Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  Wasn’t that Frank Sherwood, who lived in the same block of apartments she did? He was passing just a few feet away, so she waved him over—and instantly regretted it. He had only been trying to cross the street, and her summons put him into an agony of embarrassment, since he now had to come over and offer the table his feminine handshake and some unprepared mutterings.

  “Mr. Sherwood is our resident astronomer,” Anne explained to Peter and Jack. “He’s out most nights on the roof, looking at the stars.”

  “I’m just one of the science teachers at the high school,” he apologized, his eyes looking toward Carol Feller, who could be counted on for social ease and protection.

  “Our daughter Margaret hopes to be in your class next year,” she said with a smile. “One of her friends, Tim Herrick, speaks very highly of you.”

  The sun had long since sunk into the Shiawassee, but Anne could tell that Frank was blushing. Then somebody managed to crank the speakers to an even higher volume, and nothing could be heard except the voice of whoever it was, a thousand miles away in Philadelphia, calling Thomas E. Dewey to the platform.

  Frank took this deafening opportunity to wave good-bye to everyone at the table and melt back into the crowd, still carrying a little paper bag that contained, Anne was sure, his dinner. Part of the crowd was up from the benches and on its feet, whooping for Dewey as if he were really about to emerge from behind the big black speakers. Peter Cox was one of those who had risen, the better to cheer and the better to press his hand into Anne’s shoulder, to rub it in a way she wished she could resent as much as Jack Riley seemed to.

  If the assembled Owossoans were hoping some customized sentence or two might emerge from the square yards of black mesh—a homesick greeting from the local boy who stood upon the mountaintop in Philadelphia—it never came. “Our task is to fill our victory with such meaning that mankind everywhere, yearning for freedom, will take heart and move forward out of this desperate darkness into the light of freedom’s paradise.” Anne was sure Jack Riley had heard a lot hotter speechmaking in the union halls of Flint. Before it was finished, people were back down on the benches, using the bursts of broadcast applause as opportunities to resume their own conversations.

  “I’ll bet this is the last time we’re not in front of a television set for one of these,” said Carol Feller. “Margaret is already telling us to get one.”

  Horace Sinclair made a face—not, as Anne first thought, over the notion of television, which was already broadcasting the convention to those towns that had it, but at the idea of Dewey’s victory. “Watch what this does to the town,” he said.

  “Oh, we’ll manage, Horace,” said Harold Feller.

  “Come on, Colonel,” offered Peter. “This is the American century! And Owosso is going to be at the center of things until January twentieth, 1957. Two terms, don’t you think, Riley? He won’t be greedier than that. We’ll leave the four-term runs to you Democrats.”

  “You young men …,” said Horace Sinclair.

  These three words, obviously a familiar warm-up to lengthy complaints, made Harold Feller laugh. “Horace won’t even let Bob Harrelson sell him a car.”

  Anne was determined, the next time she was alone with him, to give Peter Cox a little lecture on the rudeness of overdoing it, whether it was politics or pawing.

  “Oh, look, everybody,” said Carol Feller. “Let’s have our picture taken for the Argus.” A young man with a camera was snapping photos of some of the tables, as if it were a wedding. Peter Cox, knowing that the Fellers were as likely to be chosen for the front page as any couple in Owosso, immediately took charge, gathering everyone into position. As the photographer fiddled with his nighttime flash, Carol Feller effortlessly kept her smile and continued talking, pointing out, with a tilt of her head, yet more groups of people, over here, over there. “That’s the Herrick boy I mentioned before, in that car at the edge of the crowd. I worry about him, but not as much as I worry about his mother. I wish she were down here. Something fun like this might do her good.”

  As the flash went off with an audible burp, it lit the scene in front of Anne’s eyes, and she noticed Margaret Feller, Carol’s daughter, a couple of tables away with friends her age, looking hungrily at Tim Herrick’s blond head in the last second before his car jumped the red light.

