Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  “Well, Mother, I could scarcely believe it when I got your letter from ‘town.’ That Reno postmark was something of a shock.”

  “My letter was perfectly straightforward.”

  “Exactly, Mother. As if this were all routine. Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “No, Mother. That may have been the question for the last fifteen years. The question now is why.”

  “Peter, this litigious style doesn’t suit us.”

  “It’s appropriate. I don’t want to play word games. I’m sick of playing them with girls, let alone my own mother.”

  “A special girl?”

  “Answer my question.”

  She lifted her purse from its place between two spokes of the wagon wheel, and extracted a snapshot. “I found this a couple of months ago. Not long before I last saw you.”

  “Father,” he said. “From about—”

  “Nineteen-thirty-three. September.”

  “So?”

  “Look at the expression.”

  “Happiness.”

  “Perfect happiness. It was taken a few weeks after he met her.”

  “Met whom?”

  “The girlfriend. Oh, please, Peter.”

  He spun the wagon wheel about forty degrees. “I suppose I’ve always guessed that.” He paused before raising his voice. “So you’re here because fifteen years later you’re angry all over again.”

  “No, I’m here because fifteen years later I’ve stopped being angry. When I saw that picture I stopped being angry for the first time. All I could see and remember was his perfect happiness, which I destroyed. Believe me, when I got through with the two of them, there was nothing left. Of course, I didn’t figure on there being nothing left of me, either.”

  “That’s not true, Mother.”

  “Of course it is. Now stop interrupting me. I’m giving you your money’s worth. When I saw that picture, I was enthralled. I wanted that happiness restored.”

  “Father’s long since forgiven you, I’m sure.”

  “Why should he? I haven’t forgiven him. Peter, I’m not talking about his happiness. I’m talking about mine. I want to be happy. I’ve spent fifteen years being victorious. A headless, winged victory. It is September twenty-eighth, 1948, Peter. I am fifty-nine years old, and I want to be happy.”

  The possibility that his mother might cry, or that her eyes might at least, however briefly, glisten, seemed to him as shocking as the idea of the Winged Victory itself flying down the steps of the Louvre.

  In her more familiar, theatrical voice, Lucy Cox came to his rescue. “Do you know who’s enchanting?”

  “Who?” asked Peter. Yes, he wanted to talk about Anne. How impressive Mother had found her on Mackinac. What an unusual beauty she had. How he must have her at all costs—even some gesture as bold as Mrs. Cox’s own Reno venture.

  “Senator Barkley.”

  “Christ, Mother, if you tell me you’re for Truman—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going to need a sound economy in which to shelter my alimony. But I like the man. He keeps up this cheerful front when all the while he’s desperately lonely. You can see it in every photograph. He’d rather have a new wife than this ridiculous job he’s running for.”

  Peter said nothing.

  “I’m looking for a husband, Peter. Someone about fifteen years younger than Senator Barkley.”

  Peter gave the wagon wheel another spin. His mother reached over and stopped it. “I’m looking for someone who, maybe for one minute, maybe for only as long as it took to click the shutter, will make me feel the way your father felt in that picture.”

  He rode back to Reno, trying to stay angry. Mother was like a hypnotist who had emerged from her own spell; she was leaving the theatre, not terribly concerned that her audience—himself, his father—was still “under.” He wanted to find a card game, or just a slot machine, to keep from pondering what she’d said. He drove down Virginia Street toward his motel, the neon reminding him of Mrs. Sinclair’s silver tea service, so well polished it had managed, the other week, to reflect the single sliver of light allowed through the colonel’s curtains. His mother sounded as if she were looking for ecstasy, as if she might suddenly decamp to California like Aldous Huxley; Mrs. Sinclair, to hear the colonel tell it, had never shown anything but serenity. The old man had shimmered like the tea set when extolling her. Did he want the town to stay as it had always been so that he could continue picturing her there? Was it as simple as that?

