Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  And then, after less than two minutes, she was gone, the way poor Bess Truman was going to be all fall, snatched back inside after being dragged out onto the caboose’s platform to offer her dour wave. The microphone came down from behind the latticework, and the kids positioned their bicycles to chase the big lettered truck as soon as it took off for the next shot. The housewives began to disperse, and with a feeling of futility Peter took from his pockets some LEADERSHIP FOR THE FIFTIES flyers. If he accomplished nothing else this afternoon, he would get rid of them.

  “Are these about the Dewey Walk?” asked a plump redhead trying to keep a baby bottle inside junior’s mouth.

  “Actually, they’re—”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Maybe you should try my friend over there.” She shifted the baby to her other shoulder and started for home.

  “Here,” said Peter to the friend. “Take ’em all. If you know anybody you think may be interested, I’d appreciate your passing them along.”

  He couldn’t get away from here fast enough, but his first steps east brought only more annoyance. There in front of the Comstock Apartments sat Riley’s fat green Ford, a battered dowager compared to the sweet little debutante Peter had left parked behind the Matthews Building. Three o’clock and the guy was already at her apartment, home from Flint for the day. Peter knew all about the sick father, but what good did this hovering do? If you asked him, it was morbid. She ought to—

  “Turn around and say hello. Only don’t hit me with your nose.”

  “Where did you come from? And what’s wrong with my nose?”

  “It’s growing.” Anne read from his campaign flyer: “… ‘will implement state programs to complement President Dewey’s national ones on behalf of housing for veterans.’ You’ve made that poor gal who handed me this an accomplice to libel.”

  “Do you want to hear Dewey’s record in New York on housing?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Tell me where you’re coming from instead.”

  “Having tea with Mrs. George Dewey.”

  “Son of a bitch. Sorry. How did you get in there?”

  “Carol brought me. A call for tea-drinking lady extras went out yesterday.”

  He studied her expression. It was taking its pleasure not from the dousing of spotlight it had had, but from the small uniqueness of the event. She looked as if she’d managed to speak with the man who once ran that carousel not too far from the coffin factory.

  “What’s she like?” he asked.

  “A hell of a character, to quote my dad. Have you noticed how many of the older people in this town are? Her, the poor colonel you’ve neglected, Jack’s dad. Do you think we’ve lost something, I mean all the ones in our genera—”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, pardon me for thinking big. She asked me what was selling well, so I told her. Then she asked if I’d read the latest James Gould Cozzens, and I said no, and she fixed me with a look.”

  “What sort of look?”

  “The sort that said, ‘You call yourself a bookseller?’ ”

  They reached Riley’s car. “We can drop you home,” Anne offered. “Jack’s waiting inside. Just let me go and rescue him from Mrs. Wagner. I’m supposed to cook an early dinner and then put in a couple of extra hours at the shop, while he’s at the hospital.” Gene had been brought back there yesterday.

  Riley reemerged with her almost instantly. Was he that eager to be sprung from the landlady, or did Anne already have him trained? Maybe he had her trained, too. His shirt was better pressed than Peter’s own, and he certainly hadn’t gotten it done at Suber’s.

  “Hi, Peter.”

  “How are you.” It was a two-door, and it made more sense for him to ride the five blocks up front, but he got into the back seat as if he knew that was his place.

  “Jack was on the President’s train Monday. Tell him about it, honey.”

  Monitoring the rearview mirror, Peter watched Jack smile at her. “It was a nice little piece of history. A very little one, I guess.”

  “I would have enjoyed reading more about it,” said Peter. “People back here didn’t see much beyond what the AP had. The Democrats blocked the Argus and WOAP guys from getting on at Grand Rapids.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Jack, honking his horn at a straggling cyclist. Anne helped the kid out with a they-went-thataway gesture, before saying, “Yes, Peter. I heard that. And do you know what I think?”

  “Tell me,” he said, leaning forward between the two of them.

