Dewey Defeats Truman Read online

  Praise for Thomas Mallon’s

  DEWEY

  DEFEATS

  TRUMAN

  “Like Shakespeare’s summery comedies, the novel is about love’s madness.… A lovely meditation on the interplay between past and present.” —Jay Parini,

  The New York Times Book Review

  “It’s fueled by a sense of period detail so strong that reading it seems at times like paging through an old high school yearbook.… I enjoyed the wit and precision with which Mallon presents this world.”

  —Michael Gorra, The Boston Sunday Globe

  “Thomas Mallon is a smart, inventive, prolific writer.… What interests him is not history per se but the way in which large events touch and alter the lives of ordinary, unknown people.”

  —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

  “Mallon’s prose is always rich and economical … . Dewey Defeats Truman is the kind of novel that restores meaning to the present by recovering the past.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[A] beautifully controlled novel.… Mallon has so meticulously re-created a time and place that even trivial data has the force of nothing less than truth.… Mallon’s complicated meditation on the trials of private and public identity is beautifully fashioned. Its tale of yesteryear tells America a little bit about what it is today.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THOMAS MALLON

  DEWEY

  DEFEATS

  TRUMAN

  Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including Henry and Clara, Fellow Travelers, and Watergate. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications.

  www.thomasmallon.com

  BOOKS BY THOMAS MALLON

  Fiction

  Arts and Sciences

  Aurora 7

  Henry and Clara

  Dewey Defeats Truman

  Two Moons Bandbox

  Fellow Travelers

  Watergate

  Nonfiction

  Edmund Blunden

  A Book of One’s Own

  Stolen Words

  Rockets and Rodeos

  In Fact

  Mrs. Paine’s Garage

  Yours Ever

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2013

  Copyright © 1997 by Thomas Mallon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data for this edition has been applied for.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80557-7

  Author photograph © William Bodenschatz

  Cover design by Evan Gaffney Design

  Cover photograph of Thomas Dewey courtesy of the Library of Congress

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Helen Harrelson

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  ONE

  June 24

  IT WAS AT MOMENTS LIKE THESE THAT BILLY GRIMES FELT humiliated to be riding his old Columbia instead of one of the English racers he’d coveted for years, ever since they showed up in magazines during the war. At seventeen, what he really required was a car, but that was another story, and right now his only course of action was to press the button on the metal box beneath the crossbar and sound the bell—somebody’s cornball idea of a built-in horn. Jeez, he might as well have one of those jinglers on a kid’s tricycle.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the guy in the hat with the press card, who was in the way, crossing the street and trying to keep his cup of lemonade from spilling. “I see ya, kid. I see ya.” He could also see the folded newspapers in the Columbia’s big wire basket, the Owosso Argus-Press for June 24, 1948. OUR TOM’S NIGHT IN PHILLY, proclaimed the rubber-banded stalks.

  Billy wanted to ask him how much Eddie Regan’s kid sister had charged for the drink: more than the six cents she was getting last week before the reporters showed up, and would be getting again once they left town? This was the sort of situation Billy watched. No business was too small, so long as it was your own and had a good idea behind it. This paper route could never belong to anyone but the Campbell brothers at the Argus, and Billy still made two cents a paper, same as he had four long years ago at the age of thirteen, the first time reporters camped out in front of old Mrs. Dewey’s house a block back, the first time “Owosso’s favorite son” got the Republican nomination for President. The guy in the hat (who, if he were anybody important, would be attached to a radio microphone instead of a pad and pencil) had probably come out to Michigan then, too. He didn’t look all that pleased about returning. Probably a Democrat. All the reporters were, according to Billy’s father, and they weren’t happy about Dewey, a sure loser last time (had anybody expected him to knock off FDR?) being a sure winner this one.

  Billy threw an Argus onto the second step of 403 West Oliver, a perfect hit, and rounded the corner to Adams. As nice as the sound of folded newsprint hitting painted wood might be, and despite its meaning two more cents toward a used Ford, Billy had to wonder if anything in his world would ever really change, or if four years from now he’d be twenty-one and still pitching papers from his seat on the Columbia as Owosso’s favorite son started running for his second term. How much had changed in the past four years, after all? Each morning Mrs. Hazel Grimes still sent Mr. Robert Grimes off with a sandwich and a kiss to his desk at Cadwallader-Lord Insurance; and Billy was still living on Pine Street with two older sisters who’d never gone off to the war the way everybody else’s brothers had.

