Dewey Defeats Truman (17 page)

“I’ve been too busy buying fudge with your Aunt Ada and playing golf with your mother.”

“Mother. She’s pronounced you ‘the most extraordinary girl.’ Says she can’t imagine why I’m interested in you.”

Anne said nothing.

“It’s a compliment. It means she can’t believe I’d make the effort required to keep a girl like
you
interested in
me
.”

“I know,” said Anne. “That’s what she told me. On the third hole.”

He paused for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll go first.”

“First?”

“First to tell you why I’m interested. In you. Because you’re beautiful, even though you probably think you’re only ‘good-looking.’ Because you’re not straining to make an impression like every other woman in here and out on the porch. And because ten years from now, when you’ve relinquished the handles on the baby carriage, you’ll want to grab on to something besides a cocktail shaker and a golf club. You might even go back to your typewriter.”

The long-view compliment, she decided, was worth the short-term insult. She kept her gaze steady. “But you
do
want to be holding a cocktail shaker and a hand of bridge. Maybe a gavel, too, but that would only be until five o’clock. Or three.”

“So what? You talk as if there’s a contradiction. There isn’t. I want you to be better than I am.”

Her eyes began to water, and just as he was thinking it was because she’d heard the nicest, noblest thing a woman could hear, she blinked and sniffled and looked into her lap and said, “I’m in love with Jack Riley.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

She laughed with such relief she had trouble stopping. For three absurd weeks she’d kept her hypocrisy bottled up. The waiter, wondering if she was getting hysterics, finally made his way over to them.

“The lady will have a ginger ale,” said Peter.

“The lady will have a Cointreau.”

“Are you sure you won’t have a beer?” asked Peter. “Straight out of the bottle?”

“The low road doesn’t become you, Peter.”

“You neither. And you know it, or else you wouldn’t have come up here.”

Anne looked at the perplexed waiter, and said, “Cointreau,
really,” before turning back to Peter. “A second ago you didn’t want me holding a cocktail shaker. Now I’m not supposed to have a beer. You think you’ve got me all figured out, that you can write my script, but you can’t even get the props straight. By the way, having had dinner with you both, I can tell you that Jack has better table manners.” She paused, hoping that he would get madder than she was herself, which wasn’t as mad as she should be. “Honestly, Peter, I’m not sure why I did come up here.” She stared hard at him, as if he might somehow yield up the answer. “I think I like getting the better of you. It’s pretty pointless, but it excites me.”

“Well, love
is
exciting.”

“No. Well, of course it is, but not this kind of exciting.” Love was exciting in the way it was with Jack, something pure and enlarging, a dance in which the partners, instead of thrusting and dipping from one apache move to another, simply held on to each other and moved together.

She took her drink off the waiter’s tray, feeling less comfortable in this soft jazzy club chair than on the hard old couch in Jack’s garage, where their every move had sent a cloud of dust toward the single light bulb beneath the rafters. Yes, she told herself, Gene Riley’s eight-foot porch was a more natural spot for her to be than Mr. Woodfill’s 880-foot verandah.

There was one way, of course, to be surer than sure, and that was to make love with Peter. It was unthinkable, but if they could wind themselves down like tops, end the apache dance by collapsing, dumb and spent, on the floor, there would be nothing left between them. The chase would be over and she would be free.

“Peter, please.”

“All right. Change of subject. Tell me what I’ve been missing.”

“Back in Owosso? There’s a big air show a week from tomorrow, and the city council takes up Mr. Jackson’s plan a couple of days after that. The poor old colonel is very upset. Carol Feller swears she can hear him sneezing five blocks away. She’s afraid the top of his head will come off.”

“We’re going to hear from Jackson Monday night at the Dewey Club. Come down and listen.”

“Monday? You mean Turnip Day?” Would he smile at that?

No, he wouldn’t. “Come with the Fellers. I’d take you myself—Riley or no Riley—but I may not get in the door.”

“Why not?”

“Haven’t you noticed?” He leaned over and pressed his clean upper lip into hers. She didn’t press back.

