Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  He paused in front of the blackboard. He kept his back to her and waited for her to finish.

  “Someone put a foolish suggestion into my head. I don’t think I ever believed it. I think I tore after you because I was angry with myself. I wanted to make the attention you gave him into something bad, so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about not giving it to him myself. I know this doesn’t make sense—”

  He heard her voice trailing off, retreating into the confusion of the other world, the one in which she spent most of each day. He wanted to wheel around and catch her, keep her here, but he couldn’t make himself do it, couldn’t take his eyes off the blackboard, this same panel of it he’d stared at one afternoon four years ago, when, five minutes after seeing the words OWOSSO MAN IN ARDENNES MASSACRE in the Teachers’ Lounge copy of the Argus, he’d come in here, as they talked and laughed and passed notes behind his back, to pick up a piece of chalk and, in a trance, write down the second law of thermodynamics.

  “I should go,” she murmured.

  “No, please, don’t,” he said, turning around. “May I give you a ride home?”

  “No. Thank you,” she said, extracting a ring of keys from her purse. “I have my car today.”

  He saw the sun and moon dangling from the chain. His mouth dropped open. He was staring straight into a total eclipse.

  “I know why you were angry at me,” he said. “It’s because we’re the same. It’s not just liking quiet and the cemetery. We’re alone in this town, and this is a hard place to be alone. It makes you angry to be yourself. A week from this Saturday night, through all the roar of the parade, I’ll stand in the middle of the crowd on the sidewalk and still be alone.”

  “Please don’t go to the parade,” she said. “Come to my house for dinner instead.”

  THEY’D REMOVED SIX BUICKS FROM THE ROSS SHOWROOM TO make space for the reception committee’s operation. At eight o’clock on Monday night, the eighteenth, the big selling floor and the sidewalk at Main and John were as busy as any stretch of downtown on a Saturday afternoon. All day long Mrs. Bruce had been running back and forth from Peter’s headquarters to the library to her own card table here. She’d just come from the reference section with what she hoped was accurate information about which implements at the Putnam farm (site of some youthful Dewey work experience) might have been automated. There was no point building a fake tractor if a hundred people along Main Street were going to hoot at an anachronism, and not even the county Farm Bureau, which was sponsoring the float, had seemed completely sure.

  Rushing back in, she bumped into two club officers returning from Detroit with complaints that they’d been high-hatted by some campaign official with bigger things on his mind than one town’s parade. “What do you expect?” said one to the other. “They play bridge on the campaign train.”

  At the back of the showroom there was a poker game in progress, which local merchants would drift in and out of for a few hands after depositing the latest load of paint or lumber or crepe paper, whose rolls were now piled up like newsprint wheels at the Argus plant. Nearby bolts of cloth bunting looked silky and regal compared to all the flimsy crinkle, but none of this red-white-and-blue swag would be hung from any outdoor lamppost until Thursday at the earliest, not with the forecast looking as uncertain as it did.

  Peter Cox, who’d just sat down at the card table, was intrigued to hear about the Victory Special’s bridge game; he would be cleaning up if he were aboard. He’d given up on the idea of playing Dewey senior and settled into his role as liaison man to the offices of Governor Sigler and Senator Vandenberg, both of whom would be on hand this weekend. And nobody was going to high-hat him when Dewey’s New York representative arrived in town tomorrow.

  “Honey, you need a cup of coffee.” He could detect the hearty voice of Kay Schmidt, here with a donation of food from the hotel, imploring Anne Macmurray to give herself a break from the busiest table of all, where she and Carol Feller and a couple of other ladies were trying to find 150 beds for various dignitaries and reporters who’d be staying over Saturday night.

  “Mrs. Schmidt,” she replied. “I need a drink.” It was exactly the sort of remark she knew how to get away with—one notch below Nice Girl, but nowhere near to pushing it. The people who heard it would go home saying she had “pizazz” and wasn’t the least bit stuck-up. It was curious, thought Peter: she knew what she was doing, was calibrating it exactly for effect, even though she had no need to. She would have made the remark anyway, said it naturally. The calculation was redundant, and as soon as she employed it she’d be on to herself, would feel a trace of guilt, which was, he thought, as he watched her flip through a card file, one of the reasons, somewhere near the middle of the list, that he was in love with her.

