Mallon - Fellow Travelers

PROLOGUE

October 15, 1991

U.S. Embassy, Tallinn, Estonia

Very snazzy, Mr. Fuller.

Very retro, replied the deputy chief of mission. Not my tie, he added, giving both ends of the black bow a last adjustment. Your snazzy. He turned around to face Ms. Boyle. Its a long time since Ive heard that one.

I suppose I could say you look baaad.

Ms. Boyle, Hawkins Fuller imagined, was just on the sunny side of forty, old enough to know snazzy and young enough to know baaad, though for that matter, even he, at sixty-six, knew that baaad meant good.

She lingered a moment, the way women still did in the presence of Hawkins Fuller, imagining when the full head of silvery hair had been black, the way the eyebrows still were, in Gregory Peckstyle contrast. But Mr. Fuller was better-looking than Gregory Peck.

He, too, lingered for a moment, prolonging the familiar comfort of admiration. These, he finally said, pointing to the stack of badly printed telexes near the edge of his desk: Very bad. Not baaad. Just lousy.

I know, sighed Ms. Boyle, who doubted that the embassy, still being flung together, would be getting even internal e-mail anytime soon. But that guys been working miracles with the phones. Theyre twenty times better than last week. The ambassador talked to Brussels and Washington twice today. Clear as a bell both times. And here, she said, darting back out to her desk and returning with some regular mail from the pouch. A primitive but reliable means of communication. She could see that the envelopes were personal, so she set them down unopened and left with a friendly marching order: Dont dawdle. Lucy will be downstairs in five minutes.

He wondered how many years ago Ms. Boyle would still have been saying Mrs. Fuller instead of Lucy.

All right, he replied. And if I do dawdlehe always did; the shambling and the daydreaming made his good looks even more appealingjust buzz me, Miss Blue.

Ms. Boyle looked puzzled.

Ah, said Fuller. That one you are too young for.

She left, smiling as she closed the door, leaving Fuller to pick up the two bright-orange envelopes atop the pile of mail shed just placed on his desk: Halloween cards, a little early, from the grandchildren in Potomac. Farther down the stack, a letter from Lucys Realtor in D.C., about that house in Chevy Chase she was determined to buy.

Theyd be home for good in another year, and hed finally take up the half-time job being held for him at the Carnegie Endowment. Odd to find himself here, in the meantime, helping out with the New World Order. He was supposed to have wound up his career last spring, after the six years in Bulgaria. It had never been that much of a career, and hed never much minded that, but as he looked out on the darkening Gulf of Finland, he seemed compelled to make a fast review of it, as if it were one of the checking-for-Alzheimers exercises that Lucy wanted to add to their breakfast regimen of bran muffins and Centrum Silver tablets.

All right: the six years in Bulgaria; the four before that in D.C.; the four years prior to those at the U.S. mission to the UN. Which put you back in the mid- and late seventiessome luck for that to be the era when they finally got posted to New York! And yet, for all the fiscal calamity and crime (that awful broad-daylight hour when Lucy came home with a bruised cheek and no purse), hed ridden the handbasket through some interesting stops on its way to hell. At fifty, hed been too old, really, for the underground pleasures that were suddenly so unpoliced. But his looks had granted him an extension, allowed him occasional, plausible entry to the throbbing middle-of-the-night world west of West Street. It had been some luck, a portion of his lifetimes worth, to have made it home from those forays without so much as a hangover, let alone the time-released fate that would now be necessitating one of those humiliating obits with their mention of a long illness or pneumonia that even Lucy, behind her newspaper and bran muffin, could manage to decode.

But I digress, he thought, resuming the fast, reassuring rewind. He reached the six years in Austria (Nixon mostly); then the four in Sweden, where the draft dodgers had more social status than the embassy people, who ran down LBJ as much as they decently could while shaking their heads and nibbling the hosts gravlax. And before that? The fourteen years, 1952 to 66, right in Foggy Bottom in the State Departments Bureau of Congressional Relations, where he would have been happy to stay forever, until Lucy decided that he should use his small accumulations of clout and connectedness to effect a shift, at the age of forty, from the civil to the foreign service. It was time for them to see the world, she had decreed.

And that was it, a life span so well recollected, he decided, there was no need to do the date ranges for the early sojourns in Oslo and Paraguay, let alone Harvard and the navy and St. Pauls. Nope, no Alzheimers for Mrs. Fullers little boy. Tomorrow morning hed tell Lucy to skip the muffins and to scramble some eggs in an aluminum skillet.

He wondered: When they got home, would there be bus service from Maryland down to the Carnegie on Massachusetts Avenue? During his last period at State81 to 85, Reagan I, thank you very muchhe had never gotten the hang of the new Metro, whose underground rumblings had, in any case, never been permitted to disturb Georgetown. He was wishing that Lucy would just let them go back there, and forget about this pile in Chevy Chase, when he noticed the small white envelope addressed in a feminine hand with the neatness of his wifes generation.

One of her Wellesley pals? Maybe, though he couldnt recall any Russell in Scottsdale, Arizona. Only after another few seconds did he see that the letter was for himself and not his wife. So he slit it openand soon heard himself saying Christ Almighty.

Dear Fuller,

Tim Laughlin died September 1 in a Catholic hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He was 59 and had been sick for some time. I heard from him oftenalmost never saw him, but counted him a good friend.

I dont know whether you pray (I myself dont), but if you do, I know that, even now, he would appreciate your prayers.

Whatever the case, I thought you should know.

Yours sincerely,

Mary (Johnson) Russell

It had been more than thirty years since hed talked to either one of them, and it was easier, now, to think of her first.

She had never called him Hawkins. Shed thought it a preposterous first name and told him so, said the last shall be first and that he would be Fuller with her, under any and all circumstances. Hed replied that she didnt know the half, that Hawkins was really his middle name, Zechariah being the first. And theyd laughed, she with the sharp glint in her eye that sometimes made him call her La Pasionaria, not because the glint was passionate but because it declared, so plainly, that you, Z. Hawkins Fuller, shall not pass. It wasnt the castle of sex from which Mary Johnson had barred him during their long non-affair; that had never really been at issue. It was any sort of confidence she had barred him from. It was her trust.

He put her letter back in its envelope, and the envelope into a drawer, a different drawer from the one into which hed put the grandchildrens cards and the Realtors letter.