Dewey Defeats Truman (13 page)

P
ETER
C
OX STEPPED OFF THE FERRY AND ONTO THE LANDING
at Huron Street. The sun shone directly over Fort Mackinac, and the carriage drivers mopped their brows between throws of the dice. There was no particular need for them to look sharp, since at this time of day the disembarking passengers who needed to hire a horse and buggy, the only vehicle permitted
on the island, were caught in a seller’s market. Peter was not gifted with much patience, and from the time he’d begun coming here as a child he’d always had reservations about the place’s antediluvian charms. It was beautiful, but after a week he felt trapped in rehearsal for some school play.

Soon enough a driver whistled for him, and he climbed into the carriage, to be chauffeured at a fast trot over the island’s limestone. Watching the cedar trees on the cliffs above, and beneath him the day-tripping Fudgies, pedaling their rented bicycles en route to purchasing the resort’s trademark delicacy, he felt restored to his normal measures of proprietariness and peace. He would enjoy himself after all. A round of golf before the afternoon was over, then drinks and dinner at the Grand Hotel with his mother. Her clapboard house fronting the straits was empty for ten months of the year, and each summer she complained anew about having to get a horse-drawn dray full of her possessions on and off the island. That was Mother: she shed vanfuls of mental baggage without a backward glance, but could never travel light on worldly goods.

Mrs. Cox came through the screen door and down the wooden steps. “
How
long are you staying?”

“Two weeks,” he said, kissing her cheek.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought it was a month.” She disguised her relief in a neutral tone that each of them judged a creditable display of warmth. “You’ll be in the middle of some company, you know. Your aunt Ada will be here next weekend.”

“Then we may be a little crowded. The girl I told you about is coming up then.”

“Good. My sister will love the idea of chaperoning.”

“Father isn’t around, is he?”

“Heavens, no,” said Mrs. Cox, looking over her shoulder, as if alarmed by her son’s morbid imagination. “We’ve traded places; he’s in Palm Springs. Come inside and get yourself settled.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Listening to the radio. I won’t be able to stand it when that little rooster takes the podium, so I thought I’d get all my drama in the daytime. They’re going to make Senator Barkley run for vice president, the poor thing. He’s past seventy, a widower. In fact, they say he’s looking for a wife.”

“Well, he can squeeze a lot of widowed grandmothers while he’s out kissing their daughters’ babies. And whoever he chooses can retire with him to the blue grasses of Kentucky next year. Honestly, Mother, do you have any idea what’s shaping up? Do you know how many Republicans we’re going to pull into the legislature along with yours truly?”

“Peter, if you start telling me all that now, we won’t have anything to talk about at dinner. I made a reservation at the hotel for seven. Mr. Woodfill was interested to hear that you were coming back. In fact, he seemed grateful for the warning. You misbehaved there last summer, didn’t you?”

“Can’t hear you, Mother, can’t hear you,” said Peter as he carried his suitcase up the narrow wooden stairs. They creaked in the same seasonal spots he had heard them creaking since his parents bought this place in 1925. Even then his old room had seemed too small; now it was positively miniature, more like a diorama than part of an actual house, all its wooden furniture painted a little too brightly. Tonight his ankles would hang over the quilt-covered bed.

Maybe two weeks was too long, however strategic his decision to take them, and however much he already needed to get away from the small-town parade of Vincent Dents, with all their pink mortgage papers and incorporation forms. It would be nice if between now and Anne’s arrival that college girl (with whom he
had
misbehaved last year, vigorously, for three days, every moment her parents weren’t around) came back. Or another college girl.

He was determined that Anne Macmurray would soon take up permanent residence in his life and mind, but for another ten days she couldn’t be present in the former, so he didn’t want her cluttering up the latter. Let these two weeks get Riley out of
her
mind. It wouldn’t take longer than that.

He had seen her only once since the Fellers’ party, by accident, a few days ago. Over breakfast at the Great Lakes the two of them had calmed down a little, making conversation that was more like trench warfare than swordplay. She was strong, this girl, so strong in her
doubts
, about herself and the world and what she was doing in it. This book of hers that she’d owned up to: it was as if she were in Owosso for all these people to use
her
, make her their instrument, their chance to express themselves on her pages. She hadn’t put it this way, of course—would have been mortified to—but that was what he understood. She didn’t really know what she wanted, and in this she reminded him of no other girl he’d known. If she reminded him of anyone, it was his great-uncle, a congregationalist minister outside Philadelphia who, a few years before Peter was born, resigned from his church in an open letter, saying he shouldn’t any longer hold the post when he wasn’t “quite completely convinced” of the basis for what he said every Sunday. Not “quite completely convinced.” He’d had, Peter was sure, several hundred
percent more conviction about what he preached than the rest of the ministers up and down the Main Line, who consubstantiated the mystical proportions of a martini with more zeal than they could muster for the Eucharist. It was a kind of doubt more reverent than faith, and she had it, too.

To be falling in love, after a handful of encounters, with a girl who reminded him of Great-Uncle Waldo! Would he want her if there were no resistance? No. Some of that was always required, if only the semi-resistance of that college girl or the English secretaries on Captain Butcher’s staff in Grosvenor Square. Resistance was the grindstone against which he would always sharpen and shine.

He
would
bring her around. If anyone were the grindstone, it would be he. And yet, when he brought the envelope to his lips, its flap had nothing to brush against. He had shaved off his Dewey mustache the other morning.

“I
T MAKES SENSE THIS TOWN
’
S BIGGEST INDUSTRY IS DEATH
, doesn’t it?”

