For the next three and a half minutes, Betty surrenders herself to Hasselmans’s lilting lullaby and dives into its colors, her eight fingers—for one does not use the pinky in harp—gently gliding up and down over the wire strings and the nylon strings and the cat-gut strings, her feet deftly moving among the pedals. She uses the occasional nail to add drama, the “plink effect,” as her harp teacher, Mrs. Friel, used to call it. As the melody fills Betty’s ears, everything else recesses into the background: Griff, the pageant, her family, Delaware, Towson. It is simply her and the harp, alone in a room with twelve thousand spectators she blissfully cannot see. Indeed she sees only the strings, spidery fingers crawling swiftly and precisely, then faster, faster, bursting with the occasional crescendo of urgency, her head at points lolling into the melody. She works her way from the bottom up, closer, closer to the top of the harp, her hands extracting the sweet high notes that conclude the composition, before she extends her right knuckles dramatically all the way back down the instrument one last time, ending with a pronounced pluck with her fourth left finger. She extends her arms, places her palms together to stop the vibration, leans back. The performance is over.
The applause is cacophonous, amplified by the high sloping ceiling and rafters of Convention Hall, and Betty lets out a breath of relief. As she stands and delivers a demure curtsy before the audience, she can make out a woman in the front row near the judges. The woman is the lone person on her feet, clapping her hands wildly above her head, so caught up in her own rapturous approval that her pearls swing slightly about her neck.
It is Lenora Slaughter, mouthing, “Bravo.”
Ten
“You look like you just stepped out of the pages of Charm !” Patsy practically screams as they saunter the Boardwalk toward the Million Dollar Pier, onto which her parents and brothers have already vanished.
“Hush!” Betty admonishes. “I’m nervous enough without you adding to it.”
“I can’t believe I missed it last night!” Patsy continues, stopping briefly to bat her eyelashes at three passing sailors who return admiring nods as they pass. “If I didn’t need the money so bad, I would have just told Mrs. Fitz that I couldn’t work at all. The bus ride here was awful, by the way. But your mom gave me a very detailed description of your solo. Were you nervous?”
“Positively terrified.”
“But you won! You won the talent preliminary! A thousand smackers! And you’re a shoo-in for the Top Fifteen. Everybody says so.”
“I won a talent preliminary, one of three, and I am absolutely not a shoo-in for anything, and absolutely nobody says otherwise.”
“Well, I say otherwise, and I know a lot about these things, no matter what your snooty roommate might think.”
Betty sighs. Patsy came directly to her room this morning after she got off the bus from Delaware, suitcase in tow, not even bothering to check into her room. Betty had suspected that Patsy and Ciji would not become quick friends: Patsy was girlish, a little emotionally immature, and a rabid gossip; Ciji was sophisticated, sarcastic, the girl who knew the things good girls weren’t supposed to know. Almost predictably, once they were alone Patsy relayed her opinion that Ciji (“Who has a name like that? It’s not even a real name”) was nothing but a snob who looked like a trollop; Betty was certain that, when the opportunity arose, Ciji would dismiss Patsy as something akin to an annoying baby sister who should be kept in her room. Or worse.
Patsy spies Betty’s brothers in line at the ice cream stand and races ahead, no doubt hoping Mr. Welch will spring for her, too. In some ways Patsy is, truly, so much younger than she, despite how close they are in actual age. Maybe because of how much Betty has grown up in the past week.
She thinks of last night, to Bob Russell dramatically looking at his notecard and reading her name as the night’s talent winner. Agog, she couldn’t move for a good five seconds. It was one thing to objectively feel you did better on your harp than Miss New Mexico did with that painful aria; it was quite another to have bested fifteen other girls and have sent cranky Miss Slaughter into near delirium. Backstage her father had embraced her tightly, telling her how proud he was. She cannot recall the last time her father has showed her any demonstrative affection.
Miss America does odd things to people.
