Free Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon

“‘Administrative assistant’ my Aunt Fanny,” declared Tommy. “He’s a goddamn researcher, almost as low on this totem pole as
you
are, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Timothy.”
    “Is he in trouble?” Tim asked. “Mr. Jones, I mean.”
    “All in good time, all in good time. Why don’t you take this document and put it on his desk, sport? And keep it open to the dog-eared page.”
    McIntyre then quickly left, no doubt headed back to the cloakroom machinations over the Republicans’ new minority majority.
    Tim walked into the next room and put the transcript on Mr. Jones’s desk. He could see from some notes on the blotter that Jones, too, was trawling after statistics on the sea lamprey. But that was hardly all. The desk, even with no one in the chair behind it, appeared to be a very busy place. Even more prominent on the blotter was a cutting from last Wednesday’s
Star,
a small, discreet story about a twenty-five-year-old theological student’s conviction for soliciting an undercover police officer in Lafayette Square. The item wouldn’t have made the paper at all were the student not the son of Senator Lester Hunt, a Democrat from Wyoming.
    The clipping made Tim burn with a terrible feeling of foolishness. He could see himself as the hapless theological student and Hawkins Fuller as Officer John A. Constanzo of the District Police. For days now he had been imagining the contempt Fuller must be feeling for him, ever since the sentimental gesture of the book, with its unguarded inscription, had revealed Timothy Laughlin to be someone who’d gotten completely the wrong idea about a friendly chat in Dupont Circle, and completely the wrong idea about Hawkins Fuller, a normal man whose fraternal, collegial favor—a simple job-hunting tip—had been twisted by the recipient into a distasteful opportunity to seek another sort of favor entirely.
    For each of the last several nights, Tim had been unable to banish his longing for Fuller, or the stupid, unextinguished hope that the older man might yet send him a kind note, maybe when he had finished the Lodge biography. Nor could he cease dwelling on the ugly probability that the book had been thrown away, along with whatever few seconds of infinitesimal regard Fuller had had for that skinny little queer on the park bench.
    It was 4:35 p.m. Tim fought the temptation to picture, for the hundredth time, what Hawkins Fuller must look like sitting at his desk in the clean aquamarine precincts of the State Department. Instead, he took one last look at the desktop in front of him and could not resist picking up the topmost letter on yet another stack of Jones’s pending concerns. It was typed with a lack of accuracy that seemed more heartfelt than sloppy:

    the Chinese doctor threatened to take me to to the hospital, on account of my frostbitten feet. My two big toe bones were sticking out, and the area around them looked real decayed. I knew that 90 or 95 percent of the men who went to the hospital never came out of it, so when the doctor left the room for five minutes, I took a fingernail (all our fingernails were real long and dirty) and punched it around the bones and broke off both of my big toes. I threw them across the floor so they’d be out of sight. The Chinese doctor came back in and he said “you go to hospital” and I said “nothing doing, my feet are okay,” and he said “let me look.” And he took a look and I had the bones broke off, and the feet now didn’t look so decayed and he said “okay” and went outside the door and never bothered me again. I knew if I’d gone to the hospital I’d have never got out of it.

    This letter from Sergeant Wendell Treffery, recently repatriated from Korea to the army hospital at Walton, Massachusetts, must be part of the preparations for Potter’s atrocity hearings.
    A second letter in the pile came from Sergeant First Class George J. Matta, who described the shallow graves he’d seen dug for American POWs