Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  Feller, who didn’t find the gun gesture that funny, said, “I guess this means you’ll be gone for the rest of the day?” The grandfather clock hadn’t even chimed three-thirty, but Harold didn’t feel he could give more than a sarcastic hint. There was no denying that Peter brought in the business.

  “I thought I might head down to the river as soon as I set Mr. Dent straight. If that’s okay with you, of course. I’d like to do an hour’s rowing before setting out for Detroit.”

  He couldn’t just use a canoe, like everyone else who went on the Shiawassee. He had to sit in that little silver scull that looked like a sports car. Feller watched him wave good-bye and start up his brand-new ’49 Ford, which already wore a Peter Cox bumper sticker. Pretty flashy, that’s for sure: the old bathtubs were slimming down into darts. This model had been unveiled only two weeks ago, and most people who wanted one were on a long waiting list. But not our future state senator. Did he know how that looked? Feller wondered.

  Once he pulled out, Peter allowed himself to look across Washington Street and into the bookstore, but there was no sign of Anne, who had probably gone back to her fugging Norman Mailer. He had to drive all of two blocks to reach Vincent Dent’s office on Ball Street, where he found the owner thrashing about in adding-machine tape and eraser shavings.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you.” Dent stood up to get the beer he’d promised, and attempted some small talk with this brainy, rich lawyer fifteen years younger than himself. “So what do you make of this Earl Warren?” he asked, uncapping the bottle of Old Frankenmuth Lager.

  “A solid, predictable fellow,” said Peter, with the authority of Walter Lippmann. “Not a man to shake things up.”

  “Will he bring votes to the ticket?”

  “Probably some from California. Not that they’ll be needed.”

  Dent nodded, but even a feeling that he was getting the straight skinny couldn’t deflect his nervousness about the papers on the table. “Are you sure, Mr. Cox, that this one doesn’t have to be in by the thirtieth?” He picked up a pale pink form. “It says on page three …”

  “Don’t worry about page three,” said Peter, without looking at page three.

  “I’m trying to save as much as possible,” said Dent, apologetically, as if his anxiety were a shameful thing compared to Peter’s expertise. “We’ve got my mother living with us now. She’s getting on, and—”

  “Ah, mothers,” said Peter, cocking his head with a sentimental smile. His own mother was in Palm Springs at the moment, probably finishing off the day’s first game of bridge. Thank goodness the Cox money flowed in a different direction: Lucy Cox couldn’t wait to see her only boy get what he had coming as soon as he could. Back in Grosse Pointe she and his father had long ago moved into respectful silence and respective rooms, and last year she had persuaded the old man—scared him was more like it—into giving Peter sixty thousand dollars now, instead of making him wait for the will. When Peter had displayed a decent hesitation at the news, and suggested he would be perfectly happy to wait until she and Father were dead, she’d assured him, in her smokiest voice: “We died years ago, angel.” His mother, who had grown up no farther south than Indianapolis, experienced more pleasure from her studied, Tallulah-like pronouncements than any anguish she suffered over the civilized collapse of her marriage; Peter could only play along. “But won’t all that money ruin my character, Mother?” “See that it does. I can’t stand character. Your father had so much of it.”

  “Let’s look at this other one,” said Peter, picking up a yellow form and, Vincent Dent hoped, warming to the task at hand. But as soon as Peter actually looked at it, they were interrupted by a knock on the window. It was Al Jackson.

  “Saw you from the street, Mr. Cox. Sorry, Vince, hope you don’t mind my barging in.” He lifted the department of finance paper out of Peter’s hand and replaced it with one of his own nine-page documents. “Yours to keep. The Argus has already set it in type. Everyone else’ll be seeing it tomorrow.”

  “Can I get you a beer, Al?”

  “Nope, nope, thanks, Vince, no time for that. Now, Mr. Cox, as soon as you finish reading that, you’ll see why I’m going to be needing you.”

  Peter got through less than a paragraph before the grin on his face, watched with curiosity by Vincent Dent, stretched four inches wide. He tapped the table in delight. “Yes, you will, Mr. Jackson! Yes, you will!”