  “I say big deal. Dewey has practically every newspaper in the country endorsing him, and don’t tell me they’re going to cover this campaign fairly. Why shouldn’t a little unfairness on the other side even things out? And don’t go giving me any lectures about what we fought the war for.”

  “Are your UAW boys staying in line, Jack? Wallace gave it to them pretty hard the other day.”

  “Would it make you happy if they voted for him?”

  “It wouldn’t make me happy,” said Anne, turning back toward Peter. “Even you’ve got to admit Truman isn’t afraid to displease his friends when he’s got to. Who was ready to draft the railroad strikers last year?”

  “Oh, he understands intimidation all right. Jack, how many UAW workers had to pay the three-dollar fine for not showing up in Detroit on Monday?”

  “Nobody had to pay three cents,” said Jack, making a sharp right onto Park Street.

  “It seems to me,” Anne added, “the only one who’s intimidated is Dewey. Hiding behind Stassen!” As soon as the car stopped, she got out and pushed the front seat forward. “You’re home, Peter.”

  “Hardly,” he answered. “But thanks for the lift. You, too, Jack.”

  The tires didn’t quite screech, but the happy couple were on their way toward Williams Street before he could add a good-bye wave.

  He hadn’t been walking here in the first place, and as soon as they turned the corner, Peter doubled back up Park and across Oliver toward his original destination, the gabled house between Hickory and Oak. Though September was proving almost as hot as August, there was no sign of life or iced tea on the open porch. He went up the front walk, glancing at each curtained window, thinking how stifling it had to be in there. The heavy green drapes of the parlor were parted a couple of inches at most, just far enough for him to get a look inside. He called through them: “Colonel, this will never do.”

  Horace roused himself from what he still called his afternoon “doze,” though that was now just one of three or four long naps.

  “Are you still hounding me?”

  Peter let himself in and switched on a light, sure that the pointless expense of electricity would agitate the old man less than opening the curtains onto the outside world. “Why the terrible mood?”

  Horace picked up the paper Billy Grimes had delivered yesterday afternoon, POLLING OUTFIT SUSPENDS WORK ON PRESIDENTIAL RACE, ran the offending headline. Elmo Roper had announced he would not keep asking people a question whose answer they had already made clear.

  “Don’t worry, Colonel. I can still get you plenty of information. Dewey takes his own polls.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better!”

  “At some point, Colonel, you’re going to tell me if all this upset is really about just papier-mâché and paint. I have a feeling it isn’t.”

  This overture only further inflamed Horace. “I am too old for psychiatry, and you are too young to try and pretend you’re my friend. As if friends did one any good!”

  “Who’s let you down?”

  “In particular, my friend Wright George, who grew up a few streets from here before he went east. I’ve invited him for a visit, but he’s full of excuses.” Horace declined to elaborate. He merely turned and pointed to a letter, apparently as offensive as the Argus, on the dining-room table. It lay by the uncleared remains of some roast chicken on a plate. Peter looked at the old man in profile, noting the new
grayness and sag to his jowls. He had declined noticeably since their last visit.

  “I imagine you’ve been posing for the cameras,” Horace said.

  “Doing my damnedest to. But I can’t get at her. It’s like getting an audience with Queen Mary.”

  “Queen Mary—another woman made of more outstanding stuff than her son.”

  “Those two don’t even speak.”

  “Whereas Annie Dewey and the young governor do. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to bring up again. Well, it so happens I walked Mrs. Dewey home from church on Sunday.”

  “Did you now?” said Peter, pouring himself some of the syrupy cordial. He took a seat behind the dining-room table, at a distance comfortable to the old man’s farsighted eyes. “And what came up in conversation?”

  “The ‘Dewey Walk,’ ” said Horace, puckering the words as insipidly as he could.

  “What did she say?”

  “Whatever it was, she said it between herself and me.”

  “Colonel, a few years ago when I was on the staff of good old Captain Harry Butcher, I was probably the best man in London at keeping seer—”

  “She says it’s the most damned fool idea she’s ever heard of!” Horace seemed to look at the remark he’d unloosed, as if it stood suspended in the air for him to measure whatever hope it held.

