Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  Before the evening’s host could reply, the dining room felt its first breeze, the arrival of the missing guest, with a great big smile on his face. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Feller, don’t get up.” Peter came around to Carol with a bouquet of flowers that he permitted her to sniff, once, before he went off to find and fill a vase in what seemed a single motion. He was Dudley, all right, thought Anne. Everyone watched, without a word, while he set the flowers down on the sideboard as if performing a magic trick. Carol remained seated, just as he’d instructed her, allowing him to circle the table and offer his hand to everyone she now introduced or reacquainted him with. When he reached Anne, and noticed her scolding expression, more sincere than flirtatious, he took her fingers and brought them to his lips in an exaggerated gesture of contrition. As her hand rose toward his tanned face, she thought: He hasn’t been with Mr. Dent at all. She would bet he’d been out on the Shiawassee in that little chromium sport canoe. Unexpectedly, she flinched at his kiss. “That tickled,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Oh, my goodness, are you growing a mustache?” Her own lips curled in distaste.

  Sudden great interest all around, a positive clattering of cutlery, as Carol Feller’s guests strained to see for themselves.

  “Just a small one, temporary, until Inauguration Day. A pledge taken Tuesday night by every member of the Owosso-Corunna Dewey for President Club. It’ll make a great group photo a few weeks from now, don’t you think?”

  Horace Sinclair snorted, but Peter went brightly on. “I’ll bet we get Harold to raise one, too, and Harris Terry down at the office. What about you, Dr. Coates?”

  “Not a chance,” interrupted Carol. “Especially not for Harold. My father had a great big mustache, practically a walrus. You always felt he was wearing a scarf when he kissed you good night. Don’t you remember, Dick?”

  “No. He never kissed me good night,” said Dr. Coates. “I do remember the back of his right hand.”

  “Don’t listen to Dick,” said his sister. “He was the baby of the family and pampered beyond anything recommended in Dr. Spock.”

  “Mustaches don’t seem terribly modern,” offered Sally.

  “Good,” said her husband. “We could use some old-fashioned sense. In fact, I thought Dewey should have called for an Old Deal the other night.”

  Harold Feller, ever temperate, asked Dr. Coates if, at least so far, he could really find anything to complain about in Harry Truman’s response to what had happened in Berlin.

  “Hell, yes. He’s started something he can’t keep up. He’ll soon find out he’d have been better off putting that six billion dollars of foreign aid into some more airplanes. And don’t get me started about the money in this housing bill.”

  “It’s almost too awful to think about,” said Carol, without saying whether she meant Berlin or the idea of Dr. Coates’s getting started on slum clearance and homes for veterans. “Did you know,” she asked Horace Sinclair, “that Harold and I were in Paris in August of ’39? It was supposed to be a second honeymoon; we put the children with their Grandma Coates. Once in France we spent the whole two weeks wondering if there was going to be an invasion.”

  Harold Feller looked at his wife, figuring she again had Jim’s draft status on her mind. He changed the subject with his natural tact. “Speaking of housing,” he said, “I see in the Argus that the city’s finally figured out what to do with the castle.” James Oliver Curwood’s folly had been leased to the board of education as a place for after-school classes in art and literature. “A good idea, no? The building’s been in terrible shape, and the board promises to fix it up once they’ve moved in. Even Mrs. Curwood out in California is pleased with the deal.”

  Eyes went toward Horace Sinclair, who was considered entitled to the final say on any matter connected to Owosso’s former times.

  “That sounds fine to me. But don’t you suppose Mr. Al Jackson will want to chop the whole thing down? Put a plaster-of-Paris White House in its place?”

  “Oh,” said Carol Feller, “I’m sure Mrs. Curwood would never permit that.”

  Horace, at this second mention of her name, decided he was lucky the widow Curwood had long since moved away. Otherwise they might try to fix him up with her. He knew for a fact that these women had even thought of him as a mate for Annie Dewey, living alone across the street, except for her handyman, Mr. Valentine, these last twenty years. Not that she wasn’t a fine woman. Quite undistracted by her son’s fame. He’d known her all his life, even when she was Annie Thomas; and more to the point, she knew who she was, more a Thomas than a Dewey, from a time in this town when the first name meant more than the second.

