Dewey Defeats Truman (24 page)

But he hadn’t said this. And Jane Herrick had just stared at him, as if he were the German officer who would reappear in her dreams forever, always available for questioning, always without an answer.

Had Frank felt able to question her, he would have asked if she had received a letter written later than the last he’d gotten, the one dated November 30, 1944. He would have asked: When his effects came home before his bones, did you find a key chain with the sun and the moon embossed on a silver disk? By any chance did you put it into the coffin at Oak Hill? There were nights without number that he had wanted to claw the earth and dig down for it, dig for the bones themselves, while she and Tim, a boy he could never figure, and could never dare to talk to about his brother, were sleeping over on Park Street.

He looked at the telephone.
Owosso 6410
. He knew that was still their number, because he checked it every year in
Polk’s City Directory
. He had never rung it, but he had a stronger desire than ever to do so now, to dial his neighbor, the only other living soul in the land of dead Herricks.

C
HIEF
R
ICE
’
S DEPUTY HAD TWICE BEEN TO SEE
J
ANE
.

On his first visit, he asked if he might have a look at Tim’s room. She said yes, but did not accompany him upstairs;
she had almost never gone into the room between ’44 and the day Tim disappeared, and she had no desire to now. After his search, the deputy remarked to her upon the room’s unusual tidiness for a boy Tim’s age. The fastidiousness extended to the fifth of whiskey tucked exactly into the first-baseman’s mitt in a bureau drawer, though the officer confined his observation of that detail to his notepad. To Mrs. Herrick he talked of the neat stacks of magazines and schoolbooks, the folded clothes and sorted coins, before asking if she had straightened things up since last seeing Tim. She answered no, and continued listening to the policeman’s description of the room as if it were a postcard from abroad.

His second visit, sparked by the
Raintree County
speculations, yielded no hidden notes or X-marked maps, no letters from Margaret Feller or anybody up on the northern peninsula. Mrs. Herrick did manage to identify the copy of Michie & Harlow’s
Practical Astronomy
that he brought down. Despite its being uninscribed, she remembered it as a present from Frank Sherwood. This merited some underlining in the deputy’s notebook. After showing himself out, he went back to City Hall astonished at the woman’s overall lack of knowledge about her son, a fact that made her mention of Frank Sherwood conspicuous.

After the officer’s two visits, and her own to Frank Sherwood’s, Jane had concluded that Tim was dead. Her “three men,” as she had called them in the gay middle days of her marriage, were all gone now. By today, Friday the thirteenth, even the girl from the
Argus
had stopped calling.

August 13. On this day in history (not the anniversaries cited by the paper, but the ones she mentally assembled),
Arnold Herrick had received a diphtheria vaccination (1931), and Byron O’Clair of Laingsburg had been killed in the Solomon Islands (1943).

Tim was deader than Arnie. Her older son had bones and a monument, which her fealty had animated with something like life. She had no theories about where Tim had gone or how he had died, nothing that took her beyond that single impulsive trip to the Comstock Apartments, prompted by the sight of the astronomy handbook and, after she’d identified it, the deputy’s mention of Frank Sherwood’s booth at the air show.

Whenever she saw him on the street, Frank seemed to
look
at her, the way people once in a while accused her of looking at them. She knew he was mixed up in this, somehow. Her train of thought went nowhere with the feeling, but lately the papers announced no military funeral that would take her mind off it. She was angry at Tim for being dead, for appropriating her grief the way he had taken everything else belonging to Arnie.

Her despair no longer nourished; it consumed. She could not sleep and was forgetting the simplest things, like her key chain with the sun and moon, which she’d left dangling from the front-door lock all night after coming back from Frank Sherwood’s apartment.

F
OR THE FIFTH NIGHT IN A ROW
, A
NNE AND
J
ACK SAT IN THE
second-floor waiting room at Memorial Hospital, holding hands.

