Dewey Defeats Truman (14 page)

“I wish,” she said, “that the whole country, not just the Dawn Patrol, had a queen and a king. I’m so sick of Dewey and Truman. This election is so
juvenile
, like picking the head of the student council.”

“Who says any of them really rule?” asked Tim, looking off toward the Elm Street gate. “I mean, what makes anybody the President? Just some ancient agreement nobody ever stops to think about. If somebody snuck into the National Archives in the middle of the night and broke open that case they keep the Constitution in, and then ripped it up, would it really exist anymore? Who says all those printed copies
have any force? Who says the world everybody agrees on is the same as the world in your head?”

He was so beautiful. He was more beautiful than Robert Daniels, that Ohio boy they were looking for, the one who was in the middle of a killing spree and had his picture in the paper. Except that Tim was good. He and she would be king and queen of their own world, without any subjects.

“Come on,” he said, jumping down from the platform. He extended his arms up to her. “I want to show you a
completely
different world.”

The car threaded the trees and moonlight, away from the factory and north toward Oliver Street. On the radio that Arnie had installed himself, years after buying the car, Eddy Arnold sang “Anytime,” but Margaret wished this would be just
one
time, so perfect, so ultimate, that the Chevrolet would keep driving forever, out of town and through the cornfields and off the edge of the earth.

Behind them, furiously pumping his legs and breathing hard, taking care to remain invisible to the rearview mirror, someone else was hoping their ride would be quick. Otherwise he would lose them, even though he was sure that tonight they would end up where he’d been expecting them to go each of the four nights he’d been following them. The car was soon out of sight, but he kept huffing and puffing toward the place where, sure enough, he found it parked and empty. He slowed down, exhausted, slumping over the handlebars as he slunk away from Tim and Margaret’s destination, the rooftop of Frank Sherwood, that son-of-a-bitch Mr. Science, that purveyor of different worlds, the mayor of the goddamned planet Jupiter.

T
HE CLOCK ON
C
ITY
H
ALL STRUCK MIDNIGHT
,
AND
H
ORACE
Sinclair switched off WGN. Truman had gotten his nomination, but in all the chaos of the convention there was still no telling when he would reach the podium for his acceptance speech. Horace, who now fervently hoped against hope for Truman’s victory, sighed with disgust. He tied the belt of his bathrobe around his ample waistline and rocked a bit—one, two, three—until he had the momentum to rise and head for the kitchen.

On the counter he set out a can of frozen orange juice to thaw for morning. You couldn’t say he was against every modern convenience. He was even preparing to keep a chart of the daily “pollen count” on the wall calendar from the heating-oil company; a lifelong hay-fever sufferer, he had welcomed the opening of Memorial Hospital’s measuring station this week. On days the stuff was really blowing, like today, he sagged something awful. He was too tired to be up at this hour, and yet he knew, as he wiped his hands on a dish towel, that he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

His spirits, and no doubt his blood pressure, had been up and down for the past two days. The news of Barkley’s selection to run with Truman had given him a boost—“another prosy old man like myself,” he’d told Carol Feller yesterday afternoon, right in front of Annie Dewey’s house—but tonight he’d been brought low by the announcement of General Pershing’s death in Washington. The chill it gave him had nothing to do with age. At eighty-eight, Black Jack had been a good sixteen years older, and when Horace had laid eyes on him fifty years ago near Santiago, it was as boy to man. No, it wasn’t old age or the Spanish War that had come to Horace’s mind. It was the war after that, specifically the Argonne forest and the service there, under Pershing’s command,
of Jonathan Adams Darrell’s child, that boy who still didn’t know what a dark star he’d been born under, thanks to what Horace and Wright George and Boyd Fowler had gone and done that summer night in ’97.

Only he and Wright were left, and after this evening of quiet agitation, when his thoughts moved from the Owosso Casket Company to the riverbank to the luckless Truman, whose imminent defeat was the cause of all his misery, Horace realized that he must not wait any longer to send a letter to New York City. He climbed the stairs to his study and rolled up the desktop.

A
ROUND THE BLOCK ON
W
ILLIAMS
S
TREET
,
WHERE THE
houses were smaller and closer together, Anne Macmurray and Jack Riley sat on Jack’s front porch, still waiting up to hear Harry Truman. The band in Philadelphia segued from “Hail to the Chief” to “My Old Kentucky Home,” in honor of Senator Barkley. Gene Riley’s room was upstairs at the back of the house, but Anne and Jack kept the radio so low the crickets almost drowned it out. “Congressman Rayburn,” the faraway commentator informed them, “is banging the gavel, trying to quiet the delegates …”

Anne realized that the desperate crowd might go on
cheering until 3
A.M.
before Jack ran out of things to say. Last month’s sudden kiss in the garage had been the first turn of a combination lock, and in the weeks since, during
Call Northside 777
and a dinner in Flint, the tumblers had started dropping. Tonight, politics had acted like nitroglycerine, blowing the safe’s door open once and for all. She could hardly shut him up, no matter the subject. Her head was on his shoulder as she looked up at the stars; inside the radio the sweet strains of Stephen Foster mixed with Rayburn’s scolding squawk.

