The Night She Won Miss America

by Michael Callahan

  “There’s nothing to figure out. You need to come home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Why haven’t you told anyone where I am?”

  He leans back. “You know why. Or have you forgotten our last meeting, in the interview room after you won?”

  There is nothing in that for her. “How did you find me?”

  He deflates, issues a weary sigh. “I repeat: I’m a reporter. And a good one. Especially when I feel I understand the person I’m writing about.”

  “Eddie,” she says softly. “I am so very sorry you are mixed up in any of this, and that I may be jeopardizing your job. I would never do anything to hurt you. You’ve been a good friend to me.”

  Hurt falls over his eyes like a pall. “That’s all I am to you? A friend?”

  Yes, she thinks. He is handsome, and there is no mistaking that he cares for her deeply. She knows little of the world of journalism, but she is not naïve enough not to know the risk he is taking by tracking her down and not telling his superiors. If someone else finds her and gets the story, and his bosses at the Press find out, his job is over. His career is probably over. You only do something like this for someone you love. She wishes she could love him back. How much easier that would be, to fall into his arms, to have him lead her back to the car, to go back to Delaware, forget any of this ever happened. But she, too, knows what love is. She loves Griff with all her heart. He’s ill, fragile. He loves her and he needs her, and he did all of this for her. She cannot abandon him. She won’t.

  But she needs to buy time. So she looks Eddie squarely in the eye and says, “For now.”

  He blows out some air—whether in relief or frustration, she can’t be sure. “You need to come back with me. I’ll be able to smooth all of this out with the authorities, and I’ll tell your story more sympathetically than any of the other mooks trying to find you will. I am your best shot at staying out of jail, Betty.”

  “Jail!”

  His turn to look around. Two men three booths away glance over, then return to their argument about the Giants. “Careful.”

  “What do you mean,” she utters in a panicked murmur, “jail?”

  “There’s a warrant out for Griff’s arrest. Kidnapping is a federal offense.”

  “He didn’t kidnap me!”

  “They don’t know that. You left half of your belongings, including your cosmetics, in the hotel room. It was clear you’d either been hustled out or taken out. There was blood on the carpet.”

  “I cut myself grabbing my razor.” She studies his expression. “How did you know that I wasn’t kidnapped?”

  “I’m still not sure you haven’t been.”

  “You sent me that note when you knew Griff was out. So obviously you’ve been here for a little while. And you didn’t go to the police.” She sinks back into the booth. “You knew. You knew I came here willingly.”

  “I wasn’t certain. But I surmised it was likely, yes.”

  She looks down into her coffee cup, slowly putting the pieces together. “You spoke to Ciji.”

  He nods. “I spoke to Ciji. Not that she said much. I’m sure she told the police even less. I got a feeling she was unsure she had done the right thing by tracking Griff down for you.”

  “Even so, this doesn’t make sense. I sent my parents a letter. I explained everything.”

  “Betty, I can assure you your parents never got any letter from you. They are sick with worry, wondering if you’re even alive.”

  The news lands like a punch. Her poor parents, picturing her dead, lying somewhere by the side of the road. How did they not get the letter? Griff. He was supposed to mail it. Clearly he hadn’t.

  But why?

  “This is all a colossal mistake,” Betty says. “I’ll explain it to everybody.”

  “It’s not that simple, Betty. You can’t just phone your family and say, ‘Sorry for the mix-up.’ The car Griff took technically belongs to his father. That’s theft. And Griff took some money from his dad’s locker at the marina. Old Man McAllister is hopping mad. He’s pressed charges. If you tell them you were not forced into this, you could go down with him as an accomplice. Think about your family, Betty. Think about your life.”

  She shakes her head. “No, no. There is no way that Honor McAllister would allow her husband to press charges against her own son. She loves Griff more than anything in the world.”

  “She doesn’t have much say in the matter. Rumor has it she’s hired her own muscle to find you two. She’s far more desperate than anyone to find Griff.”

  “Of course she is. He’s her son.”

