Dewey Defeats Truman (19 page)

By nightfall the desk of police chief Ted Rice had on it a report of August’s first serious theft, that of a Curtiss JN-4D, as well as one for the month’s first missing person, Timothy Herrick, seventeen, late of 105 Park Street.

“M
R
. C
HAMBERS
,
WILL YOU RAISE YOUR VOICE A LITTLE
,
PLEASE
? When and where were you born?”

“I was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.”

“How long have you been associated with
Time
magazine?”

“Nine years.”

“Prior to that time, what was your occupation?”

“I was a member of the Communist Party …”

The interrogation of Whittaker Chambers by Robert Stripling, chief investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, had gotten under way in Washington on the morning of August 3, and that evening Horace Sinclair read portions of it in the Detroit paper. The late Mrs. Sinclair had developed in him a taste for genteel mystery novels, ones in which truth emerged at the point of a question instead of a gun. Exactly what had transpired years ago between Chambers and a diplomat named Alger Hiss looked as if it might play out like one of the books Horace came home with each week from the Owosso Public Library, the labeled
skull on their spines promising a good night’s sleep after a bit of mental exercise.

He hoped the story would soon crowd others off the front page. He could not stand the annual round of Hiroshima anniversary features, which would reach a peak this weekend, emphasizing rebirth and a lack of hard feelings. Horace had no stomach for the bipartisan certainty that dropping the bomb had been necessary, even kind, in light of the casualties a land assault would have led to. Of course, no invasion of Japan would have been the cakewalk his own cavalry unit performed in Cuba half a century ago, but who could say what the bomb’s long-term effects would be? The smoke from it was a whirlwind begging to be reaped. The first time Horace had seen the photographs he’d noticed not a mushroom, but a sort of truncated crucifix, as if this new cross to which man was nailing himself refused to support his head; he would have to hang it in shame. This week the pictures were back, the cloud and the rubble and the craters, the heaps of lives buried and dug out and, the papers would have you believe, resurrected. And all he could think of was one small crater, hastily dug and frantically filled, fifty-one summers ago. The black buckram box stood on his dining-room table, and there had still been no letter from Wright George. If he failed to respond, Horace would have to take matters into his own hands, soon, and in the dead of night.

How he envied the Herrick boy—free and far away, if he was still alive. After three days, people were beginning to doubt anyone would ever find him. It was like looking for a needle that had blown out of one haystack into who-knew-which other. Each day the
Argus
ran the same unsmiling picture,
a much-enlarged head from a group photo of the high-school baseball team. The paper had by now familiarized readers with the fact that 1948 had seen great progress in the proliferation of VHF omnidirectional radar stations, which sent out beams toward every point on the compass instead of the mere four that older systems had. Of course, in order to use the new radar, planes had to have updated receivers, and—well, there was no radio of any kind in Gus Farnham’s biplane. The paper printed the background material on radar to fill column inches of a big local story that had very little else to offer the typesetter. All anyone had were theories, which mostly involved the plane’s having come down over water, since on Sunday there had been no crashes reported anywhere on the southern peninsula. There were those who guessed Tim had flown over Pointe Aux Barques and fallen into Lake Huron, and those who said westward, over Big Sable Point and into Lake Michigan. A few speculators, no more informed than anybody else, thought he might have made it all the way to Wisconsin. But if so, where was he? No one seemed to think he’d gone southeast or into Lake Erie—if he had, surely somebody out of all the millions of people in Detroit and Toledo would have noticed him. Though he acknowledged having taken him up a couple of times, Gus Farnham claimed to have given the boy no flying lessons: “I guess he picked it up by watching,” Gus told both the
Argus
and Chief Rice. Tim Herrick had never asked to take the controls, let alone mentioned any scheme to skip town.

The
Argus
reporter ended today’s article by noting that Margaret Feller, 17, of 430 West Oliver Street, was still “distraught” after questioning by police, and that William
Grimes, also 17, of 352 Pine, a longtime
Argus
carrier with an excellent record, was mailing flyers with Tim Herrick’s picture on them to dozens of towns throughout the state that his friend was known to have visited, mentioned, or just driven through in his brother’s old Chevrolet. Mrs. Herrick had been “in seclusion” since Monday, when she had returned, in her own car, from a Marine’s reburial in Battle Creek and learned of her son’s disappearance.

Horace’s clock chimed six-thirty. If he got ready now, he could comfortably walk to City Hall and arrive in time for the first public reading of Jackson’s scheme before the city council. He rose from his chesterfield sofa and went into the kitchen to refresh himself by sticking his head into the icebox and keeping it there, eyes closed and vapor swirling, for a good fifteen seconds. He brought his suspenders back up over his shoulders and gathered the papers he had been working with at the dining-room table, his own handsome prose descriptions of two of the town’s oldest structures: the Woodard Paymaster Building, a tiny wooden cabin from which Campbell Gregory, fifty years before, had each week handed Owosso men the wages they’d earned making chairs and coffins; and Elias Comstock’s cabin, 112 years old this May, the first regular dwelling place in town, so much improved and added on to by Judge Comstock and subsequent owners that it eventually seemed like a piece of furniture, or a secret, inside a bigger house. These endangered buildings were the real history of the town, what the council ought to be spending its money on instead of throwing up this cornball Casbah along the river. That’s the argument he would get up and make tonight. To coddle his voice he had smoked neither pipe nor cigarettes all afternoon, and before he put
these papers inside the old soft briefcase he used to take to the office on Exchange Street, he would swallow a teaspoonful of honey.

