Free Dewey Defeats Truman by Thomas Mallon

that had burst their straps, embarrassed Jack Riley. For once, in the newsreel, Lewis was looking pleased instead of furious, the United Mine Workers having just signed an agreement with the soft-coal operators; but the eyebrows seemed telltale, like some crude secret the labor leader couldn’t keep from stealing to the surface, a disgusting version of every man’s five-o’clock shadow, which each afternoon reconsigned him to the animal kingdom. Jack checked his own cheeks with his left hand, the one farthest away from her, so she wouldn’t think he was about to try something. There was nothing there, of course, couldn’t be, since he’d shaved less than two hours ago. He resisted checking the top of his head, to which
he
had applied Vitalis, uselessly: fifteen minutes after he left the house his hair always looked like a field of cowlicks. His mother had neverbeen able to keep down those reddish-brown stalks, no matter how much tonic she slathered on the comb. She’d always given up with a laugh, pushing her face down into the mess to kiss the top of his head. The woman—a walking saint, his father would say—could see the humor in anything. She had actually died laughing.
    Tonight, as Jack came down the stairs, the old man, no less cranky than he’d been before the fight two nights ago, had cracked, “Christ, Johnny, you smell like the inside of Reisner’s,” the barber on Ball Street. The combination of Vitalis and Old Spice maybe was a little sickening, so he’d gone upstairs to towel some of it off. At the moment he could smell only popcorn, which he hoped was all she could smell, too.
    At least he wasn’t sweating through his shirt. It was almost cold in here, just like the icicles fringing the Capitol Theatre’s ads in the
Argus
made a point of promising this time of year. It was still June, but you could tell it was going to be a scorching summer, and since the war people had gotten so eager for air-conditioning that feeling cool was starting to seem as important as keeping warm used to be, back in the early thirties, when the Rileys lived in that beat-to-hell house, two steps above a shack, down by the Ann Arbor Railroad. Now everybody was so sold on being cold in the summer that the Capitol would even book a Christmas picture out of season.
The Bishop’s Wife
had been around six months ago, but all its fake snow and jingling bells would make people think the air-conditioning was working even better than it was.
    She’d like the movie, wouldn’t she? She’d sworn she hadn’t seen it, and he was pretty sure he’d gotten away with the lie that he hadn’t either. He’d actually watched it with hisfather and aunt, when she came on a Christmas visit from Chicago. “She’s a real
lady
,” Aunt Eileen had said of Loretta Young, meaning not some sex bomb like Lana Turner. The judgment had stuck in his head, and when the picture showed up again he decided it would be his best shot with Anne Macmurray, who, if she were naked, would look just like those goddesses on the plaster medallions framing the stage. Or, goddammit, now framing the sight of some dock-workers on strike in London. Their roaring newsreel heads were five times bigger than life, and if that weren’t enough to turn her off union men, Ed Herlihy was informing the audience that His Majesty’s Labour government was having to use troops to bring the British people their still pitifully short rations.
    This Berlin business was scary, thought Anne. They’d all been concentrating on Dewey three nights ago, when the Russians had finished choking off the city. She’d heard on the radio this morning that every American plane they could find over there would be used to supply the old capital. It wasn’t possible, was it? And was
this
possible? Here was Dewey, intoning the same lines she’d heard come out of the radio speakers at City Hall Thursday night. She had seen television only once, through some store windows in New York last