Dewey Defeats Truman (20 page)

Anne was pretty sure Margaret had it right. Whatever had propelled Tim Herrick into the air, she was sure it wasn’t
Raintree County
, a book so messy she might have to rethink her own thoughts about small-town literary inspiration. No, this novel (like poor Margaret, alas) was only one fever in that boy’s brain. Did Margaret know more about the other ones than she was letting on? She had, after all, helped him load the plane. Everyone from Carol Feller to Chief Rice was hoping Margaret might break down and tell Anne what she was withholding from everybody else. Meanwhile, Anne had her own theory.

The bells jingled. The shop door opened and the shade behind it went down, pulled by Jack Riley, who took the Kinsey
report out of Anne’s hands. He kissed her and said, “Let’s not go.”

“I
want
to,” she insisted. “I feel like Mr. Abner. It’s pretty silly, but sort of exciting all the same.”

“I’ll tell you what’s exciting,” said Jack. “We’ll go home and cook dinner and put Pop to bed and then go out to the garage.” It was their mad love nest now. “You’ve even decorated it!” she’d cried Saturday night, after discovering he’d replaced an oil can that dripped onto the couch’s bolster with a small vase full of violets. Gene Riley, who could now barely negotiate the stairs inside, let alone leave the house, would never notice them. The things she brought to Williams Street herself, a book from the shop or a bottle of Chianti or a can opener to replace the one that seemed broken, were reverently set down by Jack in the living room or kitchen, rooms that, as they shared them, seemed to excite him as much as the garage. He never pressed her to go outside, not because he still felt the need to play the well-mannered working stiff, and not because he wasn’t a regular crazy boy once they got there; just because nothing seemed to make him happier—the kind of happy that depends on a certain disbelief—than to sit on the sofa, the doily-covered one inside, dozing off with his head on her shoulder, sniffing like a kitten. Upstairs, pills would have put Gene into a deep sleep. (It
was
cancer, she now knew, and only a matter of time.)

“We can heat up what Mrs. Goldstone made last night and turn on the radio and listen to
The Night Watchman
. What do you say? You don’t want to hear a bunch of local politicians going at each other all night.”

“Haven’t you fed your dad already?”

“He wasn’t hungry. I’m practically force-feeding him now.”

“I know.”

“Look, you want to go. That’s okay.
I’ll
skip it. I’ll walk you over to City Hall and see what’s going on in Rice’s office, see if that CAA guy from Lansing has left any more search ideas.” For the past two nights Jack had been part of the effort to find Tim Herrick, crisscrossing cornfields twenty miles away for as long as the light held out.

“No, don’t. There won’t be anything more you can do tonight. Let’s split the difference. Come to
part
of the meeting with me. We’ll leave early and go home and see if your dad has any more of an appetite.”

“Deal.” The word “home,” she realized, was making him smile. It was as if she’d put “our” before it. She looked at her watch and put away the scissors and string. Mrs. Hamel’s parcel could wait until tomorrow. Without even peeking at the graphs, Jack replaced Kinsey in the empty space on the shelf.

“Jack, I think I know where Tim is. I’ll bet you he’s safe and sound with Margaret’s brother, on the upper peninsula, where Jim and his friends have been camping all summer. I think Tim somehow made it there after Margaret, without meaning to, put the idea into his head. That’s what she realizes now, and that’s why she’s so upset. I tried this idea out on Carol last night and—”

He shook his head as he held the door for her. “Margaret may have been thinking that, but she was wrong. Jim Feller called home today for the first time in three weeks. He and his buddies are in Montana. They’ve been on the road with all their camping gear since July eighteenth, thumbing rides from trucks. Carol called me in Flint while you were
out on your lunch hour. She didn’t want to leave a long, complicated message with Mr. Abner.”

Anne looked at him, surprised.

“I didn’t want to call and upset you for the whole afternoon.” He stroked her pretty head.

“N
OW THESE ARE JUST SAMPLES
,”
SAID
A
L
J
ACKSON
,
HOLDING
up two tempera-painted panels. Laughter, and then applause, for the first.

“We all remember Otto, of course.”

