Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

Tim kept at it until 2:05, through the bride’s vigorous toss of her bouquet—“That gal can play on my team anytime!” someone roared—and the newlyweds’ departure in a black limousine, not the red Cadillac rumored to be a wedding present from some of the senator’s Texas supporters. Back out in Dupont Circle Tim soon felt himself sweating through his blue suit. His steno pad was already soaked from his own palm; thank God, at least, for ballpoint pens. Looking at the top page of his notes, he realized he would soon be mystified by his own abbreviations unless he made a fair copy, with amplifications, right away. So once he’d bought a half-pint of milk at the big Peoples drugstore, he sat down amidst the late lunchers and sun-catchers on a bench near the Circle’s western rim. Across the expanse of grass he could hear the last of the wedding guests laughing through their departures.

He had just finished transcribing the first page on the pad when he noticed a shadow approaching: someone also wanting to sit down. As quickly as he could, he cleared off his milk carton, napkin, and two loose steno pages from the rest of the bench. “Sorry,” he said, before he’d even had a chance to look up. “For what?” For everything, thought Tim, once he raised his head and saw the spectacular young man standing over him. Taking in the suit jacket slung over the man’s broad shoulders and the faint glistening of sweat in the hollow of his neck where he’d loosened his tie, Tim wanted to say: For being nothing like you. For being all you’ll have for company on this bench.

“May I?” said the man. “Of course,” Tim finally answered. “Don’t they give you an office?” Tim laughed. “They’re not even giving me a job past Friday.” And then it all came out in a nervous, mortifying rush: his graduation from Fordham; his arrival here in June; his summer of rewrites on the Star’s city desk; his hope for a job on Capitol Hill; the chance to cover McCarthy’s wedding. Realizing that the man’s suit was as fine as his physique, Tim asked: “You weren’t a guest there, were you?” It was the most foolish question he could have posed; if this man had been inside the Washington Club, or even the cathedral, Tim would certainly have noticed. “No,” said the man, pointing in the direction of New Hampshire...

“‘The neat handwriting of the illiterate,’” he said, nervously quoting 1984.

“‘The neat handwriting of the illiterate,’” he said, nervously quoting 1984. (How can it be from “1984” when this chapter is in 1953?

“You’re a riot,” said Tim, smiling as his heart pounded. He retrieved the glasses and put them back on and saw that the man was looking at him with a gaze that could only be called appraising. He wanted to give this god a playful shove, and thought he could probably get away with making it look like only that, rather than his desperate desire to touch this person whose name he didn’t even know. The streetcar stopped in front of them. “I’m Timothy Laughlin, by the way.” “I’m pleased to meet you, Timothy Laughlin.” Tim had time enough to see that the man was pleased, but then the doors of the streetcar opened and the most terrible thing imaginable happened. As the two of them boarded, three other people, two women and a child, got between them. Standing in the aisle of the crowded car as it went down Pennsylvania, struggling to see past those three other souls, Tim only briefly recaptured his acquaintance’s attention. The young man gave him a helpless shrug and a relaxed smile that seemed to say: Oh well, sorry about this little turn of fate. Tim got off—there was nothing else to do—when the car stopped in front of the Star. He waved goodbye from the sidewalk, unsure whether the man could even see him. Standing in the doorway of the newspaper’s office, he watched the streetcar continue on its eastward way, and he knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never be more in love than he was now.

“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.”

In the Baltimore Catechism, the source of all Tim’s knowledge of the world above this one, the Trinity had been depicted as a shamrock—the visual analogy closest to hand for the Irish clergyman who’d written the text. But what if one added another leaf, the way one used to, with an artful graft, after hunting in vain for four-leaf clovers on the small patch of grass in the playground near Holy Cross? Tim did not plan to worship Hawkins Fuller, but why couldn’t his love for him be attached to the love he already felt for the actual Trinity? Had he not, in fact, always been in love, physically and particularly, with Christ, whose dark, haloed image on every calendar and classroom wall glowed more handsomely than any man walking His Earth? Had not Father McGuire, in the first pages of the catechism, promised a kind of divine romance? God has been very, very good to you. He thinks more of you than He does of anything else in this world. To you alone He has given an invitation to live with Him in heaven forever. When Hawkins had removed Tim’s shirt and seen the scapular beneath it, the older man had not seemed surprised, and he had made no joke. He had hung it, without comment, over one of the bedposts at the headboard, where, whenever Tim glimpsed it during the night, it seemed no more out of place—and no less protective—than it did when draped over his own narrow chest and back.

