Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

Tim shook his head and turned on the radio, not in any real display of anger, just to make plain that he couldn’t continue a conversation in this vein. Over the airwaves, the voice of Roy Cohn was explaining the toll that this past year had taken on his parents in the Bronx. Senator Potter, tape-recorded ten minutes earlier, was wishing him well. A statement from McCarthy’s office, just released and now being read by the announcer, struck a less forgiving note: “The resignation of Roy Cohn must bring great satisfaction to the Communists and fellow travelers. The smears and pressures to which he has been subjected make it clear that an effective anticommunist cannot long survive on the Washington scene.” Woodforde was smiling—over this formulation that might soon become McCarthy’s epitaph for himself—when a colleague from U.S. News stuck his head in the door: “Come on down. Flanders is starting his speech.” Woodforde waved for Tim to join them in the gallery. “Here’s something we can all agree on, no?” Still uncertain about the censure movement, Tim nonetheless felt glad of a truce and agreed to accompany the two reporters. He fell in step beside Woodforde, wondering as they double-timed it down the corridor why some part of him felt drawn to this left-wing provocateur. The gallery was more crowded than the floor. Democrats—worried about appearing overeager—were thin on the carpeted ground below press and spectators. But rhetoric was soon off to the races. Flanders invited ...

“What I am mostly is a drunk, whether or not I’m drinking. Same way you’re a Catholic, whether or not you’re taking Communion. Which these days, I suspect, you’re not.”

Everybody’s money comes from someplace, Senator. Everybody’s people come from someplace. Tim remembered the quick threat to Potter, the poisoned meat in the sandwich of bonhomie that McCarthy had served that afternoon last March. Tommy would have heard the remark from the outer office, where he’d decided to wait. “But Joe and Roy don’t know I got myself imposed on Charlie for my own particular motives. And they don’t know I’ve got something far bigger on them than they’ve got on yours truly.” There would be no further explanation tonight. Tim reached for a peppermint and kept his eyes on the tablecloth. “Why did you tell me all this?” he asked at last. “Because I’ve seen you looking at Mr. Fuller. And I know that your life will be given to his as surely as Annie Larchwood got mine. I told you because you’ll understand.” Tommy pushed aside the just-brought coffee and leaned into the table. His eyes shone with a brutal sympathy, letting Tim know that, from this moment on, for the foreseeable future, he lived not just in Hawkins’ clutches, but in Tommy McIntyre’s, too.

When he got to I Street, his head off-kilter from the old-fashioneds, Tim looked up and saw that the apartment was dark. He wondered if he should sit on the steps and wait until Hawk returned with some weeknight conquest. For a few minutes he stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide, until he felt an enormous, unexpected surge of anger. In his mind’s eye, Hawk was bobbing atop the clean blue ocean in his pressed naval uniform, while he himself was being dragged to its weed-choked depths. Drunk as he was, he could feel the hint of autumn in the air. A “School’s Open Drive Carefully” poster flapped against the streetlamp. NO DANCING. NO CARRYING DRINKS. He walked up the building’s steps and, once inside the vestibule, took down the super’s posted instruction that tenants keep their new air conditioners pitched at a five-degree angle toward the street; drips were damaging rugs and seeping into floorboards. On the back of the paper, he wrote a note to leave in Hawkins’ mail slot: You said knowledge is insurance. Against what? The chance that somebody might turn out to be what he appears to be? That somebody might not own somebody else? I’ll never own you, no matter how many times I hum “You Belong to Me” in the shower. But I belong to you—whether you like it or not. After the cab ride, he had no money for even the streetcar. And so he walked all the way home, miles, wishing he could sing in his chains like the sea.

Kenneth Woodforde, Tim suspected, was an actual Communist. But as such he would at least be a believer in something—as opposed to Hawk, who believed in nothing, or Senator Potter, who believed what he was told to. And as opposed to himself, a believer in contradictions: that McCarthy was the devil doing the Lord’s work; that Christ was Lord and yet His laws could be disobeyed.

provoke

He took a piece of stationery from the desk’s middle drawer and wrote: “Dear Skippy, I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier….”

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.