  “That isn’t why.”

  His cat-and-mouse game is growing irksome. “Then why?”

  “Griff is sick, Betty. Seriously sick.”

  “I know.”

  His eyes narrow. “You know? You know what, exactly?”

  “He has a nervous condition. It’s under control. He’s good when he’s with me. He just needs some medicine, that’s all. He’s out getting it now, as a matter of fact.” She doesn’t know why she’s lying. “He just needs his medicine to keep calm. Stress triggers his ailment, and as I said, this has all been very stressful.”

  He reaches across the table, puts both of his hands atop hers. She tries to pull away again, but he is surprisingly strong, pins them to the tabletop.

  “Betty, listen to me very carefully. Griff does not suffer from some mild nervous condition. He’s extremely ill. He could be dangerous. He suffers from something called schizophrenia. Do you know what that is?”

  She’s heard of it, vaguely. “Not precisely.”

  “It’s a serious mental disorder. Griff was diagnosed as an adolescent. He even had electroshock treatments for it a few years ago. It’s why he had to drop out of NYU; there was some incident with a girl there. He’s capable of wild mood swings and extreme paranoia. He sometimes hears voices in his head saying all sorts of terrible things. He doesn’t always have a firm grip on reality.”

  With one violent jolt, she manages to tug her hands away. “You’re making this up. I’ve been with Griff for over a week. He’s perfectly fine. He hasn’t shown a single symptom of anything being wrong. You’re just trying to frighten me.”

  “No, I’m not. I wouldn’t do that. I care too much about . . .” He trails off. “Schizophrenics can have extended periods where they show no outward signs of turmoil, even as their brain is attacking them with all sorts of delusions and commands. But the one part Griff was honest about was his need to avoid stress. It can trigger manic outbursts. And let’s face facts, Betty: this is a stressful situation you’ve gotten yourself into. He could snap at any moment. You have to trust me. I deal in facts.”

  “How did you find out these particular ‘facts’?”

  “I spoke to his mother.”

  Betty tries to picture it, Eddie Tate in his hand-me-down sports jacket and crooked tie, sitting in front of a silver tea service in Honor McAllister’s bay-front living room as she calmly explained that her son, her pride and joy, was a lunatic. Betty remembers the intercom connected to Griff’s bedroom, Honor soothing him.

  “She would never talk about Griff in such a way.”

  “She’s his mother, Betty. Do you honestly think she would be hiring detectives to find him if he’d just gone off for a fling with some girl?”

  Betty looks at him archly.

  “I’m sorry. That was a crummy thing to say.”

  “Yes. It was.”

  “I’m only saying that she’s trying to save his life. And she knows that the longer he is away from his doctors and his family, the more likely it is that he is going to hurt himself or people around him. I need you to understand the fix you’re in. I can’t let you go back to him.”

  A thought enters Betty’s mind. “Does she know where you are?”

  He looks her dead in the eye. “Nobody knows where I am. Or where you are. Yet.”

  “The police won’t find us.”<
br />
  “I did.”

  “You’re smarter,” she says. “And you know . . . me . . . in a way they do not.”

  Something flashes in his eyes. As long as he has hopes that his feelings may be reciprocated at some juncture, he won’t divulge her secret. She’s sure of it.

  The waitress comes, refills their cups. Betty glances at her watch. This is taking too long. Griff will be back soon. He’ll go cock-eyed if he walks back into the apartment and she’s not there.

  “I have to go,” she says.

  “I won’t let you.”

  And he won’t. She can see the determination etched in his baby face. She has to buy more time. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,” she says deliberately, thinking out her argument as she enumerates it. “If he’s as volatile as you say he is, then he could do anything if he finds out I’ve gone. I can’t have that on my conscience, Eddie. I could never live with myself if something awful happened to him or anyone around him because of what he did for me. Something I asked him to do.”

  “Only because he didn’t have the guts to be Miss America’s boyfriend.”

  “You’re being peevish.”

  He says nothing. His face is impassive, unreadable. “What are you suggesting, exactly?”

