, on into State’s big box. The building had been put up a decade ago for the War Department, which had outgrown it before ever moving in. From its new Pentagon across the river, the Department of Defense, euphemized and elephantine, was happy to let State have the place.
Three cabinet secretaries had since made the best of it, but that didn’t mean she, Mary Johnson, would stay indefinitely in these waxed corridors, down which her low heels now clicked on their way to CR. She removed her scarf as she crossed the threshhold into the bureau’s outer office and heard, from farther in, a strong baritone at work on “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” Fuller, who sometimes couldn’t make himself stay through a Thursday afternoon, was here bright and early on a Saturday morning.
Mary put a piece of paper into the typewriter and then stared at it, before hearing Miss Lightfoot join Fuller, coquettishly, in song. That thick-skulled cow who so loved to proclaim herself “nobody’s fool.” She must live at the Y, thought Mary, or in some ancient boardinghouse. Surely no roommates would put up with the array of resentments she so enjoyed displaying here at work, as if they were a tray of jewelry. The woman seemed to imagine that she glowed with wit and good sense whenever she decried the uselessness of Mary’s college degree or the “terrible unfairness” of Beverly Phillips’ having put her husband through law school only to “wind up” as she had.
But Mary was resentful, too, more than ever—of Fuller. Did he know about Jerry Baumeister? He was perfectly capable of singing even if he did.
“Would you like this to go to both Pennsylvania senators?” trilled Miss Lightfoot, whose hat was visible in Fuller’s doorway. Mary guessed that the two of them were working on another appeal for votes against the Bricker Amendment, which would radically limit the president’s ability to make treaties with foreign powers. Love must trump politics, thought Mary; she could not imagine that Miss Lightfoot wasn’t personally in favor of the amendment, a pet conservative proposal.
“Oh, yes,” said Fuller. “The more the merrier, Miss Lightfoot. I’ll be back in a flash.”
He emerged from his office, startled to see Mary, who continued to peer at her typewriter carriage.
“Do you enjoy her company?” she whispered, almost in a hiss.
Fuller sat down on the edge of her desk. “What do you think?” his expression seemed to say. Mary remained silent.
“We are likely to set an office productivity record for a Saturday morning,” he cheerfully declared. “Except for you. What’s this blank page supposed to be?” He tapped the typewriter.
“My letter of resignation.” Visibly upset, Mary rose from her chair. Fuller followed her into the corridor. “You’re carrying this nostalgia for Acheson a bit far,” he said.
“Stop playing the handsome idiot.” She paused long enough to make him certain that he was being insulted, not flirted with. “It just occurred to me,” she then added, “you’re pretty much my boss. Fire me, and I’ll get whatever unemployed GS-4’s get.”
Fuller said nothing.
“Do you know they’ve fired Jerry Baumeister?”
“I don’t even know who he is.”
“He is, or was,” Mary explained, “in the office of Educational Exchange.”
“What’s his problem? Pink or lavender?”
For a moment she would gladly have thrown Fuller himself to McLeod’s wolves.
“Lavender,” she forced herself to reply.
Again, he said nothing. He seemed to be searching his memory, trying perhaps to recall whether Jerry Baumeister had been one of the department’s “summer bachelors,” the type known to make a pass at another man while his own wife was up in Maine.
“Fuller,” she said, as evenly as she could, “this is not right.”
“Would your resigning be?”
“It would give me the pleasure of making a gesture.”
She saw that he would not be
drawn in, and she knew that she should walk away. But she was too angry for that. “I don’t see any bags under your eyes,” she told him. “I guess you didn’t have one of your late nights last night.”
Fuller shrugged. “A moderately late one.”
“Oh? When did you fall asleep?”
“When Irish eyes were smiling,” he answered. And then he disappeared down the hall.
Maybe he would fire her. Once he was out of sight, Mary composed herself and returned to her desk. Miss Lightfoot was singing “People Will Say We’re in Love.”
“We are all back here on Saturday because an urgent situation has arisen,” Roy Cohn informed everyone in Room 29 of the Federal Building in New York. “There is a direct conflict in testimony which we have to resolve.”
The urgency of determining whether or not Mr. Joseph Levitsky had actually said, upon the arrest of Julius Rosenberg in 1950, “But for the grace of God there go I,” was, to Levitsky’s lawyer, Leonard Boudin, debatable at best. Boudin announced that he was instructing his client, who a decade before had been with the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, to plead the Fifth Amendment to all questions involving Rosenberg and Mr. Carl Greenblum, the man who had lied and cried in front of the committee yesterday afternoon.
When Senator McCarthy, “in fairness to the witness,” now informed Levitsky that he would be cited for contempt, Boudin asked if any members of the committee other than the chairman were present in the hearing room.
“No,” McCarthy explained. “There is the administrative assistant to Senator Dirksen, Mr. Rainville, and the assistant to Senator Potter, Robert Jones.”
For the rest of the morning, Jones himself remained pleased at the thought of his name being read into the record by the chairman himself. Otherwise he was principally aware of a new tenseness between Cohn and John Adams, the army counsel who was here in the service’s interest to observe the proceedings. Adams had so far been stressing the absence of any problem between the Pentagon and McCarthy, but now, as today’s hearing was recessed until Monday, Jones noted the cool glances exchanged by the army’s lawyer and McCarthy’s. The chairman tended to ignore Adams, but McCarthy seemed inexplicably deferential toward Cohn, even scared. Before questioning Levitsky himself, the senator had almost sought the young counsel’s permission.
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