“A phone call, Mr. Fuller. From a Mr. Sorrell at the Pentagon.” “Thanks.” Hawkins headed for one of the telephone cabins, thinking how much easier it would be to focus for a moment or two on Skippy’s future instead of his own. He understood from a letter he’d seen on Mary’s desk that there still might be time to affect a decision about Private Laughlin’s AIT, even if his Fort Dix days with the Fighting Sixty-ninth—there was nomenclatural combination!—would be over in a couple of weeks. He knew someone, of course. He’d left the message with Sorrell just an hour ago. “Andy,” he said, taking the receiver. “You always were quick.” “Got your own little Private Schine, do you?” “What about the Monterey Language School?” “That’s hard to do. Actually, it’s hard to do anything like this, but I’ll accomplish what I can. Tell me his aptitudes.” He chuckled at the word. “Writes nicely. Clever. Terribly sincere right-winger. No particular drive. A tender disposition. Would be a wonderful boy Friday to some major general.” Sorrell’s leering chuckle became a full laugh. “I see.” Fuller said nothing, just waited for an answer. “Well,” Sorrell at last replied, “maybe USAIS, the information school in upstate New York.” “I suppose that’s better than having him learn to type all over again at Fort Benjamin Harrison.” Or, God forbid, putting him into a combat arm. He once more pictured Tim bouncing toward a European death in some jeep, the same mental image he’d had at Christmas, but filled in...

Lingering in the chapel, he checked his watch and closed his eyes to say the last of his prayers, but all that came to mind, yet again, was his failed attempt at confession, at St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, on the Saturday afternoon before he’d left Fort Dix. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eighteen months since my last confession. He’d been able to hear Father Davett, identified by the nameplate on the confessional, shifting on his bench behind the sliding panel. The “eighteen months” had made the priest anticipate something exceptional, so he was moving closer for a better listen. I missed my Easter duty, Tim had continued, hopelessly, aware of how much further he had to go. Father Davett: Yes? I was in love with a man. The memory of Tommy McIntyre’s voice—“You are in love”—had seemed to find him in yet some further abyss, a pit of lying. How old are you? Twenty-three. Did you have impure thoughts about this man? No. He’d said it with conviction, believing that to say yes would be bearing false witness against the ecstatic, starlit thoughts he’d always had of Hawk. Somehow he’d tried to keep going, to see if he could reach a merciful middle ground. Father Davett (confused): Did you have carnal awareness of this man? Yes. Have you ceased to? Yes. Are you sincerely sorry? No. Father Davett (exasperated): Then why are you here? I intend to stop. I have stopped. That is not enough. You must be sincerely sorry. I can’t be sincerely sorry. How could he expl...

“Well,” said Mary, “they’re already getting Capitol Hill ready for your return. They’ve finished the foundations on that new Senate Office Building, the one going up where that little slum on First Street used to be? They’ll have the whole thing done in a couple of years.” She realized, suddenly, that she needed to concoct a fib. “I got all of that from Beverly. I think I wrote you about how much time she was spending on the Hill this spring.” Tim, certain that she’d gotten this architectural update from Hawkins, who visited the Capitol twice a week, just nodded. Mary now surmised what he was thinking, which was not at all what had made her worry. She had lied to protect a secret of her own, not Tim’s feelings. She’d seen the construction herself, during the two weekends Fred Bell had come down to Washington to see her, weekends the two of them had spent in a little room at the top of the Carroll Arms. Each Sunday afternoon, when Fred would phone his wife in Massachusetts to report on all the preparation he was doing for the next day’s lobbying, she would take a stroll around the Hill that took her past the construction site. “I may not come back to Washington at all,” said Tim, “but if I do I’ll be your neighbor a couple of times a month. The Army Reserves in D.C. are so hard up they drill in a State Department lecture room! Right at Twenty-first and C.” His face flushed with nostalgia for the handful of visits he’d made to Hawkins’ office. Mary saw his color rise and won...

“You’re sure you won’t stay here tonight instead?” Mary asked Tim. He’d checked into a guesthouse in the Quarter. “Dauphine Street is quieter than most, but still, it is a Saturday night, and—” “You’re forgetting I grew up a few blocks from Times Square,” he said, laughing. “Trust me, this is nothing! And if you’re worried about the money, remember: I’m making seventy-eight whole dollars a month on top of three meals a day and all the milk I can drink.” “I need to talk to you about something after dinner.” “Are you getting back together with Paul?” “No, no. But it does concern an engagement.” “Beverly Phillips and Jerry Baumeister!” Mr. Johnson was coming back into the library. “No, not them,” she whispered. “It’s somebody else.” “Josephine’s boy,” Mr. Johnson announced with a certain wonder, “wants her to take him to Disneyland.” The amusement park’s opening had been all over television last week. Mary looked at Tim from the corner of her eye. No, he hadn’t guessed the news she had to tell him. “Fantasyland?” he asked her father, trying to ascertain which precinct of Disneyland interested Josephine’s boy particularly. “Frontierland?” Mary excused herself to get a pack of cigarettes from her bedroom, and once there, standing still with her left hand on the dresser, she remembered the conversation that Fuller had drawn her into on Monday afternoon, just before close of business.

