Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  Here she was, five years later, happily, if modestly, aware that she had become quite a bit harder to ignore. Her personality had come out with her cheekbones; she was a “vivid, literary girl,” as one professor had put it in an evaluation she’d read upside down on his desk. She wanted to write a novel, one that had nothing to do with herself. All through the war her imagination had thrived by thinking of real life as what took place elsewhere and got lived by other people. “Elsewhere” had survived the war as an idea, a lure, and the notion that Owosso might be one of its quiet, unexpected precincts had brought her here a year ago: an Ann Arbor roommate had worked for Leo Abner in the summers and knew he could use a college graduate to help him in the shop by recommending things to his women customers. So, as she tried to make her own book come to life, she was spending her afternoons with those women—except that today there had been hardly any customers at all, ladies or gentlemen, which was why she now sat behind the counter reading The Naked and the Dead, a book that seemed to need no recommendation at all, that flew out of the shop, sometimes two at a time.

  As an aspiring writer, Anne felt obligated to brave her way through it, no matter how rough it was supposed to be, and no matter how suspicious she was of best-sellers. She’d finally plunged in last week, and now, as most of the women customers liked to say, she couldn’t put it down. Here, she thought, was what the war had really been, not the high-minded affair served up in the statesmen’s memoirs. The other day she’d managed to lose her own copy, which she’d gotten at a 75 percent discount, so she was making do with one from the shelves, which she would take care to replace without dog-earing the pages when six o’clock came around.

  It was barely five now, but she hoped the jingling bells on the front door meant that Mr. Abner, back from his errands, was going to tell her to go home.

  “Got a date?”

  It wasn’t Mr. Abner at all. It was Peter Cox, several years older than herself and too attractive for his own good. As he stood in front of her, she looked at the way a thin layer of sweat had pinned his white shirt to his shoulders, and before she could be noticed, she shifted her gaze up to his blond hair and big brown eyes.

  “A date for what?”

  “History,” he said. He was the town’s number-one up-and-coming Republican, the newly arrived hot young lawyer at Harold Feller’s firm across the street and, she’d heard from Mr. Abner, a candidate for the state legislature.

  “ ‘And Franklin Roosevelt’s looks,’ ” she started singing, “ ‘give me a thrill.’ ” She wasn’t even a Democrat (though her dad was, a rara avis in Darien); she hadn’t even been old enough to vote in ’44, and wasn’t certain if or for whom she’d vote this time, but something inside her insisted that she get under Peter Cox’s skin, not give him one more thing in a lifetime of getting everything he wanted.

  He put his hand over his heart. “I still have my Navy prayer book with Roosevelt’s signature, Miss Macmurray, and I promise I’ll treasure it to the day I die. But he’s been gone three years, if you haven’t noticed, and you surely can’t be wild about Harry.”

  She smiled. “I’m not that wild about politics, Peter. And what’s with ‘Miss Macmurray’? I know we’ve only spoken a couple of times, but don’t tell me you’re putting on your campaign manners already. It’s only June.”

  He sat down, entitled as you please, in Mr. Abner’s chair behind the counter. “I’m crushed.”

  He had that look, the one she had noticed a year and a half ago, when he’d been pointed out to her in Ann Arbor; he’d been whizzing through his last year of law school, the one he’d missed when he joined the service. And now here he was in Owosso—with a purpose and a plan. They said he’d picked the town off a wall map at the state GOP’s headquarters in Lansing. It showed a senate seat opening up in the Owosso district; an hour later he was on the phone to Harold Feller’s office.

  Could she really say that she had a plan? Her “writing”: how many nights a week, back in her room on Oliver Street, did she work at it? Not one in the last two weeks.

  “You’ll get over it,” she said.

  “Politics?” asked Peter, knowing perfectly well she meant his being crushed. “I’ll never have to. This is the beginning of everything for the Republicans. We’ve got a great crop all over the state. Over in Grand Rapids, Jerry Ford is running for Congress, and …”

  “No older than yourself, I’ll bet?”

  “Five years older!”

