Dewey Defeats Truman (33 page)

Down at Willman, when they brought Dewey out, Jack planned to turn his back on him, at least for a second. He wouldn’t give him the bird or make a thumbs-down; just this quiet, rude gesture. No one would notice, and he’d do it only to please himself. As it was, his status as a gentleman seemed unshakeable. Last night, while Peter’s shiner sprang to life as neat as Dewey’s mustache, he’d expected to be thrown out of the City Club like some common brawler. But an immediate consensus formed that Peter had been the instigator, provoking Jack “beyond endurance,” as Mr. Terry put it. Councilman Royers had even clapped him on the back. In a daze, as if he’d taken the punch instead of thrown it, he could hear Harold Feller saying, “Peter, eject yourself.” Which is what Peter did, while Royers scared up a last round of drinks and joked about “Jersey Jack” and, like the Fellers and Mr. Terry, refused to hear any apology out of him.

The only one who seemed unhappy was himself. He was glad to have slugged the guy, but it was John L. Lewis’s eyebrows all over again. In front of Anne he’d done something “common,” as his eighth-grade English teacher liked to put it; or, to use a phrase Anne sometimes applied to Truman bashers who got on her nerves in the newspaper, he’d “reverted to type.” But nobody else saw it that way. By the time they left the club, the incident was growing into a nice little legend. Back on Williams Street Anne couldn’t stop talking, telling him what a pain in the neck Peter had made himself
all week. She’d rattled on as if she were afraid to subside. It was the first time she’d stayed over since the Saturday before, and there had been no little-boy warm-up to the lovemaking; she’d wanted things right away and then again in the morning, before she jumped out of bed and walked all around the house, up and down the stairs, fast, slicing the air with her arms the way Louise always did with that bony nervous energy. She talked about the color each room could be, how they could knock a hole in the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and how up in the attic, with a little remodeling, there’d be space for another bedroom, a place for “Junior’s little brother.” She kept it up, laughing all the time, though not the way his mother would have; more like someone after a little too much gas at the dentist’s. He put it down to her being both exhausted and all jazzed up now that the big day was finally here.

He wished he could share the excitement. As it was, he felt crankier than his father had been at the end. Irked by the noise, he was just standing here, not cracking a smile, annoyed by the debate going on behind him about whether the crowd was ten thousand or fifteen thousand. Whatever it was, the Republican editors would jack it up; he knew that much from his day in Detroit. He’d actually clipped today’s
Argus
editorial to give to Walt Carroll, who lived in Flint and couldn’t imagine what Jack had had to put up with ever since moving back to Owosso last spring. “He is approaching the climax of his public career,” the Campbell brothers’ paper had said of its candidate. “On November 2 the people of this nation make him their chief executive.” Not even
will
make him. But the real crap came, as Anne had pointed out, two paragraphs later: “He had to make his own place in life
through ability and the sheer force of sticking to the job at hand. There are many American people who forget the opportunities for self-expression and advancement in this nation. They are too prone to call it quits when the going gets rough and let the government or someone else carry them along. Tom Dewey never did that …”

Dewey’s life had been a parade from the beginning! As the bobsled rode past and the crowd cheered for the boys on top of float number 2, including Phil Welch, Dewey’s fourteen-year-old second cousin, Jack tried concentrating his gaze on the undercarriage of the flatbed truck, to see if he could guess its make from that alone. But he couldn’t stop remembering the way the wind raced through that shotgun house down by the depot while he and Lorraine shivered with flu. And now here came heroic young Dewey milking cows on the Putnam farm and then selling magazines outside the Owosso Times Building, where he probably made more money than the full-grown Gene Riley did before the union came in and made his job worth having.