  “Rosebud!” he cried, having at last, after twenty minutes without going over to her, found the moment. They were bringing in the bobsled, Dewey’s own, promised by his mother and now delivered by Mr. Valentine. It would ride atop float number two, the idyllic childhood winter scene, if they ever got all this paraphernalia down to the site where the floats themselves were being built.

  Orson Welles had obviously made it to Darien. She was looking up amidst the oohs and aahs (it was a kid’s sled, for Christ’s sake) and giving him a smile.

  “Where are we taking this stuff?” shouted a newcomer.

  “The old sugar company,” answered a man struggling with a plywood witness stand.

  Mrs. Goldstone, who was dropping off two casseroles (at a considerable discount) and picking up two empty pans, became momentarily lost in angry memories; she was not entirely comfortable with the idea that these happy crepe-paper confections would be rising from the unweeded grounds of the factory whose closing, fourteen years ago, had ruined her husband’s pride.

  “Thanks for the phone number, but I was way ahead of you,” said Anne, once he finally walked over to her.

  “I figured you would be.”

  “I would have been there that first night, but we were with Billy Grimes’ father, straightening out Gene’s insurance. Not that there was much to straighten out.”

  “Certainly not as much as Billy Grimes will be carrying twenty years from now.”

  “Right. The kind that makes you a profit. Term. Or the other kind. I knew all this the night it was explained to me.”

  “So what is Billy playing? A newsboy? Bobsledder? Farmer?”

  “You jest,” said Carol Feller, on her way to give Mrs. Goldstone a hand. “Do you know how much money there is to be made Saturday night? He’ll be hawking souvenirs and running errands for every reporter on Main Street. Probably selling them Truman buttons, too.”

  “And where will you be Saturday night?” Anne asked Peter.

  “The reviewing stand, of course.”

  “Then stand next to me. I’m a sort of lady-in-waiting for Mother Dewey. Carol is, too. It’s kind of a sequel to the March of Time.”

  “The Road to Buffalo. That’s where he’s heading after church on Sunday. Inside information, of course.” He paused. “So what does Riley think of all this?”

  “He’s a model of tolerance.”

  “I wouldn’t be.”

  “No, you wouldn’t be.”

  And you wouldn’t want me to be. “What’s your job between now and then?”

  “After tonight I’m on the floats. If the speed they’re going at is any indication, don’t ask me how they’re going to get the Walk up by next spring.”

  “If things are that much behind schedule,” said Peter, “I’ll have to lend a hand myself.” He hoped that Riley’s toleration wasn’t so broad he’d be out there next to them, hammering with his overmuscled arm.

  “My God, Peter, you could have calluses by the weekend!”

  “What time does the late shift start?”

  “Seven o’clock for the next four nights. Sign up on the clipboard near the front door. They’ll have floodlights set up, and the band will be having its practice out there, to ke
ep people in the mood.”

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “Lots of Sousa.”

  “Maybe they’ll make a mistake and throw in ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ ”

  “Why stop there? How about ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime’?”

  “Do you know how much I’m going to hate you by the end of the week?”

  No, you’re not. “Yes, Mrs. Bruce?” She was tugging at his sleeve.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Cox, but you’ve got to talk to Mrs. Waters. She’s putting six names down for some of the cars. Those people are going to be crushed before the parade reaches Willman Field.”

  “Excuse me,” said Peter, in a sonorous Raymond Massey voice. “Executive decisions.”

  “Of course,” said Anne.

  He followed Mrs. Bruce to the trouble, humming “You and the Night and the Music” as he went.

  JACK AND ANNE WERE FINISHING THEIR COFFEE IN THE DINING room above Christian’s department store.