How many mortal sins had he committed last night? Did each separate act he and Hawkins performed constitute an individual transgression, or was their entire three hours together—until Hawkins left, after some chatter and a tousle of his hair but no actual goodbye kiss—a single offense? It didn’t matter, because either way, he, Timothy Patrick Laughlin, was dead. Mortal sin, said the catechism, kills the life of grace in our souls. That is why the sacrament of penance is called a sacrament of the dead. And one could not perform penance without making a confession, any more than one could make a confession without perfect contrition—which he did not feel. To his astonishment, he did not want to feel it, however well he had once mastered Father McGuire’s illustration of these matters. Elizabeth says: “Anyone who commits even one mortal sin does more harm than hundreds and hundreds of earthquakes ever could do.” She is right. As the words came back to Tim now, he pictured the ground below the 38th Parallel opening up and swallowing a thousand American soldiers. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…. Because he could not say these words this afternoon, his heart would pound with fear tonight. If I should die before I wake…Could he live, for even a little while, without grace—drained of it, like the empty black milk bottle the catechism drew for a soul with mortal or Original Sin? No. And he could not take Saint Augustine’s approach, asking to be made pure but not just now, becau...

nearly a month since their first hours in his own bed on Capitol Hill, he and Fuller had yet to take a walk together or share a meal. Hawkins had once shown up, unannounced, at the room above the hardware store, bearing a quart of milk (a joke) and a candy bar. They had eaten the candy bar in bed, but that hardly ranked with going out to a restaurant or making supper together. Were he and Hawkins having an “affair”? Actually, Tim couldn’t see that the word, with its implications of brevity and furtiveness, did the situation justice. Devoid of any previous romantic experience, he had lived these three weeks as an eternity of happiness. This wasn’t, he told himself, even technically like Back Street, since Hawkins, thank God, had not turned out to be married. That possibility, the ne plus ultra of Tim’s imaginings about the worldly and perverse, had been lifted from his mind the first night he had walked into Fuller’s almost comically authentic bachelor apartment on the fifth floor of 2124 I. Reentering the pale brick building tonight, Tim decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator to number 5B, partly to experience a pleasant envy of the career girls and med students who got to live in such proximity to Hawkins—but mostly to kill a last minute of time, enough to put him past ten-thirty on his graduation wristwatch. “It’s open,” said Hawkins, above the clatter of kitchen cleanup.

“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 morn...

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 Western Reserve. 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,...

“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 deferre...

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...

Mary checked the phonograph: the Christmasy Corelli concerto had another two inches to go before she’d need to change the record. But one of Jerry’s daughters, she now noticed, was struggling with a hem that had fallen. Maybe the hard-drinking mother had dropped a few stitches. “Honey,” called Mary, coming to the rescue, “let me get you a little old safety pin.” Inside her bedroom, while she rummaged the sewing box, Mary’s glance was drawn through the window, to a scene made visible by the streetlamp two houses down P Street. Hawkins Fuller, dressed for her party and holding a small brown bag, stood talking to a smaller man in a woollen cap and zippered jacket. She now recognized him—the tortoiseshell glasses—as the boy who’d come to the office with the book a couple of months back. He and Fuller appeared to be saying goodbye. After giving Fuller a sweet, casual punch on the arm, the boy smiled and walked away. At which point her colleague turned around and started toward her apartment. Mary wondered: Had that lovelorn little dogsbody leapt at the mere chance to walk Fuller to a party the older man wouldn’t even let him enter? What exactly should she be feeling? Disgust? Sympathy? She blocked the questions from her mind, and decided to use a needle and thread, instead of a pin, on the Baumeister girl’s skirt. Picking out a spool of bright red, she heard Corelli give way, abruptly, to Eartha Kitt: Santa baby, hurry down the chimney to me…

Looking out into the living room, she saw Fuller at the turntable and realized that he’d had a phonograph record inside the little brown bag. People were beginning to cluster around him, just as they would have had he only blown some dust off the needle and dropped it back onto Corelli. An older man from European Affairs was asking in a loud voice if he didn’t “think it terrible what had happened to poor George Marshall over in Oslo. You were over there once, weren’t you, young fellow? The poor general, heckled by those Communists while picking up his Peace Prize!” Fuller agreed that it was a shame, and moreover an embarrassment to old Haakon VII, “a fine chap and top-drawer king.” Even as his always-adaptable speech found him communicating in the EA man’s idiom, Fuller began letting his own shoulders sway in a manner both slinky and manly, one that belonged to nobody else at the party. Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing, a ring… Mary watched him and nodded but didn’t smile. She proceeded to Jerry’s daughter with her needle and thread. Ten minutes passed before she again needed to be in the kitchen, where she found Miss Lightfoot, middling drunk on Harvey’s Bristol Cream and wearing a hideous hat. Mary had had to invite her, and poor Mr. Church, an old friend from the Passport Office, was having to listen to her.

