Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

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, 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...