Getting married? she’d asked, incredulously. Having children, too, no doubt, he’d answered. Why, Fuller? Why not? Because you’re— Because I am, even so, good value for her money. No, you’re not. He’d said nothing, just smiled. Why now? A hitch in time saves nine. He’d begun moving toward the door by that point. Should I say anything to him? she’d asked. I’ll be seeing him this weekend, you know, when I’m back home. I know. I keep reading the letters you deliberately leave open on your desk. What should I tell him, Fuller? That it makes no difference. He’d already taken his hat from the clothes tree. Of course it makes a difference, she’d protested. Does Mrs. Bell make a difference, Miss Johnson? You’re a son of a bitch. Yes, I am. He’d then put on the hat. No, you’re not. No, I’m not, he’d said, without any archness, before asking, quietly, for a simple favor: Make it easy on him. She now lit one of the cigarettes and returned to the library, where there seemed to be a lull in the conversation between her father and their guest. “Tim has just finished explaining to me the difference between Frontierland and Fantasyland,” Mr. Johnson told h...

“How long have you been friends?” Tim asked. “About ten years,” Mr. Shaw explained. “Since just after the war.” “We’re in the ‘just friends’ stage now,” Wel added. “Sisters. It comes to that with the seven-year itch. Well, seven months in our case.” He laughed at Tim’s evident perplexity. “I don’t think he’s seen the movie, Clay. He was probably at The Seven Little Foys instead. Anywho,” Wel announced, picking up his cigarette lighter from the tray, “I’m going to leave you two and mosey back home to Chartres Street.” “You don’t live here?” Tim asked. The apartment wasn’t just fancy; it appeared to be enormous. Wel shook his head. “More convenient all around.” He gave Tim a peck on the cheek—“Say hello to all our fighting men!”—and made a fast exit. “May I freshen your drink, Timothy?” “Thank you, Mr. Shaw.” Without Wel, the room itself, however ornate, seemed to acquire a more masculine aspect. Mr. Shaw now appeared almost huge, more handsome and less guarded. Tim had the sense that Wel’s departure had occurred because he’d completed his work by bringing a guest here. Looking toward what seemed to be the largest bedroom, beyond a set of French doors, Tim noticed a silver crucifix attached to one of the walls. In a corner stood a black bullwhip, like something the Lone Ranger might have captured. Mr. Shaw, topping off their drinks, saw him looking and laughed. “Don’t be alarmed, Private Laughlin. That’s left over from Mardi Gras.”

The martini glass, with its high center of gravity, threatened to spill. Mr. Shaw took it from his hand and set it on the table, then placed an arm over his shoulders. The exotic-looking man sighed with what seemed a craving for something deeper than sex, some wildly imbalanced alignment. Tim recognized it through an awareness of the same desire—its other, symmetrical half—within himself. “I think you should stay here tonight,” said Mr. Shaw. “You’ll be perfectly safe.” He pointed to the whip. “We can put that between us, like Tristan’s sword.” There was a brief silence, perhaps encouraging. And yet the gentlemanly Mr. Shaw soon sensed, whatever might be in the air, that his guest was too sad and nervous to go much further. So he made them both some coffee, told some army stories of his own (a Bronze Star rested not far from the crucifix), and listened to an anguished outpouring about Hawkins Fuller. After an hour or so passed, he was walking Tim to his rooming house across Dauphine Street, and telling him: “You’ll hear again and again that he’s ‘not worth it.’ And that will be true. It will also be the stupidest thing anyone ever says to you.”

What had stopped him from getting into bed—he knew the whip would never stay in its legendary place—had been the thought of Hawk, who, he’d decided months ago, near the end, should be the only man he would ever know in this way. So, he now reasoned, while the person just ahead of him in line entered the confessional: if Hawk had once been sin, he was now the giver of chastity. Why couldn’t those two things cancel each other out and let Timothy Laughlin go back to being what he’d once been? Why couldn’t he, safely reunited with God, retire the active memory of his earthly love, frame it like the picture of some dead loved soldier on a mantelpiece? “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; it has been twenty-one months since my last confession.” No shifting, no sense of surprise from Father LeTour. The priest replied in what Tim now recognized as a Cajun accent: “Yes, young man?” The “young” sounding like “yoang.” Tim had so often replayed his abortive confession to Father Davett that he could now recite his own part from memory. But Father LeTour seemed to be working from a different script, or none at all. To each admission that emerged from Tim’s lips, the priest replied, merely, Mmm-hmm. “I intend to stop. I have stopped.” “Mmm-hmm.”