Of course, Al did not remember Otto Sprague, the Washington Street druggist who at the time of the cyclone had served as mayor, and fifteen years after that as postmaster. Otto had died before Al came to Owosso. But, as Peter Cox could see, nobody seemed to care that Al was lying. They were too occupied with enjoying Otto’s likeness. The painting showed him looking out from behind some old apothecary jars, as the pre-mustachioed Tom Dewey swept the shop floor. In his youth, Dewey had worked more jobs than Billy Grimes, and Al, or the retired teacher he’d hired to paint the scale-model panels, had decided this one was the most picturesque.

The other piece of oaktag Al was holding would come to life much further down the Dewey Walk. It depicted the candidate just four years ago in Oklahoma City, on the night he’d finally taken off the gloves against FDR (a baleful background figure done in somber hues). The speech, as no one but Peter seemed to recall, had been a disaster; the newspapers criticized Dewey for an unseemly attack upon the commander-in-chief who’d brought them to the edge of victory.
In fact, the stumble was still echoing in Dewey’s reluctance to speak ill of the current incumbent: he’d yet to say a word against the special session. But painted twenty feet high, even Oklahoma City would seem a triumph.

“I’m surprised you came,” Anne whispered to Carol Feller, who had saved her and Jack a pair of seats.

“If we’d stayed home, Margaret would think we were waiting to catch her getting a phone call from him.”

“How bad would that be?” asked Harold Feller, as he had obviously asked at least once before that evening. “We’d at least know the boy was alive.” The strain was showing on his face.

Peter looked away from the four of them, preferring that they watch him instead and take note of the little clutch of people who during any burst of laughter or applause were asking him questions about the HUAC hearings and Mr. Chambers. Did his Washington friends know what might happen next? He tried to give the impression that he wasn’t at liberty to say, even though this past week he hadn’t talked on the telephone to anyone but a secretary from Lansing—his principal diversion since he’d dropped Vincent Dent’s incorporation forms, a month late, on her desk at the state department of finance. He now realized he hadn’t even, despite a promise to himself and Anne, called up Horace Sinclair, who was in the fourth row looking loaded for bear.

Al Jackson had jumped the gun by holding up the paintings. First they had to read the resolution, Councilman Royers reminded him. It was actually a whole set of resolves, eighteen in all, involving everything from competitive bidding to funds for insurance and crossing guards to the installation of traffic meters on Water, Exchange and Main streets.
The audience clapped at the end of the list, less for its substance than for Royers’ heroic recitation. Councilman Morgan, reminding them that he was doing this only so the proposal could stay on the floor for discussion, seconded the resolution.
Now
, his nod indicated, Al could begin his pitch.

And pitch he did, without notes or interruption, explaining how the visitor would march up the west side of the riverbank past such simple sights as the law-library chair (Dewey’s transfer from Ann Arbor to Columbia would go undepicted) as well as the more sensational ones, among them a towering, glowering Waxey Gordon, the bootlegger being led off to a papier-mâché prison (five days before Repeal) by the young prosecutor. Directly across the water would be a one-to-twenty replica of the Albany, New York, governor’s mansion, in front of which, after having covered the DA years and crossed the as-yet-to-be-built footbridge, the visitor could buy a glass of Frankenmuth or Geyer’s lager. The bridge itself would be strung with authentic banners from each Dewey campaign.

Al anticipated every objection he could think of, vacuuming them up like dustballs. “The whole exhibit will be small enough so’s everybody coming to see it can leave the same day they get here. It’s not as if we’re going to need a whole lot of new hotel space. The Hotel Owosso will do nicely.”

“You mean they’ll make out nicely,” said Myron Warren, a shoe repairer in the second row, who laughed at his own joke.

“And for those of you worrying about traffic, you’ve got to remember that M-21 isn’t going to stay a two-lane road forever. Before long it’s going to be the chief highway crossing the lower peninsula.”

A murmur from the front row.

“People are going to be bothering Mrs. Dewey in any case,” said Al, directly addressing the murmurer. “Now let me say something about the added business and revenue we can expect …”

Peter watched their Rotarian eyes glisten over all the geegaws and lunches and gas they’d be selling. Only a few of them remained unmoved. What direct gain, after all, would accrue to Dr. Starns, the optometrist, or Bill Gordon, the roofer over on Chipman? No day-tripper was going to need new glasses or shingles to complete his visit to this funhouse. Peter could see the left-out stealing peeved looks at the ones who stood to cash in: the proprietors of White’s Bakery and Knapp’s Super Service and the Top Hat Tap Room (who hoped that no one came around asking if Gus Farnham ever shared the beer he bought there with any minors).

