Fellow Travelers (5+*)

 

How could I have waited nearly two decades before reading this fully realized, you-are-there account of the McCarthy era, first published in 2006 and recently resurrected by a Showtime adaptation which I'm now afraid to watch because I know it can't possibly compare despite the undeniable allure of Bomer and Bailey beefcake?  

Fellow Travelers takes place when the Cold War was still hot and a 20something Roy Cohn lusted after a blond heir whose family placed his self-penned anti-communist tract right next to the Gideons bibles in the nightstands of their chain hotel rooms.  Come to think of it, that's a pretty good metaphor for Thomas Mallon's remarkably detailed examination of Catholic guilt, politics and federalized homophobia, animated by no less than a captivating and believable story of gay puppy love inside the Beltway. 

Tim, a Hell's Kitchen transplant interning at the Washington Star, falls hard for Hawk, the State Department's most eligible and apolitical bachelor, who, as his name implies, likes 'em young.  Hawk calls the milk-loving kid Skippy and uses his connections to get him a job on the Hill working for a Michigan Senator, a legless WWII vet nicknamed "Canes."  (Yep, he was real.  Mallon brings major and minor historical figures on and off stage so briskly that multiple detours to Wikipedia enhance the book immeasurably).  The Army McCarthy hearings are in full swing and Hawk has narrowly escaped the Republican administration's purge of 500 homosexual security risks by fooling a lie detector with his characteristic sang froid.  Both sham marriages and suicide are common in these perilous times but here's how the fervently conservative, Irish Catholic Skippy reacts to the loss of his virginity:

Tim knew that he, too, would never again be what he had been, and he knew it even more surely once he saw Hawk enter the room, smile at him, and mouth the word “Skippy.” After smiling back, he turned and looked the other way, behind him, toward the rooftop’s railing, telling himself that if he leapt over it now he would die happy, the mortal sin of suicide just a redundant count in God’s indictment, earning him only a concurrent eternity in Hell.

But Tim quickly learns that closets in the swamp comprise Hell of an altogether different kind, one that stunts any possibility of a loving relationship.  If Daddy Hawk--who equates Skippy's sexual avidity with his religious fervor--had a Grindr profile, NSA would be the most prominently featured acronym.

How could he explain? Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked Earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

Mallon is no Pollyanna, that's for sure.  Before committing an act of cruel-to-be kind betrayal, Hawk imagines a future for the asynchronous couple that proves to be not far off the mark:

He [Skippy] had taken, it seemed, some vow of emotional poverty that he was willing to keep six days a week, if only on the seventh, or close enough, he could be released from it here. He would grow old in this city, become like all the other skinny, obedient clerks and bookshelvers keeping their heads down at the Library of Congress, the ones who’d come to town years before to escape the fists and cruelties of their fathers and the village hearties. He’d learn to cook, to go to Sunday-afternoon concerts at the Coolidge Auditorium with his chums. He’d save his money to go see the occasional musical in tryouts on its way to New York. He’d lose the political zealotry, once he finally realized politics to be no more than the widgets turned out by this particular company town. The religious quaverings would subside, too, displaced into solemn, furtive acknowledgment of “Mr. Fuller” when they passed in the corridor, and into more flamboyant weekly worship of the same in the little place off I Street. 

Timothy Laughlin would not be the big trouble that Hawkins Fuller feared, the trouble against which Lucy’s money would shield him. No, Skippy would be a grim safe harbor, one that would trap him in a domesticity even danker than the one across the river in Alexandria. The thrill of protectiveness and ravishment would be long gone, replaced with a cup of coffee and a slice of cake and an ongoing obligation to fuck the good little aging boy who had “given up everything”—the nelly clerks would start to tell him—for Hawkins Fuller.

Mallon's female characters--who include Hawk's foil, a protective mother hen with a secret of her own--are just as clear-eyed about the social oppression they endured in the 1950s.  Yet Fellow Travelers is less a downer than a fully researched and nuanced post-mortem on an America (complete with extremely well-curated pop cultural references!) that no longer exists but whose long shadow stunted my own emotional growth.  Read it and count your lucky stars, kids.