Fellow Travelers Read Free Page B

from what I hear,” said Miss Eversman, “McCarthy’s mother might be more surprised by all this than Liberace’s.” Everyone had heard the rumors.
    Would the president show up for the wedding? People began to take bets. Ike’s contempt for McCarthy was by now well developed, but it would be hard, some argued, for him not to put in an appearance, now that he was back from vacation, and with St. Matthew’s being only a few blocks from the White House.
    Miss McGrory, who appeared to regard this talk of McCarthy on the order of a frog in the punch bowl, returned to an earlier subject and insisted that they didn’t
need
a piano. She patted Mr. Yost’s arm and dared him to get everybody started singing “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”—Woodrow Wilson’s absolute all-time favorite, the retiring pressman had reminded them.
    Tim, who had been to all the West Side weddings of his uncountable cousins, right away felt Irish instinct trump shyness. He joined in as soon as Mr. Yost and Miss McGrory got things going, and within a moment, even as he remained alone with his thoughts, was singing the same words as everyone else:

    Let me put my arms about you,
    I don’t want to live without you.

    His job at the
Star
had come through the nephew of an old pal of his dad’s from Manhattan Criminal Court, where Paul Laughlin had worked during what everyone in the family now called the old days—the ones before Mr. Laughlin, nearing forty, put himself through LaSalle, by correspondence and then at night, completing his transformation from process server into accountant, making possible his family’s move from Hell’s Kitchen to the unimaginably big and bright new rooms of Stuyvesant Town. Those rooms seemed even larger now that Tim’s older sister, Frances, the Laughlins’ only other child, had gone off to Staten Island to live with her husband.

    If you ever leave me, how my heart would ache,
    I want to hug you but I fear you’d break—

                      
    While singing these lines, Tim realized that most of the partygoers’ eyes were on him. His pleasing tenor voice—a surprise to those who’d heard only his soft, polite speech with its occasional stammer—had risen above everyone else’s in volume, though to anybody paying attention to the lyric, it seemed far more likely that any hugging to involve this five-foot-seven, 130-pound young man would result in
his
breakage, not the girl’s. Realizing what had provoked the attention and smiles, Tim blushed and lowered his voice, while everybody else raised theirs for the song’s big finish:

    Oh, oh, oh, oh,
    Oh, you beautiful doll!

    Mr. Yost led the revelers’ applause for themselves, and when it subsided, Mr. Brogan, Tim’s boss on the city desk, announced: “It’s clear to me that we kept too much of Laughlin’s light under a bushel this summer. I wish we’d had more for you to do, Timmy.”
    Tim smiled and thanked him. Since June he’d mostly typed and done rewrites, bringing the perfect grammar of the nuns to the fitfully produced copy of the oldest city reporters, who teased him about being a college man, and about a pretty girl named Helen, another summer hire who answered a phone in Classifieds and sometimes stopped to chat at his desk.
    They might have kept on teasing him now, but they didn’t really know enough about this conscientious, if cheerful, boy, and so the spotlight soon moved elsewhere. Tim shrank back into himself as Cecil Holland redirected the conversation to—what else?—the senator from Wisconsin.
    What would McCarthy do next? people wanted to know. Holland advised them to watch what was going on up in New York: Cohn had been running subcommittee meetings there, taking testimony in closed sessions when he wasn’t snooping around Fort Monmouth over in Jersey. You watch: McCarthy would soon be taking shots at the army for whatever security breaches he could discover or invent.
    “I’m gonna love you, like nobody’s