Dewey Defeats Truman (6 page)

Soon the door had opened and shut, the frosted glass rattling in its square. It was Walt, who looked at him just sitting there and laughed. “You look like you need a mother.”

“I need a wife,” Jack replied. And not Carl’s, either.

A
NNE READ THE
A
RGUS
FOR A SECOND TIME
,
THE LAST HALF
of her tuna-fish sandwich resting on its post-convention editorial:

The phrasing was as redundant as the election itself appeared to the editors.

But the election’s conclusion was the only one they regarded as foregone. Everything else in the
Argus
was a spirited contest: tonight’s fight; the evening-gown round of the Miss Owosso competition to be held next week at the Capitol Theatre. In fact, the paper appeared to imagine the town’s whole life as a healthy competition, in which the boosterish forces of thrift and industry and get-up-and-go were sure to triumph over all but mortality. Even that foe was conceded to grudgingly: “Mrs. A. Middleton Taken By Death” went the headline of today’s obituary, done in the standard formula.
The paper made one feel that Mrs. Middleton and all the dead in Oak Hill Cemetery were victims of a technical knockout, defeated perhaps, but crossing the bar like good sports.

Regardless of the
Argus
, Anne’s life in Owosso seemed ever more maddeningly tranquil. In the hours since she’d gotten to the bookstore, she had sold exactly three books: two guides from the
See America
series and one copy of Pearl Buck’s new novel. The ’44 Dewey biographies remained untouched. The only customer in here now, a tall, thin woman who looked familiar, had walked past them with a curled lip. A Truman supporter? There had to be at least a few in town. Anne reminded herself to draw Jack Riley out on the subject Sunday night.

For the past five minutes the woman had been at the little shelf of home-repair manuals, copying out some fixit instructions that she’d obviously come in here to look up without having to spend $4.50 for the book. Anne’s “May I help you?” got a crisp “No, thank you.” She refrained from any further prodding and worried about becoming like Leo Abner, too soft for his own good as a businessman. Boredom was making her slipshod. She had the radio on, down low but tuned to
Swingmates
, just to keep herself awake. She turned a page of the
Argus
and
I Love Trouble
caught her eye: the movie she wouldn’t be seeing at the Corunna drive-in, where she and Jack Riley wouldn’t be necking.

The woman had moved to the knickknacks and notions and picked up a little date book she seemed ready to pay for. With a check, no less, though the book cost only forty cents. Anne ceded her a smile, and then, all at once, taking in the whiteness of her knuckles, and the pink overscrubbed skin
of her face, felt flooded with sympathy. Of course, she thought, looking at the tight, precise signature: it was the Herrick boy’s mother. She could now even remember when she’d first seen her, a couple of years ago in front of City Hall, on her first visit to the town, with her roommate, the Owosso girl who eventually got her this job. It had been a November day in ’45, her junior year. The survivors of Bataan were being displayed and cheered by everyone in town, even a badly burned man in a wheelchair, a victim not of the war but of some horrible childhood accident years before, who’d come to applaud some friend, she guessed, maybe the only boy who had never made a cruel remark or stared at him.

In fact, she could remember Jane Herrick’s stare from that fall morning: piercing, intently curious, though Anne had noticed it only when her attention was drawn by the woman’s mutterings, a quiet stream of dates and numbers coming out of her like tape from an adding machine, calculations with no apparent meaning to anyone but herself. She had looked at the survivors without hostility or joy, just a sort of demographer’s zeal, as if there might be a clue in their faces or bearing as to why they had returned intact and not in a coffin.

They were still coming home, those coffins. Right under the
Argus
’s eight-column headline—
GOV. WARREN TO TEAM WITH DEWEY
—was the story of “4 More Heroes Coming Back,” three from military graves in the Philippines, another from Europe. Every few weeks you’d see the same item about a little color guard being assembled to go down to the Grand Trunk depot and meet the skeleton of some boy who had lain for years beneath an Asian moon or the wings of French
nightingales, but still had to be dug up, replanted amidst native flowers and birdcalls before he could be truly dead.

“Thank you,” said Anne, putting the check beneath the change tray in her register. (Wait a minute, she thought. Hadn’t this woman bought a date book just last month? Was that possible?) Mrs. Herrick said nothing, just put the item into her purse.

