Dewey Defeats Truman (5 page)

“I have to say,” Anne ventured, “from the way he acted last night, you could never tell he was looking for someone special.”

“A little fast with his hands?” asked Carol, who had seen more than enough to require an answer, and pressed forward to a topic on which she
could
use some information. “How was Mr. Riley on your ride home?”

“A perfect gentleman.”

“Disappointed?”

“No, not really,” said Anne, laughing, and lying.

“I think he’s luscious,” said Carol Feller. “In a rough sort of way.”

“He’s taking me to the movies Sunday night.”

“What’s the picture?”

“
The Bishop’s Wife
,” Anne answered, and the two women groaned.

“He’s afraid to ask you to something steamy at the Corunna drive-in. In fact, I think he and Peter have both decided to play against type.”

“But I don’t have a type,” Anne protested.

“Oh, Anne, they’re just
men
. You can’t expect them to be subtle enough to entertain that possibility. But good for Jack Riley, even if he’s seeing you as Loretta Young.” She made a face. “Let’s give Peter an inning, too. I’m having a dinner party a week from tonight, and I’ll put him across from you.”

“H
EY
, M
ISS
M
ACMURRAY
! C
OME ON OVER AND HAVE YOUR
picture taken!”

Anne looked down at her thin little Gruen wristwatch. It was already 9:20, and if she was any later, even Leo Abner would likely lose his temper. But how could she disappoint fresh-faced Billy Grimes, who’d spotted her from his new place of business, the sidewalk in front of the post office, a half block down Exchange Street? She hurried across Washington, noticing that Carol’s daughter was with him, helping to take customers’ money before positioning them against the giant cutout of Dewey.

If Margaret had curls, instead of a ponytail, she would be tossing them, Anne thought: this girl was in a pet, eager to be anywhere but here and doing this. “Hello, Miss Macmurray,” she managed to say, as Billy held on to a little boy whose mother was wetting down his cowlick. She was such a pretty girl, with all that strawberry blond hair; why try to hide the freckles under makeup that would start flaking by noon? “He wants me to be here all morning,” said Margaret. “I wish I had a job of my own to go to, like you do.”

“I wish I
didn’t
have one,” said Anne.

“Would you just write your book instead?”

In Owosso, it wasn’t simply a case of word getting
around. Anne sometimes thought the trees were hung with invisible wire that carried the residents’ whispers and thoughts, maybe even their dreams, from one head to another.

“That’s what I tell myself.”

“Where do you find the time?”

“In the evenings. Sometimes at the library. Tonight, I’m sure, since I’ve got no other plans.”

“Come on, Margaret,” Billy pleaded. “Just
one?
” He wanted her to stand next to a farmer who was in town to pick up a package at the post office and ready to splurge a dollar. Like most of Billy’s customers, the man seemed more intrigued with the new camera than with the second-time candidate, and here into the bargain was a chance to put his arm around a pretty girl’s waist. Margaret, remembering her manners, obliged. She made a thin smile and suppressed a glare at Billy long enough for him to snap the shutter. Then she stormed off to her father’s Chevrolet, waving good-bye to Anne and leaving Billy to collect the perplexed farmer’s money.

“She’s always doing things like that,” sighed Billy. “She’s not happy unless she gets herself crazy once a week.”

“Give me an example. A quick one.”

“Oh, like a few summers ago, when she went in with those girls who helped some Jerry prisoners escape. I’m not fooling,” he said, noting Anne’s look of disbelief. “We had a POW camp outside of town, and some of the German guys were put to work at the canning factory. A few girls on the line got stuck on them and hid them in a basement. Margaret was only thirteen, and had more brains than these girls put together, but when one of them spilled the story to her
on line at Kroger’s, Margaret put twenty dollars’ worth of groceries on Mr. Feller’s tab—
food
, for some German soldiers she never even got to meet! She just gave the six bags to the girl who was hiding them.”

“What happened to the soldiers?”

“They lived like kings in that basement for a couple of days before they got caught and taken back to the camp. The girls from Roach’s got some kind of probation.”

“How about Margaret?”

“She didn’t even get hollered at. She’s Daddy’s little girl, you know. Mr. Feller’d let her get away with anything.”

