Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  “Heck of a time to open a hotel.”

  “It was a good thing they settled for five stories, instead of the twelve they’d been talking about. But there’s always been a hotel on this spot.” Kay knew by heart the little glass-framed history in the dining room. “The old Ament opened up here in 1844. After that there was the National.”

  “No kidding,” said the salesman. “So a hundred years ago tonight there was a room just where mine is.”

  “Long as you’re on a low floor. Those first hotels weren’t very tall.”

  “Room 214,” said the salesman.

  “It’s kind of like a house that’s been moved,” said Kay. “Is it the same space or not?”

  “We’re a couple of philosophers tonight,” said the salesman, putting two nickels on the counter and nodding good night. “Take care of yourself.”

  A few minutes later, back upstairs in room 214, Don Case set out a photograph of his wife and children on the lacquered-pine dresser—set them out just as, not a hundred but fifty-one years before, a young man occupying the same room, or at least the same space in the Ament Hotel, had set out the photograph of a woman. The dresser in those days had been oak; the wallpaper more abundantly floral; the overhead bulb a gas lamp. Setting out the picture was the last thing Jonathan Adams Darrell did that night, before he went over to the wall containing the gas pipe, the one feeding his room light and the lamps on Main Street below, and inserted a delicate awl.

  Tonight there were no trees on the sidewalk beneath Don Case’s room, but many years ago there had been chestnuts, great leafy ones that Horace Sinclair had climbed as a boy, and from which he’d looked into the window of what was now, as then, room 214. He had not known that when he was twenty-one, at 3 A.M. on a summer’s night in 1897, he would have to sneak into that room, the one occupied by the lifeless body of Jonathan Adams Darrell, nor that, in the fifty-one years to follow, he would never again (though no one but the late Mrs. Sinclair ever realized it) set foot in the hotel on Main Street.

  “WHY DON’T YOU LET ME WALK YOU HOME?” ASKED ANNE.

  He’d never felt more like a jerk. The movie had ended and they were back out on Main and there wasn’t a thing in the world he could find to say to this girl. His mouth was locked and dry, and on top of his head he could feel the Vitalis stinging a little from fresh sweat. Right now he’d give anything to be over in Flint on the office couch with Louise; with Anne Macmurray the only thing he ought to give was up. He couldn’t face sitting across from her in the hotel coffee shop or up at the Red Fox, so he’d said he really needed to get home and take care of his father. Hiding behind his sick old man! And she was making things worse by being nice about it.

  “Okay, thanks,” he finally replied.

  “It’s not such a bad night. It’s really not too hot.”

  “No, not too.”

  “Still, all that snow in the movie looked inviting.” Nothing. “I guess they used doubles for the skating scene. I can’t imagine the actors could really do all those jumps and turns themselves.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  God, she thought; this was some slow boat to China. As they turned right on Exchange Street, passing between the Argus building and the post office, Anne looked at the other dispersing couples and companionable old ladies, aware that here and there a pair of eyes were pausing to assess this apparent match between the Riley boy and that rather fancy girl from the bookstore. She thought again of the oak trees’ invisible telegraph, and wondered what message about her and Jack the other pedestrians could possibly send out on it tonight. The poor man was unable to generate a syllable, let alone the stuff of gossip, as the two of them walked another block, and another, in silence, down to Saginaw, down to Hickory.

  He was trying to think about anything but her, to walk as if they were two kids in a double line at school, the silence enforced upon them. He put one foot in front of the other and thought about the WPA water main she didn’t know she was walking above; about how his brother Jimmy had helped to build it in ’37; and about how that couldn’t be anything she’d be interested in. He only hoped she believed his old man was really bad off, that it was just worry which prevented her date from carrying on a conversation.

  “Is Dewey the next street?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did they name it after him in ’44?”

  “No, it was for another Dewey, one of the guys that founded the town. It was Dewey Street even when I was born. One of his ancestors, I guess.”

  Here was a glint of progress.

