Dewey Defeats Truman (41 page)

“Slow down, Margaret. Tell
me
something. Who let you know where to find him?”

“Peter,” she said, as if the name carried unspoken adjectives for everything that was brave and noble and all for love. “He never intended to take me to school. He gave me the news on the way to Mrs. Herrick’s garage. Once we got there, he told me to follow him to Perry in Arnie’s car.”

Lucy Cox on Monday night: “There’s something on his mind, and I can’t figure out what it is.”

“Margaret, how did he know about Tim?”

“I’m still not sure,” said Margaret. “He hasn’t told me everything. He’s been up all night with—”

“Does anyone else know Tim is safe?”

“I’m sure I’m the only one besides Peter. Anne, I’ve got to go. The operator’s going to—”

Anne could hear the Fellers coming down the stairs.

“Margaret,” Anne insisted, “put Peter on.
Please let me talk to him
.”

“What does Peter have to do with this?” Carol shouted.

“Yes,” yelled Harold into the receiver he took from Anne’s hand. “What does Peter Cox have to do with all this?”

Anne retreated toward the kitchen counter with the radio, which was suddenly louder, though its volume hadn’t been raised. The announcer in Flint had begun to shout, as loud as Harold Feller, like a man begging to be let out of the box in which he was sealed. “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen! Let me repeat it! The Buckeye State of Ohio has just
put its twenty-five electoral votes into the Democratic column! It’s 9:30
A.M.
, eastern standard time, this Wednesday, November the third, nineteen hundred and forty-eight, and Harry Truman has just been re-elected President of the United States!”

N
INETY MINUTES LATER
, H
ORACE
S
INCLAIR WAS STILL
listening to WOAP. He had switched to it from the Flint station for the pleasure of hearing the Owosso narrator rip and read such wire-service statistics as the one he was now struggling through: “Preliminary figures indicate that Governor Dewey actually carried a smaller percentage of the popular vote this time than he did in 1944 against the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

But these sentences from the radio were just grace notes to the glorious piece of music he held in his hand, the letter he’d found pushed through the mail slot when he came downstairs from his bedroom at five-thirty this morning.

Horace opened the blinds, and Mrs. Sinclair’s tea service caught the light that poured in. It was a fine day. Leaving
The Lady of the Lake
on the floor, where she’d fallen from his lap last night, he went out to the garage, clutching Peter’s note and the little silver container of incriminating pledges left on the porch. He put it, along with the new note, into the buckram box that had been sitting out on the workbench the past few weeks. It was almost cool enough to make a fire, and that’s what he would do once he went back inside the house. He’d consign the whole secret to the ashes and the air, and then he’d go out for a walk.

He’d go to the library for a mystery, and he’d take the long way there—not to gloat his way past the neighbors; only to enjoy the freedom from fear. He wouldn’t even scoff when he crossed the Main Street bridge and saw Mr. Jackson’s billboard. He’d just look down to the spot where Jon used to be and was again—but with a difference. Jon had been up and around for a while, refreshed, released forever
from his grim end, its morbid tokens taken off his chest and destroyed.

Horace turned the handle of the Reginaphone. Its celestial tinklings would be a better hymn of thanksgiving than any mutterings he might make on his arthritic knees. The music came out with the same utter clarity it had had in the days of President Harrison, every note springing from the same slots of metal that had once served the ears of Mrs. Sinclair, before the Victrola and radio began their siren songs of infinite variation.

The old music swam around Horace’s head in liquid perfection until a single thump against the garage door made him raise his eyelids. He got up to open the door and caught sight of the rear wheel of the schoolbound Billy Grimes’ substitute, a mile wide with his throw of the
Argus
. The paper had come early today, the edition something between the regular afternoon one and the Extra they’d hoped to have on the street last night. Horace bent down as gingerly as he could to pick it up. He peeled off the rubber band and opened it up to the black banner headline whose 108-point characters seemed to be cringing at their own size, but doing their duty, conveying what everyone up and down Oliver Street knew by now:
TRUMAN DEFEATS DEWEY
.

W
HEN
A
NNE ARRIVED AT THE BOOKSHOP
, L
EO
A
BNER WAS REMOVING
the picture of Thomas E. Dewey from the window. All over downtown, where she’d been walking in circles for nearly an hour, the candidate’s visage was disappearing in a furtive frenzy. Leo had decided to keep his indoor spotlit
bunting and provide it with a new focal point, a stiff cardboard notice that read:

“Late again,” she said. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” replied Leo. “I don’t think too many people are going to be showing their faces today.”

She was about to tell him the news of Tim Herrick, but made a snap decision not to. Until she knew the whole story herself, telling Leo any of it might put Peter at risk over whatever foolish thing he’d gone and done.

“Maybe I’ll take one of these home for myself,” mused Leo, picking up a copy of the ’44 campaign biography. “I’m lucky I sold you yours two nights ago. I don’t think I could give them away this morning.”

He waited for her to say something, with no result. “I thought you’d be crowing this morning. Are you saving it all for Jack? Oh, that reminds me. He called.” Leo handed her a slip of paper with the number of a bar in Flint near Walt Carroll’s house.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call him. I’ll bet they’re drinking an Ohio brand of beer. But before that I’ll take these to the basement.” She scooped up the three remaining Dewey books. “The sight of them will only depress anyone who does come in. I’ll do a little straightening up while I’m down there.”

“Fine with me.”

