Dewey Defeats Truman (29 page)

“Whole universe took only six days!” shouted Al, who before anyone could stop him was at the lectern roiling his oaktag sheets. Their liquid noise was far less audible than he: “We’ve already started! All we need to do is build a version of what we’ll be putting along the river. Look! ‘The Family Fireplace,’ ‘College Days,’ ‘Gotham Courtroom’ …”

Even Al’s detractors took his point.

“I thought so!” said Al, who before anyone actually said anything was standing the panels up along the bottom of the stage. “Talk about an unveiling! It’ll be like new-model day in Detroit. Now all you’ve got to do is pick who gets to play who. Good luck to everybody—so long as they know getting picked for the parade doesn’t give them any leg up when we pick people for next year by the river. That’ll be done later, fair and square.”

At the back of the temple, Peter Cox toyed with the idea of playing Tom Dewey’s father in his newspaper office. Standing atop a great moving crepe-paper version of what was once the Owosso Times Building would have its advantages. Showing himself off with a touch of gray powder at the temples; their next state senator playing father to the latest father of the country. Of course, it might look like too literal a jump on Dewey’s bandwagon, too obvious a grab at his
starched little coattails. Maybe it would be better just to secure a dignified place on the speakers’ platform wherever they decided to wind up the parade.

He’d have a day or two to decide. There was something more important to attend to now.

“What was that phone number they mentioned, Mrs. Bruce?”

From her position below his right shoulder, she looked up from her notepad. “The volunteer line?”

“Yes. Could you write it down?”

“Owosso 2188,” she said, tearing off a sheet of stenographic paper.

“Thanks,” he said, heading out toward his car. Which would be the best place to leave it? In her mailbox on Oliver or under the door of Abner’s?

O
N
M
ONDAY AFTERNOON
F
RANK
S
HERWOOD ROUNDED THE
stairwell between the first and second floors of Owosso High. As always when he found the landing here deserted, he felt relief. Most days, before the 8:15 bell and between class periods, it was filled with the athletic kings of the hill and their girlfriends, the “hearties,” as an Anglophilic colleague in the history department liked to call them. They never actually
said
anything when he walked by, but whenever he passed, he was waiting for it, imagining he’d heard some noise or seen some gesture that showed they could guess what their parents could not. (He particularly dreaded one pedagogical invention taking hold in some parts of the country: the junior high school. From everything he’d heard, dividing the educational trek into three stages instead of two meant the kids arrived at high school one year later and even more
sophisticated, having just spent puberty cut off from the smallest ones.)

But today was easy. He sat down to mark tests at his desk in front of an empty classroom and listened to the half-strength blowings of the band practicing outside for the Dewey parade. Most of the boys, along with most of the men teachers, were off pheasant hunting on this first day of the season: a peculiar little privilege that had survived the generations and was not without benefit for those who stayed behind. Frank had gotten to cancel two decimated classes.

They weren’t bad kids—he smiled to think of the boy who’d come back last year with a live turkey vulture for bird-loving Bruce Wilson in Biology—but it would be easier to live without them. Once or twice he’d thought of going along on the hunt; Arnie had shot pheasants, and the chance to stumble down paths that he once walked was almost inducement enough. But every year he declined, content to wonder what had happened to the gun, trying to picture it in a corner of the garage on Park Street. It seemed doubtful that Tim had inherited it. Last year on this day, when Frank went off to an afternoon movie at the Capitol, he’d spotted the boy in the third row, asleep and, he was pretty sure, drunk.

He’d thought of going to the movies today, but then he noticed that his first canceled class would only run into lunchtime—still too early for the first show. So he’d decided to go down to Oak Hill instead. He just sat in the gazebo for a half hour. Since suffering through those visits from Jane Herrick and Ted Rice’s deputy, he’d been afraid to go near the grave itself, lest somebody spot him there and decide it was suspicious. He hadn’t even gone to his old inconspicuous spot behind the Bell mausoleum. The last thing he wanted to
do was watch her at the headstone: it was a lovely morning and there was every reason to think she might be down there.

