Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  After the officer’s two visits, and her own to Frank Sherwood’s, Jane had concluded that Tim was dead. Her “three men,” as she had called them in the gay middle days of her marriage, were all gone now. By today, Friday the thirteenth, even the girl from the Argus had stopped calling.

  August 13. On this day in history (not the anniversaries cited by the paper, but the ones she mentally assembled), Arnold Herrick had received a diphtheria vaccination (1931), and Byron O’Clair of Laingsburg had been killed in the Solomon Islands (1943).

  Tim was deader than Arnie. Her older son had bones and a monument, which her fealty had animated with something like life. She had no theories about where Tim had gone or how he had died, nothing that took her beyond that single impulsive trip to the Comstock Apartments, prompted by the sight of the astronomy handbook and, after she’d identified it, the deputy’s mention of Frank Sherwood’s booth at the air show.

  Whenever she saw him on the street, Frank seemed to look at her, the way people once in a while accused her of looking at them. She knew he was mixed up in this, somehow. Her train of thought went nowhere with the feeling, but lately the papers announced no military funeral that would take her mind off it. She was angry at Tim for being dead, for appropriating her grief the way he had taken everything else belonging to Arnie.

  Her despair no longer nourished; it consumed. She could not sleep and was forgetting the simplest things, like her key chain with the sun and moon, which she’d left dangling from the front-door lock all night after coming back from Frank Sherwood’s apartment.

  FOR THE FIFTH NIGHT IN A ROW, ANNE AND JACK SAT IN THE second-floor waiting room at Memorial Hospital, holding hands.

  He was beginning to get her. He’d known better than to suggest The Emperor Waltz at the Capitol this weekend. Forget the music and frills: she would have no more interest in seeing Bing Crosby than he would. The Bishop’s Wife had become a standing joke between them, a story he imagined her telling friends a year from now—their friends, when they were out from under this business with Pop and had time to make them. What he really liked to picture was her telling the story to their daughter, twenty years from now, though he feared pressing his luck, even in his imagination.

  When he’d suggested the livestock parade at the Shiawassee County Fair, he knew she could be counted on to say yes, even after he admitted, like a New Yorker who’s never seen the Statue of Liberty, that he’d never been to it. Nights now, when they were home from the hospital after eating someplace down on Main or Exchange, she’d go back to the house with him and work for an hour on her book, which she claimed to be making progress on at last—“thanks to you,” she’d said. He’d sit across from her, reading the Detroit papers (he’d never been able to stand the Argus, even before it got drunk on Dewey) or a book she’d brought home from Abner’s. Now that Pop was in the hospital, she stayed over most nights, upstairs, though once they’d gone out to the garage for old time’s sake, both of them laughing over the idea, and so excited they’d practically tripped on the back steps.

  She liked doing it, not just for itself, the way it was with Louise, but because it took her someplace else. She liked him to talk at the beginning, not the filthy stuff that years ago that girl from Kroger’s had loved to hear, but hummings and murmurs, which at first had made him feel like an engine, but then, when his murmurs changed, automatically, to little whispered words, like “good” and “fine,” he felt like a kid, which was what she seemed to like best, judging from the sharpness with which she’d start taking in breath. It was then she’d tell him she felt crazy about him, at which point he’d stop murmuring and act his age. He’d rip out her last hairpin and squeeze it until it nearly broke the skin on his palm. He’d lick the rouge from her cheek and leave the spot redder than it had been before.

  He’d broken things off with Louise, two weeks ago, the first Friday morning he could get up the nerve. She’d ripped up a few dozen of Walt’s Taft-Hartley flyers and flung them in his face and called him a son of a bitch before she calmed down and, in her own words, took it like a man. She’d come by a couple of times since, asking questions about Anne and, with no sarcasm, offering advice: “Take a trip someplace, if only for a day. Be someplace where the only thing you know is each other. That’s the way to get to know her.”

