Dewey Defeats Truman (9 page)

The balcony fell silent. The newsreel, which everyone always talked through, had finished up, and as Samuel Goldwyn’s name appeared, the only thing audible was the wrappers on candy bars. Music. And then a snow scene. Loretta Young, unhappy, but
nobly
unhappy, doing some Christmas shopping, longing for some hideous hat with long ribbons that tied under the chin; and Cary Grant behind her on the street. He was an
angel
, “Dudley,” if you’d believe it, and more annoying than avenging. He went around this town solving everyone’s problems with a wave of his hand. Before it was over he’d be lightening Loretta Young’s heart,
and nervous, overworked David Niven’s, too. So debonair and know-it-all, another Peter Cox, thought Anne, this golden stranger come to town to make everyone thirst for his elixir. It was now the old professor’s turn (the same actor, what was his name, who’d played The Man Who Came to Dinner) to be given the beginnings of a little miracle, a preliminary dose of enlightenment. The old man was confessing that the book he’d always claimed to be writing (oh, dear) didn’t exist, not a word, and that long ago he’d lost the only girl he ever loved by being afraid to tell her so: “The whole story of my life—frustration. It’s a chronic disease, and it’s incurable.”

She took Jack Riley’s hand, just reached over and put it in hers, adding one gentle stroke with her thumb, the kind you’d give to reassure a kitten you wanted to stay on your lap. Maybe he’d suggest they get out of here instead of sticking with this warmed-over
Mrs. Miniver
—for that’s what it was, one of those count-your-blessings war pictures they couldn’t stop making. Maybe he’d suggest they go to the bar at the Hotel Owosso. She’d listen to his war stories (Italy, she’d heard) if he wanted to tell them. It would be a better start than this.

He gave a scratchy little gulp. “Would you like me to get you anything? A soda?”

Sshh!
said Mrs. Hopkins, the twelfth-grade rhetoric teacher.

W
ITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE
C
APITOL
B
OWL ON
South Washington, there was no interior in town more modern than the coffee shop of the Hotel Owosso. Al Jackson
himself was impressed with the chromium counters, fake leather stools and neon tubing, over which Kay Schmidt, the waitress on duty tonight, was running her damp cloth. Things would get busy once the picture let out, but for now there was just one customer: a nice-looking gentleman, Kay thought, not too handsome for his own good, like that young lawyer who had stopped in earlier.

“Want one?” Kay asked the man, seeing him look at the jar near the register.

“What are they?”

Kay spilled a couple of Dewey buttons into his palm.

“Sure,” the man said, putting them into his pocket. “I see you’re already set for the election in there.” He pointed to the hotel’s big reception hall, where a small hothouse of red-white-and-blue rosettes had bloomed over the last few days.

“Yeah,” said Kay. “They’re trying to cash in on a little of the excitement.”

“How come no giant picture of the candidate?”

“At the last minute the assistant manager remembered this is actually a hotel,” Kay said with a smile. “The only place in town with folks from
out
of town.”

“Who might not be for your boy.”

“Exactly,” said Kay. “The buttons, they figure, won’t bother anybody. In fact, I haven’t seen more than three people take one. Where are you from?”

“New York. Name’s Don Case.”

“What brings you to Owosso?”

“Men’s shirts. I’ll be selling them tomorrow morning, at least I hope so, to Christian’s and Storrer’s. I work for Hathaway.”

“And I used to work for Storrer’s,” said Kay.

“Did you really?”

“For about six weeks. Until October thirty-first, 1929, the day they opened this place. I remember setting up pumpkins all along the old counter. First thing I ever did here. Mr. Storrer had had the wits scared out of him by the stock market crash and let me and another part-timer go. He had sense.”

“Heck of a time to open a hotel.”

“It was a good thing they settled for five stories, instead of the twelve they’d been talking about. But there’s always been a hotel on this spot.” Kay knew by heart the little glass-framed history in the dining room. “The old Ament opened up here in 1844. After that there was the National.”

“No kidding,” said the salesman. “So a hundred years ago tonight there was a room just where mine is.”

“Long as you’re on a low floor. Those first hotels weren’t very tall.”