  “I guess there will be some people who want to rename the whole town for him,” she said, hoping this might pull the pin from a grenade.

  “I’d move,” said Jack, decisively, his eyes coming up from the sidewalk and meeting hers.

  “Do you really think Truman has a chance?”

  “He ought to. He would if people took a fair look.”

  “It sounds pretty hopeless to me. Did you hear that the Democrats have asked the Republicans to leave the bunting up in the convention hall in Philadelphia so they can use it themselves a couple of weeks from now? That seems so defeated somehow.”

  He appeared a bit mystified by the symbolic significance she had in mind, but she could detect a definite warming trend, if only toward the topic. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he has a couple of tricks up his sleeve,” said Jack, before asking, apologetically, as if he’d forgotten to watch his language, “I guess you’re for Dewey, aren’t you?”

  “I guess I am,” she replied. “But I’ll tell you what.” She put her arm through his. “I’ll keep an open mind.”

  No luck. The new physical arrangement was making him uncomfortable, like a rented tuxedo. If he were relaxed, he’d be dropping his arm over her shoulders. “How long has your mother been gone?”

  “Nine years,” he answered.

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “Two of each. All of them married and moved away by the time I got back from the Army.”

  “Where were you, exactly?”

  “I finished up at Anzio.” He pointed to the scar below his left eye. “January twenty-third, 1944.” Seeing her concerned look, he laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. I know guys who stayed in it after a lot worse. But my eyesight went out of whack for a year or so, and I came home.”

  “January twenty-third, 1944,” she mused. “I would have been lying on my bed in Ann Arbor reading Paradise Lost.”

  He’d heard of it, unless he was confusing it with the other one, Forever Amber. “Is Paradise Lost a book I ought to read?”

  “No, not particularly,” said Anne, with a sincerity that seemed to surprise them both, and relax them slightly.

  They’d reached the Riley home on Williams Street, and Jack, because he was still nervous, or maybe because he regretted wasting most of the last ten minutes in that stupid silence, kept walking her up the driveway, the route he always took into the house, through the garage.

  The appealing smell of grease and wood came at her in the dark. She put her hand on an old sled that stood upright against the wall as he went for the light. License plates from the thirties nailed above the rafters; broken gizmos near a watering can that had to have belonged to his mother; a beat-up sofa and a child’s bicycle with solid tires: they all flared to life under his hand.

  “Johnny? That you?” It was his father, calling from the kitchen.

  Jack gave her a helpless look, as if to say “What can I do?” but she put her finger to her lips. Amused, and vaguely excited by the sexual switch—the pretense that Gene Riley might come out any minute with a bulldog to chase away the suitor taking advantage of his boy—the two of them pulled close together, hiding. She brushed his scar with her fingertips and he rushed to cover her other hand, still on the rudder of the sled, with his own.

  HE KNEW THE HEELS CLICKING UP THE STAIRS BELONGED TO Anne Macmurray, but with the furtiveness that had become natural to him, Frank Sherwood rushed to brush two tiny flecks of t
ooth powder off the edge of the basin and rinse them down the sink. He would stay in here until she’d gone to her room. But his strategy backfired. He was so quiet she assumed the bathroom was vacant. She was pulling on the door.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” Frank replied, wiping his mouth and coming out into the hall. “I was through.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh.” He smiled and squeezed past her, knowing he had to say something more. “Did you like the movie?”

  Anne laughed. “Mrs. Wagner told you where I was?”

  “The town crier,” said Frank, who picked at an imagined spot on his T-shirt.

  “It wasn’t very good. Loretta Young. I can’t stand those sunken cheeks.”

  He could ask her about the plot, but he could not ask about the one thing that actually made him curious—Jack Riley, whom with no need of Mrs. Wagner’s help he’d seen walking up to the doorbell.

  “What did you do tonight, Frank?”

  He liked the way she could keep the ball rolling. It made their quick encounters easier than the others he had every day. “I just read a couple of magazines.”

  “No time with the telescope?” She meant his own, the little one he kept on the roof here.