Anne watched her go out and turn right. After a minute passed, she went to the door herself and stepped into the sunshine for the first time since arriving this morning. She watched Jane Herrick walk further south on Washington Street, quickly, as if she were a soldier herself, doing double time to the quick beat of some drumming Anne could hear coming from—where? Across the street: the long, slender form of Peter Cox, up on a ladder in his blue striped shirtsleeves, hammering nails into a thick cardboard sign above the entrance to Harold Feller’s law office, the sort of sign that was multiplying all over town today. This one went,
DEWEY
:
HONESTY
,
STRENGTH
. She had enough of the first to know she wanted him to turn and wave; enough of the second to keep from calling out to him.

H
E SAW HER ALL RIGHT
. A
S HE STEPPED DOWN TO THE SIDEWALK
and looked up to admire his work—absolutely straight, a museum director couldn’t have done better—he knew she was there in the corner of his eye. But when he looked across Washington Street, it was toward the south end and—ah, the widow Herrick, poor thing. He’d heard about her from Harold’s wife. She must be headed to Oak Hill, to sit alone in the gazebo and think about her boy. If Dewey were smart,
he wouldn’t harp too much on fear of another war. The last one still had its stone hand on half the hearts in towns like this one. If you were going to talk about the future, you might as well let people believe there’d be one.

What had Riley’s war been like? he wondered. Had he spun her some sad heroic tale on the ride home last night?

“Tell me something,” said Harris Terry, partner to Harold Feller, when Peter stepped back into the office. “If the economy is so bad, how come you’re closing so many mortgages?” He laughed as he asked the question; they were all Dewey men here.

“Personality, Harris.” Peter swung his wing-tip shoes up onto his desk. He rolled down his sleeves and flashed his big, white smile. “It’ll get you past the Japs, past inflation, even past Mrs. Roosevelt.”

“Yeah, personality,” said Harold Feller, coming in with a pink phone message for his young associate. “I guess that’s why my wife wants you for dinner a week from tonight. Seven-thirty. She told me to tell you.”

“I’ll be there, boss.”

Yeah, personality. Peter had it all right, thought Harold Feller, looking at the blond hair falling into the young man’s eyes, and the shirt that had more stripe than white. He liked Peter Cox, and he’d been smart to hire him; but part of him would also like to knock his feet off that desk.

“You men going to listen to the fight at the club?” wondered Harris Terry.

“City or country?” asked Feller, meaning the small club on Ball Street or the golfer’s paradise on the northern outskirts of Owosso. Harold was about to say that he and Carol would be going to the country club, when Peter declared:
“City. City Club of Detroit, that is. I’m not going to listen to it on
radio
with you primitives. They’ve got television in Detroit.”

“Carol and I are going to the country club,” said Harold Feller, pretending to ignore him. “I suspect she and her friends will play bridge in the dining room, while their primitive husbands gather round the radio at the bar.”

“Would you mind taking these along?” Peter handed Feller a bundle of handbills:
PETER COX. LEADERSHIP FOR THE 50S
.

“Isn’t it a bit early in the campaign for this?”

“Ordinarily, yes. But with people so excited about Dewey, I thought I’d give them this advance opportunity to jump on my bandwagon. There’ll be a lull in July and August, and then I’ll go full tilt in the fall.”

“Uh-huh,” said Feller, tapping the printed slogan. “The fifties? Wouldn’t your term be
ending
in 1950?”

“That’s why I’m such a leader, Harold. I keep my eye on the future.”

He dialed the telephone number on the slip of pink paper. Mr. Vincent Dent was trying to fill out incorporation papers for his new oil-delivery business, and he couldn’t figure out the forms. If he didn’t have them filed in Lansing by Wednesday, June 30, he was afraid he’d lose some tax deductions for the fiscal year, and so … Peter, who had been handling the matter, listened indulgently—“Yes, Mr. Dent. No, Mr. Dent. Don’t trouble yourself about that, Mr. Dent”—while pointing an imaginary gun at his head, a gesture of boredom for Harold Feller and Harris Terry to appreciate. “Mr. Dent, why don’t I run over and straighten this out for you? No, no problem at all. I’ll be right there. Yes, a cold beer would be very nice.”

Feller, who didn’t find the gun gesture that funny, said, “I guess this means you’ll be gone for the rest of the day?” The grandfather clock hadn’t even chimed three-thirty, but Harold didn’t feel he could give more than a sarcastic hint. There was no denying that Peter brought in the business.