A
CROSS THE STREET
B
ILLY HAD KEPT AN EYE OUT FOR
M
ARGARET
, who responded to his two-handed wave with a smile and a wink, never missing a note as the sixty-eight-piece Owosso High School band, marching between floats one and two, blared out “The Victors.” He revered her composure; a Grenadier guard outside Buckingham Palace couldn’t do better. And now that they’d had their prearranged greeting, he could get back to supervising his sales force. He was six kids’ boss tonight. The old Columbia was turning out to be a godsend, the only conceivable means of shuttling between
here and Willman, but come Monday morning he should at last have enough money for a decent used car. No, nothing as flashy as Peter Cox’s new Ford, but also no antique like Arnie Herrick’s Chevrolet, which he guessed was slowly dying of suffocation in Mrs. Herrick’s garage. He’d be paying cash, too, before his father got any ideas about how the wads he’d accumulated up in his room and at the State Savings Bank might better go toward next year’s tuition bills.

He knew he was getting sucked toward MSC or Central Michigan, and it only made sense if he was going to hold on to Margaret. It was a matter of keeping one’s machinery up to date, resisting depreciation, which is what his Owosso High diploma was bound to suffer in her eyes if he didn’t make some big score over the next four years. He didn’t have the grades for Ann Arbor, where she’d certainly get in and go, but even a Central Michigan degree might keep him looking solvent to her.

Jesus, though: if there were this many people on Main Street every Saturday night, he could be rich before 1950 rolled around.

W
ITHOUT A FLUTE AT HER LIPS
, M
ARGARET WOULD HAVE
failed to notice how damp it was tonight. The noise and light were deceptive; the ease with which she was keeping her whistle wet told the real story of how much moisture the air held. Her girlfriends had brought some spiked cider to the parade’s assembly point, and when everything was over they were going to ride out of town and finish it off. She’d go home by herself, since Billy would be selling his stuff until one in the morning and she didn’t want to have to fight to
keep her eyes open at church tomorrow. Everyone said there’d be a better view of Governor Dewey from the back pew of Christ Episcopal than the front row of the stadium.

She wondered if they’d have fireworks after he spoke tonight. That might get her more in the mood—not that she
wasn’t
in it, but she kept thinking that somehow November 2 itself would have to be more exciting than tonight, which for all its size and sound struck her as missing something, maybe a salute with a cannon, or just one plane overhead, skywriting a message.

“R
ILEY
! R
ILEY
!” O
VER THE DIN
,
FROM ACROSS THE STREET
, Jack made out the voice of Carl Rutkowski. Carl’s ruined arm had to rely on Louise to do its waving, but his voice was every bit as strong as when Jack had heard it singing “Which Side Are You On?” in ’37. Not one to mind her manners or the rules, Louise had now darted into the street, between float number eight and the Durand High School band, which was coming right at her. She made it across and started tugging him to join her and Carl.

“You’re gonna get us trampled,” Jack protested.

“Okay, we’ll wait till after the next float. Where’s Anne?”

“Down at the field. With the reception committee. And probably wearing a Truman button.”

“From what I hear,” said Louise, “she could get away with it. Tell me why I should like this girl so much,” she added, giving Jack’s rear a squeeze.

“Jeez, Louise.”

“To coin a phrase. For Christ’s sake, Jack, there’s a half dozen tubas between us and Carl, and he can hardly see past
the curb as it is. What did you do about dinner? We had ours at the Elks’ temple, and dessert at the Lutheran church. They overstocked both places, and they should’ve known better. People don’t want to sit down and eat before something like this. They only want what they can wolf down on the sidewalk or in the stands.”

“I hope Dewey’s operation gets stuck with the bills.”

“I hope somebody has the sense to get the stuff to the Salvation Army before it rots. If you’re as miserable as you look, why don’t you stop watching this and drive a truckload of leftovers to Flint?”

“Why are
you
watching this?” He pointed to her own Truman button.

“Because I love a party. And I can get away with the button just like Anne can, though for a different reason.”

“What’s the difference?”

“She can get away with it because she’s charming. I can get away with it because if anybody gives me a hard time I’ll bite their damned head off.”