“What do you mean by ‘this’?” asked Miss Lightfoot, who knew perfectly well that Mr. Church had meant the sway of Senator McCarthy when he told her that “this could all end if Senator Morse just voted with the Democrats.” Should Oregon’s independent—formerly a Republican—throw in with the other side when it came time to organize the congressional session, then the chairmanship of McCarthy’s committee, and much of his power, would pass to the opposition. “Well, Morse won’t vote with the Democrats. He’s already said so,” Miss Lightfoot informed Mr. Church, whose more serious error had been to assume, from the general tenor of those at Mary’s party, that Miss Lightfoot, too, wanted all “this” to end. She did not. Nor, actually, did the Democrats, she now argued. “They don’t want to take over. They’d rather carp. Which is why they left the committee in the first place.” Mr. Church was shaking his head with forbearance, allowing Miss Lightfoot to overprove her point, when Hawkins Fuller brushed past them both. Leaning against the sink, Fuller took note of Mary’s sleeveless black dress and declared: “That appears to be a very cold shoulder.” Miss Lightfoot, already keenly stimulated, ...

“You came alone?” Mary finally asked him. “More or less,” he replied. “How is a person ‘more or less’?” asked Mary. “Did you make that poor creature I saw from the window walk all the way back home by themselves?” Lit as she was, she took care to keep the pronouns neutral, even at the expense of grammar, since she and Fuller now had Miss Lightfoot’s complete attention, Mr. Church having beaten a gentlemanly retreat once the handsome guest began having words with the hostess. Fresh from political triumph, but still smarting from Fuller’s rebuff, Miss L...

Mary attempted to move out of the kitchen, but Fuller blocked her, trying to smooth things over with a laugh. “If I’d brought him up, he would only have asked you for a glass of milk. And you don’t seem to be serving any.” By now furious at being ignored, Miss Lightfoot could feel her overpowdered jaw suddenly slacken. Him? He? A small cascade of pennies started dropping in her head. After all her flirtation! She’d even sung with this man! Without hesitation, she began a loud, seething recitation of the words she’d seen that boy, that milk-drinking nancy, write in the Lodge biography: “‘With thanks to Hawkins Fuller. I got the job. You’re wonderful.’” She made the inscription sound as if it were a cable from Moscow that had been discovered in Fuller’s shoe. Mary, still unable to get away, could picture the book lying on Fuller’s filing cabinet. He’d never even taken the gift home—a bit of callousness that still appalled her, even as she wanted to defend Fuller from this harridan to whom he’d so foolishly exposed himself. Pushing Miss Lightfoot aside, she at last returned to the living room. Fuller lifted the bott...

Within fifteen minutes, Fuller was at the department. Inside Congressional Relations, a bottle of Kentucky bourbon—a gift of the bureau chief—sat atop each desk. On Mary Johnson’s blotter there was also a tiny box, no bigger than two inches wide and high. A ring from the brewer, Fuller supposed, as soon as he saw it. “He snuck in here around eight-fifteen,” said Beverly Phillips. “An odd way to propose, no? Maybe he wants us to be cheering her on, telling her to accept.” “And we’ll do just that,” said Fuller. “Won’t we, Miss Lightfoot? Marriage being such a grand institution? Something everybody ought to enjoy?” Miss Lightfoot looked up from what she was typing to give him a thin, defiant smile, as if signaling that she would have to bear his presence here only a little while longer. Victory would be hers. Fuller saw Mary enter the office, and he managed to halt her near the front door. Walking her back out to the hall, he said: “You’ve got a present on your desk from Mr. Right.”

“I’ve been expecting it,” she replied. She seemed calm, neither displeased nor especially happy. “You’re not going to let him take you away from all this, are you?” She looked straight at Fuller. “Are we on speaking terms yet?” They had exchanged hardly a word since the party on Saturday. “You can decide that within the next hour,” said Fuller. “I’ll be out of the office on a date with Mr. Right.” Mary looked puzzled. “McLeod. The real Mr. Right.” “Oh, Fuller.” He saw her sudden look of concern. Clearly they were speaking. “The summons arrived yesterday,” he explained. Revulsion crossed her face. “Miss Lightfoot?” He nodded. “I’m due in Room M304. I’m sure your friend Baumeister is familiar with it.” “Does Mr. Morton know?” she asked. “The boss is always the last to know. I don’t believe they tell him until after they’ve told the wife. Their idea of fair play.”