“Boy,” said Jack, “am I glad you’ve got your own apartment with its own entrance. I once dated a girl who lived in Mrs. Doucette’s rooming house down on Exchange Street, and if I brought her home past eleven, she got the riot act the next morning at breakfast.”

“Mrs. Wagner just tortures me with questions.”

He adjusted the fan, whose cord ran with the radio’s through the living-room window, so that its breeze fell on her more directly. “I never mind the heat,” he said. “I guess it’s what they call a reaction. Years ago, mornings in the winter in that old house by the train depot, I was the runt of the litter, and my mother would wrap me in her old bathrobe to stop my teeth from chattering. My brothers and sisters would tease the hell out of me.”

Anne could picture the mother, smiling and humming, cloaking her darlings in cheerful illusions. How had she managed it with the old man around? A character, her own dad would have said. He’d been friendly enough during dinner, even calling her “doll” a couple of times, but absolute sandpaper on Jack the minute a pot splattered or the phone rang. He was in pain, of course, his stomach bothering him
terribly (cancer? Jack hadn’t opened up
that
far), but some of it was just ornery assertion, pressed upon Jack in inverse proportion to the old man’s growing dependence on him.
And where are you getting these ideas above yourself?
was, she thought, the evening’s unspoken question—meant for Jack and prompted by her presence. Gene made her seem like a Buick, or a California vacation, something Jack had his nerve aspiring to, as if he too were developing “champagne tastes on a beer budget.”

Her own taste for beer had certainly helped. She was on her third Stroh’s, and hadn’t touched the pitcher of lemonade that sat catching gnats on the porch railing. Jack had prepared it this afternoon, a last offering, she hoped, to the delicate flower he’d imagined. He seemed relieved that she smoked Luckies and enjoyed plunging her hands into the dishwater; he was so much less nervous with her tonight she was almost disappointed—he hadn’t once tugged on those adorable little spikes of hair. The only time he’d shown embarrassment came when he got stalled during a wrangle with the father, something over his own salary (Gene’s implication being that it was too high), and like an anxious passenger she’d gotten out to help him push the argument. Her cues and nods rattled him, even as they won her points with the old man—presumably for her loyalty to Jack, and maybe as a display of gumption against himself.

As it was, Jack soon had things rolling again, impressing her if not his father with his command of profit margins and benefit ratios. He was patient and clear in his explanations. She could picture him persuading the fellows in Flint why it was important they get to the meeting this week, or at least give a thought to inflation when the union put in for a
smaller increase than they thought it should. He could get a point across, tell a story. (When they went out to walk off dinner, just the two of them, he told her how the water main buried beneath their feet had gotten built.) The one thing he couldn’t seem to bring up was Peter, though she wished he would. A vigorously biased assessment might get her to stop thinking about “that one,” as she and her best girlfriend in Darien used to call the most impossible boy in their lives at any given moment. She’d been relieved when he went away the other day, and she’d kept the letter that arrived this morning unopened on her dresser.

How different these talks with Jack were from those fusillades of conversation with Peter. Every word she said to Jack was designed to coax and encourage. Add to this desire an urge (so far repressed) to rip off his shirt, and she had a cocktail of longings much stronger than Stroh’s beer. She nestled closer to him, pretending it was more breeze from the fan instead of more damp from him that she was after. The two of them were dozing off, still waiting for Truman, as the announcer tried to convey a scene better suited to radio’s new competition: the candidates had just been presented with a replica of the Liberty Bell, out of which some doves of peace were taking flight.

While Senator Barkley accepted his nomination, albeit more briefly than he had keynoted the convention, Jack fell fully asleep. His exhalations came in soft little sniffs, like a kitten’s, making it impossible for her not to pet him. She shifted so his head was on her shoulder. With her gaze from above, she inventoried the face below the little stalks of hair. Everything was youthful and efficient. There was no decorative dimple, and instead of Peter’s high cheekbones, those
gaudy epaulets of breeding, Jack’s were like retracted artillery. His snub nose was in its small way perfect; the boyish little mouth seemed braced to ward off an aunt’s kisses or a brother’s fists. His chest rose and fell in time with his breathing, and her eye traveled to an open shirt button inches above his belt, through which she could see a thin line of fine dark hair.

If she weren’t careful, she’d reach her hand in. Only recently had this sort of temptation begun to seem a matter of extreme urgency. When she’d first gotten to Ann Arbor, the general dearth of men had made those around seem somehow more superfluous than desirable. Then they’d started flooding home, and she had had her first and only affair, with a dark-eyed boy from Dearborn who’d never been in the service at all. They met in Verse Writing, expressing infatuation with all the spontaneity of the romantic villanelles and octosyllabic couplets they were assigned to write each weekend. When they finally slept together, the boy’s thin, perplexed body kept no time with hers; it was as if they’d failed the
terza rima
unit. They gave up after three times, relieved to get on to the brief business of worrying if she were pregnant.