Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t do anything that will hurt that old man.”

  Neither of them could see him, but the old man in question, having taken a long detour on his way home, was walking down Shiawassee Street, with great concentration, toward the riverbank.

  FOUR

  July 8–15

  TIM HERRICK TOOK A GULP OF GEYER’S LAGER AND SAID, “Thanks, Gus. What do we owe you?”

  His companion behind the Indian Trails bus station, Billy Grimes, knew the exact cost of the bucket Gus Farnham had procured for them from the Top Hat Tap Room. Billy handed over the full eighty-five cents plus a tip. He could settle with Herrick later. There were so many things he needed to settle with his supposed best friend.

  “You want to join us?” asked Tim, spreading out one section of the July 6 Argus on the damp ground near the terminal’s brick rear wall. A faint bit of bebop from the night manager’s radio came through the window. “Gotta be on the qui vive,” said Tim, explaining the near-whisper in which he’d extended the invitation. Gus, whose fund of slang had been unmodified by two world wars, just took his dollar and said, “No, thanks. Gonna go see my girl.”

  “Gus spurns draft,” said Tim to Billy, pointing first to the beer bucket and then to a story in the two-day-old paper about how General Eisenhower had resisted the blandishments of Democrats still hoping he might, next week in Philadelphia, save them from Harry Truman.

  “Herrick slays himself,” said Billy to the still-perplexed Gus, who was hitching up his pants and taking the first steps toward his widowed lady friend in Corunna. “How’s your gal?” he asked Billy by way of good-bye.

  “I haven’t seen her much this week.”

  Herrick didn’t say anything. But he knew, which is to say he knew that Billy knew. How could he not? Margaret was no longer home when Billy came around; the Fellers’ phone was always busy (lots to discuss with her girlfriends); and this afternoon, during a pickup game at Grand Trunk Athletic Park, there had been that look she and Tim shot each other, straight down the first-base line.

  “Say hi to your pa,” said Gus, waving as he took off.

  It was left to Tim to break the silence. “You seen this thing about Civil Aeronautics jobs in Alaska?” he asked, tapping another story in the Argus. “$3,306 a year.” A sum like that was bound to get a rise out of Billy Grimes.

  “It’s not as much as it looks. Do you know what it costs to live up there? I bet they don’t attract anybody but a bunch of broken-down old guys like Gus.”

  “Mr. Sherwood told me he picked up Gus’s plane in his telescope the other night. He said it was big as a bug.”

  “He’s still giving you telescope lessons?”

  “Yeah, we hack around. He’s showed me some stuff on Jupiter a couple of times.”

  “What do you talk about with a guy like that? He’s a teacher. And what makes you so special that he wants to hang around with you?”

  “First of all, I’ve got a head for what he’s talking about. Some of us can calculate more than nickels and dimes, jerkwater.” Tim took a long gulp of beer, which he knew Margaret would have been thrilled to see run down his Adam’s apple. “And second,” he said, pausing to belch, “I think he feels sorry for poor me on account of my poor dead father and poor dead brother.”

  “I think he’s fruity.”

  “Meaning exactly what?” asked Tim, narrowing his eyes and shifting fast enough to tear two pages of the Argus underneath him.

  “Meaning nothing exactly.” That was the problem with the word; it meant two things at once, and maybe he’d intended it to mean a little of both. “Meaning nuts, I guess. He comes into the camera shop and orders two different kinds of lens wipes, like it makes such a difference, and when another customer asks him what he thinks of the weather, he gets this look on his face like it’s some technical question he isn’t sure he can answer.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, he’s not nuts. Nuts is my old lady.” Tim knew that, even now, Mrs. Jane Herrick would still be down at Oak Hill Cemetery, revved into a new cycle of grief by the news that yet another body, that of Albert Jack Holmes, d. France, July 2, 1944, had arrived home today in Owosso, at the Ann Arbor train station. The funeral would be Monday at Jennings-Lyons, and Sgt. Holmes’ parents, the William Holmeses of Alger Avenue, would be there, as would Jane Herrick, who had never met them or their son.

  Calling one’s own mother nuts was, as arguments went, pretty unanswerable, so Billy tried a more oblique attack on Frank Sherwood. “Teachers would be better off having to work summers, instead of doing whatever they do. Reading, I guess.”

