Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

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.