  At the desk in the lobby he put down change for the paper. Too bad he would be going home before October 7. Richard Nixon would be out here that day to give a speech on “Cold War Treason.” Peter Cox would be watching the Owosso City Council vote on the Dewey Walk.

  “Can you get me some ice?”

  “Of course. You’ve got a message. A Mrs. Bruce called from Michigan. She asked that you call her back and not worry about the hour or the time difference.”

  Had the office flooded? Had the colonel thrashed Al Jackson with that fifty-year-old walking stick he’d brought home from the Cuban jungle?

  Back in his room Peter waited for the operator to make a connection.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Mrs. Bruce. Can you hear me all right?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Cox!”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Trouble? Anything but trouble, Mr. Cox. He’s coming!”

  Peter hesitated as her words ran through the wires.

  “Did you hear me, Mr. Cox? Governor Dewey is coming to Owosso!”

  NINE

  October 4–22

  ON OCTOBER 4, THE DAY PETER COX ARRIVED HOME FROM Nevada, Dewey’s men in New York had still not picked an exact date for the governor’s visit. At the Great Lakes and the Hotel Owosso’s coffee shop, some argued that after the election was better, since greeting a President-elect would be even more momentous than greeting a presidential candidate. To which others rejoined: In that case, you might as well wait until next spring, when he can come back as the actual President. They wanted the visit now, just as they didn’t like having to wait until after November 2 to see themselves in the March of Time.

  This second group got its wish on Thursday, October 7, the day of the city council meeting, when the candidate’s men finally made up their minds and the Argus could announce: MONSTER RECEPTION TO BE TENDERED DEWEY HERE; EXPECTED OCTOBER 23. The council meeting, at which a few sparks had still been expected to fly, wound up being poorly attended, while over at the Elks temple, where the Dewey for President Club was reorganizing itself as a reception committee, you couldn’t find a seat. The sudden change in by-laws was a bit confusing: the club itself continued in existence, even though the new committee, in an all-for-one spirit of civic pride and hospitality, had taken on a Democrat. Bruce Wilson, the young biology teacher at Owosso High, satisfied a couple of objections by explaining what Luther Burbank had done with hybrids, and after that the group felt free to move on to the latest flurries of incoming news. Each hour seemed to bring the name of another state politician who promised to join the governor during his only Michigan appearance of the whole campaign. A stack of decisions had to be taken, from the very basic (should the parade end at City Hall or Willman Field?) to the more subtle (how should the city and its merchants split the cost of decorating the downtown?).

  At 9:15, Al Jackson came running in, out of breath with a sheaf of oaktag under his arm, to announce that the council had just approved the Dewey Walk by a vote of six to one. The single dissenter was Chester Burnham, who they all knew was an old friend of Horace Sinclair’s.

  Someone asked if Horace had even shown up tonight.

  “Didn’t see him,” said Al. “But that’s all in the past. We built the future tonight! That’s what’s important!”

  A couple of people who never would warm up to Al, at least not all the way, turned their attention back to the club/committee’s mimeographed agenda. They’d been doing just fine w
ithout Al, and now that he’d gotten his way about the Walk—which for all its permanence seemed less important than the parade two Saturdays from now—couldn’t he leave them alone?

  He couldn’t. Within ten minutes he was revved up by the can-do wartime speed of the proceedings—racing from one colloquy to another, interrupting the organizers, answering questions he hadn’t been asked. The vice president of the club, who either was or was not the co-chairman of the reception committee, felt ready to tell him to pipe down, when the question arose of what the parade floats would actually depict and whether they could be built in two weeks.

  “Whole universe took only six days!” shouted Al, who before anyone could stop him was at the lectern roiling his oaktag sheets. Their liquid noise was far less audible than he: “We’ve already started! All we need to do is build a version of what we’ll be putting along the river. Look! ‘The Family Fireplace,’ ‘College Days,’ ‘Gotham Courtroom’ …”

  Even Al’s detractors took his point.