  “I need to go back and get him to come with me. With us. Quietly. Reasonably.”

  “You’ll never get him to do it.”

  “I got him to slip me out of Atlantic City without anyone knowing,” she says curtly. “You’d be surprised what I can get him to do.”

  “So, what? You’re just going to go back and say, ‘Hey, Griff, let’s take a walk’? And then we all get on the train at Pennsylvania Station?”

  “Something like that, yes. We’re supposed to go out tonight, in fact. And he doesn’t know you’re here. That anyone knows where we are.” It’s her turn to put her hand atop his. “I just need a few days. To talk to him, to get him to come around. I can do it, I promise. A few days, Eddie. That’s all I’m asking for. Four days. Five at most.”

  “I’ll give you thirty-six hours.” He pulls out a pen, writes down an address. “This is the hotel where I’m staying. If I don’t hear from you by midnight tomorrow, I’m coming to get you. And if you’re gone, the whole tawdry story goes on the front page, his sick mind and all. Don’t cross me, Betty.”

  Ten minutes later she is out on the street, headscarf tied firmly back around her head, sunglasses firmly in place. They’ll go to the play tonight; they’ll have a wonderful date, like the ones they had in Atlantic City. She’ll find an opening, a way to get Griff to see they have to go back. She must.

  Betty barely notices when she bumps shoulders with the man hurrying up Eighth Avenue, does not register his mumbled “Pardon me” as she keeps going her way and he keeps ambling along his.

  She does not catch the look of grim satisfaction on his face as he turns up Twenty-Third Street, thinking to himself, Yup. It’s definitely her.

  ༶

  She allows herself this.

  They stroll down Forty-Fourth Street, like any carefree couple on any carefree evening, the brisk autumn air bringing their arms even closer around each other. Griff has bought her a new Scottish tweed jacket, and after properly admonishing him for spending money they do not have, she slipped it on, luxuriating in its beauty. Now they have just come from dinner, barbecued ribs at Embers on East Fifty-Fourth, he gleefully drowning their meal with hot sauce, she protesting in defense of her delicate stomach. Betty has never had beer before, was delighted by its acrid bitterness as it washed down the ribs. She has also never eaten at ten thirty at night—Ten thirty! For dinner!—but he insisted they eat after the play, that it would be fun to sit and dine late like regular New Yorkers. It is the kind of night that couples newly in love get to experience. She does not know how many more she will get to experience.

  It is the first time since leaving Atlantic City that she has not been nervous out in public, looking over her shoulder. When they exited the apartment, she snuck a quick glance around, expecting to spy Eddie lurking in a doorway. But there was nothing but what one would expect on a Manhattan side street: people coming home, people going out, taxicabs honking, a giddy Labrador retriever galloping ahead of its master, a colored man playing a saxophone through one of the open windows. It was amazing how safe a big, bustling city could make you feel.

  The walk home is long, the air crisp and delicious. “Tomorrow,” he says.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow I go to pick up the car. Our new car. The guy couldn’t find the papers, not that I should have been surprised by that.”

  She looks up at him, takes in his new face: he hasn’t shaved since they got to New York, and depending on the light, his short, scruffy beard gives him the look of either a young literature professor or an anarchist. He’s taken to wearing black-framed eyeglasses he really doesn’t need, but which he feels help keep him disguised, part of their effort to hide in plain sight. Indeed, with his altered countenance and her new dark wavy hair, anyone who had snapped a photo of them the day before the pageant and then taken another today would be shocked to have them identified as the same people.

  Not for the first time tonight, a question intervenes.

  How can you be dangerous?

  She considers Eddie’s warning. Schizophrenia? How could Griff be suffering so and show no outward signs of it? There have been times he has been quiet, withdrawn, going back to when they first met in Atlantic City. Wasn’t he moody the night they met, muttering at the bar? But then something had shifted, a light had come on. They’d gone to Captain Starn’s, and he’d eaten that monstrous meal, and they’d flirted over the table, and she’d sent the penny splashing into the wishing well. How long ago it all seemed.

