“He has as much interest in me as he does in Miss Slaughter.”
“Don’t expect sympathy. You didn’t get the guy with the big mole on his face.”
“I’m just . . . I don’t know, annoyed. I know I shouldn’t be. I mean, we’re all just thrown together like this. It’s crazy. But he just looks like he’s run out of gas or something.” Betty sighs. “I think I caught him talking to himself.”
“Oh, stop. My uncle Joe talks to himself all the time. And he’s a doll.”
“I just want to go home.”
“What’s the matter with you? It’s been, what, ten minutes, and you’re already carrying a torch? You’re being a crackup. And anyway, who cares if he’s a stick in the mud who mutters? He’s still a dreamboat. You could’ve gotten a juvie. You’ll hardly see him this week, anyway. Tomorrow morning we have to line up like fish in a barrel in our bathing suits for that big photo. Then there’s the Boardwalk parade in the afternoon. Geez. You’ll see him maybe a couple of times, for like fifteen minutes each, you’ll get through it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll walk away from all of this with some scholarship money and a nice photo of you and Monty Clift there that you can paste into your scrapbook.” She smiles, puts a reassuring hand on Betty’s arm. “And at least you’ll have a new friend you can come visit in Rhode Island.”
“Or Hollywood,” Betty says, smiling.
“Oh, let’s hope, sister.” Ciji pivots them around, guides them back to the ballroom.
Betty threads her way across the thicket on the ballroom floor, where the hostesses hover like a flock of well-dressed crows, ready to strike at the first sign of the improperly placed hand or, God forbid, lip. John Griffin McAllister still waits by the bar. Her eyes narrow. Are his lips still moving?
He spies her and steps forward, and as he does, she notices something changed in his disposition, a look on his face that is both devilish and sheepish. She has no idea what has transpired while she has been gossiping with Ciji, but clearly something has. He’s more squared in the shoulders now. Different.
“So, I have a question for you,” he says.
A dance. Well, that will be nice.
Then he unleashes a smile that almost knocks her over. A huge, bright, blazing flash that sends a boozy warmth rushing through her body, right down to her toes. She hates that a man who looked at his watch immediately after meeting her can elicit this kind of visceral reaction with one smile. She also cannot deny it. He leans in a bit closer. “Whaddya say we get out of here?”
༶
Captain Starn’s is a sprawling shack that’s actually more like a compound, plopped in the middle of a marina. A tiny fishing boat façade leads into a big white clapboard restaurant with cloth awnings that flap and flutter in the salty bay breezes. Betty puts down her menu and looks out at the twilight sky, streaked in dusky purples, oranges, and pinks. These are the kind of places she loves, ramshackle and unfancy, authentic and long-loved, the kind where people come to order messy crabs and corn on the cob drizzled with melted butter.
“They make a great chiffon pie here,” Griff says. He has loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top of his shirt, which has only helped make him look even more rakish. Patsy would dub him “Trouble, with a capital T.”
“Unfortunately I have to be in a bathing suit on the Boardwalk tomorrow morning to get my picture taken,” Betty says. “So no pie for me.”
A waitress in a starched uniform and matching cap ambles over. She looks like a grouchy nurse, with a demeanor to match. Betty orders a shrimp cocktail and a tomato juice, while Griff orders the Captain Starn’s Special: baked stuffed lobster with clam filling, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and biscuits, with a dry martini to wash it all down. He asks again if she won’t join him in a cocktail, and she reminds him that the rules forbid it. “Yeah, we’ll see how long you hold out,” he says with a laugh. “Every year the girls say, ‘Oh, I can’t drink! They’ll kick me out!’ and every year they end up sitting at a table at the Torch Club with a brandy alexander.” He lights a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you’ve had so much experience. Just how many states have you squired?”
“You’re my very first. But as I told you, my mother’s a hostess.”
They sit in silence for a minute, the only sound his fingers flicking open his lighter, then closing it, over and over. Flick, flick, flick, flick, flick.
“Are you dying to light something or just preoccupied?” Betty asks.