“But I can’t say ‘I’m sorry.’ I can’t give that to God. It’s too much. I’ve already returned to Him the best gift He ever gave me.” Father LeTour at last came to soft-spoken life. “And what was that?” “The man I loved.” “Did you give him back to God in the spirit of a gift?” Tim had to admit that that hadn’t been the case; his return of Hawkins to God had been grudging and desperate. “No, Father.” “Can you give him back to God in that spirit?” “Yes!” said Tim, well above the confessional’s normal whisper. “I can.” “Then say three Hail Marys and do that. God loves you.” A little before eleven a.m., with his two hands clutching the missal and part of his mind unable to stop wondering why Father LeTour, unlike Bishop Sheen, did not use the subjunctive—God love you—Tim walked down the cathedral’s center aisle and received the Body of Christ Our Lord.

Right now, waiting for his mail (with army logic, letters arrived more slowly than parcels), he went back to reading his biography of Cardinal Mindszenty. He had arrived at the prelate’s “Statement of November 18, 1948,” made just weeks before the Russians arrested him, forced him into a clown’s costume, and beat him with truncheons: Such a systematic and purposeful net of propaganda lies—a hundred times disproved and yet a hundred times spread anew—has never been organized against the seventy-eight predecessors in my office. I stand for God, for the Church and for Hungary. This responsibility has been imposed upon me by the fate of my nation, which stands alone, an orphan in the whole world. Compared with the sufferings of my people, my own fate is of no importance. Tim could feel in this pronouncement the peace and strength that certainty give, a serene immunity from persecution or even simple need. He had returned to the book a half-dozen times yesterday, and would get back to it as soon as he opened the two envelopes Nontone was now handing him.

One had been sent by his mother, who these days addressed him with the nervous politeness someone might employ in a first approach to a skittish Korean orphan. Today she was asking what he’d like to have for his birthday, still five weeks away. The second envelope appeared to have no return address, just a Washington postmark, but there was, Tim now noticed on the back flap, a small handwritten name: Miss Beatrice Lightfoot. Inside, neatly cut from the Sunday Star, was the item MARRIAGE OF MR. FULLER ANNOUNCED. The bridegroom-elect, deputy assistant chief…to be married on Saturday, December third. Tim’s mind gave no thought to the sender, or to how she had known where to find him. The anger and despair that swept through him—worse now than that night in New Orleans—arose only from his dispossession. He was seized by a sudden, dizzying lust for Hawkins, for the long-ago smell and taste of him. He felt hollow, literally, without the man he loved inside him.

This unexpected tumult would have been a furious temptation had its object been anywhere near or obtainable. As things were, the storm of sensation could only torment Tim like a punishment without a crime, a midnight visit from the secret police. But, unlike Mindszenty, he had no peace or strength or certainty. His reconciliation with God, he knew, was just a tar paper shack, ready to be blown to bits while his cries went unheard on the wind. He closed his eyes and prayed for help. “From the look on your face I’m guessing you don’t like to travel.” Maj...

As Fuller read her the story about the evening’s dinner, she realized why she detested Lucy. It was because she herself believed in nature, in Fuller’s fulfilling what she now accepted as his own. She also had begun to feel, perhaps contradictorily, that Jerry and Beverly were fulfilling some aspect of their natures; marriage for them would be the cementing of something childlike and fraternal and curiously authentic. But Fuller’s union with Lucy was no civilized companionship, or even some piece of sophisticated realism; it was a corrupt bargain that the two of them had struck. Fuller thought he was on top of it, but Lucy’s needle was in him deeper than McLeod’s had ever been.

I will be heading back to home and hearth between here and the Sheraton Park.” “Well, the sight of you and Lucy getting ready for a party must look like a ‘Diamond Is Forever’ ad.” She was being very polite. “Actually, we’ll be undressing. I’ve committed to making a baby, and the calendar has been calibrated like an atomic clock. The fertility gods are supposed to be in full cry between now and seven.” He checked his watch. “I’ll be leaving early.” “Would you like a boy or a girl?” “I’d like a reprieve.” He could see a look on her face that said tell me: tell me that you know it’s a mistake; tell me why you really did this; and tell me whether you aren’t really going off to meet a boy instead. But Fuller was thinking that the only mistake he’d made had been with the Italian boy. As Andy Sorrell had predicted, Tony Bianco could be had—but, as it turned out, only inconveniently. The kid had been back to Alexandria twice, without an invitation, the first time parking a block away, waiting for Fuller to pass by so that he could ask him for the price of a new set of tires. The second time he’d reappeared by mail, requesting help for his mother’s operation—for which Mrs. Hawkins Fuller charitably let her husband write a check on the joint account while she suppressed her common sense and they both silently hoped this would be the last such communication. No, this was not the big feared slip-up that had motivated him into marriage, but it was a slip-up nonetheless, and from it Lu...