  If it is a condition wrought by stress, certainly this week would have been enough to bring it on in full. And yet here they are, two young people in love, walking through a gentle mist that has begun to coat the streets of New York, giggling about everything and nothing.

  She has twenty-four hours to convince him to give up their plans and return to Atlantic City, or else suffer a monstrous scandal that will lead the authorities right to them and consume every front page in the country. Either way, their escape from reality is coming to an end. Which she worries may actually be the thing that does, in fact, make him sick.

  She wishes to preserve this for as long as she can, even as the ticking of the clock in her head grows louder by the hour, counting down the time until her bargain with Eddie must be kept. And it must be. Betty knows that it must be, just as, deep down, she has always known that this adventure could not last forever. Adventures never do.

  Betty leans into Griff. “Darling, I wanted to talk to you about something—”

  “Look up,” he says, turning them around.

  She glances up at him, follows his sightline.

  They have arrived at the west side corner of Broadway and Forty-Fourth, in the heart of Times Square. On the other side of the street is a twenty-seven-foot-high sign trumpeting: BOND. Underneath it is a running electric scroll of the headlines—“United Nations Headquarters to Be Dedicated,” blares one—and under that is more neon signage, declaring: TWO TROUSER SUITS. There is a huge waterfall behind it, and on either side seven-story-tall statues of a man and a woman, acting as bookends. A giant clock above the waterfall declares, “Every hour 3,490 people buy at Bond.” The building practically vibrates from all of the flashing lights.

  “This place, Betty, this city!” Griff exclaims. “I mean, look at it! You come here and you never know what you’re going to see, what you’re going to do next.” He turns to her. “Like this.”

  His kiss is lingering and powerful, a kiss that attacks the senses. She is at once ravenous, for the touch of him, the smell of him, the taste of him. She puts her left hand behind his neck, pulls him in, as if by sheer force the two of them can meld into one person.

  When they finally break, she is almost dizzy
. Griff takes her hands in his. And then, with the spinning playground of Times Square behind him, drops to his knee.

  “Betty Jane Welch, my love, my heart,” he says, with a look in his eyes so pure, so vulnerable, that it brings her to tears. “Will you marry me?”

  Nineteen

  Betty can hear Griff humming in the bathtub. It is the most relaxed he’s seemed since they left Atlantic City. Sun slants in through the window shades as she makes up the daybed. Reeve has already mercifully left for work. Griff mentioned at dinner last night that Reeve was wondering “when he was getting his apartment back.” To which Betty wanted to respond, Not soon enough.

  Perhaps she should be more kind, she considers, as she fluffs the pillows. After all, Reeve did take them in. And surely it has been trying, having two additional people—fugitives, no less—underfoot the moment you wake up and the moment you come home from work, in a tiny one-bedroom walkup in Chelsea. Before they go they need to give him something—a bottle of bourbon, a carton of cigarettes.

  For they are leaving tonight. This afternoon Griff will drop off their Mercury, now parked in some secret location only he knows, and trade it for the Fleetline, and off they go. To Buffalo—they are literally shuffling off to Buffalo. Griff has a friend there who can give him work in his dairy, which Griff has tried to convince Betty—and, she suspects, also himself—is just the same as working in a nursery. What was it he said? “It’s all nature.” Perhaps that is enough. She tunes back into his humming, tries to discern the song. “Sugar Moon”?

  Betty steps into the bathroom, pulls the towel from the rack. “You need to get out of there before you turn into a prune.”

  He reaches out. “Or maybe you should just come in.” He starts tugging her toward the tub.

  “Griffin McAllister, if you get me soaking wet in this dress . . . Don’t you dare!”

  He stops tugging but doesn’t let go. “You make me so happy, Betty. So incredibly happy. You know that, don’t you?”

  She kneels down by the tub, kisses him softly. “I do. I feel so blessed to have found you.”

  “So you don’t regret it? Giving up being Miss America, all of it?”