This morning had been the second of the two breakfasts with the judges, and just as they had earlier in the week, each rotated through the tables, armed with quick questions. Some jotted notes—interestingly, Earl Wilson, the newspaper columnist, took none—but the entire process seemed far different this time around. Betty was singled out by several for specific answers, as were one or two other girls at the table. Others were virtually ignored. All around the room there was a palpable sense that the judges were narrowing the field right then and there—and that Betty was very much, to her surprise, in the race.
I can’t become Miss America, she thinks for the hundredth time. I can’t.
Can I?
She clamps down on the thought like it’s caught in a bear trap. Winning Miss America would mean that Griff would, in fact, be Mr. Miss America. A crown he has been very forthright in telling her he will not wear.
He wanted to meet her after the breakfast, but there was a rehearsal for tonight’s main event. So he is coming to the hotel later today, before she has to leave for Convention Hall, to give her a kiss “for luck” and to meet her parents. But what kind of luck does she need? To win? Or lose? In the crazy event that she wins Miss America, would he really leave her? How could he?
Her mother interrupts her thoughts. “I put my foot down and said no ice cream for anyone until after lunch,” she says. “We’re going to properly celebrate the recognition of my daughter’s talent. Then the boys want to go roller skating.”
“Didn’t Ricky just break his wrist?”
“Boys will be boys, Betty,” her mother says as they walk into the restaurant where Betty’s father, brothers, and Patsy are already at a table, scanning menus. “The sooner you learn that, the better.”
༶
She doesn’t recognize him at first. In fact, she might not even have noticed him at all, except that he has been staring at her for such a prolonged period of time that she had to notice him. He is sitting on a bench on the ocean side of the Boardwalk, ostensibly a place to watch the passersby and the rolling chairs, although in his case there is only one thing that is evidently catching his eye.
Betty turns to her parents, brothers, and Patsy, all giving reviews of lunch (the boys have been talked out of roller skating in favor of a better offer to see the diving-horse girls on the Steel Pier), and mimics fluster. “Oh, I am so silly! I forgot about the check-in! All of the girls are supposed to go to Convention Hall to check in before tonight, and Miss Slaughter will absolutely kill me if I don’t get there. I’m so sorry. But it won’t take long. I’ll meet you all on the Steel Pier. Just go on ahead. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll come with you!” Patsy offers enthusiastically.
“Contestants only, Pats. Go on. I’ll be right back.”
After a few minutes of suitable affirmations and confirmations, the five of them walk northward as Betty feigns rushing down toward Convention Hall. When she is certain they are a block away, she pivots and walks over toward his bench.
Eddie Tate is very much not in his reporter’s uniform. Just the opposite. He looks summer dashing, in amber sunglasses, a button-down short-sleeved white shirt, and a belted navy bathing suit that shows off surprisingly muscular legs. He has canvas boat shoes on his feet, and—of course—a newspaper in his hand. He smiles as she approaches.
“That’s not even the Press. Isn’t that the Bulletin?”
“I don’t need to read the Press. I already know what’s in it.” He squints up at her. “I wasn’t sure you would know it was me.”
“I try to memorize the features of all of the spies who follow me.”
“I’m not a spy. I’m a reporter.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes. And I’m actually not following you.”
“So you being parked here in front of my hotel on what is obviously your day off is strictly coincidence?”
He laughs. “Well, I didn’t say that.”
“You never say much of anything.”
“That’s not true.”
She takes a seat next to him on the bench, stretches her legs out. At this point she doesn’t even care if someone sees her with a reporter. Let them.
“It’s the big day,” she says. “I’m surprised you are not working.”
“It’s the big night. I have to be at the hall by six.”
“Do they give you a good seat?”
“Right by the runway. Make sure to wave.”
“Do you enjoy what you do?”
The question appears to throw him momentarily. “I . . . Yes, I do. I give people the news. It’s an important job.”
“Miss America is the news?”
“In Atlantic City she damn sure is.” He recoils slightly. “Oh, applesauce. Sorry. That was cheap, saying something like that to a girl like you.”
Betty smiles, shrugs it off. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here, talking to him, but she can’t seem to make herself get up off the bench to go meet up with her family.