  “I’m only heading up there now. There’s so much light in the sky this time of year.”

  Please don’t ask to come up with me. She was awfully intelligent, perfectly nice, but there was nothing he had to say to her.

  “Maybe sometime you can show me.”

  “Sure.”

  “I saw you at it the other night. Not here; over at the high school.”

  “Yes,” said Frank, quickly. “I was showing one of my students a couple of planets. He’s sort of lost, not much to do in the summertime, and he’s got an interest in this kind of thing, so I let him …”

  “That’s good,” said Anne. “He’s lucky. Well, enjoy the stars.” She waved good night. “By the way, what’ll you be looking for?”

  “Jupiter,” said Frank, whose hands remained plunged in the pockets of his khaki pants as he started climbing the wooden stairs to the roof.

  He was the only one who ever came up here; the oilcloth over his telescope was exactly where he’d draped it the other night. The equipment was in as good shape as it had been when his German aunt Alma, the one who’d kept house for his widowed father and raised Frank in Cincinnati, gave it to him at the end of ’41, a present for finishing his master’s degree. It spent the beginning of the war packed away—pretty much as he had, over at the naval supply station in Detroit, until they’d let him go in the middle of ’43—he was never sure why—and he’d found the job here. He’d always looked forward to showing Aunt Alma the rings of Saturn through the expensive Leitz she’d bought him with her wages from the shoe factory (“The Germans make the best,” she’d whispered in the note that arrived in Ann Arbor with the package), but before he left the Navy she and his father were both dead and there was no point in going home to Ohio.

  Which was how he’d come here to Owosso, once he found out about the job. Five years later, at thirty-one, he knew that the time spent on his Navy bunk wasn’t an interruption of his life but a preparation for the rest of it. Never a date; never a drink; never a slip. He got to live one first glorious season here; but all at once it was over, the whole world gone out of focus. He’d spent the five years since in the same room here, getting up each morning for work, not even taking a trip this summer or last.

  He was too nervous to be teaching high-school students. His exotic subject offered some protective aura (the school paper ran stories like MR. SHERWOOD EXPLAINS ATOM BOMB), but he wasn’t cut out for a world in which two specks of dandruff, like charged particles, could start a chain reaction of giggles and whispers. He would never be one of the pep-filled class advisors, and he already longed for the days when, after forty, his bachelorhood “confirmed,” he would be immune from even the occasional matchmaking joke in the teachers’ lounge. His own world, which had flared like a supernova that first spring, had collapsed into itself, a dead star too dense to penetrate. He would be in this town, maybe even the same room, until 1982, when he turned sixty-five. Between now and then Saturn would travel its whole circle around the sun.

  How far would I travel to be where you are? How far is the journey from here to a star? He hummed the tune while removing the lens cap. At the front of the tube he saw his distended reflection, like an intruder on the other side of a peephole: the forehead under the thinning red hair was higher, the chin a bit more pointed. You’re a nice-looking man, Frank. He remembered and cherished the words, for all the good they would ever again do him.

  How he would have liked being here, with this telescope, in the 1890s, the one decade when the downtown streets had been lit with gas. But the earth insisted on burning ever more brightly, as if it had decided that looking for another world took too much effort and it would do its best to be discovered instead. Now the lights of Owosso’s business section, installed in ’46, were 6600-lumen incandescents. They made early summer nights like this one even harder for the amateur astronomer trying to golf his way from star to star. Frank crouched down, wiping his hands on his T-shirt before angling the scope above some hickory trees on the eastern edge of town. As he swung the tube south, the night sky passed through its lens like a soap bubble through a wand, until all at once a man, large as a housefly, flew into view. It was Gus Farnham, out in his old Curtiss “Jenny,” the aircraft sure to be less well lit than Gus, who would bring it down by moonlight in some field far from the airport warden’s eye. Frank had heard about the old barnstormer from Mrs. Wagner, but in four years of coming up here he had never aimed the Leitz into a single living room or parked car, and Gus Farnham’s plane wasn’t enough to make him halt the telescope for more than a second on its arc toward the place he was bringing it, the place he brought it first thing every night he was up here: the patch of sky that, by his reckoning, capped the Oak Hill Cemetery.