An elevator ride and several hundred feet of waxed corridor brought him to M304, the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, whose name always sounded to Fuller like a CIA front: the little publishing house in Vienna, the art dealer in Rome. The office he entered had walls similar in color to those in his own, but there were no partitions and, it appeared, no secretary. On a small table between two chairs rested the department’s Investigative Manual and several mimeographed copies of Scott McLeod’s August 8 speech to the American Legion in Topeka: “I have attempted very frankly and honestly to face the issue of sexual perversion—the practice of sodomy—in the State Department,” he had assured his audience, promising the Legionnaires that in trying to replace those discharged from federal service, he would be looking for men “well-grounded in the moral principles which have made our democratic republic a model form of government.” “Mr. Fuller,” said a voice emerging from the wall intercom. “I’m Fred Traband. Please step into Room M305. And please leave your coat out there.” Fuller entered the inner office and shook hands with Mr. Traband, who immediately made it clear that there ...

Fuller neither nodded nor shook his head, though Mr. Traband looked as if he expected a flood of personal confession. When none occurred, he made a request: “Mr. Fuller, please get up and walk across the room.” Fuller obliged and then returned to his seat. “Again,” said Traband. When Fuller had finished his second walk, Traband gave him a newspaper and asked him to read a small story that he’d seemed to pick at random. Fuller recited: “‘President Eisenhower revealed in his State of the Union message last January that he favors some form of home rule for the District. The pres—’” “Thank you, Mr. Fuller, that’s enough.” Traband passed an open book across the desk. “This paragraph, please. The second-to-last one on the page.” Fuller picked up the book and looked at the spine—Of Human Bondage—before he commenced reading aloud: “‘Philip opened a large cupboard filled with dresses and, stepping in, took as many of them as he could in his arms and buried his face in them. They smelt of the scent his mother used. Then he pulled open the drawers...

Somerset Maugham? Fuller wondered. Was the interrogator expected to detect a tribal affinity between author and reader? Was it to be discerned in too much mimicry, a slightly excessive archness or lyricism in the tone of the recitation? Just as, presumably, too light a step in crossing the room might be added to his own too-expensive clothes in the bill of fairy particulars being drawn up against him? “Mr. Fuller, I’m going to ask you to take a lie-detector test.” Fuller looked around but saw no machine. There was also no door leading to any Room M306. There was, however, the kind of curtained screen one found in a doctor’s office, and it turned out that Traband’s assistant had been sitting behind it, beside an apparatus, all along. Fuller was instructed to open his shirt and roll up his right sleeve. Once he did, the...

“Have you ever frequented a Washington, D.C., establishment called the Jewel Box, at the corner of Sixteenth and L streets?” The tufted purple walls. The bartender who looks a little like Alan Ladd. “No.” “Have you ever been present at a Washington, D.C., establishment called the Sand Bar, in Thomas Circle?” The old redheaded queen leaning on the big plastic anchor at two a.m., shouting to no one in particular. The piano player hammering out “Some Enchanted Evening” for the third time in two hours. “No.” Fuller looked at the blank far wall. Silently, he sang to himself: You’re calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean. At least they flap their fins to express emotion. “Mr. Fuller, who was the president of the United States when you were born?” A “baseline” question. “Calvin Coolidge,” Fuller answered. “Have you ever had...

“Have you ever engaged in sodomy or oral-genital contact with another male?” He sometimes counted them like sheep. What was the name of that Italian boy in San Diego? The night before we both shipped out. The one who rubbed his feet together, fast, like a puppy having a dream, when he came. And that same week, the one who claimed to have gone to Annapolis, and tried— “Mr. Fuller, answer the question.” “No.” “Have you ever considered yourself to be in love with another male?” Here, Fuller thought, was the first interesting query of the morning. He pondered it, sincerely, dropping his gaze from the wall to his lap and then his forearm, where, beneath the cuff of the machine’s main sensor he noticed a golden-colored fleck of something dried onto his skin: the tiniest bit of exuberant Tim, he realized, missed by the towel. That’s me. I’m your hoodlum, your little j.d. He filled up with a tender feeling, which he expelled, immediately, like a breath. “...

Outside in Room M304, Fuller was confronted with the sight of Scott McLeod himself, talking to whatever subordinate he’d brought along. Picking up his suit jacket, Fuller wondered if he himself might not be a bigger fish than he’d imagined. He nodded to the security chief, whose plump pink complexion and translucent eyeglass frames nodded back, before McLeod hastened himself and his underling into the room Fuller had just exited. McLeod’s chief patron, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, had once, around 1940, during Fuller’s time at St. Paul’s, given a speech to the students. Buttoning his jacket, Fuller could now recall its title, printed on the program passed out in the chapel: “How to Be a Man.” Alone in Room M304, he took his time, combing his hair and shooting his cuffs. He thought of Tim clutching the pair of links an hour or so ago—and then he heard conversation begi...