He was ready. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and turned off the light above the dining-room table. The fringe on its shade shook a little, as Horace stole one more glance at the buckram box, hoping against hope that when he returned tonight he might be able to put it away forever.

“G
O
, M
R
. A
BNER
. R
EALLY
,” A
NNE INSISTED
. “Y
OU WON
’
T GET
a seat unless you do.”

Leo Abner still appeared reluctant. When he’d decided to keep the shop open till seven-thirty on summer Tuesdays, he’d told Anne she wouldn’t have to stay.

“Go,” she said, giving him a little push. “I’ve got to wait for Jack, in any case.”

“All right, you talked me into it.”

Anne laughed. “You want it to go through, don’t you?”

At this mention of Al Jackson’s plan, whose presentation at City Hall was Leo Abner’s destination, the bookstore owner’s expression crumpled back toward guilt. “I shouldn’t, should I? Maybe I’m being selfish. Maybe I’ve just decided it would be good for business—all the postcards and Dewey books we’d sell to the visitors.” He couldn’t bring himself to use the uncourtly “tourists.”

“But you know, Anne”—he’d finally dropped “Miss Macmurray,” now that Jack Riley (“your beau”) offered her sufficient protection against familiarity—“part of me just
likes
the idea.”

This confession no longer surprised her. Since coming
back from Mackinac she’d heard a half dozen town elders, hierarchical club women and their privacy-loving husbands, express an embarrassed enthusiasm for the Dewey Walk, which was what everyone had taken to calling it. (“Road to Prosperity” had been dropped, probably for its faint echoes of Hoover.) Al Jackson might still be something of a brash outsider, but all the color and chatter he’d made people imagine along the riverbank stirred in them memories of the long carnival summer of ’36, when the town had celebrated its centennial and floated for weeks upon the puffings of calliopes.

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t like the idea, Mr. Abner.”

He put his hat back on. “The two of you will come along later?”

“Both of us. Now
go
.”

It was 7:20, and before Jack arrived she could perform one small chore, wrapping up a copy of
Kingsblood Royal
, the most recent Sinclair Lewis, for Mrs. Henry Hamel on Lee Street. It would replace the copy of
Raintree County
the police had taken from her yesterday. Since Sunday morning Margaret, between bouts of crying and silence, had mentioned the novel a number of times, whenever Chief Rice and his deputies inquired about what the
Argus
now called Timothy Herrick’s “state of mind.” She’d admitted that late in June Tim had stolen (and then replaced) a copy of the book from Abner’s, and had occasionally mentioned the relevance of page 464 to the author’s recent suicide. So yesterday a policeman had come into the shop looking for the book, which Anne’s card file showed as having been sold to Mrs. Hamel on July 9. A visit to Lee Street revealed that page 464 had
been underlined and starred by someone besides Mrs. Hamel, who reacted with more sheepishness than surprise: she had never made it past page 50. She let the officer take the book with him, and Leo Abner instructed Anne to send her something else, with the shop’s apologies for having sold defaced merchandise.

Anne now looked at page 464 on the store’s only other copy of
Raintree County
and considered the lines Tim had marked in the volume whose summer odyssey had ended on Chief Rice’s desk:

Anne had been surprised to find such a passage lurking in this big, bloated Carl Sandburg production. (The book
had
been seized by the Philadelphia vice squad back in March, but vice squads were always seizing something.) A little bit of Krafft-Ebing back in Ann Arbor had taught her there were men excited by such things (Kinsey, she now realized, must also have something on it), but Margaret insisted that Tim had spoken of these lines only as the clue to why a few months ago Ross Lockridge had killed himself, just when
he’d realized his big best-selling dreams. Anne had brought the novel home last night and skimmed enough of it to gather that the problem with Susanna (the girl who wanted whipping) was the guilty secret of her Negro blood. Lockridge had had his own torments, according to the magazines, including
The New Yorker
’s sophisticated pan of his book, a review that managed to call him “Lockwood” throughout.

Suicide was all the police had to hear about to start working that as Tim Herrick’s motivation, a line of thought infuriating to poor Margaret, who maintained that Tim had no guilty secrets and was only interested in what happened to Lockridge as an example of the world’s cruelty. Besides, if Tim wanted to kill himself, why would he bother to do it from a plane? Why not just jump off the water tower? Or take a page from Lockridge and run the engine of Arnie’s Chevrolet with the garage door closed? And where
was
this plane they were thinking he’d deliberately crashed?