Dewey Defeats Truman (21 page)

After another half hour, the discussion was hardly exhausted, but Councilman Morgan called for a show of hands by his colleagues. By five to two, and to substantial cheers, the plan was carried forward to a second meeting and a final vote in October.

The crowd, uninterested in sewage treatment and new fire helmets, tonight’s other items of business, were already on their feet. Peter could hear one librarian ask another if she didn’t think their friend Trudy would be perfect playing Cokey Flo Brown, the Dewey witness who’d put away Lucky Luciano, on those Saturdays when real people in costumes, the way they’d started doing it in Williamsburg, Virginia, would take their parts in front of the murals.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen!” cried Councilman Royers, who finally got those departing to turn around. “May I remind you that over the next few days, extensive on-foot searches for Tim Herrick and Gus Farnham’s plane will be conducted in Clinton and Livingston counties? Please see the bulletin board outside Chief Rice’s office for details, and please give of your time as generously as possible.”

H
ORACE FLICKED THE
UAW’
S
T
RUMAN BUTTON ONTO THE
late Mrs. Sinclair’s lemon-slice dish before dissolving, exhausted, onto the sofa. If Gene Riley’s son hadn’t given him a ride from City Hall, he would never have made it home. What a fiasco the evening had been! What a feeble attempt to avoid what was coming! He had hoped to arrive home tonight and, after fifty-one years, throw away the contents of the buckram box. Instead, if he’d had any left, he would be flinging his silly historical handbills into the wicker wastebasket by his reading chair.

He looked at the box on the dining-room table. It seemed to be clicking in the moonlight, waiting to spring to life, the way dead bacteria, scientists claimed, could wiggle back into existence if they were freed from the amber that had held them for millions of years. Whenever he was in Christ Episcopal, he thought about how the contents of the cornerstone, buried in 1859, were similarly seething with suppressed vitality, awaiting the church’s centennial and their planned release. Christ’s was where they had all met back in the eighties, in the boys’ choir led by the rector’s daughter: himself and Wright George and Boyd Fowler and Jon, poor Jon, who even then had lived from one enthusiasm to another, swept along on his own good nature, every loving or unkind word striking him five times harder than it would anyone else. “God should have brought him into the world as a dog,” Wright had said when it was all over, and the others took the remark for what it was, a compliment, and elaborated upon it, until they decided on the particular breed of retriever whose
guilelessness and feelings shone brightest on its eyes. That was Jon.

He switched on the dining-room lamp. Its fringed shade shook, raking the table with shadows. He opened the box, not to destroy its contents, but to surrender to them, to let them hurt him all over again. The letter had never had an envelope, just an engraving of the Ament Hotel in an oval-shaped cloud, at the top of the stationery:

The fold was still in the paper, with the last three words Jon ever wrote, “To Horace Sinclair,” on the back. Jon had hoped the clerk would find it in the middle of the night, when he walked the second-floor corridor and heard a faint hiss and smelled something sweet and saw no light at the threshhold. And that’s just what had happened. Once inside, the clerk pinched off the gas, but it was too late. The blue skin and strangely red lips sent him, in a panic, to the Sinclair house five blocks north on Ball Street. There, still in a shed, stood a half dozen bicycles from his father’s failed shop, so Horace gave one to the young man and the two of them rode as fast as they could back to the hotel. Up in room 214, the clerk swore the face was bluer now, an even bolder contrast to the sepia tones of Alice Banks, the girl from Lennon whose photograph had been set out on the dresser.

Only eight months had passed since the Saturday afternoon Alice came into Owosso and bought fabric from Jonathan Adams Darrell, the boutonniered new clerk on the second floor of D. M. Christian’s. Before long she was coming in each Saturday, to meet him at the counter of Otto Sprague’s first drugstore or to hold hands at the Salisbury Opera House before Jon drove her back to Lennon in his carriage, both of them dreading the sight of George F. Behan’s grain elevator, which signaled their arrival at Thomas Banks’s small house, which he’d built as close to the elevator as one safely could, the elevator being where he worked and, despite another man’s owning it, the pride of his life. By early June Alice, as feckless as Jon, was expecting a child, and Thomas Banks decided it would be more effective to banish his daughter than her detested suitor. For the two weeks before Jon cut into the gas pipe, Alice had been someplace so tightly guarded that no letter from her could reach him. Jon’s haggard pleadings had fallen on the equally deaf ears of Thomas Banks and his wife.

“Bring me the register,” Horace whispered to the clerk, who ran and got it so that Horace might rip out its last used page, the one he was now pulling out of the buckram box. “Jonathan Adams Darrell” was written beneath the name of a salesman from Chicago, who had slept through the night’s furtive commotion three rooms down the hall.

“Can you remember the rest of these names?”

“Yes,” said the clerk.

“Then copy them onto the next empty page downstairs. Do you remember his name?” asked Horace, pointing, without looking, at Jon’s still body.

“No,” said the clerk, who was smart enough to guess this
was the right answer, and calm enough now to scent opportunity, to give off a deliberate hint of unreliability, what Horace would have to satisfy three days later with fifty dollars withdrawn from the Owosso Savings Bank. The receipt for that transaction, also in the buckram box, was stamped “100 W. Oliver Street,” the address of the Amos Gould house, out of which the bank had operated in those days, a fact he neglected to put into the handbills he’d passed out tonight. By the end of the summer of ’97 the clerk was gone from Owosso, managing some Harvey House out west.

