“I’ll tell you one thing,” Billy continued. “Those Jerries knew how to work. That’s what every farmer around here, not just the cannery boss, will tell you. Wait till this Marshall Plan kicks in and they’re back on their feet over there.”
Anne smiled. “Billy, I’ve got to get to work, if I’m going to stay on mine.” She wished there were some sign of Margaret’s contrite return, so she wouldn’t be leaving this poor eager beaver with nothing but his cardboard cutout. “Oh, look,” she said. “You’ve got a customer coming.”
“Nah,” said Billy, looking down Exchange Street. “It’s my boss, Mr. Jackson.”
“Hey, Billy!” shouted the fast-walking figure. “Who’s your pretty friend?” As he came into closer view, Anne realized that his speed was more nervous than youthful. He must be almost forty. He was loud, too, and sweating more than the weather demanded. He pushed up his eyeglasses—black plastic ones instead of the wire contraptions most men in town still curled over their ears—and extended a thin, hairless arm toward her. She let him pump her hand, noticing as he did that his shirtsleeves were actually made short, cut and hemmed that way instead of rolled up.
“You’re in a hurry this morning,” she said.
“Been in a hurry ever since I got back from France in ’45. Worked at Chrysler before the war, but decided to get off the line and into business. Moved my wife Marie and daughter Jennie from Detroit to here and opened the store at 125 West Exchange Street. Haven’t seen you there! Come on in and I’ll reserve one of these for you. They don’t go on sale till fall.” He pointed with one short-sleeved arm to the Polaroid camera, while the other reached into his pants pocket for a business card. “Had your picture taken with the next President?”
Anne pleaded appearance. “I’m afraid I’m not as well turned out as Mr. Dewey this morning. Perhaps another time.” As she talked, Al Jackson supplied a sort of commentary with his hands, as if he were translating the words of a deaf-mute: a sharply pointed finger that seemed to say “you’re absolutely right” about Dewey’s grooming; a palms-down seesaw to underline the maybe, maybe not of the last part.
“It’s on me, Miss Macmurray. That is your name, isn’t it? Come on.” He commandeered her, as Billy had Margaret, to a place between himself and the candidate, whose photographic mustache and moist, canine eyes were at a level half an inch below her own. She slouched a bit upon noticing she was also taller than Mr. Jackson.
“Hold this,” he said, handing her his briefcase. He broke the pose to help Billy with the suddenly balky camera.
“Is there anything in this?” she asked when he got back. “It feels so light.”
“That briefcase contains twenty-seven pieces of—smile!—paper, Miss Macmurray.” They stepped away from Dewey as Billy began the sixty-second Polaroid countdown. “But they’re twenty-seven pages—three sets, one original, two carbons, nine pages apiece—that are going to change everything. Been working on them for weeks. Marie finished typing this morning. They’re the future of Owosso, Miss Macmurray. A master plan. Isn’t that right, Billy?”
“Thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six,” Billy continued to mutter as he nodded agreement.
“I’m on my way with them to the Argus, and City Hall, and then, this afternoon, to WOAP. Which means I could use you, Billy, to mind my store between three and five. Can you do that?”
“Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty …” Vigorous nods.
“Good! And make sure you give Miss Macmurray her discount when she comes in.”
He was already halfway toward Washington Street, where she ought to be, and down which she now saw Margaret Feller’s Chevrolet tearing at a rate that would provoke scowls from mothers with strollers.
“He almost looks alive, doesn’t he?” asked Billy, handing her the still-curly photograph.
Anne pondered Dewey’s figure and countenance. “I’m not sure I’d go that far.”
“HURRY, BABY, HURRY.”
“Yeah,” murmured Jack Riley, trying to, panting, squeezing Louise Rutkowski’s bare, thin shoulders even harder, pushing faster. It was Louise who had already finished, a full minute ago, with a neat satisfied shout; he was the one who couldn’t quite get there, though he did every Friday at just this time with Louise, here on the beat-up green leather couch in the Flint UAW office he shared with Walt Carroll. Louise dug her nails deeper into his back, and licked his cheek, patiently urgent, and he kept saying yeah, and getting closer, until he’d catch a glimpse of his own socks, which he never had time to remove during one of these meetings, or a pile of REPEAL TAFT-HARTLEY flyers that Walt had neatly stacked. Then he’d lose that ready-to-peak sensation, feel it subside back into his thighs.