He was beginning to get her. He’d known better than to suggest
The Emperor Waltz
at the Capitol this weekend. Forget
the music and frills: she would have no more interest in seeing Bing Crosby than he would.
The Bishop’s Wife
had become a standing joke between them, a story he imagined her telling friends a year from now—
their
friends, when they were out from under this business with Pop and had time to make them. What he really liked to picture was her telling the story to their daughter, twenty years from now, though he feared pressing his luck, even in his imagination.

When he’d suggested the livestock parade at the Shiawassee County Fair, he knew she could be counted on to say yes, even after he admitted, like a New Yorker who’s never seen the Statue of Liberty, that he’d never been to it. Nights now, when they were home from the hospital after eating someplace down on Main or Exchange, she’d go back to the house with him and work for an hour on her book, which she claimed to be making progress on at last—“thanks to you,” she’d said. He’d sit across from her, reading the Detroit papers (he’d never been able to stand the
Argus
, even before it got drunk on Dewey) or a book she’d brought home from Abner’s. Now that Pop was in the hospital, she stayed over most nights, upstairs, though once they’d gone out to the garage for old time’s sake, both of them laughing over the idea, and so excited they’d practically tripped on the back steps.

She liked doing it, not just for itself, the way it was with Louise, but because it took her someplace else. She liked him to talk at the beginning, not the filthy stuff that years ago that girl from Kroger’s had loved to hear, but hummings and murmurs, which at first had made him feel like an engine, but then, when his murmurs changed, automatically, to little whispered words, like “good” and “fine,” he felt like a
kid, which was what she seemed to like best, judging from the sharpness with which she’d start taking in breath. It was then she’d tell him she felt crazy about him, at which point he’d stop murmuring and act his age. He’d rip out her last hairpin and squeeze it until it nearly broke the skin on his palm. He’d lick the rouge from her cheek and leave the spot redder than it had been before.

He’d broken things off with Louise, two weeks ago, the first Friday morning he could get up the nerve. She’d ripped up a few dozen of Walt’s Taft-Hartley flyers and flung them in his face and called him a son of a bitch before she calmed down and, in her own words, took it like a man. She’d come by a couple of times since, asking questions about Anne and, with no sarcasm, offering advice: “Take a trip someplace, if only for a day. Be someplace where the only thing you know is each other. That’s the way to get to know her.”

The other night Louise had come by the hospital with Carl; she’d stayed here in the waiting room with Anne while the two men went in to see his father. He’d practically been jumping out of his skin the whole time, but he needn’t have worried. Carl had focused completely on Gene, talking about the ’37 strike as if Gene were really taking it in instead of looking up confused and angry.

Coming back out he’d heard Anne and Louise talking about him and what a good son he was and how Gene was too ornery to die. With one signal, communicated to him by a movement of her head as she and Carl were starting back for Flint, Louise gave Anne her seal of approval. Later at the house he considered telling Anne about her, about why it had been and how it was over, but he’d stopped short, because it wasn’t something you told your girl—not even this one, who made no secret about having a small past of her
own, and who would, in the middle of dinner, start guessing about the Fellers’ sex life. “Jesus, Anne,” he’d say with his mouth full of corn, and she would brighten up, enjoying this the same way she seemed to like the idea, when he was murmuring in bed, that she was the one leading the dance.

Gene had been asleep when they arrived a half hour ago, and there was little chance he would awaken before visiting hours ended, but the two of them, their nightly schedule established, lingered amidst the green linoleum and translucent glass cubes that divided the waiting room from the nurses’ station. Anne read
Colliers
, barely realizing her right hand was in Jack’s as she turned the magazine’s pages with her left.

His rough, rumpled beauty brought forth something extra from her own smoother kind; she felt like the plain white egg she’d seen resting on mica chips in the window of a New York jeweler a couple of years ago. The egg’s bland perfection was suddenly the more dazzling for its surroundings. And yet, as she and Jack walked together on Washington or Main, receiving the appreciative looks she liked and he didn’t notice, she was aware of being the tougher customer, the one who, just the other day, when they were in Storrer’s getting Gene a pair of pajamas for the hospital, wouldn’t let the salesman get away with a nasty remark about Harry Truman. Jack knew all the party-supplied statistics and arguments, but when she tried to put forth a few of them second-hand, he turned red and started nudging her toward the socks counter, as if this weren’t the time or place. “Anne, I’ve known that man since I was six.” As often as not, she felt herself protecting him, from one kind of awkwardness or another—despite the physical command she enjoyed being under more every day, and despite his still-occasional attempts
to shield her from things that were supposed to upset her, be they the doctor’s details about pancreatic cancer or the state park service’s best estimates of how long a seventeen-year-old boy might have survived in the woods.