  The other night Louise had come by the hospital with Carl; she’d stayed here in the waiting room with Anne while the two men went in to see his father. He’d practically been jumping out of his skin the whole time, but he needn’t have worried. Carl had focused completely on Gene, talking about the ’37 strike as if Gene were really taking it in instead of looking up confused and angry.

  Coming back out he’d heard Anne and Louise talking about him and what a good son he was and how Gene was too ornery to die. With one signal, communicated to him by a movement of her head as she and Carl were starting back for Flint, Louise gave Anne her seal of approval. Later at the house he considered telling Anne about her, about why it had been and how it was over, but he’d stopped short, because it wasn’t something you told your girl—not even this one, who made no secret about having a small past of her own, and who would, in the middle of dinner, start guessing about the Fellers’ sex life. “Jesus, Anne,” he’d say with his mouth full of corn, and she would brighten up, enjoying this the same way she seemed to like the idea, when he was murmuring in bed, that she was the one leading the dance.

  Gene had been asleep when they arrived a half hour ago, and there was little chance he would awaken before visiting hours ended, but the two of them, their nightly schedule established, lingered amidst the green linoleum and translucent glass cubes that divided the waiting room from the nurses’ station. Anne read Colliers, barely realizing her right hand was in Jack’s as she turned the magazine’s pages with her left.

  His rough, rumpled beauty brought forth something extra from her own smoother kind; she felt like the plain white egg she’d seen resting on mica chips in the window of a New York jeweler a couple of years ago. The egg’s bland perfection was suddenly the more dazzling for its surroundings. And yet, as she and Jack walked together on Washington or Main, receiving the appreciative looks she liked and he didn’t notice, she was aware of being the tougher customer, the one who, just the other day, when they were in Storrer’s getting Gene a pair of pajamas for the hospital, wouldn’t let the salesman get away with a nasty remark about Harry Truman. Jack knew all the party-supplied statistics and arguments, but when she tried to put forth a few of them second-hand, he turned red and started nudging her toward the socks counter, as if this weren’t the time or place. “Anne, I’ve known that man since I was six.” As often as not, she felt herself protecting him, from one kind of awkwardness or another—despite the physical command she enjoyed being under more every day, and despite his still-occasional attempts to shield her from things that were supposed to upset her, be they the doctor’s details about pancreatic cancer or the state park service’s best estimates of how long a seventeen-year-old boy might have survived in the woods.

  They were waiting for Gene to die, of course. It was almost like a birth. If she weren’t holding Jack’s hand, she could picture him pacing this waiting room like an expectant father. It had been less than two months since The Bishop’s Wife, but she had taken to imagining a future for them. A few years in Ann Arbor, with Jack going to school on the GI Bill?

  Suddenly, not one siren, but two. Fifteen minutes ago they’d heard the hospital’s red Cadillac ambulance pull out of the parking lot, and now it was returning, behind a police ambulance sounding the treble note in a frantic harmony. The head nurse went squeaking across the linoleum on her crepe soles, standing on tiptoe to get a better look through the window. Whatever it was, the commotion soon dissipated into the emergency room a floor below, while Jack and Anne resumed their pointless watching of the clock.

  Within ten minutes, two groups began forming on the second floor, adults and young people, both of them distressed and smo
king earnestly. Between the two and belonging to neither sat a short, thin fellow in a tan jacket who had his hand near his face, as if trying to conceal the fact that he’d just done some crying. It took Anne a moment to realize who he was.

  “Billy?” She pointed him out to Jack before she got up and crossed the room. “What’s going on?”

  For a second he looked as if he wanted to hide behind the translucent glass. But once Billy started up, his narrative ran with the same don’t-let-them-interrupt-you drive as his sales pitches.

  “Bill Stone lost control of his Ford V-8 out at the Speedway. Actually, it isn’t his, it belongs to some guy from Howell, and it’s a complete wreck now. Stone souped it up and drove it in the first race. He busted through a pole, lost control of the thing completely and sort of flew up into the grandstand. He flipped over three times, must have gone a hundred feet before he came to a stop. People got clipped and creamed the whole way along, and one man wound up pinned under it.”

