Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  Anne could picture the mother, smiling and humming, cloaking her darlings in cheerful illusions. How had she managed it with the old man around? A character, her own dad would have said. He’d been friendly enough during dinner, even calling her “doll” a couple of times, but absolute sandpaper on Jack the minute a pot splattered or the phone rang. He was in pain, of course, his stomach bothering him terribly (cancer? Jack hadn’t opened up that far), but some of it was just ornery assertion, pressed upon Jack in inverse proportion to the old man’s growing dependence on him. And where are you getting these ideas above yourself? was, she thought, the evening’s unspoken question—meant for Jack and prompted by her presence. Gene made her seem like a Buick, or a California vacation, something Jack had his nerve aspiring to, as if he too were developing “champagne tastes on a beer budget.”

  Her own taste for beer had certainly helped. She was on her third Stroh’s, and hadn’t touched the pitcher of lemonade that sat catching gnats on the porch railing. Jack had prepared it this afternoon, a last offering, she hoped, to the delicate flower he’d imagined. He seemed relieved that she smoked Luckies and enjoyed plunging her hands into the dishwater; he was so much less nervous with her tonight she was almost disappointed—he hadn’t once tugged on those adorable little spikes of hair. The only time he’d shown embarrassment came when he got stalled during a wrangle with the father, something over his own salary (Gene’s implication being that it was too high), and like an anxious passenger she’d gotten out to help him push the argument. Her cues and nods rattled him, even as they won her points with the old man—presumably for her loyalty to Jack, and maybe as a display of gumption against himself.

  As it was, Jack soon had things rolling again, impressing her if not his father with his command of profit margins and benefit ratios. He was patient and clear in his explanations. She could picture him persuading the fellows in Flint why it was important they get to the meeting this week, or at least give a thought to inflation when the union put in for a smaller increase than they thought it should. He could get a point across, tell a story. (When they went out to walk off dinner, just the two of them, he told her how the water main buried beneath their feet had gotten built.) The one thing he couldn’t seem to bring up was Peter, though she wished he would. A vigorously biased assessment might get her to stop thinking about “that one,” as she and her best girlfriend in Darien used to call the most impossible boy in their lives at any given moment. She’d been relieved when he went away the other day, and she’d kept the letter that arrived this morning unopened on her dresser.

  How different these talks with Jack were from those fusillades of conversation with Peter. Every word she said to Jack was designed to coax and encourage. Add to this desire an urge (so far repressed) to rip off his shirt, and she had a cocktail of longings much stronger than Stroh’s beer. She nestled closer to him, pretending it was more breeze from the fan instead of more damp from him that she was after. The two of them were dozing off, still waiting for Truman, as the announcer tried to convey a scene better suited to radio’s new competition: the candidates had just been presented with a replica of the Liberty Bell, out of which some doves of peace were taking flight.

  While Senator Barkley accepted his nomination, albeit more briefly than he had keynoted the convention, Jack fell fully asleep. His exhalations came in soft little sniffs, like a kitten’s, making it impossible for her not to pet him. She shifted so his head was on her shoulder. With her gaze from above, she inventoried the face below the little stalks of hair. Everything was youthful and efficient. There was no decorative dimple, and instead of Peter’s high cheekbones, those gaudy epaulets of breeding, Jack’s were like retracted artillery. His snub nose was in its small way perfect; the boyish little mouth seemed braced to ward off an aunt’s kisses or a brother’s fists. His chest rose and fell in time with his breathing, and her eye traveled to an open shirt button inches above his belt, through which she could see a thin line of fine dark hair.

  If she weren’t careful, she’d reach her hand in. Only recently had this sort of temptation begun to seem a matter of extreme urgency. When she’d first gotten to Ann Arbor, the general dearth of men had made those around seem somehow more superfluous than desirable. Then they’d started flooding home, and she had had her first and only affair, with a dark-eyed boy from Dearborn who’d never been in the service at all. They met in Verse Writing, expressing infatuation with all the spontaneity of the romantic villanelles and octosyllabic couplets they were assigned to write each weekend. When they finally slept together, the boy’s thin, perplexed body kept no time with hers; it was as if they’d failed the terza rima unit. They gave up after three times, relieved to get on to the brief business of worrying if she were pregnant.

