Fellow Travelers (26 page)

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.”

According to the Sunday-morning paper, two hundred and fifty thousand children were receiving Communion in Rio de Janeiro this weekend; Cardinal Spellman, in Brazil on a visit, had said a midnight Mass prior to the huge outdoor Eucharist.

Sitting in the back of the cathedral in Jackson Square, Tim envied the privileged innocence of these quarter million boys and girls he’d just read about, but mostly he wondered what Saturday-night stories might be told by the tired morning-after souls in his midst, right here in New Orleans. He checked the bus ticket stuck in his missal—and then noticed a small green light go on, indicating the presence of a Father LeTour in the confessional just ten or twelve feet from the pew.

It didn’t seem possible: all his life he had known only Saturday confessions. But perhaps this city’s superabundance of temptation necessitated a few freewheeling shortcuts toward forgiveness. He noticed that three or four people had already lined up at the booth with their still-brand-new sins—lucky, shadowed souls who within a half hour would be kneeling at the altar rail, as newly innocent as any Brazilian boy or girl.

On impulse, he acted: put his bus ticket back into the missal, marked his seat in the pew with the book, and got up to join the line, which was moving quickly. Father LeTour appeared to be passing out absolution with the speed of a chaplain on the battlefield.

He would try not to think. He would try just to do it, to get back to and then somehow past the point at which he had been refused by Father Davett. He could not live forever without God’s full presence; he could not—having last night understood that Hawkins was gone forever—accept the permanent loss of God’s grace, too.

His mind raced with logic and analogy: McCarthy had called Geneva a “dismal failure,” since there hadn’t been any talk of the satellite countries, whose enslavement was the moral crux of the whole Cold War. That was the truth—and shouldn’t the truth be accepted even from a sinner? Furthermore, shouldn’t a sinner be accepted if he
told
the truth? Which was to say, couldn’t he himself be accepted back into the Church with just renunciation of what he had done, unaccompanied by any admission of regret?

He had wanted to stay with Mr. Shaw last night. He had not been very drunk, just sad and shocked over Hawkins’ engagement. Mr. Shaw’s exotic allure, his potent combination of the hulking and effeminate, had attracted him. There had been, as they’d sipped coffee, one repelling moment—a gentle, last-ditch suggestion that he put on what appeared to be a child’s set of pajamas—but more than anything else Mr. Shaw had seemed manly and cherishing, qualities that he himself, now denied both Hawk and God, desired intensely.

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.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

September 25–28, 1955

“So, is it true?” asked Fred Bell. “Do they really stand him on a box before the cameras roll?”

He and Mary had just seen the decidedly short Alan Ladd in
The McConnell Story.

“That’s what they say,” she answered. She hadn’t paid much attention to the picture—neither the based-on-real-life heroics of the title figure, nor the scratchy little voice of June Allyson as the air ace’s perfect wife. Truth to tell, she would have been content not to go to the movies at all, and to spend the evening as they’d spent the whole afternoon, upstairs in the Carroll Arms, in bed with just room service and each other—though minus the bottle of Hildebrand-family beer that had been standing up, accusingly, in the ice bucket.

It was now half past twelve on Saturday night. The Sunday papers had long since reached the streets, but here in a candy store a block from the Ambassador Theater, Fred was displaying more interest in the radio than in the already-obsolete
Star,
for which he’d just put down his fifteen cents. A Washington news announcer was reporting on a press conference still going on out in Denver, not far from where the president had gone for a fishing vacation.

So much for the “digestive upset” that had been reported this morning! The doctors were now admitting that Ike had had a heart attack and was in an oxygen tent, and that Vice President and Mrs. Nixon had “gone into seclusion, leaving their young daughters at home on Tilden Street in the care of a trusted secretary.”

“Fred,” said Mary. “There’s a radio back in the hotel.” Which she hoped he wouldn’t listen to once they got there. Fred might be only the third lover she’d had, but of that small sample he was far and away the best, full of ardor and eye contact; she was eager to get back to doing just what June Allyson and Paul, staring at her through the Hildebrand label, would no doubt disapprove of.

At last she felt Fred’s hand on the small of her back, urging her out of the store and onto Eighteenth Street.

“Taxi!” he called.

But once the Diamond cab arrived at the curb, she heard him ask not for the Carroll Arms but for Tilden Street.

“Where on Tilden?” the driver asked.

“Just drive down the three-thousand blocks. Past the embassies.”

“What are we doing?” asked Mary.

Fred continued instructing the driver. “I don’t know the exact number, but there’ll be a little crowd on the lawn, newsmen and so forth.”

“We’re going to the Nixons’,” said Mary, having just remembered Tilden Street from the radio.

“Yeah,” said Fred. “To stand outside the house.”

“Why?”

“Because if this is the moment, I want to be there.”

“The moment when Ike dies?”

