Dewey Defeats Truman (25 page)

“I had some stuff at the Speedway. I’m not really hungry.”

Anne was sure he wanted to cry, and that he wouldn’t let himself do it in front of Jack Riley. She looked at Jack, not just to convey this reading of the situation with her eyes, but to see if she
could
convey it, like a test of the emergency broadcast system, or the sort of shortwave communication a man and woman didn’t necessarily develop until they’d been together for years.

Jack took the hint. “I’ll go downstairs and wait for the Fellers.”

Once he’d left, Billy stood next to Anne, fingering the glass cubes and looking down at his high-top sneakers. “I didn’t even want to go tonight, but one of my sisters told me she’d heard Margaret would be there with a couple of friends. I’d never been able to get her to go with me; I must’ve asked her a dozen times last summer. I knew I still wouldn’t get a chance to talk to her tonight, and I didn’t plan on bothering her, really—” He looked up at Anne, imploring her to believe him on this small point. “I just wanted to see her.”

“You wanted to see her happy,” said Anne. “Out doing normal things again.”

Billy nodded, and asked, by the way, what she and Mr. Riley were here for tonight.

“Jack’s father,” said Anne, pointing to room 208. “He’s very sick.”

“Are you two going to get married?”

Refreshed by the question’s childish good sense, Anne brushed one of the freckled cheeks onto which Billy had still not permitted tears to fall. “Let’s go find Margaret,” she said. “Before her parents get here.”

“Will the doctors let us in?” He’d already started walking.

“We’ll get in.”

A floor below, away from some crying women in sleeveless dresses, and some men who didn’t realize they were stroking their young sons’ crew-cut hair, the eight injured spectators who had been brought to Owosso Memorial were being attended to by as many doctors and nurses as could be called in for an extra shift. “When you think about it,” went the relieved refrain, “it was a miracle.” And Anne supposed it
had been. No one else had gotten hurt as badly as that man taken to St. Johns, and someone was saying even he might pull through. She threaded her way through the emergency room and down the first-floor corridor, noticing a boy and girl in matching arm slings, as if they’d gotten themselves up for a costume party; one doctor was explaining to an unconvinced father that his daughter’s broken collarbone was not the end of the world.

Through the half-open door of an examination room, Anne and Billy spotted Margaret sitting up. Her left leg, swollen but clean, was propped up on a chair back.

It was such a ladylike injury, Margaret thought. Instead of X-rays, she might be waiting for someone to fling his cape over a mud puddle. She could also see in the mirror that she looked about thirteen: along with color, the panic and pain had drained years from her face. But she was calm, clear-eyed, as if she’d finally woken from a dream and admitted, once and for all, that no magical boy or message was going to fly through her window and say that all was well. If a hot rod could bowl twenty people over like a pair of strikes, what kind of fiery crater must a plane falling from the sky have made? How thin
was
the rope attaching us to this world? What could she cling to? She shook off a chill and slid her hand down the waxy paper on the examining table.

“Margaret, I’m so sorry.”

She looked up at the sound of Anne’s voice, and upon seeing Billy she burst into tears.

“I’m sorry, too.” She was looking at him as she said the words.

Speechless, he turned to Anne for some sort of permission, before taking the few steps left to reach Margaret
and put his arm, very gently, around her shoulders, his shaking thumb coming to rest upon her miraculously unbroken collarbone.

“If you’re okay by next week, do you want to go to the Capitol? The picture’s going to have Marlene Dietrich.” In sudden alarm, not knowing what transformations the month had effected, he added a question: “Is she still your favorite? If you’re in a wheelchair, I can push.”

Margaret, through her tears, kissed his hand and said that she would love that.

L
ABOR
D
AY BEGAN ITS APPROACH WITH PEOPLE HOPING THAT
a thunderstorm might sweep away the dog days gripping Owosso and much of the country. Twenty Michiganders had died from the heat, and locally several events preyed on already tired nerves. There were no further mishaps at the Speedway, but up near the country club a child’s birthday party ended with one little girl’s being run over and killed. Over in Vernon a diagnosis confirmed the rumor that two kids had come down with polio.

The campaign needed a cloudburst, too. President Truman was supposed to arrive in Detroit for a holiday rally in Cadillac Square. His speech, some said, would finally provoke Dewey to step outside and mix things up, but fresh evidence of the challenger’s imperturbability continued to make news. On August 24, when the temperature reached ninety-eight degrees, Dewey brought his two sons to Yankee Stadium and went on from there to his office in the Roosevelt Hotel for some “personal business.” Just watching him
made one feel cooler; even Norman Thomas was forecasting his victory.

The peacetime draft arrived on the thirtieth, and Billy Grimes, who would turn eighteen before the year was out, reported to the Owosso Armory with Margaret’s brother, Jim, to register. Though her son had only just gotten back from his travels and would be returning to Dartmouth in another two weeks, Carol Feller banished her anxieties about Berlin to make the boys a big breakfast amidst the usual morning bustle. Peter Cox was at her table, too, conferring with Harold about someone’s lawsuit against the Speedway.