“All right, Mr. Laughlin.” Fuller rose from the edge of the desktop. “We can’t waste the taxpayers’ money by keeping you here any longer.” The dismissal was performed as a burlesque of impatience, but Tim knew he was indeed meant to go, as if the two of them really were Mr. Fuller and Mr. Laughlin, strangers. The touch of Hawkins’ hand to his shoulder, for the briefest moment as they reached the door, did little to erase the impression. “He’s a nice boy,” said Mary Johnson, once he was gone. “Skippy?” asked Fuller. “Practically an angel.” She resumed typing thank-you letters to opponents of the Bricker Amendment. “You don’t approve,” said Fuller, not quite ready to reenter his own office. “Of what?” asked Mary. The ensuing silence convinced her he didn’t really mean to discuss it. “Fuller,” she finally said—a last effort—“I’m not Miss Lightfoot.” “I’ll tell the brewer. He’ll be relieved.” “But no,” said Mary. “I suppose I don’t approve. I doubt any woman really does. And you can’t expect me to: I was still getting ashes on my own head three years ago. But there are things I approve of less.” “Of our boy Skippy railing against the reds?” “No. Of your breaking his heart.” Fuller paused before saying, grandly, “I lack all such intention.” “But not all such power.”

They were both still afraid of this conversation, and knowing that Fuller could outlast her in any duel of silences, Mary got up to file a handful of Bricker clippings from the European press. “I suppose,” she said at last, “Tim was imagining how he’d like to sit at that desk every day, be at your beck and call.” She nodded to Miss Lightfoot’s empty station. “He’d be excellent,” replied Fuller. “Works very hard, and has his race’s gift of gab when he’s working on paper. The stammer disappears then, just as it does when he’s drunk or—I’m sure—angry, though that I’ve never seen. His handwriting is even neater than Miss Lightfoot’s.” “Oh, you’d see him angry if he worked at that desk.” Mary kept filing as she spoke. “How do you think he’d feel taking your calls, and hearing your conversations?” Fuller said nothing, but still would not go back inside his office. Mary knew that he wanted to make her work even harder at this, force her to stick the knife farther in, get her—where McLeod had failed—to make the needle jump. “Wouldn’t sooner rather than later hurt him less?” she asked. “Couldn’t you let him down easily? Give him up for Lent?” Fuller pushed his hair above his forehead, making his ashless, marble brow fully visible. He returned to his office, declaring curtly, “I’m not Catholic, Miss Johnson.”

Sokolsky’s speech had contained one peculiar patch, a piece of hit-and-run rhetoric in which McCarthy offered up the possibility that everyone hearing his voice might soon die, and the nation itself be destroyed, because of unnamed traitors who had slowed down production of the U.S. hydrogen bomb. And now, as Tim looked into his water glass, he felt himself wishing for the prophecy’s fulfillment—a manmade Second Coming, all doom and no redemption. Weeks without Hawkins had left him with circles under the eyes and even thinner. He now took a cigarette whenever Tommy offered an open pack, and after work crawled into the bed he’d left unmade that morning. Good Friday was nine days away and he would not be heading home to New York: longing for Hawkins had made Thanksgiving and Christmas hard enough; consciousness of banishment would be unbearable in Grandma Gaffney’s parlor. Once he failed to make his Easter duty at the Communion rail, his estrangement from the Body of Christ would become official and another mortal sin upon his soul. Several times during the last few weeks he had come close to entering the confessional, in search not of absolution but some temporary solace. Yet what could he possibly say in the darkened booth? Bless me, Father, for I have been unable to sin; he won’t see me.

Cohn, too, shook his head no, while allowing his gaze to linger on the handsome soldier. In the two of them Tim saw a crude Herblock cartoon of himself and Hawkins Fuller, though he felt sure nothing had ever been consummated between the lawyer and the private. And he wondered: Would he himself have been better off loving Hawkins without any physical return? Without the illusions of emotional requitement he sometimes allowed sex to impose? One heard that Schine actually liked Cohn; could anyone say that Hawkins Fuller liked Timothy Laughlin? Tim would never learn whether he was ready to face this last question, because at the moment he posed it to himself, he heard Hawkins whisper: “I’ve decided to forgive you, Skippy.” Dumbstruck, he turned around to look. Hawk’s hand was on his shoulder—a mirage brought forth by his own weeks of thirst and suffering?

“Go tell them you’re sick and have to leave right now. Don’t wait for the gavel. Meet me in ten minutes on the southwest corner.” He made it there in eight, after lying to Tommy McIntyre, racing back to Potter’s office in the Capitol, shutting his desk lamp, and, once he saw Hawkins’ big green Buick waiting for him outside the SOB, wondering if he’d left any lights burning at home. He realized now that they were going away. To Charlottesville, for the weekend, Hawk explained. He sat in silence all the way over the Memorial Bridge and through the red-bricked garden apartments of Arlington, offering no argument or banter, nothing that began “You’re forgiving me?” He said nothing at all, as if, unlike the doubtful Private Schine, he really were a hostage, one who at any moment might be thrown out upon the open road. Hawkins, too, all the way to Manassas with the radio off, said nothing. But no, this could only be good, could only be another miracle on the order of Hawkins’ telephone call to the Star last September.