  There was a second flash, a big one, from a concession booth that had just flung itself up at the foot of City Hall’s steps. Dewey was still perorating in Philadelphia, but—what?—he seemed to be here. As several gasps indicated, some people believed he actually was, until they realized, along with everyone else, that they were looking at a giant black-and-white photographic cutout of the governor of New York, around whom Al Jackson, the town’s camera and electronics salesman, had draped a friendly arm.

  “Billy Grimes will explain it to you!” he told the clutch of people fast assembling.

  “That’s right!” said Billy, who was holding up a stiff little square of paper, so excited by this job he’d been offered out of the blue a few hours ago that he was barely trying to spot Margaret Feller in the crowd. “I’m Mr. Jackson’s new assistant. Starting tomorrow morning, for one dollar, outside the post office, you can have your picture taken with the next President of the United States by the first Polaroid camera in Owosso, Michigan. It’ll be in your hands sixty seconds after the shutter clicks!”

  The crowd oohed in knowing amazement. They had heard about this camera on the radio, even read about it in the Argus.

  The whole Feller party had gotten up and now stood at the edge of Al Jackson’s display. “That,” said Carol, “is Billy.” Peter nodded, as Horace Sinclair tapped Jack Riley on the arm. “If you get any buttons from your union boys—I don’t care if they’re Truman buttons or Wallace buttons—will you send me one?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jack, laughing for the first time tonight.

  “Good!” boomed Horace Sinclair. “I’d rather have Charlie McCarthy in the White House than see these jackasses turn this town into a tourist trap for the next four years.”

  “Eight,” corrected Peter, with a smile for the old man. “Anne, what do you say? Ready to go home?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but Jack is taking me.” Peter looked at the two of them, trying to hide his disbelief that she could resist him or his brand-new ’49 Ford. “I promised him when we first sat down. You didn’t hear us. I think you were telling Mrs. Feller why Senator Vandenberg’s foreign policy was too much like Truman’s for him to have been the candidate. Something like that.”

  Everyone’s eyes turned to Peter.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll call you.” It was a suave recovery, Anne thought, until she and Jack got ten feet on their way and heard Peter calling out, with a politician’s terrible heartiness: “Riley!”

  They turned around.

  “You’re fighting two lost causes!”

  TWO

  June 25

  ANNE SQUEEZED THE ATOMIZER ON THE BOTTLE OF SCHIAPARELLI her brother had given her last Christmas. She never touched it without thinking of the Japanese being blown to smithereens by the Bomb, and that this particular fragrance would make better sense on a girl in a Norell jacket brushing past Walter Winchell at the Stork Club than on one getting dressed for a day at Abner’s Bookshop and an evening with no plans at all. Still, she thought, this was what she’d chosen for “the time being,” a good name for her unpalpable present, as well as the working title of the novel she was trying to write (her work-in-stasis, she liked to say when people asked about it).

  As she combed her hair, the curtains blew gently into the room, revealing maple trees against a sunny sky. In New York this late in June it would be sweltering, and she would be sharing a room beside the El with two other girls. Here in Mrs. Wagner’s little two-story block of apartments, curiously zoned into the green, prosperous world of Oliver Street, all she had to share was a bathroom, with Frank Sherwood, who was neat as a cat and too meek to complain about her hair
pins and lipstick stains, which she could never quite keep off the sink and hand towels. He never made a sound, didn’t even play the radio, whereas she was sure he could hear hers, right now, through the wall behind the mirror.

  “I feel very pleased to know that Tom Dewey has again been selected to run for President,” former mayor Ellis was saying over WOAP. “There is no question that our next President will be a Republican and that our own Tom will be that chief executive.” Some enterprising reporter had been out this morning with a tape recorder, getting reactions to the nomination, which were uniformly well-wishing, midwestern proud, even from the head of the Shiawassee County Democratic Party. The only hint of sourness came from a “man on the street” who requested that he not be identified: “I see no reason why he shouldn’t be as good as the other candidates. I also see no reason why he shouldn’t be better.” Anne wondered if this might be old Mr. Sinclair. It sounded like him, and he was surely the early-to-rise type.