The cardinal told the correspondent of Magyar Honvéd: ‘I want to be better informed of the situation before I do or say more.’” Meyers caught Tim murmuring, prayerfully. “I guess this is a big deal for you, huh?” He shrugged. “What do I know? I’m just a Jew from Secaucus.”

“You’re muttering, Laughlin. Speak up.” “Sir. Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio—” Major Conroy shook his head. “At ease, Corporal.” “Amen, sir.”

“Any more news from the doctors?” “Yes,” he replied. “They told us yesterday afternoon that ‘we’re’ pregnant. What started them using that pronoun? Dr. Spock?” Mary looked at his blotter for a moment—it held the latest poll numbers on whether the U.S. should get out of the UN—before leaning down to kiss him on the cheek. “Congratulations. To you and Lucy. How far along is she?” “Two months. Maybe two and a half. And a nervous wreck. The doctor recommends she take up smoking.” “What are you going to do for nerves, Papa?” Fuller sighed. “Maybe I’ll give it up.”

“Fred, what exactly do you expect to happen in Estonia?” “Wildfire, Mary. Think about the way it spreads. Why did the Hungarians rise up? Because five days before they did they heard about some Poles in Wroclaw dragging the Soviet flag through the gutter. Eisenhower should stop trying to calm things down. He should be fanning the flames.” “I’ll tell that to the next Young Republican who calls.” “Get ready for a new birth of freedom,” said Fred, more sonorously than usual. “Fred, I need to go. Fuller wants something,” she fibbed. She hung up the phone and put some lotion on her hands. Two months. Maybe two and a half. Counting on her moistened fingers, she calculated that Lucy’s baby would probably come in late May, only a bit earlier than her own. IKE IN LANDSLIDE; DEMS HOLD CONGRESS

PART FOUR DECEMBER 1956–MAY 1957 How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. —W. H. AUDEN, “THE MORE LOVING ONE” (1957)

Lucy now waved to Fuller from the open upstairs window. Still in her quilted yellow peignoir with its little bow at the neck, she had her sketch pad balanced on the sill. She was drawing with the expensive pens Fuller had gotten her from Fahrney’s and handed over this morning after she made her own premature gift. To show that she was indeed using them to create her tight, folksy drawings—what Grandma Moses might have produced with ink instead of oils—she raised one of the pens for her husband to see. Her other hand held a filter-tipped Salem, the brand that was helping to soothe her through a fourth month of pregnancy. She had still hardly begun to show, not even when she wore something besides this billowing nightgown.

RUSZKIK HAZA! He was glad he had been the one—not Lucy—to open the door when the telegram arrived. What exactly, he’d wondered, did Skippy want done? Air strikes? Maybe just an airlift for all the priests the embassy in Budapest couldn’t hold? He’d also wondered why this frantic little cry—he could almost feel it being whispered into his ear, between ardent kisses of his neck—was coming only now. It could hardly have to do with just Hungary. Whatever it meant, it felt helpless, like the furtive leafleting said to be going on even now in the streets of Budapest. Fuller lit a match and watched the leaves catch fire. He had no compelling desire this afternoon for the keypunch operator, let alone Andy Sorrell. He felt himself, unexpectedly, wanting someone and something else. The radio, filling up the rest of halftime, had begun to play some old Tommy Dorsey songs, Dorsey having choked to death on a forkful of food earlier in the week. I’m getting sentimental over you. Things you say and do… He looked over his shoulder and back toward the house. On the breeze, smoke from Lucy’s cigarette joined the smoke from the leaves.

Valentine’s Day: Lucy, he now recalled, wanted to go to Bermuda for it. He slid this thought, too, to the edge of his mental blotter, as the university’s terrain gave way to Foggy Bottom’s crumbling little brick houses, toy cottages attached to one another for dear life. The Negroes had made this shaky spot their own for decades, until the whites started coming back when the department relocated itself to the neighborhood after the war. What the bulldozers hadn’t gotten was now falling into the hands of renovators. Eleanor Dulles, the secretary’s sister, had herself bought and fixed up one little row of the miniature dwellings; she’d made them what the real estate ads called “darling,” and sold one or two to the sort of boys in the department who had something to fear from Scott McLeod.

