Free Dewey Defeats Truman by Thomas Mallon Page B

Al Jacksonhimself 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; theoverhead 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