Dewey Defeats Truman (22 page)

“
Principles of Celestial Navigation
.” Jane picked up the book as she read out the title.

“It’s from the school library,” explained Frank. “I got it out because it was the only thing my chairman and I could think of for me to do on Sunday. I had this little booth at the air show—”

He realized she wasn’t looking at him. She was regarding the electric ring under the saucepan, watching it turn redder and redder, as if the hotplate were really Saturn, and had dropped in tonight on its long circuit around the sun.

“I’m sure that Tim is okay, Mrs. Herrick. You know, that plane was in surprisingly good shape. That’s what the airport warden said: ‘Say what you want about Gus, he really took care of the plane. He was out there working it every Saturday, working on everything from the—’ ”

“Mr. Sherwood,” said Jane, moving her gaze from the hotplate’s ring to Frank’s eyes, gathering in her lungs and
throat the same voice she had shouted into the Ardennes forest on a December night in ’44, in a dream. Tonight she was right here in Owosso, awake, but the words that came out of her were the same ones she’d cried in her sleep three and a half years ago:
“What have you done with my son?”

DEWEY
’
S CAMPAIGN PLANS QUICKENING
;
SILENT OVER SPECIAL SESSION

Peter picked up Anne’s
Argus
from the counter near the register.

“He may be ‘silent’ over the session,” she said, “but the session is over, period.” It was Monday, August 9, two days after Congress had adjourned. Along with price controls, the House had even rejected, as too liberal, a housing bill backed by the arch-conservative Senator Taft. Truman could now gleefully complain about the do-nothing Eightieth Congress for the twelve weeks until Election Day.

“That’s some forthright candidate you’ve got, Peter.”

“Who do you think will break his silence first?” he asked. “Dewey or the Herrick kid?”

A terrible joke (after nearly ten days the search for Tim had been quietly called off), but she was pleased to find herself laughing. It meant she had at last relaxed with Peter
Cox. She was now officially Jack’s girl, recognized as such by all, including Peter. Their skirmishes were over; he had surrendered the other night, gracefully she thought, when she and Jack ran into him in front of the Capitol Theatre. He’d actually shaken Jack’s right hand, while Jack’s left one stayed around her waist. It wasn’t exactly signing papers on the deck of the
Missouri
, but she detected a touch of formality in it. With all that behind them, Peter could now cross the street and drop into the shop at lunchtime like some friendly trade delegation on a routine mission.

Peter wished she hadn’t laughed at his joke. He already knew she had a streak of black humor, but he would have preferred still being enough of a threat to require scolding. Instead, as she unpacked a box of novels from Lippincott, she motioned him into the chair behind the counter. “Put your feet up,” she said. “I hear from Carol it’s what you do at the office.”

“Okay.” He swung them onto Leo Abner’s blotter.

“How about
your
campaign plans? Are they ‘quickening’?”

“I’m not making much noise yet, but I’m not lying quite so low as the top of the ticket. I’ll be at a meeting of the Shiawassee County Young Republicans later in the week, where the Wayne University
Collegian
’s star reporter will tell everybody about the wonderfully modern Dewey machine he saw operating in Philadelphia.” He dropped his head to his chest and made snoring noises.

“Is this boy from Owosso? Maybe they can paint him into the convention panel of the Dewey Walk.”

“God, you’re really for that thing.”

“I am. I am genuinely for it and for Harry Truman.”

“It’s so cornball,” said Peter.

“The Walk or Harry?”

“Both.”

“Neither. Harry’s going to go down fighting, and all those things on the Walk will say more to people than Dewey himself ever will. You remember our conversation after Carol’s dinner party? When you said the Walk was more important than those backyards, on account of history and fame or something like that? You were trying to talk me into it. Well, I am talked into it, but not for your reasons, and certainly not to lure the tourists. I like it because it’s peculiar; it’ll be one of a kind, not something from a chain store. They say the future will be places like that ready-made town they’re going to put on a potato farm outside New York—each house like every other. But how many towns had a coffin factory, or a woman who crippled herself working on the slanted floor of her husband’s merry-go-round? If Owosso is the place that produced Dewey, at least it’s the
only
place that produced him. So let’s put up the Walk.”

“What does Jack think?”

This was the first time Peter had spoken his name as a simple fact, something requiring no particular tone of voice, only the recognition facts routinely got.

“He just wants them to wait. He still thinks it’s indecent to do anything before the election.” She called out to a customer at the back of the store. “It’s $1.95, Mrs. Smart. Sorry about the missing cover, but that’s eighty cents off.”

“How’s his father?” asked Peter.

Anne walked back to the counter to give him his answer, cancer being one fact that demanded not just recognition but a shameful hush. “He’s slipping. Jack thinks they’ll put
him in a hospital within another week. Either here or in Lansing.”

“I hope he doesn’t have to get poked by Dr. Coates.
That
must be some bedside manner.”