  “What’s the last book you finished? Dale Carnegie? You ought to read a little more and find a few things out.”

  “Mr. Quiz Kid.”

  “I don’t mean facts. I mean reasons. Things between the lines. Like the lines of page 464.” Tim refilled his wax cup and said no more.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Page 464 of what?”

  “Raintree County. Go look at the copy down at Abner’s. I underlined the place before I slipped it back onto the shelf.”

  “You returned a book you stole?”

  “I didn’t want to get Anne into trouble.”

  Anne. So Margaret’s friends were already his friends. Clenching his fist, Billy asked, “So what’s the big goddamn secret, anyway? On page 464.”

  “Why the guy that wrote the book killed himself a few months ago.”

  “You’ve lost me.” And he had, totally. His best friend had always been a little different, but lately he was scary. Stewed on beer half the time (he’d already drunk the second and was pouring a third), carrying a gun around at night, looking for Jupiter and talking stuff like this. They said craziness ran in families. Maybe nuts wasn’t just Mrs. Herrick. Maybe nuts was her son, too. In any case, he’d lost his best friend, and his almost-girlfriend along with him. To him. They’d be going off to Jupiter together after fruity Frank Sherwood threw them a bon voyage party. A month ago, when he was telling Margaret about his own determination to escape this town, to make the big money in New York, she’d looked at him and said, “I don’t want to escape it. I want to overcome Owosso.” What had that meant? Something else on page 464?

  “Whatever happened to Sharon?” Billy asked. Tim was guzzling the third beer like it was malted milk a doctor had prescribed to some skin-and-bones guy getting over TB.

  “She’s selling pedal pushers at the Ruth Shop.” He yawned.

  One more small hope—that ladykiller Herrick might still have some interest in the last girl he’d had on his string—now lay dashed at Billy’s sneakered feet, among the damp parking-lot weeds and sodden Argus. It was Margaret, for keeps; and Billy was angry. “Poor Sharon. Just another slob behind a counter earning a paycheck.”

  “Christ, are you touchy. I can’t help it if my old man believed in a lot of insurance and dropped dead early.” It was Alan Herrick’s prudence in 1935 that now permitted his widow to spend the day down at Oak Hill, and his surviving son to loaf through the last two summers—behavior Billy looked at disapprovingly.

  “I’m gone,” Tim said. “You going to want any more of this?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Tim lifted the bucket to his lips and finished off the rest of the Geyer’s.

  “Where you heading?” asked Billy.

  “No place fast.” Tim threw the bucket into the bushes. “But in a little while I’ll be leaving. Going far, far away.” He pointed north, and toward the sky.

  Now he was sounding like Jesus, ready to ascend into heaven. Well, thought Billy, even Herrick can’t fly.

  “POLITICS FULFILLS MAN’S ESSENTIAL AND PERMANENT FUNCTION as a social being, as a part of God’s creation.”

  Al Jackson pointed to the radio in the Hotel Owosso’s coffee shop. “Well, she’s got that right. I’ll give her that, I’ll give her that.” From Philadelphia, the voice of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor, was
complimenting the delegates to the Democratic convention as they sat, in the same wooden chairs the Republicans had occupied three weeks before, probably drenched with sweat.

  The radio had been going all night, straight through Senator Barkley’s sixty-seven minute keynote speech. Kay Schmidt had paid it no more mind than the kitchen exhaust. She smiled politely at Al before checking the supply of eggs for tomorrow morning and wishing the three men in here would finish, so she could close up.

  Things did seem to be reaching a climax. Al Jackson had gotten up from the booth so that the other two, papers spread among their coffee cups, could talk between themselves. At the counter, moving from one stool to another, swiveling, pacing, flipping the cards in the jukebox, pushing up the tops of the creamers and clanking them back down, Al looked like somebody with Saint Vitus’ dance. He was a nice enough fellow, but he was making Kay crazy, pawing through the jar of Dewey buttons and spinning the glass sugar dispenser in a series of noisy circles on the formica surface she’d just finished cleaning. “Marie was over at her Gyro-Duce class tonight.” It seemed his thought had been prompted by the twirling container. “I think she’s just fine myself, but she says she’d like to drop five pounds.” Actually, Marie Jackson could drop twenty and never miss them, but Kay figured Al had never stood long enough in one place to get a good look at his wife.

