Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  To be falling in love, after a handful of encounters, with a girl who reminded him of Great-Uncle Waldo! Would he want her if there were no resistance? No. Some of that was always required, if only the semi-resistance of that college girl or the English secretaries on Captain Butcher’s staff in Grosvenor Square. Resistance was the grindstone against which he would always sharpen and shine.

  Dear Anne,

  Just arrived here at my mother’s. Enclosed are train and ferry schedules. Whatever you want to do once you’re up here is fine—you can stay at the house or the hotel, where we can get you a room even at the last minute. At the house you’d have one quiet enough to write your book in, and far enough removed from mine that you’ll hardly know I’m here. In fact, your real trouble will be the attentions of female company. My mother’s sister, Ada, an endless talker, will be here too. But don’t make that a reason to stay at the Grand. Make it a reason to stay here, so you’ll have to beg me to come to your rescue.

  Honestly, I’ll behave.

  Has your “open mind” about the election got room in it for three Democratic parties? It looks as if the plantation owners are going to crash into Wallace’s communist friends as they rush through the convention-hall exits.

  I should tell you that I ran into Jackson, our camera-selling Barnum, at the Great Lakes this morning, just before I set out. He wants me to get up on a stump for his proposal, and I said yes. If the town is going to be a museum, it might as well take on a little bit of Coney Island instead of the fudge-colored amber this place is stuck in. (Even so, you’ll love Mackinac, because I’ll be here.)

  You will be worrying, no doubt, about the old colonel. I won’t do anything to send his blood pressure over San Juan Hill. In fact, I’ll take care of him the easy way: I’ll convert him to Jackson’s enterprise.

  I’ll bring the old man around, and I’ll bring you around, too.

  Until the 23rd,

  Peter

  He would bring her around. If anyone were the grindstone, it would be he. And yet, when he brought the envelope to his lips, its flap had nothing to brush against. He had shaved off his Dewey mustache the other morning.

  “IT MAKES SENSE THIS TOWN’S BIGGEST INDUSTRY IS DEATH, doesn’t it?”

  “I know just what you mean,” replied Margaret Feller to Tim Herrick. Actually, she did and she didn’t. On the one hand, there was no denying where they sat on this summer night: a loading dock at the back of the Owosso Casket Company, which had been making coffins on South Elm Street since Lyman Woodard went into business in 1885. His adjoining furniture factory had suffered mightily in the 1911 cyclone, but had sprung back, and along with the casket operation it still kept the Woodards, the wealthiest family in the city, in their compound of mansions on the western stretch of Oliver Street.

  On the other hand, even though Margaret had in the past let the noontime blasts of the Woodard factory whistle camouflage her own ten-second screams of frustration over life in Owosso, she could no longer equate the town with the slow death that comes from being bored. It was only a week ago that Carole Landis had committed suicide in Hollywood—pills—and since that day Margaret had more than once reminded herself, gratefully, that that could so easily have been her. If her first date with Tim hadn’t been the success it had, who knows what might have become of her?

  But it had been heaven, and the twelve days since had passed in a continual dream: the long, long talks, about everything—their parents, Tim’s dead brother, the German soldiers four years ago (imagine telling him that), what the two of them read (he was absolutely right about page 464 of Raintree County)—and the long soulful kisses in Arnie’s Chevrolet or here behind the casket factory or in back of the Indian Trails terminal. She wished he wouldn’t drink so much beer, but he was too much of a gentleman to insist she drink along with him. Half the jerks from school would only be trying to get her drunk.

  As far as she was now concerned, this wooden platform was more glamorous than any black-and-white marble floor in those ancient dance movies her parents had years ago dragged her and Jim to when they couldn’t find a babysitter. And the Woodard smokestacks were as thrilling as any of those cardboard Manhattan skyscrapers. She hadn’t gone so far as telling anyone (certainly not Tim), but she was suddenly, secretly, in love with Owosso, just as she had made peace with her own face, which since Saturday had gone without its morning application of Helena Rubinstein.

  “I mean, it’s just perfect for my mom,” said Tim, after pulling on his beer. “Living in a place that churned out more coffins than any other town in America. Keeping the graveyards well supplied.” He raised a toast to a squadron of delivery trucks parked across the asphalt.

  “I think your mother is deep,” said Margaret. “Even if she is sort of sad. I’m sure she understands life a lot more than my mother does—just playing bridge and going to all those little charity lunches with her hat and gloves on, never having to actually see any of the poor people her friends claim to care about so much. That and matchmaking are nearly all she does.”

  “How’s her Peter Cox project coming?”

  “She claims to be neutral between him and Mr. Riley, but of course she isn’t, because from her way of looking at it, only Peter is ‘appropriate’ for Anne. But Peter is up on Mackinac, so things have slowed down for a while.”

  “How did he get there?” asked Tim, looking at the sky.

  “In his ’49 Ford—a car that nobody else around here has even gotten delivery of. And then the ferry. Did I tell you Anne is going up the weekend after this one?”

