It was at Arlington Hall that he first knew what it was to be in a lab. It felt like a team. At times it felt like a family.
There were several people there who were like him: men who loved men, women who loved women. Temperamental, they called themselves, or homophile, or gay. The last was the first word Harold learned that felt correct to him. It was a nice word, he thought, appropriate in many ways. He liked the carelessness of it, the implication that they had their heads somehow above the fray. That they did not care what others thought of them. Outsiders referred to them differently: the lavender set, or sex perverts, or queers.
In 1946, he went with a colleague to the Mayflower Hotel, and he met George. George was sitting on a tall stool, wearing his hat indoors, grinning. He was younger, fashionable. He was, Harold thought, powerfully attractive. His gaze was steady and secure. The word beatnik hadn’t been invented yet; if it had been, he’d have been one. Where Harold was conservative in dress, George was unsubtle. He wore mainly black. The length of his hair raised eyebrows. He wrote poetry. He was a talented artist: he made paintings on large canvases that it took two people to lift.
Harold, at first, was skeptical of him. He seemed frivolous, cocky, too overt. He went with frequency to the Chicken Hut, a hangout so obvious that Harold avoided it.
“Why?” George said, wrinkling his brow. “Who cares?”
By that time, George had already cut off all contact with his family, wealthy New Yorkers from a dynastic family who disapproved of him deeply. They had caught him with a boy, said George. They humiliated him. There had been a scandal, already, in the family—something about the father and a girl—and they were wary of another. They threatened to institutionalize him. Instead they sent him off to preparatory school in New Hampshire, from which he ran away when he was seventeen. They reported him missing; they could not find him. It was only when he became a legal adult, at eighteen, that he reemerged. He told them he had no interest in ever speaking to them again. In turn, they disowned him.
This was the subject of one of the first conversations Harold ever had with him. Telling his story, George looked simultaneously amused and distressed. Emotions passed across his face like scudding clouds.
George lived at the Hamilton Arms, a strange housing complex in Georgetown, a sort of commune populated by artists and scholars. The buildings were a collection of alpine-style cottages centered by a café called the Hamilton Arms Coffee House, where George also worked. There were murals on the walls, a pool, perpetually drained, in the middle of the courtyard. He brought Harold back with him, that first night.
Inside the gate, which locked behind them, were two women sitting in lawn chairs on the edge of the empty pool. One was smoking a pipe. Harold had never seen a woman smoke a pipe before.
“Helen,” said George, nodding in her direction, and Helen—lanky, languorous, older than both of them, said, “Who’s the catch?”
Harold had never been referred to as a catch before. He reddened.
George held the door to the coffee shop open for him. He ordered banana pie and Coca-Cola: a strange combination that remained in Harold’s memory for years. He listened over a cup of coffee while Harold talked, clumsily, at length, about his own family. About Ernest.
“You must miss him,” said George.
“How old are you?” asked Harold, warily.
“How old are you?” asked George.
“Twenty-eight,” said Harold.
“Twenty-one,” said George.
“A kid,” said Harold, but in fact—when he looked back on that time later—they both were.
They fell in love. George, as it turned out, was kind: endlessly kind, and endlessly willing to do what was just in the face of oppression. He was radical, carefree. Braver than Harold was. He was exciting. Once—Harold smiled, remembering it—George kissed him full on the mouth, outdoors, on the street. He did not believe in or bend to formalities or social niceties, and therefore he was sometimes perceived as rude, but really he was just honest. He worked for equality in every pocket of the world. He lived as best he could, he told Harold, outside the confines of an oppressive, warmongering America. He joined the Communist Party, attended meetings in the back room of a local bar—a fact that was first whispered about him, and then spoken of overtly, when it became clear that George did not care to keep it a secret.
As much as he scoffed at tradition, though, George still bore the hallmarks of his upbringing, and though he was quite a bit younger than Harold, he taught him a great deal. It was George who taught him to make tea the way he would for the rest of his life, for example. It was George who taught him about classical music—one of their first outings together was to the National Symphony Orchestra, to see them perform Beethoven’s Fifth. George who got Harold listening to the police dramas that he would enjoy for the rest of his life.
Harold felt safe, at first, in Washington. There was a community, a movement—the fellowship that Harold had mentioned in his letters to Ernest. The city felt modern. The war had ended: it was a new era.
This sense of safety extended even to his work. There were several other men and women like him. He had even seen his boss, Conrad Lewey, at the Horseshoe one night—although Harold normally avoided places as indiscreet as that one, he had been dragged there with George, tipsy, after a long night—and Lewey had nodded to him from across the room. Harold did not approach him in person; there was no need to press the matter further. Lewey had looked stricken, anyway, as if he didn’t want to be recognized. Still, Harold took this exchange as a positive sign: a sign of an ally within the department.
The rest of his colleagues, too, were intellectuals, progressive, subversive in their way. It was true: they worked for the government, but it was with a sort of tacit agreement that they were doing it only to protect their peers. If they could prevent an attack on American soldiers, well, that was good and valuable work. When it came to the government officials to whom they reported, there was a collective eye roll, a kind of benevolent dismissiveness.