For a minute they sit in silence, just watching the people on the Boardwalk, men in linen jackets and flapping oatmeal trousers escorting women in blouses and peasant skirts into restaurants and shops and candy stores; old men, their skin the color of malt whiskey, pushing other couples in wicker rolling chairs to some appointed destination; gaggles of boys and girls, running past them toward the next amusement pier, the echo of stern remonstrations from their parents never far behind. Betty does not spot a single contestant. She wonders if they are all huddled in their various hotel rooms, testing ten shades of lipstick and frantically rolling and unrolling their hair for a pageant that will not start for hours.
He removes his sunglasses. “Look, I—” He wants to say something, by his tone something serious, but stops himself.
“Yes?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.”
“How do you know if you don’t say it?”
“ ’Cause I do, that’s all. I just hope you know I never meant to dog you or anything. I just think you’re special, that’s all. I think you deserve the best, Betty, I really do. But I think you already suspected that.”
It touches her, in an unexpected way, how he has dropped his mask, is talking to her this way. She instinctively feels how hard it is for him to do it and wants to be respectful of that. “You got me out of a jam when you warned me about the phone call you got, and you really got me out of one when you didn’t print any of the things that girl told you over the phone. A girl I know has to be Mary Barbara Adair, by the way.”
“A reporter never gives up his sources.”
“You don’t have to. Anyway, I appreciate that, Eddie. I really do. You could have been really crummy, and you weren’t. Thank you.”
He nods several times, never looking at her, his eyes staring down at the boards below his feet. “Well, you got a pageant to get ready for, and I got a pageant to get ready for,” he says softly. He chuckles. “I bet it takes me longer to get ready than it takes you.”
“Beauty requires effort,” she says, rising.
His arm shoots out and he grabs her hand. He looks up at her, and for the first time she sees the true depth of his affections, reflected in his pale blue eyes. He looks at her the same way she looks at Griff. “Beauty requires no effort from you,” he says. “Good luck tonight, Betty.”
“To you, too,” she says, and instantly wishes she could take it back, because it makes no sense, and he knows it makes no sense, but she cannot douse this moment with an awkward retraction and rephrasing. So she simply withdraws her hand and begins walking toward the Steel Pier, feeling his eyes following her until she melts into the crowd.
Eleven
Down the runway they swan, fifty-two “of the most beautiful girls in America,” Bob Russell says to the frenzied crowd, an estimated twenty-three thousand, twice as many as any of the preliminary rounds, inside Convention Hall. Betty’s pupils dilate from all of the photographers’ flashbulbs. The girls wear opera gloves past the elbow and identical pink strapless evening gowns with full tulle ball skirts by Everglaze, the official something or other of Miss America. Betty thinks they look like a sea of Glinda the Good Witches.
Betty waves to no one and to everyone, smiling—oh, how glad she will be to be done with the incessant admonitions from everyone to smile, smile, smile!—as she reaches the end of the runway and pivots back toward the stage. She can barely make out the people, people everywhere, packed into the endless rows of seats that stretch all the way to the entrance on the Boardwalk, people elbow to elbow by the runway, people standing in the aisles, people hanging over the railings on the balcony. The noise shakes the building, swirls around the girls like a mist, the clapping and cheering and sign waving and hooting and whistling. And for perhaps the first time this week, Betty thinks not of Griff or of romance, but of trying to memorize this lunacy, to lock away the images in her mind so she can take them out and sort through them later.
Standing backstage with his nerve-racked bevy of contestants, Russell had given them a pep talk: “Remember: Tonight you’re not girls from different states. You’re performers, actresses. You’re models, you’re singers, you’re entertainers. Girls, show this great city that you’re happy American girls, happy to be here in Atlantic City, the city of beautiful girls!”
Eventually Betty finds her place on the stage, off to the right, on the riser in between Miss Vermont and Miss California, and again the crowd erupts as Russell introduces the outgoing Miss America, who emerges from the wings in a ponderous ruffled floral gown that makes her appear as if she has just come out from the shade of a Mexican hacienda. She glides about the stage as if on a giant lazy Susan, waving with the slow, effortless grace of Princess Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Russell begins to sing.
