Dewey Defeats Truman (10 page)

He was the only one who ever came up here; the oilcloth over his telescope was exactly where he’d draped it the other night. The equipment was in as good shape as it had been when his German aunt Alma, the one who’d kept house for his widowed father and raised Frank in Cincinnati, gave it to him at the end of ’41, a present for finishing his master’s degree. It spent the beginning of the war packed away—pretty
much as he had, over at the naval supply station in Detroit, until they’d let him go in the middle of ’43—he was never sure why—and he’d found the job here. He’d always looked forward to showing Aunt Alma the rings of Saturn through the expensive Leitz she’d bought him with her wages from the shoe factory (“The Germans make the best,” she’d whispered in the note that arrived in Ann Arbor with the package), but before he left the Navy she and his father were both dead and there was no point in going home to Ohio.

Which was how he’d come here to Owosso, once he found out about the job. Five years later, at thirty-one, he knew that the time spent on his Navy bunk wasn’t an interruption of his life but a preparation for the rest of it. Never a date; never a drink; never a slip. He got to live one first glorious season here; but all at once it was over, the whole world gone out of focus. He’d spent the five years since in the same room here, getting up each morning for work, not even taking a trip this summer or last.

He was too nervous to be teaching high-school students. His exotic subject offered some protective aura (the school paper ran stories like
MR. SHERWOOD EXPLAINS ATOM BOMB
), but he wasn’t cut out for a world in which two specks of dandruff, like charged particles, could start a chain reaction of giggles and whispers. He would never be one of the pep-filled class advisors, and he already longed for the days when, after forty, his bachelorhood “confirmed,” he would be immune from even the occasional matchmaking joke in the teachers’ lounge. His own world, which had flared like a supernova that first spring, had collapsed into itself, a dead star too dense to penetrate. He would be in this town, maybe even the same room, until 1982, when he turned sixty-five.
Between now and then Saturn would travel its whole circle around the sun.

How far would I travel to be where you are? How far is the journey from here to a star?
He hummed the tune while removing the lens cap. At the front of the tube he saw his distended reflection, like an intruder on the other side of a peephole: the forehead under the thinning red hair was higher, the chin a bit more pointed.
You’re a nice-looking man, Frank
. He remembered and cherished the words, for all the good they would ever again do him.

How he would have liked being here, with this telescope, in the 1890s, the one decade when the downtown streets had been lit with gas. But the earth insisted on burning ever more brightly, as if it had decided that looking for another world took too much effort and it would do its best to be discovered instead. Now the lights of Owosso’s business section, installed in ’46, were 6600-lumen incandescents. They made early summer nights like this one even harder for the amateur astronomer trying to golf his way from star to star. Frank crouched down, wiping his hands on his T-shirt before angling the scope above some hickory trees on the eastern edge of town. As he swung the tube south, the night sky passed through its lens like a soap bubble through a wand, until all at once a man, large as a housefly, flew into view. It was Gus Farnham, out in his old Curtiss “Jenny,” the aircraft sure to be less well lit than Gus, who would bring it down by moonlight in some field far from the airport warden’s eye. Frank had heard about the old barnstormer from Mrs. Wagner, but in four years of coming up here he had never aimed the Leitz into a single living room or parked car, and Gus Farnham’s plane wasn’t enough to make him
halt the telescope for more than a second on its arc toward the place he was bringing it, the place he brought it first thing every night he was up here: the patch of sky that, by his reckoning, capped the Oak Hill Cemetery.

“H
ORACE
,
YOU
’
RE OVER HERE
,”
SAID
C
AROL
F
ELLER
,
POINTING
to a chair at one end of her oval table. He would be the extra man, and that was fine with him. It was one of the reasons he liked Mrs. Feller, for knowing better than to sit him beside some widow who would fuss over him or, worse yet, decide by evening’s end that she was in line to take the place of the late Mrs. Sinclair.

“Did you hear that Truman may actually decide to run with Mrs. Roosevelt?” asked Dr. Coates, Carol’s brother, who had grown up in Owosso but now made a small fortune as a radiologist over in Lansing. He was here tonight with his pert blond wife, Sally, who laughed at the latest rumor about Harry Truman’s choice of a vice-presidential candidate. “It sounds like one of those old Eleanor jokes. Remember them?”

