Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online

companion must have an altogether more manly scrawl. “‘The neat handwriting of the illiterate,’” he said, nervously quoting 1984. “Here we go. Mrs. Dulles. And Mrs. Walter Bedell Smith, the undersecretary’s wife. The Spanish ambassador? That doesn’t count. Harold Stassen? Foreign operations administrator for the president? Not actually the State Department, I guess. Is that where you work?”
    “Yes. The job also brings me to the Hill every week or two. But I’m not due there today until three-thirty. By the way,” he said, taking Tim’s pad and flipping back to something he’d noticed on the first page, “there’s no ‘e’ in Roy Cohn.”
    “Live and learn,” said Tim, who obediently made a correction. “Thanks.”
    “Come on. We can walk a bit and pick up the streetcar on Pennsylvania. It’ll get us both where we’re going.”
    Tim started gathering his things so quickly that the young man had to tell him, “Finish your milk. We’ve got time.”
    Taking two last pulls on his paper straw, Tim looked at the paragon beside him and hoped he wouldn’t now tighten his tie.
    “Okay, we’re off,” said the man, once Tim had trotted the waxed milk container to a trash basket. Only when he fell into step with the handsome stranger did he notice that the bench to the right of the one they’d shared had been empty all along.
    Walking across the Circle to Connecticut Avenue, no more than ten minutes into their acquaintance, the much taller man said: “And to think you used to be so talkative.”
    Thrilled at being teased, Tim replied, laughing: “I do talk too much.”
    “No, you don’t,” said the young man, giving Tim’s neck a momentary, affectionate squeeze. The touch rendered him mute, perhaps the only person in the United States who couldn’t find one more thing to say about Joe McCarthy.
    The man walking beside him broke the silence: “May I ask you a personal question?”
    “Sure.”
    “Is this milk-drinking a habit of yours?”
    “Sort of. I think they were always hoping it would make me taller. I didn’t rise to the full five-feet-seven you see before you until I was seventeen. I guess I developed a taste for it.”
    The man nodded. “Glasses?”
    “Two or three a day. Small ones.”
    “No, idiot. How long ago did you get
those
?” He tapped the right arm of the boy’s spectacles.
    “Oh!” said Tim. “Had ’em since time immemorial. I must have been eight. Farsighted. I can read a street sign a block away, but I’ve got a problem with print or even faces close up.” With his eyeglasses in place, he could see the man’s expression quite clearly, but couldn’t be sure what it indicated. A trace of pity? A flicker of real interest in what he’d been telling him? Anxious when his companion said nothing more, he went nattering on. “They’re not so bad, really. I used to have those old steel-wire frames. Got these tortoiseshells going into my junior year of college. Pretty snazzy, no?” Looking up into the man’s blue-gray eyes, Tim felt sure that they had never worn corrective lenses. His own glasses suddenly felt like an artificial limb.
    They reached the corner with the streetcar stop.
    The man tenderly removed Tim’s eyeglasses. “How many fingers?” he asked, holding up three just an inch from Tim’s eyes.
    “Three,” said Tim, just able to make them out.
    “There. You’re healed,” said the man, folding the eyeglasses and slipping them into the handkerchief pocket of Tim’s jacket.
    “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