Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  He’d been one of the first babies born in Memorial Hospital, which opened its doors just days before Jane went into labor. She’d held him up to see the cornerstone laid at City Hall in ’24, and a year or so after that he’d begun first grade at the brand-new Emerson School. He’d been first in line for a free ride when the airport opened in 1929, and six years later had his first job running a Skee-Ball booth at the centennial celebrations. When he’d gone into the Navy in ’39, just a week after graduating from Owosso High, he’d practically broken her heart. Why? she’d asked him again and again. There isn’t any war. He’d gotten out in ’41, three months before Pearl Harbor, and that time, by reversing her argument, telling him there soon would be a war, she’d kept him from signing up for a second hitch.

  For the next two years it had been just the three of them—herself and Arnie and Tim, who was so much younger he seemed more like Arnie’s son than brother. Each day, as if he were the papa, Arnie had gone off to and come home from his job in a teller’s cage at State Savings Bank. These had been the best years, these twenty-five months, which she was sure still existed in a part of the universe undetectable even to that teacher with the telescope, the one who was always giving Tim a look through it. From ’41 to ’43 she’d kept expecting a girl to come along, but none had, and she’d gotten used to the idea that they would see out the war, the three of them, just as they were. Arnie’s prior service, plus his being the sole support of a widowed mother and brother, kept him safe from the draft. There was no way the board could know how much the insurance money amounted to.

  But then one night in October of ’43 he’d come into the kitchen with tears in his eyes and sat her down and told her he couldn’t stay any longer, not with everyone he’d gone to school with off in one place or another from the Solomon Islands to the Kasserine Pass. She had to understand, he said; it wasn’t right; she had to know that. And so he shouldered the same bag he’d brought home from the Navy two years before and kissed her good-bye and went out through the back screen door. He left her alone with Tim, who grew into his clothes, moved into his room, and eventually drove his car—becoming, to his mother, an impostor, even while Arnie was still in training down at Fort Benjamin Harrison (another President whose casket had been made in Owosso).

  In the weeks after he went into Europe, she followed the progress of the American armored divisions via the little blue pins moved every day from one spot to another on the map of Europe in the Argus’s window on Exchange Street. All that fall the pins moved faster and faster, like filings drawing closer to a magnet, until the snow began falling and the radios started playing “White Christmas” and she’d gotten her green felt skirt dry-cleaned specially at Suber’s, and then, for one week, the magnet’s charge reversed itself and a handful of pins stopped and fell back and dropped from the map.

  Now, forty-three months later (just fifty-eight days short of what she had calculated would be Arnie’s ten-thousandth day on earth), Jane heard the metal milk box scrape the back porch beneath her window. That girl. She’d forgotten all about her.

  “Margaret?” she called out the window. The girl had been waiting so long she’d brought the milk box over to her chair and propped her feet on it. “He said two o’clock, but he never keeps his word.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Herrick. I don’t mind waiting.”

  “All right, then,” said Jane, who shut the window and turned on the electric fan Tim had actually managed to repair last month. For all she knew the girl would wait all night, until Harold and Carol Feller came looking for her.

  Yes, Margaret just might. Three weeks into her romance, she had gotten used to Tim’s being late, or never arriving at all, and that was all right, because the deep, far-off nature she had fallen in love with was what made him forget, and he always made it up by proposing they do something even more exciting than what they’d planned in the first place. Their being together was like a journey across the mountains; the great peaks were important, not these little molehills of disappointment. And the next great peak would be the Dawn Patrol a week from tomorrow, which Tim could not stop talking about, as if he somehow needed to work her up for the day. She took this as a form of considerateness, his worry that the rally lacked a feminine dimension to interest her. She wanted to tell him that just witnessing his pleasure was the greatest thrill she could have designed for herself. In any case, the Dawn Patrol was fixed upon her calendar as irreversibly as Easter or the first day of school.