He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, thinking about, instead of looking at, Louise, who had flecks of gray in her hair but was amazingly trim for somebody with four grown kids, her taut arms more like a girl’s than a forty-five-year-old woman’s. She was happy about all this—thrilled, she said—even if she still loved Carl. And why shouldn’t she? Everybody loved Carl; even he loved Carl, who had sat down with Jack’s father during the ’37 strike and patted Jack on the shoulder when at sixteen he came with his mother and a thousand other kids and wives to pass food through the windows of the plant. Now Carl was at home, permanently, with a bad back from taking too many chassis down from their hooks on the line; and Jack was here, humping Carl’s wife, who was eighteen years older than himself. She’d explained it to him: “I was faithful all through the war, all through those years when the other men were away and, believe me, sweetie, nobody was faithful, not completely, so I’m not going to feel bad about having my fun now, especially not with somebody as gorgeous as you.” And that was when she pulled back on his spiky hair and plunged her face into his with a fierceness that usually got him as crazy as she was, but today—
Now, on top of everything else, the phone was ringing.
“Don’t, baby, don’t!”
“I’ve got to. It’s my old man. I told him to—”
“Don’t!” Louise cried, turning the radio dial sky high, so that WWJ’s South American Way would drown out the ringing.
“Walt’s gonna come in—”
“No,” said Louise, quickly changing to “Yes, yes,” pretending to be ready again, to be with him now, an idea that got him close to the breaking point, which was what he reached, finally, when the image of Peggy Lee, who was singing “Mañana,” came into his mind—that strange blond babe, the little voice like a wisp of smoke escaping a volcano. This was what it took to blow away the picture of Anne Macmurray that had been sneaking into his brain every few seconds. Peggy brought him over the top like there was no tomorrow, no mañana, and Louise pretended to go right there with him.
“That’s my baby boy,” she said, already on her feet and pulling up her stockings. Jack rested his head on the fat green back of the couch, a white towel over his shoulders, like a dazed boxer who’d fought his way to a draw.
“Friday,” said Louise, kissing him.
“Yeah.”
“You’re a good boy, Jack. Call your dad.”
Through the frosted-glass panel in the door he saw her slender form retreat toward the daylight, back toward the bus and the market to shop for Carl’s supper.
He dialed the phone. “Pop?”
“Where were you?” asked Gene Riley, twenty miles west in Owosso.
“Did you call? I went down the hall to get a Coke. How you feelin’?”
“I’m fine. And listen, speaking of Coke, don’t bring any home tonight. Get some beer. I don’t give a crap what Dr. Hume says. I’m not going to listen to the fight sipping a Coke.”
“Okay,” said Jack. “I guess we can make an exception.”
“What kind of odds are the fellas giving?”
“On the fight, you mean? I haven’t had a chance to hear anything. I don’t think there’s much betting going on.”
“Yeah,” said Gene. “They can’t get interested if it’s just one
colored guy against another.”
“Pop, I’ve got to go. I’ll bring the beer and some potato chips. Is Mrs. Goldstone gonna bring dinner?”
“That’s what you pay her to do, isn’t it? Since I can barely do a goddamned thing for myself anymore?”
“All right. You’re complaining enough I can tell you’re all right. So I’ll sign off.”
“See you later, Johnny.”
Jack sat back for another minute, wiping his face with the towel and thinking about the afternoon ahead: nothing but a meeting on whether the union was happy enough with its new eleven-cent-an-hour increase from GM to join in the planned August celebration of the one-hundred-millionth car to come out of an American plant. He put the towel out of sight and checked his belt to make sure it was fastened, and realized that his twenty minutes with Louise had left him hungry. He’d have to find some lunch somewhere. He’d forgotten his own on the kitchen counter back home; this morning he’d been busy preparing his father’s when he looked up at the clock and realized it was time to go. Right now he only had the energy to stare at the splintery wooden floor.
Soon the door had opened and shut, the frosted glass rattling in its square. It was Walt, who looked at him just sitting there and laughed. “You look like you need a mother.”
