He could remember envying all that temporary passion, and wishing he had someone at home to betray, but by the time he’d gone over to London he’d long since learned to imitate his parents’ indifference to love. He’d started practicing his own version of invincibility the summer he’d been the Pierrot up on Mackinac, the summer after things had gone wrong at home. As he’d told Harris Terry weeks ago, it was personality that closed the deals, that got you past the Japs or Mrs. Roosevelt or you name it.
Could he name them? There had been so many girls he no longer could.
His mother’s letter had so much of her silvery nonchalance that it had taken him three hours after reading it—as he lay in bed on Park Street, letting the phone ring in the dark (the tax-department secretary)—to realize the obvious, if still unexplained, matter behind it. Something had happened, something to make her feel there was now a reason for her and Father to be officially apart instead of officially together, as they had been for so long, like two parallel-parked Lincolns. But what was it?
This afternoon he was no closer to guessing. He stuck it out at the office for longer than usual, interrupting himself only to look out the window and across the street at Abner’s. Any sight of her was blocked by the glare, which made the bookshop’s window a blue rectangle, into which the occasional customer would be painted just before entering the shop. At 4:45 Jack Riley arrived and disappeared inside. Were they down to a thirty-five-hour week in Flint? Or had he come home early to take care of his old man? Either way, he was in there, while Peter sat across the street, so deep in the picture’s background it didn’t even count.
His only route forward seemed to be the Dewey Walk, that “peculiar” one-of-a-kind boulevard she’d decided she liked. It was the service road he had to stay on.
Unless, he all at once realized, Dewey himself could be used to bring Peter Cox and Anne Macmurray together.
“Harris! I’m leaving for the day. If Harold comes looking for me, tell him—”
“That you’re on the river? Or that you had to nip over to the tax department in Lansing? Poor Vince Dent’s affairs must be extraordinarily complicated.”
“No, Harris, you can tell him I’ve gone up to Oliver Street to see the mother of our next President.”
BERTRAM HAD JUST BEEN WOUNDED IN A DUEL, FATALLY IT seemed, but Horace Sinclair, who had finally finished Ivanhoe and now had Guy Mannering open on his lap, was paying more attention to WGN, the Chicago Tribune station with a ten-state range, named for the World’s Greatest Newspaper. The announcer was listing the long—and, to Horace, quite pointless—itineraries of the presidential candidates. The public ought to demand that Dewey and Truman get on the same stage and argue things out like shrunken devolutions of Lincoln and Douglas. Instead, the two of them would spend the next three months flying and locomoting all across the country, avoiding each other like a lover and a cuckold.
In other news, the announcer declared, the House of Representatives (for all its parsimony these past weeks) had agreed to spend $65 million to build the United Nations a headquarters in New York. Horace frowned, not because he disapproved of the U.N. (it was a comfortable old idea, like the failed League of Nations), but because the item renewed the rage he’d felt over a billboard he’d seen this morning. COMING SOON TO THIS SITE, it said, big as life, stuck in the riverbank and visible from the Main Street bridge he’d been walking over on his way to the library. OWOSSO’S HERITAGE WALKWAY. CELEBRATING ITS NATIVE SON, THOMAS E. DEWEY, 34TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. It couldn’t be more than twenty feet from Jon’s bones, there on the slope between the Armory and the river.
He’d turned right around and come home, where he spent the afternoon with Guy Mannering, from his own shelves, when he wasn’t making calls to City Hall. None of the council were around, but he finally reached Ed Royers at home, only to receive a nursemaid’s soothings. “Now, Horace, don’t get yourself in a lather. Al put it up himself. We didn’t give him a dime, or any seal of approval. Yes, strictly speaking, it’s premature, but what harm’s it doing?”