  Footsteps coming up the driveway; 4:10 P.M. on her wristwatch. Was it? No, it was Billy, whose fast gait she ought to have recognized. From the edge of the porch she could see him poised beneath Tim’s window, looking up for cigarette smoke, the usual sign of his best friend’s presence at home. He then turned toward her and the porch that (she knew, guiltily) had once been the site of a hundred card games and bull sessions between him and his best friend.

  She and Billy were each angry the other hadn’t turned out to be Tim, but Margaret was bored with waiting, so she invited him up onto the porch. Lonely from her recent absence and Tim’s, he accepted.

  “We were supposed to, I mean we’re going to, drive to Saginaw Bay,” she explained.

  Billy wanted to say he wished he had a dead brother with a car to inherit, but he settled for looking at his own watch, implying as snidely as he could that it was getting a little late for that long a drive, wasn’t it? All he had to do was hold the pause, be cruel, but he couldn’t. “Do you want to see Naked City instead?” he asked. He couldn’t even stop himself from adding the slogan—“THE MOST EXCITING STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST EXCITING CITY!”—just like the old merchandising Billy she’d grown tired of.

  “All three of us?” she asked.

  Well, no, he’d figured on the two of them going alone, but now that she mentioned it, the thought of being with both of them instead of by himself didn’t seem so bad.

  “That’s impossible,” said Margaret, pushing the milk box away with her foot.

  He looked at her and believed there was only a thin line, one more provocation at most, between remaining Billy Grimes and becoming Robert “Murli” Daniels. But he wouldn’t kill her for the thrill of it; he’d kill both of them, her and Tim, for revenge and peace.

  “Margaret?” Mrs. Herrick had come through the screen door. “Oh, hello, Billy,” she said, managing a smile. She liked the boy; he had made Arnie laugh.

  “Hello, Mrs. Herrick.”

  “Margaret, I’m afraid you’ll wait here all day and most of the night.” Couldn’t the girl take a hint? No, she supposed she couldn’t. Jane had seen her one night, weeks ago, behind the bushes across the street.

  “I don’t understand,” said Margaret, groping for permission to stay where she was. “I really don’t know where he could be—”

  “I do,” said Billy.

  “Where?” both women asked, though Margaret inquired with more urgency.

  “With Mr. Sherwood, I’ll bet.”

  “You can’t look at the stars during the day,” said Margaret.

  “Mr. Sherwood doesn’t want to look at the stars,” Billy shouted, trumping her disgust. “He wants to look at Tim.”

  “What do you mean?” said Margaret.

  He was already off the porch and heading for his bicycle, already feeling guilty, maybe even unforgivable, but he said no more. Let them figure it out. He wanted to hurt every one of them, even Mrs. Herrick.

  “OH, WASN’T THE TEA DANCE LOVELY!”

  Ada Gardiner spoke as if, hours later, she’d just realized the fact all over again. The after-dinner breeze raking the porch of the Grand Hotel reminded her that nothing helps the world like a little effusion.

  Anne Macmurray smiled. After thirty hours, and even more of Ada’s company than she had expected, she liked the woman, who was as naturally fluffy as her sister, Mrs. Cox, studied to be sharp.

  “Charles L. Fischer and his Globe Trotters!” cried Ada, relishing the band’s name. “I remember th
em from twenty years ago, when I first came up here with Lucy and Ray. Peter was just a little boy. I don’t think I’ve heard them in all that time since. Not that I’ve made a practice of coming every summer, but—”

  “They were never around in the thirties,” said Mrs. Cox. “But they’ve reappeared since.”

  “Mother thinks it’s auspicious,” explained Peter. “The good times are coming back. The New Deal will be over at last and everything will be all right again. Isn’t that right, Mother? What’s it you want to see return?”

  “Normalcy,” said Mrs. Cox, without embarrassment. “Peter likes to mock everyone’s sentiments,” she told Anne in the instructive tone both mother and son had used to her all day, as if the Coxes were a species apart, unintelligible without constant commentary.

  “Especially the sentiments he holds himself,” said Anne.