  She looked out her window, west across Adams and down toward Pine. There was no sign of commotion near Annie Dewey’s house. The out-of-town reporters must already have packed up. Straining for a better look, she noticed the Fellers’ place, diagonally opposite the candidate’s mother, and she decided to take Carol up on her invitation to drop in for coffee some morning soon. Mr. Abner wouldn’t mind if she opened up a little late.

  It was a big white clapboard with a gay red-shingled roof hanging over dormers and bay windows and a wraparound porch. The front door, bordered by two white columns, faced neither Oliver nor Pine but stood at a forty-five-degree angle to each, fronting onto the corner itself. When Anne appeared, at the kitchen door around the side, Carol seemed no more surprised than if her husband had entered the room still tying his tie. She just said hello and set a cup of coffee on the table. She went to turn down the radio, but the end of an item on WOAP’s “Civic Calendar” caught her ear. “The Owosso Armory will be open from seven to eleven o’clock tonight and from eight to five tomorrow. All applicants must be enlisted and qualified by midnight Saturday …”

  “Applicants for what?” asked Anne.

  “The National Guard. They’ve put a ceiling on Michigan enlistments, and tomorrow is the last day. Mr. Truman is going to sign the draft bill, and if my son Jim were here instead of camping with his Dartmouth buddies somewhere on the upper peninsula, he might have a chance to get into Company I. I’m afraid he’s going to arrive home a month from now, dirty and happy as can be, only to find orders taking him to boot camp and Berlin.”

  Anne noticed that throughout this explanation the corners of Carol’s mouth never dropped; she might have been making a humorous complaint against the high cost of living—or HCL, as the newspapers had taken to calling it, as if it were rising too fast for anyone to take the time to say all five syllables.

  “No need to rush things with Jim,” said Harold Feller. Late for the office, he had just hurried downstairs. “Hello, Anne.” He refused an offer of toast from his wife. “I was too young for the First War but had a couple of friends who weren’t. And they got over to the Argonne with Company M. This was just about the smallest city in the country ever to get a Guard unit, and twenty years after we did, we lost more boys than any city its size in the whole United States. That’s a fact. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask Horace Sinclair.”

  Mrs. Feller laughed.

  “If there’s another war,” Harold continued, “they’ll get Jim one way or the other. There’s no need to bring him home by bush telegraph. And no need to be so worried, either.” He kissed his wife, and Anne, who was still reminding herself that, against all appearances, this town of sixteen thousand was technically a city, lost any feeling of distaste for what had looked like Carol Feller’s unmaternal calm. She guessed that the woman’s husband of twenty-five years knew when she was worried and when she wasn’t.

  “Where’s Margaret?” Harold Feller asked his wife.

  “Gone off in the Chevy. Ages ago.”

  He put on his jacket and smiled at Anne. “Any message for Peter?”

  “Do get lost, sweetheart,” said Carol, snatching her husband’s coffee cup and giving him a little shove toward the door. “You’re embarrassing Anne.” She handed him the Detroit paper and he was on his way.

  “Was there any message?” asked Carol, who now sat down and gave her guest her full attention.

  “No,” said Anne.

  “Needless to say, we talked all about the two of you before falling asleep last night. Is there anything you want to know about him?”

  “Harold?”

  “No. Peter, of course.”

  Anne, who could hardly pretend she’d come here for anything else, warmed to the subject. “Well,” she said, “is there a girlfriend?”

  “Lots of them,” said Carol.

  “Oh.”

  “But no one special. I’m sure that’s what he’s looking for, and why he’s looking at you.”

  “Does he need a wife? To run for the legislature?”

  “No,” said Carol, after a moment’s pause to think. “Running for Congress requires a wife, I should imagine. The state senate probably lets you get away with being a bachelor.”

  “I have to say,” Anne ventured, “from the way he acted last night, you could never tell he was looking for someone special.”

  “A little fast with his hands?” asked Carol, who had seen more than enough to require an answer, and pressed forward to a topic on which she could use some information. “How was Mr. Riley on your ride home?”