  “That should make you happy,” said Peter.

  “It does not,” replied Horace. “Because she clearly won’t say a public word about it. Between now and the election she’s not going to do a thing to discourage anybody, anywhere, who’s pushing her son. By the time she’s ready to speak up, the thing will be half built.”

  “You must have talked about something else as well.”

  “Yes, we did, Mr. Cox. About your fondest desire. That little campaign visit you think will pump up your majority. Now does that make you happy? I suggested it to her as a ‘wonderful’ idea.” More puckering, on the order of “Dewey Walk.”

  “Her reply?”

  “ ‘Tom’s his own law.’ ” He could see Peter’s response coming and waved it off. “You would have been proud of me, Mr. Cox. I argued, ‘Surely you’ve got special influence with him.’ ”

  “Well, she must. Mustn’t she?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea. Now, look, Mr. Cox, I mentioned it. Are you going to keep harassing me? Like another bad memory?”

  No, he’d finished his pitch, and even that wasn’t what had really brought him here. It was the letter from Reno, and his own bad memories of a father who, as the years went by, could barely speak to him, let alone yell. Peter liked this old man’s bark, and wanted to know about the bite: the one the colonel had given life, and the one life was still taking out of his hide. But most of all he wanted to know what real, remembered passion kept pumping out all that uxorious tribute. What sort of union could stay unriven by all except death?

  “Tell me about her, Colonel.” Peter was pointing to the portrait of the late Mrs. Sinclair.

  ONE DAY BEFORE THE END OF SUMMER, WHAT SEEMED THE first decent breeze of the season came through the trees of Saint Paul’s Roman Catholic cemetery at the end of South Chipman. Two graves stood open, one of them fully dug and ready to receive a coffin, the other just barely begun, temporarily abandoned by the workmen in deference to the feelings of those gathered for a funeral at the first.

  Anne Macmurray looked over toward the unready plot. Stuck in the dried-out ground at its border was a pitchfork. She nudged Jack. He looked at it and smiled, recalling their argument last night, as the wake wound down and the Rileys mixed reminiscences with Pat-and-Mike jokes. The conversation had turned to politics, with Jack saying he didn’t think Truman should have accused Dewey of “sticking a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.” The President had gotten carried away at the National Plowing Contest in Dexter, Iowa. But a Riley cousin who grew corn in Fountain County, Indiana, begged to differ with Johnny. If he’d been around there in the thirties, he wouldn’t mince words either. Jack, in the darker of his two suits, what he called his negotiating outfit, said it did Truman no good to sound like the worst hotheads in the CIO. When Anne took the cousin’s side and started teasing him, the rest of the Rileys had felt confirmed in their feeling that this girl was all right.

  Throughout the quick prayers that preceded the lowering of Gene’s body, the pitchfork stood at macabre attention. Anne kept to a polite place in the second row, behind the brothers and sisters who had come back to town, even though her favorite among them, Lorraine, had for two days already been calling her “Annie” and treating her like one of the family. “Thanks for all you did for my dad,” she’d said, handing her a little pin for a present, as matter-of-factly as if she’d brought a side dish over for supper. Anne wondered what Jack had written or said to her over the telephone, but the Rileys were so transparent she could see her reviews posted on their faces.

  As the priest went through the last words of the Apostles’ Creed, Jack felt Anne squeeze his hand from behind. He was feeling oddly happy. The last time he’d been on these grounds had been the morning they’d buried his mother. Today he could barely remember that. He felt as if Gene had finally gotten a hard-earned vacation from his pain, and that everyone here was full of fine, honest feeling—glossing over Gene’s faults, to be sure, but more natural and even festive than people were on those union picnics he never could stand. Mixed into the line of family and old friends (this was the first time he’d ever seen Louise in a hat) were a half dozen people who’d turned out for Anne, which made him wonder, pleasurably, what she’d been telling them about him these last three months. The Fellers had come, along with Margaret and Billy Grimes, like in-laws from another state, a prosperous branch of the family you only saw at funerals and weddings. It was decent of Frank Sherwood to skip a couple of classes and show up; and if Peter Cox had decided to do him a favor by staying away, he was grateful for that, too.

