The diction is formal, precise, like a grammarian, or Katharine Hepburn. Betty turns to see Honor McAllister making her way toward her.
In the five days she has been in Atlantic City, Betty has never been formally introduced to Griff’s mother. Each hostess has a group of several contestants for whom she is responsible, mainly to ensure that each girl is where she is supposed to be at any given moment. But Betty is not in Honor McAllister’s group. She has spied her across various ballrooms and stages but has lacked the temerity to make herself known. And she has found it slightly peculiar that Honor has not approached her, has not been curious about the girl her son has been squiring. It has left her with an impression of Honor McAllister as cold and forbidding, the harridan convinced that no girl is good enough for her son.
Up close, Honor is beautiful in the way wealthy older women tend to be, with slicing cheekbones and a long, narrow face that seems faintly equine. She places a bony hand atop Betty’s forearm, guides her away from the doors.
“Betty. I do so very much apologize for not introducing myself earlier,” she says, her smile bright and gleaming, like an overly sparkly Christmas ornament. She is tall, at least five-ten, Betty thinks, and has a coiffure of chestnut hair the texture of cotton candy that crests right to left over her head in a dramatic wave. Her skin—shiny, uncreased, delicate—indicates mid-forties at best. She has the dramatic eyebrows of a mannequin. “This is my first year acting as the vice president of the hostess committee, and I confess it’s been a bit overwhelming. But I do hope to get to know you better, and to meet your wonderful family, of course. My Griffin has been telling me the most lovely things about you.”
“He’s not here,” Betty replies flatly. She meant to say, “It’s so nice to meet you.” Or “How nice to make your acquaintance.” But her defenses are down. Not just down. Destroyed. Stood up one day and she is already unraveling.
I hate love.
Honor pats her on the hand, like a wealthier Mary Worth. How pathetic and mousy Betty must look, pining for the boy who isn’t here, a boy she’s just met but about whom she’s acting as if he were her fiancé. A few girls nearby throw themselves into the arms of their respective escorts. Even Ciji has a date tonight with the Mole. Off to the Saratoga Room. Betty just wants to leave. Why won’t they just let me leave?
“I know that you and Griffin had plans today, dear,” Honor says, and Betty wants to die. Did he really send his mother to ditch her? “But he fell terribly ill this morning. Some sort of stomach bug, I think. He didn’t even go to the nursery, and we had a huge delivery come in. He would never have missed that if he weren’t genuinely unwell.” She looks into Betty’s eyes. “He feels terrible that he disappointed you today. But I assure you he’ll be better tomorrow. In fact, I was hoping you would come out to the house and be our guest for luncheon.”
Betty’s eyes narrow. She is momentarily baffled. Lunch? Tomorrow?
“I . . . Of course. Of course. Yes, that would be lovely,” Betty says. “How very kind of you.”
“Not at all. I’ll have a car pick you up at your hotel at noon. Oh!” She turns, scans the lobby, looking for something. “I almost forgot. Come with me, dear.”
And they’re off, hustling through the cavernous lobby of Boardwalk Hall, until they arrive at a table strewn with flyers, posters, badges, and other assorted Miss America ephemera. Honor picks up a big bouquet, delicately wrapped in brown paper. “These are for you. An apology from Griffin.”
Roses. A dozen blooms, yellow, expertly arranged. Betty is not certain of much in this moment, but she knows this: this bouquet was selected by the mother, not the son. Any schmo can give a girl roses. She thinks of the sunflowers still sitting on the dresser in her hotel room. She wonders if they’re still alive.
༶
He lies on the mattress in his childhood bedroom, and the silence is everywhere and nowhere. Longport is a low-humming town even in the midst of the hubbub of summer, but now, after Labor Day, it is somnolent and still. And yet he cannot quiet them, these voices in his head, which scream at him, in various tones and accents and sometimes even strange languages. They come and stay, swirling through his brain for hours, sometimes days, and then leave just as quickly—once for several years. But he knows they will come back.
They always come back.