  But Jack, after a year when she had barely been able to find a girlfriend, let alone a date, was something else. She just had to touch, if not what was beneath it, at least the undone button, but as soon as she did the radio crackled to life: “I am sorry that the microphones are in the way, but I must leave them the way they are because I have got to be able to see what I am doing—as I am always able to see what I am doing!”

  “Pop?” asked Jack, opening his eyes.

  “Truman,” said Anne, though she had to admit the buckshot coming through the Philco—so different from Dewey’s baritone sax and those great bolts of satin cloth unrolled by FDR—was a bit like Gene Riley.

  “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!”

  Anne laughed, but Jack cringed, as if Truman were some crude friend he’d brought along and he’d only now realized his mistake. But Anne was laughing in admiration; the schoolyard bluster was preposterous, but you had to hand it to him. At this point in his fortunes, he ought to be begging, but instead he was dishing it out—to his supporters, no less: “Never in the world were the farmers of any republic or any kingdom or any other country as prosperous as the farmers of the United States; and if they don’t do their duty by the Democratic party, they are the most ungrateful people in the world!” Jack sat up and nodded.

  Now, unbelievably enough, it was the unions’ turn. Their wages had gone up $99 billion in the past fifteen years, thanks to Roosevelt and the Democratic party, the “one friend in politics” they’d ever had. “And I say to labor what I have said to the farmers: they are the most ungrateful people in the world if they pass the Democratic party by this year.”

  Giving himself over to it, Jack let out something between a laugh and a war whoop, swinging Anne, as if she were a girl from Flint and not the maid of Darien, into a momentary headlock. He planted a kiss on the back of her neck. A second later he was paying her no mind, just reaching to turn up the sound and the hell with all the Dewey-voting neighbors. As Truman went on against “the convention that met here three weeks ago,” and “that so-called Taft-Hartley Act,” and all the rest of the sins of the do-nothing Eightieth Congress, she and Jack sat smiling like some long-married couple on a Sunday night, delighted that Jack Benny was hitting his stride.

  “I recommended an increase in the minimum wage. What did I get? Nothing! Absolutely nothing!” Social security, civil rights, the Republicans’ tax bill: what really came through this litany of mass concerns was a fit of personal pique, a tantrum so strong he had to scold the crowd for even murmuring its astonishment: “Now, listen!” How could one not? The two of them hung on each word, straight through to the surprise ending: “On the twenty-sixth of July, which out in Missouri we call ‘Turnip Day,’ I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis … I shall ask them to act upon other vitally needed measures such as aid to education, which they say they are for; a national health program …”

  July twenty-sixth. The day she would be coming back from Mackinac.

  “Jack, I’d better go. It’s past two.”

  His thoughts had darkened in time with hers. He was frownin
g as he looked up. “This special session’s not a good idea. They’ll just say no to him every single day, and he’ll look as if he isn’t running the country.”

  “Time for you to go to bed. I don’t have to be in till noon, but you’ll be lucky if you get five hours. Come on, run me home.”

  They drove his Ford down Williams to Hickory. Despite the President’s barked imperative, it was clear that almost nobody in Owosso but themselves had been listening. Every light was out, including Horace Sinclair’s. Jack pointed out the dark gabled house as they turned west on Oliver. “I was sort of hoping the old man would be up. He’s about the only person I’ve run into here who seems to be on the fence.”

  “Unless you count me,” said Anne. “But I think I’ve fallen off it. I may vote for Truman.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “About the whole election, no; not as much as I ought to be. But about voting for Harry? I think so. Character ought to count for something. He showed it tonight.”