“A hundred minutes ago,” Tim finally said, as they passed the battlefield cemetery, “I’d have been wishing I were lying there.” “Having to look at Karl Mundt will do that, I’m sure,” said Hawkins, never taking his eyes from the road. Tim struggled to keep from fishing, from begging for reassurance: You know what I meant. “A hundred years ago,” said Hawkins, “you would have been here, freshly dead. While your Grandma Gaffney was out rioting against the draft that stole you for a drummer boy.” “Before I died I would have had a case on you, in your fancy uniform at the head of a Zouave regiment.” “No, you wouldn’t have. You’d never have met me. I’d have bought my way out of conscription for three hundred dollars, so that I could still be eating oysters at Delmonico’s while you were cracking your poor Irish teeth on hardtack.” Tim smiled and rested his head against the backseat. A minute later he fell asleep, exhausted with relief as they continued riding westward. He slept until the beginning of a bright orange sun...

“I can’t—” said Hawkins. “I know,” said Tim, recovering as quickly as he could. “I know. You can’t have this.” In fact Fuller was thinking: No, what I can’t do is even tell you why I came across town—how it was the television picture I saw of you emptying Potter’s ashtray, looking gaunt and desperate, the circles under your eyes as dark as the ones under McCarthy’s. And because of the glimpse I caught of that cold-eyed prick Bob Kennedy, no different from the way he was at Harvard a half dozen years ago, glancing at you while you fussed over the ashtray, annoyed that this hardworking little fairy was cluttering up a piece of history in the making. That was what he wanted to say and couldn’t. But, yes, he did want Tim to stop crying now, and he was wishing he’d resisted the impulse to drive across town and get him. He was wishing he were right now back with the uncomplicated cracker kid he’d ha...

And yet, for all that, he wanted to hear Tim’s chatter, wanted the intermittent pleasure of protecting him; and wanted to fuck him on the floor of the car once it was dark enough to pull over into the woods. They stopped to buy him a toothbrush and underwear and a second shirt, and then had dinner on King Street before browsing the used bookstore a block away and walking along the colonnade of rooms on the university lawn, where they looked out of place with their un-crewcut hair and made jokes about the white-bucked college boys, even jokes about taking one of them back to the hotel. When they checked into their room, Tim’s tears came again, from some borderless place between anguish and joy, where he was struggling to believe that the two of them had actually been visible together, out in public, in a restaurant and a store. “Do you know what? It’s the same question!” he cried, laughing and shaking. “The same question! The one I was asking myself when you wouldn’t come back to me and the one I’ve been asking myself all night, when you’ve made me happier than I’ve ever been! What did I do to deserve this? The same question!” During all the coltish kisses with which he always so...

At eight minutes before five, just prior to adjournment, Jenkins’ assistant was moved to ask Adams whether it wasn’t true “that many of these remarks or abuses that you have detailed on the part of Mr. Cohn were actually made in a facetious or jovial vein?” Quite the contrary, Adams replied. “On the subject of Schine, nothing was funny. Nothing was facetious. Nothing was jovial.” Tim heard this last exchange on the radio in Potter’s Capitol office. He was happy to be overworked, fielding calls while rewriting a speech and folding one stack of papers into another. The more he had to do, the less time there was for being lovesick, which he’d been more often than not since Charlottesville. In the hotel room there, after a ferocious storm of sex that had followed the slap to his face, he had for the first time been allowed to lie all night in Hawkins’ arms. But when the two of them returned to Washington, things reverted to their regular pattern, making him miss the near-hysteria he’d felt during the unexpected travel idyll, and causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity—and then everything else.

The president’s decision to float above the battle, in a kind of military observation balloon, had been vindicated to his strategists. This afternoon, as Cohn retook the witness chair, Ike, the recipient of his Communist-hunting compliments, was at a Washington Senators game to benefit the Red Cross. “I would like,” said Senator Potter, who now resumed his questioning, “to have you comment on the extent of Communist influence in our government.” “Yes, sir,” said the still-modest Cohn. “It can only, of course, be a comment, because I don’t know all the facts.” “When did that ever stop him?” whispered Miss McGrory. “During the 1930s and 1940s,” said Cohn, “the Communist Party of the United States was, I would say, remarkably and unbelievably successful in placing Communists in a number of key spots in our government.” But sheer numbers, he explained, weren’t important. “One is too many. I think Stalin or Lenin, one of the top Communist theoreticians, once said something to the effect that it takes a thousand people to build a bridge; it takes one person to blow it up.”

