Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

  He swallowed the rest of his drink. “Jane, do you remember the envelope I gave you Monday afternoon?”

  “Yes, I’ve got it right here.”

  “Open it.”

  Someone else would have asked, “Are you sure?” or “Right now?” but this was Jane he was talking to, and the next thing he heard was her slitting the flap. He waited, and saw in his mind’s eye exactly what she was seeing: the photograph that matched the one in his wallet, two young men in shirtsleeves, their arms draped over each other outside the Red Fox tavern.

  AT 9 A.M. HARRY TRUMAN WAS TWO MILLION VOTES AHEAD, with Illinois sitting on his side of the electoral college. Crossing the street to the Fellers’, Anne looked back at 421 West Oliver and wondered if Annie Dewey wouldn’t be less pained waiting out the end behind her own lace curtains than in New York City. There wasn’t a single person on the sidewalk, and Anne doubted there would have been even if the owner were home. Any remaining chance the house had of ever being declared a national monument now depended on Ohio.

  “Do you remember my brother in Lansing?” asked Carol, handing her a cup of coffee. “He just called. He’s ready to lead an invasion force against Illinois.” Anne smiled absently.

  “Where’s Jack?” asked Carol. “He ought to be over here toilet-papering our trees, or something like that.”

  “He drove off to Flint a nervous wreck. He still thinks it’s too good to be true. And Harold?”

  “Upstairs sleeping off Peter’s victory champagne. He has no idea of the rude awakening he’s in for. There were plenty of bad signs at midnight, but he went to bed sure that Harris Terry was just enjoying his turn as the prophet of doom.”

  “Did Peter display any grace in victory?”

  “I didn’t see him until an hour ago. He came by looking a trifle the worse for wear. He asked for two aspirin and a cup of coffee, and then he gave Margaret a ride to school. ‘Constituent service,’ he called it. She remembered she needed to be in early for rehearsal.”

  “Can it really be over?” Anne asked. As yet she no more believed in the upset than Jack did.

  Carol pointed to the radio, which was only murmuring. “It will be,” she said, “if ‘the Buckeye State’ declares it so. They keep trying to find new ways to refer to Ohio since it became the center of the universe. It’s gotten on my nerves so much I had to turn down the volume.”

  “What are we all going to do? Here in town, I mean.”

  “Die of embarrassment, I suppose. All of us but Al Jackson. He’ll be on to something else, bless his heart.”

  Anne played with her teaspoon against the oilcloth.

  “Why aren’t you looking happier?” Carol asked. “You’re the only Truman voter between here and Jack’s.”

  “You’re not counting the colonel,” Anne replied. But she saw the point of Carol’s question. Why wasn’t she happier? Had she started rooting for Dewey? For the town’s sake? Was she that fond of the unbuilt Walk? In the last few hours, had the candidate’s preening, pint-sized perfection metamorphosed into an underdog’s lovable scruffiness? Or did she just somehow fear seeing what wasn’t supposed to happen, happen?

  She snapped out of her perplexity. “Are you ready for the local news?”

  “What’s that?” asked Carol.

  “Mrs. Wagner had a call from Frank Sherwood this morning. He’s in New York.”

  “No!”

  “She gave no details, acted very privileged and mysterious, but she says he’s all right and—”

  “Excuse me.” Carol went to answer the telephone.

  “Margaret? What’s all that noise? Are they building sets?”

  “No, Mother, that’s traffic.”

  “Where are you?”

  Carol could hear Margaret cupping her hand to get that information from whomever she was with, before she relayed the answer: “At a big intersection in Perry. Outside a diner. Now, Mother, you’ve got to listen carefully. I’m with Tim. He’s alive.”

  Anne could see the knuckles of Carol’s hand, the one with the receiver, squeezing themselves white.

  “He’s alive and well, Mother, but so skinny! It’s an amazing, terrible story, but he’s come back. To all of us. To me especially. And I need to be with him. We have to—”

  “Don’t leave the line!” shouted Carol, handing off the phone to Anne. “Harold!” she cried, rushing up the stairs. “Harold! Wake up!”

