The Night She Won Miss America

by Michael Callahan

  Betty thinks back to yesterday morning, to the cop walking slowly toward them inside the diner, the strenuous effort she’d had to make to appear stolid. With each of his approaching steps, she’d zoomed right to the worst—being escorted out of the diner, a thousand flashbulbs exploding at the disgraced Miss America. Griff behind her, screaming and attempting to shake off the escorting officers, his internal voices at full throttle. It had unfurled like a ten-second newsreel before a movie showing.

  “Is that your Fleetline out in the parking lot?” the cop had asked Griff. He had the mailbox build and beefy hands one would expect of a policeman, but his face seemed soft, delicate, almost feminine, as if the wrong head had been placed on his body.

  “Yes, sir,” Griff had replied, and then picked up a slice of bacon and shoved it into his mouth, as if the question had been asked and answered and that was that. Betty had studied him like one does a particularly exotic zoo animal. She wondered if the voices were telling him what to say, how to act. This was now her default: everything was about the voices.

  “Your brake lights are on,” the cop said curtly, clearly annoyed either by Griff’s lack of suitable apprehension at being questioned by an officer of the law or by his insouciant reaction to the cop’s kindness for coming into the diner and pointing this out. Betty had quietly let out a long, hearty exhalation, even as she continued to wipe her clammy hands against the sides of her dress under the table.

  Griff looked up, smiled. “Why, thank you, Officer . . .” He squinted at the cop’s lapel. “. . . Staiber. I do appreciate you letting me know.” He stood, extended his hand. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Patrolman Staiber, seemingly mollified, shook Griff’s hand and wished them both a good day before heading back to the counter for a cup of coffee and some harmless flirting with Shirley the waitress. “I thought the jig was up,” Betty whispered.

  “You worry too much,” Griff had said, and then returned to the last of his eggs.

  The memory fades as Betty feels her body slacken, dovetail into the rocking of the car. She dozes off once more until she feels his tapping on her forearm. “Bett, wake up, honey,” Griff says, pointing to the looming, multi-gabled mansion in front of them. “We’re here.”

  ༶

  Ciji almost hadn’t recognized them. Betty seemed skeletal, as if she had just emerged from the shadows of Ravensbrück rather than New York; her drab, wrinkled dress hung around her frame limply, like it was too tired not to slouch. Her hair was a disaster, dark and wild, which only made her skin, which had been like porcelain the night she won the crown, now seem chalky and gray. Purplish circles framed her eyes.

  And Griff. The mustache and scraggly beard had transformed him from movie idol into someone who looked like a young, angry Russian history professor. Ciji couldn’t tell whether she had been influenced by Eddie’s revelations yesterday, but to her he seemed shifty, bordering on paranoid.

  She leads them up the flights of narrow, winding servants’ stairs in the back of the hotel until they reach a tiny attic of a room at the end of the hall. Betty goes to the window, which looks out onto the rear lawn below and where workers scurry about, laying out thick bolts of canvas. The room is stuffy and horrifically small—it can’t measure more than nine-by-eight—and boasts only a single bed in a metal frame, a floor lamp, and a small wooden nightstand with a ceramic bowl and pitcher. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do better,” Ciji says. “But I needed somewhere you wouldn’t be seen. It’s the best I could manage.”

  “It’s perfect,” Betty says, arms crossed, eyes still fixed outside. Her monotone matches her appearance: tired, flat, defeated.

  “We truly appreciate everything you are doing for us,” Griff says. “And, of course, the money.”

  The money? Ciji turns expectantly as Betty jerks around from the window. “Darling, let’s not discuss such things when we’ve only just arrived,” Betty says. “We don’t want to be rude when Ciji is showing us such kindness.”

  Ciji picks up the cue. “Don’t be silly, Betty.” She turns to Griff. “I’m happy to help. It’s just that I can’t get any money until the bank opens again on Monday. But that will give you two some time to relax a little bit, to regain your strength before you begin on the next leg of your journey.”

  Griff takes her hand. “This is very generous of you.”

  “Not at all. Now I think we should let the driver rest a bit, and I will take Betty down to my suite for her much-deserved bath.”

  Griff appears suddenly stricken. “Oh, no, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s important . . . that we stay together.”

  “Griff honey, you’re exhausted,” Betty says. “You need to sleep. And I’m only going one floor down. I’ll be back in half an hour. And look at me!” She grabs lumps of hair in each hand. “I’m a mess. Please, my darling. I need to sit in a nice hot tub and wash away the road. You go lie down. All right?”