  Realizing he was lost in thought, and afraid of looking forgetful, he rushed back to the conversational track: “Miss Macmurray, what do you think of all this?”

  Knowing Carol wouldn’t want the old man excited by controversy, Anne replied, “I’m afraid I’ve been busy wondering whether Peter wants his supporters to adopt any of his attributes, like Governor Dewey’s mustache.”

  “Which ones?” asked Peter. “The wonderful smile? The broad shoulders?”

  Laughter from nearly everyone, though Sally Coates, who was seeing Peter in action for the first time, merely let her mouth hang open in a pretty little o.

  “Maybe this,” said Anne, touching the dimple in Peter’s chin. No, she hadn’t been able to throw him off stride; she had only earned her dessert, by playing her part, the ingenue.

  “When do you start your campaign, Mr. Cox?” asked Dr. Coates.

  “In earnest? After Labor Day. As I explained to Harold, last week was the right time to trade on a little of the convention excitement. But between now and September I’ll lie low and—as I haven’t yet explained to Harold—take a little time away from the office. Just a couple of weeks,” he added, “so I can go up to Mackinac and use the house my parents have there. You ought to come up for a while yourself,” he said to Anne.

  He’d thrown her off stride, and she was furious. Should she say yes? If she did, would she be calling his bluff, or just calling her own, trumping the part of her that tried to pretend he was unattractive?

  “I’ve been there,” she settled for saying. “It was my introduction to Michigan, years ago.” She would wait for him to follow through, but he didn’t get the chance. Horace Sinclair, a little worked up after all, leaned across the table and addressed Peter with some insistence: “You ought to be staying around here. When the city council has to deal with Mr. Jackson’s ‘plan,’ you should make yourself a voice of good sense.”

  “Oh, I won’t be gone long, Colonel.” Like the good politician he intended to become, Peter managed to make noncommitment seem like assent.

  “Good, because I have a little plan of my own,” said Horace, leaning into the table. “I think I can thwart him.”

  But he was himself thwarted by the arrival of Margaret Feller and Billy Grimes, who had driven her parents’ car halfway to Flint for frozen custard.

  “I may send you back there for a couple of gallons on Sunday,” said Carol. “Unless you’re willing to work the churn for Fourth of July.” Margaret groaned at this tradition her mother insisted on keeping; to Margaret’s mind it was like picking one day of the year to give up the vacuum for a feather duster.

  “Come give your uncle a kiss,” said Dr. Coates. Margaret reluctantly obliged. “There we go. I guess any man with a daughter named Margaret can’t be all bad.”

  “At least this one doesn’t sing,” added Harold Feller.

  “Honest to God,” said Dr. Coates, displeased with himself for having let up on Truman for ten seconds, “did you hear that at a couple of stops on that cross-country train trip—which we all paid for, by the way—he actually came out on the platform in his bathrobe? Dragged the poor girl and her mother out there with him.”

  Margaret made her way around the table to greet the rest of her parents’ guests. Billy was about to follow, when he noticed Mr. Sinclair, who hadn’t been around to pay
him the other day.

  “Grimes,” said Horace, nodding.

  Too worn out with frustration over Margaret and his own finances to practice Dale Carnegie on the old coot, Billy settled for saying, “Long time no see.”

  “Can I talk to you?” Margaret whispered to Anne.

  “How about a few minutes from now? Just before your mother brings out coffee?”

  “I’ll be out on the back porch. Signal me? Please?”

  Anne finished her second helping while Peter, whether for his own good or the general one she couldn’t tell, turned the conversation from politics to the Detroit Tigers, a subject that, surprisingly enough, brought Sally Coates to life.

  “May I help clear?” Anne asked Carol. She followed her into the kitchen, spotting Margaret through the screen door and raising the eyebrows she had plucked this morning. She set down a small stack of plates. “Carol, where can I find the bathroom?”

