The Lacuna (47 page)

“Yes. J. Edgar Hoover.”

She’s asked permission to leave early tomorrow to see Truman on his whistle-stop for the reelection. He’s coming through Asheville, speaking from a platform on the back of the Ferdinand Magellan. It’s the same train the people here stood waiting for all night, when it carried Roosevelt home. But it never came.

September 15

The Grove Park is a reassuring place, all that squared-off, heavy Mission furniture with its feet firmly on the ground. The giant stone fireplaces, the carpentered grandfather clocks, even the roof, snub and rounded like the thatch of a fairy-tale cottage, with little eyebrow
curves above the windows of the top-floor rooms. Tom likes those best, he feels he’s an artist up in a garret. He insists Scott Fitzgerald always took a top-floor room here when he came to visit Zelda. “Just ask the bellhop, I
told
you so, and I’m right. He might have written
Gatsby
in the very room where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“More likely
The Crack-Up
. If he was here in town for the reason you say.”

Tommy rolled his head in a circle. “Oh,
The Crack-Up
, well done!” He moves like an actor, physically earnest, aware of his better angles. Today he had a better audience: the terrace was jammed, people out enjoying the autumn sun. The tourist trade is back, all those postponed vacations must be had before cold weather hits, it’s like a rush on the bank. Tommy was playing dissect-the-guests.

“That one over there has got clocks on his socks. I’ll lay a fiver on it. Go over and ask him to raise up his pants leg.”

“I don’t know what that means. Clocks on his socks.”

“It means,” he leaned forward, sotto voce, “the car he left with the valet has a
fox tail
attached to the antenna. Hubba hubba. You don’t know these college boys. I can see them in the dark.” Sloe gin was not fast enough for Tommy today, so we drank “Seabreezes,” a concoction he’d explained to the bartender. Complicated instructions for what amounted to gin and orange juice.

“Over there, the couple. Parisians, a jasper and his zazz girl,
très
vout-o-reenee.”

“Really.” There was no learning Tommy’s language, I’d given up on trying.

“In Paris I can always pick out the Americans like anything,
ping, ping
!” One eye closed, he feigned using a pistol. “A Frenchman’s like
this
”—he pulled his shoulders toward his ears—“like someone’s put ice down his collar. And a Brit’s just the opposite, shoulders back. ‘I say, a spot of ice down the old neck! Not a problem, by Jove.’”

“And the American?”

Tommy flung himself back in his chair, knees spread wide, hands clasped behind his golden head, vowels flat: “‘Ice, what’s the big idea? I take mine straight up.’”

And the Mexican:
I carried the ice here on my back, I chopped it with a machete, and probably it still isn’t right
. Tommy lifted two fingers to signal the next round.

“No more for me,” I said. “I’m nursing a ridiculous hope that I’m still going to get some work done this evening. Coca-Cola, please.”

The waiter nodded. Every waiter in the place was dark-skinned, and all the guests white. It felt like an occupied zone after ceasefire, two distinct factions inhabiting the same place: the one tribe relaxed and garrulous, draped unguarded on the chairs in colorful clothes, while the other stood wordless in starched coats, white collars sharp against black skin. In Mexico when we served a table it was normally the guests in starched collars, the servants in floral tapestries.

Tommy informed me that Coca-Cola sells fifty million bottles a day.

“Who are you, Elmo Roper?”

“It’s enough to float a battleship. I mean, literally it is, if you think about it. The French National Assembly just voted to nix Coca-Cola, no buy no sell, anywhere in their empire. What’s the static?”

“Maybe they don’t want it poured down their backs.”

“You’re going home and working
tonight
?” His eyes are so pale and clear, his whole complexion really, he seems to give off light rather than absorb it. Moths must fly into his flame and perish gladly.

“I can stay the afternoon. But I’m so near the end of the book. It’s hard to think of much else.”

“Oh, Jack
will
be a dull boy.”

“Or my meat will go to gristle, if my stenographer is to be believed.”

He leaned forward, pinched the flesh of my upper arm, clucked his tongue. Then fell back in his chair. He had a way of looking
tossed around, like one half of a prizefight. “And what’s the buzz on your cooper?”

I pondered this. “I give up.”

“Your moving picture.”

“Oh. I’m not sure. The Hollywood winds blow hot and cold.”

“Listen, I could sell it. Make your picture the talk of the season.”

“I thought you wanted a look at Robert Taylor. Now you’re selling him?”

“Cat, you don’t listen to me. I am going to be an ad man. I interviewed with a firm last week.”

“I do listen. You’re going to sell presidential candidates. You know what, they need you right now. All four of them.”

“You said it! Four men running, and not one winner I can see. Lord and butler, spare me that cold cut Tom Dewey and his toothbrush moustache.”

“You may not be spared. The newspapers say it’s already over. With the Democrats split three ways, Dewey’s just waiting to be confirmed. The editorial this morning said Truman’s cabinet should resign now and get out of the way.”

“It can’t
be
. Dewey doesn’t even look like a proper Republican. He looks like a magazine salesman.”

“Some salesman, he’s not even campaigning. ‘America the Beautiful’ is not exactly a platform. I suppose he doesn’t want to lower himself to Truman’s level, it would show lack of confidence.”

Tommy put his face in his hands. “Not Tom Dewey the toothbrush moustache!
Please
not that mug in all the photos for the next four years.”

“Would you rather look at Strom Thurmond for four years?”

“What a drizzle bag.”