When Tommy spoke again, it was to tell McCarthy, casually, that with a little help this fellow Hart might pull things off. But before McCarthy could respond to the suggestion, the sharp cry of an infant came from the second floor. “My baby!” yelled the senator, grinning broadly before bounding upstairs to the child he and Jeannie had just adopted from the New York Foundling Hospital. Cardinal Spellman, who’d seen no need to ask too many questions about the acquisition, had helped things along. Tim decided that this was the moment to escape the house. But McCarthy was almost immediately back in the living room, somehow managing to keep a firm, tender grip on the blanketed baby. “Jeannie says Princess Grace just had a girl of her own! The palace in Monte Carlo put it out over the radio. Ain’t that swell? Well, that little girl can’t be any prettier than this one!” They might all be at some post-christening shindig inside McConnell’s beer hall on Ninth Avenue. Tim wouldn’t be surprised if he were asked to favor everyone with a song. “Ain’t she grand?” asked McCarthy, looking more like the baby’s uncle or grandfather as he thrust it into Tommy’s arms for closer inspection. Overtaken by his own sentiments, Tommy appeared unable to resume the mission that had brought him here, and in the commotion of the baby’s transfer Tim at last managed to slip away.

He got as far as the vestibule before he felt McCarthy’s hand on his shoulder. It should have been frightening, but it wasn’t. McCarthy himself looked innocently wounded, wanting to know what the hurry was. “You do look familiar,” he said. “We met just before the hearings, the day after Senator Potter got a copy of ‘the Adams chronology.’” “When Charlie was trying to get me to fire Roy!” McCarthy laughed, as if remembering some comically bad season with the company baseball team. “Yes,” replied Tim, at a loss for more to say as he looked for another escape route from Tommy’s vengeful world. He could feel himself being lashed to it by the telephone line that had once reached into Madison Square Garden. Boys, girls, your old-maid auntie. When he’s hammered he’ll grope anything… He moved for the door, but McCarthy kept coming toward him, with an enormous, devouring smile. Reaching for the handle, Tim heard himself saying, inanely, to keep the man calm: “I was also at your wedding. Helping out Miss Beale for the Star.” “No kidding!” McCarthy proceeded to smother him with a hug, to give his neck a boozy kiss and his crotch a hard locker-room squeeze. “We’re going to christen her Tierney!” he called out as Tim raced toward the street. “Come to the church!”

Last night, when he’d seen Hawk’s face, he’d thought his heart would collapse into itself. He’d forced himself to keep talking to Father Molnar, pouring forth chatter about how much the work at St. Mary’s meant to him, and Father Molnar, who’d depleted his life savings by half in order to come up with the twenty-five dollars for his own dinner ticket, had expressed delight. He’d lain awake most of the night thinking what a delusion it had been to believe that two years away could do anything, that he could be strong enough to come back to D.C., or that he had come back for any other reason than Hawk. This morning he’d gotten up for early Mass at St. Mary’s, dragging himself from the artists’ loft as if God were a boyfriend he was seeing on the rebound; and then this afternoon, only an hour ago, he’d raced from the church to the streetcar to the glass doors of State as if it were October of ’53 and his heart had not yet been flooded and battered in all the ways it had been since then. The last man whose breath he’d smelled was Joseph McCarthy. Now, as his surviving heart pounded louder and louder, mimicking the volume of the footsteps coming up the stairs, he wanted only to feel and taste the air coming from Hawkins Fuller’s mouth.

And there he was at last, in the room, Hawk, the silhouette of his figure visible in the dark. Fuller lit a match and held it under his face, which blazed up like one of the La Tour paintings Tim had seen in Paris. He walked forward. “Take your scarf.” Tim rose from the blanket and slid the muffler, knitted by his mother, from Hawkins’ neck, while with the hand not holding the match, Fuller reached into his pocket for a candle. Lighting it, he looked for a place to prop it up and, unable to find one, he let it drip a wax base onto one of the turret’s windowsills. Tim’s spirit leapt with a deduction: He hasn’t been up here with anyone else; he would already have figured out the problem with the candle if he had. He made this place for us. Fuller reached into the other pocket of his suit, which in the candle’s new light, Tim could see, bulged with a paper bag. From it Fuller extracted a pint bottle of milk. He pulled off its small cap and tossed the little circle of cardboard onto the blanket, like a poker chip.

“Drink.” Tim took two swallows and then Hawkins tilted the bottle further back, until more milk was coming out than Tim could swallow. It ran down his cheek and chin, and Hawk began to lick it off, and twice, once gently and once not, to bite him. He took off Tim’s shirt and then he removed his own. In the rush to speed both of them toward nakedness, Tim spilled the rest of the small bottle onto the bare, warped floor near the blanket. “Don’t cry over—you know,” said Hawk. But he was crying anyway. “I love you, Hawk.” He pressed himself against Fuller’s body, which was still tanned from the trip to Bermuda with his wife. Holding Tim’s shoulders from behind, bringing his lips to the boy’s ear, Fuller felt how much he had missed him—the smoothness, the frailty, the chatter and the tender heart. And so, to reclaim the protective thrill that would come with ravishment, he felt himself starting to say the words he knew he shouldn’t, words that were actually a bit more true than he would ...

