Dewey Defeats Truman Page 14

  As Anne, without knowing what to call them, admired chandelles performed by the latest two pilots, Carol Feller sidled up and said, “I promised Harold I’d be like the League of Women Voters and stay strictly neutral. But the one you’ve got here is awfully nice.”

  Anne watched Jack watching the precision spins from the place where he’d volunteered to stand along the ropes, like a policeman at a parade. One little girl was actually holding on to his leg. “He is, isn’t he?” she replied to Carol.

  Frank Sherwood regarded the geometry of two skywriters who, as they swept through barrel rolls and an Immelmann turn, appeared to be connecting dots in the sky, skeining the sun-camouflaged stars into a pattern, a face or design that would soon emerge and stun them all into silence.

  Billy observed Mr. Sherwood as he made what Billy took to be the impressively detached observations of the pure scientist. Billy wished he could take back the thought he had planted in Mrs. Herrick’s addled head, but he knew that that was no more possible than this antique Bristol Boxkite’s being able to erase its white plumes of skywriting.

  Five minutes later it was the ground, not the sky, that the planes were whitening. A long green strip held the targets for a precision bomb drop, the climax of the morning’s competitions. Bag after bag of flour fell, exploding without a whistle or thud, puff after white puff dappling the grass and exciting the crowd’s applause. Harold Feller, still caught between the wars, watched in silence, his emotions too encrypted for even himself to read. His daughter looked at Tim Herrick in another kind of bafflement, trying to descry the thoughts inside him, to understand what was keeping his attention from all these events he had talked about for weeks, why his eyes kept darting toward the parked planes and not the ones competing overhead. Carol Feller studied her daughter and wondered why she seemed febrile with devotion over her new love, like an ecstatic nun, rather than just purring with ordinary happiness. Jack Riley watched the fiftieth sack of flour explode upon the soldierless ground and knew exactly what he was remembering and why he wouldn’t think any more about it. He would occupy his mind with the sensation of having his thumb chewed by the little girl to whom he’d offered it.

  When all the planes were down and their pilots all applauded, the major turned things over to Cass Hough, the English daredevil, who pulled a card from an envelope and announced that none other than Doris Singer, their own Miss Owosso, who had just the other week made the state finals but lost the prize of being Miss Michigan, had been chosen Miss Dawn Patrol.

  “Come on,” said Tim. “Help me.”

  He needed Margaret to go back with him to the car, in whose trunk he had another trunk, a big one, half the size of an old steamer. Would she help him carry it to Gus’s plane? “It’s a surprise,” said Tim. “I’m going to cover it up with a blanket. He won’t even notice till after he’s put the plane back in his barn.”

  “What’s in it?” asked Margaret, as she walked backwards with it, covering the three hundred yards between Arnie’s Chevrolet and Gus’s plane. Gus himself was sure to be at the just-opened beer stand.

  “Cans of soup, evaporated milk, stuff like that. Gus is a lot poorer than people think. He can use all of it, and it’s easier for him to just find it than have to say thank you.”

  Gus’s plane might look smaller than Harold Feller’s Oldsmobile, but there was a surprising amount of room behind the old leather passenger’s seat. The trunk hid easily under a blanket that had been lying in a clutter of tools and beer bottles.

  “That’s great,” said Tim. “Why don’t you get a place for us on the rides line? I’ll be there in another minute. I just want to leave him a note. A couple of these things need instructions.”

  He was, she decided, too embarrassed to have her see him complete this act of charity, and she wanted to be as considerate of his feelings as he was of Gus’s. So she gave him a kiss and ran off to join her girlfriends, who were still dismissing the charms of Doris Singer, as they waited for the first plane, ahead of the long line of ticket holders, to rev up and take off. The skies had been silent for nearly a half hour, and the crowd was beginning to miss the noisy motorized duets. Soon enough, though, an uncertain hum filled the air. Margaret’s friends stood on their toes to see the first of the twenty-five-cents-a-ride planes take off. But as the erratic buzz grew more raucous, there was still no plane visible ahead. All at once it became clear that the sound was above and behind them. They turned and looked up to see, sticking out of a low-flying cockpit, not a helmet and goggles, but a head of golden hair, streaming in the wind as the plane went, accidentally, into a quarter roll, before the pilot righted it and waved good-bye to his girlfriend below, pulling up on the stick and disappearing into a sun so bright it seemed more silver than gold.