Two of the ninety-five telephones then in Owosso were owned by the Ament Hotel and Wright George’s parents. At 3:15
A.M.
Horace got the operator to ring the Georges’ number, trusting that Wright would be the one to pick up. “Meet me in front of your house in ten minutes, and have your father’s wagon ready.” By 3:30 they had roused Boyd Fowler, and by four they had stolen a mahogany coffin from Boyd’s place of business, the Owosso Casket Company. Before the sun came up they had buried Jon in the soft riverbank behind the shuttered mill. No lights gave them away: there was then no Armory, no high school, no purposeless castle just across the water.

Along with Jon’s note, the page of the register, the bank receipt and the photo of Alice, there was a copy of the pact Horace had talked them into signing. They had put the original into Jon’s stolen coffin, a paper averring that they had buried Jon so as not to give Thomas Banks the satisfaction, nor Alice Banks the agony, of knowing what had happened. Horace would write Mr. Banks that a despairing, desperate Jon, determined never to return to Michigan or communicate with Alice again, had shipped out with the Navy; so it
was safe to bring her home and be happy with the misery Mr. Banks had caused them all. As for Jon’s mother, she required no material assistance, and Horace convinced himself he had spared her with the same lie, which she was able to believe, since she had never liked Alice Banks and let Jon know it: it made sense that he was bitter enough never to write home from San Diego or Manila Bay or any of the other ports of call where from time to time she imagined him over the next and last ten years of her life.

Horace took another look at the buckram box and wondered if
he
had any possibility of another ten years. Could he live through the unearthing of all this? Survive the
Argus
story that was sure to reach Jon’s son, a fifty-year-old man who, as Horace knew from years of secretly keeping track, still lived in Detroit? Useless speculation; as useless as continuing to wonder if Wright George would answer his letter. The only question worth asking was whether or not Horace Sinclair could still wield a shovel.

M
ARGARET LAY AWAKE
,
LOOKING THROUGH HER OPEN WINDOW
. She was still sure—at least for moments at a time—that he would come to her, or get her a message, explain what his voyage had been about, and what it had to do with her. The thought that it had
nothing
to do with her, that he had betrayed their weeks together, was still unthinkable, though, also for moments at a time, she had been tempted to consider this. To stop herself, she would concentrate on her enemies, chief among them Billy, whose every effort at helping, like those ridiculous flyers, seemed an I-told-you-so. Then there was the parade of Tim’s old girlfriends, like Sharon
Daly, eager to get themselves into the
Argus
and on WOAP, coming forward to list all the places
they
had gone with Tim in Arnie’s Chevrolet, as if Tim might have flown his plane back to one of them as some lovesick gesture.

In the darkest part of her heart, she suspected her parents—as she suspected they suspected her—of having had something to do with what happened Sunday morning.

But what had happened
since
then? Where had he landed the plane, and what had he been doing? She
did
believe he was alive, but she remained incapable of picturing him outside the cockpit with his feet on the ground, breaking into the provisions she had helped him load. Did this mean the thread connecting them was too thin to transmit an image?

H
E SUSPECTED BOTH OF THEM
;
THEY WERE IN IT TOGETHER
.

That’s what Billy thought as he walked east on Oliver away from Margaret Feller’s window. Herrick was making a place for her, establishing a beachhead, where she would soon join him, having “overcome” Owosso at last. It was as if his own life were some game of ten little Indians; Billy Grimes, who had more practical ideas for getting out of this town than any of them, would be the one forced to stay behind. He could have made a lot extra helping Mr. Jackson at the city council meeting tonight. Would Herrick ever realize he cared enough about his friend to give that up and work on his latest flyers? He’d dropped them off at Chief Rice’s office (the town would pay the postage), and now he was just walking, watching the lightning bugs go on and off, like substitutes for the forsythia petals of spring. At least, by luck, he
was on the north sidewalk; across Oliver, he could make out Jane Herrick coming in the opposite direction, and he didn’t want to have to talk to her. What was she doing out at midnight? It was creepy even to think about, so he’d think about his fifty-to-one shot, his best fantasy for the way this whole thing might turn out, with Tim returning unharmed, and Margaret so furious at his having hotfooted it off without her that she never spoke to him again. He, Billy, would have both of them back to himself.

But all this was too improbable to keep his mind off old lady Herrick. Was she wishing Tim were dead? Shot down by some insane Nazi exile living on the northern peninsula? Which would make him another casualty to bury and remember? Or had she, like some crazy Quaker, you couldn’t tell with her,
told
him to run off—to avoid August 30, when every Shiawassee County male born between 1923 and 1930, which included Herrick and yours truly, was supposed to register for the draft? “24
YOUTHS VOLUNTEER FOR ARMED SERVICES—LARGEST PEACETIME CONTINGENT
”: that’s what the
Argus
had just bragged about. But anybody who did the numbers could tell you that was pretty small compared to the
in-
voluntary contingent they’d soon be assembling.

J
ANE APPROACHED THE
C
OMSTOCK
A
PARTMENTS
,
HER MATHEMATICAL
compulsions operating as she pushed the bell for number 331. Subtract that many days from August 3 and you were back at September 7, the birthday of Charles Beck, a Corunna boy who’d lost a foot on Okinawa, which wasn’t the same thing as being dead, but which still meant something. She brushed off a couple of small leaves that had attached
themselves to her green felt skirt, which wasn’t right for the season and hadn’t been pressed in more than three years, but which she’d still put on for this visit.

Frank Sherwood opened the door, unnerved, as she’d hoped he would be.

“Mrs. Herrick. Please come upstairs.” He’d thought it might be Anne, that she’d forgotten her key.

Jane looked around the room.

“Can I offer you a cup of tea?” asked Frank. “It takes a few minutes to get the water going on this hotplate, but I can do it.” He turned it on without waiting for an answer, taking down a second cup and a package of Tetley’s, which he’d drunk since ’43 and knew was her brand because he’d seen
him
buying it, back then, in Kroger’s.