  “Is it this parade?” she asked. She could understand his being tired—he’d been working long hours in Flint, trying to make up for the past three months—but she didn’t know what was making him blue.

  “No,” he answered. “I’m glad you’re doing it.”

  “Is it the arrest then?”

  “A little bit, I suppose.” The excitement over Dewey was bad enough—it made his own Labor Day contact with Truman less special, to himself and maybe to her. But the arrest, over in Pontiac, after so many months, of a union man in the shooting of Walter Reuther: it was hard not be be brought low by that. The guy was even an officer in a Ford local—it wasn’t impossible Jack had met him. To top it off, it looked as if he’d also robbed a CIO co-op store. Just a hoodlum, in other words.

  “Did anything go on in the shop today?”

  “Not much. Leo put in his order for Eisenhower’s memoirs.”

  “I wonder if we might have won with him,” Jack said, more to the coffee cup than her.

  “I don’t know, Jack.” She looked at her watch and couldn’t think of a cheerful thing to say.

  “Lorraine called me this morning. We finished up everything about Dad. They all want me to have the house.”

  She knew that Gene had left no will, but that was it? Just some informal chat among the brothers and sisters? No pieces of paper with percentages and dates?

  “None of them is nearby anymore, and she went on about how I’d taken care of Dad and all that.”

  “The Rileys are a lot more civilized than the Macmurray brothers would be, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Do you want me to sell it? If I do, I’ll give Lorraine and the rest of them some of the money, but we could keep a lot of it, and get a GI mortgage on some place elsewhere. Flint’s not much, but there are some nice spots just outside it. Or we could stay and fix the house up any way you like.”

  She could picture herself walking home on days like this, down Oliver Street, past Mrs. Wagner, who would have turned into an anecdote; waving to Carol Feller, whom she would eventually be like, their both having lived in the neighborhood for years and years. She would go through the garage, and look at the sofa and the license plates, which would still be there, before walking through the back door and up to her study, though she’d call it something else, that funny little room at the back of the house, right next to the one Gene had done some of his dying in. She’d paint it light blue.

  “Oh, turn that up,” said Jack. “You’ve got to hear this.” The waitress refilled their cups and raised the volume of the Flint station.

  “Jack, I’ve heard it. It’s a rehash. The story is a week old.”

  “… in Beaucoup, Illinois, where Governor Dewey’s Victory Special nearly backed into a supportive crowd because of a mistake by the trainman. ‘That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,’ said the distressed candidate, who added that the man ‘should be shot at sunrise.’ But as no one had been hurt, Dewey offered the man a pre-presidential reprieve before heading on to Oklahoma City.”

  “Like he’s Louis the Fourteenth,” said Jack. “Can you believe that? ‘Shot at sunrise’? And the announcer was laughing, could you hear him, like it was a funny story.”

  “Down, boy,” she said, massaging the place between his neck and shoulders in a way that interested the waitress more than anything the radio had said.

  “Can I turn it down now?” the girl asked. “My boss doesn’t like—”

  “At least he doesn’t have you shot at sunrise, does he?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if he did.” She winked at him and took away their plates.

  “You’ve dated her,” said Anne. “Oh, God, I knew it.”

  “Once. Ages ago. What’s that got to do with Dewey?”

  “Nothing. That’s why I brought it up. Listen, why don’t you concentrate on Harry’s crowds? They say they’re enormous.” At single stops in places like San Antonio, two hundred thousand people had been turning out to see Truman step through the blue velvet curtains and start firing at the Republicans.

  “They also say they’re just coming out to see a President,” said Jack.

  “Well,” said Anne, wiping her mouth. “Maybe they’re right. I guess I’m coming out to see the next one. And you are, too.”

  “Do I have to?” he asked, with a hint of lower lip.

  “P—. Oh, God, I almost said pwease. I’m on the verge of talking baby talk in a public place. Either you’ve got to get less adorable or you’ve got to take me out of here. I’m late as it is.”

  “Okay, let’s go.” He put down a five-dollar bill and they headed out.