“Would that be a progressive thing to do?” asked Harold Feller. “Or would it be hanging on to the past?”

“Hanging on to the wreckage,” offered Dr. Coates, whom Carol sat across from Horace.

The past
. Of all the advice that Horace Sinclair received from his fellow Owossoans—those self-interested widows; the young matrons aside from Mrs. Feller; the men his own age (usually “cardiac” patients full of frightened optimism about the new regime Dr. Hume had them on)—the piece he most disliked was the injunction against “living so much in the
past.” It always assumed that the past, while perhaps not a bad place, was too easy a spot for anyone to live in; that abiding there was an “escape” that didn’t challenge the mind, which left it as vulnerable as all those septuagenarian hearts. Whereas Horace knew that living in the past demanded much more effort than living in the here and now. As it receded ever further, the past required more and more work for a man to keep up with it, ever greater imaginative stamina to keep chasing it down the tracks. The present asked no more than that he get aboard and take a window seat. Living there showed nothing like a proper regard for life or time; it made them both disposable, like the magazines that had stolen their names. The past was the present treasured and enhanced, an object needing the same care as the late Mrs. Sinclair’s silver tea service, the one she had received from her sister in Boston, in 1900, as a wedding present. Horace continued to apply the pink polish to it every Saturday, even though he had never been able to stand the smell through all the decades of his marriage.

Mrs. Sinclair had not actually shared his love of the past, had in fact done her brisk best over the years to keep him “current.” His propensity to reside in another time probably came from the other Mrs. Sinclair, his mother, who had frozen her imagination in the fall of 1892, before the following year’s depression, which to the Sinclairs had been every bit as Great as the one coming forty years later. It had shut down his father’s bicycle shop, and sent Horace himself looking for work at seventeen. By the time he went off to the Spanish War in ’98 he was a self-educated man, but destined never to be anything else through all his long years as an accountant on Exchange Street.

“Anne, you’re on Horace’s right, and Sally, I’ve got you on his left.”

“Everything looks lovely,” said Anne. She surveyed the cut-glass dishes and china platters full of roast potatoes and glazed carrots and sliced beef ribboned with gravy. It looked a bit heavy for this early summer night, when all the curtains hung limply against the open windows, but the “lighter seasonal fare” that cookbooks now talked about was more likely to have caught on in New York or San Francisco than here. As it was, she felt hungry, her appetite fired by anxiety over the whereabouts of her half-blind date. Peter Cox had yet to arrive; he’d called to say he was dealing with Vincent Dent’s final incorporation panic and would be late. He had missed the two rounds of cocktails, and the chair between Carol Feller and her sister-in-law remained empty.

“Peter said to start, and I’m taking him at his word,” said Carol. “Dig in.”

Dr. Coates couldn’t stay off politics long enough for everyone to serve themselves. After complimenting his sister on the potatoes, he turned to his brother-in-law and said, “The papers are predicting he’ll put Taft on the Supreme Court and make Dulles Secretary of State. What do you think, Harold?”

Before the evening’s host could reply, the dining room felt its first breeze, the arrival of the missing guest, with a great big smile on his face. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Feller, don’t get up.” Peter came around to Carol with a bouquet of flowers that he permitted her to sniff, once, before he went off to find and fill a vase in what seemed a single motion. He was Dudley, all right, thought Anne. Everyone watched, without a word, while he set the flowers down on the sideboard as if
performing a magic trick. Carol remained seated, just as he’d instructed her, allowing him to circle the table and offer his hand to everyone she now introduced or reacquainted him with. When he reached Anne, and noticed her scolding expression, more sincere than flirtatious, he took her fingers and brought them to his lips in an exaggerated gesture of contrition. As her hand rose toward his tanned face, she thought: He hasn’t been with Mr. Dent at all. She would bet he’d been out on the Shiawassee in that little chromium sport canoe. Unexpectedly, she flinched at his kiss. “That tickled,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Oh, my goodness, are you growing a mustache?” Her own lips curled in distaste.

Sudden great interest all around, a positive clattering of cutlery, as Carol Feller’s guests strained to see for themselves.