  “I want us to make a date,” said Tim, putting down his bottle and looking right at her with his cool and limpid green eyes. “The Dawn Patrol is coming to the airport two weeks from Sunday. Practically every light-plane flier in the state, hundreds of them, will be touching down. They haven’t picked Owosso for this in seven years.”

  “What do they do once they get here?”

  “Finish watching the sun come up, have a huge breakfast, and then take their planes back up for joyrides and sightseeing, even a little racing. They give out a lot of prizes, too. You know, who came the farthest, stuff like that.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” said Margaret, whose head was already swarming with airplanes beautiful as butterflies. If she were still going with Billy, he’d be asking her to the hotrod races that began their season tonight at the Speedway or—God forbid—next month’s cornball county fair.

  “You promise?” asked Tim, putting his hands on her shoulders.

  “Of course,” said Margaret, leaning in for a long, long kiss, during which her mental aircraft looped and dove and swept back up again.

  When it was over and her head came to rest on Tim’s shoulder, he looked up at the smokestacks, all of them idle but one, which emitted a narrow plume of steam as the night shift sent a thinner stream of glue and shavings toward the Shiawassee than the one pumped in each morning. It seemed to Tim that the whole factory was just a small part, the packaging end, of a much bigger one, life’s own, the one producing and growing and curing the corpses themselves, which would be shipped to their final points of delivery, beneath headstones, from Maine to California. Compared to just regular life and death the war itself had been a small thing; that’s what his mother didn’t get. She was like a cop trying to arrest some pathetic bookie without taking any notice of the Mr. Big in charge of the whole operation.

  “Have you ever heard of Cass Hough?” he asked.

  Margaret, nervous for a second that Cass might be a girl, said she hadn’t.

  “He’s an Englishman some people think broke the sound barrier back in ’42, though they can’t prove it. He’s going to be the main guest at this year’s Dawn Patrol.”

  Relieved, Margaret asked, “Is there really a big thunderclap when the sound barrier gets broken?” She knew, of course, that there was, but she wanted him to enchant her with explanations while they looked up at the sky.

  “It’s the place where distance and t
ime slam into each other. There’s got to be some little crevice the plane flies right over, some passageway into another dimension.”

  If Billy were saying all this it would sound like an Action comic, but Tim could tell her he had a map of the place in his pocket and she wouldn’t doubt him. And if he kissed her again, she would break the sound barrier, fly involuntarily over that threshold they were always hinting at in Girls’ Health, the one past which she wouldn’t be able to control herself. If only right now he would say the words, she could die right here, in perfect happiness; they could put her into the simplest pine coffin in the factory. Tim would cry for a time, but recover when he accepted that she’d been killed by an excess of joy.

  “I wish,” she said, “that the whole country, not just the Dawn Patrol, had a queen and a king. I’m so sick of Dewey and Truman. This election is so juvenile, like picking the head of the student council.”

  “Who says any of them really rule?” asked Tim, looking off toward the Elm Street gate. “I mean, what makes anybody the President? Just some ancient agreement nobody ever stops to think about. If somebody snuck into the National Archives in the middle of the night and broke open that case they keep the Constitution in, and then ripped it up, would it really exist anymore? Who says all those printed copies have any force? Who says the world everybody agrees on is the same as the world in your head?”

  He was so beautiful. He was more beautiful than Robert Daniels, that Ohio boy they were looking for, the one who was in the middle of a killing spree and had his picture in the paper. Except that Tim was good. He and she would be king and queen of their own world, without any subjects.

  “Come on,” he said, jumping down from the platform. He extended his arms up to her. “I want to show you a completely different world.”

  The car threaded the trees and moonlight, away from the factory and north toward Oliver Street. On the radio that Arnie had installed himself, years after buying the car, Eddy Arnold sang “Anytime,” but Margaret wished this would be just one time, so perfect, so ultimate, that the Chevrolet would keep driving forever, out of town and through the cornfields and off the edge of the earth.

  Behind them, furiously pumping his legs and breathing hard, taking care to remain invisible to the rearview mirror, someone else was hoping their ride would be quick. Otherwise he would lose them, even though he was sure that tonight they would end up where he’d been expecting them to go each of the four nights he’d been following them. The car was soon out of sight, but he kept huffing and puffing toward the place where, sure enough, he found it parked and empty. He slowed down, exhausted, slumping over the handlebars as he slunk away from Tim and Margaret’s destination, the rooftop of Frank Sherwood, that son-of-a-bitch Mr. Science, that purveyor of different worlds, the mayor of the goddamned planet Jupiter.

  THE CLOCK ON CITY HALL STRUCK MIDNIGHT, AND HORACE Sinclair switched off WGN. Truman had gotten his nomination, but in all the chaos of the convention there was still no telling when he would reach the podium for his acceptance speech. Horace, who now fervently hoped against hope for Truman’s victory, sighed with disgust. He tied the belt of his bathrobe around his ample waistline and rocked a bit—one, two, three—until he had the momentum to rise and head for the kitchen.