  Ciji drinks in the scene. And I thought I was the actress.

  Griff’s eyes begin shifting around the room. “They’re listening.”

  Betty takes him by the shoulders, leads him slowly onto the bed. She practically unfolds him, stretching his body out, gently removing his shoes, whispering to him the entire time. Finally she leans over, kisses him tenderly on the lips. She turns to Ciji. “What room are we going to?”

  They’re listening? Ciji says nothing for a few seconds, wondering whether she is supposed to lie. “It’s my room,” she says finally. It is not her room—it is the staff room, kept for those who fall ill or who need a place to sleep in case of car trouble or inclement weather. But today it’s her room. “From the front desk, you turn left and go down the hall, and it’s the last door on the left.”

  “Now there, you see?” Betty says. “You know exactly where we’ll be. But, Griff, you must promise not to come down unless it’s absolutely an emergency. We wouldn’t want our plans to go awry, would we?” She says it like a grandmother admonishing a little boy not to get out of bed on Christmas Eve and risk running into Santa.

  He reaches up, brushes her cheek with the back of his hand. “Okay, then,” he says. “I suppose I am tired.” There is no more talk of anyone listening.

  ༶

  The bath was heavenly. Hot, soapy, Betty blissfully alone in the bubbly suds, not having to think of anything beyond her taut muscles unwinding into the water. Ciji had whisked away her rumpled clothes to be laundered, after Betty had stripped naked right there in front of her, something Betty would have never considered during their week together at the pageant. The tenets of survival easily vanquish those of modesty and ceremony. Ciji left her an outfit to wear, a navy blue and white polka dot wool crepe day dress with a Queen Anne neckline and a gathered waist panel, along with a white cashmere cardigan sweater. Eyeing Betty’s dainty feet, Ciji had warned her that the navy peep-toe heels might be a tad roomy, so she’d left tissues to stuff into the backs just in case.

  Betty knew that Ciji had a thousand questions, but Betty had pleaded putting off answering until she could at least look and feel like a normal human being again. Brushing her now-dark hair in the mirror, she studies her own reflection, wondering if there are any traces left of the naïve girl who traded her life for a slice of lemon cake all of those months ago. She tries not to think of her family, wondering where she is now, why she’s done what she’s done. She feels assuaged in the belief that Martha has gotten a message to them. For now, that must be enough.

  Betty gathers up the towels from the floor and tosses them into the nearby laundry bin, checks to make sure she still has the key to the room. She’ll dash down the hall toward the sitting area, then make the quick left toward the interior servants’ stairs.

  But when she emerges from the hall, she finds herself momentarily turned around: are the stairs she needs these to the right, then? Or are they down a little bit, on the left? The ground floor is a warren of well-appointed drawing rooms, mercifully deserted save for one young couple, dee
p in conversation, having tea near a front window. As Betty tries to get her bearings, she feels a presence slide behind her.

  “Hello.”

  Eddie Tate’s pale blue eyes are as piercing as ever.

  “So nice to see you,” he says, taking advantage of his sneak attack and quickly guiding her by the arm toward the back door of the hotel. “I think it’s high time we caught up, don’t you?”

  Twenty-five

  Betty cannot decide whether or not to keep the cardigan on. At times, when the sun is shining down on them as they stroll the Cliff Walk, she feels unbearably warm; then, as soon as she starts to remove the sweater, some clouds pass overhead, the temperature plummets the way it only does in New England, and she finds herself buttoning it back up. It’s fitting. During her entire relationship with Eddie, she has run hot and cold.

  She’d protested that it was risky for her to go waltzing out in public. He was unmoved. “You owe me one walk,” he’d said.

  He was right about that.

  His hair, a throwback to her own former shade and perfectly parted to the side, flits about his face in wisps as the wind whips off the water. Combined with his dark sunglasses and form-fitting knit shirt, it all combines to give him a more rugged, masculine appearance than she would have thought him capable of.

  They pass the great back lawn of the hotel on the right, where dozens of workers hammer and lift and carry ropes and long metal poles and more bolts of pale yellow-and-white-striped canvas. “I wonder what all of this is about,” Betty says.

  Eddie stops. “Tomorrow night. It’s the big Masquerade Ball for the Preservation Society. Ciji says the Ocean House was pretty peeved they weren’t selected. I think everyone was worried that if the weather was bad the Cliff Lawn couldn’t pull it off, using a big circus tent. But it seems like it’s all going to come together.”