I just wish they’d speed things up and hire me.” He leaned in and kissed Fuller’s bare chest. They had climaxed once already, but as they lay on the blankets together Tim was once more hard against Hawk’s stomach, experiencing, he thought, a kind of unified happiness: God and politics and love were for once aligned in peaceful coexistence. The other day he’d bought a portable radio and brought it here. Set to Twilight Tunes on WRC, it was now playing “These Foolish Things.” Hawk, who had greeted the radio’s arrival with a questioning look, casually reached over and moved the dial until he landed on Bob and Ray. Wally Ballou was running for mayor, and after a moment or two Tim was enjoying the comic routine even more than the romantic music. “They used to do ‘Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons,’” he explained to Fuller. But at the first commercial he clicked off the little box, the better to concentrate on kissing Hawk, who soon flipped him over and entered him. Their rhythms and avidity matched; familiarity—their own history—now allowed them to merge with a completeness they hadn’t been able to manage, even during the good moments, three years before. Hawk pulled on his hair a precise moment before they both came. The days had grown a bit longer, but even so, by the time the two of them were finished the streetlamps had come on. Realizing it was time to go find his Plymouth and drive home to Alexandria for dinner, Fuller retrieved his car keys from under one of the blankets.

“Are you eating much these days?” he asked, brushing his hand over Tim’s rib cage. “I’ll buy myself a sandwich on the way home,” Tim explained through a dreamy yawn. “On nights when Woodforde’s girlfriend tries to cook, everybody flees. You know, Mr. Osborne says the job will be in the main State Department building, so if it comes through I thought I’d try to get a little place not far from where you used to be on I Street. I can cook for myself then.” Fuller found himself suddenly wary. Inside Skippy a future little life was rising, as surely as the white-brick apartment house beginning to grow from the ruins of the gasworks across the street. “Where exactly are my jockey shorts, Timothy?” “I was hoping to steal them.” He laughed. “Try under the plaid blanket, near the radio.” Fuller dressed in the gathering darkness, but with only a sandwich awaiting him, Tim lingered in the makeshift bed. Fuller glimpsed his face in the orange glow of the space heater; it looked like some small ornament lit by a Christmas bulb. Its cheer and serenity prompted him to remember the expression’s opposite, a face Tim had shown during an especially tormented moment back in the early days, while he’d been explaining yet another spiritual infraction he was afraid of committing.

“Tell me, Skippy. Why give up anything for Lent when you’re not even taking Communion?” “I am taking Communion.” Tim’s eyes remained closed and he was smiling. He seemed to be falling asleep, pleasantly exhausted. It was becoming clear to Fuller that Skippy now believed everything between them to have been somehow miraculously sanctified; he seemed to have reached the conclusion that he, too, could live as a bigamist. Just as Hawkins Fuller could go home to Lucy, Timothy Laughlin could go home to God—until it was again time to meet here, which the two of them would keep doing until the house was torn down, at which point they would presumably start going to the “place not far from where you used to be on I Street.” From the moment he had allowed things to resume, Fuller had feared that Tim would end up making trouble, would become a hysterical version of Tony Bianco, threatening a scene—not for money but assurance, for some further allotment of affection. One morning he would show up on the Fullers’ suburban doorstep, wracked with anger and some fresh twist of biblical shame. But here he was: happy, calm, wanting not so much as a second “I love you.” He had taken, it seemed, som...

Timothy Laughlin would not be the big trouble that Hawkins Fuller feared, the trouble against which Lucy’s money would shield him. No, Skippy would be a grim safe harbor, one that would trap him in a domesticity even danker than the one across the river in Alexandria. The thrill of protectiveness and ravishment would be long gone, replaced with a cup of coffee and a slice of cake and an ongoing obligation to fuck the good little aging boy who had “given up everything”—the nelly clerks would start to tell him—for Hawkins Fuller. Dressed now, Fuller lay back down on the blankets and took Tim in his arms. The two of them wriggled around until they were spooning, with Tim holding Hawk from behind, moment...

“You wouldn’t let me do this a few Christmases back,” Francy recalled. “I was pregnant with Maria. You may even have mentioned my ‘condition.’” “Did I?” Tim asked, laughing. “Well, it was a productive worry. See how healthy she turned out?” “I hope the next one will, too.” She rapped the wooden board beneath the dish drainer. “Are you?” “Yes, and believe me, in our neighborhood, you go three years without dropping another, people think something’s very wrong.” “Do you want to sit down?” He pointed to a stool by the broom closet. “Don’t be ridiculous. But let’s sit down together.” She turned the faucets off. “Lent’s over,” she said, handing him a cigarette as they settled themselves at the small table. “Talk to me.”