He’d hung up with a loud slam, a bad habit the late Mrs. Sinclair had cured him of long ago, but which had come back, like excessive smoking and eating peas with a knife, in his years as a widower. That lonely status was “no excuse for such behavior” (the words she would have used if she were still here), but it was a better one than all the luxurious reasons Wright George had finally sent explaining his inability to come to Owosso anytime soon. His wife was sick; they’d promised visits to their children in other parts of the country; he’d turned his ankle, really rather badly, on the golf course. Without a wife or children or the breath to play golf, Horace had sat seething the last few nights, knowing Wright was doing his best to forget what Horace had told him. He was hoping that fate or luck would prevent the discovery.
Discovery was only half of it, thought Horace. The desecration bothered him as much as the thought of Jackson’s contractors driving their steam shovels into the earth and finding the other box inside the no doubt long-rotted mahogany one. The airtight silver case, the one in which he and Wright and Boyd had each put a self-identifying token, was sure to be there amidst the broken-hearted bones.
Each evening since Wright’s letter, Horace had sat here in his chair, getting perhaps a dozen pages deeper into Guy Mannering, until the wave of exhaustion met and overwhelmed the wave of dread riding his overworked arteries. Then, if he hadn’t fallen asleep in the chair, he would hoist himself up for the slow climb upstairs to the late Mrs. Sinclair’s side of the bed, where he would drift into a messy assortment of dreams.
He was dozing in the chair even now, but a footfall on the wooden porch came and roused him. Either Grimes arriving to collect, or Mrs. Goldstone (recently recommended by Carol Feller) to drop off the two roast chickens he would live off for the next week.
“Come in!” Horace shouted, glad he had his wallet in his pocket and could avoid the effort of rising.
“Colonel.”
“What are you doing here?” It was the young lawyer, Cox, the one he’d once had some hopes for against Jackson.
For a moment, as the ceiling fan blew his blond hair up and down in the dark room, Peter appeared at a loss, unprepared for the energy of the man’s hostility. “Get yourself a drink,” Horace growled, pointing to the tray of liquors a foot away from the silver tea service. “And turn off that radio.” The bottles, stoppered with cut glass, looked warm and syrupy. Peter poured himself what he guessed was sherry, trying as he did to keep smiling at Horace, whose massive head with its still-full share of slicked-back hair looked, in the room’s shadows, like the bronze promontory of a war memorial.
“I’m disappointed in you,” said Horace.
“How come?” asked Peter, taking the seat he hadn’t been offered.
“I heard about what you said at the Dewey Club.”
“Ah,” said Peter. “Introducing Mr. Jackson’s plan.”
He was squinting at the old man, wishing he would turn on a light. Instead, from his chair Horace pulled the curtains’ drawstring and closed them a final six inches against the detested sight of the camera salesman’s ranch house.
“What’s so terrible about it, Colonel?”
“You’ve already heard me on that subject. You were at the council meeting.”
“Where you proposed restoring some of our older buildings.”
The “our” only further inflamed Horace. It was perhaps three months since this young man had arrived in Owosso, after selecting it with a politician’s dowsing rod.
“Why can’t we do both, Colonel? Organize some private funding for the Paymaster Building and, you know, the other one, I forget its name, if the council won’t appropriate anything. I’d be glad to contribute something myself.”
“Stop soft-soaping me. I’m only one vote, Mr. Cox. I left the Army before Thomas E. Dewey was born, carrying, despite my erstwhile nickname, the rank of lieutenant.”
“Is there something personal
in this passion, Mr. Sinclair?” That was the sort of motive Peter could understand, the sort that had brought him here.
“Not one bit!” Horace shouted, with a different, more urgent, agitation. “That riverbank is what carries the life of this town. Poking holes in it is like firing gunshots into a person! I’m just one old man, but I—”
“Tell me about Annie Dewey,” said Peter, as quietly as he could and still be heard.
The change of subject baffled Horace into meekness. Had he missed a question? He was about to start doing his memory exercise, the one he murmured to himself as proof against senility—Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan—when he heard Peter Cox say, just as quietly as before: “Please, tell me about her.”
“She’s as fine a woman as you’ll find in the state of Michigan.”
“But crusty, too, I’ve heard.”
“Nothing wrong with crustiness.”
“No, indeed.”
