“Why are you watching this?” He pointed to her own Truman button.
“Because I love a party. And I can get away with the button just like Anne can, though for a different reason.”
“What’s the difference?”
“She can get away with it because she’s charming. I can get away with it because if anybody gives me a hard time I’ll bite their damned head off.”
Even Louise couldn’t make herself heard over the wave of sound now engulfing their block of Main. Float number nine, the last one, had just surprised the crowd by turning on its own set of lights. Jack looked up and recognized what it was: the White House, two huge frosty white tiers of crepe paper with a dozen lit, trimmed windows blinking on and off.
“Christ,” said Louise, laughing. “They should have stuck Dewey on top of it. He really would look like he was on a wedding cake.”
“LET ME HELP YOU WASH UP.”
“Oh, no,” said Jane Herrick. “I’m just going to run water into the pots, so things won’t stick. Please, go sit in the front parlor. I’ll be in with coffee in a moment.”
Frank was sure she wanted the water’s noise, not its function. Five minutes ago, at nine-twenty, the sound of drums, along with some fainter buzz that must have been the crowd, had begun reaching the house, making her nervous, as if the two of them were the only people at home on Park Street. Quite possibly they were, and the sense of that had made the room a desert island, filled it too full of imminent revelation. She needed, he knew, to take refuge in the music of the faucet, lest the drumbeats crack the evening’s fragile formality, which so far had sheltered the two of them like the glazed bowl holding the stewed carrots.
There had not been one word about Tim, let alone Arnie, unless you counted a single reference to “my babies,” one thrilling bump along a road of early-biographical recitation. She’d established a certain superiority over the parade by telling him a story about flu masks and her own personal meeting with Thomas E. Dewey; the tale of their tennis game followed. Both epidemic and sport were described colorlessly, except for some brief statistical flourishes—body counts and set scores. She had a picture of Dewey, from the 1919 Spic, the high school yearbook Frank had fortunately never had to “advise.” Showing it had led to discussion of the piece in today’s Argus—“page twelve, columns two and three,” she’d said—in which a college roommate of the candidate’s took exception to his stuffy image. Jane assured Frank the roommate was wrong.
The house was beyond stuffy, so he secretly raised the parlor window another inch. Since hot air rose, the upstairs was bound to be even worse, but ever since he’d stepped through the front door it was the upstairs that had suggested itself as a place of heavenly breezes and spilling treasures, the place with a room behind whose door Arnie had slept.
Frank had not been in this house until tonight. Arnie’s never having asked him over was proof of the intensity between them, something forbidden, dangerous, too likely to give itself away in the home Arnie shared with his mother and kid brother. Throughout Mrs. Herrick’s dinner conversation, Frank had fought the impulse to get up from the table and maraud through these domestic precincts, to suck up the sight of every knicknack and carpet runner he’d had to picture in his mind for five—or, to put it as she might, five and one-fifth—years. Excusing himself before they sat down to the table, he’d gone as far as the downstairs bathroom. Once inside he’d been afraid to open the medicine chest, but he’d run his hands over the tiles and mirrors before noticing, amidst a clutter of Q-tips and sachets on a little open shelf, a pin from that college on Gute’s Hill, where Arnie had taken those night classes while working at the State Savings Bank. Could he steal it? Would she notice? He’d settled for making a mental note to touch, before he left the house, the moon-and-sun key chain, which he’d already seen lying on a table in the foyer.
Now, in the front parlor, the sound of the eastward-moving parade grew louder, closer. He watched her bring in the tray, and asked if he could help, but she set it down and poured the coffee herself. Her jaw clenched against the possibility of spillage and the irritating drums. Before she stirred the cups, a spurt of numerical facts gleaned from the Argus and pertaining to frankfurters, wind instruments and the number of cars on the Victory Special emerged from her. He knew why she was so interested in this parade she clearly resented: because Arnie, if he weren’t dead, would be in the thick of it, the way he had thrown himself into the centennial when he was a boy, and before that been one of the first babies out of Memorial Hospital, facts Frank had heard Arnie impart, laughing at his own rube-ish pride, one night in the Chevrolet.