  One more year. Then he would be out of Owosso High and not on his way to Ann Arbor or MSC. All his friends were now deciding to be college men, as if the world offered no other choice. Billy only needed to get out of school and launch the right scheme, something that would work better than the ones he’d already tried. Each summer he found a new one, whether it was peddling weed killer he’d made in the basement or running a raft up and down the Shiawassee River, its painted sail advertising Christian’s department store. Last summer he’d tried to get Gus Farnham, an old barnstormer who had flown in the First World War, to split the profits on fifteen-minute joy rides they could give local kids in Gus’s old biplane. Gus would do the flying while Billy spread the word and sold the tickets. His father’s colleague Max Barber would have provided the insurance, if old Gus hadn’t shown up drunk at Cadwallader-Lord the morning they all met to discuss the plan.

  Billy sometimes wondered if he wasn’t jinxed—which was why he held on to the paper route year after year. But his faith in himself (what Dale Carnegie preached in his amazing book) always reasserted itself and made him believe that one day he would be another Charlie Wilson running Gene
ral Motors. Or at least enough of a success to carry Margaret Feller over the town line like it was a threshold. Before he was through he’d set the two of them up in some place on Park Avenue in New York City. He had known Margaret forever, and been “seeing her” (his mother’s phrase) since ’46, contenting himself with a date every other Saturday night and kisses that were directed to her cheek (roughly 75 percent of the time), her lips (most of the remaining 25 percent) and twice—only twice—to her luscious neck. About everything else, he had been dreaming almost since Dewey had run for President the first time.

  Maybe tonight, as the town got all worked up, and Our Tom had his night in Philly, Billy Grimes would have his dream of Margaret Feller. He was hoping for cymbals and confetti and dancing down Main Street, the kind of stuff that would whip everyone, including Margaret, into a frenzy—even if all of it was over some New York governor nobody but the old-timers could remember. After all, Tom Dewey had gotten out of Owosso thirty years ago. He might have done it by way of Ann Arbor, but Billy was still happy to feel his fortunes connected to this rackets-busting Man of Destiny. The point was he had gotten out.

  Oh, for crying out loud, there she was, Jane Herrick and her green garden hose, standing there like a sour statue, watering her grass. She might be the mother of his best friend, Tim, but Billy was determined to avoid having to say hello to her. He flipped an Argus to the house across the street from hers, watching its flight as if he really needed to concentrate. Mrs. Herrick didn’t even take the paper anymore. After her husband’s early death ten years ago, and Tim’s older brother, Arnie, getting killed in Belgium in ’44, she didn’t, as far as Billy could tell, take an interest in anything. “She’s angry at life,” his mother would say sympathetically.

  It was now safe to look back over his shoulder. She wouldn’t notice him glancing up toward Tim’s open window for some sign that his friend sat behind the blue curtains fluttering over the sill. No, thought Billy, he wasn’t there. He was bound to be lying on a bank of the Shiawassee, along one of the stretches below town, the ones where no one had ever been around to see the advertising sail on the raft. He’d be there with a book, even though it was a perfect summer day. Tim Herrick was the best first baseman in Owosso, and whenever he and Billy managed to sneak a couple of beers behind the Indian Trails bus terminal, Tim could turn into a wild man of joy, whooping and hollering as if he were possessed. But most days he was too serious for his own good, too ready to ask crazy questions that ought to be left to philosophers. When the Russians pushed Masaryk out a window last winter, Tim had asked Billy, as they rode to school in his car (the ’36 Chevy that had belonged to Arnie), if he, Billy, sometimes wondered “if it meant nothing at all.” Billy had thought he was talking about whatever the Russians hoped to accomplish by “defenestrating” the Czech foreign minister, but no, it turned out Tim meant life itself, the whole thing. Living with his morose mother was having a bad effect on him. “Herrick,” he’d told him, “you’re too damned deep and depressed. You need a tonic.”

  It was time to dismount. If the paper didn’t hit the top step of Horace Sinclair’s porch, right in the middle of the space under the overhang—God forbid a drop of water got on it—the old Spanish-American War cavalryman would have a holy fit. Calculating things on a time/labor basis, Billy figured he lost a half cent a day climbing off the bike to hand carry the paper to the porch: that was more than five dollars in five years. By rights, fat-assed old Mr. Sinclair—who, Billy’s grandmother insisted, had been thin and handsome when he charged up San Juan Hill, or the one next to it—ought to be paying extra for the custom service, but Billy never even got a Christmas tip.

  “Thank you, Grimes,” said Horace Sinclair, sipping his glass of iced tea and not looking up from his copy of Ivanhoe. He and “the late Mrs. Sinclair,” as he still referred to his dead wife (a nice woman; she used to tip Billy) had always been great readers.

  “It’s a pleasure, sir.” (Dale Carnegie couldn’t have done better.) Billy got back on the Columbia after wiping his forehead and taking an envious look at the pitcher of tea. A few more houses to hit and that was it. He turned down Oak, deciding that the shade of its trees was better than any sip of tea the old man might have offered. Racing back west on Williams, depositing two more papers on porches and four more cents in his bank account, he reached a point where he could see through a couple of yards to the back of the two-story Comstock Apartments on Oliver, the ones where a number of his female teachers had lived over the years, and where he sometimes saw Anne Macmurray, the dishy girl from Abner’s Bookstore, going in and out. If they all looked like her in Ann Arbor, where she’d gotten her diploma a year ago, Billy might be convinced to reconsider his plans; but most of the college-bound girls he knew were plain Janes. Margaret Feller was another exception; his biggest fear was that she’d insist on a college man for herself and send him a Dear John letter a semester after she left Owosso.