  Anne laughed as she twisted the scarf above her cardigan jacket. “You’re keeping track, aren’t you?” She wished she hadn’t worn it: her neck was her best feature. She knew she was too thin and too tall and that her eyebrows were too thick, but in her neck she had absolute confidence, and here she was covering it up.

  “Advanced, aren’t we?” Peter asked, pointing to the open copy of The Naked and the Dead.

  “He’s five years younger than you are.”

  “The Army guys I met were the best fellows in the world. Not the bunch of animals he makes them out to be.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Don’t have to,” said Peter.

  What would he know? thought Anne. From what she’d heard, he’d spent the war behind some desk in London. “Well, it’s very good, and I’d rather read it than Churchill’s memoirs.”

  “Ike’s will be coming along pretty soon.”

  She groaned, but he ignored her and began browsing a shelf. His fingers hesitated at another copy of the Mailer book.

  “Go ahead,” she urged. “You know you ought to pick it up.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He laughed and she began quoting from her own copy. “ ‘Goldstein thought he was on guard and had fallen asleep. He whispered desperately several times, “I wasn’t sleeping. I was only closing my eyes to fool the Japs, I was ready, I swear I was ready.” ’ ”

  The bells jingled again. Still not Mr. Abner, but Jack Riley.

  “Hi, Anne.”

  “Hello, Jack. This is Peter Cox.”

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” said Riley, managing a thin smile and extending his hand. “You’re running against Harvey Angell. A pleasure.”

  Anne was sure it wasn’t. Jack Riley, who was two inches shorter than Peter, whose hair stood up in brown tonicked sticks and whose eyes were a little too close together—and who for all that was terribly appealing (those intense green eyes never seemed to shut)—was a UAW official in Flint. He was back in Owosso this summer to take care of his sick father, who lived next door to a friend of hers on Williams Street. They had been introduced last Saturday, over a hedge between driveways, as he washed his car. He wasn’t through his third sentence explaining the reasons he’d returned to town before the old man was bellowing for him. He’d dropped into the store on Monday, finally asking for the World Almanac instead of the date with her that she knew he’d come in for. She gave him twenty-five cents off—the book was six months old—but all he managed to say was “Good deal.”

  Now, back for a second run at it, he turned his attention away from Peter as fast as manners would permit. “Anne, how about a movie tonight? Do you want to see that one with Jane Wyman?”

  “Yeah,” Peter interrupted. “Ronald Reagan’s wife. He’s the union man out in Hollywood, isn’t he, Jack?”

  Riley offered no smile.

  “Boys, boys,” Anne clucked. “If you’re going to fight, it’d better be over me.”

  “She can’t go,” Peter told Jack. “I’m taking her out.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Anne. “I’m nobody’s wife, and I don’t recall having heard myself say yes or no.”

  “You must have missed it,” said Peter. “Trust me, you said yes. I’m picking you up at seven. You’re a cheap date, too. They’re serving supper outside City Hall in front of the radio speakers. Only seventy-five cents a plate.”

  She wanted Jack Riley to sock him. The trouble was she also wanted to accept. She couldn’t face one more movie, and she doubted that Pe
ter would ask a second time, whereas she was pretty certain Jack Riley would make a few more polite tries. “How about all three of us going?” she proposed.

  “Dewey is a little more than I can stand,” said Jack.

  “I’ll bet the seventy-five cents goes into his campaign coffers, too,” Peter mentioned.

  “Come on, Jack. Do it for history’s sake,” said Anne. “Or just to spy for the opposition.”

  For the first time he smiled, in her direction only. “Okay. I’m used to taking the best bargain I can get. I’ll find you both there at seven.” He waved good-bye and was out the door to another jangle of bells.

  “Now we’re stuck with him,” said Peter. “I’m backing out.”

  “Well,” said Anne, starting to straighten up the counter, “in that case, ‘fug you.’ ”

  “What?” Peter cried.

  “Norman Mailer,” she explained. “Very advanced.”