“Will you still vote for Governor Dewey?” Frank finally thought to ask. It was the most personal question he had raised all evening, but right now he felt he could get away with it. A sudden intimacy seemed to demand it: he loved her for hating the parade, and for making him hate it, too.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “I don’t vote.”
He was disappointed. He’d wanted to tell her he planned to cast his own ballot for Truman, but her remark was at some other level, the wide-eyed one she’d been jumping on and off all night, a place where he could no more join her than he could reach the bedroom upstairs.
“History is not in our hands,” she elaborated. “It will unfold just as it’s planning to, whether we send Tom to the White House or keep Mr. Truman there.”
He nodded, and she stepped back down, her eyes resuming the look of the here and now.
“And what keeps you here, Mr. Sherwood? In Owosso, I mean.”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Herrick.” The lie was so big it demanded a varnish of truth. “I don’t really have a home anymore.” But that was a lie, too; his home was the one he shared with her, in secret alternation, down at Oak Hill.
“There’s no one special? Here or anywhere else?”
“No, there’s no one special.” Could she mean a woman? Had her suspicions receded so far as to leave him beached in full normality?
“Was there ever?” She was almost girlish now, teasing him.
“Once,” he said, with the full measure of daring he’d permit himself tonight. “Someone who’s not here any more.”
“Why don’t you get away?” she asked, her eyes undilated, fully focused on him; the two of them, for all her misapprehension, stood on the same level.
“I’m not really looking,” he said. It was a true statement, but he hated the social laugh with which he accompanied it.
“I don’t necessarily mean someone,” she said, still present, still fully lucid. “Just something, maybe.” She sighed. “You know, towns like these …” She stopped herself, as if, without experience of anything else, she had no right to criticize.
“My neighbor, Anne Macmurray, tells me she came here to find something.”
Jane shook her head, unimpressed by whatever this girl in the bookshop thought she was doing.
“How old are you, Frank?”
“Thirty-one.”
She instantly did the arithmetic. “When I was thirty-one, I was absolutely happy.” She meant, he understood, that all her men were still alive, and that he should be happy, too, at least for a while longer. He saw her struggling to stay where she was, to avoid falling down the statistical well of her obsession. She was trying to remain with him, on the plane of sympathy. She fought the widening of her eyes like a patient trying to blink away an optometrist’s drops.
“Do you have any money?” she asked.
“Seven hundred dollars. In the State Savings Bank,” he added, determined not to dare anything further.
“My son used to work there.”
“Oh?” Each foray into truth demanded its own shameful camouflage. He could remember the day he’d opened the account, August 18, 1943, and the four times he’d come back during the next two weeks, depositing amounts that were comically, suspiciously small. He had kept going in, just before closing time, until it finally happened: Mr. Herrick, as his teller’s pin read, suggeste
d they go out and get themselves a glass of beer.
“My son used to say, if he had a lot of money, he’d go to New York.”
“He did?” There was no lie in the question. Frank’s surprise was genuine. He’d never heard Arnie indicate anything but cheerful acceptance of his role in life, a widowed mother’s comfort and a kid brother’s father. Responsibility was his sunlight; he sought it like a photosynthesizing plant. “Another day, another dollar” was fine by his sunny disposition, which asked for nothing outside this one-horse town but the chance to shoot pheasants a couple of times a year and go to the movies on Saturday night. Unless the chance to sustain some new happiness, a deeper, dangerous one, had secretly begun unsettling him?
“When did he say that?” Frank asked.
“A few weeks before he left. He was sitting in the chair you’re in now. The radio was on, playing ‘This Can’t Be Love’ one night after dinner, and I asked him why he looked so”—she paused to find the word—“enchanted, that’s how he looked, and it wasn’t because of the song itself. It was more that it was coming ‘live,’ in the very moment, from New York. For some reason that fact struck him, as if he were realizing it for the first time. Some friend of his had just explained radio waves to him, and this common thing was suddenly magical. ‘Life would be easy there,’ he said, as if he were standing, right then, on a corner in the middle of Manhattan.”