“Mr. Cox, just what is it that you want? You make me nervous.”
“I don’t mean to, Colonel.”
“Then what is it?”
“I need to talk to Mrs. Dewey, and I’m having trouble getting to her.”
“Really.”
“Mr. Valentine, her houseman, just answered the door, and when he called my name up to her, she said sorry, she wasn’t able to see me. Now or at any other time, apparently.”
Probably decided the one sharpie she’d raised was enough, thought Horace. Or maybe she figured she’d already done this young man enough of a favor; he had heard about that little stunt with the letters at the club meeting. Or maybe she was just getting cautious. There would be plenty of stories about her in the next twelve weeks. Somebody was bound to revive the old rumor that she had once belonged to the Committee of One Million, which she hadn’t. But if she had? Did that make her the only person to discover there will always be some disreputable people advocating your own reputable opinion? Most of the voters on this street had been isolationist until Pearl Harbor.
“What do you want from her?”
“I want her to bring her son to Owosso between now and Election Day.”
“Why can’t he decide to come on his own?”
“Would you? If you were he? I mean, why waste the time? This isn’t exactly a toss-up town. In any case, the Dewey Club hasn’t had any nibbles from the national organization.”
“I’m sure the governor just wants to avoid making some controversial remark—like how good it feels to be back in his hometown.”
Peter leaned forward and nodded, as if Horace had just gotten the point. “I’m sure, if he were here, he’d avoid all controversy. In fact, if some reporter from the campaign train were to ask him what he thought of this immense tribute the town was undertaking to build, I think prudence would pretty much obligate him to say he was touched, but that if it were up to him he’d like to see the money go to, let’s say, orphanages and war heroes.” He paused. “A remark like that could put a damper on the whole project.”
Horace, who by now had gotten the point, and was wondering what was in it for Peter Cox, reopened the curtains several inches and fixed him with a hard look.
Peter knew he couldn’t go to the Fellers for help with this: it seemed the loan of the letters had apparently used up any line of credit he had through them with Mrs. Dewey, and Carol, if not Harold, was sure to smoke out an ulterior motive. He forced himself not to glance at Al Jackson’s suddenly visible house; he returned Horace’s stare without blinking. “I want him here, Colonel. I want everybody pitching in to get ready for him. I want a lot of fuss.”
Horace ran his finger over Guy Mannering’s spine. He looked away from Peter as if he might be considering it; and to give him a moment, Peter looked around the room, from the heavy sconces to the full-sized radio cabinet to the silver tea service.
“Colonel, did you and Mrs. Sinclair ever think of getting a divorce?”
The question, out of the blue and in a different tone from the one he’d been hearing, offended Horace not at all. It prompted no alarm or antisenility exercises. It was as if Peter Cox, for whatever reason, had finally asked him something worth answering.
“No, Mr. Cox, we didn’t.”
“I wonder if people who get divorced ever really separate themselves from each other. I wonder if that’s possible.”
Horace put Guy Mannering on the table and closed his eyes. “Son, one can’t undo anything.”
Peter rose and made ready to go. Instead of shaking Horace’s hand, he gently closed the curtains for him. “Call Mrs. Dewey, Colonel.”
FRANK SHERWOOD LOOKED THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW and wondered how he might land. He wasn’t thinking seriously about jumping, but defenestration was back in the news. This time, unlike the one before with the Czech foreign minister, there seemed no question that the victim, Mrs. Oksana Kosenkina, had descended of her own free will from the third floor of the Soviet consulate in New York. The fifty-two-year-old teacher, a visitor from the U.S.S.R., had failed to show up for the boat home on July 31. The consular authorities were now claiming to have rescued her from White Russian exiles, but Mrs. Kosenkina, from her hospital bed, insisted that the Soviets had taken her prisoner inside their building on Sixty-first Street.
Here in the Comstock Apartments Frank felt similarly stateless. He was cut off from the small patch of memory he’d counted as home, deemed an enemy by his last living connection to it, Jane Herrick, with whom he’d never spoken a word until a week ago Tuesday night.