For a moment Tim thought he could feel the Caucus Room expand with history and purpose. Something important was being offered for discussion. But the senator and the witness soon returned to the question of whether, on or around December 9, Adams had offered to trade Cohn an air force scandal for the Fort Monmouth investigation. “Somebody is not telling the truth,” said Potter, reiterating what had become his catchphrase. “Somebody is certainly mistaken, sir,” responded Cohn. “It is certainly not us, sir.” “So,” said Potter, with the logic Tommy McIntyre had supplied him, “perjury has been committed.” “Well, sir,” answered Cohn, “somebody is certainly mistaken, and, once again, sir, I am not.” Tim noticed that Cohn might be denying no more than stupidity; he had not denied lying—let alone denied that the eleven memoranda over his name had been typed on an office machine he was never even near.

When the session ended and the lights went down, the witness gathered his papers and stood up just two feet from Tim, who still occupied the seat Mrs. Potter had decided to pass up for an afternoon’s shopping. Full of anger and a certain relief, as if he could now shed a cloak that had made him itch unbearably, Cohn stepped up to Tim’s left ear and whispered: “If your soldier-boy boss isn’t careful, he may find that his balls go the way of his legs.” Not waiting for McCarthy, he exited the room. Tim said nothing, just stood there breathing a little hard over the first words Cohn had ever spoken to him directly. When Tommy came to collect the transcript he’d been working on, Tim repeated Cohn’s remark. “That’s nothing to worry about,” Tomm...

“I’m fine,” said Tim, who wanted to get out of the room as fast as Cohn had. In exiting, he allowed himself one glance in Potter’s direction and realized that Tommy was right: the senator appeared perfectly content, pleased with the crispness of his own performance. He wore the look of serene dignity that he could maintain for hours at a time, the same expression he’d no doubt worn when reading one of Everett Dirksen’s five unpublished novels, a task he’d undertaken, he explained to Tim, “because Senator Dirksen values my opinion.” “Come on,” called someone from the crowded elevator car that was just about to close. “You’re skinny enough to fit in!” Tim emerged from his distraction to realize that the voice belonged to McCarthy, who was forgoing, as he often did, the Senators Only car. As Tim squeezed into place, he felt a gentle, almost fatherly, hand on his shoulder. “Pete over there better not complai...

Tim knew that he, too, would never again be what he had been, and he knew it even more surely once he saw Hawk enter the room, smile at him, and mouth the word “Skippy.” After smiling back, he turned and looked the other way, behind him, toward the rooftop’s railing, telling himself that if he leapt over it now he would die happy, the mortal sin of suicide just a redundant count in God’s indictment, earning him only a concurrent eternity in Hell. Hawk approached with an improbable entourage: Mary Johnson and the man who must be her fiancé, along with Mrs. Phillips and a fellow Tim didn’t recognize. They all took drinks from a tray, a waiter having glided instantly up to Hawk, just the way Tim remembered it had gone at the restaurant in Charlottesville. With one hand Hawkins selected a summery gin and tonic, and with the other he made a discreet wave to Joe Alsop, who, engaged in conversation with Ike’s press secretary, gave a businesslike one in return. “Here,” said Hawk, presenting Tim to his companions, “is the real source of your invitations.” In fact it had been a joyful, capering Tommy McIntyre who’d pressed a fistful of Mrs. Craig’s invites upon Fuller when he’d visited the office yesterday morning to talk to Senator Potter about the St. Lawrence Seaway legislation. “It’s nice to see you again,” said Mary Johnson, who reacquainted Tim and Beverly Phillips before introducing him to Paul Hildebrand and Jerry Baumeister. “Mr. Fuller,” she explained to Tim, “is making us...

Senator Gore’s chief of staff came over to greet Hawk, displacing Tim from the circle of conversation. The new vantage allowed him to watch the almost formal way in which Hildebrand held Mary Johnson’s hand—a contrast to the easy exuberance of the arm Mr. Baumeister kept draped over Mrs. Phillips’ shoulders. “My mother,” Baumeister was telling Miss Johnson with a loud laugh, “didn’t feel completely keen on my going out with a divorced woman.” Mrs. Phillips laughed, too. “Jerry is an excellent companion. A lot more fun than the widower turned out to be.” “And I got her a free window sash from the hardware store!” Hawkins pulled Tim back into the group and away from an oncoming conga line whose members were shouting the defeated candidate’s campaign slogan, but adding the unheroic last lyric of the song from which it had come: “The whole town’s talking about the Jones boy…and he’s only nine days old!” On primary day the youthful challenger had lost by five to one. “Yes,” said Hawkins, “the hidden vote stayed hidden.” Senator Gore’s aide replied that the only thing Mainers now had to worry about was Nixon’s plan to vacation in the state.