Surely it was the need for responsibility that had made him join up when he didn’t have to. That’s what Frank told himself most nights; there was nothing that could have changed things. But on other nights, when he had a need to feel guilty, and ecstatic, he let himself wonder: Did he go because of me? Because staying here was too dangerous for us both? That Arnie had gone into the Army to get away from him was the surest proof of love he could have given, more passionate and generous than refusing to invite him home.
Life would be easy there. Was it possible that for one moment, before too much responsibility killed him, the way too much light will kill a plant, he had struggled to lean his nature away from it? Had he been looking for a way out, one the two of them could share?
“I think some part of him is there even now.” As Jane said this, her eyes were widening, becoming just wild enough for him to fear she would now drown him with figures about the actual locations of the glorious dead. But it didn’t happen. All at once she was back here and calm.
“Can you hear it?” she asked. “It’s stopped.”
It was almost ten o’clock. The parade had reached the field and could no longer be heard here at the corner of Oliver and Park. Her mind could rest. The silence of the grave could settle over her once more. “Thank you,” she said, leaning over to touch Frank’s knee. “Thank you for being with me.”
THE SEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE IN THE STANDS WERE FREEZING. Why hadn’t he thought of a blanket concession? Billy Grimes paused on the edge of Willman Field to admire the Dewey operation. There was the special podium, flown into town in advance of the candidate; the four rows of press tables topped with sharp pencils and special telephones, like restaurant tables in the movies. And there was the huge canopy, folded up but standing by, in case the skies opened and the 250 people who would be on the still less than half-occupied platform needed cover.
Peter Cox sat on a folding chair far from the podium, holding the side of his face that didn’t hurt. All day he’d kept ice on his injured eye and cheek. “Insulted,” that dainty coroner’s word, was actually a better term than “injured” for what had happened to his head. He’d lain alone in the dark last night, not picking up the phone (he was sure it was Mother, still in Reno), and thinking about how Riley, after that cornball sucker punch, had managed to emerge the crowd’s favorite. All he had done was raise a few important points, national and local, before Studs Lonigan started in with the fists.
For one instant, before his vision cleared, he’d thought he had actually come out the winner, that Riley would be thrown out of the City Club, and the Feller party, including Anne, would do what good Americans now did with anyone they’d just seen bombed to kingdom come: shower them with the spoils of war. In his case, that would have been Anne, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Out of the corner of his good eye, as Harold handed him his hat, he’d noticed her standing there, safely draped with Riley’s arm, the one that had belted him.
At three o’clock this afternoon, he’d checked his face in the mirror and decided it was not yet sufficiently presentable to travel all the way out to Jackson with the reception committee. And he did not mean unpresentable to her. The contest was finished and she was welcome to Riley. He’d gone off to the kitchen to make another ice pack and climbed into bed with it, getting up only an hour ago. His head still hurt, but the darkness was doing wonders for his looks.
What he felt was more like a hangover than anything else, and when the stands and platform started popping with the light of flashbulbs, hundreds of them, he ached the way one did when a window shade snapped up the morning after a four-highball night. He could swear that the tips of his perfectly shaped ears hurt. What had caused this outburst of light, anyway? Clearly it was related to the sound now drilling the deepest interior of his skull. Turning a bit to the left, no pleasant task, he realized that the radio drums had given way to real ones. The crowd had risen to its feet—did he have to?—and was whooping it up for the National Guard. (The same company that had gotten creamed in the First War? He’d read a little local history the other day, after she shook him up with that tornado story.) They were cutting smart military turns, clearing a path.