  Anne winced, and let Jack, who’d come over to listen, too, put his arm around her waist. Billy went on—“The guy that got pinned has gone to the hospital in St. Johns with a few of the others, but they brought at least six people here—” until Jack interrupted him with a question.

  “Why are you here?”

  Billy looked at him, surprised that the current central fact of his own life could elude anyone.

  “It’s Margaret. Her left ankle’s broken and both her legs are cut. You see, everybody was looking at the front-runners. Stone’s Ford was dead last. No one was paying any attention to it. Nobody saw him coming.” He paused for a second, trying to skip over the moments when Margaret and the others were injured. “Stone walked away from it. He just opened the door and got out. A few minutes after it happened some people were saying he’d been thrown clear, but it didn’t happen like that. He hung on. It was like watching one of the bull riders at that rodeo down in New Buffalo last spring. I saw him behind the wheel just before the second flip.”

  “They should close that place down,” said Anne. “There were those two drivers who got killed last month—”

  “Tonight’s card was a benefit for them! One guy’s widow was there. She was talking to Bill Stone after he got out of his car. Miss Macmurray, they didn’t even shut the place down tonight. They’re running the rest of the card right now. Leo Kosecki’s Chevrolet is in the feature race.”

  Jack asked Billy where Margaret’s parents were.

  “On their way home from Lansing. Somebody called them.”

  “Is Margaret calm?” Anne asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Billy, with a look of wonderment at how she could be unaware of another central fact—namely, that he hadn’t been with her. “She was at the race with a couple of her girlfriends. It must have been the first time she’s gone out since the Dawn Patrol. I was sitting miles above her. I only saw her being put onto the stretcher. She was crying. I followed the ambulance on my bicycle.”

  What a miserable summer, Anne thought. “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “I had some stuff at the Speedway. I’m not really hungry.”

  Anne was sure he wanted to cry, and that he wouldn’t let himself do it in front of Jack Riley. She looked at Jack, not just to convey this reading of the situation with her eyes, but to see if she could convey it, like a test of the emergency broadcast system, or the sort of shortwave communication a man and woman didn’t necessarily develop until they’d been together for years.

  Jack took the hint. “I’ll go downstairs and wait for the Fellers.”

  Once he’d left, Billy stood next to Anne, fingering the glass cubes and looking down at his high-top sneakers. “I didn’t even want to go tonight, but one of my sisters told me she’d heard Margaret would be there with a couple of friends. I’d never been able to get her to go with me; I must’ve asked her a dozen times last summer. I knew I still wouldn’t get a chance to talk to her tonight, and I didn’t plan on bothering her, really—” He looked up at Anne, imploring her to believe him on this small point. “I just wanted to see her.”

  “You wanted to see her happy,” said Anne. “Out doing normal things again.”

  Billy nodded, and asked, by the way, what she and Mr. Riley were here for tonight.

  “Jack’s father,” said Anne, pointing to room 208. “He’s very sick.”

  “Are you two going to get married?”

  Refreshed by the question’s childish good sense, Anne brushed one of the freckled cheeks onto which Billy had still not permitted tears to fall. “Let’s go find Margaret,” she said. “Before her parents get here.”

  “Will the doctors let us in?” He’d already started walking.

  “We’ll get in.”

  A floor below, away from some crying women in sleeveless dresses, and some men who didn’t realize they were stroking their young sons’ crew-cut hair, the eight injured spectators who had been brought to Owosso Memorial were being attended to by as many doctors and nurses as could be called in for an extra shift. “When you think about it,” went the relieved refrain, “it was a miracle.” And Anne supposed it had been. No one else had gotten hurt as badly as that man taken to St. Johns, and someone was saying even he might pull through. She threaded her way through the emergency room and down the first-floor corridor, noticing a boy and girl in matching arm slings, as if they’d gotten themselves up for a costume party; one doctor was explaining to an unconvinced father that his daughter’s broken collarbone was not the end of the world.

