Dewey Defeats Truman (2 page)

Oh, for crying out loud, there she was, Jane Herrick and her green garden hose, standing there like a sour statue, watering her grass. She might be the mother of his best friend, Tim, but Billy was determined to avoid having to say hello to her. He flipped an
Argus
to the house across the street from hers, watching its flight as if he really needed to concentrate. Mrs. Herrick didn’t even take the paper anymore. After her husband’s early death ten years ago, and Tim’s older brother, Arnie, getting killed in Belgium in ’44, she didn’t, as far as Billy could tell, take an interest in anything. “She’s angry at life,” his mother would say sympathetically.

It was now safe to look back over his shoulder. She wouldn’t notice him glancing up toward Tim’s open window for some sign that his friend sat behind the blue curtains fluttering over the sill. No, thought Billy, he wasn’t there. He was bound to be lying on a bank of the Shiawassee, along one of the stretches below town, the ones where no one had ever been around to see the advertising sail on the raft. He’d
be there with a book, even though it was a perfect summer day. Tim Herrick was the best first baseman in Owosso, and whenever he and Billy managed to sneak a couple of beers behind the Indian Trails bus terminal, Tim could turn into a wild man of joy, whooping and hollering as if he were possessed. But most days he was too serious for his own good, too ready to ask crazy questions that ought to be left to philosophers. When the Russians pushed Masaryk out a window last winter, Tim had asked Billy, as they rode to school in his car (the ’36 Chevy that had belonged to Arnie), if he, Billy, sometimes wondered “if it meant nothing at all.” Billy had thought he was talking about whatever the Russians hoped to accomplish by “defenestrating” the Czech foreign minister, but no, it turned out Tim meant
life itself
, the whole thing. Living with his morose mother was having a bad effect on him. “Herrick,” he’d told him, “you’re too damned deep and depressed. You need a tonic.”

It was time to dismount. If the paper didn’t hit the top step of Horace Sinclair’s porch, right in the middle of the space under the overhang—God forbid a drop of water got on it—the old Spanish-American War cavalryman would have a holy fit. Calculating things on a time/labor basis, Billy figured he lost a half cent a day climbing off the bike to hand carry the paper to the porch: that was more than five dollars in five years. By rights, fat-assed old Mr. Sinclair—who, Billy’s grandmother insisted, had been thin and handsome when he charged up San Juan Hill, or the one next to it—ought to be paying extra for the custom service, but Billy never even got a Christmas tip.

“Thank you, Grimes,” said Horace Sinclair, sipping his glass of iced tea and not looking up from his copy of
Ivanhoe
.
He and “the late Mrs. Sinclair,” as he still referred to his dead wife (a nice woman;
she
used to tip Billy) had always been great readers.

“It’s a pleasure, sir.” (Dale Carnegie couldn’t have done better.) Billy got back on the Columbia after wiping his forehead and taking an envious look at the pitcher of tea. A few more houses to hit and that was it. He turned down Oak, deciding that the shade of its trees was better than any sip of tea the old man might have offered. Racing back west on Williams, depositing two more papers on porches and four more cents in his bank account, he reached a point where he could see through a couple of yards to the back of the two-story Comstock Apartments on Oliver, the ones where a number of his female teachers had lived over the years, and where he sometimes saw Anne Macmurray, the dishy girl from Abner’s Bookstore, going in and out. If they all looked like her in Ann Arbor, where she’d gotten her diploma a year ago, Billy might be convinced to reconsider his plans; but most of the college-bound girls he knew were plain Janes. Margaret Feller was another exception; his biggest fear was that she’d insist on a college man for herself and send him a Dear John letter a semester after she left Owosso.

No, it wouldn’t happen that way. By that time he’d have launched his scheme in a place bigger than this, and she’d be desperate to hear of its success. He too would be a
GONE GOOSE
, as the bedsheet hanging from the upper story of an ardent Republican house put it. The painted bird above the two words had Harry Truman’s face and was winging its way back to Independence, Missouri. The phrase came from Mrs. Henry Luce’s speech to the convention a couple of nights ago. Billy had heard it on the radio and decided there
was no reason it couldn’t apply to his success as well as Truman’s failure. (Talk about a scheme. Imagine coming up with the idea for
Time
and
Life
. No wonder Henry Luce had landed himself a wife as clever as that.)