And now they are here, chanting like Trappist monks, loud, angry, virulent, urgent. And so he wonders. He wonders if by chance he was to listen to them, to try to act on their warnings, protestations, and outcries, would they then leave him for good? Would they be satisfied, move on to someone else’s brain, go on to torment another soul someplace else?
Griffin McAllister feels the sweat coating his body, looks toward the window and the moon above, searching for answers that never materialize. He tries once again to do his breathing exercises, to clear his mind as the doctors have taught him, but the voices are too powerful tonight, too insistent. Stop. Stop!
But the voices continue.
She doesn’t love you. Nobody loves you, says the angry woman.
I don’t understand you. Why can’t you see them? They’re everywhere, spying on you. They can see you through that lamp on the table. They’re watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake, and then they’re going to send you away forever and you’ll never see anyone again. The gruff voice, the one that sounds like his late grandfather.
Betty is a harlot. It would be better if she drowned in the ocean, shrieks the one that’s always screaming, always pitched.
God wants you to suffer. It is your duty to suffer. Voltaire. He didn’t speak for years but has recently returned.
Kill yourself. It’s better than living like this.
This last the worst voice of all.
His own.
Eight
The pine-green Cadillac glides down Atlantic Avenue, through southern Atlantic City, then the tiny beach towns of Ventnor and Margate, before coasting into Longport, at the very end of Absecon Island. The driver—a buttoned-up, hulking man with the pug nose of a boxer—has picked her up at the hotel promptly at noon and now deposits her in front of a grand sea captain’s house that faces the bay. He opens the rear passenger door, and Betty gives a gracious nod as she exits, carrying the box with the cheesecake she bought this morning at Kornblau’s.
She got up an hour early simply so she would not have to rush the decision on what to wear. Ciji refused to help, finding all of the fretting ridiculous and, Betty suspects, not a little bit irritating. In the end Betty mentally used her mother as a guide. What would one wear to a lunch with the Junior League? The answer was evidently a printed crepe day dress with a small white, straw, side-swept hat. The thought enters Betty’s mind that her parents and brothers are no doubt already in the car, on their way to Atlantic City. Oh, the endless, overly bubbly inquiries, especially about Griff, that are sure to surface. She dreads them almost as much as tonight’s last preliminary contest: talent. It is one thing to have walked down a runway in a swimsuit, and the next to have walked down the runway in an evening gown. But the biggest group for which Betty has ever played her harp was during the Miss Delaware contest, and that was fewer than two hundred people.
Tonight there will be twelve thousand.
I’m not going to think about that, she says to herself as the driver opens the front door of the house and waves her inside.
The living room is formal, wide and expansive, all the better to take advantage of the views of the bay. It features a floral-patterned Bigelow carpet and a standard selection of hand-painted porcelain lamps and mahogany and cherrywood furniture. There is a slender secretary in the corner, where Betty imagines Honor McAllister sits and composes lovely notes on her personal stationery, all penned in a perfect loping script. The fireplace mantel is a pleasing off-white, and above it hangs a portrait of a Colonial-era gentleman in tailored clothing, no doubt some formidable McAllister forefather, his full sideburns gray and bushy. A small cabinet to the left of the mantel is
closed but, Betty suspects, contains a television. A television! This is one of the few areas where she and her brothers have agreed, collectively begging their parents to buy one. It is one of the many in which they have been collectively unsuccessful.
Betty wanders about the room, inspecting the bookshelves and occasionally glancing out to the sunlight shimmering on the water, and wonders where everyone is. She picks up a Chinese vase, tries to make sense of the random markings on the bottom, gently places it back. A check of her watch. Is she early? No. She writhes her hands together, feels suddenly antsy and self-conscious, as if somewhere in the house an argument is in full bore on who is to blame for inviting her.
Roaming around, she spies a small box with a speaker attached to the wall by the window. A radio built into the wall? But there is no dial, just a switch. In an act of nervous curiosity, she flips it on.