  By nightfall the desk of police chief Ted Rice had on it a report of August’s first serious theft, that of a Curtiss JN-4D, as well as one for the month’s first missing person, Timothy Herrick, seventeen, late of 105 Park Street.

  SIX

  August 3

  “MR. CHAMBERS, WILL YOU RAISE YOUR VOICE A LITTLE, PLEASE? When and where were you born?”

  “I was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.”

  “How long have you been associated with Time magazine?”

  “Nine years.”

  “Prior to that time, what was your occupation?”

  “I was a member of the Communist Party …”

  The interrogation of Whittaker Chambers by Robert Stripling, chief investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, had gotten under way in Washington on the morning of August 3, and that evening Horace Sinclair read portions of it in the Detroit paper. The late Mrs. Sinclair had developed in him a taste for genteel mystery novels, ones in which truth emerged at the point of a question instead of a gun. Exactly what had transpired years ago between Chambers and a diplomat named Alger Hiss looked as if it might play out like one of the books Horace came home with each week from the Owosso Public Library, the labeled skull on their spines promising a good night’s sleep after a bit of mental exercise.

  He hoped the story would soon crowd others off the front page. He could not stand the annual round of Hiroshima anniversary features, which would reach a peak this weekend, emphasizing rebirth and a lack of hard feelings. Horace had no stomach for the bipartisan certainty that dropping the bomb had been necessary, even kind, in light of the casualties a land assault would have led to. Of course, no invasion of Japan would have been the cakewalk his own cavalry unit performed in Cuba half a century ago, but who could say what the bomb’s long-term effects would be? The smoke from it was a whirlwind begging to be reaped. The first time Horace had seen the photographs he’d noticed not a mushroom, but a sort of truncated crucifix, as if this new cross to which man was nailing himself refused to support his head; he would have to hang it in shame. This week the pictures were back, the cloud and the rubble and the craters, the heaps of lives buried and dug out and, the papers would have you believe, resurrected. And all he could think of was one small crater, hastily dug and frantically filled, fifty-one summers ago. The black buckram box stood on his dining-room table, and there had still been no letter from Wright George. If he failed to respond, Horace would have to take matters into his own hands, soon, and in the dead of night.

  How he envied the Herrick boy—free and far away, if he was still alive. After three days, people were beginning to doubt anyone would ever find him. It was like looking for a needle that had blown out of one haystack into who-knew-which other. Each day the Argus ran the same unsmiling picture, a much-enlarged head from a group photo of the high-school baseball team. The paper had by now familiarized readers with the fact that 1948 had seen great progress in the proliferation of VHF omnidirectional radar stations, which sent out beams toward every point on the compass instead of the mere four that older systems had. Of course, in order to use the new radar, planes had to have updated receivers, and—well, there was no radio of any kind in Gus Farnham’s bip
lane. The paper printed the background material on radar to fill column inches of a big local story that had very little else to offer the typesetter. All anyone had were theories, which mostly involved the plane’s having come down over water, since on Sunday there had been no crashes reported anywhere on the southern peninsula. There were those who guessed Tim had flown over Pointe Aux Barques and fallen into Lake Huron, and those who said westward, over Big Sable Point and into Lake Michigan. A few speculators, no more informed than anybody else, thought he might have made it all the way to Wisconsin. But if so, where was he? No one seemed to think he’d gone southeast or into Lake Erie—if he had, surely somebody out of all the millions of people in Detroit and Toledo would have noticed him. Though he acknowledged having taken him up a couple of times, Gus Farnham claimed to have given the boy no flying lessons: “I guess he picked it up by watching,” Gus told both the Argus and Chief Rice. Tim Herrick had never asked to take the controls, let alone mentioned any scheme to skip town.