T
HE REMAINS OF THE PEACH ICE CREAM WERE STARTING TO
melt, but nearly a hundred people had gotten scoops as they waited for the Dewey Club’s open meeting to begin at 7:30
P.M.
on July 26. Two organizers went out to the hallway of the Matthews Building in search of more folding chairs. “Be glad we didn’t make onion sandwiches,” said one of them, pointing to the ice-cream mess while alluding to another youthful culinary favorite of the candidate. The second club member had spent his day licking three-cent stamps and hanging up a giant blow-up photo (courtesy Jackson Camera and Electronics) of the young Tom Dewey as Uncle Sam, posed next to little Miss Columbia by the
Argus
’s photographer on the Fourth of July 1909. Billy Grimes now sat beneath it, handing
out Citizens for the Future flyers and avoiding the gaze of Mr. and Mrs. Feller, who were in conversation, down front, with Peter Cox.

“You couldn’t get her to come?” Peter asked Carol, sounding less sure of himself than usual.

“I’m afraid not. But I had more luck with the older woman you asked me to soft-soap.” She handed him a small stack of letters. “She’s underlined a few bits, which are the only ones you’re allowed to use. And if you don’t think she means it, just ask Reverend Davis or any of her bridge circle what it feels like to have Annie Dewey bite your head off.”

“Forewarned,” said Peter.

“She’s even taken my head off,” said Harold Feller.

“And you’re a fine, mild fellow, Harold.”

“That’s right, Peter. Up to a point I am.”

Peter knew what was coming, and to escape the question about why he hadn’t bothered coming in to the office today, he pretended to return a wave from Vincent Dent in the third row.

Peter took one of the chairs on the rostrum just as the club secretary test-tapped the microphone and began the meeting: “You know,” he said, waiting for the last of the audience to take their seats, “back in 1940, our first Dewey for President Club had no need for a microphone. I think all of us who were in it could probably have fit into one booth down at the Great Lakes.”

Christ, thought Peter. The guy had actually written this stuff on index cards.

“But we did have a club back in ’40, because some of us already knew that the best man to be President of the United States was a thirty-eight-year-old district attorney whose only mistake was ever leaving Michigan for New York.”

Peter grinned wide and tilted his head back. No one would realize his laughter was pantomime, not even the high-school girls down in front, friends of Margaret Feller’s who, Carol said, were here because Peter was so “dreamy.”

“In 1944 this club sent out a hundred and fifty thousand Dewey for President buttons. I can see a few of you are wearing those tonight, and probably appreciating our foresight in leaving the year off them.”

Focusing on a clock at the back of the room, Peter tuned out the voice of this amiable stiff. The guy couldn’t really be excited about Dewey, could he? Pretending was one thing, but actually buying the whole cardboard package? The elevator shoes; never having missed a day of school; playing the gentleman farmer in upstate New York; having his press secretary announce his candidacy, like it was an afternoon appointment. What they said was probably true: You had to know him really well to dislike him. None of this kept Dewey from being absolutely preferable to that strutting little Missouri jackass, but there
was
something insidious, an irritating grain of truth, in that rhyme—Keep America Human with Truman. Humanity itself might be overrated, but what if you suspected that the bulk of your life’s acquaintance—all those punctually plastered guests at your parents’ cocktail hours, with their indisputable skill in running the world—fell into that inhuman counterspecies to which Dewey was accused of belonging?

Come on, buddy, come on. He already knew what he himself was going to say, and all he wanted to do was say it and get out of here and get his paddle into the river while there was a last half hour of sunlight. He wouldn’t take more than a jab at foreign policy—not with everyone in such an all-for-one-and-one-for-all mood over Berlin, and with
Iron
Curtain
playing down the street. He’d keep it simple, the way the alcoholics did, and end with the little hometown touch of these letters Carol had gotten him.

“… and further down the ticket, the man it is now my pleasure to present: an outstanding Michigander, an Ivy League scholar, a distinguished veteran, a skilled attorney with Feller, Terry and Nast, and the next senator from the Twenty-third District of this state—Peter Cox!”