Yes, there it was at last, a sleek green convertible, like a new dollar bill, carrying Thomas E. Dewey into the stadium ahead of the parade. Real roars now, at exactly 10:00. Peter looked down at the candidate, who was standing as tall as his rumored elevator shoes would allow, accepting (the word had never been more accurate) the cheers of the crowd. The cars of the reception committee motored in his wake, Al Jackson running beside them like a welterweight doing road-work; he wouldn’t be cooped up in a car when the nine-float prototype of his personal World’s Fair was rolling in. He bounded up the platform, before the candidate, as if he were about to drive in the golden spike. Renewed roars as the VIPs—Anne, too—filed up and stood before their folding chairs. Special ululations for Mother Dewey. Anne was with the Fellers in the front row, giving a big wave, much bigger than the shy one being dispensed by Annie Dewey’s daughter-in-law, otherwise known as the candidate’s wife. She was waving to Riley, of course, signaling him. Peter followed Anne’s eyes and arm to the general vicinity they were trying to reach, and sure enough, he spotted him, in an old hunting jacket, right behind the baseline and a row of cops.
As near as Peter could figure out, the Dewey Club president was now introducing the introducers’ introducers. He wished he’d paid a little more attention to Mrs. Bruce all week; he’d have a better idea of how much he had to endure, how many speech-lengths of watching her short dark curls and her clean white collar, just three seats left of Mama Dewey, and only two more than that from her son. He was better off far away from her. He wouldn’t be craning his neck to see if she’d acknowledge him; he wouldn’t be trying to catch her licking her lips, his favorite nervous gesture of hers, second only to the way she ran her left hand along her neck, which he could tell she was vain about.
“You can write this down,” shouted Senator Vandenberg a moment later, his two hundred pounds as unbuttoned as Dewey’s slimness seemed corseted. “When election night is over—and it’s going to be over early—Governor Dewey will have four hundred electoral votes and the soon-to-be-former President a mere one hundred thirty-one!” The crowd ate it up, and “Van” flashed a big Dutch grin. The night wind ruffled the curtain of hair combed over his shining dome, and he went on to tell them how, come January 20, “the hates and hubbub of splinter government will move out! So will the Reds and red herrings! So will the bureaucratic despotism of the last sixteen years!” None of the swells on the platform, l
east of all Vandenberg, had been for Dewey before June, but if the gallant old boy was feeling any regret that, with a little more pushing, this could all have been his, he gave no sign of it. He was as happy as Barkley in a bevy of widows. And where was Mrs. V.? Peter wondered, imagining a helpmeet as vitalizing as the late Mrs. Sinclair.
As the band kept the applause going, Peter felt a touch on his shoulder.
“I can’t find much to clap for, but I’m still pleased to see you.”
God, they’d invited everyone. It was Harvey P. Angell, his Democratic opponent.
“Well, Harvey, on most days Vandenberg sounds more like Truman than Dewey.”
“I know!” said Angell, who Peter could tell was about to make some sincere remark about what everyone now called “bipartisanship” and how, when it came to foreign policy, politics stopped at the water’s edge. He wished he would just shake hands and go. For one thing, turning in his chair to look Harvey in the face made his own face hurt too much, and for another, this accountant from Durand was so damned nice that his presence made Peter feel guilty about the thirty-point margin he expected to bury him with.
“Gosh,” said Angell, noticing Peter’s eye. “What happened to you?”
“I was attacked by one of your supporters, Harvey.”
Angell looked stunned, as if he might have a goon squad he didn’t know about.
“Relax, Harvey. I’ve just got girl trouble.”
“Oh,” said Angell. “You know, Peter, the other week, at that debate in Corunna, my wife noticed you were single. When this election’s over, win or lose, we’d love to have you over to dinner. My wife’s cousin is a great girl, a couple of years younger than you and pretty as can be. Her name’s Mary and she works for the FSA.”
This guy was killing him. “Okay, Harvey,” he replied in a whisper, grateful for a hush that signaled the beginning of the next speech. “We’ll talk.”
Mayor Kenneth Crawford confined himself pretty much to expressions of delight and logistical warning. The official reception for invited guests would take place on the platform immediately following the governor’s speech; the band would continue playing throughout it, and the mayor hoped the citizenry would depart the stadium in an orderly but prompt fashion, so that the parade cars and buses might have a clear route back to the Hotel Owosso and the candiate could get home to his mother’s house on Oliver Street without any undue delay.
Dewey Defeats Truman Page 25
