The Last Bathing Beauty

by Nathan, Amy Sue

  He leaned in to her ear. “You seem a little distracted, bubbeleh. What’s wrong?”

  “I was just thinking about the Miss South Haven contest.” It was better to be distracted by a beauty pageant than by a boy. At least to Zaide. “Nancy Green is in Europe.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Do you think I have a shot? I mean, I’m going to enter anyway, but, oh, Zaide! I really want to win. Wouldn’t that be a swell thing to do before I go to Barnard?”

  “That would make Nannie and me very proud.”

  “We’d get a lot of free publicity, wouldn’t we?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “I’ll do my best, I promise.”

  “You’re a beautiful girl, and the judges would be fools not to see it, whether there’s a Nancy Green or not.” Zaide smiled, twirled Betty, and spoke into her ear. “I think someone is waiting for you by the door.”

  Betty craned her neck, but with the dancing and the crowd and the low light it was hard to discern one black or blue jacket from another. Still, Betty’s heart felt as if it nearly skipped a beat, as though her feet were atop Zaide’s like when she was a little girl as they turned in time to the music. Zaide was smiling. He approved. She glanced around the smoke-shrouded glamour to the door, the corners, no Abe. “Don’t tease me, Zaide.”

  “Look.”

  Zaide motioned with his chin, and as if he were the conductor, the music stopped. Zaide kissed Betty atop her head, held her shoulders, and turned her toward the door. “He’s a nice boy. Go, have fun.”

  That’s when she saw Marv walking through the doors into the lobby.

  Did Zaide think she was dating Marv? Did anyone else think she was dating Marv?

  Betty wished she could have told Zaide she didn’t like Marv, not like that. Zaide had urged her off the dance floor, so Betty pushed through the dining room doors. Marv paced the lobby, tossing and catching a peach as if it were a baseball.

  His actions were cavalier and casual, in contrast to his tightly slicked-back hair and tailored semiformal. But she had to admit he was neatly groomed. And a decent dancer.

  Betty turned toward the window before Marv looked at her.

  Outside the window, light spilled onto the steps and the lawn. Moonlight brightened the sky to a bluish gray, and the beacon from South Haven lighthouse shined like a flame, casting its spell over the water.

  Betty cupped her hands by her temples to block the glare. She needn’t squint and strain her eyes to know that Abe hadn’t waited for her this long; she was more than an hour late. A current of sadness pulsed through her; then a sharp pain pinched her chest. She laid her hand on her heart and felt it thump. Tomorrow. She’d catch a glimpse of him tomorrow. Betty didn’t want to be one of those girls who whined and whimpered when her boyfriend was out of sight. She’d go home, set her hair, and go to sleep while the band played swing and jazz and the guests drank Manhattans and whiskey sours.

  She hoped Abe would explain why he’d left. She’d certainly apologize for being late, though he’d likely say she didn’t need to apologize for anything. He understood she was devoted to her family, because he was devoted to his. She was just doing her job—her this-is-not-a-vacation job—as the Stern granddaughter.

  Betty tugged at the fingers of her left glove, yanked it off, and did the same for the right. Darn, she’d left her clutch on the table inside. She tucked the gloves into one hand. She didn’t need her lipstick because the night was over, or her key, because her front door was always unlocked.

  “I told my mother I was walking you home.”

  Betty adjusted her gaze and saw Marv’s reflection behind her own in the window. She wasn’t in the mood for polite small talk. “Why did you do that?”

  “She likes you.”

  Betty fiddled with her gloves. “That’s nice to hear, but please don’t make up stories about me.”

  “It won’t be a story if you let me walk you home.”

  “I thought we could be friends. We danced—and it was nice. But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll walk home myself.”

  “It’s only a block and a half, Betty, but if I was your guy, I wouldn’t let you go on your own.”

  “Well, you’re not ‘my guy.’” She hadn’t meant to snap, but he had nerve. He didn’t know anything about Abe.