He winked at Margaret’s friends and got up from his chair. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Peter Cox” (you couldn’t say it too many times) “and I’m happy to be one candidate who moved
to
Owosso.” (General applause; wait two suspenseful beats after it subsides; solemnly lower voice.) “Tomorrow morning President Truman will ask the Congress for a tax on profits and the authority to control prices. It’s fitting, I think, that he should make these requests during a ‘Special session’ whose convening demonstrates that he has no more respect for the Constitution than he does for the laws of economics and the rights of the American small businessman.” (Smattering of applause; probably would be more if there’d been an awestruck mention of “the American worker” in the same sentence. It had gotten so you couldn’t give even a Republican speech unless it came out like sounding like “The House I Live In.”) “The President, a failed businessman himself, isn’t happy unless every druggist and grocer and haberdasher is feeling the pinch.” (No need to mention that Truman went bust with Harding in the White House.)

“The Eightieth Congress, whose record is one of exceptional accomplishment, is about to do the country its greatest service yet by defeating every single proposal that comes
its way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the next few weeks.” (If Dewey were bolder, he’d get out and lead that Congress, send it his own program and start acting like the President six months before his own inauguration.) “And I daresay the Eightieth Congress will give the President reason to regret the tantrum that’s brought it back into session. The House Un-American Activities Committee, under the leadership of J. Parnell Thomas and sparked by the energy of young Republicans like Congressman Nixon of California, is going to use the opportunity to hold some extra hearings, and a few Washington friends of mine say they’re likely to produce a couple of interesting surprises.” (Impressed glances between members of the audience realizing they would have a state senator with his own connections in the nation’s capital. All right, that little hint was enough about Communism and, by implication, foreign affairs. It was time to balance the cosmopolitan outsider with the humble, happy-to-be-here local boy. Pull letters from pocket. Take a long pause.)

“You know, if my mother doesn’t get a letter from me each week, I hear about it but good.” (Carol Feller whispered “Oh, brother” to Harold. Margaret’s friends were further enchanted.) “I suspect Tom Dewey has it just the same.” (Laughter from all who these days were pretending to know Annie Dewey better than they did.) “I draw that conclusion not just because the governor is the kind of man he is, but also because Mrs. Dewey has allowed me to share with you a couple of lines that her son has found the time to send home to her here in Owosso. Now, the governor is more of a gentleman than I am” (fat chance of anyone believing that, with the two-hundred-dollar summer suit he had on) “and,
as you know, his public comments on Mr. Truman’s shanghaiing of the Congress have been more restrained than mine. But lest you think his silence has been dictated by political prudence or secret worry, let me tell you what he tells his mother: ‘The special session is a nuisance, but no more …’ ” (Big, big applause. Thanks, once more, to their next state senator, they were getting some inside dope unknown to even those press boys who’d left a month ago and wouldn’t be back until November.) “The candidate, who as you know has two sons of his own, also writes his mother that there’s ‘no rush’ about planning ‘accommodations at the White House for the family, if I am elected.’ ” (Big laugh at the emphasized “if.”) “Governor Dewey would be too modest to note it himself” (yeah, right), “but there are polls now showing him ahead even in the state of Florida” (a small gasp from the history teacher), “which means that the solid South is looking about as solid as Mr. Truman’s haberdashery in 1921.” (Applause.)

“I’d like the people in the back rows near the window to turn around and look across the street to the Colvin Home Appliance Shop. I’m sure you all recognize the apartment above it as being not only the current residence of Charlie Bernard (he’d found “Bernard, Charles S.” in the street directory), but the first home, the birthplace, of the thirty-fourth President of the United States.” (Biggest applause of the evening.) “We all know when and where the Dewey story reaches its climax—on January twentieth in a White House that will be renovated in more ways than one. But that little building across the street is where the Dewey story began, right here in Owosso; and it’s along the banks of our own Shiawassee River” (he was beginning to make himself sick)
“that it took its first steps, toward Annie Dewey’s big, friendly house on Oliver Street.

“That little stretch of land now belongs to history, and to the country as a whole. It’s our job in Owosso to manage it with the largest and most faithful sense of purpose we can muster. As you know, a week from now our city council will be holding its first discussion of this matter, so I’m going to acknowledge your patience and graciousness in listening to me and” (it was 7:53; he’d be on the water by 8:10) “turn this meeting over to the next speaker, our neighbor Al Jackson, who has asked for and been given the Dewey for President Club’s permission to speak on behalf of Citizens for the Future. Al, won’t you come up here?” (Polite, mixed-feelings applause for Jackson, who was running up the middle aisle.) “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and good night!” (Bigger, much bigger, applause. He was going to take 65 percent of this town.)