  “So, gentlemen?” he called out, striding back to the booth, no longer able to stand the wait.

  “Well, Al,” said Councilman Morgan. “We’re talking a couple of hundred thousand dollars. And that’s assuming there are no holdouts among the property owners.”

  “The city’ll make back what it spends before half his first term is over!”

  “I hear a couple of the owners are already resisting,” said Councilman Royers.

  “We’ve only got to get them into the spirit of the thing!” cried Al. “It’s just a piece of their backyards, and they’ll be getting a good price.”

  “They might figure nothing’s worth having hundreds of people tramping across what used to be part of their land.”

  Al looked crestfallen over this possibility, as well as Councilman Morgan’s use of “hundreds” instead of “thousands.” But he was back with a rebuttal before Kay could reach the booth with one more refill. “The tourists will be hidden by the walls, the big murals behind the exhibits. But time is of the essence. Those walls are going to take time—that is, if we get a first-rate painter to paint ’em.”

  Councilman Royers nodded patiently, doubting somehow that Frederick Frieseke, if he were still kicking around in France, would want to hustle home to Owosso to paint twenty-foot-high likenesses of Lucky Luciano and Lepke and all the other milestones on Dewey’s climb to the top. The council had never had to consider such things before. “Al, don’t you think the budget you propose for maintaining this whole thing, once it’s up, is a little small? The gravel paths alone …”

  “Volunteers!” Al threw his reassuring grin, like a double-play ball, from Royers to Morgan to Kay. “The chance to be a part of history and take pride in their town! Like the song says, who could ask for anything more?”

  “Not you,” said Councilman Morgan. “You’ll probably sell about five hundred extra rolls of film a week, once all those tourists start coming.”

  Al looked genuinely hurt.

  “I’m just ribbing you,” said Morgan.

  “With all the town makes from ticket sales and added tax revenues,” Al argued, “everybody is going to come out ahead. There’ll be money to do things we’ve never been able to think about before. We might even clean up the river!” The Shiawassee, despite James Oliver Curwood’s passion for conservation, ran so pollutedly past his castle that ten days ago the state stream control commission in Lansing had declared it unfit for swimming.

  “My wife’s glad it’s off limits this summer,” said Royers. “She’s always afraid the kids are going to pick up polio.”

  Al ignored mention of the disease, as if it were one more untidy part of the past that would soon be taken care of. “Phil. Eddie. It’s already July twelfth. All I’m asking for is a timetable.”

  “That we can give you,” said Morgan. “A first reading of the proposal before the full council on August third. Second reading and a vote on it round about October seventh.”

  Thanking Kay for a fresh napkin, Al failed to hide his disappointment. “I don’t know that we could have fought the war on a schedule as leisurely as that. You can’t make it any faster?”

  “Those are the rules,” said Royers. “Think of it this way, Al. It’ll give you time to whip everybody up, including those yard owners.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Al, reverting to overdrive, wiggling into his pocket for Kay’s tip. “But I’m going to go ahead with a few things on my own. That’s the only way, if we’re going to have this up and running by spring. Jeez, I wish Inauguration Day were still March fourth instead of January twentieth. Did I tell you I talked to somebody over at U of M who thinks he can get us the chair in the law library that Dewey used to sit in every night he was hitting the books? Make a great exhibit!”

  At the counter, Kay Schmidt waved good night to Al and the councilmen as the last syllables of Frances Perkins’ quavery voice died upon the radio waves between Philadelphia and Owosso. It was when she walked back to the booth and collected the three face-up Franklin D. Roosevelt dimes the men had left for her that she realized whose voice she’d missed coming out of the radio tonight, the only one without a band behind it that had ever made her turn up the sound.

  PETER COX STEPPED OFF THE FERRY AND ONTO THE LANDING at Huron Street. The sun shone directly over Fort Mackinac, and the carriage drivers mopped their brows between throws of the dice. There was no particular need for them to look sharp, since at this time of day the disembarking passengers who needed to hire a horse and buggy, the only vehicle permitted on the island, were caught in a seller’s market. Peter was not gifted with much patience, and from the time he’d begun coming here as a child he’d always had reservations about the place’s antediluvian charms. It was beautiful, but after a week he felt trapped in rehearsal for some school play.