“Just a small one, temporary, until Inauguration Day. A pledge taken Tuesday night by every member of the Owosso-Corunna Dewey for President Club. It’ll make a great group photo a few weeks from now, don’t you think?”

Horace Sinclair snorted, but Peter went brightly on. “I’ll bet we get Harold to raise one, too, and Harris Terry down at the office. What about you, Dr. Coates?”

“Not a chance,” interrupted Carol. “Especially not for Harold. My father had a great big mustache, practically a walrus. You always felt he was wearing a scarf when he kissed you good night. Don’t you remember, Dick?”

“No. He never kissed me good night,” said Dr. Coates. “I do remember the back of his right hand.”

“Don’t listen to Dick,” said his sister. “He was the baby of the family and pampered beyond anything recommended in Dr. Spock.”

“Mustaches don’t seem terribly modern,” offered Sally.

“Good,” said her husband. “We could use some old-fashioned sense. In fact, I thought Dewey should have called for an Old Deal the other night.”

Harold Feller, ever temperate, asked Dr. Coates if, at least so far, he could really find anything to complain about in Harry Truman’s response to what had happened in Berlin.

“Hell, yes. He’s started something he can’t keep up. He’ll soon find out he’d have been better off putting that six billion dollars of foreign aid into some more airplanes. And don’t get me started about the money in this housing bill.”

“It’s almost too awful to think about,” said Carol, without saying whether she meant Berlin or the idea of Dr. Coates’s getting started on slum clearance and homes for veterans. “Did you know,” she asked Horace Sinclair, “that Harold and I were in Paris in August of ’39? It was supposed to be a second honeymoon; we put the children with their Grandma Coates. Once in France we spent the whole two weeks wondering if there was going to be an invasion.”

Harold Feller looked at his wife, figuring she again had Jim’s draft status on her mind. He changed the subject with his natural tact. “Speaking of housing,” he said, “I see in the
Argus
that the city’s finally figured out what to do with the castle.” James Oliver Curwood’s folly had been leased to the board of education as a place for after-school classes in art and literature. “A good idea, no? The building’s been in terrible shape, and the board promises to fix it up once they’ve moved in. Even Mrs. Curwood out in California is pleased with the deal.”

Eyes went toward Horace Sinclair, who was considered
entitled to the final say on any matter connected to Owosso’s former times.

“That sounds fine to me. But don’t you suppose Mr. Al Jackson will want to chop the whole thing down? Put a plaster-of-Paris White House in its place?”

“Oh,” said Carol Feller, “I’m sure Mrs. Curwood would never permit that.”

Horace, at this second mention of her name, decided he was lucky the widow Curwood had long since moved away. Otherwise they might try to fix him up with
her
. He knew for a fact that these women had even thought of him as a mate for Annie Dewey, living alone across the street, except for her handyman, Mr. Valentine, these last twenty years. Not that she wasn’t a fine woman. Quite undistracted by her son’s fame. He’d known her all his life, even when she was Annie Thomas; and more to the point, she knew who
she
was, more a Thomas than a Dewey, from a time in this town when the first name meant more than the second.

Realizing he was lost in thought, and afraid of looking forgetful, he rushed back to the conversational track: “Miss Macmurray, what do you think of all this?”

Knowing Carol wouldn’t want the old man excited by controversy, Anne replied, “I’m afraid I’ve been busy wondering whether Peter wants
his
supporters to adopt any of
his
attributes, like Governor Dewey’s mustache.”

“Which ones?” asked Peter. “The wonderful smile? The broad shoulders?”

Laughter from nearly everyone, though Sally Coates, who was seeing Peter in action for the first time, merely let her mouth hang open in a pretty little
o
.

“Maybe this,” said Anne, touching the dimple in Peter’s
chin. No, she hadn’t been able to throw him off stride; she had only earned her dessert, by playing her part, the ingenue.

“When do you start your campaign, Mr. Cox?” asked Dr. Coates.

“In earnest? After Labor Day. As I explained to Harold, last week was the right time to trade on a little of the convention excitement. But between now and September I’ll lie low and—as I
haven’t
yet explained to Harold—take a little time away from the office. Just a couple of weeks,” he added, “so I can go up to Mackinac and use the house my parents have there. You ought to come up for a while yourself,” he said to Anne.