  Marv held up his hands in surrender. “I’m just trying to be a gentleman, that’s all.”

  Betty rolled her eyes. “I think the last thing you’re trying to be is a gentleman.”

  “Betty Claire Stern!”

  Betty swung around. “Nannie, I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Apparently not!”

  Marv raised and lowered one eyebrow. Nannie had been just out of Betty’s view and he knew it.

  Nannie pressed the white beaded clutch into Betty’s hands. “I think you owe Marvin an apology.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. And I think it would be nice for him to walk you home. There isn’t anyone else waiting for you, is there?”

  As if Betty needed the reminder. “No, Nannie.”

  “It’s settled then. Thank you for being so thoughtful, Marvin.” Nannie gave Betty “the look” and walked back into the dining room.

  “Don’t get all bent out of shape about me asking to walk you home. I’m a nice guy. Ask Eleanor.”

  “I think we have different definitions for ‘nice guy.’”

  “Ouch.” Marv held open the door.

  “Thank you.” Betty walked through. “So, it’s official now?”

  “Is what official?”

  Betty skipped down the steps. “You and Eleanor.”

  Marv shrugged. He removed his jacket, hung it over one shoulder with a crooked finger, then loosened his tie.

  “Truce?” he asked.

  “You didn’t answer my question about Eleanor.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Hey, I’m just trying to be friendly. Answer or don’t.” Betty could wrangle any staff gossip out of Mabel or the girls, no matter what Marv did or didn’t tell her.

  There was no point in being his enemy—her grandparents wouldn’t permit it because he was a guest. Betty nodded to Marv and walked next to him with an arm’s length between them. It was only a block and a half until she was home.

  They crossed the street and walked on the sidewalk instead of the beach. Betty’s shoes and hose were made for glamour, not sand.

  Marv stepped around Betty and walked by the curb. Gallant even by Betty’s standards.

  “I’m not half-bad when you get to know me,” he said.

  Betty smiled. It was a half smile, but at this moment he was trying to be nice. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Oh, Princess Betty is giving me a chance to prove myself?”

  Betty stopped and stomped her foot. “I am not a princess!” Then she laughed and lightened the mood.

  “You kind of are,” Marv said. “Barsky’d better treat you like one.”

  Betty wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult. They walked the last hundred yards in silence and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

  “We could sit and talk,” Marv said.

  Betty wanted to talk to Abe. She shook her head, almost apologizing, but she wasn’t sorry.

  “Can’t fault a guy for holding out hope.”

  She could not. Betty smiled. Marv didn’t stir her or interest her the way other boys had, the way Abe did, but he seemed sincere. When he could have been cold or flippant or handsy, he wasn’t. Maybe they could be friends. She could use another friend. The warm porch light soothed her soul and softened her outlook.

  “So, where do you think they are?”

  Marv furrowed his brow. “Who?”

  “Abe and Eleanor.” It just occurred to her. “Neither of them were where they said they’d be.” She didn’t mean to insinuate that they were together, just that they might be at the same place. Lots of kids hung out way past m
idnight. Betty gulped. She knew what happened when kids were “hanging out.”

  Marv pulled a leather key pouch from his pocket and swung it like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. “I have a car. We could go find them.”

  “Isn’t that like spying?” She was strangely intrigued.

  Marv shrugged.

  She did want to know where Abe had gone, and she could justify the outing by helping Marv find Eleanor. And no one had to know; it could be their secret. A secret between friends. Betty held out one side of her skirt in a faux curtsy.

  “You mean right now?”

  “Do you have a better offer for tonight?”

  She did not.

  Chapter 10

  BETTY

  Betty handed Marv a flashlight. He pointed it low and straight ahead. They crouched beneath the still-open windows of the main house, and duckwalked close to the building, as the band played the lively “Aba Daba Honeymoon.” Betty loved that song, but not enough to be distracted. The music faded as she turned to the back of the house and passed the kitchen. She and Marv stayed small, quiet, and imperceptible longer than necessary. Betty felt like Nancy Drew. The Mystery of the Missing Boyfriend.