“The moment when we get a president who’ll actually fight, who’ll roll them back.” He proceeded to review for her the vice president’s steely anticommunist credentials. Sure, Nixon sometimes had to say things against McCarthy or in favor of Geneva, but everybody knew that the man who’d brought down Hiss and Helen Douglas would stand up to the Russians—if he were blessed with his own presidency.

“Blessed?” asked Mary, looking at Fred’s excited profile while a string of Connecticut Avenue streetlamps flashed their glow onto and off his skin. He appeared even more aroused than he’d been behind the heavy curtains of their room in the Carroll Arms.

The car radio was explaining just how Nixon had learned the seriousness of Ike’s condition, when the taxi caught up with the twenty or so reporters and gawkers on the vice president’s front lawn. At an upstairs window, behind sheer curtains, the silhouettes of two small girls, delighted by the commotion, were jumping up and down on a bed.

Fred told the cab to wait, and once on the sidewalk with Mary he put some questions to a man with a microphone and a walkie-talkie. No, he learned, there really wasn’t any news. The press conference in Denver had just ended, and a heart specialist had flown out to Colorado, but that was about it.

Mary took Fred’s arm and drew him back to the curb. “I want to ask you something. Are you hoping that the president of the United States will die?”

Fred paused for a moment’s thought before replying. “I’m hoping the president will fight.”

“The
current
president,” Mary insisted. “You want to see the hero of D-Day die for Estonia?”

He looked straight at her. “I landed on Utah Beach eleven years, three months, and nineteen days ago. I do the arithmetic every morning when I brush my teeth.”

There wasn’t much to say to that; she looked longingly at the cab.

“Maybe you should take it,” said Fred. “I’m too keyed up. I’ve got to stay awhile more.”

“All right.”

“You’re not mad?”

“No. Confused maybe.”

He was already looking for a way to make it up to her. “How about I pick you up for church?”

“No, thanks,” she said, laughing from sheer surprise. “I’m not going by myself, and I’m not going with you, either.”

“Come on,” he cajoled, smiling in the mischievous way he ought to be smiling back at the Carroll Arms, coaxing her over some new threshold of adventurousness. “There’s a Polish church on Thirty-sixth Street,” he explained. “Father Kaminsky does the eleven-o’clock Mass, and he’s a spellbinder. I guarantee you he’ll have something to say tomorrow morning.”

She looked at him disbelievingly, but he persisted, as if she were only displaying a customer’s last bit of resistance toward the product being offered: “I went to hear him once with a guy from the Polish group that sometimes makes the rounds with us down here.”

“Fred, I am not going to Mass to pray for the ill health of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

“Well, I wouldn’t do that, either.”

“Let’s say you wouldn’t do that
exactly.
” She looked back toward the cab, whose meter was still running. “Call me sometime before you go back home.” She accepted a kiss, against her better judgment, and got into the taxi, still carrying the copy of the
Star
from the candy store.

Inside her place on P Street, she made herself a drink and climbed into bed with the paper, passing up its stale front page in favor of the book reviews and wedding announcements—“the ladies’ sports pages,” Paul used to joke, though in Washington you would sometimes find the groom’s name, not the bride’s, in the headline:
MR. HERBERT ENGAGED TO WED
. No matter how pretty the future Mrs. Herbert might be, her fiancé’s father had been governor of Ohio, and that settled that.

There was the phenomenon again, in the upper-right-hand corner:
MARRIAGE OF MR. FULLER ANNOUNCED
. The news was being spread by his soon-to-be in-laws, Professor and Mrs. Chester Boardman of Wellesley, Massachusetts, parents of Lucy Catherine, the fiancée. “The bridegroom-elect, a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s bureau of congressional relations, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fuller of New York City.” The little story had everything right: St. Paul’s, the war record, Harvard, Paraguay, Oslo.

Mary put aside the paper and wondered if she’d even tease Fuller about it on Monday. No, she could no longer do that. Too many things had galloped beyond the pale, herself included maybe.

At least the item wouldn’t run anywhere near Fort Polk. She had heard from Tim only once since New Orleans, a letter full of talk about the Eucharist and the Russians’ persecution of Cardinal Mindszenty. His merry side had been there in one of the margins—an ink sketch of Major Brillam hurling an editorial thunderbolt against whatever laxness had permitted weevils to invade the mess hall—but mostly the letter shook with a febrile zeal that left her both upset and envious. Fred, too, had this electric susceptibility, this touch of true-believing that must be connected to male ardor in bed.
The little Irish tiger cub:
she now remembered Fuller dropping that offhand excuse when he arrived at the office even later than usual one morning.

All of them, from Hawkins Fuller to Beverly Phillips, were dangling from the world tonight, unaligned nations or shaky protectorates, struggling toward independence or falling into unwise alliance. She felt a pang for Paul and his simple marital urge. If she’d let things turn out differently, the two of them might be climbing into bed right now, turning off the television in some nice house in Alexandria.

