Dewey Defeats Truman (32 page)

Peter smiled. “I’ve come to talk about Sunday morning.”

“You mean the ten o’clock service.”

“That’s right. I always keep my part of a bargain. I know a reporter from the
Sun-Times
who’ll be there. I’ve arranged to have him ask Dewey a question about the Walk—in such a way he’ll almost have to discourage it.”

“I’ve given up on the Dewey Walk,” said Horace. “Given up on any chance it won’t be built.”

“Come on, Colonel. You’ve earned this last try. You went and talked to Mrs. Dewey, after all. And it seems to have worked. The governor
is
coming.”

“Your Chicago friend can do whatever he likes. I’m proceeding as if Mr. Jackson’s Walk is going up.” He forced himself not to look at the shovels.

“Proceeding?” asked Peter.

“Resigning myself.”

“Colonel, why do people put things out in garages?” Peter touched a pair of crates beneath the Reginaphone. “I mean, if you want to get rid of things, why not throw them clear away?”

“You can’t get rid of the past, Mr. Cox. The past is not a matter of time. It’s a place. Somewhere just out of reach.”

“You sound like H. G. Wells.”

“No, I don’t, because I know no machine will take you to it. It’s right here, rearranged, hiding like the face drawn into a tree in one of those children’s puzzles. People who appreciate the past work harder to see it. They know it’s there. They can sometimes see the beard, or the eyes, or the nose. But never the whole thing.” He looked at the box. “The world is divided into two kinds of people, Mr. Cox. Those who, when they pass a house, wonder who lives there, and those who, when they pass it, wonder who
used
to live there. I belong to the second group, but no matter which anyone belongs to, he still runs out of time. I’ve run out of time.”

“So have I,” said Peter.

Horace snorted.

“Really, Colonel, I have. There are only two days left in my campaign, and I’m further behind than when I started.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not senile.”
Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley
. “Election Day is November second, and you’re
exactly
the sort of man we’ll be electing from now on.”

“Not that campaign, Colonel. Another one.”

“Ah,” said Horace, getting a general idea and sounding almost apologetic. For a moment, ten years dropped off him. “Who is she?” he asked, thinking it had to be somebody new.

“Anne Macmurray.”

All at once Horace could feel himself angrier than ever before at Peter Cox. He struggled to measure his tones. “She is a lovely girl. Very special. And it’s past time you gave up on her. She is going to marry Riley’s boy. I heard all about it from Mrs. Goldstone. Mr. Cox,
he
is good enough for her.”

“Colonel, why don’t you go in and get us a drink? A real one, not the cordials. When you come out, you can tell me how you courted Mrs. Sinclair.”

“If you’re interested in that, you might as well come inside.”

“No,” said Peter. “I like it out here. I might play the Reginaphone.”

“All right, suit yourself. I’ll bring out some whiskey and some ice.”

Horace went inside, leaving Peter alone with the Reginaphone, which he cranked, and the buckram box, which he opened.

J
ACK HAD NEVER BEEN TO THE
C
ITY
C
LUB
,
BUT LATE
F
RIDAY
night, when he arrived to pick Anne up from the sugar-factory grounds, Carol Feller insisted he join a group that would be there celebrating the readiness of everything for Dewey’s arrival.

They drove up Main, where the 6600-lumen incandescents brought to life the bunting and the candidate’s black-and-white face, endlessly repeated, pole after pole. The
Hotel Owosso was full, music from a swing band sailing through its open doors.

Upstairs at the City Club, along with Peter Cox, Harris Terry and Councilman Royers, Harold Feller waited for his wife. He was in an expansive mood—life was much better than it had been in August—and delighted to see Carol arrive with a group, even if the club had grown short of chairs and waiters. “I’ll do the honors,” he said, taking the newcomers’ drink orders as soon as he found them something to sit on.

When he made it back with the tray, Harris Terry was taking the last sip of his second highball and asking where the young people were. “Not that you three aren’t young,” he said to Anne and Jack and Peter, “but I meant Margaret and her swain.”

“Billy,” said Harold Feller, “is probably selling the last roll of crepe paper at three times the price.” He felt so right with the world he could even accept the idea of Billy Grimes as a son-in-law, should Margaret somehow make it through four years in Ann Arbor as contented with her lot as she now appeared to be.

“There is no further need for crepe paper,” Carol informed her husband and Harris Terry and Ed Royers. “Everything is completely finished. Ready for Freddie.”

“How’s it looking?” asked Terry.

“Like a dream,” said Anne. “It’s such a wholesome sight; it’s only the
extent
of it that seems opulent, as if Marie Antoinette were in charge of the prom.”

“Let ’em eat crepe,” said Peter.

“Well, this will fuel Al’s megalomania,” mused Ed Royers, laughing.

“Has anybody figured out what they’re going to do with the traffic?” asked Jack. It was the most neutral, sportsmanlike question he could think of.

“They’ll start blocking off the streets at three tomorrow afternoon,” answered Royers.

“Imagine what January twentieth in Washington is going to be like,” said Terry. “The
Argus
says they’ve already got Truman’s farewell parties planned. A lot of the Cabinet are renegotiating their leases so they won’t be stuck paying rent.”

“Harry may have a few cards left to play,” said Anne. Everyone knew about her postconvention enthusiasm for the President (what Peter called the New Zeal), and they indulged it like someone’s unaccountable fondness for a mangy dog. Even Jack could still be surprised by the ardor of it.

“You mean cards like the Vinson mission?” asked Peter.

“Now, Peter,” cautioned Harold, “that’s been canceled.”

