Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online Page B

hair—all these features fought against the committee counsel’s improbable, extreme youth. Twenty-six, Cecil Holland, back at the
Star,
had said.
    Tim could see the concern that Cohn’s line of questioning had provoked on the high, creased forehead of the army’s new counsel, John Adams. But Tim was looking more closely at Potter, to whom he might actually be talking once the hearing reached its conclusion. Yesterday afternoon he’d called the senator’s office to confirm his appointment and been told by the secretary that he might like to get a glimpse of Potter in action before coming in for an interview.
    With his horn-rim glasses and balding brow, he reminded Tim of the lay teachers in math and science at St. Agnes’ Boys’ High. He would have been surprised by Potter’s own youth if he hadn’t looked him up in the
Congressional Directory
during his last afternoon at the
Star.
Only thirty-six, and already in the upper body after three terms in the House! In addition to his regular committee assignments, the senator served on the Battle Monuments Commission, a fact that somehow appealed to Tim, who last night had imagined getting the job and making phone calls that would spruce up the cannon at Bull Run or the statue of Father Duffy in Times Square.
    But the crisp zeal Potter was again showing, now that Cohn had subsided, had to do with far-more-distant battlefields that had barely cooled. None of the POWs who’d been rescued or exchanged—in a mental condition more frightening than their physical one—was seated here this morning. Only the brass were at the witness table, and it was painful enough hearing the descriptions of torture filtered through them. Tim could only guess what the impact would be when the victims themselves testified in a couple of months. Cecil Holland had told him how McCarthy liked to perform a sleight of hand between the committee’s executive and public sessions. When pink witnesses who’d been subpoenaed to reveal their former Communist ties showed any instinct to fight back during the closed session, they most likely wouldn’t get called for the open hearing, where McCarthy preferred to display the timid and guilty-looking. Things would operate with a strange similarity in this case, Tim imagined. The more shaky the repatriated prisoners, the more powerful Senator Potter’s point would be.
    All this activity felt reassuring to Tim. Whatever the committee’s reported excesses, surely not even Miss McGrory, back at the
Star,
could object to this particular inquiry. Only three days ago the pope himself had called for new international laws against war crimes, and two years before that, Tim had heard Father Beane, the visiting priest from the Chinese missions, tell about what he and his brothers had suffered at the hands of Mao’s advancing armies. Even now he remembered the friar’s cadences and fervor, and how he himself had sat in the Church of the Epiphany, between Frances and his mother, thinking: Some “soldier of God”
I
am! That was, after all, what he was supposed to have become on the spring Sunday in 1944 when Bishop O’Neill confirmed him with a symbolic toughening slap to the face.
    But maybe here, in the smallest of ways, he could be helpful in the fight against godlessness and cruelty. If he went to work for Potter, he would not just be keeping Father Duffy laureled; he’d be affording protection to Father Beane as well. It might be the only soldiering he ever did. He’d never been able to think through what he’d do when the draft board got around to calling him up.
Do you have homosexual tendencies? Check yes or no.
When he’d registered, almost four years ago in that little office up at Fordham, he’d realized he was damned either way he answered: he could be an outcast or a liar. He’d chosen to lie, rationalizing that “tendencies” could be proved only by experience, and he’d certainly had none of that.
Homosexual tendencies:
had Uncle Alan, his