Dewey Defeats Truman

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by Thomas Mallon


  “Can you remember the rest of these names?”

  “Yes,” said the clerk.

  “Then copy them onto the next empty page downstairs. Do you remember his name?” asked Horace, pointing, without looking, at Jon’s still body.

  “No,” said the clerk, who was smart enough to guess this was the right answer, and calm enough now to scent opportunity, to give off a deliberate hint of unreliability, what Horace would have to satisfy three days later with fifty dollars withdrawn from the Owosso Savings Bank. The receipt for that transaction, also in the buckram box, was stamped “100 W. Oliver Street,” the address of the Amos Gould house, out of which the bank had operated in those days, a fact he neglected to put into the handbills he’d passed out tonight. By the end of the summer of ’97 the clerk was gone from Owosso, managing some Harvey House out west.

  Two of the ninety-five telephones then in Owosso were owned by the Ament Hotel and Wright George’s parents. At 3:15 A.M. Horace got the operator to ring the Georges’ number, trusting that Wright would be the one to pick up. “Meet me in front of your house in ten minutes, and have your father’s wagon ready.” By 3:30 they had roused Boyd Fowler, and by four they had stolen a mahogany coffin from Boyd’s place of business, the Owosso Casket Company. Before the sun came up they had buried Jon in the soft riverbank behind the shuttered mill. No lights gave them away: there was then no Armory, no high school, no purposeless castle just across the water.

  Along with Jon’s note, the page of the register, the bank receipt and the photo of Alice, there was a copy of the pact Horace had talked them into signing. They had put the original into Jon’s stolen coffin, a paper averring that they had buried Jon so as not to give Thomas Banks the satisfaction, nor Alice Banks the agony, of knowing what had happened. Horace would write Mr. Banks that a despairing, desperate Jon, determined never to return to Michigan or communicate with Alice again, had shipped out with the Navy; so it was safe to bring her home and be happy with the misery Mr. Banks had caused them all. As for Jon’s mother, she required no material assistance, and Horace convinced himself he had spared her with the same lie, which she was able to believe, since she had never liked Alice Banks and let Jon know it: it made sense that he was bitter enough never to write home from San Diego or Manila Bay or any of the other ports of call where from time to time she imagined him over the next and last ten years of her life.

  Horace took another look at the buckram box and wondered if he had any possibility of another ten years. Could he live through the unearthing of all this? Survive the Argus story that was sure to reach Jon’s son, a fifty-year-old man who, as Horace knew from years of secretly keeping track, still lived in Detroit? Useless speculation; as useless as continuing to wonder if Wright George would answer his letter. The only question worth asking was whether or not Horace Sinclair could still wield a shovel.

  MARGARET LAY AWAKE, LOOKING THROUGH HER OPEN WINDOW. She was still sure—at least for moments at a time—that he would come to her, or get her a message, explain what his voyage had been about, and what it had to do with her. The thought that it had nothing to do with her, that he had betrayed their weeks together, was still unthinkable, though, also for moments at a time, she had been tempted to consider this. To stop herself, she would concentrate on her enemies, chief among them Billy, whose every effort at helping, like those ridiculous flyers, seemed an I-told-you-so. Then there was the parade of Tim’s old girlfriends, like Sharon Daly, eager to get themselves into the Argus and on WOAP, coming forward to list all the places they had gone with Tim in Arnie’s Chevrolet, as if Tim might have flown his plane back to one of them as some lovesick gesture.

  In the darkest part of her heart, she suspected her parents—as she suspected they suspected her—of having had something to do with what happened Sunday morning.

  But what had happened since then? Where had he landed the plane, and what had he been doing? She did believe he was alive, but she remained incapable of picturing him outside the cockpit with his feet on the ground, breaking into the provisions she had helped him load. Did this mean the thread connecting them was too thin to transmit an image?

  HE SUSPECTED BOTH OF THEM; THEY WERE IN IT TOGETHER.