Dr. Coates? Oh, Carol’s brother, the rabid radiologist. “I’m afraid poor old Gene is way past the X-ray stage.”

Cancer could shut even Peter up; she had to jump over the silence. “Well,” she sighed, tapping the paper, “Dr. Coates won’t have to worry about money being squandered on little apartments for veterans. Honestly, Peter, when they won’t even pass
Taft
’s housing bill! It’s like saying Mr. Bumble’s been too generous with the porridge.”

She spoke, he thought, like somebody who would be turning into a Democrat even if she weren’t dating one; she talked as if she wanted to have a
discussion
, that so-much-less-sexy version of an argument.

“If you don’t want houses that all look alike,” he replied, “why do you want the government to build skyscraper slums?”

“People have got to live
someplace
. And why do you say they’ll be slums?”

“You’re right. They won’t be. Because Congress isn’t going to build them.”

She paused to ring up Mrs. Smart’s copy of
The Ides of March
. And because she wasn’t going to give him the sort of argument he wanted, she shifted the subject.

“I’m getting excited about the election, which I never would have expected. I think my dad was the only Democrat in Darien, and I could never understand why he bothered tacking signs to the trees each fall, and driving old ladies to the polls when he knew they were going to vote for Landon. But I’m beginning to feel it.”

Was it, Peter wondered, her romance with the town—the one she was willing herself into for the sake of her book—or the one she was having with Riley? The first, he decided. Evenings spent pouring Jack his beer and listening to why everyone needed more wages to make fewer widgets might have made her “Truly for Truman,” but it was this novel of hers that was leaving room for the Dewey Walk.

“Well, I’m bored with the whole thing. That’s the way it is with foregone conclusions. Even the war was boring after New Year’s ’45.”

Which he’d spent smashed on champagne in Grosvenor Square, she bet. While Jack was thanking God his eye had twitched back to life.

“How’s your girl from Lansing? The one with the tax department.”

“She’s retiring.”

“More like the pink slip, I’d say. From you.” It was the closest she’d come to flirting, and it was over before she got back to the box of books from Lippincott.

He’d had enough. He swung his legs off the counter and started for the door.

“Oh, Peter! I forgot. Your mother is going to think I’m as rude as can be. I only this morning got around to writing her a thank-you letter for everything on Mackinac. I haven’t even mailed it yet. If you talk to her—”

“I’ll tell her you’ve been busy.” The bells jingled and he waved good-bye from the sidewalk.

Crossing Washington Street, he felt inside his pocket for a letter that assured the pointlessness of Anne’s, one he’d found waiting at home last night, its absurd postmark—
RENO
—falling over the three-cent Statue of Liberty. After thirty-four years of marriage his mother was in the Biggest
Little City in the World, living at a dude ranch to establish residency for a divorce.

Once back at his desk, his feet squarely under it, he read Lucy Cox’s handwriting for the third time:

Of course she was talking about the money, and about everything except why she had suddenly gone and done this, now, fifteen years after he had seen what bound her and his
father just disappear, like an animal that had run off. Back then he had asked, again and again, to no answer but a smile:
What’s the matter?
From that time on the house had felt muffled, except during the cocktail hour, when with their friends his parents roared into false gaiety, each of their voices echoing like a room robbed of its furniture.

He wouldn’t hear men and women that loud again until the war, when the soldiers and secretaries throwing themselves at one another talked at a volume two notches higher than necessary. But their noise, he remembered noticing, lacked that echo. Something packed it, something from within, maybe an awareness of the person back home they were betraying and somehow loving the more for doing it.

He could remember envying all that temporary passion, and wishing
he
had someone at home to betray, but by the time he’d gone over to London he’d long since learned to imitate his parents’ indifference to love. He’d started practicing his own version of invincibility the summer he’d been the Pierrot up on Mackinac, the summer after things had gone wrong at home. As he’d told Harris Terry weeks ago, it was
personality
that closed the deals, that got you past the Japs or Mrs. Roosevelt or you name it.

Could he name
them?
There had been so many girls he no longer could.

His mother’s letter had so much of her silvery nonchalance that it had taken him three hours after reading it—as he lay in bed on Park Street, letting the phone ring in the dark (the tax-department secretary)—to realize the obvious, if still unexplained, matter behind it. Something had
happened
, something to make her feel there was now a reason for her and Father to be officially apart instead of officially together,
as they had been for so long, like two parallel-parked Lincolns. But what was it?

This afternoon he was no closer to guessing. He stuck it out at the office for longer than usual, interrupting himself only to look out the window and across the street at Abner’s. Any sight of her was blocked by the glare, which made the bookshop’s window a blue rectangle, into which the occasional customer would be painted just before entering the shop. At 4:45 Jack Riley arrived and disappeared inside. Were they down to a thirty-five-hour week in Flint? Or had he come home early to take care of his old man? Either way, he was in there, while Peter sat across the street, so deep in the picture’s background it didn’t even count.