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Authors: Thomas Mallon
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man asked.
“I doubt it,” said Mary.
Managing not to stammer, the boy said, “I was bringing him this.” He handed Mary a new biography of the elder Henry Cabot Lodge. A receipt from Trover’s bookshop stuck out of it. An odd present to bring here, thought Mary, Lodge not exactly having been an internationalist. But it was a big and serious book—impressive, the boy had probably reasoned—and he had spent six dollars on it.
“You could leave it here,” she said. “I’ll see that Mr. Fuller gets it.”
The boy still looked crestfallen.
“You can leave a note, too,” Mary added. “So he’ll be sure to know who it’s from.”
“I’ll write one inside the book,” the young man declared, looking more hopeful.
Mary pointed to the empty chair at the side of her desk and watched him fumble for his ballpoint pen. His handwriting was so neat she could read it upside down without the least effort.
With thanks to Hawkins Fuller
(I got the job. You’re wonderful.)
Timothy Laughlin
“Does he know where to reach you?” asked Mary, trying to sound casual instead of confidential. “Is there a number you’d like to leave?”
“I’m not on the phone,” said Timothy Laughlin. A cloud rushed over the map of Ireland that was his face—mortification, Mary thought, at having used such a tenement archaism. “But I’ll put my address with it,” he added, recovering enough equilibrium to accept the index card that Mary gave him to write it on. He also removed the bookshop receipt, and asked if she could direct him back to the Twenty-first Street entrance.
After he’d gone, she prepared the envelope for another soothing letter, to Congressman Ikard of Texas. Adjusting her typewriter’s left margin, she noticed Miss Lightfoot smoothing her strawberry-blond permanent wave, and realized what close attention the woman had paid to the boy’s visit.
CHAPTER FIVE
October 16, 1953
Senator Kennedy, the radio was saying, had today called for “the development of a strategic air force with sufficient retaliatory powers to threaten a potential aggressor with havoc and ruin.” However strong his words, they could not compete with McCarthy’s announcement, just made in New York—and deemed worthy of a bulletin—that one of his Fort Monmouth witnesses had broken down crying and admitted he’d been lying to the committee. According to the announcer, the senator had rushed out of the hearing in the Federal Building, spoken to reporters, and then rushed back in to get what the witness promised would now be the truth.
After a full week in Senator Potter’s suite of offices, Tim had grown used to the radio’s steady murmur. The Fort Monmouth hearings were making so much news—lab secrets said to be going to East Germany; the alleged spies’ links to the now-dead Julius Rosenberg—that you would think they were open to the public, whereas in fact all the news they made came straight from McCarthy himself, whenever he decided to hit the microphones outside the committee room’s closed door. The senator seemed determined to justify the urgency with which he’d interrupted his honeymoon last Sunday, even though he was right now the only senator up in New York at the executive sessions. Several staffers—including Mr. Jones, for Senator Potter—were up there, too.
Still not sure what Jones’s exact position was, Tim felt it probably didn’t matter much. In practical terms, the office’s secretary, Miss Cook, a single woman who lived at the Hotel Continental, was the person who kept everyone, Potter included, hopping. She’d directed Tim to answer constituent mail this morning, and right now had him writing a speech on fishing-industry issues that the senator would deliver the next time he was home. Tim had just looked up “sea lamprey” in the encyclopedia.
The staff were encouraged to go into the galleries and listen to the floor debates as often as they liked. The Potter legend—what Tommy McIntyre
“I doubt it,” said Mary.
Managing not to stammer, the boy said, “I was bringing him this.” He handed Mary a new biography of the elder Henry Cabot Lodge. A receipt from Trover’s bookshop stuck out of it. An odd present to bring here, thought Mary, Lodge not exactly having been an internationalist. But it was a big and serious book—impressive, the boy had probably reasoned—and he had spent six dollars on it.
“You could leave it here,” she said. “I’ll see that Mr. Fuller gets it.”
The boy still looked crestfallen.
“You can leave a note, too,” Mary added. “So he’ll be sure to know who it’s from.”
“I’ll write one inside the book,” the young man declared, looking more hopeful.
Mary pointed to the empty chair at the side of her desk and watched him fumble for his ballpoint pen. His handwriting was so neat she could read it upside down without the least effort.
With thanks to Hawkins Fuller
(I got the job. You’re wonderful.)
Timothy Laughlin
“Does he know where to reach you?” asked Mary, trying to sound casual instead of confidential. “Is there a number you’d like to leave?”
“I’m not on the phone,” said Timothy Laughlin. A cloud rushed over the map of Ireland that was his face—mortification, Mary thought, at having used such a tenement archaism. “But I’ll put my address with it,” he added, recovering enough equilibrium to accept the index card that Mary gave him to write it on. He also removed the bookshop receipt, and asked if she could direct him back to the Twenty-first Street entrance.
After he’d gone, she prepared the envelope for another soothing letter, to Congressman Ikard of Texas. Adjusting her typewriter’s left margin, she noticed Miss Lightfoot smoothing her strawberry-blond permanent wave, and realized what close attention the woman had paid to the boy’s visit.
CHAPTER FIVE
October 16, 1953
Senator Kennedy, the radio was saying, had today called for “the development of a strategic air force with sufficient retaliatory powers to threaten a potential aggressor with havoc and ruin.” However strong his words, they could not compete with McCarthy’s announcement, just made in New York—and deemed worthy of a bulletin—that one of his Fort Monmouth witnesses had broken down crying and admitted he’d been lying to the committee. According to the announcer, the senator had rushed out of the hearing in the Federal Building, spoken to reporters, and then rushed back in to get what the witness promised would now be the truth.
After a full week in Senator Potter’s suite of offices, Tim had grown used to the radio’s steady murmur. The Fort Monmouth hearings were making so much news—lab secrets said to be going to East Germany; the alleged spies’ links to the now-dead Julius Rosenberg—that you would think they were open to the public, whereas in fact all the news they made came straight from McCarthy himself, whenever he decided to hit the microphones outside the committee room’s closed door. The senator seemed determined to justify the urgency with which he’d interrupted his honeymoon last Sunday, even though he was right now the only senator up in New York at the executive sessions. Several staffers—including Mr. Jones, for Senator Potter—were up there, too.
Still not sure what Jones’s exact position was, Tim felt it probably didn’t matter much. In practical terms, the office’s secretary, Miss Cook, a single woman who lived at the Hotel Continental, was the person who kept everyone, Potter included, hopping. She’d directed Tim to answer constituent mail this morning, and right now had him writing a speech on fishing-industry issues that the senator would deliver the next time he was home. Tim had just looked up “sea lamprey” in the encyclopedia.
The staff were encouraged to go into the galleries and listen to the floor debates as often as they liked. The Potter legend—what Tommy McIntyre
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