  That’s what Billy thought as he walked east on Oliver away from Margaret Feller’s window. Herrick was making a place for her, establishing a beachhead, where she would soon join him, having “overcome” Owosso at last. It was as if his own life were some game of ten little Indians; Billy Grimes, who had more practical ideas for getting out of this town than any of them, would be the one forced to stay behind. He could have made a lot extra helping Mr. Jackson at the city council meeting tonight. Would Herrick ever realize he cared enough about his friend to give that up and work on his latest flyers? He’d dropped them off at Chief Rice’s office (the town would pay the postage), and now he was just walking, watching the lightning bugs go on and off, like substitutes for the forsythia petals of spring. At least, by luck, he was on the north sidewalk; across Oliver, he could make out Jane Herrick coming in the opposite direction, and he didn’t want to have to talk to her. What was she doing out at midnight? It was creepy even to think about, so he’d think about his fifty-to-one shot, his best fantasy for the way this whole thing might turn out, with Tim returning unharmed, and Margaret so furious at his having hotfooted it off without her that she never spoke to him again. He, Billy, would have both of them back to himself.

  But all this was too improbable to keep his mind off old lady Herrick. Was she wishing Tim were dead? Shot down by some insane Nazi exile living on the northern peninsula? Which would make him another casualty to bury and remember? Or had she, like some crazy Quaker, you couldn’t tell with her, told him to run off—to avoid August 30, when every Shiawassee County male born between 1923 and 1930, which included Herrick and yours truly, was supposed to register for the draft? “24 YOUTHS VOLUNTEER FOR ARMED SERVICES—LARGEST PEACETIME CONTINGENT”: that’s what the Argus had just bragged about. But anybody who did the numbers could tell you that was pretty small compared to the in-voluntary contingent they’d soon be assembling.

  JANE APPROACHED THE COMSTOCK APARTMENTS, HER MATHEMATICAL compulsions operating as she pushed the bell for number 331. Subtract that many days from August 3 and you were back at September 7, the birthday of Charles Beck, a Corunna boy who’d lost a foot on Okinawa, which wasn’t the same thing as being dead, but which still meant something. She brushed off a couple of small leaves that had attached themselves to her green felt skirt, which wasn’t right for the season and hadn’t been pressed in more than three years, but which she’d still put on for this visit.

  Frank Sherwood opened the door, unnerved, as she’d hoped he would be.

  “Mrs. Herrick. Please come upstairs.” He’d thought it might be Anne, that she’d forgotten her key.

  Jane looked around the room.

  “Can I offer you a cup of tea?” asked Frank. “It takes a few minutes to get the water going on this hotplate, but I can do it.” He turned it on without waiting for an answer, taking down a second cup and a package of Tetley’s, which he’d drunk since ’43 and knew was her brand because he’d seen him buying it, back then, in Kroger’s.

  “Principles of Celestial Navigation.” Jane picked up the book as she read out the title.

  “It’s from the school library,” explained Frank. “I got it out because it was the only thing my chairman and I could think of for me to do on Sunday. I had this little booth at the air show—”

  He realized she wasn’t looking at him. She was regarding the electric ring under the saucepan, watching it turn redder and redder, as if the hotplate were really Saturn, and had dropped in tonight on its long circuit around the sun.

  “I’m sure that Tim is okay, Mrs. Herrick. You know, that plane was in surprisingly good shape. That’s what the airport warden said: ‘Say what you want about Gus, he really took care of the plane. He was out there working it every Saturday, working on everything from the—’


  “Mr. Sherwood,” said Jane, moving her gaze from the hotplate’s ring to Frank’s eyes, gathering in her lungs and throat the same voice she had shouted into the Ardennes forest on a December night in ’44, in a dream. Tonight she was right here in Owosso, awake, but the words that came out of her were the same ones she’d cried in her sleep three and a half years ago: “What have you done with my son?”

  SEVEN

  August 9–23

  DEWEY’S CAMPAIGN PLANS QUICKENING; SILENT OVER SPECIAL SESSION

  Peter picked up Anne’s Argus from the counter near the register.