  “HORACE, YOU’RE OVER HERE,” SAID CAROL FELLER, POINTING to a chair at one end of her oval table. He would be the extra man, and that was fine with him. It was one of the reasons he liked Mrs. Feller, for knowing better than to sit him beside some widow who would fuss over him or, worse yet, decide by evening’s end that she was in line to take the place of the late Mrs. Sinclair.

  “Did you hear that Truman may actually decide to run with Mrs. Roosevelt?” asked Dr. Coates, Carol’s brother, who had grown up in Owosso but now made a small fortune as a radiologist over in Lansing. He was here tonight with his pert blond wife, Sally, who laughed at the latest rumor about Harry Truman’s choice of a vice-presidential candidate. “It sounds like one of those old Eleanor jokes. Remember them?”

  “Would that be a progressive thing to do?” asked Harold Feller. “Or would it be hanging on to the past?”

  “Hanging on to the wreckage,” offered Dr. Coates, whom Carol sat across from Horace.

  The past. Of all the advice that Horace Sinclair received from his fellow Owossoans—those self-interested widows; the young matrons aside from Mrs. Feller; the men his own age (usually “cardiac” patients full of frightened optimism about the new regime Dr. Hume had them on)—the piece he most disliked was the injunction against “living so much in the past.” It always assumed that the past, while perhaps not a bad place, was too easy a spot for anyone to live in; that abiding there was an “escape” that didn’t challenge the mind, which left it as vulnerable as all those septuagenarian hearts. Whereas Horace knew that living in the past demanded much more effort than living in the here and now. As it receded ever further, the past required more and more work for a man to keep up with it, ever greater imaginative stamina to keep chasing it down the tracks. The present asked no more than that he get aboard and take a window seat. Living there showed nothing like a proper regard for life or time; it made them both disposable, like the magazines that had stolen their names. The past was the present t
reasured and enhanced, an object needing the same care as the late Mrs. Sinclair’s silver tea service, the one she had received from her sister in Boston, in 1900, as a wedding present. Horace continued to apply the pink polish to it every Saturday, even though he had never been able to stand the smell through all the decades of his marriage.

  Mrs. Sinclair had not actually shared his love of the past, had in fact done her brisk best over the years to keep him “current.” His propensity to reside in another time probably came from the other Mrs. Sinclair, his mother, who had frozen her imagination in the fall of 1892, before the following year’s depression, which to the Sinclairs had been every bit as Great as the one coming forty years later. It had shut down his father’s bicycle shop, and sent Horace himself looking for work at seventeen. By the time he went off to the Spanish War in ’98 he was a self-educated man, but destined never to be anything else through all his long years as an accountant on Exchange Street.

  “Anne, you’re on Horace’s right, and Sally, I’ve got you on his left.”

  “Everything looks lovely,” said Anne. She surveyed the cut-glass dishes and china platters full of roast potatoes and glazed carrots and sliced beef ribboned with gravy. It looked a bit heavy for this early summer night, when all the curtains hung limply against the open windows, but the “lighter seasonal fare” that cookbooks now talked about was more likely to have caught on in New York or San Francisco than here. As it was, she felt hungry, her appetite fired by anxiety over the whereabouts of her half-blind date. Peter Cox had yet to arrive; he’d called to say he was dealing with Vincent Dent’s final incorporation panic and would be late. He had missed the two rounds of cocktails, and the chair between Carol Feller and her sister-in-law remained empty.

  “Peter said to start, and I’m taking him at his word,” said Carol. “Dig in.”

  Dr. Coates couldn’t stay off politics long enough for everyone to serve themselves. After complimenting his sister on the potatoes, he turned to his brother-in-law and said, “The papers are predicting he’ll put Taft on the Supreme Court and make Dulles Secretary of State. What do you think, Harold?”