  The Argus reporter ended today’s article by noting that Margaret Feller, 17, of 430 West Oliver Street, was still “distraught” after questioning by police, and that William Grimes, also 17, of 352 Pine, a longtime Argus carrier with an excellent record, was mailing flyers with Tim Herrick’s picture on them to dozens of towns throughout the state that his friend was known to have visited, mentioned, or just driven through in his brother’s old Chevrolet. Mrs. Herrick had been “in seclusion” since Monday, when she had returned, in her own car, from a Marine’s reburial in Battle Creek and learned of her son’s disappearance.

  Horace’s clock chimed six-thirty. If he got ready now, he could comfortably walk to City Hall and arrive in time for the first public reading of Jackson’s scheme before the city council. He rose from his chesterfield sofa and went into the kitchen to refresh himself by sticking his head into the icebox and keeping it there, eyes closed and vapor swirling, for a good fifteen seconds. He brought his suspenders back up over his shoulders and gathered the papers he had been working with at the dining-room table, his own handsome prose descriptions of two of the town’s oldest structures: the Woodard Paymaster Building, a tiny wooden cabin from which Campbell Gregory, fifty years before, had each week handed Owosso men the wages they’d earned making chairs and coffins; and Elias Comstock’s cabin, 112 years old this May, the first regular dwelling place in town, so much improved and added on to by Judge Comstock and subsequent owners that it eventually seemed like a piece of furniture, or a secret, inside a bigger house. These endangered buildings were the real history of the town, what the council ought to be spending its money on instead of throwing up this cornball Casbah along the river. That’s the argument he would get up and make tonight. To coddle his voice he had smoked neither pipe nor cigarettes all afternoon, and before he put these papers inside the old soft briefcase he used to take to the office on Exchange Street, he would swallow a teaspoonful of honey.

  He was ready. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and turned off the light above the dining-room table. The fringe on its shade shook a little, as Horace stole one more glance at the buckram box, hoping against hope that when he returned tonight he might be able to put it away forever.

  “GO, MR. ABNER. REALLY,” ANNE INSISTED. “YOU WON’T GET a seat unless you do.”

  Leo Abner still appeared reluctant. When he’d decided to keep the shop open till seven-thirty on summer Tuesdays, he’d told Anne she wouldn’t have to stay.

  “Go,” she said, giving him a little push. “I’ve got to wait for Jack, in any case.”

  “All right, you talked me into it.”

  Anne laughed. “You want it to go through, don’t you?”

  At this mention of Al Jackson’s plan, whose presentation at City Hall was Leo Abner’s destination, the bookstore owner’s expression crumpled back toward guilt. “I shouldn’t, should I? Maybe I’m being selfish. Maybe I’ve just decided it would be good for business—all the postcards and Dewey books we’d sell to the visitors.” He couldn’t bring himself to use the uncourtly “tourists.”

  “But you know, Anne”—he’d finally dropped “Miss Macmurray,” now that Jack Riley (“your beau”) offered her sufficient protection against familiarity—“part of me just likes the idea.”

  This confession no longer surprised her. Since coming back from Mackinac she’d heard a half dozen town elders, hierarchical club women and their privacy-loving husbands, express an embarrassed enthusiasm for the Dewey Walk, which was what everyone had taken to calling it. (“Road to Prosperity” had been dropped, probably for its faint echoes of Hoover.) Al Jackson might still be something of a brash outsider, but all the color and chatter he’d made people imagine along the riverbank stirred in them memories of the long carnival summer of ’36, when the town had celebrated its centennial and floated for weeks upon the puffings of calliopes.

  “There’s no reason you shouldn’t like the idea, Mr. Abner.”

  He put his hat back on. “The two of you will come along later?”

  “Both of us. Now go.”

  It was 7:20, and before Jack arrived she could perform one small chore, wrapping up a copy of Kingsblood Royal, the most recent Sinclair Lewis, for Mrs. Henry Hamel on Lee Street. It would replace the copy of Raintree County the police had taken from her yesterday. Since Sunday morning Margaret, between bouts of crying and silence, had mentioned the novel a number of times, whenever Chief Rice and his deputies inquired about what the Argus now called Timothy Herrick’s “state of mind.” She’d admitted that late in June Tim had stolen (and then replaced) a copy of the book from Abner’s, and had occasionally mentioned the relevance of page 464 to the author’s recent suicide. So yesterday a policeman had come into the shop looking for the book, which Anne’s card file showed as having been sold to Mrs. Hamel on July 9. A visit to Lee Street revealed that page 464 had been underlined and starred by someone besides Mrs. Hamel, who reacted with more sheepishness than surprise: she had never made it past page 50. She let the officer take the book with him, and Leo Abner instructed Anne to send her something else, with the shop’s apologies for having sold defaced merchandise.