Billy watched the smooth young attorney without envy. After all, here
he
was, back in his girl’s kitchen, while Peter had lost any chance of success with Anne Macmurray. According to Margaret, who had regained enough interest in life to look out her window, there were nights when Anne never made it all the way home from Jack Riley’s house down on Williams. Billy was encouraged to hear her report this behavior with excited approval: Margaret’s admiration for Miss Macmurray was so thorough, she might be inclined to imitate her in this sphere of activity.

Outside the Armory the Methodist minister once again stood with his 11-11-11-11-11 tornado. Inside, approaching the registration table, Billy noted the name HERRICK, TIMOTHY L., just a few below his own on the ledger. What would they mark in the box at the end of the day? AWOL? That would actually be sort of swell. It would seem as if Tim had
today
made one of those defiant gestures that used to let him feel alive. But Billy knew the only reason they hadn’t drawn a line through Tim’s name was its being too soon to declare him “legally” what everyone knew he was, which was dead.

Seeing their names together, the way they had traveled alphabetically since the two of them started grade school, made it seem, for a last moment, impossible that they wouldn’t be sharing whatever lay ahead, even fighting their way toward Berlin. They had, in a way, shared even Margaret. She had returned to Billy as if waking up from a dream, and been more affectionate these last two weeks than in all the years he’d known her. Yet he could never rid himself of the feeling that she remained, in some way, Tim’s girl, in a world beyond this one, where Tim was dead and wouldn’t relinquish her.

If Tim and Margaret had gone all the way—something he could not bring himself to ask or imagine—then she
was
still Tim’s girl, at least until the two of them, he and Margaret, finally made love to each other. Which made the need for that to happen even greater than the biological imperative conceded by
The Boy Scout Handbook
.

In the meantime, Margaret would be the one to share Berlin with him. On Friday night, as the holiday weekend began, the two of them watched Marlene Dietrich and John Lund romance their way through the rubble of the German capital. As it happened, Margaret did not require a wheelchair; she had already gone from crutches to a cane. With her ankle still in a cast, she had to take Billy’s arm when they got out of her father’s Chevrolet on Main Street. She leaned on him more heavily than she needed to, and once they took their seats he stroked her hair as if she had accomplished something heroic by her journey from the curb. She spent almost the whole movie with her head on his shoulder, and to his astonished delight her whispered commentary showed a preference for Jean Arthur, as the
no-nonsense Congresswoman Frost, there in occupied Germany to investigate looseness and corruption, over Dietrich, the black-marketeering
femme fatale
who sang at the cabaret. Billy had always loved that scratchy little voice Jean Arthur had; it came up like ice-cream soda through a straw, a little sting in its sweetness. And in this movie she was even a Republican.

Margaret had seen some sort of light. Two months ago she had been mooning over that mass murderer, but tonight, on the way down Washington Street in the car, when she’d mentioned Robert Mitchum’s arrest for dope she’d crinkled her nose in disgust. Billy wasn’t going to say he told her so, because when she’d been wrapped up in her dream of Tim he couldn’t tell her anything. He preferred to think that she’d been brought to her senses by suffering. Both of them had; they were now wise beyond their years. All last night and this morning, seven hundred of their fellow students had lined up outside Owosso High, trying to make sure they’d be assigned one of the second-floor lockers for the coming school year. By the time the sun came up, a window had been broken and the principal called the cops—all because everyone said you didn’t rate if you had to lock on the first floor. He and Margaret not only didn’t bother to camp out with everybody else, they just shook their heads when one of Margaret’s friends told them about the melee. And, no, they weren’t interested in taking a couple of the Wallace buttons some of the kids had gotten hold of—as if wearing one would be such a big shock to their parents. The two of them were grown up now. They’d be ready to blow this town in a year. Maybe, before they did, they’d even skip the prom.

S
TANDING AT THE SIDE OF THE RAIL CAR
,
AROUND THE CORNER
from its rear platform, Jack couldn’t see Harry Truman, but he was close enough to hear him without the microphone: “I understand in your state college out here the veterans are sleeping three deep in a gymnasium, and that there was a time when your Republican city council here in Lansing could have helped remedy that situation. They decided not to do it!” Jack had driven to Lansing two hours ago and was waiting to board the train and ride with the President from here to Detroit to Hamtramck to Pontiac and finally Flint, where he would get off and find Anne. She’d promised to be standing by the fourth post of the railing around the grass in the park, where Truman would speak after a short drive from the station.

He and Walt had gotten the call last Friday from Reuther’s own office: one of them could be part of the UAW delegation on the train. It didn’t seem fair—given everything Walt had been doing against Taft-Hartley, while he’d been distracted by his father and Anne—but Walt insisted they toss a nickel. Jack picked the buffalo side, which landed face up, so here he was with, believe it or not, his heart pounding, thinking about how eight hours from now he might be telling his girl he’d exchanged a couple of words with the President of the United States.