  “Margaret, it’s Anne. What’s going on?”

  “It’s Tim. He’s back! And I need to be with him for a while. Anne, it’s a miracle! Tell them not to spoil it by worrying. I’ll explain everything later, but now—”

  Amidst the dozen questions forming in her mind, Anne had the distinct impression that Margaret’s voice, coming through the wires, sounded more alive, closer and more fully present, than it had the last time she’d been face-to-face with the girl.

  “Margaret, how did you get where you are? Who took you to Tim?”

  “I drove out in Arnie’s Chevrolet. It started up like it had been driven the day before! The keys were in the ignition, just where Tim left them in August.”

  “Does Mrs. Herrick know he’s all right?”

  “She must have been fast asleep when I backed the car out of the garage. There wasn’t time to tell her, Anne. I had to get here. And Tim needs to talk to me first. I’m the one he trusts. He can’t have her and the police and everybody else sweeping down on him yet. I just wanted to tell Mother and Father not to worry. We’ll—”

  “Slow down, Margaret. Tell me something. Who let you know where to find him?”

  “Peter,” she said, as if the name carried unspoken adjectives for everything that was brave and noble and all for love. “He never intended to take me to school. He gave me the news on the way to Mrs. Herrick’s garage. Once we got there, he told me to follow him to Perry in Arnie’s car.”

  Lucy Cox on Monday night: “There’s something on his mind, and I can’t figure out what it is.”

  “Margaret, how did he know about Tim?”

  “I’m still not sure,” said Margaret. “He hasn’t told me everything. He’s been up all night with—”

  “Does anyone else know Tim is safe?”

  “I’m sure I’m the only one besides Peter. Anne, I’ve got to go. The operator’s going to—”

  Anne could hear the Fellers coming down the stairs.

  “Margaret,” Anne insisted, “put Peter on. Please let me talk to him.”

  “What does Peter have to do with this?” Carol shouted.

  “Yes,” yelled Harold into the receiver he took from Anne’s hand. “What does Peter Cox have to do with all this?”

  Anne retreated toward the kitchen counter with the radio, which was suddenly louder, though its volume hadn’t been raised. The announcer in Flint had begun to shout, as loud as Harold Feller, like a man begging to be let out of the box in which he was sealed. “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen! Let me repeat it! The Buckeye State of Ohio has just put its twenty-five electoral votes into the Democratic column! It’s 9:30 A.M., eastern standard time, this Wednesday, November the third, nineteen hundred and forty-eight, and Harry Truman has just been re-elected President of the United States!”

  NINETY MINUTES LATER, HORACE SINCLAIR WAS STILL listening to WOAP. He had switched to it from the Flint station for the pleasure of hearing the Owosso narrator rip and read such wire-service statistics as the one he was now struggling through: “Preliminary figures indicate that Governor Dewey actually carried a smaller percentage of the popular vote this time than he did in 1944 against the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

  But these sentences from the radio were just grace notes to the glorious piece of music he held in his hand, the letter he’d found pushed through the mail slot when he came downstairs from his bedroom at five-thirty this morning.

  4:45 A.M.

  Colonel—

  Jonathan Adams Darrell is back where he spent the last half century. When the billboard comes down, the
spot will look just as it did for all those years and for the next fifty to come. If the GOP is dumb enough to nominate Dewey a third time in 1952, I doubt even Mr. Jackson will try to revive the Walk.

  The Herrick boy is okay. He won’t say anything; I’ve seen to that by providing him with his heart’s desire.

  I’m glad you had your heart’s desire, Colonel. I refer, of course, to the late Mrs. Sinclair. We don’t all get ours, and it’s too bad J.A.D. never had his. (As you must know by now, I read the papers in the box while you were mixing me a drink.)

  Do not save this note for fifty years. Better yet: Throw your whole damned box away, along with these things I took out of the casket.

  Well, I got 58 percent instead of 65. Next time, when I’m not being squashed by the top of the ticket, I’ll do better.

  Peter Cox

  P.S. Your lantern and shovel are back in the garage.