  Soon enough a driver whistled for him, and he climbed into the carriage, to be chauffeured at a fast trot over the island’s limestone. Watching the cedar trees on the cliffs above, and beneath him the day-tripping Fudgies, pedaling their rented bicycles en route to purchasing the resort’s trademark delicacy, he felt restored to his normal measures of proprietariness and peace. He would enjoy himself after all. A round of golf before the afternoon was over, then drinks and dinner at the Grand Hotel with his mother. Her clapboard house fronting the straits was empty for ten months of the year, and each summer she complained anew about having to get a horse-drawn dray full of her possessions on and off the island. That was Mother: she shed vanfuls of mental baggage without a backward glance, but could never travel light on worldly goods.

  Mrs. Cox came through the screen door and down the wooden steps. “How long are you staying?”

  “Two weeks,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  “Oh,” she said, “I thought it was a month.” She disguised her relief in a neutral tone that each of them judged a creditable display of warmth. “You’ll be in the middle of some company, you know. Your aunt Ada will be here next weekend.”

  “Then we may be a little crowded. The girl I told you about is coming up then.”

  “Good. My sister will love the idea of chaperoning.”

  “Father isn’t around, is he?”

  “Heavens, no,” said Mrs. Cox, looking over her shoulder, as if alarmed by her son’s morbid imagination. “We’ve traded places; he’s in Palm Springs. Come inside and get yourself settled.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Listening to the radio. I won’t be able to stand it when that little rooster takes the podium, so I thought I’d get all my drama in the daytime. They’re going to make Senator Barkley run for vice president, the poor thi
ng. He’s past seventy, a widower. In fact, they say he’s looking for a wife.”

  “Well, he can squeeze a lot of widowed grandmothers while he’s out kissing their daughters’ babies. And whoever he chooses can retire with him to the blue grasses of Kentucky next year. Honestly, Mother, do you have any idea what’s shaping up? Do you know how many Republicans we’re going to pull into the legislature along with yours truly?”

  “Peter, if you start telling me all that now, we won’t have anything to talk about at dinner. I made a reservation at the hotel for seven. Mr. Woodfill was interested to hear that you were coming back. In fact, he seemed grateful for the warning. You misbehaved there last summer, didn’t you?”

  “Can’t hear you, Mother, can’t hear you,” said Peter as he carried his suitcase up the narrow wooden stairs. They creaked in the same seasonal spots he had heard them creaking since his parents bought this place in 1925. Even then his old room had seemed too small; now it was positively miniature, more like a diorama than part of an actual house, all its wooden furniture painted a little too brightly. Tonight his ankles would hang over the quilt-covered bed.

  Maybe two weeks was too long, however strategic his decision to take them, and however much he already needed to get away from the small-town parade of Vincent Dents, with all their pink mortgage papers and incorporation forms. It would be nice if between now and Anne’s arrival that college girl (with whom he had misbehaved last year, vigorously, for three days, every moment her parents weren’t around) came back. Or another college girl.

  He was determined that Anne Macmurray would soon take up permanent residence in his life and mind, but for another ten days she couldn’t be present in the former, so he didn’t want her cluttering up the latter. Let these two weeks get Riley out of her mind. It wouldn’t take longer than that.

  He had seen her only once since the Fellers’ party, by accident, a few days ago. Over breakfast at the Great Lakes the two of them had calmed down a little, making conversation that was more like trench warfare than swordplay. She was strong, this girl, so strong in her doubts, about herself and the world and what she was doing in it. This book of hers that she’d owned up to: it was as if she were in Owosso for all these people to use her, make her their instrument, their chance to express themselves on her pages. She hadn’t put it this way, of course—would have been mortified to—but that was what he understood. She didn’t really know what she wanted, and in this she reminded him of no other girl he’d known. If she reminded him of anyone, it was his great-uncle, a congregationalist minister outside Philadelphia who, a few years before Peter was born, resigned from his church in an open letter, saying he shouldn’t any longer hold the post when he wasn’t “quite completely convinced” of the basis for what he said every Sunday. Not “quite completely convinced.” He’d had, Peter was sure, several hundred percent more conviction about what he preached than the rest of the ministers up and down the Main Line, who consubstantiated the mystical proportions of a martini with more zeal than they could muster for the Eucharist. It was a kind of doubt more reverent than faith, and she had it, too.