  HE OUGHT TO BE OWOSSO’S FAVORITE SON, THOUGHT ANNE, looking up at Lady With a Parasol, the Renoir-esque painting that Frederick Frieseke, Owosso High class of 1893, had donated to the town library long after going to make his life in Paris. He’d been dead for nine years now, and gone for nearly fifty, and the few people who remembered him would tell you his crowning glory was a mural he did for the Wanamaker Building in New York City.

  Anne studied the painting instead of the three new sentences of The Time Being she had managed to write in two hours here on a Friday night and tried to remind herself why she had come to a place like this, exactly the sort of town artists fled from. Hadn’t Frieseke only managed to breathe a smidgen of false new life into an old cliché? Success excepted him from the thousands of painters sitting on the sidewalks of Montmartre and adding one more ill-proportioned Sacré-Coeur to all the ones already in existence. It was, what, 4 A.M., in Paris now, and she’d bet a couple of them were still going at it by citronella candlelight. Wouldn’t she be the same if she’d gone to New York to “write”? Weren’t the great stories right around her, in the dull American center, parochial lumps of coal waiting to be squeezed into artistic diamonds? HONESTY. STRENGTH. Didn’t it take more of both to be here?

  And yet, how many carats had she pressed today? Those three sentences. The real strength she needed was the kind to keep her eyes open, and the only honesty she’d practiced was in coming here at all: at six o’clock, while closing up for Mr. Abner, she’d remembered telling Margaret Feller how, yes, she would no doubt be working on her book tonight.

  As it happened, Margaret was only fifteen feet away, browsing the fiction shelves; dateless, it seemed. Anne supposed Billy was going up and down Oliver Street hawking ice cream and souvenir programs to people sitting home and listening to the fight on the radio.

  She waved to the girl, and Margaret strode right over. Obviously, she’d been wanting to, but regarded Anne as too much of a grown-up, or too serious an artist, to be disturbed.

  “Hello, Miss Macmurray. Is that your novel?

  “Please call me Anne. Yes, Margaret, that’s it.”

  “How is it coming?”

  “Well, I’m struggling with point of view in this scene.” She couldn’t bear listening to herself. All she was struggling with was an attempt to look at the mostly blank page with a tenth the interest Margaret now displayed toward it. HONESTY: she wasn’t the least bit honest. This girl was the honest one—you could tell—her sails looking for every bit of breeze, so eager for the horizon she didn’t care about falling over the edge.

  “Margaret, I’m lying. I’ve been sitting here bored for over an hour. I’d rather open any book in this library than look at this one, which isn’t even a book yet and probably never will be. I can’t wait to get out of here. Would you like to have a cup of coffee at that little place on Exchange Street?”

  “The Great Lakes? I’d love that! Let me check these out, and I’ll meet you outside.”

  They walked east on Main, away from the site beside the library where a new funeral home would soon be built.

  “I suppose everybody’s occupied with the fight tonight?” asked Anne.

  “Yes,” said Margaret, who then thought for a moment. “Well, no, not everybody.”

  Anne guessed she meant the Herrick boy, but decided against drawing her out. If this forthright girl didn’t say more, it meant she didn’t want to. At least not right now. So they walked across the Main Street bridge, and Anne confined the conversation to the weather and the latest rumor, that a film crew from the March of
Time would soon be coming through town. Beneath the bridge the Shiawassee dipped and bubbled. On their right stood the modest Dewey birthplace, and a few hundred yards left, the tiny castle James Oliver Curwood had built as a writing studio. He had willed it to the town, but the town never seemed to know what to do with it. Lately it had been empty altogether, a fieldstone ghost with three pointed turrets, an oddly continental legacy from someone who had called plain, midwestern Owosso “the nicest place in the world.”

  A headlight caught the little gold letters on the honor roll outside City Hall. The names of the Owosso war dead, including Pfc. Arnold Herrick’s, glinted for a moment like stars. As Margaret and Anne turned north on Water Street, the clock showed it was coming up to nine.

  “I hope the Great Lakes will still be open.”