  “Exactly,” replied Mrs. Cox, pleased she had taught Anne well enough for the girl to make a remark like that. But Anne knew the woman was also pondering the observation. Despite the smoky, gin-voiced cynicism (itself a kind of nostalgia for the twenties), it was clear that sentiments—especially her son’s—mattered to her a great deal. The thirties hadn’t wounded her with creeping socialism; it was retreating love that had made her suffer.

  “Now why exactly would Peter do that?” asked Peter. “Mock his own sentiments.”

  “A psychologist would call it displacement,” said Anne, looking at Mrs. Cox and Ada Gardiner, the three women smiling as if the question had been taken from a radio audience instead of asked by the subject himself. “Indicating a lack of self-confidence.”

  Ada didn’t have much idea what they were talking about, but their teasing Peter made her recall something fond about him. “You know, I remember a nice time from the thirties. Wasn’t I up here the summer they had that great big costume ball and Peter came dressed as a, I can never get the French word right, a—”

  “Pierrot,” said Peter. “1934. Celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the island’s discovery by the French. I’d just turned sixteen.”

  “And were so handsome!” cried his aunt. “We couldn’t get over it. All of a sudden you were a little man.”

  Not quite, thought Peter, who remembered getting within ten minutes of losing his virginity to a twenty-year-old girl from Pittsburgh.

  “A little man wearing tight silk breeches,” said his mother. “In love with the line of his own leg. Look sharp, Peter. Here comes Mr. Woodfill.”

  Promenading down the Grand’s 628-foot verandah (not the 880 feet he’d gotten Ripley’s Believe It or Not! to print), the hotel’s owner, a vision of affable formality in his starched collar and fully buttoned double-breasted suit, was greeting his guests.

  “They say he’s got the chairs in his own parlor bolted into position,” Peter whispered to Anne. In the ten days since his arrival, he hadn’t seen Mr. Woodfill until now. He’d spent most of his time with some downstate politicians, golfing, riding and discreetly gambling. Or “gaming,” as Mr. Woodfill liked to say, mostly when he was denying the existence of such a thing at the Grand.

  “Hello, Miss Macmurray!”

  Anne and Woodfill had met yesterday, while she was checking into her sixteen-dollar-a-night room and instructing the desk clerk to bill her and not Peter, even if, as the clerk insisted, it had “all been arranged.” What she herself had arranged, once she decided she had to go through with this by now very ill-advised visit, was to keep as much distance as possible from Peter. The result had been a lot of time spent in the company of Mrs. Cox and Aunt Ada, including yesterday’s late lunch, when she had delighted W. Stewart Woodfill, as she was doing again now, by being dressed up a little more than other members of what he called—through the kind of clenched teeth with which people still said “Japs”—the “younger generation.”

  “Did you enjoy your dinner?”

  “Very much,” said Mrs. Cox. “But it’s a shame not to see as many regulars as one used to in the dining room.”

  “Fewer of them each year,” said Mr. Woodfill, whose regret was tempered by the booming first-timers’ trade.

  “Why don’t you join my mother and aunt,” said Peter, “while I show Anne more of the hotel?”

  Declining Peter’s chair, but offering Anne a hand as she rose, Mr. Woodfill recommended the Radio Salon as ideal for conversation at this hour.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Peter. “I think I’m going to run her by the Presidential Apartment. Any chance it’s vacant?”

  “We’ve got a party checking into it tomorrow, but I suppose the bell captain might allow you and Miss Macmurray in for a peek.”

  Anne nodded as Peter led her off. It was clear that Mr. Woodfill could do without any ideas from him.

  “The ‘Apartment of the President of the U.S.’ is a bit of a sore subject,” Peter explained. “They did the thing up ten years ago, hoping Roosevelt would stay over during some state Democratic party conference, but the only guy they could get to hang his hat was Jim Farley.”

  “Of course, all that will change with a Michigan man in the White House, right?”

  “You bet, sweetheart.”

  “So where is it?”

  “Who cares?” Peter propelled her into the art deco cocktail lounge, where they sat down amidst a whirl of flanges and chevrons that still seemed giddy over Repeal. “You know,” he said, “this is the first time we’ve been alone since you got here.”