Let’s drink a toast to Miss America,
Let’s raise our glasses on high
From coast to coast in this America,
As the sweetheart of the U.S.A. is passing by
And then the folderol and fuss before the announcement of the Top Fifteen. The National Anthem, the introduction of the judges, more banter from Russell with some of the girls near the front. All the while the fifty-two contestants perch on chairs still as statues, their sunny expressions frozen in place.
And then, finally, it is here.
Bob Russell walks over to the judges’ table, retrieves his list. He emphasizes that the names of the Top Fifteen are in no particular order, and the timpani rumbles, and the crowd of twenty-three thousand falls silent. The air is thick, suffocating with nerves and expectancy.
“Our first semifinalist . . . is . . .” Dramatic pause. “Miss South Carolina, Marilyn Hortensia Palma!”
Betty recalls the image of Miss South Carolina in a corner, gossiping about her with Mississippi as she was being admonished by Miss Slaughter. Well, at least she’s pretty, I’ll give her that.
“Miss . . . Chicago!”
“Miss . . . Florida!”
“Miss . . . New York State!”
“Miss . . . Alabama!”
Of course, Betty thinks, politely clapping as Mary Barbara Adair—expressing faux surprise and a healthy dose of false humility, and doing both badly—rises from her chair and scurries from the left of the stage to join the four others near Russell. Betty is more convinced than ever that it was Mary Barbara who dimed her out to Eddie. Not that it matters anymore.
I truly don’t care who wins. But I do not want it to be her.
“Miss . . . Virginia!”
Betty begins clapping as if she is rooting for the Phillies, then quickly regains her composure. Adelaide Carson, her spirited—if overly nosey—compatriot in Miss Sla
ughter’s Boardwalk swimsuit ambassador brigade. It’s nice to see someone like that in the Top Fifteen.
“Miss . . . California!”
Betty turns to Miss California sitting next to her, places a congratulatory hand on her arm, but the girl does not tarry long enough to accept any goodwill from her fellow contestants. She ignores them all, jumps off of the riser as if it’s ablaze.
Witch. I hope you lose.
“Miss . . . Nevada!”
Oh yes, the girl in the evening gown everyone was dying for. And she won Miss Congeniality from the other contestants this morning at the breakfast. Such a nice girl! Logical. Okay, I’ll root for you.
“Miss . . . Texas!”
I was wondering when they were going to call her. She’s the one everyone thinks is going to win, despite the Scarlett O’Hara gown. Good golly, she’s gorgeous. How does she get her hair to shine like that? Somebody told me she uses an egg wash.
“Miss . . . New York City!”
Both New York girls. Wow. Though this girl has a reputation even worse than poor tone-deaf Cecelia Kihm. I wonder if the judges know what she’s been up to.
Bob Russell roams the middle of the stage, looking like a lounge singer in his white dinner jacket and black trousers. “That’s ten, ladies and gentlemen! Only five spots left for the chance to be Miss America 1950! Your next finalist is . . . Miss Ohio!”
So it turns out the early gossip was correct. People thought she’d make it.
The crowd once again calms down temporarily, waiting for the twelfth name.
“And our next semifinalist is . . . Miss . . . Delaware, Betty Jane Welch!”
Delaware?
Did he just say Delaware?!
Betty cannot see her eyes, but she knows how they must look, grotesque and saucer-like, hiding none of her disbelief.
Great Scott! I made the Top Fifteen!
She feels gloved pats on both arms, pats on her back, and gets pulled into a quick side hug by Miss Vermont, and she can’t move, she can’t feel her own arms or legs, and she wonders if they are going to have to come up and carry her down off the riser, but there is a gentle nudge at her back from Miss Michigan, and she gets up from her chair and begins walking, slowly, toward the center, nodding and smiling—smiling, smiling!—and trying to make sure her sash does not fall off her shoulder and that she does not faint in front of thousands of people as her stomach flips over and over.
The Night She Won Miss America Page 10