Another group seemed hopefully uncertain: might a few of the tourists be so taken with Owosso that they’d stay to buy houses from Thane Neal’s realty office? Would any of them, in a burst of patriotic decorum, stop in to Reisner’s barbershop before hitting the Walk? The key to Jackson’s success, Peter decided, lay with those who had no hope of realizing any added business but were smiling anyway, like Mike Hodges, an upholsterer on East Main who was either impressed by Al Jackson’s budgetary statistics or just tickled by the prospect of visitors walking past those looming dioramas.

“Do you think they could get Roosevelt’s cigarette to puff out smoke?” one old lady asked her husband. “Like Times Square?”

“That’s a wonderful idea!” he responded.

A retired stenography teacher stood up and waited for
quiet before declaring: “I think James Oliver Curwood would be
appalled
by this defacement of the river. The castle he built upon it was something beautiful, made out of nature’s own stones. He would hate these papier-mâché monstrosities being constructed from partisanship and greed.”

Councilman Royers calmed the waters. “Nobody can speak for the dead, ma’am.”

Peter was surprised—almost as surprised as Anne—to see Jack Riley’s hand go up.

“Is it democratic to do this before the election?” he asked. “Is a town supposed to bet its money on one candidate over another, even if the candidate is a favorite son?”

A smattering of applause; a vigorous, grateful nod from Horace Sinclair. The crowd, hushed by the contention, listened to Al: “Everybody knows those Republican delegates in Philadelphia were picking a President. Everybody knows how this election is going to turn out. We’ve got a responsibility to get started. The sooner we do, the sooner we’ll turn a profit. A profit that, under President Dewey, won’t all go to taxes.”
Hear, hear
, from a few businessmen.

“Does anyone here remember Amos Gould?” Horace Sinclair, without being recognized, was on his feet, the boom in his voice overriding its scratchy touch of hay fever. “Well, even I’m too young to remember him.” The old man, winning Peter’s admiration, waited for his laugh before going on. “But I know who he was. He was the first mayor of this city and he built the old house at 100 West Oliver in 1843. It’s been chopped up for apartments now and—no disrespect to anyone living there—the history of the place is being plastered over and subdivided out of all recognition. There are a dozen buildings like it in Owosso, ones that
don’t have any plaques on them, even though they represent the
real
history of the town that produced Thomas E. Dewey. If you want to get a sense of his life, you should learn to recognize them instead of staring goggle-eyed at this carnival Mr. Jackson is proposing to throw up along the river.” As if he were Robert Stripling reaching a dramatic moment with Whittaker Chambers, he turned around and faced Al. “Mr. Jackson, may I be so bold as to inquire if anyone has asked Governor Dewey about this big idea of yours?”

“He’s in the middle of a presidential campaign, Mr. Sinclair.”

“Do you mean the future of Owosso itself isn’t important enough to bother him with?” Horace wheeled around and faced the crowd. “How many of you know where to find the Paymaster Building, or the Comstock cabin? Or even know what they are? Here, let me show you.” He took to the aisle and began passing out his stenciled descriptions of the two fragile piles, along with a suggested appropriation for fixing them up. It was a dramatic enough maneuver, thought Peter, but it quickly lost steam: Horace hadn’t brought nearly enough copies, and the councilmen weren’t going to wait for him to finish his distribution before resuming the meeting.

Passing among the bakers and gas-station owners and just ordinary excited citizens, Horace felt ridiculous and frail, like that cabin that had been built over without a second thought. What had made him think this counterproposal would move them more than Jackson’s gaudy little Lido? What made him think he could believe in it himself? It was only a cover-up, and he was disgusted by his own arguments. (As if he cared what Thomas E. Dewey
thought of anything, Owosso included!) He ran out of handbills halfway up the aisle and kept moving toward the door. He departed just as he heard Jackson, looking ahead to the groundbreaking, say something about “driving piles into the riverbank.”

Damn it, thought Peter. He had hoped he might fulfill his promise to Anne by catching the old man even tonight, flattering him about his point of view before talking him out of it. Well, Anne and Riley would have to comfort him instead. They also were making for the exit.