  P.P.S. I borrowed your monkey wrench.

  Horace opened the blinds, and Mrs. Sinclair’s tea service caught the light that poured in. It was a fine day. Leaving The Lady of the Lake on the floor, where she’d fallen from his lap last night, he went out to the garage, clutching Peter’s note and the little silver container of incriminating pledges left on the porch. He put it, along with the new note, into the buckram box that had been sitting out on the workbench the past few weeks. It was almost cool enough to make a fire, and that’s what he would do once he went back inside the house. He’d consign the whole secret to the ashes and the air, and then he’d go out for a walk.

  He’d go to the library for a mystery, and he’d take the long way there—not to gloat his way past the neighbors; only to enjoy the freedom from fear. He wouldn’t even scoff when he crossed the Main Street bridge and saw Mr. Jackson’s billboard. He’d just look down to the spot where Jon used to be and was again—but with a difference. Jon had been up and around for a while, refreshed, released forever from his grim end, its morbid tokens taken off his chest and destroyed.

  Horace turned the handle of the Reginaphone. Its celestial tinklings would be a better hymn of thanksgiving than any mutterings he might make on his arthritic knees. The music came out with the same utter clarity it had had in the days of President Harrison, every note springing from the same slots of metal that had once served the ears of Mrs. Sinclair, before the Victrola and radio began their siren songs of infinite variation.

  The old music swam around Horace’s head in liquid perfection until a single thump against the garage door made him raise his eyelids. He got up to open the door and caught sight of the rear wheel of the schoolbound Billy Grimes’ substitute, a mile wide with his throw of the Argus. The paper had come early today, the edition something between the regular afternoon one and the Extra they’d hoped to have on the street last night. Horace bent down as gingerly as he could to pick it up. He peeled off the rubber band and opened it up to the black banner headline whose 108-point characters seemed to be cringing at their own size, but doing their duty, conveying what everyone up and down Oliver Street knew by now: TRUMAN DEFEATS DEWEY.

  WHEN ANNE ARRIVED AT THE BOOKSHOP, LEO ABNER WAS REMOVING the picture of Thomas E. Dewey from the window. All over downtown, where she’d been walking in circles for nearly an hour, the candidate’s visage was disappearing in a furtive frenzy. Leo had decided to keep his indoor spotlit bunting and provide it with a new focal point, a stiff cardboard notice that read:

  GENERAL EISENHOWER TELLS HIS OWN STORY!

  CRUSADE IN EUROPE

  AVAILABLE NEXT MONTH

  RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW!

  “Late again,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” replied Leo. “I don’t think too many people are going to be showing their faces today.”

  She was about to tell him the news of Tim Herrick, but made a snap decision not to. Until she knew the whole story herself, telling Leo any of it might put Peter at risk over whatever foolish thing he’d gone and done.

  “Maybe I’ll take one of these home for myself,” mused Leo, picking up a copy of the ’44 campaign biography. “I’m lucky I sold you yours two nights ago. I don’t think I could give them away this morning.”

  He waited for her to say something, with no result. “I thought you’d be crowing this morning. Are you saving it all for Jack? Oh, that reminds me. He called.” Leo handed her a slip of paper with the number of a bar in Flint near Walt Carroll’s house.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call him. I’ll bet they’re drinking an Ohio brand of beer. But before that I’ll take these to the basement.” She scooped up the three remaining Dewey books. “The sight of them will only depress anyone who does come in. I’ll do a little straightening up while I’m down there.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Once downstairs, she took a seat on the stool, lit a Lucky and began to cry. Dudley, she thought, until she could hear only “Peter,” the way it had been pronounced by Margaret Feller’s revitalized voice, the way she’d been hearing it in her head for an hour.

  It could not turn out this way. Like all writers, Anne suspected, she saw two movies for every book she read, and every movie she could think of and every book she could remember told her it couldn’t end like this. The romantic thing, which was to say the right thing, was to go off with the underdog. But what if the impossible overdog was really the prodigal romantic, and the underdog merely decent and loving and wonderful in bed? She had the definite feeling that Peter Cox would turn out to be pretty bad in that department, not so bad as the grad student in Ann Arbor, but nothing to write home about, if one wrote home about such things and if she’d had enough comparative experience to make the writing worthwhile.

