DC By the Book

Excerpt: Back out in Dupont Circle Tim soon felt himself sweating through his blue suit. His steno pad was already soaked from his own palm; thank God, at least, for ballpoint pens. Looking at the top page of his notes,he realized he would be mystified by his own abbreviations unless he made a fair copy, with amplifications, right away. So once he'd bought a half-pint of milk at the big Peoples drugstore, he sat down amidst the late lunchers and sun-catchers on a bench near the Circle's western rim. Across the expanse of grass he could hear the last of the wedding guests laughing through their departures. He had just finished transcribing the first page on the pad when he noticed a shadow approaching: someone also wanting to sit down. As quickly as he could, he cleared off his milk carton, napkin, and two loose steno pages from the rest of the bench. "Sorry," he said, before he'd even had a chance to look up. "For what?" For everything, thought Tim, once he raised his head and saw the spectacular young man standing over him. Taking in the suit jacket slung over the man's broad shoulders and the faint glistening of sweat in the hollow of his neck where he'd loosened his tie, Tim wanted to say: For being nothing like you. For being all you'll have for company on this bench.

Excerpt: He reached the corner of 25th and H...when he spotted, lo and behold, the brewer, poking around the weeds and tin cans in a yard belonging to a red-brick house, just as narrow as the others, but a little taller, with a comical turret at the top.... "Well," said Fuller, looking up at the turret while he shook Hildebrand's hand, "this one is pretty baronial for the Bottom." -- "A regular Taj Mahal. I'm not sure what we're going to do with it." Hildebardand pointed in the direction his nearby small brewery, visible from this corner, though dwarfed by the much larger Heurich's plant beside it. "We still own two or three of these little dumps," he explained, pointing to the row of houses running up 25th. "Heurich used to have most of them. They got built in the '90s, mostly for the Germans and the Irish, who all took off once the streetcar came in. No reason to actually live here when for a couple pennies a day they could get in and out to make their living making beer. The colored have been in the houses ever since. This one's so far gone it's been abandoned for a year.... I'm a little taken aback. I didn't realize I was a slumlord.... Christ, a colored woman who passed by five minutes ago told me there were still privies in the alley during [World War Two]. Mrs. Roosevelt came poking around one day, shaking her head." -- HISTORICAL CONTEXT --> Many recent Irish arrivals were employed at the gasworks and lived in a section just south of here called Connaught’s Row. Several nearby breweries, especially the massive Heurich facility that stood where the Kennedy Center is now, also provided jobs, especially to the many Germans who settled here.

Excerpt: Fuller walked down H Street toward the Potomac, past the university's buildings and the boys in their letter jackets. Maybe he'd keep going all the way to the river, or drop into the Foggy Bottom Wax Museum and stand with the handful of visitors fitting themselves into the goofball tableau of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.... as the university's terrain gave way to Foggy Bottom's crumbling little brick houses, toy cottages attached to one another for dear life. The Negroes had made this shaky spot their own for decades, until the whites started coming back when the [State Department] relocated itself to the neighborhood after the war. What the bulldozers hadn't gotten was now falling into the hands of renovators.... Yes, the mephitic old neighborhood, having sagged for a century with its poor drainage, ammonia factory, and tinderbox warehouses, was slowly recuperating toward a placid modernity. Where the gasworks has stood when Fuller first arrived at State, foundations were now being laid for the kind of white=brick apartment building that back home was turning stretches of Park Avenue into sets of high-rise dentures. ---------- The western section of Foggy Bottom, furthest from the federal core and closest to the river, was long home to working class immigrants and African Americans. Factories here provided jobs and housing was affordable. Smokestacks and other industrial structures defined the landscape, including two massive tanks along Virginia Avenue here, where Washington Gas and Light Company stored gas for powering DC’s streetlights.

