Dewey Defeats Truman (18 page)

Another wink for Margaret’s friends. By the time Jackson unveiled his god-awful six-by-four-foot “artist’s conception” of the new riverbank, no one would realize Peter Cox was gone. He made his way up the side aisle, handing Annie Dewey’s letters to Carol (“Going home to write Mom?” she asked) and clapping the Grimes kid on the shoulder. The boy looked haggard.

“Where’s all that get-up-and-go, Billy?”

“It got up and went.”

“Girl trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“Join the club.”

I
N THE EARLY LIGHT OF
A
UGUST
1,
A LEFTOVER PIECE OF RIBBON
fluttered on the ground at Idlewild Airport. Yesterday’s joint dedication by the President and Governor Dewey had proceeded peaceably. In fact, Dewey had been astonished to hear Truman, as if caught up in the spirit of modernity, whisper into his ear: “You’ll want to do something about the plumbing after you move in.” Was the little rooster less confident than he pretended? Or was it his idea of mockery, a little psychological warfare from somebody with nothing to lose?

Five hundred miles away, at the Owosso Community Airport, the smells of dew and gasoline mixed on the air with those of frying steak and eggs, as the first hundred or so planes flying in for the Dawn Patrol completed their landings. Before the morning was out, a hundred more were expected, along with another thousand spectators to join the thousand already there. In one of the improvised outdoor hangars, Gus Farnham polished the fuselage of his Curtiss “Jenny.” Next to him the AM radio inside a decommissioned Brewster Fighter pulled in Chicago’s WGN. Jane Powell sang about its being a most unusual day, before giving up the air to an announcer who had the latest from England on seventeen-year-old Bob Mathias’s progress in the Olympic decathlon.

Walking between the rows of planes, Tim Herrick and Margaret Feller looked like a young couple browsing Bob Harrelson’s Chevrolet showroom, but Margaret was so giddy that the field and sky seemed to her like a cartoon: the perfect shapes of the colorful planes swooping down and blowing raspberries of motor noise, the whole effect sort of sweet and silly, like a gaggle of puffing little-engines-that-could.
She half expected the wingtips to be wearing white Mickey Mouse gloves that would wipe beads of sweat from chubby faces behind the propellers.

The applicant must be 16 years of age or over. The applicant shall have logged at least 35 hours of solo flight time … Included in the foregoing are at least 5 hours of cross-country flying, of which at least 3 hours shall have been solo, providing for at least one flight over a course of not less than 50 miles with at least two full-stop landings at different points on such a course. In addition, the applicant shall satisfactorily accomplish a written examination covering prevailing weather conditions in the United States
 … A lot of the boys—whose mothers, if they’d grown up in town, could tell them the cautionary tale of how James Oliver Curwood’s son had died in a flying accident right here in 1930—got to the table with information on private-pilot ratings and scooped up the leaflets. To Margaret’s surprise, Tim put back the one she handed to him, saying, “Nah. I don’t really want a license.”

From behind a table selling V-8, Nestle’s Quik, and orange drink, Billy Grimes, whom Al Jackson had given the weekend off, watched Tim and Margaret as if they were a movie whose sound had died. He would never be able to repair it, never again get close enough to hear either one. Billy stared at the two of them, as if the intensity of his gaze might resolder the wire that had once made them the two main posts in his life’s circuit. There wasn’t the faintest sizzle of renewed connection.

Twenty yards away, Anne Macmurray was avoiding gazes, not pressing them. “It didn’t take him long,” she said to Carol Feller, who had also seen the new blonde sitting on the trunk of Peter’s Ford.

“Second thoughts?” asked Carol.

“No.”

“Well, he’s not having them either.”

Anne wished that Jack would hurry and get back here with the coffee.

“Second thoughts about you, that is. I don’t think you’ve heard the last of him.”

“And the blonde?”

“She’s not really a thought,” said Carol. “More like a daydream. You darling man!” she exclaimed, taking two of the four cardboard cups Jack had in his well-scrubbed hands. “Now all I’ve got to do is find Harold. He drifted over to the Navy pilots’ booth while you were gone, Jack.” It was peculiar having a husband who’d been too young for the First War and too old for the Second. The accident of time had left Harold with funds of curiosity and deference he would never be able to spend. “What is it you two are signed up to do?” Carol asked as she started off.