They were waiting for Gene to die, of course. It was almost like a birth. If she weren’t holding Jack’s hand, she could picture him pacing this waiting room like an expectant father. It had been less than two months since
The Bishop’s Wife
, but she had taken to imagining a future for them. A few years in Ann Arbor, with Jack going to school on the GI Bill?

Suddenly, not one siren, but two. Fifteen minutes ago they’d heard the hospital’s red Cadillac ambulance pull out of the parking lot, and now it was returning, behind a police ambulance sounding the treble note in a frantic harmony. The head nurse went squeaking across the linoleum on her crepe soles, standing on tiptoe to get a better look through the window. Whatever it was, the commotion soon dissipated into the emergency room a floor below, while Jack and Anne resumed their pointless watching of the clock.

Within ten minutes, two groups began forming on the second floor, adults and young people, both of them distressed and smoking earnestly. Between the two and belonging to neither sat a short, thin fellow in a tan jacket who had his hand near his face, as if trying to conceal the fact that he’d just done some crying. It took Anne a moment to realize who he was.

“Billy?” She pointed him out to Jack before she got up and crossed the room. “What’s going on?”

For a second he looked as if he wanted to hide behind the translucent glass. But once Billy started up, his narrative
ran with the same don’t-let-them-interrupt-you drive as his sales pitches.

“Bill Stone lost control of his Ford V-8 out at the Speedway. Actually, it isn’t his, it belongs to some guy from Howell, and it’s a complete wreck now. Stone souped it up and drove it in the first race. He busted through a pole, lost control of the thing completely and sort of flew up into the grandstand. He flipped over three times, must have gone a hundred feet before he came to a stop. People got clipped and creamed the whole way along, and one man wound up pinned under it.”

Anne winced, and let Jack, who’d come over to listen, too, put his arm around her waist. Billy went on—“The guy that got pinned has gone to the hospital in St. Johns with a few of the others, but they brought at least six people here—” until Jack interrupted him with a question.

“Why are
you
here?”

Billy looked at him, surprised that the current central fact of his own life could elude anyone.

“It’s Margaret. Her left ankle’s broken and both her legs are cut. You see, everybody was looking at the front-runners. Stone’s Ford was dead last. No one was paying any attention to it. Nobody saw him coming.” He paused for a second, trying to skip over the moments when Margaret and the others were injured. “Stone walked away from it. He just opened the door and got out. A few minutes after it happened some people were saying he’d been thrown clear, but it didn’t happen like that. He hung on. It was like watching one of the bull riders at that rodeo down in New Buffalo last spring. I saw him behind the wheel just before the second flip.”

“They should close that place down,” said Anne. “There were those two drivers who got killed last month—”

“Tonight’s card was a benefit for them! One guy’s widow was there. She was talking to Bill Stone after he got out of his car. Miss Macmurray, they didn’t even shut the place down
tonight
. They’re running the rest of the card right now. Leo Kosecki’s Chevrolet is in the feature race.”

Jack asked Billy where Margaret’s parents were.

“On their way home from Lansing. Somebody called them.”

“Is Margaret calm?” Anne asked.

“I don’t know,” said Billy, with a look of wonderment at how she could be unaware of another central fact—namely, that he hadn’t been with her. “She was at the race with a couple of her girlfriends. It must have been the first time she’s gone out since the Dawn Patrol. I was sitting miles above her. I only saw her being put onto the stretcher. She was crying. I followed the ambulance on my bicycle.”

What a miserable summer, Anne thought. “Have you had anything to eat?”