So Daddy’s little girl had been looking for a grand passion since she was thirteen years old. Tim Herrick’s feathery yellow hair, Anne now guessed, belonged in part to those German boys Margaret had never gotten to see.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Billy continued. “Those Jerries knew how to work. That’s what every farmer around here, not just the cannery boss, will tell you. Wait till this Marshall Plan kicks in and they’re back on their feet over there.”

Anne smiled. “Billy, I’ve got to get to work, if I’m going to stay on mine.” She wished there were some sign of Margaret’s contrite return, so she wouldn’t be leaving this poor eager beaver with nothing but his cardboard cutout. “Oh, look,” she said. “You’ve got a customer coming.”

“Nah,” said Billy, looking down Exchange Street. “It’s my boss, Mr. Jackson.”

“Hey, Billy!” shouted the fast-walking figure. “Who’s your pretty friend?” As he came into closer view, Anne realized that his speed was more nervous than youthful. He must be almost forty. He was
loud
, too, and sweating more than the weather demanded. He pushed up his eyeglasses—black
plastic ones instead of the wire contraptions most men in town still curled over their ears—and extended a thin, hairless arm toward her. She let him pump her hand, noticing as he did that his shirtsleeves were actually made short, cut and hemmed that way instead of rolled up.

“You’re in a hurry this morning,” she said.

“Been in a hurry ever since I got back from France in ’45. Worked at Chrysler before the war, but decided to get off the line and into business. Moved my wife Marie and daughter Jennie from Detroit to here and opened the store at 125 West Exchange Street. Haven’t seen you there! Come on in and I’ll reserve one of these for you. They don’t go on sale till fall.” He pointed with one short-sleeved arm to the Polaroid camera, while the other reached into his pants pocket for a business card. “Had your picture taken with the next President?”

Anne pleaded appearance. “I’m afraid I’m not as well turned out as Mr. Dewey this morning. Perhaps another time.” As she talked, Al Jackson supplied a sort of commentary with his hands, as if he were translating the words of a deaf-mute: a sharply pointed finger that seemed to say “you’re absolutely right” about Dewey’s grooming; a palms-down seesaw to underline the maybe, maybe not of the last part.

“It’s on me, Miss Macmurray. That
is
your name, isn’t it? Come on.” He commandeered her, as Billy had Margaret, to a place between himself and the candidate, whose photographic mustache and moist, canine eyes were at a level half an inch below her own. She slouched a bit upon noticing she was also taller than Mr. Jackson.

“Hold this,” he said, handing her his briefcase. He broke the pose to help Billy with the suddenly balky camera.

“Is there anything in this?” she asked when he got back. “It feels so light.”

“That briefcase contains twenty-seven pieces of—smile!—paper, Miss Macmurray.” They stepped away from Dewey as Billy began the sixty-second Polaroid countdown. “But they’re twenty-seven pages—three sets, one original, two carbons, nine pages apiece—that are going to change everything. Been working on them for weeks. Marie finished typing this morning. They’re the future of Owosso, Miss Macmurray. A master plan. Isn’t that right, Billy?”

“Thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six,” Billy continued to mutter as he nodded agreement.

“I’m on my way with them to the
Argus
, and City Hall, and then, this afternoon, to WOAP. Which means I could use you, Billy, to mind my store between three and five. Can you do that?”

“Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty …” Vigorous nods.

“Good! And make sure you give Miss Macmurray her discount when she comes in.”

He was already halfway toward Washington Street, where she ought to be, and down which she now saw Margaret Feller’s Chevrolet tearing at a rate that would provoke scowls from mothers with strollers.

“He almost looks alive, doesn’t he?” asked Billy, handing her the still-curly photograph.

Anne pondered Dewey’s figure and countenance. “I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

“H
URRY
,
BABY
,
HURRY
.”

“Yeah,” murmured Jack Riley, trying to, panting, squeezing Louise Rutkowski’s bare, thin shoulders even harder,
pushing faster. It was Louise who had already finished, a full minute ago, with a neat satisfied shout; he was the one who couldn’t quite get there, though he did every Friday at just this time with Louise, here on the beat-up green leather couch in the Flint UAW office he shared with Walt Carroll. Louise dug her nails deeper into his back, and licked his cheek, patiently urgent, and he kept saying yeah, and getting closer, until he’d catch a glimpse of his own socks, which he never had time to remove during one of these meetings, or a pile of
REPEAL TAFT-HARTLEY
flyers that Walt had neatly stacked. Then he’d lose that ready-to-peak sensation, feel it subside back into his thighs.