“But for it to have been
thought
of!” The President’s idea of sending the Chief Justice on a trip to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin—a scheme vetoed by General Marshall—had dealt Truman an embarrassment he could scarcely afford.

“Yeah,” said Peter, entering his relentless mode, “that’s really giving the Russians hell.”

“Too bad he isn’t as tough as Dewey,” said Jack. “He could invite Stalin over here and have him shot at sunrise.”

“Oh,” said Peter, “the engineer. Jeez, Jack, he’s just trying to regulate the railroads. You’re all for the regulation of every interstate thing under the sun, aren’t you?”

“Enough,” said Anne. “That particular train has pulled out. ‘With a little jerk,’ as someone wrote.”

“I think we ought to make the incident a booth along the Dewey Walk,” said Peter. “Give our Democratic visitors a chance to work themselves up.”

“Or maybe,” said Jack, “you could make it into a game for the Republicans. Shoot the engineer and win a kewpie doll.”

“I like the way you think!” said Peter, raising his glass. “Tell me, Annie, what are you going to play out there next spring? And have you thought about growing gracefully into the older character parts as the years go by? Maybe even Mama Dewey herself along about 1990? You’ll be, what, sixty-five?”

“Anne, you and I both need a snack,” said Carol. “We skipped dinner, if you remember.” The two women headed off to see if the kitchen was open. Before they were out of earshot Anne heard Jack suggesting that the next time Peter looked at a map for a legislative seat, he think about picking Rat’s Ass, Alabama. She missed the reply, but Carol caught it. “Peter says he can’t run there, because Rat’s Ass is part of the Democratic plantation. You know, the solid South. Don’t worry, Anne, they’ll cool down. By the way, has Peter been drinking?”

“Not enough. Nothing takes the edge off him.”

“Well, Harold will keep him in line.” They joined a group in search of sandwiches.

“Why won’t he
quit?
” asked Anne.

“Because he hasn’t won.”

“But he’s
lost
. And is that all he wants? To win?”

“No,” said Carol. “He may be a politician, but he wants
you
.” The two women looked back toward the circle of chairs they’d just left. The noise was growing.

“I have to confess I hate seeing some of the changes occurring here,” said Carol, diverting Anne’s gaze to other parts of the room. “Everything is already getting spruced up and unrecognizable. A year from now all the ashtrays and glasses will probably look like souvenirs from Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, except they’ll have pictures of Tom and Frances Dewey on them.”

“Maybe they will for a while,” said Anne. “But not by 1990. I mean, surely everybody will be over it by then.”

“Don’t bet on it. Have you ever been to Marion, Ohio? You’d think Caesar were buried there instead of Harding.”

Anne seemed to drift away from the conversation. It was as if she were off in another place, hearing and answering Carol by radio, half her mind working along some track that ran parallel to the words.
1990
. Between now and then the country would plow itself up ten times. These elections weren’t a matter of democracy; they were a self-induced reinvention, history’s protest that, even with the occasional war, it would bore itself to death without a new era every four years. How could the country get ten lives while she, living here, would get only one?

“Wouldn’t I somehow be
older
than sixty-five in 1990? It feels as if I should.”

“It feels to me as if I’ve every right not to be
dead
by then, but I will be.”

While Carol took possession of two sandwiches, Anne saw a picture of the next fifty years passing, one in which the town remained the same and everything around it—this abstract, galactic swirl—spun and crackled and continually reconfigured itself, a terrible, inviting vortex. She would be asking Jack to shield her sight from the lightning while, the
whole time, she peered through the cracks between his fingers.

“Chicken salad all right?” asked Carol. “They’re out of everything else.”

“Yes,” said Anne, trying to turn off her mind’s eye. The two women started back toward the circle of chairs holding their husband and fiancé. The younger men’s voices, which had subsided for a minute, were regaining volume. Shouts of “Taft-Hartley” and “Pendergast machine” and “ignoramus” were pitched and batted back, while Harold Feller and Harris Terry tried, like umpires, to be heard.

“We know what this is really about!” Jack shouted.

Judging from everyone’s sudden silence, including Harold’s and Harris Terry’s, Anne realized that everyone
did
know what it was really about, a situation so mortifying she had to shut her eyes. Behind their lids she once more saw Owosso, forever denied a second tornado, as the still point in the swirling universe, and she understood that only one thing, something inevitable, and imminent, and necessary, could halt the swirling. To her immense relief it was exactly what happened next, when Jack, without getting up from his chair, leaned over and knocked Peter’s block off.

T
HE SEVEN BRASS BANDS AND THE FLOODLIGHTS AND HOWEVER
many thousand people were shouting on the sidewalks seemed ready to crack the nighttime sky, to puncture it like an eggshell. They were living in a Dewey world now. There weren’t even real movies anymore: the Capitol’s marquee proclaimed
THE DEWEY STORY
!
MARCH OF TIME
STARTS TOMORROW
!
CONTINUOUS SHOWINGS
! It had been decided somewhere that the nine-minute newsreel, starring Himself, would be released to Owosso early; the rest of the country would get it after victory footage from election night was added.

Residents had been urged to eat dinner at home and save space for visitors in the big chow lines set up at the high school, the Lutheran church and who knew where else. Jack had made himself two hamburgers after Anne left for Jackson, Michigan, at four o’clock with the reception committee. She’d boarded the Victory Special there about three hours ago, arriving with it in Owosso on the dot, at 9:10. Fifteen
minutes earlier, the parade had stepped off with a roar toward Willman Field, where the candidate would be waiting. As soon as the last float passed by, Jack would get down there, to the place he and Anne had arranged for her to spot him, a reversal of what they’d done in Flint.