  Anne now looked at page 464 on the store’s only other copy of Raintree County and considered the lines Tim had marked in the volume whose summer odyssey had ended on Chief Rice’s desk:

  The figure on the floor sighed and said mournfully,

  —Whip me, honey. I deserve it.

  Johnny picked up the whip and tossed it into a corner of the room.

  —Get up, you crazy little thing, he said.

  —Go on and lash me, she said with savage intensity. You’re too good to me, Johnny, and I don’t deserve it. I wish you’d beat me good and hard.

  Johnny leaned over and pulled her to her feet. She was crying and kissing him at the same time.

  Anne had been surprised to find such a passage lurking in this big, bloated Carl Sandburg production. (The book had been seized by the Philadelphia vice squad back in March, but vice squads were always seizing something.) A little bit of Krafft-Ebing back in Ann Arbor had taught her there were men excited by such things (Kinsey, she now realized, must also have something on it), but Margaret insisted that Tim had spoken of these lines only as the clue to why a few months ago Ross Lockridge had killed himself, just when he’d realized his big best-selling dreams. Anne had brought the novel home last night and skimmed enough of it to gather that the problem with Susanna (the girl who wanted whipping) was the guilty secret of her Negro blood. Lockridge had had his own torments, according to the magazines, including The New Yorker’s sophisticated pan of his book, a review that managed to call him “Lockwood” throughout.

  Suicide was all the police had to hear about to start working that as Tim Herrick’s motivation, a line of thought infuriating to poor Margaret, who maintained that Tim had no guilty secrets and was only interested in what happened to Lockridge as an example of the world’s cruelty. Besides, if Tim wanted to kill himself, why would he bother to do it f
rom a plane? Why not just jump off the water tower? Or take a page from Lockridge and run the engine of Arnie’s Chevrolet with the garage door closed? And where was this plane they were thinking he’d deliberately crashed?

  Anne was pretty sure Margaret had it right. Whatever had propelled Tim Herrick into the air, she was sure it wasn’t Raintree County, a book so messy she might have to rethink her own thoughts about small-town literary inspiration. No, this novel (like poor Margaret, alas) was only one fever in that boy’s brain. Did Margaret know more about the other ones than she was letting on? She had, after all, helped him load the plane. Everyone from Carol Feller to Chief Rice was hoping Margaret might break down and tell Anne what she was withholding from everybody else. Meanwhile, Anne had her own theory.

  The bells jingled. The shop door opened and the shade behind it went down, pulled by Jack Riley, who took the Kinsey report out of Anne’s hands. He kissed her and said, “Let’s not go.”

  “I want to,” she insisted. “I feel like Mr. Abner. It’s pretty silly, but sort of exciting all the same.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s exciting,” said Jack. “We’ll go home and cook dinner and put Pop to bed and then go out to the garage.” It was their mad love nest now. “You’ve even decorated it!” she’d cried Saturday night, after discovering he’d replaced an oil can that dripped onto the couch’s bolster with a small vase full of violets. Gene Riley, who could now barely negotiate the stairs inside, let alone leave the house, would never notice them. The things she brought to Williams Street herself, a book from the shop or a bottle of Chianti or a can opener to replace the one that seemed broken, were reverently set down by Jack in the living room or kitchen, rooms that, as they shared them, seemed to excite him as much as the garage. He never pressed her to go outside, not because he still felt the need to play the well-mannered working stiff, and not because he wasn’t a regular crazy boy once they got there; just because nothing seemed to make him happier—the kind of happy that depends on a certain disbelief—than to sit on the sofa, the doily-covered one inside, dozing off with his head on her shoulder, sniffing like a kitten. Upstairs, pills would have put Gene into a deep sleep. (It was cancer, she now knew, and only a matter of time.)