  Jack was the comparative experience she’d have in her memory for as long as she lived, and if her suspicions about Peter turned out to be right, those memories would always be her punishment, though they wouldn’t be punishment enough.

  Jack called. Call him at FL 6790. Granger’s Bar.

  She looked at the slip of paper and then closed her eyes, knowing she had to do the worst thing she would ever do.

  “Anne?” It was Leo at the top of the stairs. “I’ve got to go home and check on Mrs. Abner. I’ll be back after lunchtime. Do you mind bringing your sandwich back here?”

  “No, Leo. Tell Martha I hope she’s feeling better.”

  In the year 2000, Jack would bring her cups of tea and massage her swollen ankles. Peter? She couldn’t get any picture of him, probably because he’d have been gone for years, after their divorce. She strained to put him onto the screen of her imagination, but all that came was the vision she’d had at the City Club a week and a half ago, just before Jack made Peter see stars: the turn of the century, the next century, with Owosso as the fixed center of a swirling, galactic vortex.

  She heard Leo close the door upstairs. Now she could go from sniffles to tears. She could cry over her own awfulness. What was she going to do?

  There was only one thing she could do. She was going to go upstairs and call Flint and shout into the receiver how wonderful it was that Harry would still be in the White House seven years from now, when Junior’s little brother was going off to kindergarten.

  But once back at the cash register she did nothing, and before she knew it, it was 11:45, and the day’s apparent first customer was really a breathless Harris Terry, who couldn’t bring himself to speak the name he needed to. He just pointed through Leo’s window, back across the street to Feller, Terry & Nast, and asked Anne: “Have you seen him?”

  “No,” she replied. “Honest.”

  “Harold and Carol are in pursuit of Margaret. And I’m supposed to be in pursuit of Peter. I’m on my way to the hotel to see if he’s with his mother. If he’s not, maybe she knows something. Can you go over to the Matthews Building and see if he’s holed up in his headquarters? I don’t know what would possess him to come back here at all, let alone do whatever he’s done, but it’s all I can think of.”

  They left the shop toge
ther, after Anne flipped the BACK IN A MINUTE sign behind the door blind. At the corner, they wished each other luck and split up. Harris Terry entered the Hotel Owosso, and Anne headed west on Main, noticing as she went how the street once more looked like a sensible brown parcel, the curled ribbon of bunting having disappeared along with most of the governor’s pictures. To the traveler passing through, the Dewey story would soon be like that of the tornado, a piece of old-timers’ lore, something to be acquired through a little interested questioning, while Owosso remained the perfectly ordinary place it had so recently celebrated itself for being. She walked slowly, trying to remember the street as it had been two Saturdays ago, during the town’s brief enchanted hour on a dateline that traveled coast to coast, and as she went she crossed her fingers and even prayed that Peter was at the hotel with Mrs. Cox.

  It was 1:05 when she climbed the stairs of the Matthews Building. The door to COX FOR SENATOR was ajar, so she entered. The litter from last night’s celebration remained: the champagne bottle Harold Feller had drained, a napkin with the co-ed’s lipstick, the giant check mark on the blackboard.

  “Mrs. Bruce?” she called, but got no answer.

  A radio was playing in the small back room; its door, too, was open several inches. Through the crack Anne could hear, for what she realized would be the last time ever, the voice of Thomas E. Dewey, conceding the election from New York: “Our task now, as I said in my telegram to the President, is to get together and support the administration in the interest of the peace of the world.” She approached the second doorway and found what she was still telling herself she hoped not to.

  “Everyone’s looking for you, Peter.”

  His hair was uncombed and he hadn’t shaven. He was in yesterday’s shirt, still wearing his own campaign button.

  “Maybe I’ll go hide in Curwood Castle. It’s a great spot for that.”

  “Is that where Tim was?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the desk.

  “Only part of the time.”