  “It will be,” said Margaret. “They’ll want to get some business from the boys signing up for the Guard.” She pointed to two lanky young men who had come out of the Armory exchanging goofy mock salutes with each other.

  “Your mother told me this morning that she wished your brother were here to sign up. Otherwise the draft—”

  “That’s Mother all right,” said Margaret. “They don’t come any more sensible. Everything can be managed. I mean, the National Guard. It’s like buying a war on the layaway plan.” Anne laughed; she supposed she knew what the girl meant. Better a sudden invasion, with flood and fire, better the chance to be instantly resplendent, than to serve with those who stand and wait one weekend a month.

  “I’m sure your mother … What’s that?” asked Anne, drawing Margaret’s attention to a big oaktag sign on which a tornado’s funnel had been drawn. Beneath the whirling black lines lay the numbers 11 11 11 11 11. “Do you think it’s something out of Revelation?” Anne recognized the balding young man who stood on the Armory steps holding the sign. He was the minister from the Wesleyan Methodist church on Pine Street. Did Methodists go in for that sort of slam-bang Armageddon?

  “It’s the tornado story,” said Margaret. “You’ve been here a year and never heard it? A big cyclone came through town on the eleventh of November 1911 at eleven minutes past 11 P.M.”

  “Like the Armistice?”

  “Except for more elevens. Nineteen eleven instead of eighteen, and 11:11 P.M., I swear. After the First War, people decided it had been a sort of prophecy. My father was ten years old when it hit. He was lying in bed in my grandparents’ house on Hickory Street. He remembers the window shade being sucked through the window, torn right off its runners, even though the window was only open six inches. It’s a miracle their roof didn’t come off. People were killed, and buildings blew away all over town. Two churches lost their steeples.”

  So it was a prophecy that had already been fulfilled. A sign that the Guard unit the town had been so proud of would perish in the Argonne—what Margaret’s father had talked about this morning. This young reverend protesting enlistments was reminding people.

  “He’s brave,” said Anne.

  Margaret, her instincts activated by the word, looked closely at the shy figure on the steps and seemed to consider him in a new light.

  “Really,” said Anne, “think of it. That can’t be an easy opinion to hold.” This reverend was a story, not to mention the tornado itself—every word of it apparently true. There was no need to go to Paris, or even New York. She almost wanted to give Margaret a rain check and go back to the library to work.

  They crossed Water Street where it met Exchange. The two new recruits, just ahead of them, were going through the Great Lakes’ door. But the moment Margaret and Anne reached the sidewalk, Margaret stopped to look over her shoulder, as if something had told her to. She stared up at the high school, which stood next door to the Armory and used the building for dances and basketball.

  Anne turned with her and saw the lit window. Two figures in it had arrested Margaret: Frank Sherwood’s intense, bespectacled face was watching someone peer through a telescope.

  Tim Herrick was scanning the planets. And Margaret Feller had just seen the sun, moon and stars. Anne looked from Margaret to the window and back, and wanted to tell the girl, as if Margaret really were looking at the sun, not to look too directly. But Margaret’s face shone with what she saw.

  To be that young and to love this hard—

  “Oh, Anne, hide!”

  Tim Herrick had looked up.

  FIVE HUNDRED MILES TO THE EAST, AT YANKEE STADIUM, JERSEY Joe Walcott had been knocked out by Joe Louis in the eleventh round. Jack Riley, who at the last minute this afternoon had put some money on the victor, turned on his windshield wipers and continued driving east on Oliver. Passing Anne Macmurray’s window, he was depressingly aware of the smell of alcohol—not just the beer on his breath, but the traces of a Sea Breeze left on his neck by a Louis-loving blonde at the Red Fox Tavern twelve miles north of town, where he had ended up going to listen to the fight after his father decided he was too nauseated and cranky to stay up for it. The beer and potato chips Jack had brought back from Flint lay unopened on the kitchen counter. The blonde had been ready, willing and able, but the idea of twice in a single day with two different girls, not that Louise was a girl, seemed scummy, so he’d directed her attention back to Kenny Anderson’s orchestra and let her down gently. It was midnight now; Anne Macmurray remained the only thing on his mind, and as the Comstock Apartments receded in his rearview mirror, he wondered if he’d stop smelling of booze by the time he showed up at her doorstep on Sunday night.