He appears momentarily startled, like a child caught taking money out of his mother’s purse. “Oh, sorry,” he says, shoving the lighter into his pocket. “That’s annoying. No, I’m not preoccupied. Actually, that’s not true. I am a little preoccupied. I feel like I am making a terrible impression, and here you are, at the pageant, a real cookie, and I am the ‘escort’ supposed to show you a grand time, and I’m failing miserably.”
“Well, at least you’ve stopped muttering to yourself.”
She can almost see the blood drain from his face. She has no idea what nerve she has touched on, but she knows she has done just that. “I’m . . . I’m sorry. I was only kidding. My . . . my uncle Joe talks to himself all the time. And he’s a doll!”
His eyes betray a look of fleeting panic. “Old college habit, I’m afraid,” he finally says airily. “I used to memorize answers and then recite them over and over before tests as I was walking around the campus. It’s really rather embarrassing.”
Betty begins to apologize again, but he cuts her off. “Anyway, I feel bad that I said that thing about dreading it. You know, my mother . . .” He says it in a way that Betty interprets as If you only knew. “Is your mother here?”
Mothers. Safe ground. “Not yet. Thankfully my brother broke his wrist playing baseball, and that derailed her plans to come and hover over me the entire week.” Ricky, always ending up in some sort of fix. What was it with boys? “She feels terrible she’s missing the parade tomorrow. She’ll be here with my father and brothers for the weekend. So your mother is one of the hostesses?”
“Yes.” He takes a graceful sip of his just-delivered martini. “I take it you haven’t met her yet.”
“No.”
“Lucky you.”
His face fades back to impassivity, like a curtain has just dropped over it. Not again. Now he seems positively morose. She can’t figure him out. One minute, disinterested and bored; the next, charming and attentive. One minute, funny and clever; the next, bitter and miserable. It’s like he’s some sort of Atlantic City Jekyll and Hyde. At least they split the day and the night. She doesn’t know which one she is speaking with from minute to minute. She wonders if she just should have gone back to the hotel, spent the evening in her nightgown laughing with Ciji about Mary Barbara’s ridiculous dress.
“You’re wishing you had just gone back to the hotel, aren’t you?”
Oh my God.
She startles for just a second, adjusts the napkin on her lap. “Of course not.”
He leans back in his chair. He proceeds to button the top of his shirt again, adjust the knot back up. “Tell you what,” he says. “Let’s start all of this over.” He extends a hand across the table. “Griff McAllister. Nice to meet you.”
She shakes his hand. “Betty Jane Welch, Miss Delaware. Likewise.”
The food arrives and they talk—or mainly she talks, because his meal is enormous and hers consists of five shrimp in a cocktail glass teeming with shaved ice—and they cover broad territory, from her uneventful upbringing to her mother’s longing for the Junior League (she’s since gotten in), the lemon cake that led her here, her brothers, her studies, her best friend Patsy, things to do in Delaware. He is dutifully impressed she is a harpist but seems more thrilled by the fact that she roots for the Philadelphia Eagles. She had the athletic identity correct but the wrong sport: no football. He was a rower through junior year of high school. She doesn’t ask why he didn’t row his senior year, and he doesn’t offer an explanation. In fact, other than t
he fact that he has a younger sister named Martha, he offers very little about himself at all. She doesn’t know whether he is shy, or mysterious, or simply not very interesting. She does know he is the best-looking boy she’s ever laid eyes on.
On his second martini, he finally wears her down to take a sip. She pictures a buzzer going off, a mob of hostesses led by a grim Mrs. McAllister swarming in with handcuffs, stripping off her sash. Though, of course, she is not wearing her sash.
“So your family supplies the flowers to all the hotels in Atlantic City?”
“More or less.”
“You must send flowers to every girl you meet.”
He laughs. “Is that a hint?”
She flushes. “No, of course not.”
“Any schmo can give a girl roses. I never do.”
“You own a nursery and you never send flowers?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I never send roses.”
“I see. And what do you send, when you are inclined to send?”
“Variety of things. But for very special girls, I send sunflowers.”