  “If you agree to come Saturday night, we can go out to the Corunna drive-in as soon as it’s finished. The midnight show. Something bloody. Bleached blondes, John Garfield, that kind of stuff.”

  “Not The Bishop’s Wife.”

  “Liar!” she shouted, slapping him on the arm. “I forgot to tell you! Your aunt Eileen, at the funeral, told me you’d already seen that movie before you took me. She was asking about our first date, and I mentioned it, and she looked all confused and said, ‘I’m sure that’s what Gene and Johnny took me to at Christmastime.’ ”

  “That’s before I knew you were an—”

  “Adventuress. Come on, we’ve got to hustle.”

  They got into the car.

  “So what about the house?” he asked.

  “Let’s keep it.”

  “You don’t want something new? No ranch like the Jacksons’?”

  “No. I’d like the old colonel to feel free to drop by.”

  He reached over and touched her knee. “We can make that little room at the back into a kid’s room.”

  Of course. She’d been seeing bookshelves, but this was a truer projection of the future, just a little further distant than the one she’d projected herself. She remembered the sight of him at the air show, her vision of children falling safely into his arms. She squeezed his hand but said nothing, and he yawned: “I’ll take a nap. Then pick you up at eleven.”

  “No, go to sleep. I’ll get a ride. Really. I’ll call and wake you if I don’t. I promise.”

  “Okay.” He pulled the Chevy in through the rusted gates of the Owosso Sugar Company and tried to smile. “I can’t believe you’re helping out that overprivileged little s.o.b.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “He’s not that bad.”

  “Are you kidding? ‘Shot at sunrise’?”

  “Oh, you mean Dewey. No, he’s awful.” She pointed to a huge wall of crepe paper. “Look! They’ve got the birthplace up!”

  “TUFT, STAPLE, FLUFF. TUFT, STAPLE, FLUFF. OH, FORGET IT. You’re hopeless.” Anne took the botched crepe-paper flower from Peter and put it on the pile she was making, six a minute, for one of the floats. “Just cut off foot-long strips. Did you ever hold a skein of yarn for your mother?”

  “Mother doesn’t knit.”

  They were sitting cross-legged beside one of the scenes that would be hoisted onto flatbed trucks Saturd
ay afternoon. The floats committee, headed by Gordon Graham, had hired a Detroit company to do the heavier construction, and a host of volunteers were putting floral pelts onto anything already hammered together. Anne twisted another four buds into bloom before Mrs. Bruce, her hands full of lists, came up to Peter.

  “The ones in this column will turn down Oakwood, and these will go down Dewey. Both will wind up at the field.” Peter glanced at the rosters of cars and dignitaries, imagining these two divergent strands of the parade taking a couple of wrong turns and crashing back into each other like clusters of Keystone Kops.

  “Very good, Mrs. Bruce. I’m sure you’ll keep them in line.” The poor thing; his compliments, like cups of coffee, were getting her through the week. When she’d gone, he turned back to Anne and asked, “Is that all you’re going to do?”

  “You mean make flowers? Probably. We need a few Indians along with the chiefs.”

  “As one of the chiefs, I’m pleased to tell you that I personally vetoed the ‘platform’ idea.’ The more intense partisans of the Dewey Club had wanted a giant rendering of the GOP platform, or at least its highlights, spelled out in crepe-paper rosettes and waiting for the candidate when he arrived at the reviewing stand.

  “That was big of you,” said Anne. “Although there was no danger the actual platform would have collapsed from any substantial extra weight. It’s not like, well, this, for example.” She cleared her throat like a singer on prize day and started reciting the more ambitious pledges of the Democratic party. “Repeal Taft-Hartley. Increase minimum wage to seventy-five cents an hour. Increase social security payments 50 percent. Control prices—”

  “Save it for Saturday night. There’ll be three ambulances and two First Aid stations along the route. You can blow hot air at me when there’s somebody around to dispense oxygen.”

  “There’ll be no time to propagandize. After all, the program starts at 10:05. Not 10:06. Not 10:04. 10:05.”