Once downstairs, she took a seat on the stool, lit a Lucky and began to cry.
Dudley
, she thought, until she could hear only “Peter,” the way it had been pronounced by Margaret Feller’s revitalized voice, the way she’d been hearing it in her head for an hour.

It could not turn out this way. Like all writers, Anne suspected, she saw two movies for every book she read, and every movie she could think of and every book she could remember told her it couldn’t end like this. The romantic thing, which was to say the right thing, was to go off with the underdog. But what if the impossible overdog was really the prodigal romantic, and the underdog merely decent and loving and wonderful in bed? She had the definite feeling that Peter Cox would turn out to be pretty bad in that department, not so bad as the grad student in Ann Arbor, but nothing to write home about, if one wrote home about such things and if she’d had enough comparative experience to make the writing worthwhile.

Jack was the comparative experience she’d have in her memory for as long as she lived, and if her suspicions about Peter turned out to be right, those memories would always be her punishment, though they wouldn’t be punishment enough.

Jack called. Call him at FL 6790. Granger’s Bar
.

She looked at the slip of paper and then closed her eyes, knowing she had to do the worst thing she would ever do.

“Anne?” It was Leo at the top of the stairs. “I’ve got to go home and check on Mrs. Abner. I’ll be back after lunchtime. Do you mind bringing your sandwich back here?”

“No, Leo. Tell Martha I hope she’s feeling better.”

In the year 2000, Jack would bring her cups of tea and massage her swollen ankles. Peter? She couldn’t get any picture of him, probably because he’d have been gone for years, after their divorce. She strained to put him onto the screen of her imagination, but all that came was the vision she’d had at the City Club a week and a half ago, just before Jack made Peter see stars: the turn of the century, the next century, with Owosso as the fixed center of a swirling, galactic vortex.

She heard Leo close the door upstairs. Now she could go from sniffles to tears. She could cry over her own awfulness. What was she going to do?

There was only one thing she
could
do. She was going to go upstairs and call Flint and shout into the receiver how wonderful it was that Harry would still be in the White House seven years from now, when Junior’s little brother was going off to kindergarten.

But once back at the cash register she did nothing, and before she knew it, it was 11:45, and the day’s apparent first customer was really a breathless Harris Terry, who couldn’t bring himself to speak the name he needed to. He just pointed through Leo’s window, back across the street to Feller, Terry & Nast, and asked Anne: “Have you seen him?”

“No,” she replied. “Honest.”

“Harold and Carol are in pursuit of Margaret. And I’m supposed to be in pursuit of Peter. I’m on my way to the hotel to see if he’s with his mother. If he’s not, maybe she knows something. Can you go over to the Matthews Building and see if he’s holed up in his headquarters? I don’t know what would possess him to come back here at all, let alone do whatever he’s done, but it’s all I can think of.”

They left the shop together, after Anne flipped the
BACK IN A MINUTE
sign behind the door blind. At the corner, they wished each other luck and split up. Harris Terry entered the Hotel Owosso, and Anne headed west on Main, noticing as she went how the street once more looked like a sensible brown parcel, the curled ribbon of bunting having disappeared along with most of the governor’s pictures. To the traveler passing through, the Dewey story would soon be like that of the tornado, a piece of old-timers’ lore, something to be acquired through a little interested questioning, while Owosso remained the perfectly ordinary place it had so recently celebrated itself for being. She walked slowly, trying to remember the street as it had been two Saturdays ago, during the town’s brief enchanted hour on a dateline that traveled coast to coast, and as she went she crossed her fingers and even prayed that Peter was at the hotel with Mrs. Cox.

It was 1:05 when she climbed the stairs of the Matthews Building. The door to
COX FOR SENATOR
was ajar, so she entered. The litter from last night’s celebration remained: the champagne bottle Harold Feller had drained, a napkin with the co-ed’s lipstick, the giant check mark on the blackboard.

“Mrs. Bruce?” she called, but got no answer.

A radio was playing in the small back room; its door, too, was open several inches. Through the crack Anne could hear, for what she realized would be the last time ever, the voice of Thomas E. Dewey, conceding the election from New York:
“Our task now, as I said in my telegram to the President, is to get together and support the administration in the interest of the peace of the world.”
She approached the second doorway and found what she was still telling herself she hoped not to.

“Everyone’s looking for you, Peter.”

His hair was uncombed and he hadn’t shaven. He was in yesterday’s shirt, still wearing his own campaign button.

“Maybe I’ll go hide in Curwood Castle. It’s a great spot for that.”

“Is that where Tim was?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the desk.

“Only part of the time.”

“I don’t care how you found him, I—”

“You don’t know the half.”

“I only want to know why you sent Margaret to him.”

Peter drank the last gulp of flat champagne from a bottle in front of him. “So she could get her heart broken. Instead of just slowed down until it stops. You know, in the Cox family tradition.”

“Is she coming back with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to the plane? Does he still have it? Suppose he takes off with her in it.”

“Can’t happen,” said Peter, tossing Monday’s newspapers into the wastebasket and then collapsing back into his chair from the effort. “I threw a monkey wrench into the engine. Literally.”

“Has it occurred to you,” cried Anne, “that Harold and Carol will go to the police with what happened? Margaret may come home, but what if your part in everything gets into the
Argus?
What are you going to do then?”

“Gee, Anne, I don’t know.” His expression mocked her prudence, told her it disgusted him. “I guess I’ll resign my seat.”

“Even if the Fellers forgive you, how long do you think this will stay a secret?”

“I don’t know. Fifty years? Yeah. If people can keep
dark
secrets that long, I ought to be able to hold a pleasant little one like this down.”