  “I’m sorry for you,” said Jane Herrick with much-practiced dignity. He barely knew her by sight, and wondered what had brought her out. The First War had ended before Gene even finished training for it. Horace Sinclair, still wearing the Truman button Jack had given him, shuffled slowly through the line, his elbow cradled by Mrs. Goldstone, who had driven him here. “You’ll be needing dinners for a little while,” she said to Jack, her eyes bright with kindness and what he could still recognize as Depression fear: she’d started cooking for other people when the Owosso Sugar Company closed in ’34. “I can bring you things for a week or so. How about that?”

  “Thanks,” he said in the same automatic way he’d been saying it for three days, waiting for this strangely enjoyable party to come to an end, so he could at last, and for the first time ever, be alone with Anne.

  Walt Carroll and two other guys from the office were bringing up the rear. Walt told him to take his time coming back, but Jack insisted he’d be in on Wednesday. He still felt bad about having won the toss for the Labor Day train.

  People had begun to walk toward their cars. The body, by prior agreement, would be lowered outside everybody’s presence. Anne came forward and threaded her arm through Jack’s, pointing to a couple he at first didn’t recognize. From the back they appeared to be making hesitant conversation, maybe one of them offering the other a lift; as they set off together, he realized that the two thin figures were Frank Sherwood and Jane Herrick.

  “Now what is that about?” Anne whispered.

  He looked at her and didn’t answer. He was seeing only her interest in it, the way she was adding it up, figuring it out, not for gossip’s sake, but to understand some piece of the world she hadn’t understood before. And while she watched Frank and Mrs. Herrick, she didn’t worry about anyone watching her. He’d never met a girl who cared less about being looked at—or not looked at. Or who could take a compliment with less fuss.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked. “I know this isn’t the place, I know it’s ridiculous, but—”

  She looked
away for a second, back toward all the rows of headstones, newly carved or weatherbeaten: the men and women mated for life and now eternity; the babies of another time, dead the year they were born; long-lived maiden aunts buried with their parents, the dates so strangely aligned it took a visitor a few seconds to sort out the blood ties; the boys who’d gone down into the ground, for a second time, as Jane Herrick listened to “Taps”; the dozens of men who, right in this town, had built the caskets they lay in.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this place, Jack. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

  HE FELT AS IF HE’D DRIVEN OVER FROM NEW HAVEN ON A date, and the desk clerk at this dude ranch outside Reno were a dormitory matron at Vassar. He hadn’t been allowed what she called “up,” though all the rooms were spread out in two big one-story buildings, like giant versions of Al Jackson’s house.

  His mother had come into the lounge looking wonderful, a new jangle of turquoise on her wrist, her hair freshly silvered by the sun. They each had a martini resting on the wagon-wheel table, and she was leafing through three issues of the Argus that Mrs. Bruce had airmailed him.

  “Oh, there’s your name, dear.” She’d found the small item about a debate he’d been in before a government club at the Corunna high school. “Right next to this article about the Dewey boardwalk, or whatever it is. COUNCIL TO VOTE OCT. 7. You mentioned that to me up on Mackinac. You’re for it, if I recall.”

  “Yes.”

  “It must be good politics.”

  “Yeah,” said Peter, impatiently.

  Lucy Cox continued reading aloud, delighted by the project’s comical controversies, like the question of whether space should be left on the east bank, south of, say, the high school, so that depictions of the Dewey administration’s achievements could be added to representations of the candidate’s rise. She finished an inch of her drink before putting the paper down.

  “Peter,” she finally said. “Exactly why are you here? I could scarcely believe it when I got your call from town.”