  OF COURSE, HE’D HEARD GRIMES, BUT HE WASN’T GOING TO let him know it. Billy’s yapping about money and plans and baseball stats was too much to take sometimes, too much antifreeze to the system after hours of his mother’s cold silences, which were so loud in their own way that he couldn’t think his thoughts. And it was his thoughts he lived in. That’s why an hour ago he’d just lain here, not moving a muscle, even though he could feel a bug crawling through his blond hair, could feel it making tracks across his scalp, causing him to wonder if his hair weren’t already beginning to thin, the way everyone said Arnie’s had just before he left home.

  Billy would only have been wanting the two of them to go and watch the Dewey stuff, which Tim had no interest in, and which he couldn’t go to anyway, having promised his mother that he’d fix an electric fan for her tonight. He could remember how four years ago she’d let herself get all excited and wouldn’t stop telling the story of how Thomas E. Dewey had once taken her out to play tennis and how, once he was President, Roosevelt’s war would end and Arnie would be home. She’d made you think that Dewey could raise the dead, that as soon as he was in the White House Dad might even reappear at the dinner table. This time she hadn’t mentioned Dewey’s name once, and Tim doubted if she could have told the difference, if the two of them came walking down Oliver Street, between Dewey in his homburg hat and Harry Truman in one of those Hawaiian shirts.

  If he figured out how to fix the fan, he’d probably take off in Arnie’s car for the drive-in outside Corunna. What was playing didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be Henry V, of course. They wouldn’t put that on at a drive-in, though Grimes had insisted it was a great make-out movie, on account of no one being able to understand what anyone was saying. As if Billy couldn’t really learn something from it if he applied his mind, and as if he’d ever gotten beyond halfway to first base with Margaret Feller.

  Tim didn’t care if there were no movie at all at the drive-in. It would be enough to sit in the open and look up at the stars, alone but not too alone, the light flickering on the screen and the other people in their other cars, the knowledge of them keeping his mind from going too far down its own road, the way it did when he was too far into the beer. No, secure in the presence of the other cars, he could sit there and try to confound the steady-state theory of the universe, something new that Mr. Sherwood had brought up in science class the week before school ended—scared, fussy Mr. Sherwood, who took such an interest in him and thought he was so deep and would blossom into some kind of minor genius once he went off to Ann Arbor. The steady-state theory was a depressing thing to contemplate, this idea that the whole universe was like an accordion, expanding and contracting, but never doing one thing any more than the other. It made the world seem like a trap, something from which there was no relief, and it seemed to contradict the rules of life here on earth, where for years his own world on Oliver Street had only been shrinking, down to himself and his mother. Mr. Sherwood had lately been full of interest in the big new Palomar telescope, but Tim thought that if the steady-state theory was the big truth it was going to find, they might as well keep the dome closed.

  He shifted the book supporting his shoulders and neck; Grimes probably hadn’t seen it and by now there were probably a lot of bugs crawling between its pages. It was Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge, and he’d nicked it from Abner’s the other day, along with a copy of The Naked and the Dead, thinking he’d return both when he was through with them. It was only after he got home that he’d realized the Mailer book was the personal property of Miss Macmurray, who had been busy with two customers in the back and never saw him make off with it. In any case, it was Raintree County he’d really been after. He was already two hundred pages into it, certain he would find the passage—the key, or at least the clue—that told you why the author, just thirty-three, had decided, right after his book came out, to kill himself.

  BY NINE-THIRTY IT WAS ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING, AND Anne wished that were over, too. Senator Taft had conceded hours ago, and Stassen and Vandenberg (a truer favorite son of Michigan than Dewey, if truth were told) had both given up. Dewey had had his third-ballot victory and was now on his way to the convention arena, all of which the loudspeakers on the steps of City Hall, broadcasting NBC radio’s live coverage from Philadelphia, had made deafeningly clear. The crowd of several hundred Owossoans filling the rows of picnic tables at the intersection of Main and Water Streets was in a good, partisan humor, though there were exceptions, like Jack Riley on Anne’s right, who had exchanged barely a word with Peter Cox, on her left. They’d long since gone through their seventy-five-cent allotment of beer and ham sandwiches, and Anne was depending on the Fellers—Peter’s boss, Harold, and his wife Carol—to keep things civil until the governor could make his acceptance speech.