“Sunflowers? That’s unusual.”
“I think they’re just beautiful. Those big brown circles, surrounded by the yellow, orange, tangerine buds sprouting outward. And they’re hearty. They last. They’re a message that sticks around.” He winks. “But like I said, I only send those to very special girls.”
The dinner flies by.
She notes things, files them away for dissection with Ciji later. The way his gray eyes disappear into matching crinkles when he laughs. The fullness of his mouth, soft like a woman’s. His hands, large and masculine but smooth to the touch. His ability to not talk, to enjoy moments of silence during a dinner conversation, and his artful use of them as bridges to new topics.
By the time he has paid the check, she feels both deeply smitten and deeply inadequate. His mood has whiplashed throughout the entire evening, but she discounts it, overwhelmed by the skein of butterflies fluttering about her stomach. He is a college dropout but clearly an urbane young man of taste, style, discernment. For the first time since forking into her mother’s lemon cake, she is happy about her decision to enter Miss Delaware.
He places his hand lightly on the small of her back as they leave the restaurant, and a current rips through her. She has never been on a date like this, never been with a boy like this, never felt . . . this. Her head swims, and the feeling is delightful. She wonders if it is not she, rather than he, who has had the two martinis. She senses a nonstop stream of laughter surfacing, fights to stave it off. Her face is hot.
On the pier in front of the restaurant is a wishing well surrounded by a white wooden fence. Griff digs into his trouser pocket, extracts a penny, hands it to her. “Make a wish,” he whispers.
Betty closes her eyes, sends the shiny penny flipping into the water with a gentle plunk.
Throughout the ensuing years, on those rare occasions when her Herculean efforts to keep this chapter in her life locked away from her consciousness fail her, it is always this memory that she recalls most vividly. For she knows it is the moment where she lost everything.
Four
“A few more minutes and I am going to wilt out here.”
Betty doesn’t know who says it—Connecticut? Colorado? Definitely one of the C’s—but she cannot agree more. The calendar says September 6, but the weather says mid-August. It is ten a.m. and the thermometer is already approaching eighty. She has powdered herself silly in an effort to stay dry but is quickly losing the battle. They’re all going to look like dishrags if this photograph isn’t taken soon.
They have gathered—all fifty-two of them, including the just-arrived new Miss Idaho (the first was disqualified when officials found out she had entered two local pageants in the same year)—under the band shell across from Convention Hall, to pose for the annual contestants photo. They wear identical navy panel bathing suits trimmed in white. Betty and Ciji have spent fifteen minutes in their hotel room this morning trying on heels to match, but it doesn’t really matter: who wears a swimsuit with heels? Betty finally went with a white wedge-heeled sandal and hoped for the best. And now here they all are, lined up like the Rockettes behind the opening curtain.
As the photographer continues to fiddle with his camera, urging patience and uttering more than one “Just a minute, ladies,” the girls cordon off into clusters, seeking shade. Ciji has had the foresight to bring a newspaper and is now providing commentary on today’s headlines as they wait. Actually, they are yesterday’s headlines; with the heels crisis, there was no time to stop for today’s paper.
“Listen to this,” Ciji announces to a half dozen girls near her. “Rudy Vallee got married to his fourth wife, who is twenty-one—”
“Oh my God!” pipes in Miss Florida. “Isn’t he seventy or something?”
“He’s forty-eight. Listen, listen. They’re getting married, and she stands too close to a candle, and her veil catches on fire! Says here Rudy rubbed out the flames with his bare hands. But not before his bride’s hair got completely singed.”
“Serves him right, the geezer. And her, too. What a hussy.” Betty recognizes the milky drawl without having to look over. Mary Barbara, Alabama. Of course.
“Did you catch that picture of the girl in the bikini? They’re all the rage now,” comes a voice from the left.
“I wouldn’t count on seeing one on Miss America anytime soon,” Ciji responds, to appropriate laughter.
“Ladies, places, please!” the photographer shouts.