“I need a wife,” Jack replied. And not Carl’s, either.
ANNE READ THE ARGUS FOR A SECOND TIME, THE LAST HALF of her tuna-fish sandwich resting on its post-convention editorial:
Their choice for a presidential candidate is almost assured of being the man who will occupy the White House after next January twentieth. The delegates were in effect practically electing a President of the United States.
The phrasing was as redundant as the election itself appeared to the editors.
But the election’s conclusion was the only one they regarded as foregone. Everything else in the Argus was a spirited contest: tonight’s fight; the evening-gown round of the Miss Owosso competition to be held next week at the Capitol Theatre. In fact, the paper appeared to imagine the town’s whole life as a healthy competition, in which the boosterish forces of thrift and industry and get-up-and-go were sure to triumph over all but mortality. Even that foe was conceded to grudgingly: “Mrs. A. Middleton Taken By Death” went the headline of today’s obituary, done in the standard formula. The paper made one feel that Mrs. Middleton and all the dead in Oak Hill Cemetery were victims of a technical knockout, defeated perhaps, but crossing the bar like good sports.
Regardless of the Argus, Anne’s life in Owosso seemed ever more maddeningly tranquil. In the hours since she’d gotten to the bookstore, she had sold exactly three books: two guides from the See America series and one copy of Pearl Buck’s new novel. The ’44 Dewey biographies remained untouched. The only customer in here now, a tall, thin woman who looked familiar, had walked past them with a curled lip. A Truman supporter? There had to be at least a few in town. Anne reminded herself to draw Jack Riley out on the subject Sunday night.
For the past five minutes the woman had been at the little shelf of home-repair manuals, copying out some fixit instructions that she’d obviously come in here to look up without having to spend $4.50 for the book. Anne’s “May I help you?” got a crisp “No, thank you.” She refrained from any further prodding and worried about becoming like Leo Abner, too soft for his own good as a businessman. Boredom was making her slipshod. She had the radio on, down low but tuned to Swingmates, just to keep herself awake. She turned a page of the Argus and I Love Trouble caught her eye: the movie she wouldn’t be seeing at the Corunna drive-in, where she and Jack Riley wouldn’t be necking.
The woman had moved to the knickknacks and notions and picked up a little date book she seemed ready to pay for. With a check, no less, though the book cost only forty cents. Anne ceded her a smile, and then, all at once, taking in the whiteness of her knuckles, and the pink overscrubbed skin of her face, felt flooded with sympathy. Of course, she thought, looking at the tight, precise signature: it was the Herrick boy’s mother. She could now even remember when she’d first seen her, a couple of years ago in front of City Hall, on her first visit to the town, with her roommate, the Owosso girl who eventually got her this job. It had been a November day in ’45, her junior year. The survivors of Bataan were being displayed and cheered by everyone in town, even a badly burned man in a wheelchair, a victim not of the war but of some horrible childhood accident years before, who’d come to applaud some friend, she guessed, maybe the only boy who had never made a cruel remark or stared at him.
In fact, she could remember Jane Herrick’s stare from that fall morning: piercing, intently curious, though Anne had noticed it only when her attention was drawn by the woman’s mutterings, a quiet stream of dates and numbers coming out of her like tape from an adding machine, calculations with no apparent meaning to anyone but herself. She had looked at the survivors without hostility or joy, just a sort of demographer’s zeal, as if there might be a clue in their faces or bearing as to why they had returned intact and not in a coffin.
They were still coming home, those coffins. Right under the Argus’s eight-column headline—GOV. WARREN TO TEAM WITH DEWEY—was the story of “4 More Heroes Coming Back,” three from military graves in the Philippines, another from Europe. Every few weeks you’d see the same item about a little color guard being assembled to go down to the Grand Trunk depot and meet the skeleton of some boy who had lain for years beneath an Asian moon or the wings of French nightingales, but still had to be dug up, replanted amidst native flowers and birdcalls before he could be truly dead.
“Thank you,” said Anne, putting the check beneath the change tray in her register. (Wait a minute, she thought. Hadn’t this woman bought a date book just last month? Was that possible?) Mrs. Herrick said nothing, just put the item into her purse.
