Dewey Defeats Truman

by Thomas Mallon

“I don’t care how you found him, I—”

  “You don’t know the half.”

  “I only want to know why you sent Margaret to him.”

  Peter drank the last gulp of flat champagne from a bottle in front of him. “So she could get her heart broken. Instead of just slowed down until it stops. You know, in the Cox family tradition.”

  “Is she coming back with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened to the plane? Does he still have it? Suppose he takes off with her in it.”

  “Can’t happen,” said Peter, tossing Monday’s newspapers into the wastebasket and then collapsing back into his chair from the effort. “I threw a monkey wrench into the engine. Literally.”

  “Has it occurred to you,” cried Anne, “that Harold and Carol will go to the police with what happened? Margaret may come home, but what if your part in everything gets into the Argus? What are you going to do then?”

  “Gee, Anne, I don’t know.” His expression mocked her prudence, told her it disgusted him. “I guess I’ll resign my seat.”

  “Even if the Fellers forgive you, how long do you think this will stay a secret?”

  “I don’t know. Fifty years? Yeah. If people can keep dark secrets that long, I ought to be able to hold a pleasant little one like this down.”

  “You’re exhausted. What are you talking about?”

  “The other half of the story.”

  The ’44 campaign biography that she’d brought him the other night was still on the blotter. They stared at it until Peter broke the silence.

  “You said everybody’s looking for me. Does everybody include you?”

  She continued staring at the book. “Harris Terry asked me to come.”

  Peter grabbed the telephone receiver and pushed it into her hand. “Hear the operator? It’s still connected. Mrs. Bruce paid the bill through the fifth of the month. Most people would have tried calling first.”

  She said nothing. He slammed the receiver back into its cradle, and then got up out of his chair to take her by the shoulders. “You’re in love with me, Anne. It’s not a political or a literary decision you get to make. It’s the simple truth. I’m not an idea, and it’s not my fault that I’m richer and better-looking than Jack.”

  “And what am I supposed to do about him?”

  “We’ll fix him up with Harvey P. Angell’s wife’s cousin.”

  She smacked his face. “That’s exactly the kind of heartless thing he’d never say.”

  “And one of the reasons you’re in love with me is it’s just the kind of thing I would.”

  She knew she mustn’t let the air hang silent, but she waited too long and the radio got the next word. The CBS man was reporting that “Governor Dewey has just left the room, telling members of the press, ‘It’s been grand fun, boys and girls.’ ”

  “Game’s over, Anne.”

  “I could never stay in this town! Not with Jack here.”

  “Well, now you won’t have to.”

  “But I love this place!”

  “Then pay a price! Why should you not have to give anything up?” She saw him shaking, more with fatigue than anger, and she knew that somewhere, in the place it most counted, she was stronger than Peter, too, stronger and harder than both Peter and Jack, and of all the things she hated about herself right now, she hated this one the most.

  “Goddammit, Anne.” He was crying. “I’ve been up all night, doing more heavy lifting than you can guess. And now I’ve got this Rotary Club posse bearing down on me. They’re going to be here any—”

  She finally took his hand. “There’s only one problem,” she whispered to him, as he let his head collapse onto her shoulder, and as the other part of her mind silently asked forgiveness for doing what she knew, at last, was the right thing.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Wherever we go, I’m still going to be a Democrat.”

  He kissed her long neck. “At least I know the worst.”

  SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES TO THE SOUTHWEST, IN INDEPENDENCE, Missouri, sirens crowed and schoolchildren, dismissed for the day, ran home laughing. In downtown Owosso there was hardly a sound. Kay Schmidt wiped an empty countertop in the hotel coffee shop; inside the Argus building the bale of papers reserved for Billy Grimes lay unclaimed; and across the street at the post office, the extra clerk who’d been put on for lunchtime customers wanting November 3, 1948, cancellations stepped out for a sandwich at the Great Lakes.

  At Gute’s drugstore, Jane Herrick took the third copy of the Argus from the bottom of the stack and headed toward Main Street. She was on her way to the library to reconfirm the exact position of the Twelfth Army Group on November 3, 1944, which also happened to be the birthdate of Private Fred Mitchell of Durand, who had died the year before that in the Solomons. This was the job she had assigned herself an hour before Frank Sherwood’s phone call. And yet, as she looked at her note in today’s box on one of the calendars she bought at Abner’s, the task seemed pointless. She recognized her own hand, but the urgent pencil pressure seemed to have been applied by someone else.