  “He’s a character, all right.”

  They rode past the Herrick house at the corner of Park. “That’s where the boy Margaret’s mad for lives.”

  “They’re a sad family,” said Jack.

  “Did you know the brother? Arnie?”

  “We were in school together,” was all that Jack replied. Anne took the absence of further comment to be a kind of tribute, the unpresuming silence of a survivor for the lost. The Ford rolled past Christ Church, and Jack changed the subject: “That’s where you’ll get the best view of Dewey if he comes through between now and Election Day. He’ll probably take his mother to Mass, or what do you call it, service.”

  Anne, a Presbyterian who hadn’t been to church since leaving home, glanced at the park surrounding Christ’s. “Trust the Episcopalians to need a whole square block.”

  Jack, who found the Protestants’ denominational patchwork a mystery, killed the engine outside the Comstock Apartments. “Mrs. Wagner hasn’t been listening to Harry either,” said Anne. “Unless she’s had him shouting into the dark. Either way, it looks as if I’m safe from questions tomorrow.” She leaned into Jack. “Okay. I’ll take my kiss here. That way you can get started right for home.”

  He put his arms around her, the third time all told that he’d done so. But what she suddenly seemed to have in mind was no quick kiss like the one he’d had after the movies or the restaurant in Flint. She was stroking his hair, pulling on his ears, and not doing anything to stop his hands, which seemed released from the invisible cuffs he’d made himself wear all month. It was as if he were with Louise, but without the radio soundtrack, with absolutely no sound at all, not even the crickets. Close as he was to her, he managed to open one eye, the one that had been dark through most of ’44. He wanted to see her, to realize this wasn’t Louise, but his beautiful out-of-state dream. The moonlight caught her face, which continued its passionate business, detonating in him a single moment of memory, his own vision of Fatima: the onscreen sight of Jeanne Eagels, twenty years before, in the dark of the Capitol, with his mother.

  When Anne finally spoke, it was as if the screen, back then, had begun talking. “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

  “Me neither,” he replied, squeezing her tighter.

  “No,” she said. “I mean it. Let’s turn around.” He drew back, puzzled. “That sofa in the garage,” she said. He turned the key and pressed the starter, more surprised than if the Christ Church bell had cracked in half, releasing a flight of doves.

  FIVE

  July 24–August 1

  IT WASN’T TRUE THAT JANE HERRICK NO LONGER READ THE Argus. She might have given up home delivery from Billy, but that was because she could not stand the paper’s being thrown at her house like a German grenade in the Ardennes. The paper was so important to her as herald of the returning dead that she insisted on a personal connection to any copy of it coming into her home. Before canceling her subscription, she had been troubled by a sense that whatever copy Billy threw was the wrong one, whereas now, by running her thumb up and down the stack of Arguses at Kresge’s, she could find the one meant for her. The last month’s worth of them were stacked in the corner of her bedroom, which no one besides herself had entered in years.

  Today’s edition, Saturday, July 24, carried news from Ohio of the capture of Robert “Murli” Daniels. Having taken part “in 6 cold-blooded murders in 14 days,” he was as unrepentent as he was handsome, but he didn’t interest Jane. Tuesday’s story of Pershing’s burial had been another matter, because it fed one of her mathematical compulsions: calculating forward to the year in which Arnie, were he still alive, would reach the age of the deceased—in this case 2009, the sum of 1921 and 88. That would put him past the millennium, whose arrival she felt sure would lift the seventh of the seals, the atomic bombs over Japan having blasted open the first and second.

  There had been no stories of returning soldiers this week, not even in the Flint paper, nothing to clip for the scrapbook, her own Oak Hill, inside the top drawer of her maplewood vanity. She had only glanced at the campaign news, such as yesterday’s front-page picture of six men, each wearing a mustache and posed beside a “picture of their idol,” Thomas E. Dewey. Lee Janssen, the former Corunna mayor serving as temporary chairman of the Dewey for President Club, had reminded the Argus’s reporter that any man wanting to join would have to raise the mustache. Peter Cox, whom she had heard Tim mention in the kitchen (the only place they encountered), was still up on Mackinac and therefore not in the photo, and his absence didn’t register with Jane.