“Jack is going to spot one of the runways.”

He would be the most perfect of mates, she decided. She told herself their children would fall off the roof and land like laughing angels in his arms. As they drank their coffee and strolled by a row of Beechcraft, Jack kept one arm around her shoulders and pointed with his coffee cup, resuming an earlier explanation of the difference between an aileron and a stabilizer, something he remembered from four months helping to retool the Ford line in ’42, before the draft took him. “The stabilizer is fixed but the aileron lets you roll.” She glanced toward Peter Cox, but he and the blonde had already quit the scene.

“Hi, Frank.” Jack set down his coffee cup on the high-school science department’s table and shook hands with
Frank Sherwood, who was out here this morning to talk about the dead-reckoning method of celestial navigation to anyone who cared to listen, even if the technique was unlikely to be useful to fliers of small planes so far from an ocean.

Frank nodded to Anne. “I thought you might be here. I heard you getting up this morning.”

“I’m never as quiet as Frank,” Anne explained to Jack. “He’s a much more considerate neighbor than I am.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean—” said Frank.

“It’s true!” cried Anne. “He’s Mrs. Wagner’s favorite.” She picked up one of his star charts and admired it. Without taking time to think, she said, “I saw your prize astronomy pupil looking at some planes with Margaret Feller.” Anne thanked her lucky stars that, in the course of spinning some comic tales of what went on under Mrs. Wagner’s roof, she hadn’t told Jack what she’d figured out about poor Frank.

Frank straightened the pile of charts. “This celestial navigation is actually pretty earthbound stuff.”

“How so?” asked Jack.

“Well, with real astronomy the earth hardly counts. But when you navigate by the stars you’ve got to see things in relation to where you are.” As he spoke this explanation to Jack Riley’s open, intelligent face, Frank decided Anne Macmurray was a lucky girl. So many faces this morning had seemed twitchy and peculiar, as if they weren’t used to getting up so early. Margaret Feller had given him the oddest, most pained look, and the Grimes kid had gotten positively tongue-tied when he went up to him for a soda.

Jack pointed to the Owosso High banner. “Are they paying you for this, Frank?”

“Nope. This is just a break from that big summer vacation they’re always telling us makes up for everything else.”

“Are you going to get home before summer’s over?” asked Anne, who felt guilty to be thinking how much easier it would be to have Jack spend the night, and slip out undetected the following morning, if Frank weren’t on the other side of the wall.

“No, I’ll be staying around. I don’t really have anybody back in Ohio anymore.” He looked up at the wind sock, which was half-filled but pointing as best it could in the direction of Oak Hill. This was home now; he knew that.

“Welcome!” shouted the retired Air Force major in charge of the Dawn Patrol. He urged people to make for seats behind the ropes so that the competitive drills could get under way. The throng tossed their paper cups and began a dutiful shuffle, while the major read off a list of 1948’s big aviation events, from the first jet carrier landing to the first nonstop Paris-New York commercial flight (“just sixteen hours”) to the death of Orville Wright. But the eyes of the migrating crowd were already on the first two planes, a couple of Hughes racers with open cockpits, their goggled, helmeted pilots facing into the wind and waiting for the sound of the starting gun to pull back on their sticks and take off. A moment after they were up, to everyone’s cheers, the silver planes took 270-degree turns in opposite directions, each describing an arc that suggested a hot-air balloon. Before they were out of sight, another pair were aloft, executing loops that Margaret couldn’t stop pointing to. Her gesture was more than exuberance in the presence of beauty; it was oddly functional, because unless prompted Tim didn’t seem inclined to look at the stunts.

As Anne, without knowing what to call them, admired chandelles performed by the latest two pilots, Carol Feller sidled up and said, “I promised Harold I’d be like the League
of Women Voters and stay strictly neutral. But the one you’ve got here is awfully nice.”

