Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  “Harvard doesn’t need Communists,” said Fuller. “The Ivy League undergraduate mentality is already more collective than anything you’d find on a Soviet wheat farm.” He made some robotic rowing movements that had Tim laughing just before the telephone rang.

  The caller was somewhere so noisy that Fuller tried covering his free ear to hear him better. “You sound like you’re down at the Jewel Box,” he shouted over the apparent din on the other end. “You are?” he asked, laughing, his voice higher than usual. “Well, let me get back to you tomorrow.” A second call, almost immediately after the first, was from Fuller’s mother; he told her, too, that he would ring back the next day.

  “Mother is bored with Father,” said Hawkins, returning to the couch and once more putting his arm around Tim. “She needs a new cause. Getting Eisenhower nominated wasn’t much of one, and it’s been made obsolete by its own success.”

  “I did my own small bit for that,” said Tim, knowing he was setting himself up to be teased. He told Hawkins of how, while at Fordham, he had worked part-time, mostly running errands, for Tex McCrary’s public relations firm. “You weren’t aware of my proximity to the famous, were you?” he asked, hoping to provoke some laughter and roughhousing. “I had to pass out leaflets at the big Draft Ike rally in Madison Square Garden. My father wanted Taft, and he was not pleased.”

  “Neither was mine,” said Hawkins. “I was at the rally, too.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Tim, almost wheeling out of his embrace.

  “Accompanying my mother. And thereby annoying my father, who reminded me that a State Department employee shouldn’t be at such a gathering.”

  Tim’s mind was far away from politics and the Hatch Act. He had soared into the realm of romance and fate, and before he could stop himself, he asked: “I wonder what would have happened if we’d met there, that day, instead of in Dupont Circle.” He winced as soon as the words—too presumptuous—were out of his mouth.

  Hawkins grinned from his well-defended battlement. “You’d have been sorely disappointed.”

  “How so?” said Tim, the whiskey putting him in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Because I had an assignation that night with a musician. Who,” Hawkins said, pulling Tim close enough for whispering, “does things you haven’t even dreamed of.” He pulled back in time to catch the blush he knew this would raise. “A clarinet player in Hell’s Kitchen.”

  “I’d have walked you to his apartment,” said Tim, after only a few seconds’ hesitation. “On the way I’d have shown you where I used to go to school and church.”

  The scenario was ridiculous, and yet so likely that both men laughed. Even so, Tim was soon feeling bad about himself: pride might be a sin, but self-mortification, detached from penance, could be one, too. He reached for the tumbler of rye, his arm knocking into Fuller’s, which he realized had raised itself, tenderly, in order to caress his face. There was a softness, a sense of pathos and protection in Hawkins’ expression, that he had never seen. But the collision of their two arms caused Hawkins to withdraw the gesture and replace the look on his face with one of relief—the look of a man who was, upon further reflection, pleased not to have given away something he didn’t need to.

  Swallowing more whiskey, Tim asked: “Does your mother ever fix you up with girls?” His own parents, curiously tactful, never seemed to try. Hawkins said nothing. Tim bit down on an ice cube and tried to blunt the query with playfulness: “She’s probably too busy beating them away from the door.”

  Hawkins unbuttoned his own shirt. “She does do a little matchmaking for yours truly. And of course she’ll succeed at it one of these days.”

  Tim tried to hide the revulsion and fear coming over him by pressing his face against Hawkins’ now bare chest.

  “But that doesn’t amount to a terribly compelling crusade,” said Hawkins, as he removed Tim’s eyeglasses. “What she should really carry the banner for is religion. You know, she’s more than a little attracted to your people. I think she imagines herself as Loretta Young or Mrs. Luce, converting herself at the feet of Fulton J. Sheen.”

  “I was watching him tonight, on a TV at Hecht’s.” Tim was relieved to think they might be finding their way back to the more usual precincts of raillery.

  “Well, Mother was no doubt watching it up on Seventy-fourth and Park. I’ve seen it with her several times myself. I’m sure what she really wishes is that we still had an Irish maid she could Lady-Bountifully invite to join her on the sofa.”

  “You’re talking about your mother,” said Tim, poking Hawkins’ thigh.

  “No, we’re talking about you,” said Fuller, drawing Tim up so that their two faces were only inches apart. “Tell me, Skippy, how’d you escape Local 20 of the cherubim? Why didn’t they make you into a priest?”

  For the same reason you should never be a husband, he wanted to say.

  “Maybe because I like doing this too much instead,” he settled for answering. He kissed Hawkins’ neck, receiving in return only a familiar, opaque smile, as if “this,” and all it signified, did not even register. Was Hawkins ever really conscious, Tim wondered, of their doing anything at all? Or had he somehow made “this” into an automatic, harmlessly recurring condition, like sleepwalking?

  Hawkins lifted him from the couch, and turned off the television. Once they were in the bedroom and he was removing the last of his clothes, the older man finally said, “Of course, there’s my father’s great dilemma to consider, too.”

  Tim propped himself up on the pillow, surprised at what seemed to be a waiver of the rules. He prepared for the imparting of real, personal information, unprompted by any risky question of his own.

  Hawkins flopped onto the bed, holding a shiny brochure. “The old man is deciding whether he can permit himself to drive an automatic transmission—or whether that’s something that was never meant to be, like filter tips.” He climbed on top of Tim and, between kisses, began a comic recitation of the advertisement. “‘Now your hand, foot, and mind are completely free from all gear-shifting work,’” he whispered. Tim remembered to laugh, but this transposition of the brochure’s promises, accompanied by Hawkins’ insistent touch, was ludicrously thrilling, a smoothly narrated trip into the helplessness he sought. “‘Masters the steepest grades without asking a thing of you,’” said Hawkins, who shut the light and placed one hand under the small of his back. “‘Instant response to throttle.’”

  When they were through, Tim held on to Hawkins in the dark for as long as he could, knowing he would soon hear the serious joke about this being a school night, and how he ought to get home so that come morning he would be fresh for “Citizen Canes,” as Hawkins liked to call Potter. But for the moment he could feel the beating of their hearts, at different rates, and recognize in Hawkins’ touch a fondness, an attachment, that was sanctioned only by the dark.

  At that same hour, a mile or so away, Mary Johnson was sitting down to a late supper with Jerry Baumeister at the Occidental. She’d already had an early one with Paul Hildebrand, whom she was now seeing happily enough almost every other night, but Jerry’s invitation had been urgent. His thin, ordinarily pleasant face seemed pallid. He had picked, she noted, the most brightly lit corner of the most respectable place imaginable, close by the Willard Hotel and White House.

  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 demonstrati
on 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.