After throwing the last paper and turning the bike toward the center of town, he decided he might as well go find Herrick. On his way to the patch of riverbank where he knew Tim would be, he could pass City Hall and see if there were signs of preparation for the stupendous celebration he was hoping for. He sped down John Street past Curwood Castle. Built by Owosso’s true favorite son, the late James Oliver Curwood, this stone imitation of a French fortress had always seemed an embarrassing thing to Billy, nothing on the order of the fortresses he’d read about in Howard Pyle’s books. Curwood’s “folly” (he’d learned the word from Mrs. Porter in sophomore English) had nothing to do with the man’s own books, either, these nature novels full of wolves and bears and cayuses (whatever the hell
they
were) that had earned him his money and got made into movies. They were dull books to Billy, but you couldn’t deny the success of the scheme. Curwood had turned himself into a brand name, and the proud librarians and Mr. Abner down at the bookstore liked to point out that by the time he died, the year before Billy was born, Curwood had outsold Zane Grey. He’d built the castle next to the house in which he’d toiled away at his first stories, and everybody seemed to think he was a swell guy for not abandoning Owosso after making his bundle. Like every other student at Owosso High, Billy had had to read the man’s autobiography—just as, he supposed, all the younger ones would soon have to read Dewey’s.

He crossed Main Street and was disappointed to see
nothing in front of City Hall but a bunch of picnic tables. It was still early, he told himself, taking the Columbia down Ball Street until he could cut over to the Shiawassee and—sure enough—spot Herrick, who was lying on his back and looking up toward the sun above the shiny waters, doing absolutely nothing. Billy wondered whether it was encouraging or a little creepy that he didn’t have a book beside him. How could he just lie there? Close enough to make out the expression on his face, to see the lips that were slightly puckered in some kind of silent song, Billy cupped his hand to his mouth and came so close to shouting “ ’Ey,
Her
-rick!”—his best imitation of Lou Costello calling Abbott—that he could almost hear the words before he said them.

But he didn’t say them. Something told him, just this once, to let Tim be, to refrain from disturbing whatever daydream his friend was lost inside. Pretty sure he hadn’t been seen, he backed the Columbia off the mud and out of the bushes, taking care not to snap a twig or make a sound, as if he were one of the Shiawassee who long ago had tiptoed here and given the river its name.

T
HE AFTERNOON WAS SO SLOW THAT
A
NNE HOPED
M
R
. Abner, once he got back, would tell her to close up and call it a day. She was alone in the bookshop on South Washington, without anything to do since bringing up the five copies of Stanley Walker’s 1944 campaign biography that had been lying in the basement for the past four years.
Dewey: An American of This Century
had gone to the printer before D-Day and was terribly out of date, but Mr. Abner hoped he might yet unload three or four of them while the renomination excitement
lasted. Anne put the little pile next to Churchill’s
Gathering Storm
, beside which, six months from now, if she was still in Owosso, she would be stacking General Eisenhower’s memoirs, which Mr. Abner told her were scheduled to appear in time for Christmas shopping.

The whole war had begun to seem as far away as its very first day, that Pearl Harbor Sunday she’d slept late, after the previous night’s junior-class dance at Darien High School, back in Connecticut. The Macmurrays would get through the war just fine, her two brothers coming home without a scratch. The biggest change it had made in her own life was bringing her to Michigan in the fall of ’43. With her father away for weeks at a time with the OPA in Washington, and her mother indifferent to anything but the vigil she was keeping for her sons, there had been no one especially attentive to her choice of a college. When she suggested going out of state, to Ann Arbor, on no stronger grounds than some pleasant ideas of Michigan from two summer weeks spent with a cousin on Mackinac Island, her mother had said, “That sounds fine, dear,” without looking up from the piece of V-mail she was reading.