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate,
thinking
about, instead of looking at, Louise, who had flecks of gray in her hair but was amazingly trim for somebody with four grown kids, her taut arms more like a girl’s than a forty-five-year-old woman’s. She was happy about all this—thrilled, she said—even if she still loved Carl. And why shouldn’t she? Everybody loved Carl; even
he
loved Carl, who had sat down with Jack’s father during the ’37 strike and patted Jack on the shoulder when at sixteen he came with his mother and a thousand other kids and wives to pass food through the windows of the plant. Now Carl was at home, permanently, with a bad back from taking too many chassis down from their hooks on the line; and Jack was here, humping Carl’s wife, who was eighteen years older than himself. She’d explained it to him: “I was faithful all through the war, all through those years when the other men were away and, believe me, sweetie, nobody was faithful, not completely, so I’m not going to feel bad about having my fun now, especially not with somebody as gorgeous as you.” And that was when she
pulled back on his spiky hair and plunged her face into his with a fierceness that usually got him as crazy as she was, but today—

Now, on top of everything else, the phone was ringing.

“Don’t, baby,
don’t!
”

“I’ve got to. It’s my old man. I told him to—”

“
Don’t!
” Louise cried, turning the radio dial sky high, so that WWJ’s
South American Way
would drown out the ringing.

“Walt’s gonna come in—”

“
No
,” said Louise, quickly changing to “Yes,
yes
,” pretending to be ready again, to be with him now, an idea that got him close to the breaking point, which was what he reached, finally, when the image of Peggy Lee, who was singing “Mañana,” came into his mind—that strange blond babe, the little voice like a wisp of smoke escaping a volcano. This was what it took to blow away the picture of Anne Macmurray that had been sneaking into his brain every few seconds. Peggy brought him over the top like there was no tomorrow, no
mañana
, and Louise pretended to go right there with him.

“That’s my baby boy,” she said, already on her feet and pulling up her stockings. Jack rested his head on the fat green back of the couch, a white towel over his shoulders, like a dazed boxer who’d fought his way to a draw.

“Friday,” said Louise, kissing him.

“Yeah.”

“You’re a good boy, Jack. Call your dad.”

Through the frosted-glass panel in the door he saw her slender form retreat toward the daylight, back toward the bus and the market to shop for Carl’s supper.

He dialed the phone. “Pop?”

“Where were you?” asked Gene Riley, twenty miles west in Owosso.

“Did you call? I went down the hall to get a Coke. How you feelin’?”

“I’m fine. And listen, speaking of Coke, don’t bring any home tonight. Get some beer. I don’t give a crap what Dr. Hume says. I’m not going to listen to the fight sipping a Coke.”

“Okay,” said Jack. “I guess we can make an exception.”

“What kind of odds are the fellas giving?”

“On the fight, you mean? I haven’t had a chance to hear anything. I don’t think there’s much betting going on.”

“Yeah,” said Gene. “They can’t get interested if it’s just one colored guy against another.”

“Pop, I’ve got to go. I’ll bring the beer and some potato chips. Is Mrs. Goldstone gonna bring dinner?”

“That’s what you pay her to do, isn’t it? Since I can barely do a goddamned thing for myself anymore?”

“All right. You’re complaining enough I can tell you’re all right. So I’ll sign off.”

“See you later, Johnny.”

Jack sat back for another minute, wiping his face with the towel and thinking about the afternoon ahead: nothing but a meeting on whether the union was happy enough with its new eleven-cent-an-hour increase from GM to join in the planned August celebration of the one-hundred-millionth car to come out of an American plant. He put the towel out of sight and checked his belt to make sure it was fastened, and realized that his twenty minutes with Louise had left him hungry. He’d have to find some lunch somewhere. He’d forgotten his own on the kitchen counter back home; this
morning he’d been busy preparing his father’s when he looked up at the clock and realized it was time to go. Right now he only had the energy to stare at the splintery wooden floor.