Seeing their names together, the way they had traveled alphabetically since the two of them started grade school, made it seem, for a last moment, impossible that they wouldn’t be sharing whatever lay ahead, even fighting their way toward Berlin. They had, in a way, shared even Margaret. She had returned to Billy as if waking up from a dream, and been more affectionate these last two weeks than in all the years he’d known her. Yet he could never rid himself of the feeling that she remained, in some way, Tim’s girl, in a world beyond this one, where Tim was dead and wouldn’t relinquish her.
If Tim and Margaret had gone all the way—something he could not bring himself to ask or imagine—then she was still Tim’s girl, at least until the two of them, he and Margaret, finally made love to each other. Which made the need for that to happen even greater than the biological imperative conceded by The Boy Scout Handbook.
In the meantime, Margaret would be the one to share Berlin with him. On Friday night, as the holiday weekend began, the two of them watched Marlene Dietrich and John Lund romance their way through the rubble of the German capital. As it happened, Margaret did not require a wheelchair; she had already gone from crutches to a cane. With her ankle still in a cast, she had to take Billy’s arm when they got out of her father’s Chevrolet on Main Street. She leaned on him more heavily than she needed to, and once they took their seats he stroked her hair as if she had accomplished something heroic by her journey from the curb. She spent almost the whole movie with her head on his shoulder, and to his astonished delight her whispered commentary showed a preference for Jean Arthur, as the no-nonsense Congresswoman Frost, there in occupied Germany to investigate looseness and corruption, over Dietrich, the black-marketeering femme fatale who sang at the cabaret. Billy had always loved that scratchy little voice Jean Arthur had; it came up like ice-cream soda through a straw, a little sting in its sweetness. And in this movie she was even a Republican.
Margaret had seen some sort of light. Two months ago she had been mooning over that mass murderer, but tonight, on the way down Washington Street in the car, when she’d mentioned Robert Mitchum’s arrest for dope she’d crinkled her nose in disgust. Billy wasn’t going to say he told her so, because when she’d been wrapped up in her dream of Tim he couldn’t tell her anything. He preferred to think that she’d been brought to her senses by suffering. Both of them had; they were now wise beyond their years. All last night and this morning, seven hundred of their fellow students had lined up outside Owosso High, trying to make sure they’d be assigned one of the second-floor lockers for the coming school year. By the time the sun came up, a window had been broken and the principal called the cops—all because everyone said you didn’t rate if you had to lock on the first floor. He and Margaret not only didn’t bother to camp out with everybody else, they just shook their heads when one of Margaret’s friends told them about the melee. And, no, they weren’t interested in taking a couple of the Wallace buttons some of the kids had gotten hold of—as if wearing one would be such a big shock to their parents. The two of them were grown up now. They’d be ready to blow this town in a year. Maybe, before they did, they’d even skip the prom.
STANDING AT THE SIDE OF THE RAIL CAR, AROUND THE CORNER from its rear platform, Jack couldn’t see Harry Truman, but he was close enough to hear him without the microphone: “I understand in your state college out here the veterans are sleeping three deep in a gymnasium, and that there was a time when your Republican city council here in Lansing could have helped remedy that situation. They decided not to do it!” Jack had driven to Lansing two hours ago and was waiting to board the train and ride with the President from here to Detroit to Hamtramck to Pontiac and finally Flint, where he would get off and find Anne. She’d promised to be standing by the fourth post of the railing around the grass in the park, where Truman would speak after a short drive from the station.
He and Walt had gotten the call last Friday from Reuther’s own office: one of them could be part of the UAW delegation on the train. It didn’t seem fair—given everything Walt had been doing against Taft-Hartley, while he’d been distracted by his father and Anne—but Walt insisted they toss a nickel. Jack picked the buffalo side, which landed face up, so here he was with, believe it or not, his heart pounding, thinking about how eight hours from now he might be telling his girl he’d exchanged a couple of words with the President of the United States.