  Good thing she’d changed her clothes. The Skylark dress would have dragged, and the pedal pushers allowed her to strike these unladylike poses and maintain her dignity. The peep-toe pumps would have slowed her pace. She’d rolled her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck. A ponytail would have been too bouncy.

  With every step, Betty repeated to herself that she trusted Abe. But did she? Not enough to repress her curiosity. Plus, she was bored. She’d waited all night for the exhilaration of seeing him only to be disappointed.

  Last year, the Saturday nightclub would have been enough to keep Betty buzzing with delight and fantasies. But her enchantment with glitz and glamour had been lost to that of summer romance. How could it not be? The sparkle in Abe’s eyes outshined the crystal chandeliers, and the melody of his words whispering in her ear was more hypnotic than music. His lips against her skin were smoother than the fabric of any cocktail dress. Betty swallowed, and her skin prickled as if it were dusted with sand, though she didn’t want to brush it away. She’d happily linger in that sensation for the rest of her life.

  It had only been two weeks. Not even. It had been ten days since she’d seen Abe for the first time on the lawn. Three days since she’d let him walk her home, and twenty-four hours since the dunes. Time seemed an irrelevant inconvenience. She could have sworn it had been years.

  Another few feet of crawling and she and Marv would be in the clear, far enough from the windows of the main house and the cabins.

  It wasn’t easy for her to go unnoticed in South Haven, let alone on the property, but the guests and her grandparents were still drinking and dancing. More important, no one was looking for her.

  Betty and Marv stood upright at last.

  “You did good bopping along there.” Marv chuckled. “Betty Bop. Almost Betty Boop.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I think it suits you.” Marv pointed. “We’ll see if his car is here in the lot. If it’s not, we’ll take my mother’s car and hit some spots around town. I have ideas where they could be.”

  Betty took a giant step forward. “I changed my mind.”

  Marv stopped, and Betty stood next to him. “Why?”

  “I just don’t think we should spy. It’s wrong.” What if she found Abe with someone else? She would have to bear not only the heartache, but the humiliation of Marv knowing her business.

  “We’re not spying, we’re looking. Just trying to find our . . .”

  Betty didn’t know the right words to use either. She and Abe had acknowledged their relationship and their immediate connection, but it wasn’t like he’d pinned her or asked her to go steady.

  “Don’t you want to know if Abe has taken off with Eleanor for the night?”

  “He’s not ‘off with Eleanor.’” And certainly not for the night.

  “How do you know?”

  “He just wouldn’t.”

  Marv shrugged, and started walking again. “Then his car will be in the parking lot, and when we go over toward the Palace he’ll be playing poker with the guys or sound asleep like an angel.” Marv drew a halo in the air above his head.

  Betty skittered and kept up this time, shuffling through the grass, glad she’d worn her old saddle shoes. “I didn’t say he was an angel. I just mean, I trust him. I was much later than I said I’d be.” Betty felt the same jolt of tension in her neck as when Nannie announced Tillie and Joe’s annual visits.

  Marv stopped and skimmed the group of cars with the flashlight.

  The patchy, unkempt grass of the staff parking lot was in stark contrast to the resort’s pristine front lawn. This area wasn’t even raked gravel like she’d seen at other resorts, or the pale, cracked tar of the loading areas. This wasn’t a parking lot. It was a forgotten lot.

  “What kind of car does he have?” Marv asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “We’re here, it’s not a big deal to just look.”

  Betty turned left, west, toward the lake, even though she couldn’t see it. They were a block or two away by now. She leaned back on a blue car and pushed herself up to sit on the hood. The cold steel shocked her hands and the backs of her shins, but it wasn’t half as chilly as the rushing breeze that seemed to pass through her, though the air was motionless. This close to the lake, that usually meant a storm threatened to drop in unannounced, but copious twinkling stars filled the sky like spatter dots on draped black fabric, and the South Haven Herald had called for sunshine tomorrow. It was rarely wrong.