Anne watched her go out and turn right. After a minute passed, she went to the door herself and stepped into the sunshine for the first time since arriving this morning. She watched Jane Herrick walk further south on Washington Street, quickly, as if she were a soldier herself, doing double time to the quick beat of some drumming Anne could hear coming from—where? Across the street: the long, slender form of Peter Cox, up on a ladder in his blue striped shirtsleeves, hammering nails into a thick cardboard sign above the entrance to Harold Feller’s law office, the sort of sign that was multiplying all over town today. This one went, DEWEY: HONESTY, STRENGTH. She had enough of the first to know she wanted him to turn and wave; enough of the second to keep from calling out to him.
HE SAW HER ALL RIGHT. AS HE STEPPED DOWN TO THE SIDEWALK and looked up to admire his work—absolutely straight, a museum director couldn’t have done better—he knew she was there in the corner of his eye. But when he looked across Washington Street, it was toward the south end and—ah, the widow Herrick, poor thing. He’d heard about her from Harold’s wife. She must be headed to Oak Hill, to sit alone in the gazebo and think about her boy. If Dewey were smart, he wouldn’t harp too much on fear of another war. The last one still had its stone hand on half the hearts in towns like this one. If you were going to talk about the future, you might as well let people believe there’d be one.
What had Riley’s war been like? he wondered. Had he spun her some sad heroic tale on the ride home last night?
“Tell me something,” said Harris Terry, partner to Harold Feller, when Peter stepped back into the office. “If the economy is so bad, how come you’re closing so many mortgages?” He laughed as he asked the question; they were all Dewey men here.
“Personality, Harris.” Peter swung his wing-tip shoes up onto his desk. He rolled down his sleeves and flashed his big, white smile. “It’ll get you past the Japs, past inflation, even past Mrs. Roosevelt.”
“Yeah, personality,” said Harold Feller, coming in with a pink phone message for his young associate. “I guess that’s why my wife wants you for dinner a week from tonight. Seven-thirty. She told me to tell you.”
“I�
�ll be there, boss.”
Yeah, personality. Peter had it all right, thought Harold Feller, looking at the blond hair falling into the young man’s eyes, and the shirt that had more stripe than white. He liked Peter Cox, and he’d been smart to hire him; but part of him would also like to knock his feet off that desk.
“You men going to listen to the fight at the club?” wondered Harris Terry.
“City or country?” asked Feller, meaning the small club on Ball Street or the golfer’s paradise on the northern outskirts of Owosso. Harold was about to say that he and Carol would be going to the country club, when Peter declared: “City. City Club of Detroit, that is. I’m not going to listen to it on radio with you primitives. They’ve got television in Detroit.”
“Carol and I are going to the country club,” said Harold Feller, pretending to ignore him. “I suspect she and her friends will play bridge in the dining room, while their primitive husbands gather round the radio at the bar.”
“Would you mind taking these along?” Peter handed Feller a bundle of handbills: PETER COX. LEADERSHIP FOR THE 50S.
“Isn’t it a bit early in the campaign for this?”
“Ordinarily, yes. But with people so excited about Dewey, I thought I’d give them this advance opportunity to jump on my bandwagon. There’ll be a lull in July and August, and then I’ll go full tilt in the fall.”
“Uh-huh,” said Feller, tapping the printed slogan. “The fifties? Wouldn’t your term be ending in 1950?”
“That’s why I’m such a leader, Harold. I keep my eye on the future.”
He dialed the telephone number on the slip of pink paper. Mr. Vincent Dent was trying to fill out incorporation papers for his new oil-delivery business, and he couldn’t figure out the forms. If he didn’t have them filed in Lansing by Wednesday, June 30, he was afraid he’d lose some tax deductions for the fiscal year, and so … Peter, who had been handling the matter, listened indulgently—“Yes, Mr. Dent. No, Mr. Dent. Don’t trouble yourself about that, Mr. Dent”—while pointing an imaginary gun at his head, a gesture of boredom for Harold Feller and Harris Terry to appreciate. “Mr. Dent, why don’t I run over and straighten this out for you? No, no problem at all. I’ll be right there. Yes, a cold beer would be very nice.”
Dewey Defeats Truman Page 4