  “I’ve been too busy buying fudge with your Aunt Ada and playing golf with your mother.”

  “Mother. She’s pronounced you ‘the most extraordinary girl.’ Says she can’t imagine why I’m interested in you.”

  Anne said nothing.

  “It’s a compliment. It means she can’t believe I’d make the effort required to keep a girl like you interested in me.”

  “I know,” said Anne. “That’s what she told me. On the third hole.”

  He paused for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll go first.”

  “First?”

  “First to tell you why I’m interested. In you. Because you’re beautiful, even though you probably think you’re only ‘good-looking.’ Because you’re not straining to make an impression like every other woman in here and out on the porch. And because ten years from now, when you’ve relinquished the handles on the baby carriage, you’ll want to grab on to something besides a cocktail shaker and a golf club. You might even go back to your typewriter.”

  The long-view compliment, she decided, was worth the short-term insult. She kept her gaze steady. “But you do want to be holding a cocktail shaker and a hand of bridge. Maybe a gavel, too, but that would only be until five o’clock. Or three.”

  “So what? You talk as if there’s a contradiction. There isn’t. I want you to be better than I am.”

  Her eyes began to water, and just as he was thinking it was because she’d heard the nicest, noblest thing a woman could hear, she blinked and sniffled and looked into her lap and said, “I’m in love with Jack Riley.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  She laughed with such relief she had trouble stopping. For three absurd weeks she’d kept her hypocrisy bottled up. The waiter, wondering if she was getting hysterics, finally made his way over to them.

  “The lady will have a ginger ale,” said Peter.

  “The lady will have a Cointreau.”

  “Are you sure you won’t have a beer?” asked Peter. “Straight out of the bottle?”

  “The low road doesn’t become you, Peter.”

  “You neither. And you know it, or else you wouldn’t have come up here.”

  Anne looked at the perplexed waiter, and said, “Cointreau, really,” before turning back to Peter. “A second ago you didn’t want me holding a cocktail shaker. Now I’m not supposed to have a beer. You think you’ve got me all figured out, that you can write my script, but you can’t even get the props straight. By the way, having had dinner with you both, I can tell you that Jack has bette
r table manners.” She paused, hoping that he would get madder than she was herself, which wasn’t as mad as she should be. “Honestly, Peter, I’m not sure why I did come up here.” She stared hard at him, as if he might somehow yield up the answer. “I think I like getting the better of you. It’s pretty pointless, but it excites me.”

  “Well, love is exciting.”

  “No. Well, of course it is, but not this kind of exciting.” Love was exciting in the way it was with Jack, something pure and enlarging, a dance in which the partners, instead of thrusting and dipping from one apache move to another, simply held on to each other and moved together.

  She took her drink off the waiter’s tray, feeling less comfortable in this soft jazzy club chair than on the hard old couch in Jack’s garage, where their every move had sent a cloud of dust toward the single light bulb beneath the rafters. Yes, she told herself, Gene Riley’s eight-foot porch was a more natural spot for her to be than Mr. Woodfill’s 880-foot verandah.

  There was one way, of course, to be surer than sure, and that was to make love with Peter. It was unthinkable, but if they could wind themselves down like tops, end the apache dance by collapsing, dumb and spent, on the floor, there would be nothing left between them. The chase would be over and she would be free.

  “Peter, please.”

  “All right. Change of subject. Tell me what I’ve been missing.”

  “Back in Owosso? There’s a big air show a week from tomorrow, and the city council takes up Mr. Jackson’s plan a couple of days after that. The poor old colonel is very upset. Carol Feller swears she can hear him sneezing five blocks away. She’s afraid the top of his head will come off.”

  “We’re going to hear from Jackson Monday night at the Dewey Club. Come down and listen.”

  “Monday? You mean Turnip Day?” Would he smile at that?

  No, he wouldn’t. “Come with the Fellers. I’d take you myself—Riley or no Riley—but I may not get in the door.”

  “Why not?”

  “Haven’t you noticed?” He leaned over and pressed his clean upper lip into hers. She didn’t press back.