  No, it wouldn’t happen that way. By that time he’d have launched his scheme in a place bigger than this, and she’d be desperate to hear of its success. He too would be a GONE GOOSE, as the bedsheet hanging from the upper story of an ardent Republican house put it. The painted bird above the two words had Harry Truman’s face and was winging its way back to Independence, Missouri. The phrase came from Mrs. Henry Luce’s speech to the convention a couple of nights ago. Billy had heard it on the radio and decided there was no reason it couldn’t apply to his success as well as Truman’s failure. (Talk about a scheme. Imagine coming up with the idea for Time and Life. No wonder Henry Luce had landed himself a wife as clever as that.)

  After throwing the last paper and turning the bike toward the center of town, he decided he might as well go find Herrick. On his way to the patch of riverbank where he knew Tim would be, he could pass City Hall and see if there were signs of preparation for the stupendous celebration he was hoping for. He sped down John Street past Curwood Castle. Built by Owosso’s true favorite son, the late James Oliver Curwood, this stone imitation of a French fortress had always seemed an embarrassing thing to Billy, nothing on the order of the fortresses he’d read about in Howard Pyle’s books. Curwood’s “folly” (he’d learned the word from Mrs. Porter in sophomore English) had nothing to do with the man’s own books, either, these nature novels full of wolves and bears and cayuses (whatever the hell they were) that had earned him his money and got made into movies. They were dull books to Billy, but you couldn’t deny the success of the scheme. Curwood had turned himself into a brand name, and the proud librarians and Mr. Abner down at the bookstore liked to point out that by the time he died, the year before Billy was born, Curwood had outsold Zane Grey. He’d built the castle next to the house in which he’d toiled away at his first stories, and everybody seemed to think he was a swell guy for not abandoning Owosso after making his bundle. Like every other student at Owosso High, Billy had had to read the man’s autobiography—just as, he supposed, all the younger ones would soon have to read Dewey’s.

  He crossed Main Street and was disappointed to see nothing in front of City Hall but a bunch of picnic tables. It was still early, he told himself, taking the Columbia down Ball Street until he could cut over to the Shiawassee and—sure enough—spot Herrick, who was lying on his back and looking up toward the sun above the shiny waters, doing absolutely nothing. Billy wondered whether it was encouraging or a little creepy that he didn’t have a book beside him. How could he just lie there? Close enough to make out the expression on his face, to see the lips that were slightly puckered in some kind of silent song, Billy cupped his hand to his mouth and came so close to shouting “ ’Ey, Her-rick!”—his best imitation of Lou Costello calling Abbott—that he could almost hear the words before he said them.

  But he didn’t say them. Something told him, just this once, to let Tim be, to refrain from disturbing whatever daydream his friend was lost inside. Pretty sure he hadn’t been seen, he backed the Columbia off the mud and out of the bushes, taking care not to snap
a twig or make a sound, as if he were one of the Shiawassee who long ago had tiptoed here and given the river its name.

  THE AFTERNOON WAS SO SLOW THAT ANNE HOPED MR. Abner, once he got back, would tell her to close up and call it a day. She was alone in the bookshop on South Washington, without anything to do since bringing up the five copies of Stanley Walker’s 1944 campaign biography that had been lying in the basement for the past four years. Dewey: An American of This Century had gone to the printer before D-Day and was terribly out of date, but Mr. Abner hoped he might yet unload three or four of them while the renomination excitement lasted. Anne put the little pile next to Churchill’s Gathering Storm, beside which, six months from now, if she was still in Owosso, she would be stacking General Eisenhower’s memoirs, which Mr. Abner told her were scheduled to appear in time for Christmas shopping.

  The whole war had begun to seem as far away as its very first day, that Pearl Harbor Sunday she’d slept late, after the previous night’s junior-class dance at Darien High School, back in Connecticut. The Macmurrays would get through the war just fine, her two brothers coming home without a scratch. The biggest change it had made in her own life was bringing her to Michigan in the fall of ’43. With her father away for weeks at a time with the OPA in Washington, and her mother indifferent to anything but the vigil she was keeping for her sons, there had been no one especially attentive to her choice of a college. When she suggested going out of state, to Ann Arbor, on no stronger grounds than some pleasant ideas of Michigan from two summer weeks spent with a cousin on Mackinac Island, her mother had said, “That sounds fine, dear,” without looking up from the piece of V-mail she was reading.