Tim had to be dead. Frank pictured him lying inside his crumpled plane, as yet undetected by the party of hikers or hunters who would eventually find him, a skeleton in a broken fuselage, his things still in the footlocker the paper had mentioned every day until they tired of the story. In the locker Frank imagined a clean white shirt, like the one they always found with the Japanese soldiers being pulled out of hiding in the jungle, the shirt they kept for the day they’d be flying over Washington, the shirt Tim might have packed to wear when he got to wherever he thought he was going.
The police had shown up three days after the Dawn Patrol. Had she sent them? It was awful either way. One of Chief Rice’s deputies asked what he knew of Tim’s “habits” while examining Frank’s bookcase and night table and, finally, the contents of his top desk drawer. He missed two nearly identical pictures marked “September ’43,” both of them showing two young men a little drunk outside the Red Fox tavern, their arms draped over each other, looking to the slightly drunk third party with the camera like just what they were, a schoolteacher and a bank teller loosening up after work.
The patrolman had asked to go up to the roof and have a look through this telescope he’d heard about, and Frank had obliged, wishing that the daylight hiding Jupiter might somehow hide him as well.
“Are you staying around this summer, Mr. Sherwood?”
“Of course,” he’d answered.
There was nowhere else to go, so he would stay, hearing in his head, over and over, that unexpected conversation he’d had with her, as if it were an Encyclopedia Britannica film he had to show four different classes in a single day. He would keep thinking of what he should have said instead of “I just gave him some astronomy lessons.” He should have said, “I’ve visited his brother’s grave as often as you, sometimes even when you were there, though you didn’t know it. As soon as I saw you coming, or until I’d see you leave, I’d sit in the gazebo or lurk behind the Bell mausoleum.”
But he hadn’t said this. And Jane Herrick had just stared at him, as if he were the German officer who would reappear in her dreams forever, always available for questioning, always without an answer.
Had Frank felt able to question her, he would have asked if she had received a letter written later than the last he’d gotten, the one dated November 30, 1944. He would have asked: When his effects came home before his bones, did you find a key chain with the sun and the moon embossed on a silver disk? By any chance did you put it into the coffin at Oak Hi
ll? There were nights without number that he had wanted to claw the earth and dig down for it, dig for the bones themselves, while she and Tim, a boy he could never figure, and could never dare to talk to about his brother, were sleeping over on Park Street.
He looked at the telephone. Owosso 6410. He knew that was still their number, because he checked it every year in Polk’s City Directory. He had never rung it, but he had a stronger desire than ever to do so now, to dial his neighbor, the only other living soul in the land of dead Herricks.
CHIEF RICE’S DEPUTY HAD TWICE BEEN TO SEE JANE.
On his first visit, he asked if he might have a look at Tim’s room. She said yes, but did not accompany him upstairs; she had almost never gone into the room between ’44 and the day Tim disappeared, and she had no desire to now. After his search, the deputy remarked to her upon the room’s unusual tidiness for a boy Tim’s age. The fastidiousness extended to the fifth of whiskey tucked exactly into the first-baseman’s mitt in a bureau drawer, though the officer confined his observation of that detail to his notepad. To Mrs. Herrick he talked of the neat stacks of magazines and schoolbooks, the folded clothes and sorted coins, before asking if she had straightened things up since last seeing Tim. She answered no, and continued listening to the policeman’s description of the room as if it were a postcard from abroad.
His second visit, sparked by the Raintree County speculations, yielded no hidden notes or X-marked maps, no letters from Margaret Feller or anybody up on the northern peninsula. Mrs. Herrick did manage to identify the copy of Michie & Harlow’s Practical Astronomy that he brought down. Despite its being uninscribed, she remembered it as a present from Frank Sherwood. This merited some underlining in the deputy’s notebook. After showing himself out, he went back to City Hall astonished at the woman’s overall lack of knowledge about her son, a fact that made her mention of Frank Sherwood conspicuous.
Dewey Defeats Truman Page 17