Here she was, five years later, happily, if modestly, aware that she had become quite a bit harder to ignore. Her personality had come out with her cheekbones; she was a “vivid, literary girl,” as one professor had put it in an evaluation she’d read upside down on his desk. She wanted to write a novel, one that had nothing to do with herself. All through the war her imagination had thrived by thinking of real life as what took place elsewhere and got lived by other people. “Elsewhere” had survived the war as an idea, a lure, and the notion that Owosso might be one of its quiet, unexpected
precincts had brought her here a year ago: an Ann Arbor roommate had worked for Leo Abner in the summers and knew he could use a college graduate to help him in the shop by recommending things to his women customers. So, as she tried to make her own book come to life, she was spending her afternoons with those women—except that today there had been hardly any customers at all, ladies or gentlemen, which was why she now sat behind the counter reading
The Naked and the Dead
, a book that seemed to need no recommendation at all, that flew out of the shop, sometimes two at a time.

As an aspiring writer, Anne felt obligated to brave her way through it, no matter how rough it was supposed to be, and no matter how suspicious she was of best-sellers. She’d finally plunged in last week, and now, as most of the women customers liked to say, she couldn’t put it down. Here, she thought, was what the war had really been, not the high-minded affair served up in the statesmen’s memoirs. The other day she’d managed to lose her own copy, which she’d gotten at a 75 percent discount, so she was making do with one from the shelves, which she would take care to replace without dog-earing the pages when six o’clock came around.

It was barely five now, but she hoped the jingling bells on the front door meant that Mr. Abner, back from his errands, was going to tell her to go home.

“Got a date?”

It wasn’t Mr. Abner at all. It was Peter Cox, several years older than herself and too attractive for his own good. As he stood in front of her, she looked at the way a thin layer of sweat had pinned his white shirt to his shoulders, and before
she could be noticed, she shifted her gaze up to his blond hair and big brown eyes.

“A date for what?”

“History,” he said. He was the town’s number-one up-and-coming Republican, the newly arrived hot young lawyer at Harold Feller’s firm across the street and, she’d heard from Mr. Abner, a candidate for the state legislature.

“ ‘And Franklin Roosevelt’s looks,’ ” she started singing, “ ‘give me a thrill.’ ” She wasn’t even a Democrat (though her dad was, a
rara avis
in Darien); she hadn’t even been old enough to vote in ’44, and wasn’t certain if or for whom she’d vote this time, but something inside her insisted that she get under Peter Cox’s skin, not give him one more thing in a lifetime of getting everything he wanted.

He put his hand over his heart. “I still have my Navy prayer book with Roosevelt’s signature, Miss Macmurray, and I promise I’ll treasure it to the day I die. But he’s been gone three years, if you haven’t noticed, and you surely can’t be wild about Harry.”

She smiled. “I’m not that wild about politics, Peter. And what’s with ‘Miss Macmurray’? I know we’ve only spoken a couple of times, but don’t tell me you’re putting on your campaign manners already. It’s only June.”

He sat down, entitled as you please, in Mr. Abner’s chair behind the counter. “I’m crushed.”

He had that
look
, the one she had noticed a year and a half ago, when he’d been pointed out to her in Ann Arbor; he’d been whizzing through his last year of law school, the one he’d missed when he joined the service. And now here he was in Owosso—with a purpose and a plan. They said he’d picked the town off a wall map at the state GOP’s headquarters
in Lansing. It showed a senate seat opening up in the Owosso district; an hour later he was on the phone to Harold Feller’s office.

Could she really say that
she
had a plan? Her “writing”: how many nights a week, back in her room on Oliver Street, did she work at it? Not one in the last two weeks.

“You’ll get over it,” she said.

“Politics?” asked Peter, knowing perfectly well she meant his being crushed. “I’ll never have to. This is the beginning of everything for the Republicans. We’ve got a great crop all over the state. Over in Grand Rapids, Jerry Ford is running for Congress, and …”

“No older than yourself, I’ll bet?”

“Five
years
older!”

Anne laughed as she twisted the scarf above her cardigan jacket. “You’re keeping track, aren’t you?” She wished she hadn’t worn it: her neck was her best feature. She knew she was too thin and too tall and that her eyebrows were too thick, but in her neck she had absolute confidence, and here she was covering it up.

“Advanced, aren’t we?” Peter asked, pointing to the open copy of
The Naked and the Dead
.

“He’s five years
younger
than you are.”

“The Army guys I met were the best fellows in the world. Not the bunch of animals he makes them out to be.”