“I thought I might head down to the river as soon as I set Mr. Dent straight. If that’s okay with you, of course. I’d like to do an hour’s rowing before setting out for Detroit.”

He couldn’t just use a canoe, like everyone else who went on the Shiawassee. He had to sit in that little silver scull that looked like a sports car. Feller watched him wave good-bye and start up his brand-new ’49 Ford, which already wore a Peter Cox bumper sticker. Pretty flashy, that’s for sure: the old bathtubs were slimming down into darts. This model had been unveiled only two weeks ago, and most people who wanted one were on a long waiting list. But not our future state senator. Did he know how that looked? Feller wondered.

Once he pulled out, Peter allowed himself to look across Washington Street and into the bookstore, but there was no sign of Anne, who had probably gone back to her fugging Norman Mailer. He had to drive all of two blocks to reach Vincent Dent’s office on Ball Street, where he found the owner thrashing about in adding-machine tape and eraser shavings.

“Boy, am I glad to see you.” Dent stood up to get the beer he’d promised, and attempted some small talk with this brainy, rich lawyer fifteen years younger than himself. “So what do you make of this Earl Warren?” he asked, uncapping the bottle of Old Frankenmuth Lager.

“A solid, predictable fellow,” said Peter, with the authority of Walter Lippmann. “Not a man to shake things up.”

“Will he bring votes to the ticket?”

“Probably some from California. Not that they’ll be needed.”

Dent nodded, but even a feeling that he was getting the straight skinny couldn’t deflect his nervousness about the papers on the table. “Are you sure, Mr. Cox, that this one doesn’t have to be in by the thirtieth?” He picked up a pale pink form. “It says on page three …”

“Don’t worry about page three,” said Peter, without looking at page three.

“I’m trying to save as much as possible,” said Dent, apologetically, as if his anxiety were a shameful thing compared to Peter’s expertise. “We’ve got my mother living with us now. She’s getting on, and—”

“Ah, mothers,” said Peter, cocking his head with a sentimental smile. His own mother was in Palm Springs at the moment, probably finishing off the day’s first game of bridge. Thank goodness the Cox money flowed in a different direction: Lucy Cox couldn’t wait to see her only boy get what he had coming as soon as he could. Back in Grosse Pointe she and his father had long ago moved into respectful silence and respective rooms, and last year she had persuaded the old man—scared him was more like it—into giving Peter sixty thousand dollars now, instead of making him wait for the will. When Peter had displayed a decent hesitation at the news, and suggested he would be perfectly happy to wait until she and Father were dead, she’d assured him, in her smokiest voice: “We died
years
ago, angel.” His mother, who had grown up no farther south than Indianapolis, experienced more pleasure from her studied, Tallulah-like pronouncements than any anguish she suffered over the civilized collapse of her marriage; Peter could only play
along. “But won’t all that money ruin my character, Mother?” “See that it does. I can’t stand character. Your father had so much of it.”

“Let’s look at this other one,” said Peter, picking up a yellow form and, Vincent Dent hoped, warming to the task at hand. But as soon as Peter actually looked at it, they were interrupted by a knock on the window. It was Al Jackson.

“Saw you from the street, Mr. Cox. Sorry, Vince, hope you don’t mind my barging in.” He lifted the department of finance paper out of Peter’s hand and replaced it with one of his own nine-page documents. “Yours to keep. The
Argus
has already set it in type. Everyone else’ll be seeing it tomorrow.”

“Can I get you a beer, Al?”

“Nope, nope, thanks, Vince, no time for that. Now, Mr. Cox, as soon as you finish reading that, you’ll see why I’m going to be needing you.”

Peter got through less than a paragraph before the grin on his face, watched with curiosity by Vincent Dent, stretched four inches wide. He tapped the table in delight. “Yes, you will, Mr. Jackson! Yes, you will!”

H
E
OUGHT TO BE
O
WOSSO
’
S
FAVORITE SON
,
THOUGHT
A
NNE
, looking up at
Lady With a Parasol
, the Renoir-esque painting that Frederick Frieseke, Owosso High class of 1893, had donated to the town library long after going to make his life in Paris. He’d been dead for nine years now, and gone for nearly fifty, and the few people who remembered him would tell you his crowning glory was a mural he did for the Wanamaker Building in New York City.