  Driving northwest, almost straight on toward Jack Riley, though twenty miles away, Peter Cox took his ’49 Ford up to 75 and moved his head backward, like a test pilot settling into some satisfying g-stress. Its pleasure was denied him, however, when his silver scull’s silver paddle, which he’d forgotten to take out of the back of the car, caught him on the right ear and plunged him back into his bad mood.

  Nota bene, as that guy in the English department at Yale used to say: don’t let yourself become a lawyer. A lifer at it, that is. He had never spent a more boring evening. He’d been surrounded by lawyers in Detroit, all of them squinting and complaining about the picture quality of the television. Which was, admittedly, lousy; but nobody seemed willing to admit the thrill of being able to watch Louis knock Walcott on his behind five hundred miles away. They could only grouse and grumble as if they were actually there in the Bronx, stuck in the cheap seats. Even five years of closing mortgages and incorporating the Vincent Dents of Owosso would kill him. He had to make every play this year. It was now or never—the same for Miss Anne Macmurray. If there were no encouragement by next week, she could forget him. He took the Ford to 80 and wondered if Harold Feller had passed out his leaflets.

  Approaching town, he turned on WOAP, which through the static of distance and rain was giving the news. The Republicans were “packing up from Philadelphia, while meanwhile, here in Owosso, Mr. Al Jackson of Jackson Camera and Electronics has assumed the chairmanship of Citizens for the Future, a committee of businessmen who will be urging the city to adopt a radical development scheme in anticipation of the presidency of favorite son Thomas E. Dewey …” Peter raised the volume.

  “Mr. Jackson and his associates will be publishing their proposal in tomorrow’s Argus. It calls for …” Margaret Feller, lying on her bed but still fully dressed, turned the dial in search of music, but WGN was just talking and WWJ had already left the air. She shut off the radio and heard voices downstairs. Her parents had come home from the country club, which put an end to all the evening’s possibilities but one, the chance to do what she had already done twice this week: wait until they’d gone to bed and then sneak out of the house and down to Park Street to hide behind the hedges and look at Tim Herrick’s window. No; she wouldn’t. It was too terrible either way. If the light was on, she could barely keep from crying out to him, and if it was off she would agonize over his not being there, or agonize that he was there, asleep, and breathing softly in the dark without her. Three nights ago had been the
worst: the light had been on, but then he had risen, out of nowhere, naked, a god behind the curtain that shimmered like a cirrus cloud. With a movement of his arm, he’d hit the switch and the room had gone dark. But it wasn’t the room light he extinguished; it was her. She’d been left to walk home in darkness and torment.

  Tonight she had been on the verge of telling Anne Macmurray about him, but had instead told the ridiculous lie that when the two of them looked up at the high school, she had been worried Billy might be inside the classroom along with Tim and Mr. Sherwood, and that he would find out she’d really been free this evening, after she’d told him something else. What an embarrassment. But was it possible Anne hadn’t even noticed? After all, she had been awfully eager to pump her about Peter Cox, that stuck-up new lawyer working for her father. Not that there was much to tell, since Margaret had met him only twice. No, he wasn’t exactly stuck-up; he was, what was that word she’d underlined in a book the other day? She couldn’t think of it, but she knew it fit him perfectly. Insufferable: that was it.

  She’d had so little to tell Anne about Peter that she was afraid this older woman would lose interest in her, regret asking her to come to the Great Lakes. But then the minister with his tornado sign came in, to smile and joke with the waitress as he had his coffee and pie and hunted for something on the jukebox. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could change gears so quickly, go from World War III to Doris Day like that. She’d gone up and introduced herself and said she thought what he’d been doing tonight was interesting, and she’d told him the story of her father and the window shade.

  Remembering that now filled her with tenderness for her dad. There was even a little left over for her mother. Thank goodness they were home, throwing ice into their glasses for a nightcap; now she couldn’t walk out the door and down to Park Street. Unless the Great Lakes’ coffee kept her awake past the point they came upstairs and turned in.