The speaker crackles to life, and Betty instantly makes out two voices speaking in hushed but exigent tones.
Not a radio. An intercom. Connected to some other room in the house.
“. . . downstairs, darling. Now we mustn’t keep her waiting any longer. We are being rude, and I know you would not want her to think you rude.”
Honor.
“I can’t. I can’t. You know I can’t.” Griff, barely audible, clearly upset. He and Honor are talking. About her. Betty knows this is wrong, that she’s eavesdropping, that she has no right to hear any of this. But she cannot bring herself to turn off the intercom.
“Now, dearest,” Honor is saying, “she’s come all the way from Atlantic City. And we cannot simply send her back. It will be good for you to see her, to be around someone you like so much. You know what the doctors have always told us, that you need to not isolate during your episodes.”
“Stop! Stop it!” Griff says. He sounds petulant, like a four-year-old who doesn’t wish to take his nap. Honor shushes him in soothing, babyish tones. Betty can almost picture them, sitting on Griff’s bed, Honor gently stroking his hair, telling him it’s all going to be all right.
Episodes? Episodes of what? “She’ll know. She’ll look at me and she’ll know. Just like that reporter—”
“I told you that you had to forget all about that silly reporter. It’s clear he fancies Betty and that he only telephoned in order to upset you. But Betty is here. To see you. She cares for you. I know she does.” Eddie Tate? Eddie called Griff? Why?
“Only because she doesn’t know the truth,” Griff is saying. “Everyone is against me. You’re against me, too!” Betty believes she catches a sob in his voice. Is he crying? What truth does she not know?
There is more arguing done in indecipherable whispers, until Honor convinces Griff to take “your medicine”; Betty can make out the pouring of water, the handing over of a glass. Several minutes later it appears Griff has calmed down; Betty can hear movement in the room, the opening of a drawer, the brushing of pants. Hastily, Betty snaps off the intercom and takes a furtive view around. What if the driver had come in, caught her listening?
Why is there an intercom between the parlor and Griff’s bedroom?
“You must be Betty,” a voice interjects.
Betty spins around to see a girl several years younger than she, maybe fourteen or fifteen, standing by the living room arch. She’s delicate, with fine alabaster skin and a sprinkle of freckles on her nose; her long hair, pulled into a loose chignon at the back, is almost identical in color to Betty’s own. She wears a playsuit with bright vertical stripes.
“I’m Martha,” the girl says, walking into the room and extending her hand. “Griffin’s sister.”
“Of course,” Betty says. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“And I you. You’re even prettier than Griffin said.”
“He’s very generous with his compliments.”
“Please,” the girl says, guiding Betty back into the room, “sit.”
Betty sinks down onto the edge of a blue-and-white wingback chair. She poses, crossing her ankles behind her, places her lace-gloved hands one atop the other on the bag on her lap, ensures that her expression is one of pleasant expectancy. As Martha talks, Betty’s mind drifts elsewhere: whirling with doubts, with anxiety, with concern for the young man who has so quickly stolen her heart. And with one loud, demanding question.
What’s wrong with him?
༶
They walk out onto the jetty that juts into the ocean at Eleventh Street, where the ocean melds into the bay. The breeze is up but warm. The lunch went well; when he finally walked into the living room, Griff seemed himself, with nary a trace of the panicked, churlish boy on whom she’d eavesdropped. He was playful and sardonic with Martha, the quintessential loving big brother. He’s wearing a linen oxford and vest with a pair of canvas pants, his feet bare. He puts an arm around her, pulls her closer, and kisses her head.
“Did you notice when we turned up? This is Eleventh Street, not First Street. Even though the island ends here.”
“How odd,” she says. “What happened to the first ten streets?”
“Legend has it that there was a great hurricane that came and swept the first ten blocks of Longport out to sea. You occasionally still get divers out here, trying to find this Atlantis of the Jersey Shore.”
“You mean to say there are ten blocks lying at the bottom of the ocean?”