  “Upstairs and to the left.”

  Upstairs and to the right lay Margaret’s room, into which Carol’s daughter, following behind, nudged Anne. She closed the door. Anne laughed at the girlish conspiracy and the realization that this seventeen-year-old’s room was twice the size of what she herself rented from Mrs. Wagner.

  Margaret was concentrating too hard to smile. “How can I get rid of Billy?” she asked.

  “Forever?”

  “Just for tonight. Before eleven o’clock.”

  It was 8:45.

  “I’m supposed to see Tim Herrick,” confessed Margaret, fiddling with the shirttail tied over her bare midriff.

  “It’s called late-dating, Margaret, and it isn’t a crime. Just tell Billy you’re sick. But what about your mother and father? How do you get out of the house?”

  “Oh, that’s no problem. I just sneak out. I’ve done it lots of times.”

  What did this girl really want from her? Surely not advice.

  As soon as Margaret’s eyes met hers again, Anne knew. Her role was to provide the thrilling opportunity for Margaret at last to say the boy’s name in that kind of confidential whisper louder than the loudest radio or newsreel or television transmission.

  “I don’t want to hurt him. Billy, I mean. He and Tim are best friends, you know.”

  Somehow that didn’t seem likely. From Anne’s sightings of Tim Herrick, with those cloudy blue eyes and that yellow hair like a prairie fire, he didn’t seem the kind of boy who would have a best friend, let alone a harmless little go-getter like Billy Grimes. He seemed more the kind to make somebody desperate—a mother, or a girl like Margaret, or poor Frank Sherwood, probably sitting alone in his room tonight, waiting for the next time the boy would look into that telescope and be blindfolded by the universe, giving Frank the chance to gaze at the back of his head.

  “I’m sure you won’t hurt Billy. But tell me, Margaret, how did this date get arranged?”

  “I ran into Timothy the other night. On the corner by his house.”

  So now it was “Timothy.” What a golden bough of passion this boy had made Oliver Street. “Just like that?” asked Anne.

  “Not exactly. I’d gone out. I was taking a walk. I mean—”

  “It’s all right. I guessed, last Friday night, when you saw him at the high school. But where are you supposed to go with him at eleven o’clock?”

  “For a drive. In his brother’s old car.”

  “All right, just try not to upset your parents.”

  Margaret nodded, as if they would always be the least of her worries. Anne, who could hear someone in the bathroom, said that she herself ought to be getting downstairs.

  “How is Peter?” Margaret asked quickly. Having gotten the older woman’s approving attention, she was a little giddy now, ready to be on the other end of some girl talk.

  “Oh,” said Anne, “he’s very much himself.”

  “His favorite thing.”

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “Not as much as Mr. Riley.”

  “What do you know about Mr. Riley?”

  “Just what I hear from Mother.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you two communicate about some things.”

  “Oh, come on, Anne, aren’t you going to tell me any—”

  Anne was already on her way back to the party, waving to Margaret as she went down the carpeted staircase, preparing to tell Billy that the girl wasn’t feeling well. Should she lay it on thick and say it was the frozen custard that had made her ill?

  There wasn’t much of a party to return to. Carol was setting down cups and saucers, but Sally Coates had begun washing up in the kitchen, an excuse, it seemed, to put on the radio and listen to the Tigers game. Harold Feller and his brother-in-law had lit their pipes in the living room, and out on the porch Horace Sinclair was reaching into his pocket, better late than never, for some change with which to pay Billy—who took it and ran off down the Fellers’ driveway.

  “Where is he going?” Anne asked Peter.

  “To drive my car back to my place. That way I get to walk around with you when we get out of here. Do you think Margaret will mind that he’s gone?”

  Anne went back to the table.

  “I should have made this evening into one of those ‘buffets,’ ” said Carol, who gave up on reassembling everybody for coffee.