Even Louise couldn’t make herself heard over the wave of sound now engulfing their block of Main. Float number nine, the last one, had just surprised the crowd by turning on its own set of lights. Jack looked up and recognized what it was: the White House, two huge frosty white tiers of crepe paper with a dozen lit, trimmed windows blinking on and off.

“Christ,” said Louise, laughing. “They should have stuck Dewey on top of it. He really
would
look like he was on a wedding cake.”

“L
ET ME HELP YOU WASH UP
.”

“Oh, no,” said Jane Herrick. “I’m just going to run water into the pots, so things won’t stick. Please, go sit in the front parlor. I’ll be in with coffee in a moment.”

Frank was sure she wanted the water’s noise, not its function. Five minutes ago, at nine-twenty, the sound of drums, along with some fainter buzz that must have been the crowd, had begun reaching the house, making her nervous, as if the two of them were the only people at home on Park Street. Quite possibly they were, and the sense of that had made the room a desert island, filled it too full of imminent revelation. She needed, he knew, to take refuge in the music of the faucet, lest the drumbeats crack the evening’s fragile formality, which so far had sheltered the two of them like the glazed bowl holding the stewed carrots.

There had not been one word about Tim, let alone Arnie, unless you counted a single reference to “my babies,” one thrilling bump along a road of early-biographical recitation. She’d established a certain superiority over the parade by telling him a story about flu masks and her own personal meeting with Thomas E. Dewey; the tale of their tennis game followed. Both epidemic and sport were described colorlessly, except for some brief statistical flourishes—body counts and set scores. She had a picture of Dewey, from the 1919
Spic
, the high school yearbook Frank had fortunately never had to “advise.” Showing it had led to discussion of the piece in today’s
Argus
—“page twelve, columns two and three,” she’d said—in which a college roommate of the candidate’s took exception to his stuffy image. Jane assured Frank the roommate was wrong.

The house was beyond stuffy, so he secretly raised the
parlor window another inch. Since hot air rose, the upstairs was bound to be even worse, but ever since he’d stepped through the front door it was the upstairs that had suggested itself as a place of heavenly breezes and spilling treasures, the place with a room behind whose door Arnie had slept.

Frank had not been in this house until tonight. Arnie’s never having asked him over was proof of the intensity between them, something forbidden, dangerous, too likely to give itself away in the home Arnie shared with his mother and kid brother. Throughout Mrs. Herrick’s dinner conversation, Frank had fought the impulse to get up from the table and maraud through these domestic precincts, to suck up the sight of every knicknack and carpet runner he’d had to picture in his mind for five—or, to put it as she might, five and one-fifth—years. Excusing himself before they sat down to the table, he’d gone as far as the downstairs bathroom. Once inside he’d been afraid to open the medicine chest, but he’d run his hands over the tiles and mirrors before noticing, amidst a clutter of Q-tips and sachets on a little open shelf, a pin from that college on Gute’s Hill, where Arnie had taken those night classes while working at the State Savings Bank. Could he steal it? Would she notice? He’d settled for making a mental note to touch, before he left the house, the moon-and-sun key chain, which he’d already seen lying on a table in the foyer.

Now, in the front parlor, the sound of the eastward-moving parade grew louder, closer. He watched her bring in the tray, and asked if he could help, but she set it down and poured the coffee herself. Her jaw clenched against the possibility of spillage and the irritating drums. Before she stirred the cups, a spurt of numerical facts gleaned from the
Argus
and pertaining to frankfurters, wind instruments and the number of cars on the Victory Special emerged from her. He knew why she was so interested in this parade she clearly resented: because Arnie, if he weren’t dead, would be in the thick of it, the way he had thrown himself into the centennial when he was a boy, and before that been one of the first babies out of Memorial Hospital, facts Frank had heard Arnie impart, laughing at his own rube-ish pride, one night in the Chevrolet.