Truman himself seemed unjustifiably calm. He urged everyone to register and make sure they made it to the polls on November 2—reminding them, as had become his habit, that they deserved whatever they got if they didn’t. But having said that, he declared, “I shall be perfectly satisfied with the result. I know what that result will be,” as if he knew something they didn’t. A minute later the train was off on its two-and-a-half-hour run to Detroit. For most of it Jack had to stand, jammed in with an army of small-town mayors, AF of L officials, newspaper reporters and an actual Medal of Honor winner who’d come aboard at Grand Rapids. It was a hot, chaotic ride, the way the press boys said it would be for the whole two months after September 17, when the “whistlestop” campaign would pull out of Washington in earnest. Toledo was the last town on today’s schedule, and a guy from the Blade predicted “Harry’ll be coming onto that platform like a cuckoo out of a clock” until Election Day.
According to one reporter used to making counts, there were 300,000 people in Cadillac Square by 1:30. He said his Republican publisher would see that the figure got edited down to 150,000, but you could trust him: he’d specialized in this kind of thing from war-bond rallies to V-J Day, and there were 300,000 people out there. Even when the minor politicians warming up the crowd couldn’t get it to cheer, the hum of people’s voices gave the square the sound of another world. It reminded Jack of the ’37 strike, when he’d stood behind the ropes with his mother and noticed this look of anticipation on all the women and even the kids. Today’s crowd was in a lighter mood, of course, but there was still this look of waiting to be fed, if only a message or a war cry instead of the actual food they’d been worrying about eleven years ago.
He stepped off the train clutching the pass that would let him back on, and worked his way around the end, where at 1:40 he caught his first glimpse of Truman. The President emerged from the car, through the blue curtains, and started talking just as soon as his spectacles caught the sunlight. “As you know, I speak plainly sometimes. In fact, I speak bluntly sometimes. I am going to speak plainly and bluntly today.” No, he wasn’t the rooster they liked to compare him to, and he wasn’t the cuckoo in a clock; but he did, Jack thought, seem half machine. It was as if some engine down in his stomach kept feeding him the words, firing them out of his mouth like rivets. Anybody in this crowd who’d spent his life hooked up to a line, picking up and bolting and setting down whatever the belt drove past, until he felt he was part of the mechanism, so connected to it he had trouble dreaming about anything else, had to feel connected to Harry right now, if only in the “subconscious,” to use that word Anne liked.
This was the second time Jack had ever seen Reuther, who looked more like a politician, or even a college professor, than Truman. He just stood there listening, quietly holding his hat, probably still wearing bandages under the suit. Jack wondered about the size of the hole the shotgun had put into him, but he wondered for only a moment; you might be able to take your eyes off Harry, but you couldn’t take your ears off him. “You all remember how a Democratic administration turned the greatest depression in history into the most prosperous era the country has ever seen!”
While Jack pounded his palms together with everyone else, a cold trickle of doubt leaked into his belief in all that. Hadn’t a lot of people the Rileys knew been worse off in ’37, after a whole term of FDR, than they’d been at the beginning of ’33? Even Pop might admit that. Maybe it was only the war that turned things around. No, he thought, still clapping, pulverizing the heresy between his hands: today he was proud and excited to be union, and anyway, as
people never remembered to ask themselves, how much worse might ’37 have been after another four years of Hoover?
“Remember that the reactionary of today is a shrewd man. He is in many ways much shrewder than the reactionaries of the twenties. He is a man with a calculating machine where his heart ought to be!” They would lose the election, but they might at least carry Michigan. Seeing all the crowds along the tracks, you wondered how they could lose it. What kind of place was Owosso, anyway? How could it be part of a state full of towns like Hamtramck, where the train arrived for a quick stop at 2:45, just long enough for Truman to tell the crowd: “I understand that you are 97 percent Democratic. Now I wonder what’s the matter with that other 3 percent? See what you can do about that in November!” It was practically the same in Pontiac, where the President told his supporters that voting the Republicans in for no other reason than that they’d been out for sixteen years would be like going back to making buggies because four decades had passed since they started turning out automobiles. Keeping up his attack on Capitol Hill, he laid claim to “the greatest veto record in the history of Congress except for Grover Cleveland,” a fact Jack reminded himself to pass on to Horace Sinclair, the only person he could think of likely to be impressed by it.