“I know just what you mean,” replied Margaret Feller to Tim Herrick. Actually, she did and she didn’t. On the one hand, there was no denying where they sat on this summer night: a loading dock at the back of the Owosso Casket Company, which had been making coffins on South Elm Street since Lyman Woodard went into business in 1885. His adjoining furniture factory had suffered mightily in the 1911 cyclone, but had sprung back, and along with the casket operation it still kept the Woodards, the wealthiest family in the
city, in their compound of mansions on the western stretch of Oliver Street.

On the other hand, even though Margaret had in the past let the noontime blasts of the Woodard factory whistle camouflage her own ten-second screams of frustration over life in Owosso, she could no longer equate the town with the slow death that comes from being bored. It was only a week ago that Carole Landis had committed suicide in Hollywood—pills—and since that day Margaret had more than once reminded herself, gratefully, that that could so easily have been her. If her first date with Tim hadn’t been the success it had, who knows what might have become of her?

But it had been heaven, and the twelve days since had passed in a continual dream: the long, long talks, about everything—their parents, Tim’s dead brother, the German soldiers four years ago (imagine telling him that), what the two of them read (he was absolutely right about page 464 of
Raintree County
)—and the long soulful kisses in Arnie’s Chevrolet or here behind the casket factory or in back of the Indian Trails terminal. She wished he wouldn’t drink so much beer, but he was too much of a gentleman to insist she drink along with him. Half the jerks from school would only be trying to get her drunk.

As far as she was now concerned, this wooden platform was more glamorous than any black-and-white marble floor in those ancient dance movies her parents had years ago dragged her and Jim to when they couldn’t find a babysitter. And the Woodard smokestacks were as thrilling as any of those cardboard Manhattan skyscrapers. She hadn’t gone so far as telling anyone (certainly not Tim), but she was suddenly, secretly, in love with Owosso, just as she had made
peace with her own face, which since Saturday had gone without its morning application of Helena Rubinstein.

“I mean, it’s just perfect for my mom,” said Tim, after pulling on his beer. “Living in a place that churned out more coffins than any other town in America. Keeping the graveyards well supplied.” He raised a toast to a squadron of delivery trucks parked across the asphalt.

“I think your mother is
deep
,” said Margaret. “Even if she is sort of sad. I’m sure she understands life a lot more than
my
mother does—just playing bridge and going to all those little charity lunches with her hat and gloves on, never having to actually
see
any of the poor people her friends claim to care about so much. That and matchmaking are nearly all she does.”

“How’s her Peter Cox project coming?”

“She claims to be neutral between him and Mr. Riley, but of course she isn’t, because from her way of looking at it, only Peter is ‘appropriate’ for Anne. But Peter is up on Mackinac, so things have slowed down for a while.”

“How did he get there?” asked Tim, looking at the sky.

“In his ’49 Ford—a car that nobody else around here has even gotten delivery of. And then the ferry. Did I tell you Anne is going up the weekend after this one?”

“I want
us
to make a date,” said Tim, putting down his bottle and looking right at her with his cool and limpid green eyes. “The Dawn Patrol is coming to the airport two weeks from Sunday. Practically every light-plane flier in the state, hundreds of them, will be touching down. They haven’t picked Owosso for this in seven years.”

“What do they do once they get here?”

“Finish watching the sun come up, have a huge breakfast,
and then take their planes back up for joyrides and sightseeing, even a little racing. They give out a lot of prizes, too. You know, who came the farthest, stuff like that.”

“It sounds wonderful,” said Margaret, whose head was already swarming with airplanes beautiful as butterflies. If she were still going with Billy, he’d be asking her to the hotrod races that began their season tonight at the Speedway or—God forbid—next month’s cornball county fair.

“You promise?” asked Tim, putting his hands on her shoulders.

“Of course,” said Margaret, leaning in for a long, long kiss, during which her mental aircraft looped and dove and swept back up again.

When it was over and her head came to rest on Tim’s shoulder, he looked up at the smokestacks, all of them idle but one, which emitted a narrow plume of steam as the night shift sent a thinner stream of glue and shavings toward the Shiawassee than the one pumped in each morning. It seemed to Tim that the whole factory was just a small part, the packaging end, of a much bigger one, life’s own, the one producing and growing and curing the corpses themselves, which would be shipped to their final points of delivery, beneath headstones, from Maine to California. Compared to just regular life and death the war itself had been a
small
thing; that’s what his mother didn’t get. She was like a cop trying to arrest some pathetic bookie without taking any notice of the Mr. Big in charge of the whole operation.

“Have you ever heard of Cass Hough?” he asked.

Margaret, nervous for a second that Cass might be a girl, said she hadn’t.

“He’s an Englishman some people think broke the
sound barrier back in ’42, though they can’t prove it. He’s going to be the main guest at this year’s Dawn Patrol.”

Relieved, Margaret asked, “Is there really a big thunderclap when the sound barrier gets broken?” She knew, of course, that there was, but she wanted him to enchant her with explanations while they looked up at the sky.

“It’s the place where distance and time slam into each other. There’s got to be some little crevice the plane flies right over, some passageway into another dimension.”

If Billy were saying all this it would sound like an Action comic, but Tim could tell her he had a map of the place in his pocket and she wouldn’t doubt him. And if he kissed her again,
she
would break the sound barrier, fly involuntarily over that threshold they were always hinting at in Girls’ Health, the one past which she wouldn’t be able to control herself. If only right now he would
say the words
, she could die right here, in perfect happiness; they could put her into the simplest pine coffin in the factory. Tim would cry for a time, but recover when he accepted that she’d been killed by an excess of joy.