Free Dewey Defeats Truman by Thomas Mallon Page A

Christmas in the middle of a blizzard, a “live” transmission of some puppet show, and having these pictures on the movie screen just three nights after they were shot seemed equally impressive.
    Not that the candidate was: “
Our task is to fill our victory with such meaning
 …” Those same meaningless words again, even less stirring now that she could see the head they came out of. And that
mustache
: did he comb it with Vitalis? It was ridiculously well managed. Didn’t his wife ever muss it with akiss? She supposed it had taken nerve to keep wearing it right through Hitler, but it certainly didn’t make her swoon. Still, she’d probably end up voting for him, if only out of local pride and a sense that Truman fell so short of FDR. Dewey did have the voice of a President, she thought, a nice baritone, even if he was just playing scales with this dreary speech. He’d actually trained as a singer, a fact she hadn’t known until Friday afternoon, when she picked up that ’44 campaign biography—that’s how bored she’d been.
    “I can’t stand him,” said Jack Riley, the first spontaneous thing he’d uttered since picking her up on Oliver Street. She looked at his face under the projector’s cone of light, and couldn’t get over how alive and appealing it suddenly was. But then she could see him retracting his own expression, as if embarrassed by the outburst. She wanted to say “Don’t go away!”—don’t go back down into that shell-casing of propriety you keep presenting me with, as if I’m the fragile nurse who’s just arrived at the front.
Stay up here and play
. Before he brought her home, she was determined to get one good kiss from that face—the one she’d seen a moment ago, not the tight little profile facing the screen again.
    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.