Fellow Travelers Read Free Page A

and took his nickname from a weekend job he had as a constable over in Berwyn Heights.
    More people drifted in. “We could use a piano,” opined Miss Eversman, the music critic. She’d covered Liberace’s concert two nights ago at Constitution Hall and was telling a police reporter that the pianist’s mother had been in the president’s box with one of Liberace’s brothers, Rudy, who’d served in Korea.
    “So she’s got one boy who’s a soldier?” asked the reporter. “Maybe she’s got hope of grandchildren after all.”
    Miss Eversman laughed.
    “Forget Liberace,” said Mr. Yost, who’d started to reminisce about his first years here at the paper. “I remember seeing Wilson himself—that’s
Woodrow
Wilson, not Charlie, to you youngsters—up in
his
box at Keith’s Theatre. You wouldn’t have figured it from an egghead like him, but did that man ever love his vaudeville. You could sell him any player-piano roll the minute it came out.”
    “We really
do
need a piano,” Miss Eversman sighed, as the national and managing editors walked in. Mr. Corn and Mr. Noyes took up positions off to the side of things and remarked to each other, a bit shamefacedly, on the smallness of the spread.
    “Well,” said Mr. Corn, quoting the late Senator Taft’s famously impolitic advice about higher food prices: “Eat less.”
    The party was making Tim feel nostalgic, and thus a bit foolish, since he’d been, after all, only a summer hire allowed to stay on through September—or, more exactly, this coming Friday afternoon. They’d put him in the city room, even though he’d never been to Washington before June and knew nothing about the District as a place where many citizens lived life quite oblivious to the federal government. His placement, he’d come to understand, was typical of the
Star,
a paper both venerable and feckless, produced each evening by an eccentric, occasionally brilliant staff. He had liked it here and would miss the place, but given the shortness of his tenure he wasn’t sure he should even take a piece of the cake once it got cut.
    A small stack of the paper’s early edition lay atop an open drawer of the file cabinet he was leaning against. Ambassador Bohlen was flying home from Moscow to talk with Secretary Dulles, and this morning Louis Budenz, a Fordham professor and former red, had testified to the McCarthy committee that, in his “humble opinion,” parts of an Army-commissioned pamphlet about Siberia—something put together to educate the Far Eastern Command—contained large chunks of Soviet-sympathizing stuff that had been taken, without footnotes or refutation, from Communist writers.
    Cecil Holland, the reporter who’d written the Budenz story, now saw Tim reading it and asked, “Laughlin, you just graduated from Fordham, didn’t you? Ever study with this guy who says the army’s been indoctrinating itself?”
    Tim smiled. “I had somebody else for Economics, Mr. Holland.” He grimaced. “I think I got a C-plus.” Holland laughed and walked over to claim a piece of the cake that had finally been sliced.
    At Fordham, Tim had mostly studied American history and English literature, and his plan in coming to Washington remained, even now, to combine his major and minor into a job writing for a politician, though throughout the city’s hot, depopulated summer he’d made little headway finding anything on Capitol Hill. Well, he’d have plenty of time and motivation come Friday afternoon!
    The party conversation had turned to Senator McCarthy’s imminent wedding. “What kind of guy picks lunch hour on Tuesday to get married in a church?” asked the financial-page editor.
    “A guy who’s busy taking over the world,” answered Cecil Holland.
    “That’s why he’s marrying a girl on his staff,” added the police reporter. “Maximum efficiency. She’ll be able to crank out the press release for Joe’s firstborn as soon as she’s cranked out the baby.”
    “Well,