  MRS. WAGNER WAS ASLEEP. THE LENS OF FRANK SHERWOOD’S telescope was capped, its black tube under the oilcloth. There wasn’t a light on in the Comstock Apartments, but the oak trees’ leaves had at last begun to move with a breeze.

  “What did you think of the doctor?” Peter asked Anne, as they stood on the steps.

  “He sounds like somebody who was hit too much as a child. But he’s a true believer, at least where your side’s concerned.”

  “I couldn’t stand him,” said Peter. “Cute wife, though.”

  “Poor Carol. It was like giving a party on an assembly line.”

  “Well, that’s the future. Everything’s going to speed up.” His last words were drowned out by the noise of his new ’49 Ford, which Billy Grimes was taking on a fifth run down Oliver Street, the sound of George Winslow’s orchestra, on WGN, coming out its window.

  “What do you mean, ‘your side’?” Peter asked all of a sudden. “You said ‘your side’ about the election. Isn’t it yours, too?”

  “I’m keeping an open mind.”

  “Oh, God, he’s gotten to you, hasn’t he? Riley. That must be why the dinner looked like an ‘assembly line’ to you.”

  “All right, Peter. It looked like the floor of the stock exchange. Do you like that better as an image of bustle?”

  “A lot better. But when you come up to Mackinac, all your images will be peaceful ones. No cars on the whole island. Only wagons.”

  “I remember,” said Anne. “All right. Which weekend?”

  “Which ones do you have free from Riley?”

  “Not the next one.”

  “Okay, two weekends after that.”

  This was more like poker than dating. Did she even want to go? Didn’t she just want to stay here and untie Jack’s tongue? At least toward that end her stratagems were sincere, tactics tried out in straightforward good faith: bringing his dad a book on fishing, and the other afternoon a cake—though the price for baking it in Mrs. Wagner’s kitchen was having to tell her “everything.” Still, all that was better than this neurotic skirmishing. What was it about Peter, anyway? He seemed so eager for opposition that he couldn’t take victory lying down. As soon as he won an exchange, he insisted on a rematch. Why this should be she wasn’t sure, since in other respects he was too much like every older boy she’d known in Darien. They all had more or less the same resumé and future, even if Peter acted oddly delighted about his date with Destiny. The Darien boys treated Destiny more calmly; she was just Success, after all, sort of like the right girl from Rosemary Hall or Miss Porter’s. They’d all wind up with her. Peter wanted to step on the gas toward the rendezvous, but Anne hadn’t come to Owosso to get into
his ’49 Ford. She should get serious about her book, but otherwise it was all right to be here purposefully without purpose, to wait for something unknown, something different, to overtake her—particularly if that turned out to be Jack. From the moment his garage light had come on and she’d seen those license plates on the wooden walls, she’d really felt the difference. In Darien those plates would have been hanging in a self-amused way, pleased with their own jaunty pointlessness. But on the Riley wood they seemed real and proud, without irony, like the height marks parents penciled on a wall, evidence of a family’s simple, solid movements with and against gravity.

  She would change the subject. “What are you going to do when old Mr. Sinclair approaches you for help?”

  “Get out of it. It won’t be hard.”

  “Are you really in favor of this scheme to tear up that whole stretch of the riverbank, right in the middle of the town?”

  “A bunch of backyards. That’s all it amounts to. Face it, Anne, all of those people with the land, just like everybody else in this town, are going to be famous. Not movie-star famous, but attached to one big piece of somebody else’s fame. For the rest of their lives, when they get into a conversation in a club car or a hotel lobby or anyplace out of town and people find out they’re from here, people are going to say, ‘Oh, that’s where President Dewey grew up.’ It’s not earth-shattering, but it is earth-shaking, a small tremor, let’s say. The earth under this town is moving, just a bit, certainly enough to rearrange a riverbank.”

  “You keep saying they. For the rest of their lives.”

  “Well, were not going to be around here for very long.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “You’re not going to be here if you’re with me.” Ignore it. Don’t rise to it. Don’t bluff, don’t bet, don’t fold. And no kiss either. “Promise me one thing, Peter.”