A stout woman in a scant bandeau and espadrilles minced across the terrace. In Mexico she would have been a beauty of a certain type, but not here, I gathered. Tommy’s eyes tracked her too dramatically, like Charlie Chaplin in
The Gold Rush
.

“Maybe Scarlett O’Hara will come out and stump for Strom,” I suggested. “And Rhett Butler, whistling Dixiecrat to call out the segregationists.”

Tom looked up, eyes wide. “Now
that
is a campaign image. You’ve got the gift! And on the other team, Henry Wallace as the Pied Piper, with the liberals skipping off behind him.”

“Poor Truman, he’s got nobody left. I read he’s asked a dozen men to run as his vice president, and they all turned him down. Do you think that’s true?”

“He can’t get reelected, why should they waste the time?”

A young couple slid into the next table, inciting Tom to announce: “Hardware and headlights, call the nabs.” The fellow was an Adonis, more or less Tommy in a younger model. The girl wore a tennis dress and diamond bracelets.

“My stenographer went out to see Truman at his whistle stop here, just a couple of weeks ago. She’s League of Women Voters. So there’s one he can count on.”

“Oh, gee. Little man with high voice makes barnyard jokes from back of train.”

“She said he turned out quite a crowd.”

“Natch. The first thing he’s accomplished in the last two years.”

“That’s not fair. The Republicans kill every one of his bills in Congress. They can’t be bothered with the minimum wage or housing starts, they’re all crowding into the communism hearings to see Alger Hiss charged with espionage.”

Tommy vamped a few bars of “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” with jazz hands.

“It’s true, Tommy. If you read something besides the
Echo
, you’d know that.”

“Fine, down with it. Harry Truman gets
two
votes.”

“I don’t vote. I never have.”

“
Really
? Conk me. I had you down for a Henry Wallace type. The rise of the common man and all that. All the reviewers say so.”

“Politics in this country are never quite what they seem. I don’t quite feel…what? Entitled.”

He looked genuinely amazed. “
Entitled
. Cat, this is
America
, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don’t take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.”

“Well, that’s the thing, it’s all too much. Too fast. I need to brood on things.”

He cocked his head in a sympathetic pout. “Sad stranger in the happy land.”

The New York Times,
September 26, 1948

Truman Is Linked by Scott to Reds

Special to
The New York Times

November 1

This strange day. Early snow, and a visit from the FBI.

The snow fell in huge, leisurely flakes, piling itself carefully on everything, even twigs and telephone wires. Putting white caps on the hydrants, covering the mud puddles and buckled sidewalks. A Benediction for the Day of the Dead. Or perhaps last rites, this weary world with all its faults consenting to lie down with a sigh and be covered up with a sheet. “Holy is the day”—I had just thought those words when he came tramping tiredly up the walk, leaving behind a trail, the impressions of his leather shoes. At the curb he’d hesitated, turning this way and that before coming up my walk. It looked like an Arthur Murray dance diagram.

Myers is the name. I made sure to get it this time, Melvin C. Myers, special agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not the same man who was here before, right away I knew it was a different voice. This Myers is a man of rank, evidently, but he seemed almost apologetic. Too old for a fight, sorry that life has come to this.

I could hardly let him stand out there getting a snowdrift on his hat. I had a fire on the hearth and coffee made, prepared for a soli
tary day. Mrs. Brown is kept home by the weather, her bus line canceled. So I brought Myers his coffee on the sofa and poked up the fire, to all appearances entertaining a guest. We joked about the elections coming up, how Truman will soon be looking for a new job. Three magazines lay on the coffee table, the week’s editions I’d purchased from the newsstand, all of them with President Dewey on their covers, his bold new plan for the nation outlined inside. Chisme and Chispa weren’t fooled by the friendly patter, they rose from their pool of warmth by the hearth, hissed inaudibly, and slunk away. I should have done the same.

He believes I have a very large problem, does Mr. Myers. Things really do not look good regarding my position with the State Department. I’m about to be in the same boat with Truman, he said. Hunting a new job.

“Oh, well, it’s too bad. A lot of it going around.” I decided to play it contrite, to satisfy this fellow. No need to tell him I hadn’t worked for the State Department in years, and had no intention of ever doing so again.

“Except for us gumshoes,” he said with a chuckle. “Our job security is A-okay.”

“I’ve heard that. Snakes out of Ireland, and so forth.”

He was eager to show me his portfolio of evidence against me, and I was curious, especially about the photograph. Harrison Shepherd and wife, Communist party meeting 1930. It was a puzzling disappointment, not one thing in the picture I could recognize. No person I’d ever known, no place I had been.

“Is this the noose around my neck? I can’t even guess which one of those men is supposed to be me. I was fourteen that year, living in Mexico.” I handed back the photograph, and he took a great deal of care to put it inside a folder and settle it in the correct compartment of his briefcase.

Then said, “That photograph is a piece of garbage. I realize that.”

The man was so shabby and earnest, I almost hated to let him
down. Probably people habitually responded this way—shop clerks slipped back his change, the butcher put an extra ounce of chuck on the scales. Probably I’d let him in the door because of some vague sense he was a man of Artie’s ilk. A short, bald, gentile Arthur Gold. A widower, judging from his clothes, and the long, scant hair combed over his bald head, no one to tell him that was a bad idea. He had none of Artie’s cleverness but seemed to carry the same torch. Searching for an honest man and fed up with the whole shmear.