Anne watched Jack watching the precision spins from the place where he’d volunteered to stand along the ropes, like a policeman at a parade. One little girl was actually holding on to his leg. “He is, isn’t he?” she replied to Carol.

Frank Sherwood regarded the geometry of two skywriters who, as they swept through barrel rolls and an Immelmann turn, appeared to be connecting dots in the sky, skeining the sun-camouflaged stars into a pattern, a face or design that would soon emerge and stun them all into silence.

Billy observed Mr. Sherwood as he made what Billy took to be the impressively detached observations of the pure scientist. Billy wished he could take back the thought he had planted in Mrs. Herrick’s addled head, but he knew that that was no more possible than this antique Bristol Boxkite’s being able to erase its white plumes of skywriting.

Five minutes later it was the ground, not the sky, that the planes were whitening. A long green strip held the targets for a precision bomb drop, the climax of the morning’s competitions. Bag after bag of flour fell, exploding without a whistle or thud, puff after white puff dappling the grass and exciting the crowd’s applause. Harold Feller, still caught between the wars, watched in silence, his emotions too encrypted for even himself to read. His daughter looked at Tim Herrick in another kind of bafflement, trying to descry the thoughts inside him, to understand what was keeping his attention from all these events he had talked about for weeks, why his eyes kept darting toward the parked planes and not the ones competing overhead. Carol Feller studied her daughter and wondered why she seemed febrile with devotion
over her new love, like an ecstatic nun, rather than just purring with ordinary happiness. Jack Riley watched the fiftieth sack of flour explode upon the soldierless ground and knew exactly what he was remembering and why he wouldn’t think any more about it. He would occupy his mind with the sensation of having his thumb chewed by the little girl to whom he’d offered it.

When all the planes were down and their pilots all applauded, the major turned things over to Cass Hough, the English daredevil, who pulled a card from an envelope and announced that none other than Doris Singer, their own Miss Owosso, who had just the other week made the state finals but lost the prize of being Miss Michigan, had been chosen Miss Dawn Patrol.

“Come on,” said Tim. “Help me.”

He needed Margaret to go back with him to the car, in whose trunk he had another trunk, a big one, half the size of an old steamer. Would she help him carry it to Gus’s plane? “It’s a surprise,” said Tim. “I’m going to cover it up with a blanket. He won’t even notice till after he’s put the plane back in his barn.”

“What’s in it?” asked Margaret, as she walked backwards with it, covering the three hundred yards between Arnie’s Chevrolet and Gus’s plane. Gus himself was sure to be at the just-opened beer stand.

“Cans of soup, evaporated milk, stuff like that. Gus is a lot poorer than people think. He can use all of it, and it’s easier for him to just find it than have to say thank you.”

Gus’s plane might look smaller than Harold Feller’s Oldsmobile, but there was a surprising amount of room behind the old leather passenger’s seat. The trunk hid easily
under a blanket that had been lying in a clutter of tools and beer bottles.

“That’s great,” said Tim. “Why don’t you get a place for us on the rides line? I’ll be there in another minute. I just want to leave him a note. A couple of these things need instructions.”

He was, she decided, too embarrassed to have her see him complete this act of charity, and she wanted to be as considerate of his feelings as he was of Gus’s. So she gave him a kiss and ran off to join her girlfriends, who were still dismissing the charms of Doris Singer, as they waited for the first plane, ahead of the long line of ticket holders, to rev up and take off. The skies had been silent for nearly a half hour, and the crowd was beginning to miss the noisy motorized duets. Soon enough, though, an uncertain hum filled the air. Margaret’s friends stood on their toes to see the first of the twenty-five-cents-a-ride planes take off. But as the erratic buzz grew more raucous, there was still no plane visible ahead. All at once it became clear that the sound was above and behind them. They turned and looked up to see, sticking out of a low-flying cockpit, not a helmet and goggles, but a head of golden hair, streaming in the wind as the plane went, accidentally, into a quarter roll, before the pilot righted it and waved good-bye to his girlfriend below, pulling up on the stick and disappearing into a sun so bright it seemed more silver than gold.