Excerpt: The Sand Bar's piano player started in on "Some Enchanted Evening," and Tim ordered a bottle of Senators beer.... Two stools to his left, a slightly built man with dyed hair and plucked eyebrows nodded to him. He nodded back and, never having been by himself in a bar--let along this kind of bar--worried that he might have just given a signal that was open to misinterpretation.... Across the room a skinny Negro scolded his white boyfriend: "You do so know. My black taffeta with the pleats!" With a tilt of his head, the bartender signaled a bouncer to eject the overexcited colored boy. Tim couldn't hide a certain relief and even his feeling that justice was being done by the regulation of such effeminacy. The bartender, he knew, could see him pining for normality, for the chance to believe he still lived with the rest of the world.

Excerpt: "Mr. Fuller, I'm going to ask you to take a lie-detector test." ... "Have you ever frequented a Washington, DC establishment called the Jewel Box, at the corner of 16th and L Streets?" The tufted purple walls. The bartender who looks a little like Alan Ladd. "No."

Excerpt: Tim would accompany him as far as 5th Street, where he'd veer off to St. Mary of God, the Hungarian church. He'd been working there on behalf of the refugees now streaming into town, taking his meals in the rectory basement and coming home with pin money for his efforts.... The country had already turned its attention away from the exiles, but there had been no slackening of zeal inside the rectory at St. Mary, Mother of God, where a few minutes after leaving [his friend] Time was busy with money orders, cans of cling peaches, and pediatrician referrals.

Excerpt: On Friday night at Gawler's funeral home, Tim had stood in a long line of the mournful, the curious, and the silently triumphant, waiting to file past the open casket in which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy reposed. Despite the mortician's art, the corpse had looked nearly as gray as his tie.

Excerpt: She was soon at Quigley's, on a stool, drinking the malted Fuller had already ordered for her. He sipped a glass of seltzer, and for a minute or two they said nothing. "So, he told you," she finally said. "He told me." .... She pushed away the malted and swiveled the stool, as if it were her typist's chair, so that she could face him. "You condescending, buck-passing bastard," she declared, as evenly as she could. "It's your romance too. You found the castle for it."

Excerpt: "Two more blocks," Hawk said, pointing to the Old Post Office, their destination, a gigantic Romanesque pile between 11th and 12th streets. Hoover's [FBI] now had a portion of its training academy in the building, which the Postmaster General had long ago eded to a motley assortment of small federal agencies and government record collections. Fuller led Tim through the dim after-hours light to a bank of elevators. "Not that one," he said, instructing Time to wait for another car. "Number one is solely for the use of Edgar and Clyde. Or so I hear." They rode to the ninth floor... Hawkins then piloted them through a door and into the clock tower, which rose several stories and could be scaled only by ladders attached to its stone walls. Up they climbed past the kind of narrow windows designed for medieval archers holding off a siege. [Hawkins] pulled Tim up the last steps and onto the belfry's floor, so that that the two of the stood above the tower's northern clockface, looking down on Pennsylvania Avenue and the Star's building across the streets.... Tim moved to another arch, one that faced more to the east. Through it he could see the Navy Yard and the smokestacks of St. Elizbabeth's, the instance asylum still holding Ezra Pound.... In one corner of the belfry there was a small pile of blankets, none too clean, left over from others' trysts. Fuller moved the stack to a different corner of the tower and sat down on it... "Don't worry," he said, coaxing Time toward him. "I'll get you to your bus."

Excerpt: The winds were picking up, sharpening the contrast between this morning's weather and the sunny calm of yesterday afternoon, when Time had watched the parade from the corner of 13th and Pennsylvania. His vantage point, the pedestal of Pulaski's statue, had been so good he was able to pick out even the types of flowers in the Nixon girls corsages.

Excerpt: "Well," said Mary, "they're already getting Capitol Hill ready for your return. They've finished the foundations on that new Senate Office Building, the one going up where that little slum on 1st Street used be? They'll have the whole thing done in a couple of years."