  “A perfect gentleman.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “No, not really,” said Anne, laughing, and lying.

  “I think he’s luscious,” said Carol Feller. “In a rough sort of way.”

  “He’s taking me to the movies Sunday night.”

  “What’s the picture?”

  “The Bishop’s Wife,” Anne answered, and the two women groaned.

  “He’s afraid to ask you to something steamy at the Corunna drive-in. In fact, I think he and Peter have both decided to play against type.”

  “But I don’t have a type,” Anne protested.

  “Oh, Anne, they’re just men. You can’t expect them to be subtle enough to entertain that possibility. But good for Jack Riley, even if he’s seeing you as Loretta Young.” She made a face. “Let’s give Peter an inning, too. I’m having a dinner party a week from tonight, and I’ll put him across from you.”

  “HEY, MISS MACMURRAY! COME ON OVER AND HAVE YOUR picture taken!”

  Anne looked down at her thin little Gruen wristwatch. It was already 9:20, and if she was any later, even Leo Abner would likely lose his temper. But how could she disappoint fresh-faced Billy Grimes, who’d spotted her from his new place of business, the sidewalk in front of the post office, a half block down Exchange Street? She hurried across Washington, noticing that Carol’s daughter was with him, helping to take customers’ money before positioning them against the giant cutout of Dewey.

  If Margaret had curls, instead of a ponytail, she would be tossing them, Anne thought: this girl was in a pet, eager to be anywhere but here and doing this. “Hello, Miss Macmurray,” she managed to say, as Billy held on to a little boy whose mother was wetting down his cowlick. She was such a pretty girl, with all that strawberry blond hair; why try to hide the freckles under makeup that would start flaking by noon? “He wants me to be here all morning,” said Margaret. “I wish I had a job of my own to go to, like you do.”

  “I wish I didn’t have one,” said Anne.

  “Would you just write your book instead?”

  In Owosso, it wasn’t simply a case of word getting around. Anne sometimes thought the trees were hung with invisible wire that carried the residents’ whispers and thoughts, maybe even their dreams, from one head to another.

  “That’s what I tell myself.”

  “Where do you find the time?”

  “In the evenings. Sometimes at the library. Tonight, I’m sur
e, since I’ve got no other plans.”

  “Come on, Margaret,” Billy pleaded. “Just one?” He wanted her to stand next to a farmer who was in town to pick up a package at the post office and ready to splurge a dollar. Like most of Billy’s customers, the man seemed more intrigued with the new camera than with the second-time candidate, and here into the bargain was a chance to put his arm around a pretty girl’s waist. Margaret, remembering her manners, obliged. She made a thin smile and suppressed a glare at Billy long enough for him to snap the shutter. Then she stormed off to her father’s Chevrolet, waving good-bye to Anne and leaving Billy to collect the perplexed farmer’s money.

  “She’s always doing things like that,” sighed Billy. “She’s not happy unless she gets herself crazy once a week.”

  “Give me an example. A quick one.”

  “Oh, like a few summers ago, when she went in with those girls who helped some Jerry prisoners escape. I’m not fooling,” he said, noting Anne’s look of disbelief. “We had a POW camp outside of town, and some of the German guys were put to work at the canning factory. A few girls on the line got stuck on them and hid them in a basement. Margaret was only thirteen, and had more brains than these girls put together, but when one of them spilled the story to her on line at Kroger’s, Margaret put twenty dollars’ worth of groceries on Mr. Feller’s tab—food, for some German soldiers she never even got to meet! She just gave the six bags to the girl who was hiding them.”

  “What happened to the soldiers?”

  “They lived like kings in that basement for a couple of days before they got caught and taken back to the camp. The girls from Roach’s got some kind of probation.”

  “How about Margaret?”

  “She didn’t even get hollered at. She’s Daddy’s little girl, you know. Mr. Feller’d let her get away with anything.”

  So Daddy’s little girl had been looking for a grand passion since she was thirteen years old. Tim Herrick’s feathery yellow hair, Anne now guessed, belonged in part to those German boys Margaret had never gotten to see.