“Bless me, Sister, for I have…” “That’s not a bad beginning. Keep going.” “I’m fine.” “You’ve been telling me that for three years now.” She reached back to the counter and picked up the cuff links he’d removed from his shirt when he started on the dishes. She pressed them into his hand. “I still don’t know who ‘Hawkins Fuller’ is, but one of these Christmases or Easters that old lady will finally be dead”—she pointed back to the living room and Grandma Gaffney—“and while she’s down there complaining about too few Jews being in Hell—” Tim began to laugh, evasively. Francy pressed the cuff links harder against the palm of his hand. “—I’ll finally be cooking the dinner on Staten Island, where there’ll be two children, no more, and my sullen son of a bitch of a husband.” Over her brother’s nervous, lighthearted protest, she continued: “And I want you to know that whoever this person is”—she pressed the cuff links even harder into Tim’s hand—“he’s always welcome in my house.”

When the Baumeisters were gone, she sat down on one of the freshly vacuumed couch cushions. She was wondering whether to open the little box when the phone rang. Fuller’s voice came through the receiver. “I never remembered to disconnect mine, either. The missus had to remind me to.” She supposed he knew everything after all. And why should she be surprised by that? Or surprised by his having waited until the last minute to be in touch? “I’ve switched the service over to the Vassar girl who’s moving in tomorrow,” she explained, as matter-of-factly as possible. “Go downstairs in five minutes. A cab will be waiting to take you to me.” “Fuller, I’m not going to the department.” “You’re going to Quigley’s drugstore. Near GWU. I’ll be at the soda fountain.” “Why don’t you just drive here in your Plymouth? My plane doesn’t leave for hours.” “I know. It leaves at five-forty-five. But there is no Plymouth this week. It’s out in Alexandria at the disposal of the nurse taking care of my little girl.” “How is she?” “Remarkable. Very small but very calm. Quite discriminating. Standoffish, I’d say. We call her Garbo.” I want to be alone. She almost said it, but it wasn’t true. She was all at once nervous and again wanting company, even his. “If there’s no Plymouth, why don’t you take a cab here?” “I don’t want to be around if you have a surprise visitor, which is to say, if Skippy gets there early. Come on, head downstairs. The cabbie will be honking his horn any minute.” She was soon ...

She pushed away the malted and swiveled the stool, as if it were her typist’s chair, so that she could face him. “You condescending, buck-passing bastard,” she declared, as evenly as she could. “It’s your romance, too. You found the castle for it.” “You’re right. It was my romance, too.” Her hand went, involuntarily, to her stomach. It rested there, protectively, for a moment. “‘Was’? Does he know that?” “No. He’s dealing with a vocational setback right now.” The answer’s coolness was, she realized, too much even for Fuller. The display of sang-froid suggested the opposite, an agitation that had prompted him to summon her here. “Did he not get the job?” was all she asked. “He did not get the job.” “That was the ‘other matter’ he called you about.” “Yes, but he wound up chattering mostly of you. In those little grammatical torrents that issue from him when he’s nervous, as if he’s reciting the Apostles’ Creed. He was sentimental. For some reason he couldn’t bear the idea of your leaving without our saying goodbye, you and me.” “Tell me what happened with the job.” “Osborne sent him a letter.” “I thought it was more or less settled, a sure thing.” “‘Security considerations’ arose.” “About him?” “Yes. I mean, they’re obvious enough, aren’t they?” “How exactly were they obvious to Osborne? Or let’s say more obvious than they would have been in February.” Fuller didn’t answer. But when she looked at him, she knew. More than that, she knew that he wanted her to know—just as sure...

Fuller took a sip of seltzer and regarded the countertop. “Did you decide, after all, that he was inconvenient?” she asked in a furious whisper. “This is inconvenient, Fuller.” She placed his hand on her stomach. “But it’s mine—mine at least to ease into the world. Too bad there’s no one down on F Street that you could pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars to to have Tim killed.” For all her disgust, her sense that he had done the most despicable thing possible, another part of her felt grateful to him, because what made the act despicable also made it definitive, the surest means of ending what had to end, now or later, with Tim’s broken heart. And she knew, looking at Fuller, that his reasoning matched her own. “You think you did this for his sake, don’t you?” she asked. “You’ve convinced yourself of that, haven’t you?” “No, I did it for me. You’ll do the other part, the part that’s for his sake.” “And how will I do that, Fuller?” “By putting me beyond the pale.” “You want me to tell him the truth.” “Make it hard on him.” She got down from the stool and closed her coat. A coed who was with her boyfriend smiled, enviously, in her direction. She wondered, absurdly, whether she c...