  “I thought so!” said Al, who before anyone actually said anything was standing the panels up along the bottom of the stage. “Talk about an unveiling! It’ll be like new-model day in Detroit. Now all you’ve got to do is pick who gets to play who. Good luck to everybody—so long as they know getting picked for the parade doesn’t give them any leg up when we pick people for next year by the river. That’ll be done later, fair and square.”

  At the back of the temple, Peter Cox toyed with the idea of playing Tom Dewey’s father in his newspaper office. Standing atop a great moving crepe-paper version of what was once the Owosso Times Building would have its advantages. Showing himself off with a touch of gray powder at the temples; their next state senator playing father to the latest father of the country. Of course, it might look like too literal a jump on Dewey’s bandwagon, too obvious a grab at his starched little coattails. Maybe it would be better just to secure a dignified place on the speakers’ platform wherever they decided to wind up the parade.

  He’d have a day or two to decide. There was something more important to attend to now.

  “What was that phone number they mentioned, Mrs. Bruce?”

  From her position below his right shoulder, she looked up from her notepad. “The volunteer line?”

  “Yes. Could you write it down?”

  “Owosso 2188,” she said, tearing off a sheet of stenographic paper.

  “Thanks,” he said, heading out toward his car. Which would be the best place to leave it? In her mailbox on Oliver or under the door of Abner’s?

  ON MONDAY AFTERNOON FRANK SHERWOOD ROUNDED THE stairwell between the first and second floors of Owosso High. As always when he found the landing here deserted, he felt relief. Most days, before the 8:15 bell and between class periods, it was filled with the athletic kings of the hill and their girlfriends, the “hearties,” as an Anglophilic colleague in the history department liked to call them. They never actually said anything when he walked by, but whenever he passed, he was waiting for it, imagining he’d heard some noise or seen some gesture that showed they could guess what their parents could not. (He particularly dreaded one pedagogical invention taking hold in some parts of the country: the junior high school. From everything he’d heard, dividing the educational trek into three stages instead of two meant the kids arrived at high school one year later and even more sophisticated, having just spent puberty cut off from the smallest ones.)

  But today was easy. He sat down to mark tests at his desk in front of an empty classroom and listened to the half-strength blowings of the band practicing outside for the Dewey parade. Most of the boys, along with most of the men teachers, were off pheasant hunting on this first day of the season: a peculiar little privilege that had survived the generations and was not without benefit for those who stayed behind. Frank had gotten to cancel two decimated classes.

  They weren’t bad kids—he smiled to think of the boy who’d come back last year with a live turkey vulture for bird-loving Bruce Wilson in Biology—but it would be easier to live without them. Once or twice he’d thought of going along on the hunt; Arnie had shot pheasants, and the chance to stumble down paths that he once walked was almost inducement enough. But every year he declined, content to wonder what had happened to the gun, trying to picture it in a corner of the garage on Park Street. It seemed doubtful that Tim had inherited it. Last year on this day, when Frank went off to an afternoon movie at the Capitol, he’d spotted the boy in the third row, asleep and, he was pretty sure, drunk.

  He’d thought of going to the movies today, but then he noticed that his first canceled class would only run into lunchtime—still too early for the first show. So he’d decided to go down to Oak Hill instead. He just sat in the gazebo for a half hour. Since suffering through those visits from Jane Herrick and Ted Rice’s deputy, he’d been afraid to go near the grave itself, lest somebody spot him there and decide it was suspicious. He hadn’t even gone to his old inconspicuous spot behind the Bell mausoleum. The last thing he wanted to do was watch her at the headstone: it was a lovely morning and there was every reason to think she might be down there.

  She scared him more than the police. A few weeks ago, at Gene Riley’s funeral, she’d come up to him and started making odd conversation about how Saint Paul’s was nice enough in its way, but as cemeteries went it really couldn’t compare to Oak Hill. She’d even asked him for a ride home, which he’d been too flummoxed not to offer, even though he feared a barrage of new questions, ones that had occurred to her in the weeks since his denials that night back in his apartment. But they’d ridden all the way along Chipman and Oliver in a crazy, screaming silence.