“It’s usually good to keep things well hidden,” said Tim to Hawkins. He realized that his level of inebriation had caught up to that of the reporters at the railing. And being out in the open with Hawk, in a setting so much more public than even the Charlottesville restaurant, was making him giddy. Maybe he shouldn’t have said what he just did, but Hawk seemed to get his meaning and laughed over it: “There are all kinds of things hidden here.” Fuller pointed to the figure of G. David Schine, who had entered with an attractive girl Tim recognized as Iris Flores, one of the private’s regular girlfriends; she had been interviewed in executive session but never called upon to testify in public. In the closed hearing she had described herself as an “inventor” trying to market her latest brainstorm, a new-and-improved nylon brassiere strap. Joe and Jean McCarthy might be home tending their wounds, while Cohn burnt the midnight oil back in the office, but here, Tim thought, was Schine, smiling—in uniform, no less—and being mobbed, followed around by Dorothy Kilgallen, Hearst’s gossip writer, who took down his every word. “Mr. Fuller.” Tommy McIntyre, full of vigor and vim, gleaming wit...

“So where’s the ostensible boss?” he asked, meaning Potter. Tim wanted to sink from the hotel’s rooftop to its basement. “Home in Arlington with the missus,” said Tommy, neither surprised nor displeased by the query. Tim tried not to stammer. “It would’ve been awfully hard for him to come here. After all, he hired Mr. Jones.” “And he fired him, too,” said Tommy. “We like Senator Potter having things both ways. It’s this flexibility that gives him a certain utility. “ A secretary from Senator Kefauver’s office came and pulled Hawkins away. “Someone I want you to meet,” she said. Tommy took the opportunity to tug Tim in the opposite direction. “Look at them lappin’ it all up,” he said, tracing the whole senatorial panorama with his glass of 7Up. “Some of the girls they’ve brought along could get ’em charged under the Mann Act. Of course, their aides have to settle for simpler pleasures, with smaller penalties. Jenkins over there will be heading off any time now to the men’s room at the G Street Y.” Tim looked skeptically toward Lyndon Johnson’s executive assistant, a family man by all accounts. “Oh, yes,” said Tommy...

“You look steady enough to me,” said Tommy, whose eyes were now fixed on Private G. David Schine. “I’m trying to remember which does what,” said Tim. “The Mann Act and the Volstead Act, I mean.” Tommy laughed. “The first one strives mightily to protect underaged innocence. Oh, it’s a terrible law to be caught violating.” After a pause, he added: “But set a thief to catch a thief.” Tim pointed toward Iris Flores. “She certainly looks twenty-one.” “Oh, she is,” said Tommy, baring yellow teeth as he laughed. “That’s not Schine’s problem.” Was it, Tim wondered, remembering Alsop’s information, someone else’s problem? Perhaps a problem Schine knew McCarthy had? Was Tommy on the verge of revelation? Tim had wondered for months why the older man kept plying him with riddles. It had to be more than Celtic frat...

From behind, Tim heard a woman’s soft Southern voice beginning to sing “Hey There.” He felt an ice-filled glass being pressed against the back of his neck and realized it must be Mary Johnson. He turned around and smiled. “Me with the stars in my eyes,” he sang in return. “That ice felt good. Where’s Paul?” “At a phone, ordering us a car. He figures we’ll never get a cab downstairs.” “You’re leaving so soon?” Mary laughed. “It’s a miracle he lasted this long.” Tim noticed the way she said it, as if Hildebrand’s prudential nature might be troubling her more than Hawkins’ daredevil one. “Would you let me make you dinner some night?” she asked. “Really?” “Really,” she assured him. “Just the two of us.” “Of course,” he replied, knowing there would be a third, incorporeal presence at her table. For the first time in his life he would be talking to somebody about Hawkins Fuller, saying his name, making judgments and speculations about him, offering amusing stories in which he himself figured. But were there any stories that Tim could actually tell? Ones that didn’t have nakedness...

The widow of the twenty-eighth president remained plump and pretty, sitting in a white metal garden chair atop this hotel whose opening she had attended in 1917. He watched Hawk standing over the former first lady, charming her. She was playfully swatting him with a heavily ringed and braceleted hand, its adornments probably having come wholesale from her first husband, Mr. Galt, whose old jewelry store survived a few blocks away. “No,” said Mary. “Fuller was taken to meet the one standing next to her.” Tim noticed a well-tailored blond girl alternating her gaze between Hawk and Mrs. Wilson, smiling as if her life depended on it. “She’s pretty,” said Tim. “You think so?” asked Mary, who then seemed surprised...