“Room 214,” said the salesman.

“It’s kind of like a house that’s been moved,” said Kay. “Is it the same space or not?”

“We’re a couple of philosophers tonight,” said the salesman, putting two nickels on the counter and nodding good night. “Take care of yourself.”

A few minutes later, back upstairs in room 214, Don Case set out a photograph of his wife and children on the lacquered-pine dresser—set them out just as, not a hundred but fifty-one years before, a young man occupying the same room, or at least the same space in the Ament Hotel, had set out the photograph of a woman. The dresser in those days had been oak; the wallpaper more abundantly floral; the
overhead bulb a gas lamp. Setting out the picture was the last thing Jonathan Adams Darrell did that night, before he went over to the wall containing the gas pipe, the one feeding his room light and the lamps on Main Street below, and inserted a delicate awl.

Tonight there were no trees on the sidewalk beneath Don Case’s room, but many years ago there had been chestnuts, great leafy ones that Horace Sinclair had climbed as a boy, and from which he’d looked into the window of what was now, as then, room 214. He had not known that when he was twenty-one, at 3
A.M.
on a summer’s night in 1897, he would have to sneak into that room, the one occupied by the lifeless body of Jonathan Adams Darrell, nor that, in the fifty-one years to follow, he would never again (though no one but the late Mrs. Sinclair ever realized it) set foot in the hotel on Main Street.

“W
HY DON
’
T YOU LET ME WALK
YOU
HOME
?”
ASKED
A
NNE
.

He’d never felt more like a jerk. The movie had ended and they were back out on Main and there wasn’t a thing in the world he could find to say to this girl. His mouth was locked and dry, and on top of his head he could feel the Vitalis stinging a little from fresh sweat. Right now he’d give anything to be over in Flint on the office couch with Louise; with Anne Macmurray the only thing he ought to give was up. He couldn’t face sitting across from her in the hotel coffee shop or up at the Red Fox, so he’d said he really needed to get home and take care of his father. Hiding behind his sick old man! And she was making things worse by being nice about it.

“Okay, thanks,” he finally replied.

“It’s not such a bad night. It’s really not
too
hot.”

“No, not too.”

“Still, all that snow in the movie looked inviting.” Nothing. “I guess they used doubles for the skating scene. I can’t imagine the actors could really do all those jumps and turns themselves.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

God
, she thought; this was some slow boat to China. As they turned right on Exchange Street, passing between the Argus building and the post office, Anne looked at the other dispersing couples and companionable old ladies, aware that here and there a pair of eyes were pausing to assess this apparent match between the Riley boy and that rather fancy girl from the bookstore. She thought again of the oak trees’ invisible telegraph, and wondered what message about her and Jack the other pedestrians could possibly send out on it tonight. The poor man was unable to generate a syllable, let alone the stuff of gossip, as the two of them walked another block, and another, in silence, down to Saginaw, down to Hickory.

He was trying to think about anything but her, to walk as if they were two kids in a double line at school, the silence enforced upon them. He put one foot in front of the other and thought about the WPA water main she didn’t know she was walking above; about how his brother Jimmy had helped to build it in ’37; and about how that couldn’t be anything she’d be interested in. He only hoped she believed his old man was really bad off, that it was just worry which prevented her date from carrying on a conversation.

“Is Dewey the next street?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did they name it after him in ’44?”

“No, it was for another Dewey, one of the guys that founded the town. It was Dewey Street even when I was born. One of his ancestors, I guess.”

Here was a glint of progress.

“I guess there will be some people who want to rename the whole town for him,” she said, hoping this might pull the pin from a grenade.

“I’d move,” said Jack, decisively, his eyes coming up from the sidewalk and meeting hers.

“Do you really think Truman has a chance?”

“He ought to. He would if people took a fair look.”

“It sounds pretty hopeless to me. Did you hear that the Democrats have asked the Republicans to leave the bunting up in the convention hall in Philadelphia so they can use it themselves a couple of weeks from now? That seems so defeated somehow.”

