Dewey Defeats Truman (36 page)

Well, thought Peter, walking home in the opposite direction, that was that. He’d kept his promise to the colonel, but the green light had gone to Al Jackson. Would it matter
now? With the exhumation of the body, would the old man care any longer? Not if he’d managed to get the bones out of the castle and reburied away from anyone’s notice.

Peter asked and re-asked himself the obvious questions. How long had young Herrick been inside Curwood’s folly? How had he gotten back to Owosso, and where was the plane? Had anyone helped him get home, and was anybody—Margaret Feller, let’s say—helping him to stay? Somehow Peter didn’t think so: he’d seen her coming into church with her father and mother. They’d even exchanged a few words, and he’d found her a perfect lady, dulled by her sorrow but a good deal warmer to him than usual. She was riding her parents’ new wave of sympathy for poor, chastened Peter.

His friend from the
Sun-Times
left town five minutes after the service, promising to mail Peter the picture he’d gotten of him and Dewey and Rev. Davis. For an instant Peter thought of telling the reporter how, inside that little castle he’d probably noticed, there was a far better story than this orgy of hometown adulation. But he checked himself. If it got out that he was messed up in the Tim Herrick mystery, if only by providing its solution, who knew what suspicions might be raised? Harvey P. Angell might wind up getting elected over his own protests that he was sure Peter Cox hadn’t done anything wrong.

Should he tell Anne the story, give it to her for her novel? No, she’d only remind him he was the accessory to a crime, which he probably was, before telling Riley to break down the castle walls with his bare, heroic hands. But there was more than the practical angle. Peter wanted to let the kid play out whatever he was doing, the same way he’d decided
not to halt the colonel’s strenuous digging. In a way he envied both of them; each seemed closer to accomplishing something than he himself had gotten with his campaign to wrest Anne from Riley.

There was something foolishly consoling in this new secret he had, and on Sunday night he drove across the Main Street bridge, looking to see if the kid had nerve enough to keep the light on. When he slowed down to peer, he could make out just a flicker: Horace Sinclair’s lantern, he would bet, a dimmer substitute for an electric bulb. One good rain had washed away any signs of Horace’s digging; the dirt, if not the coffin, must have been replaced by the kid.

F
IVE DAYS AFTER THE PARADE
,
JUST FIVE NIGHTS BEFORE THE
election, Peter saw Anne again. Sitting dateless in the Capitol Theatre, watching an early-evening showing of
The Dewey Story
, he was startled by the sight of her, for a few quick seconds, in Mama Dewey’s parlor, before she and Owosso disappeared from the film, making room for a review of the candidate’s march toward the White House, that sequence of events soon to be made even more dully familiar by the Dewey Walk.

The Fellers were being especially friendly. Harold let his absences from the office go unremarked upon, and Carol had him over to dinner, where they talked of Other Things. They were treating him with the kindness one shows a loser, which was what he would continue feeling like Tuesday night, even after Harvey Angell rang up from Durand.

He wouldn’t be surprised if Dewey wound up feeling the same. The campaign had hit a nasty end, Truman outdoing
himself for sheer buffoonishness by comparing the Republican candidate to Hitler. Dewey’s wife had kept her husband from fighting back—or so Peter had heard from an insider friend in New York. Politically, the wife was the wiser of the two, but Peter had to wonder if five days from now, on top of the Roosevelt Hotel and striding the free world, Dewey would be feeling every bit a President and not entirely a man.

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE PARADE
H
ORACE AWAKENED TOO
late to go to Christ Episcopal, but he had long since given up that any answer Dewey gave Cox’s friend from the
Sun-Times
would make a difference; he wondered only if his own absence from the service would be remarked upon. This small worry joined the new guilty spectres in his brain. What would happen if the boy was discovered with the body? What sort of monster would Horace Sinclair be thought for having, in addition to his youthful crime, failed to tell Mrs. Herrick her son was still alive and well? Each day for the next week he thought of going to her house and confessing all, and each day his new awful secret held him back as firmly as the old. On Friday afternoon, the twenty-ninth, he saw her walking down Oliver Street with the science teacher, Sherwood, and came within a second of calling out the window; but the moment passed and he never said a word, just calculated how, once he got what he wanted from the boy, he would be able to inform her with an anonymous note, and hope that Tim didn’t pay him back betrayal for betrayal.