  On the steps of City Hall, Al Jackson’s cutout of Thomas E. Dewey stood by itself. The edges of its paper suit were frayed from four months of mute campaigning, but no arm was draped across it now. Jane mounted the steps and sat down next to it, her hand covering her mouth while she rested for a moment and thought about New York City. She and Arnie and eight-year-old Tim, persuaded by her cousin in New Jersey to pay a visit, had stood on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on the cold, clear morning of February 10, 1939. The boys had spent most of their time looking miles eastward, down to the spikes and globules of the nearly finished World’s Fair. It looked just like the future it advertised itself to be, and she promised the two of them they would all come back after it opened. Through the binoculars, Arnie showed his brother each of the pavilions whose shapes were already familar from the magazines. She spent the time looking north, making sure her eyes, like fingers running over a Venetian blind, touched each one of the streets as far as they could see. That way she would know that she had visited them all, even if they never got back to New York, which they didn’t.

  She must have seen Fifty-seventh Street, and the one with the planetarium, and she knew for sure that she and the boys had passed Lord & Taylor on the ground. Last night, as the Times Square beacon waved unexpectedly southward, it must have raked the observation deck on which she and her sons—how clearly she could see them now!—had stood that morning. Right this minute, November 3, 1948, here at 84°W/43°N, the sun was glinting off the name of Pfc. Arnold Herrick on the honor roll, a drop of reflected light looking as bright as Jupiter had the night Frank Sherwood showed it to her through his telescope.

  She took the photograph out of her pocket and tilted it into the light, allowing it to catch the ray leading from the memorial back to the sun and out to Jupiter itself, wherever that planet was hiding in the brightness of midday. Frank Sherwood had loved her son. Frank Sherwood, the only man she had kissed—on the cheek at the Grand Trunk depot—since Arnie left her house on October 2, 1943.

  She rose to her feet and stood face-to-face with Thomas E. Dewey, and she burst out laughing. If he didn’t have one already, she would have drawn a mustache on him. As it was, she just started down the steps, at twice the speed she’d gone up them. Heading west, toward the Main Street bridge, she went on tiptoe at the moment ten sudden explosions filled the air. Some high-school boys, not dismissed for the day, only at their lunchtime recess, had found the fireworks behind Al Jackson’s billboard on the riverbank and shot them off. You couldn’t see the sprays of light, for they were lost in the kind of sky so bright it looked more silver than gold, but they were there.

  Jane stepped onto the bridge just ahead of the deserted Dewey birthplace. The sound of the rockets prevented her from hearing Chief Rice’s deputy a hundred feet behind. He was shouting “Mrs. Herrick! Mrs. Herrick!”, trying to tell h
er what the police had just learned. The noise of the fireworks died, and their ashes fell on the roof of Curwood Castle, and he kept calling her name, but still she couldn’t hear him. She was dancing across the bridge in the arms of a young man in a private’s uniform. You couldn’t see him, but he was there.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  In doing research for this book, I received help from the staff of Owosso’s public library and a number of its citizens, including Ivan Conger, Phil Welch, and Bruce and Elizabeth Wilson. Thomas E. Dewey’s biographer, Richard Norton Smith, and Karl Kabelac of the University of Rochester, where the Dewey papers are housed, generously answered queries, and Michael Barone provided political lore and confidence. My thanks to all.

  No one was, or could have been, more helpful than Helen Harrelson, Owosso’s splendid historian, whose exactitude equals her love for her subject. I thank her for hundreds of facts, and for indulging my deviations from some of them.

  In an afterword to my previous novel, I wrote: “Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase ‘historical fiction’ it is important to remember which of the two words is which.” This applies in spades to Dewey Defeats Truman, where I have taken a number of liberties with both local and national history.

  I owe real debts to my editor, Dan Frank; my agent, Mary Evans; my good friends and readers Frances Kiernan and Lucy Kaylin; to Sallie Motsch; and, as always, to Bill Bodenschatz.

  I first visited Owosso several years ago on a tip from my colleague at Vassar College, the author Nancy Willard. Had I never written a word about the place, I would still want to thank her for leading me to it.

  Westport, Connecticut

  April 12, 1996