  On the counter he set out a can of frozen orange juice to thaw for morning. You couldn’t say he was against every modern convenience. He was even preparing to keep a chart of the daily “pollen count” on the wall calendar from the heating-oil company; a lifelong hay-fever sufferer, he had welcomed the opening of Memorial Hospital’s measuring station this week. On days the stuff was really blowing, like today, he sagged something awful. He was too tired to be up at this hour, and yet he knew, as he wiped his hands on a dish towel, that he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  His spirits, and no doubt his blood pressure, had been up and down for the past two days. The news of Barkley’s selection to run with Truman had given him a boost—“another prosy old man like myself,” he’d told Carol Feller yesterday afternoon, right in front of Annie Dewey’s house—but tonight he’d been brought low by the announcement of General Pershing’s death in Washington. The chill it gave him had nothing to do with age. At eighty-eight, Black Jack had been a good sixteen years older, and when Horace had laid eyes on him fifty years ago near Santiago, it was as boy to man. No, it wasn’t old age or the Spanish War that had come to Horace’s mind. It was the war after that, specifically the Argonne forest and the service there, under Pershing’s command, of Jonathan Adams Darrell’s child, that boy who still didn’t know what a dark star he’d been born under, thanks to what Horace and Wright George and Boyd Fowler had gone and done that summer night in ’97.

  Only he and Wright were left, and after this evening of quiet agitation, when his thoughts moved from the Owosso Casket Company to the riverbank to the luckless Truman, whose imminent defeat was the cause of all his misery, Horace realized that he must not wait any longer to send a letter to New York City. He climbed the stairs to his study and rolled up the desktop.

  Dear Wright,

  Tonight Mr. Kaltenborn was speculating that our two national paragons—I speak, of course, of your governor and His Accidency—will encounter each other face-to-face before the month is out, when both show up to cut the ribbon on your new airport. (Pretty name, Idlewild: too pretty for all the noise and commotion that will bear it.) I suppose your city fathers will have to keep the scissors blunt, lest either one of these two makes a lunge for the other. Of course, young Dewey probably never angers to the point where he’s a danger to himself or anyone else. Truman, I gather, is another story, though I have no intention of waiting through the dawn to hear rhetorical evidence of it. I’ve already witnessed enough of his hapless party at work.

  As you can imagine, your hometown is in a lather over the whole thing, lawn signs and mustaches sprouting from the front yards and faces of people who never laid eyes on or particularly liked the disciplined little s.o.b., but there you are, and I suppose it’s to be expected. I would be amused if it weren’t for another development that distresses me greatly and concerns you, too, I’m afraid. We’ve got this awful camera salesman—lives right across the street in what he calls a “ranch” house, as if it’s some stop on a cattle drive—and he’s hell-bent on turning Owosso into Monticello for the Masses, a vacationer’s shrine to Our Next President. Chief among his plans is digging up the riverbank along that crucial stretch where you and I and Boyd lost our sense a half century ago.

  I cannot bear that this should suddenly haunt us all over again. I feel some terrible judgment roaring down, gathering in the distance like the ’11 cyclone. The man’s scheme (his name is Jackson) has got to wind through the city council for the next couple of months, and I need to talk to you, Wright. We need to stop him. I don’t have the energy to explain it all on paper, but I’m enclosing these cuttings from the Argus and asking you to telephone me as soon as you’ve had a chance to think on this.

  “A little little grave, an obscure grave.” Even after fifty years we must keep it an undiscovered country.

  Urgently,

  Horace

  AROUND THE BLOCK ON WILLIAMS STREET, WHERE THE houses were smaller and closer together, Anne Macmurray and Jack Riley sat on Jack’s front porch, still waiting up to hear Harry Truman. The band in Philadelphia segued from “Hail to the Chief” to “My Old Kentucky Home,” in honor of Senator Barkley. Gene Riley’s room was upstairs at the back of the house, but Anne and Jack kept the radio so low the crickets almost drowned it out. “Congressman Rayburn,” the faraway commentator informed them, “is banging the gavel, trying to quiet the delegates …”

  Anne realized that the desperate crowd might go on cheering until 3 A.M. before Jack ran out of things to say. Last month’s sudden kiss in the garage had been the first turn of a combination lock, and in the weeks since, during Call Northside 777 and a dinner in Flint, the tumblers had started dropping. Tonight, politics had acted like nitroglycerine,
blowing the safe’s door open once and for all. She could hardly shut him up, no matter the subject. Her head was on his shoulder as she looked up at the stars; inside the radio the sweet strains of Stephen Foster mixed with Rayburn’s scolding squawk.

  “Boy,” said Jack, “am I glad you’ve got your own apartment with its own entrance. I once dated a girl who lived in Mrs. Doucette’s rooming house down on Exchange Street, and if I brought her home past eleven, she got the riot act the next morning at breakfast.”

  “Mrs. Wagner just tortures me with questions.”

  He adjusted the fan, whose cord ran with the radio’s through the living-room window, so that its breeze fell on her more directly. “I never mind the heat,” he said. “I guess it’s what they call a reaction. Years ago, mornings in the winter in that old house by the train depot, I was the runt of the litter, and my mother would wrap me in her old bathrobe to stop my teeth from chattering. My brothers and sisters would tease the hell out of me.”