He laughs. For the first time today, he laughs like he did two nights ago at the Brighton. It’s her first glimpse today of the young man she has grown to know. To love. “That’s why it’s a legend. And like most legends, it’s absolutely untrue. Old Man McCullough sold off the first ten blocks across the Inlet. Over there”—he points to houses across the water—“is what’s now known as the Gardens section of Ocean City. But they used to be the first ten blocks of Longport. Unfortunately, that’s not quite as thrilling a tale as that of an underwater city.”
They stand for a few more minutes in silence. A skiff sails by. “Your mother didn’t seem to want to let us take a walk alone,” Betty says finally. The lunch was, like Honor McAllister herself, elegant and brisk. Cold baked ham and potato salad with iced tea, Betty’s cheesecake with coffee brought in on a beautiful white tray for dessert. Honor practically commanded Martha to join them for their walk on the beach, but—bless her heart—Griff’s sister resisted the entreaty.
“My mother worries too much.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
“Is there something to be worried about?”
He gives her a look of studied sobriety, as if he’s trying to discern how much to tell her. Or perhaps what to tell her. “Well, this is a bit embarrassing to confess to a girl, but you’re special, Betty. I think you know that.” He looks back out toward the water. “I can have trouble handling too much stress, and it takes a toll on me physically,” he says, spooning out each word. “It’s why I . . . I had to leave college. It’s mortifying to talk about, truly. Jeepers, I already said that. The point is, I take medicine for it, and I’m fine. It’s just that I have to be careful not to let myself get run-down. Like yesterday. I was just done for. I hated not seeing you. And I feel like a jackass for not calling the hotel and leaving you a message myself. It’s off the cob, to have your own mother give your girl flowers for you. And not even the right ones. So I want you to know I’m sorry.”
She turns to him, places her hand on the side of his face. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, John Griffin McAllister. You . . . you’re the most wonderful boy I’ve ever known.”
“So you’re not sore?”
She smiles. “No, I’m not sore.”
This kiss is even better than the one on the Boardwalk, dreamy and romantic rather than primal, with just the right degree of longing. Standing tiptoe on the windswept jetty, folded into his arms, Betty has never felt more secure in her entire life. Learning about his condition has made him seem more real, more vulnerable and open.
“Honey,” he
says quietly after a few minutes, “there is something else I need to talk to you about.” He fishes in his pocket, extracts a piece of newspaper that’s been torn and hands it to her. “Did you see this?”
Her heart sinks. Not another one. The clipping is from today’s Atlantic City Press. A column titled “Around the Pageant,” with small dispatches about various contestants and goings-on. Betty begins reading an item about Miss Hawaii giving hula lessons to some of the other girls.
“Third item down,” Griff says.
Pageant bigwigs try their best to keep their fillies in line, but that doesn’t stop a few from sneaking out every year to explore the wonders of Atlantic City nightlife. Our spies tell us that on Wednesday night a few pretty state-holders were seen at the Brighton, where one particular Miss got a special serenade in the form of a personal song from her pageant escort, which the ga-ga hepcat wrote himself! We’re told the crowd went bananas for this fine fella’s crooning to his lady, and more than a few gals were jealous he hadn’t been selected as their date this week. But does a song dedication help put a girl in the rhinestone tiara? We’ll have to wait till Saturday night to find out.
“Hot dog!” Betty exclaims. “How did they know we were there?”
“These reporters have eyes everywhere,” Griff says, taking the clipping out of Betty’s hands and shoving it back in his pocket. “Waiters, busboys, maids. They’re always looking for the skinny on you girls.”
Betty’s mind reels. At least she wasn’t named this time. But does Miss Slaughter know it was her?
“Don’t worry,” Griff says, intuiting her thoughts. “If Miss Slaughter knew it was you, you would have had a visit first thing this morning before you ever left the hotel. Publicly they may wag their fingers at this stuff, but deep down they know it’s good publicity for them to have you girls seen around town. It fuels interest in the pageant.”
Betty squints up at him through the midday sun. “Does it bother you?”
The Night She Won Miss America Page 8