  The quiet here in room 211, as four distant clarinets dominated two distant trumpets on “The Sidewalks of New York,” made him as peaceful as he ever was in this building. Marking the third incorrect rendition in a row of the formula for hydrochloric acid, he tried to tell himself that he would be more interested a month from now, when the curriculum put them through a unit of astronomy.

  A knock.

  “Come in,” he said, disappointed that the five minutes he still had coming to him, thanks to the pheasants, would now be spoiled.

  The wooden door opened, and he saw her standing before him, pieces of wet green grass stuck to the darker green of the same skirt she’d had on when she rang his bell in August. With fast, pointless instinct, he shut his grade book. Was there a policeman behind her?

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” she asked, with a kind of desperate clarity, as if she were speaking the one line she had in an Owosso Community Players production and was afraid she wouldn’t get it out.

  “They’ve all gone pheasant hunting,” he said, with the same overenunciation, as if he had misheard a cue and delivered his line out of sequence.

  She sat down in the front row, placing her folded newspaper on the paddle desk. She fidgeted a bit and tried smiling. “They never did have enough of these for southpaws.” She waited a moment before going on. “My son Arnie used to hunt pheasants. Tim was never much interested.”

  “Did—” To his absolute horror, he realized he had started to ask what ever happened to Arnie’s gun. He caught himself, and beneath the desktop dug the point of his red pencil into his thumb. “I don’t think we’re going to get much of anything done this fall. Every club in the school is involved in one way or another with the rally for Dewey, and as soon as that’s over everyone will be getting ready for the homecoming game.” The night before, down on the river, as they screamed and petted their way through a pep rally, he would have to supervise the bonfire, a quasi-scientific duty that fell to him every year.

  “That snake,” she said. “I never like it. It reminds me of maneuvers. Or some terrible medical probe.” She was talking about the giant conga line of seniors that roared through the downtown. Her images for it, disgorged by her obsession, touched him unexpectedly. Surprised at himself, but without checking the movement, he came out from behind the desk and stood less than
two feet from her. He looked down at the newspaper item she had circled with a wax pencil: eighteen Shiawassee County boys were reporting to Flint for pre-induction physicals.

  “I can hear those seniors all the way to my corner of Park Street,” she said. “You like quiet, too, I suppose.”

  Was this a trap? He offered nothing.

  “I saw you at Oak Hill this morning,” she said. “Sitting in the gazebo. It’s a wonderful place to go for peace and quiet, isn’t it?”

  It was a trap, he was sure, and he had to figure out what wild supposition might be coming next.

  “Have you lost someone who’s there?” she asked.

  “All my family are buried in Cincinnati.” He said it with self-imposed calm, in such a low monotone that no one in a theatre could have heard him. She nodded, respectfully. His having dead of his own, wherever they were, was clearly important to her, like a demonstration of good manners.

  “Thank you for dropping me home the other week,” she said, looking up.

  He had to reply. “I’m glad you said hello to me at Mr. Riley’s funeral.” No, he wasn’t; no more glad than that she’d come here. What did she want, and why wouldn’t she come out and say it and then leave him alone forever?

  “There was something I wanted to tell you then,” she said.

  Inside his jacket pocket, he pressed on the red pencil with what he calculated as the maximum force it could stand without snapping in two. He waited. But whatever it was she had to say, she couldn’t make herself do it. Some compulsive numbers came out instead.

  “I suppose you saw the Argus for September 29th. Two weeks ago Wednesday? 358,967 dead. The official count. Not made or released until thirty-seven months after the second surrender. And 150,000, still just a round number, already home or to be returned.”

  As if pushed by a giant ball of ticker tape, Frank began to retreat behind his desk.

  “Mr. Sherwood, I’m sorry,” said Jane, in a tone suddenly lucid with pleading. “I don’t know where Tim is, and you don’t either. I never paid the least bit of attention to him. I’m glad that you gave him some.”