She herself was caught between two banked fires. Her recent pursuit of passion, for all its illicit pleasures, seemed at the moment as obligatory as another person’s quest for security and the norm. If she were truly carried away by love, and Fred, she might by now be turning the handle of some basement printing press, cranking out the latest stack of Free Estonia Now pamphlets, helping her man to turn the tide. As it was, come Monday she and Fuller, if Ike remained alive, would no doubt be spreading the message of continuity, steady as she goes, to the fire-breathers on the Hill, shoring up all the caution Fred wanted to blast away with liberty’s blowtorch.

She let the
Star
fall to the floor, and she clicked off the light.

“You know,” Senator Goldwater reflected, “I’d ten times rather play cards with Hubert. Dick Nixon is one of the shiftiest sons of bitches I’ve met since I got here in ’52.”

Fuller smiled, even tilted his head back to accentuate amusement, though he really didn’t need to strive for effect. He liked this handsome half-Jew, half-Episcopalian from Arizona.

“May I tell that to Mr. Morton?” he asked.

“You can tell it to the goddamn
New York Times,
for all I care,” said Goldwater. “Though I know you won’t.”

“No, sir.”

Fuller stood up to leave, having gotten what he wanted—an assurance that Goldwater, like the other bellicose senators he had to visit, would throughout the tense coming days confine himself to supporting get-well-Ike resolutions, and not overcompensate for any appearance of governmental distraction by having America rattle its missiles in their hardened silos. So far only McCarthy was believed to be scenting opportunity within the crisis. Several reports since Saturday had him thirsting anew for politics, not just Jim Beam.

“Two more stops to make,” said Fuller, shaking Goldwater’s hand. But his progress toward Senator Hickenlooper’s office was halted in Goldwater’s reception area by the sight of Senator Charles Potter and Tommy McIntyre.

Citizen Canes was sturdily upright, his balding head under a cheap, snap-brim Stratoliner that the missus had probably picked up at Herzog’s, thinking it would make him look snazzy. Which was not an adjective one would apply to McIntyre, with his rheumy eyes and gin-blossomed cheeks. He appeared to need a couple of canes more than Potter did.

“A pleasure, Senator,” said Fuller, extending his hand. “Even if this accidental encounter doesn’t save me any labor. There’s no need, of course, to come see you in this uncertain time. We know your instincts will be superb.”

Tommy coughed. “You’re laying it on pretty thick today.”

Fuller, tilting back his head in the same move he’d used on Goldwater, felt almost relieved that the broken-looking Irishman hadn’t lost his nasty gab.

“I appreciate the compliment,” said Potter, catching sight of the man he’d come to visit. He raised one of his canes and winked its little electric light. “Barry!”

Goldwater waved him forward.

“I’m here to pick up my model,” Potter explained to Fuller. With the excitement of a boy, he headed toward the inner office, pointing as he went to one of several plastic miniatures of the RC-121, the “flying radar station,” that were on display. Goldwater, a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, had piloted the plane over the Pacific last weekend.

Left alone with Tommy, Fuller was delayed in taking his leave by some compliments the ravaged little man had to offer. “Congratulations on your engagement. I saw mention made of it in the
Star.
”

“Thank you, McIntyre.”

“I’m sure she’s a beautiful girl.”

“Very.”

“I lost
my
girl almost a month ago.” Tommy shifted his gaze to the window. He had a look of sheer agony, and the dampness on his eyes had swollen into actual tears.

My girl?
Was this, Fuller wondered, remembering Tim’s piece of the story, the drunken woman in Michigan, the labor widow supposed to be at the heart of McCarthy’s implosion?

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Tommy’s face turned angry, and not so much toward the world as toward Hawkins Fuller in particular. “One can’t count the number of women who have been betrayed by men, nor the number who will be. What’s your girl’s name again?”

“Boardman,” said Fuller. “Lucy Boardman.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” McIntyre responded, as if to suggest he was updating the police files he kept in his head. “By the way, back at the office we don’t hear nearly enough from your friend, Private Laughlin.”

“What are you hearing from the constituents? Good wishes for the president’s health, I imagine?”

“Actually,” said Tommy, “most of the wires concern the acquittal of those apes who killed the Till boy down in Mississippi. It’s nice to know more than a few people don’t believe a colored fellow should necessarily be beaten to death for whistling at a white woman.”

The remark vibrated with Tommy’s shrill sympathy for the oppressed, but it also carried a threatening whiff, an intimation that Fuller, a sexual trangressor himself, must find stories like the Till boy’s particularly unsettling.

Fuller confined himself to some cool, safe sarcasm: “‘No Negroes on the jury because none are registered to vote in the county.’ That was the official local explanation. Which I suppose we’ll report with a straight face over the Voice of America.”

“A nice part of the country for your boy to be in.”

“It’s time for me to call my office,” said Fuller. He tipped his hat to avoid shaking Tommy’s hand, and when he got to a pay phone at the end of the corridor he rang the bureau.

Mary picked up.

“I was expecting to hear Beverly,” said Fuller.

“She’s down the hall collecting some telexes.”