  “He may be ‘silent’ over the session,” she said, “but the session is over, period.” It was Monday, August 9, two days after Congress had adjourned. Along with price controls, the House had even rejected, as too liberal, a housing bill backed by the arch-conservative Senator Taft. Truman could now gleefully complain about the do-nothing Eightieth Congress for the twelve weeks until Election Day.

  “That’s some forthright candidate you’ve got, Peter.”

  “Who do you think will break his silence first?” he asked. “Dewey or the Herrick kid?”

  A terrible joke (after nearly ten days the search for Tim had been quietly called off), but she was pleased to find herself laughing. It meant she had at last relaxed with Peter Cox. She was now officially Jack’s girl, recognized as such by all, including Peter. Their skirmishes were over; he had surrendered the other night, gracefully she thought, when she and Jack ran into him in front of the Capitol Theatre. He’d actually shaken Jack’s right hand, while Jack’s left one stayed around her waist. It wasn’t exactly signing papers on the deck of the Missouri, but she detected a touch of formality in it. With all that behind them, Peter could now cross the street and drop into the shop at lunchtime like some friendly trade delegation on a routine mission.

  Peter wished she hadn’t laughed at his joke. He already knew she had a streak of black humor, but he would have preferred still being enough of a threat to require scolding. Instead, as she unpacked a box of novels from Lippincott, she motioned him into the chair behind the counter. “Put your feet up,” she said. “I hear from Carol it’s what you do at the office.”

  “Okay.” He swung them onto Leo Abner’s blotter.

  “How about your campaign plans? Are they ‘quickening’?”

  “I’m not making much noise yet, but I’m not lying quite so low as the top of the ticket. I’ll be at a meeting of the Shiawassee County Young Republicans later in the week, where the Wayne University Collegian’s star reporter will tell everybody about the wonderfully modern Dewey machine he saw operating in Philadelphia.” He dropped his head to his chest and made snoring noises.

  “Is this boy from Owosso? Maybe they can paint him into the convention panel of the Dewey Walk.”

  “God, you’re really for that thing.”

  “I am. I am genuinely for it and for Harry Truman.”

  “It’s so cornball,” said Peter.

  “The Walk or Harry?”

  “Both.”

  “Neither. Harry’s going to go down fighting, and all those things on the Walk will say more to people than Dewey himself ever will. You remember our conversation after Carol’s dinner party? When you said the Walk was more important than those backyards, on account of history and fame or something like that? You were trying to talk me into it. Well, I am talked into it, but not for your reasons, and certainly not to lure the tourists. I like it because it’s peculiar; it’ll be one of a kind, not something from a chain store. They say the future will be places like that ready-made town they’re going to put on a potato farm outside New York—each house like every other. But how many towns had a coffin factory, or a woman who crippled herself working on the slanted floor of her husband’s merry-go-round? If Owosso is the place that produced Dewey, at least it’s the only place that produced him. So let’s put up the Walk.”

  “What does Jack think?”

  This was the first time Peter had spoken his name as a simple fact, something requiring no particular tone of voice, only the recognition facts routinely got.

  “He just wants them to wait. He still thinks it’s indecent to do anything before the election.” She called out to a customer at the back of the store. “It’s $1.95, Mrs. Smart. Sorry about the missing cover, but that’s eighty cents off.”

  “How’s his father?” asked Peter.

  Anne walked back to the counter to give him his answer, cancer being one fact that demanded not just recognition but a shameful hush. “He’s slipping. Jack thinks they’ll put him in a hospital within another week. Either here or in Lansing.”

  “I hope he doesn’t have to get poked by Dr. Coates. That must be some bedside manner.”

  Dr. Coates? Oh, Carol’s brother, the rabid radiologist. “I’m afraid poor old Gene is way past the X-ray stage.”

  Cancer could shut even Peter up; she had to jump over the silence. “Well,” she sighed, tapping the paper, “Dr. Coates won’t have to worry about money being squandered on little apartments for veterans. Honestly, Peter, when they won’t even pass Taft’s housing bill! It’s like saying Mr. Bumble’s been too generous with the porridge.”