The girls scurry to their assigned spots, twenty-six on the top row, twenty-six on the bottom, as Miss Slaughter stands in a straw cartwheel hat behind the photographer, eyes hidden behind dark oval sunglasses. Betty smiles, the girls smile, Miss Slaughter most noticeably does not smile. The camera begins to click.
Betty must admit it: she is enjoying herself. Yes, there are the difficult girls, and snobbish girls, and overly competitive girls, and two-faced girls, and one or two ridiculously stupid girls. But overall the whole thing is like a Girl Scout jamboree with makeup and gowns.
And there is Griff. She spent last night thinking of him as she settled down onto her pillow and struggled to shut off her mind, watching Ciji, her closed eyes recently ministered to with witch hazel (“It de-puffies,” she’d said) across the room, fast asleep. Betty had played the night over in her head like a favorite record, lingering on each moment, from his walk across the Dennis ballroom to the penny tumbling into the wishing well. She still feels the butterflies. He has promised to come to the parade this afternoon. It cannot get here fast enough.
“Hey, Delaware!” Ciji yells up. “I hate to interrupt your nice daydream, though I don’t need to guess what it’s about. The pictures are over. Come down. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
༶
Eddie Tate is a reporter for the Atlantic City Press, part of an army of men in fedoras and sweat-stained dress shirts walking up and down the Boardwalk this week chronicling every step, word, and wave of the Miss America delegation. Betty squirms in the heat, uncomfortable and self-conscious, sitting on a bench while still in her swimsuit, sash, and too-tight wedges. She is pretty certain she is not supposed to talk to a reporter without a hostess present; wasn’t that one of the thousand rules rolled out yesterday? But in his little round spectacles and too-big fedora, Eddie Tate seems nice and affable, almost gentle, less like a reporter out for a story than a young medical intern about to dispense aspirin. He’s short—maybe five-seven?—and wiry. His blond hair makes him appear even younger. He can’t be older than twenty-four.
“So how did a nice girl from Delaware end up in a crazy whirlwind like this?” he asks. She bristles. She’s not even sure why. The gumshoe phrasing seems crass, demeaning. She wonders if he’s putting on a wise guy act, or whether her first impression is mistaken.
“How do you know I’m a nice girl?” she asks. She gets a mental picture of an invisible hostess next to her, fainting ri
ght onto the Boardwalk.
His eyes register due surprise. A live one, they seem to say. “I’ve met the people who judge this stuff,” he says, smiling. “It’s pretty hard for a bad apple to get out of the orchard and make it all the way here.”
She nods. “Well, to answer your question, it’s very simple, really. Like all the other girls, I entered a state pageant, and by sheer luck I won.” She tries to remember her bullet points, the sheet the Delaware pageant folks gave her. “You know, it has been five years since Delaware sent a delegate here. I am just so honored to have been chosen.”
Betty catches his eye roll, watches him scribble some random words into his notebook. “Well, thanks,” he says, standing up.
She hoods her eyes, squints up at him in the blazing sun. “I take it I am not a very interesting interview.”
His face clouds. “You’ve just got nothing to tell me. None of you do. It’s all the same, with these canned answers of how wonderful it feels to be here.” He makes no attempt to hide his contempt. Though he seems too young to be this jaded.
“I’ve got news for you, Mr. Tate,” she says, a trace of snap in her voice. “It does feel wonderful to be here. Maybe the problem is that you’re too much of a skeptic. Or maybe you’re just not asking the right questions.”
He arches an eyebrow, shrugs. He plops back down, flips the notebook back open. “Okay, Miss Delaware, go ahead, please, by all means: tell me what I should be asking.”
For a moment she says nothing, instead gazes directly into his blue eyes, watches a trickle of sweat travel from his matted hairline down his left cheek. She should be focusing on what to say, but the only thing she can think of is how hot he must be in his suit and tie, sitting out here roasting in the midday heat. She is in a swimsuit and feels like she’s on a barbecue spit. Somewhere in the distance, a young boy is yelling, “Get your tickets now to see the beauties on parade! Bleacher seats twenty-five cents cheaper than last year!”
“What do you think your readers want to know?” she asks finally.
The Night She Won Miss America Page 4