Oh, why had he never learned to drive a car? This stupid piece of imagined fealty to the past would now prevent
him from keeping his pact with it. He had not dared go back to the castle, not even in the hours before dawn, though down along the river night was hardly night now, not with the floodlight Jackson had started shining upon the billboard announcing the Dewey Walk. For the past week Horace had confined his time outdoors to brief morning walks, awaiting discovery at every turn. “The thief doth fear each bush an officer,” he whispered, dreading the look of everyone he knew, most of all Peter Cox. The cessation of those unexpected, knowing visits of his now seemed more ominous than the visits themselves. Whatever happened, whenever it did, Horace felt sure it would be even worse than the consequences of leaving the body where it had been.

L
ATE ON
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
,
THE THIRTIETH
, F
RANK
went into Abner’s, knowing that Anne Macmurray was off for the day and couldn’t bother him with all her fond, well-meaning questions, worse in their way than Mrs. Wagner’s. He scanned the shelves for something he could bring to Jane’s, passing up Lloyd C. Douglas and
Doctor Faustus
and anything about the war in favor of some man named Robinson’s history of the British post office, a paradise of numbers and linkages that Leo Abner, probably unable to resist some sales rep with the tale of a new baby at home, had agreed to stock.

A few hours later he arrived for dinner and gave the book to Jane, just before blurting out his confession: “I can’t go back to school next week. I won’t. I was staring at my grade book all morning, and at two o’clock this afternoon I threw it away.”

“Quit,” she said, without a pause. “Get your money when the bank opens Monday morning and leave without delay.” The emergency enlivened her, made her seem just a normal person in the heat of an important moment. Clasping his arms, she literally pushed on him, moving his body two inches to the right, as if helping him dodge a bullet. “Just go. Don’t even give them notice.”

Frank laughed, letting himself enjoy the impossibility.

“I’ll drop you off at the Grand Trunk depot. You can take the train from Durand to Chicago and then leave on the Broadway Limited for New York. It pulls out at 4:30.”

How did she know these things? Had she studied the regular commercial timetables while memorizing troop trains and doing the ratio of those who boarded to those who survived?

“I’ll give you the Durand-to-Chicago fare,” she said. “A going-away present.”

From the moment a week ago when she’d leaned over to touch and thank him, it had become Jane Herrick’s mission in life to rectify a miscount of the dead that had consigned Frank Sherwood’s spirit six feet under. Her duty, as she somehow saw it, was to repatriate him among the living, to get him back
to
some corner of a vital foreign field. Mixed in with the more fantastic ingredients of her motive was a simple, sensible desire to convince Frank that Owosso was no place for him. Somewhere else, like New York, he could find what he should be looking for—something unspoken but presumably other than a girl, of which Owosso afforded many.

He tried changing the subject. “Do you want to go up on the roof later?” He meant the roof of his place, where
they’d gone this week after dinners at the Hotel Owosso and a nice restaurant in Lansing. He was teaching her the rudiments of astronomy, whose distances and brightness factors were a natural for her statistical mind; she took his own awareness of them as further evidence of his displacement, his being worlds away from where he belonged. He’d been showing her Jupiter, not stopping the telescope along its arc above Oak Hill.

Jane didn’t answer. She led him to the table and made him sit down. “Arnie never liked corn,” she said, pointing to the plates, as if baffled by the vegetable’s reappearance. Frank thrilled to hear this fact, because it was one he remembered. As the week passed, he’d had the feeling she saw him as a living substitute whose own attractiveness, like that of nylon stockings, established itself unexpectedly.

“Picture yourself in the Pullman,” she urged.

“I’ve never been in a sleeper.”

“That means for a while you’ll sit up, with your tie still fastened. You’ll be a little too nervous to loosen it. It’s nine o’clock and you’re two hundred miles out of Chicago, still twelve hours away from New York. You’re fingering the quarter you have left over from the fifty-cent haircut you had right on the train. You used the third quarter to tip the barber, who never once nicked you as the train sped along the rails.”