  She spoke, he thought, like somebody who would be turning into a Democrat even if she weren’t dating one; she talked as if she wanted to have a discussion, that so-much-less-sexy version of an argument.

  “If you don’t want houses that all look alike,” he replied, “why do you want the government to build skyscraper slums?”

  “People have got to live someplace. And why do you say they’ll be slums?”

  “You’re right. They won’t be. Because Congress isn’t going to build them.”

  She paused to ring up Mrs. Smart’s copy of The Ides of March. And because she wasn’t going to give him the sort of argument he wanted, she shifted the subject.

  “I’m getting excited about the election, which I never would have expected. I think my dad was the only Democrat in Darien, and I could never understand why he bothered tacking signs to the trees each fall, and driving old ladies to the polls when he knew they were going to vote for Landon. But I’m beginning to feel it.”

  Was it, Peter wondered, her romance with the town—the one she was willing herself into for the sake of her book—or the one she was having with Riley? The first, he decided. Evenings spent pouring Jack his beer and listening to why everyone needed more wages to make fewer widgets might have made her “Truly for Truman,” but it was this novel of hers that was leaving room for the Dewey Walk.

  “Well, I’m bored with the whole thing. That’s the way it is with foregone conclusions. Even the war was boring after New Year’s ’45.”

  Which he’d spent smashed on champagne in Grosvenor Square, she bet. While Jack was thanking God his eye had twitched back to life.

  “How’s your girl from Lansing? The one with the tax department.”

  “She’s retiring.”

  “More like the pink slip, I’d say. From you.” It was the closest she’d come to flirting, and it was over before she got back to the box of books from Lippincott.

  He’d had enough. He swung his legs off the counter and started for the door.

  “Oh, Peter! I forgot. Your mother is going to think I’m as rude as can be. I only this morning got around to writing her a thank-you letter for everything on Mackinac. I haven’t even mailed it yet. If you talk to her—”

  “I’ll tell her you’ve been busy.” The bells jingled and he waved good-bye from the sidewalk.

  Crossing Washington Street, he felt inside his pocket for a letter that assured the pointlessness of Anne’s, one he’d found waiting at home last night, its absurd postmark—RENO—falling over the three-cent Statue of Liberty. After thirty-four years of marriage his mother was in the Biggest Little City in the World, living at a dude ranch to establish residency for a divorce.

  Once back at his desk, his feet squarely under it, he read Lucy Cox’s handwriting for the t
hird time:

  August 5, 1948

  Dear Peter,

  This isn’t too much of a shock, is it? There’s a slot machine in the stable, and another in the powder room, and everyone is terribly nice. It’s a big hen party with half the girls already “looking.” Except for all the liquor, it reminds me of the semester I had at Smith forty years ago, before your grandfather brought me home—the greatest sorrow of my life, as I’m sure I’ve told you.

  I’ve already begun to receive invitations: dinner next Saturday night at the archbishop of Reno’s. Yes, Reno has an archbishop, but a very liberal one, I hear, so I probably won’t find Senator McCarran at his table. You’ll have to make that conquest yourself, whenever you manage to graduate to Washington.

  The requirement here is six weeks, and they say one should figure on another two before getting everything straightened out, but I’ll be back in time for your election. Try to call me some morning at the number on the stationery. And put your mind at ease. Your father has agreed to it, and nothing has changed from your standpoint. I’m talking about the money, of course.

  With love from your

  Mother

  Of course she was talking about the money, and about everything except why she had suddenly gone and done this, now, fifteen years after he had seen what bound her and his father just disappear, like an animal that had run off. Back then he had asked, again and again, to no answer but a smile: What’s the matter? From that time on the house had felt muffled, except during the cocktail hour, when with their friends his parents roared into false gaiety, each of their voices echoing like a room robbed of its furniture.

  He wouldn’t hear men and women that loud again until the war, when the soldiers and secretaries throwing themselves at one another talked at a volume two notches higher than necessary. But their noise, he remembered noticing, lacked that echo. Something packed it, something from within, maybe an awareness of the person back home they were betraying and somehow loving the more for doing it.

 

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