It was 7:00 before the train pulled into Flint station and Jack Riley met the President of the United States. He’d been assigned to a bus three vehicles behind Truman’s car, but before the motorcade started off a state party official matched his lapel tag to his name on a list and brought him to a line of twenty local people standing by the limousine’s open door. Truman was shaking everyone’s hand with the regularity of a loom.
“Son,” he said, giving one quick pump to Jack’s arm. Jack had several times rehearsed what would be his own four words should this occasion arise, but before the sounds of “Good luck, Mr. President” could reach his lips, Truman was two men further down the line, snapping off a salute to the World War I vet who headed up the local VFW chapter.
Thirty thousand people packed the park, but Anne was exactly where she said she’d be, in her long skirt and sleeveless white blouse. Her hair was loose, the way he’d been hoping to see it as he pictured this moment all morning and afternoon. She looked as natural to the spot as she ever could have to Darien.
“Anne!”
She heard him on the first shout, and though she couldn’t see him, she waved the TRUMAN-BARKLEY pennant she’d bought an hour ago from a grittier, city version of Billy Grimes.
“Stay where you are!” he cried. “I’ll come to you!” He excused his way through the twelve-deep crowd standing between them, his apologies lost in the shouts of approval that had already commenced for Truman, who was rattling through reminders of labor’s contribution to the war. It was when the President attacked the next piece of reactionary “poppycock” that Jack reached Anne, and kissed her, and felt richer than any of the Republicans profiting from the “rich man’s tax bill,” felt in fact that he had robbed them of one fabulous prize that should have been their own.
“I shook his hand,” he said, and they kissed again. Anne heard the President of the United States talk about choosing hope over fear, as she kissed Jack’s neck and twirled two of those little stalks of hair that were sticking up in the summer heat. The roaring and rhetoric made her want to go out and post the minimum wage in factories, attend discussions of the Four Freedoms with dark-skinned delegates to the U.N. It was only further proof that what had happened between her and Jack was the real thing.
“The speech was a little different in every town,” he said.
“Did you get a picture?”
“A CIO guy I knew was taking some at the train station. I think I’m in one of them; I can call him up.”
“You’re sunburned.”
“I know. I was only off the train for an hour at a time, but I can feel it.”
“I’ve been here since three-thirty. The car is miles away.”
“How was Pop?”
“I went up to his room when I went over to get the car.” Gene Riley was out of the hospital, doped up and in his own bed, at least for a while. A nurse came in the daytime, but Jack felt bad about all Anne was doing to help, each evening and early every morning.
“Was he awake?”
“On and off. I put the radio on in his room. The rally was just getting started in Detroit. I told him you were there.”
“Did he get it?”
“Even better. He thought he was there, too.”
PETER HAD COVERED THE TWO MONTHS’ RENT ON HIS CAMPAIGN office in the Matthews Building with a check his mother sent from Reno. He was paying his one devoted staffer, Mrs. Bruce, whose husband had just retired from Johnson Controls, out of his own pocket. Given her ardor for his prospects and the Republican cause, he probably could have gotten her as a volunteer. When she wasn’t rolling envelopes through the old Underwood he’d borrowed from the basement of Feller, Terry & Nast, she was either gazing at his four-color campaign poster or staring out at the Dewey birthplace.
A month from now he would need extra help to tack up signs and pass out leaflets. Billy Grimes would be perfect, but for the foreseeable future Al Jackson had full use of his after-school services. There was another reason, too, why Billy couldn’t join the Cox campaign. Apparently, Margaret Feller didn’t share her friends’ estimation of the candidate’s dreaminess. Or so Carol Feller had tactfully hinted, while explaining how Billy wasn’t doing anything these days that might risk expulsion from his paradise regained.