She scared him more than the police. A few weeks ago, at Gene Riley’s funeral, she’d come up to him and started making odd conversation about how Saint Paul’s was nice enough in its way, but as cemeteries went it really couldn’t compare to Oak Hill. She’d even asked him for a ride home, which he’d been too flummoxed not to offer, even though he feared a barrage of new questions, ones that had occurred to her in the weeks since his denials that night back in his apartment. But they’d ridden all the way along Chipman and Oliver in a crazy, screaming silence.

The quiet here in room 211, as four distant clarinets dominated two distant trumpets on “The Sidewalks of New York,” made him as peaceful as he ever was in this building. Marking the third incorrect rendition in a row of the formula for hydrochloric acid, he tried to tell himself that he would be more interested a month from now, when the curriculum put them through a unit of astronomy.

A knock.

“Come in,” he said, disappointed that the five minutes he still had coming to him, thanks to the pheasants, would now be spoiled.

The wooden door opened, and he saw her standing before him, pieces of wet green grass stuck to the darker green of the same skirt she’d had on when she rang his bell in August. With fast, pointless instinct, he shut his grade book. Was there a policeman behind her?

“Do you mind if I sit down?” she asked, with a kind of desperate clarity, as if she were speaking the one line she had in an Owosso Community Players production and was afraid she wouldn’t get it out.

“They’ve all gone pheasant hunting,” he said, with the same overenunciation, as if he had misheard a cue and delivered
his
line out of sequence.

She sat down in the front row, placing her folded newspaper on the paddle desk. She fidgeted a bit and tried smiling. “They never did have enough of these for southpaws.” She waited a moment before going on. “My son Arnie used to hunt pheasants. Tim was never much interested.”

“Did—” To his absolute horror, he realized he had started to ask what ever happened to Arnie’s gun. He caught himself, and beneath the desktop dug the point of his red pencil into his thumb. “I don’t think we’re going to get much of anything done this fall. Every club in the school is involved in one way or another with the rally for Dewey, and as soon as that’s over everyone will be getting ready for the homecoming game.” The night before, down on the river, as they screamed and petted their way through a pep rally, he would have to supervise the bonfire, a quasi-scientific duty that fell to him every year.

“That snake,” she said. “I never like it. It reminds me of maneuvers. Or some terrible medical probe.” She was talking about the giant conga line of seniors that roared through the downtown. Her images for it, disgorged by her obsession, touched him unexpectedly. Surprised at himself, but without checking the movement, he came out from behind the desk and stood less than two feet from her. He looked down at the newspaper item she had circled with a wax pencil: eighteen Shiawassee County boys were reporting to Flint for pre-induction physicals.

“I can hear those seniors all the way to my corner of Park Street,” she said. “You like quiet, too, I suppose.”

Was this a trap? He offered nothing.

“I saw you at Oak Hill this morning,” she said. “Sitting in the gazebo. It’s a wonderful place to go for peace and quiet, isn’t it?”

It was a trap, he was sure, and he had to figure out what wild supposition might be coming next.

“Have you lost someone who’s there?” she asked.

“All my family are buried in Cincinnati.” He said it with self-imposed calm, in such a low monotone that no one in a theatre could have heard him. She nodded, respectfully. His having dead of his own, wherever they were, was clearly important to her, like a demonstration of good manners.

“Thank you for dropping me home the other week,” she said, looking up.

He had to reply. “I’m glad you said hello to me at Mr. Riley’s funeral.” No, he wasn’t; no more glad than that she’d come here. What did she want, and why wouldn’t she come out and say it and then leave him alone forever?

“There was something I wanted to tell you then,” she said.

Inside his jacket pocket, he pressed on the red pencil with what he calculated as the maximum force it could stand without snapping in two. He waited. But whatever it was she had to say, she couldn’t make herself do it. Some compulsive numbers came out instead.

“I suppose you saw the
Argus
for September 29th. Two weeks ago Wednesday? 358,967 dead. The official count. Not made or released until thirty-seven months after the second surrender. And 150,000, still just a round number, already home or to be returned.”

As if pushed by a giant ball of ticker tape, Frank began to retreat behind his desk.

“Mr. Sherwood, I’m sorry,” said Jane, in a tone suddenly lucid with pleading. “I don’t know where Tim is, and you don’t either. I never paid the least bit of attention to him. I’m glad that you gave him some.”

He paused in front of the blackboard. He kept his back to her and waited for her to finish.