He appeared a bit mystified by the symbolic significance she had in mind, but she could detect a definite warming trend, if only toward the topic. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he has a couple of tricks up his sleeve,” said Jack, before asking, apologetically, as if he’d forgotten to watch his language, “I guess you’re for Dewey, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am,” she replied. “But I’ll tell you what.” She put her arm through his. “I’ll keep an open mind.”

No luck. The new physical arrangement was making him uncomfortable, like a rented tuxedo. If he were relaxed, he’d be dropping his arm over her shoulders. “How long has your mother been gone?”

“Nine years,” he answered.

“Any brothers or sisters?”

“Two of each. All of them married and moved away by the time I got back from the Army.”

“Where were you, exactly?”

“I finished up at Anzio.” He pointed to the scar below his left eye. “January twenty-third, 1944.” Seeing her concerned look, he laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. I know guys who stayed in it after a lot worse. But my eyesight went out of whack for a year or so, and I came home.”

“January twenty-third, 1944,” she mused. “I would have been lying on my bed in Ann Arbor reading
Paradise Lost
.”

He’d heard of it, unless he was confusing it with the other one,
Forever Amber
. “Is
Paradise Lost
a book I ought to read?”

“No, not particularly,” said Anne, with a sincerity that seemed to surprise them both, and relax them slightly.

They’d reached the Riley home on Williams Street, and Jack, because he was still nervous, or maybe because he regretted wasting most of the last ten minutes in that stupid silence, kept walking her up the driveway, the route he always took into the house, through the garage.

The appealing smell of grease and wood came at her in the dark. She put her hand on an old sled that stood upright against the wall as he went for the light. License plates from the thirties nailed above the rafters; broken gizmos near a watering can that had to have belonged to his mother; a beat-up sofa and a child’s bicycle with solid tires: they all flared to life under his hand.

“Johnny? That you?” It was his father, calling from the kitchen.

Jack gave her a helpless look, as if to say “What can I do?” but she put her finger to her lips. Amused, and vaguely
excited by the sexual switch—the pretense that Gene Riley might come out any minute with a bulldog to chase away the suitor taking advantage of his boy—the two of them pulled close together, hiding. She brushed his scar with her fingertips and he rushed to cover her other hand, still on the rudder of the sled, with his own.

H
E KNEW THE HEELS CLICKING UP THE STAIRS BELONGED TO
Anne Macmurray, but with the furtiveness that had become natural to him, Frank Sherwood rushed to brush two tiny flecks of tooth powder off the edge of the basin and rinse them down the sink. He would stay in here until she’d gone to her room. But his strategy backfired. He was so quiet she assumed the bathroom was vacant. She was pulling on the door.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Frank replied, wiping his mouth and coming out into the hall. “I was through.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.” He smiled and squeezed past her, knowing he had to say something more. “Did you like the movie?”

Anne laughed. “Mrs. Wagner told you where I was?”

“The town crier,” said Frank, who picked at an imagined spot on his T-shirt.

“It wasn’t very good. Loretta Young. I can’t stand those sunken cheeks.”

He could ask her about the plot, but he could not ask about the one thing that actually made him curious—Jack Riley, whom with no need of Mrs. Wagner’s help he’d seen walking up to the doorbell.

“What did you do tonight, Frank?”

He liked the way she could keep the ball rolling. It made their quick encounters easier than the others he had every day. “I just read a couple of magazines.”

“No time with the telescope?” She meant his own, the little one he kept on the roof here.

“I’m only heading up there now. There’s so much light in the sky this time of year.”

Please don’t ask to come up with me
. She was awfully intelligent, perfectly nice, but there was nothing he had to say to her.

“Maybe sometime you can show me.”

“Sure.”

“I saw you at it the other night. Not here; over at the high school.”

“Yes,” said Frank, quickly. “I was showing one of my students a couple of planets. He’s sort of lost, not much to do in the summertime, and he’s got an interest in this kind of thing, so I let him …”

“That’s good,” said Anne. “He’s lucky. Well, enjoy the stars.” She waved good night. “By the way, what’ll you be looking for?”

“Jupiter,” said Frank, whose hands remained plunged in the pockets of his khaki pants as he started climbing the wooden stairs to the roof.