  “It doesn’t matter because his car isn’t here,” Betty said.

  Marv leaned on the car and looked away from Betty toward the abyss of vehicles she didn’t care about. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  Marv turned to Betty. “You think you know me. But you don’t. I am sorry. For your sake, I wanted to be wrong.”

  “This proves nothing.”

  “Okay, you’re right. Your boyfriend said he’d meet you, he ditched you, and now you can’t find him or a girl we know would be happy to do what you won’t do.”

  “You are quite presumptuous.”

  Marv turned away. Betty was glad not to see his face and imagined his smug grin. Her cheeks grew warm, but she shivered. “If that’s what you think of Eleanor, why are you dating her?”

  Marv said nothing and confirmed what she suspected. She wasn’t naive . . . well, maybe a little. But she was a lot optimistic.

  “I bet she’ll fall in love with you by the end of the summer.”

  Marv guffawed. “I don’t think Eleanor is the ‘in-love’ type.”

  “Every girl is the in-love type.”

  It sounded like something Doris would say as Betty scoffed, but the words had come out of Betty’s mouth. And she believed them.

  “Is that so? I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You should.”

  “Are you in love with Barsky?”

  She hopped off the car and ground her toe into a lonely patch of grass. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  Marv walked the length of the row of cars and back again. “It doesn’t mean anything, you know, that his car isn’t here,” he said. “He could be out with some of the guys, even over in one of the meadows. Your grandparents would have a cow if they caught anyone drinking, and no one wants to lose their job.”

  “You should look for Eleanor. Girls like to be pursued.”

  Marv smirked.

  “What’s that look for?”

  “You surprise me, Betty Boop—oh, I’m sorry—Betty. You have very conventional notions of what girls and boys should do, don’t you? I thought of you as modern and sophisticated, maybe even a bit of a rebel, but I was wrong. You’re a nice girl through and through. Barsky doesn’t know what he’s in for.”

  “What�
�s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that nice girls break your heart, and because you don’t see it coming, it hurts like hell. Excuse my language.”

  “Is that why you don’t have a girlfriend? Besides Eleanor, I mean? Did a nice girl break your heart?”

  Marv looked away and Betty regretted her accusation. She hadn’t meant her words to be hurtful, even if she was hurting. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s none of my business.”

  He stepped closer to Betty but didn’t touch her or look at her. “If you must know, I don’t have a girlfriend because until a month ago, I had a fiancée.”

  Betty gasped. She didn’t know as much about Marv Peck as she’d thought.

  They retraced their steps in a courteous silence without dipping or ducking from anyone.

  At the corner of Lakeshore and Avery, they stopped. Betty turned to Marv. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Marv shrugged. “No reason not to. Her name was Debbie. We were together for a year and engaged for two months. Until last month.”

  “What happened? I mean, if you want to tell me.”

  “She said she didn’t love me enough to marry me, gave me back the ring, and I never saw her again. I called her parents a week later to see if she’d changed her mind. I told them I’d wait for her to love me. That I was patient and we’d make it work.”

  “She didn’t buy it.”

  Marv shook his head. “I don’t know what I did wrong. My father gave me plenty of ideas, though.”

  Betty found she felt sorry for Marv, even disbelieving he’d done anything wrong at all.

  “Don’t listen to him. You didn’t do anything wrong. You lucked out.”

  “What are you talking about? Debbie was the only girl I ever loved.” Marv’s voice dropped to an almost indiscernible whisper. Betty knew he hadn’t meant to be so vulnerable. “Sorry. I do like you, you know that, Betty. I like you more than I should considering you’re swooning over Barsky and I keep looking like a fool. Who would want a fool?”

  “You’re not a fool.” Betty briefly touched Marv’s hand. “She was the fool. If she couldn’t commit to you as your fiancée, she wouldn’t have made a very good wife. Most of the girls I know are dying for a ring and a husband. They would do anything to make it work with a boy like you.”