“Someone put a foolish suggestion into my head. I don’t think I ever believed it. I think I tore after you because I was angry with myself. I wanted to make the attention you gave him into something bad, so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about not giving it to him myself. I know this doesn’t make sense—”

He heard her voice trailing off, retreating into the confusion of the other world, the one in which she spent most of each day. He wanted to wheel around and catch her, keep her
here
, but he couldn’t make himself do it, couldn’t take his eyes off the blackboard, this same panel of it he’d stared at one afternoon four years ago, when, five minutes after seeing the words
OWOSSO MAN IN ARDENNES MASSACRE
in the Teachers’ Lounge copy of the
Argus
, he’d come in here, as they talked and laughed and passed notes behind his back, to pick up a piece of chalk and, in a trance, write down the second law of thermodynamics.

“I should go,” she murmured.

“No, please, don’t,” he said, turning around. “May I give you a ride home?”

“No. Thank you,” she said, extracting a ring of keys from her purse. “I have my car today.”

He saw the sun and moon dangling from the chain. His mouth dropped open. He was staring straight into a total eclipse.

“I know why you were angry at me,” he said. “It’s because we’re the same. It’s not just liking quiet and the cemetery. We’re alone in this town, and this is a hard place to
be
alone. It makes you angry to be yourself. A week from this Saturday night, through all the roar of the parade, I’ll stand in the middle of the crowd on the sidewalk and still be alone.”

“Please don’t go to the parade,” she said. “Come to my house for dinner instead.”

T
HEY
’
D REMOVED SIX
B
UICKS FROM THE
R
OSS SHOWROOM TO
make space for the reception committee’s operation. At eight o’clock on Monday night, the eighteenth, the big selling floor and the sidewalk at Main and John were as busy as any stretch of downtown on a Saturday afternoon. All day long Mrs. Bruce had been running back and forth from Peter’s headquarters to the library to her own card table here. She’d just come from the reference section with what she hoped was accurate information about which implements at the Putnam farm (site of some youthful Dewey work experience) might have been automated. There was no point building a fake tractor if a hundred people along Main Street were going to hoot at an anachronism, and not even the county Farm Bureau, which was sponsoring the float, had seemed completely sure.

Rushing back in, she bumped into two club officers returning from Detroit with complaints that they’d been high-hatted by some campaign official with bigger things on his mind than one town’s parade. “What do you expect?” said one to the other. “They play
bridge
on the campaign train.”

At the back of the showroom there was a poker game in progress, which local merchants would drift in and out of for a few hands after depositing the latest load of paint or lumber or crepe paper, whose rolls were now piled up like newsprint wheels at the
Argus
plant. Nearby bolts of cloth bunting looked silky and regal compared to all the flimsy crinkle, but none of this red-white-and-blue swag would be hung from any outdoor lamppost until Thursday at the earliest, not with the forecast looking as uncertain as it did.

Peter Cox, who’d just sat down at the card table, was intrigued to hear about the Victory Special’s bridge game; he would be cleaning up if he were aboard. He’d given up on the idea of playing Dewey senior and settled into his role as liaison man to the offices of Governor Sigler and Senator Vandenberg, both of whom would be on hand this weekend. And nobody was going to high-hat
him
when Dewey’s New York representative arrived in town tomorrow.

“Honey, you need a cup of coffee.” He could detect the hearty voice of Kay Schmidt, here with a donation of food from the hotel, imploring Anne Macmurray to give herself a break from the busiest table of all, where she and Carol Feller and a couple of other ladies were trying to find 150 beds for various dignitaries and reporters who’d be staying over Saturday night.

“Mrs. Schmidt,” she replied. “I need a
drink
.” It was exactly the sort of remark she knew how to get away with—one notch below Nice Girl, but nowhere near to pushing it. The people who heard it would go home saying she had “pizazz” and wasn’t the least bit stuck-up. It was curious, thought Peter: she
knew
what she was doing, was calibrating it exactly for effect, even though she had no need to. She would have
made the remark anyway, said it
naturally
. The calculation was redundant, and as soon as she employed it she’d be on to herself, would feel a trace of guilt, which was, he thought, as he watched her flip through a card file, one of the reasons, somewhere near the middle of the list, that he was in love with her.