All the cosmic arrangements he was used to calculating had never really allowed him to project himself anywhere; the dry dates and numbers she gathered in grief were, he now understood, kindling for an imagination that let her go backwards and forwards to live and relive life, as it might be, as it had been, with more detail than most people noticed while it happened in real time, right before them.

“Will you get into bed or go to the club car? Maybe try and find the library they say exists on that train?”

He pushed some corn away with his fork. There was a wild, sickening intimacy to what she was doing. It was as if she’d loosened a button on his shirt, or was saying the words he could remember from long ago—
you know you want to
—as she drew him into a game that, yes, he did want to play.
You’re a nice-looking man, Frank
.

“What’s above you?” she asked. “On the rack.”

“Two suitcases,” he said. “And the telescope. In the aluminum packing tube.”

She nodded encouragement. “When you wake up in the Pullman it’ll be Tuesday morning.”

“Just when they’re really beginning to miss me at school. The first day they’ll figure I felt too sick to call in, but on the second, even with the voting lines in the gym to distract them, they’ll know something’s really wrong. An investigation will ‘ensue,’ as the
Argus
would put it, and that will lead to the discovery that on Monday morning Mr. Sherwood withdrew every last cent—$706.48—from his account at the State Savings Bank.”

She smiled at him.
Now you’re getting it
.

On Sunday night, through the wall, he heard Anne and Jack Riley laughing over Jack Benny. He packed the two suitcases and left whatever wouldn’t fit. He went up to the roof to dismantle the telescope, humming “This Can’t Be Love” as he cleaned it off with the chamois cloth. Monday morning, as soon as he was through waiting on the longer of two lines at the bank, the one that led to Arnie’s old window, he called Jane to tell her what he had done and to ask if she would actually give him the ride to Durand. He almost asked her to come for him in the old Chevrolet, which he was sure
still sat in her garage, but he didn’t want to risk revelation for the sake of a talisman. As it was, when they got to the depot, he handed her an envelope with the instruction not to open it until she heard from him again. She nodded, uncompelled to ask whether that would be in ten days or ten years or some exponential measure of astronomers’ time. She just took the envelope and said good-bye.

M
RS
. B
RUCE WAS ALREADY CLOSING THE BOOKS
. H
AVING JUST
paid Billy Grimes’ two friends twelve dollars to adorn a hundred telephone poles with new likenesses of Peter Cox, and having already bought champagne for tomorrow night’s victory party, the campaign had made its final expenditures. All of tomorrow’s drivers were strictly volunteers, and when a half hour ago they became overbooked, Mr. Cox, like an angel, had offered to ride the last old lady on the list. What a thrill she would have when he showed up to take her from Mason Street to the high school.

Everything was running smooth as silk, though Mrs. Bruce could have done without this co-ed on the telephone across the room. Her job was setting up election-night interviews with out-of-state reporters here to cover the hometown angle. Mr. Cox might make jokes about his “duty” to represent the wave of young Republican officeholders who would be coming in with Dewey, but Mrs. Bruce knew it was precisely because he thought of such things that he was going places. There was no reason she couldn’t be making these calls herself, but he’d told her the account books and drivers were too important to have her diverted from them. She couldn’t help letting her imagination get ahead of itself, picturing
what she might be doing on this very night four or six years from now, when Peter Cox ran for the U.S. Senate or the governor’s mansion.

In the office’s other room, the candidate sat with his feet up on the desk, looking at the wall clock. It was getting on toward 8
P.M.
, and he had run out of things to do. He’d talked to the Kiwanis Club in Perry, shaken hands in front of Christian’s and checked his mother into the Hotel Owosso. He’d told her there was plenty of room with him on Park Street, but she’d insisted. It wasn’t that she expected some sock-strewn bachelor’s lair; she wanted to be part of the out-of-town crowd in order to meet that younger version of Senator Barkley. Late tomorrow night she’d join the locals celebrating here in the Matthews Building and over at the City Club.