  She never ventured across the worn hall carpet to her son’s room. Each of them allowed the other a separate world within the house, and used the kitchen as a kind of vacuum tube through which to pass essential messages. There was much they might be telling each other, if they weren’t leading such busy existences inside their own imaginations. Two weeks ago, for instance, exasperated at the sight of his mother pinning on her small black hat, the one he recognized as her uniform for the more important occasions at Oak Hill, Tim had asked if she was going out to do her part for the “underground economy.” He was being what Arnie used to call a “wiseacre.” If he were really interested in Owosso’s coffin-building connections to death, he might have wondered, as she did, why Howard Jennings and Marvin Lyons, each the son of an undertaker, had both returned safely from the war in order to take over the Jennings-Lyons funeral home from their fathers. This signified something, and Jane had almost been ready to discuss it with Tim the other week; but he only wanted to mock her black hat.

  Now that Kirk White’s house had been moved, Jennings and Lyons’ new chapel would be going up next to the library, which would make Jane’s consultation of old Owosso High yearbooks, Argus back issues and Polk’s City Directory even more convenient. She lived on anniversaries. They came along like mealtimes in a hospital—regular, necessary and much anticipated occasions. Dark anniversaries as well as happy ones, dates pertaining not only to Arnie but to other dead boys, too: births, graduations, inductions. Her year was as complicated as the Catholics’ church calendar, one event after another requiring commemoration, and climaxing just before Christmas—December 17, to be exact, by which time the snows had generally begun and the decorations were up at Christian’s department store. This December 17 would be the fourth one since 1944’s, which had been the third December 17 you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas”; the last December 17 she had worn her green felt skirt to the Fellers’ Christmas party; the December 17 Arnie had been machine-pistoled to death along with eighty-five other American prisoners of war at Malmédy, Belgium.

  Last December 17 she had found herself in Gute’s Pharmacy, where she heard a customer laugh with the clerk as they used the phrase “Battle of the Bulge” to describe the woman’s struggle with her waistline.

  Arnie had been buried in a coffin manufactured by the Owosso Casket Company, as had President McKinley, a point of quiet local pr
ide, the week Jane was born in September 1901. Tom Dewey had been a year behind her in school, and they had taken no notice of each other until a fall day in 1918 when she was a new graduate volunteering as a nurse under Mrs. Maud Thompson. She rang the bell at 421 West Oliver, expecting Annie Dewey to open the door and take the gauze flu guards she was distributing, only to be greeted by Tom, who seemed enchanted at the sight of Jane in her own mask. For the duration of the epidemic Mrs. Thompson wanted all the volunteers to be “an advertisement of necessity,” but Tom acted as if he were seeing Mata Hari, just Jane’s eyes peeking over a veil. And that was why he asked her to play tennis the following day, in a tearing wind. Taking off the mask—it was too ridiculous to play in—restored her face to ordinariness, at least in his eyes; by the end of the third set he had lost interest, and she had acquired a nervous habit, which took her six months to lose, of running the palm of her left hand across her mouth, as if to conceal a flaw. That was what she got for condescending to go out with a senior! Not that it mattered. A year later, she was married to Alan and already expecting Arnie.

  She loved that word—expectant was even better—because it was how Arnie let her feel, continually, even after he was born. The warmth of his disposition, from the moment his first cries were stilled, was remarked upon by everyone who met him. People were still teasing him for an excess of good nature when he was a beautiful young man of sixteen. He would laugh along with them, even as he blushed right up to his cap of chestnut hair. There was always one day in early spring when the air was so clear and the morning so bright the sun appeared to be more silver than gold: that was Arnie’s disposition, Jane had decided on one of those days four months after his death.