“Oh, you’re just exactly right,” said Mrs. Bruce, as she banged on the Underwood. She was taking down Peter’s reply to the President’s Detroit speech, which he had to get to the Argus before four o’clock. He should have done this days ago, but he’d been hoping to play off a reply from on high, and the Dewey camp’s rejoinder to Truman had been less than thundering. It had even been less than personal. On Tuesday night, Harold Stassen, the governor’s opponent in the primaries, acted as his surrogate in Detroit, giving a nationwide radio address from the Masonic Temple there. Dewey listened in “with great interest” from his Pawling, New York farm, but otherwise—said a spokesman—had no comment. Peter had heard the speech here in the office with Mrs. Bruce, the two of them sorting voter lists as she nodded in time to each burst of applause from Detroit.
“Okay, let’s see now. ‘And keeping reporters from the Argus and WOAP off the campaign train, despite earlier assurances that they could ride along with everyone else, only added’ … how about … ‘undemocratic insult to the economic injury Mr. Truman has already done the state.’ That ought to do it.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Bruce, who hit the keys with an aggression she hoped would be worthy of the point. “But do you really want to begin that sentence with a conjunction?”
“I’ll leave that up to you, Mrs. Bruce. I’ve got to get going.”
“Are you going to be in the picture?” The March of Time was back in Owosso, filming a short that would be shown in theatres after Dewey’s election, and a rumor of the shooting schedule had made its way through town. The cameramen should be setting up in front of Annie Dewey’s about now, and Mrs. Bruce couldn’t imagine Peter Cox having any other destination.
Too vain to tell her no one had requested to film him, he settled for asking, as generously as he could manage, “Are you sure you don’t want to come along?”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Mrs. Bruce, inserting a fresh sheet of stationery into the Underwood. “I’ve got to make this perfect by four o’clock.” She couldn’t tell him that her own best chance of getting into the film lay in staying here and waving from the window when the crew reached the Dewey birthplace an hour from now. Surely one of the cameramen would, what was that word, “pan” across the street to catch her standing between the two posters that filled the second-story window, one of Governor Dewey and the other of Mr. Cox—she didn’t know who was handsomer. Mr. Bruce had laughed when she confessed her hope of playing some small female ro
le along the Dewey Walk next spring; it would be even worse to look overeager about the newsreel and have Mr. Cox think her ridiculous.
“Thank you, Mrs. Bruce. My conjunctions are equally grateful, I’m sure.”
The clock on top of City Hall said five minutes to three. Turning north up Water Street, Peter figured he had enough time to get there: he couldn’t imagine the March of Time letting its cameras roll before the grammar schools at each end of Oliver Street disgorged a horde of cycling kiddies to swell the huzzahing throng.
The throng’s housewives, being kept back by Chief Rice himself, already stood three deep at the curb, trampling cables as they watched the sound man hiding a boom mike behind the porch’s latticework for when Annie Dewey emerged to wave and speak whatever piece she’d prepared.
Was there no female dogsbody to whom Peter could flash a smile and introduce himself, giving her the photogenic idea of having Mrs. D. pose with this other bright hope of Owosso, a taller, better-looking surrogate for her unavoidably absent son? The newsreel’s postelection premiere meant the picture wouldn’t do him any good, but a word or two with Mrs. Dewey, unmediated by that Cerberus Mr. Valentine, still might. Alas, there was no girl around to put him in the picture. He was as far outside the frame as he’d imagined himself while looking at the bookshop window.
“Dewey! Dewey! Dewey!” the housewives chanted, before their cycling progeny took up the cry. Do we what, he wanted to ask. Do we barge across the lawn and just shake her hand? It wasn’t possible. As soon as she emerged, the director, if you could call a newsreel shooter that, sat her down on the porch’s striped glider. She was with a woman about the governor’s age. (Miss Liberty of 1909 from the Argus’s pages? All grown up?) Whatever the First-Mother-to-be was saying remained inaudible to the sidewalk audience; the microphone was designed to record, not project. But Peter could see how relaxed she was in her print dress. The steel specs and tightly waved hair belied the way she let the seat glide a little, back and forth, as she answered the man’s questions.
Dewey Defeats Truman Page 19