  “You know,” said Harold Feller, “I can remember the day in 1924 they laid the cornerstone for that building. I was twenty-three. I still think it’s a handsome pile, don’t you, Anne?” He pointed to City Hall behind him. Anne smiled and nodded. She liked his blend of pride and self-deprecation. He and his wife had a nice commonsensical ease to them. They were the local gentry, which meant more than it would have in Darien, where everyone was gentry more or less, but there was nothing puffed-up about them. Peter Cox was lucky to have found such a man, even if Harold Feller’s law office were no more than a rest stop on his way to the governor’s mansion or wherever else Peter was certain the road would lead.

  “I call it the Greco-Wolverine style,” said Carol Feller, a pretty brunette, a little Myrna Loy–ish, who was laughing at herself for making this joke, which she’d clearly been making for years, about City Hall’s combination of classical columns and simple yellow bricks.

  “Nothing wrong with little stretches toward grandeur,” said her husband. “And speaking of those, Anne, have you ever seen the Dewey birthplace? Look down a block. See the appliance store? The apartment above it is where he actually came into the world. The big place on Oliver came later. By the way, where is Mama Dewey tonight? Does anyone know?”

  “At home,” grumped Horace Sinclair, who had taken a seat beside Carol Feller, after she’d spotted him puffing through the crowd on his walking stick and insisted he join them. “Where I ought to be.”

  “Oh, stick around, Colonel. We need you for some historical perspective,” implored Peter, with a politician’s flattery: the “colonel” was a nice touch, Anne thought.

  “You mean I’m an old crock,” said Horace Sinclair. “And so I am. And I can give you a little perspective on the young Tom Dewey, for what it’s worth. Not a particularly pleasant boy. A bit too much confidence and a bit too quick with his fists—don’t let that dainty little mustache fool you. A fast-buck operator, too. Used to charge his mother a quarter to mow her lawn.”

  The Fellers laughed, and said, more or less together: “Billy.”

  “Who’s Billy?” asked Peter.

  “Our daughter’s ardent suitor,” Carol explained. “I’m sure you’ll see him before the evening is over, selling souvenirs or peanuts.”


  “Or campaign buttons for our next President,” said Peter, who reached around Anne—managing to brush her back on the way—and clapped Jack Riley on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Jack. You’ve still got Harry for another six months. And it could have been worse. We could have nominated Taft.”

  “What makes you so sure I’m for Truman?” asked Riley, without much of a smile. “How do you know I’m not going to vote for Wallace?”

  “Good for you, Jack,” said Carol Feller, who meant it, too, in the spirit of fair play and democracy, though she and her husband hardly wished any luck to the expected third-party run by Roosevelt’s onetime vice president, who, Anne’s father assured her, was little different from Stalin. Jack gave Mrs. Feller a grateful nod, and the party appeared ready to move on from politics, at least the radical kind Jack Riley might actually favor. You couldn’t tell: the last two months, ever since somebody had wounded Walter Reuther with a shotgun, the feelings of autoworkers in these parts had been running high.

  Anne was happy to change the subject in any case. Politicians bored her. She looked at City Hall and its yellow bricks and thought of the road to the Wizard of Oz. They were all like him, promising they’d change everything, even the weather if you asked them to. As it was, the weather had taken a change toward coolness, and she was now glad she had the cardigan jacket (though she’d gotten rid of the scarf that hid her neck). Whatever additional warmth she might require was being supplied by Peter Cox, whose hand had never made it all the way home from its friendly tap of Jack Riley, and had come to rest across her own shoulders. Once or twice he had also managed to maneuver his leg beneath the broad folds of her walkaway skirt. This was a fast worker, she thought, almost wishing she were padded inside the giant contours of last year’s fashions, which she hadn’t had the money or inclination to buy, but which offered a woman the protection of a football player’s uniform. Being of the lower orders, Jack Riley, who she bet was a better kisser than Peter Cox, had had to behave like a gentleman all evening.