  Through the half-open door of an examination room, Anne and Billy spotted Margaret sitting up. Her left leg, swollen but clean, was propped up on a chair back.

  It was such a ladylike injury, Margaret thought. Instead of X-rays, she might be waiting for someone to fling his cape over a mud puddle. She could also see in the mirror that she looked about thirteen: along with color, the panic and pain had drained years from her face. But she was calm, clear-eyed, as if she’d finally woken from a dream and admitted, once and for all, that no magical boy or message was going to fly through her window and say that all was well. If a hot rod could bowl twenty people over like a pair of strikes, what kind of fiery crater must a plane falling from the sky have made? How thin was the rope attaching us to this world? What could she cling to? She shook off a chill and slid her hand down the waxy paper on the examining table.

  “Margaret, I’m so sorry.”

  She looked up at the sound of Anne’s voice, and upon seeing Billy she burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry, too.” She was looking at him as she said the words.

  Speechless, he turned to Anne for some sort of permission, before taking the few steps left to reach Margaret and put his arm, very gently, around her shoulders, his shaking thumb coming to rest upon her miraculously unbroken collarbone.

  “If you’re okay by next week, do you want to go to the Capitol? The picture’s going to have Marlene Dietrich.” In sudden alarm, not knowing what transformations the month had effected, he added a question: “Is she still your favorite? If you’re in a wheelchair, I can push.”

  Margaret, through her tears, kissed his hand and said that she would love that.

  EIGHT

  August 24–September 28

  LABOR DAY BEGAN ITS APPROACH WITH PEOPLE HOPING THAT a thunderstorm might sweep away the dog days gripping Owosso and much of the country. Twenty Michiganders had died from the heat, and locally several events preyed on already tired nerves. There were no further mishaps at the Speedway, but up near the country club a child’s birthday party ended with one little girl’s being run over and killed. Over in Vernon a diagnosis confirmed the rumor that two kids had come down with polio.

  The campaign needed a cloudburst, too. President Truman was supposed to arrive in Detroit for a holiday rally in Cadillac Square. His speech, some said, would finally provoke Dewey to step outside and mix things up, but fresh evidence of the challenger’s imperturbability continued to make news. On August 24, when the
temperature reached ninety-eight degrees, Dewey brought his two sons to Yankee Stadium and went on from there to his office in the Roosevelt Hotel for some “personal business.” Just watching him made one feel cooler; even Norman Thomas was forecasting his victory.

  The peacetime draft arrived on the thirtieth, and Billy Grimes, who would turn eighteen before the year was out, reported to the Owosso Armory with Margaret’s brother, Jim, to register. Though her son had only just gotten back from his travels and would be returning to Dartmouth in another two weeks, Carol Feller banished her anxieties about Berlin to make the boys a big breakfast amidst the usual morning bustle. Peter Cox was at her table, too, conferring with Harold about someone’s lawsuit against the Speedway.

  Billy watched the smooth young attorney without envy. After all, here he was, back in his girl’s kitchen, while Peter had lost any chance of success with Anne Macmurray. According to Margaret, who had regained enough interest in life to look out her window, there were nights when Anne never made it all the way home from Jack Riley’s house down on Williams. Billy was encouraged to hear her report this behavior with excited approval: Margaret’s admiration for Miss Macmurray was so thorough, she might be inclined to imitate her in this sphere of activity.

  Outside the Armory the Methodist minister once again stood with his 11-11-11-11-11 tornado. Inside, approaching the registration table, Billy noted the name HERRICK, TIMOTHY L., just a few below his own on the ledger. What would they mark in the box at the end of the day? AWOL? That would actually be sort of swell. It would seem as if Tim had today made one of those defiant gestures that used to let him feel alive. But Billy knew the only reason they hadn’t drawn a line through Tim’s name was its being too soon to declare him “legally” what everyone knew he was, which was dead.