  An elderly French-speaking couple passes them. Betty laughs. “You never stop being a reporter.”

  He thinks about his own career, now in ruins. “Sometimes I do.” He reaches into his pocket, extracts a fresh newspaper clipping. “News from the home front. I thought you’d be interested.”

  Betty unfolds it, begins reading.

  NEW MISS AMERICA TO BE CROWNED IN A.C.

  Betty Jane Welch “left of her own free will,” officials declare

  By Charles Kaisinger

  Press Staff Writer

  ATLANTIC CITY—Officials at the Miss America Pageant announced last night that they will crown Miss Texas, Eleanor Patricia Wyatt, the first runner-up in this year’s contest, as the new Miss America. The move will officially strip the title from Betty Jane Welch of Delaware, who vanished the night of her crowning, reportedly in the company of her pageant escort, Mr. John Griffin McAllister of Longport.

  Miss Welch’s disappearance set off a frenzy of searches by law enforcement for clues to her whereabouts, and wild speculation that she had been kidnapped by Mr. McAllister or other parties. But yesterday pageant officials confirmed reports that Miss Welch had recently contacted Mr. McAllister’s sister, Martha, and through her relayed a message to her family in Delaware that she was well and had not been taken against her will. Interviewed by authorities, Miss McAllister—whose mother, socialite Honor McAllister, was recently involved in a car crash in New York City but is now recovering—said that Miss Welch had telephoned her yesterday and stated emphatically that she was not under duress and had left Atlantic City with Mr. McAllister of her own accord.

  As a result of these new facts, Atlantic City police have closed the case and stopped searching for the fly-the-coop lovebirds, whose whereabouts remain unknown. Pageant director Lenora Slaughter said a formal crowning of Miss Wyatt will occur this Saturday at the Traymore Hotel, followed by a small reception for honored guests. “We are happy to put this unpleasant chapter behind us,” Miss Slaughter said in a brief statement to reporters. “We are confident that Eleanor will represent the finest traditions of Miss America for her year of service.”

  Miss Welch’s win will be expunged from pageant records. Miss Slaughter declined to say whether the pageant would seek compensatory damages from Miss Welch, if and when she surfaces, for her abdication. “At this moment we would like to concentrate on the future, not the past,” she said.

  Thank God for Martha. My parents know I’m safe. This is one step closer to all being over. Betty turns to him. “Well, at least they’ve stopped looking for us.”

  “The Atlantic City cops, anyway.” Eddie conjures an image of his last day in the office, packing his desk as his coworkers tried not to look, except of course for that chucklehead Chick Kaisinger. He’d been panting like a German shepherd to take over the missing Miss America story since it began.

  “How come you didn’t write the story?” Betty asks.

  He shrugs. “On a different beat now.”

  They begin walking again, away from the cacophony of the workmen and the rising tent. “I didn’t think I would ever see you again,” she says finally.

  “Were you hoping you wouldn’t?”

  “I know you must be sore. But I did call. I did. I left a message at your hotel. You were just . . . too late.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t realize I was going to miss the murder.”

  He wants to stuff it back into his mouth, like eating a piece of paper. She stops dead in her tracks.

  “That was cheap. And unworthy of you.”

  “A man is dead, Betty.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “So help me understand.”

  Betty folds her arms, walks slightly ahead of him. “You went into the apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I was chasing a story.”

  “Which you didn’t write.” They walk a bit farther in silence, until she finally asks, “Why are you here?”

  “Ciji asked me to come.”

  “You didn’t come for Ciji.”

  “Do you love him?” he blurts out. It is the question he does not want answered, because as long as it isn’t answered, declaratively, plainspokenly, then his mind still contains room to be unencumbered, to host fantasies that he cannot let go of, no matter how hard he tries. But he must have the answer. He must.

  “I don’t want to, if you can believe that.”

  They are silent for seconds that tick by like hours, both of them now looking out at the placid, rippling water, the spray from the whitecaps mixing into the breeze. “I fell in love,” she says finally. “I won’t apologize for that. It was real and true, and I had never been that happy in my entire life. I didn’t know the world could look like that, could smell like that. He told me I was the world to him. You have to understand what that does to a girl when she hears that.”

  “The world,” Eddie says, “until you won Miss America.”

  “Until I won Miss America,” she repeats. “I mean, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. He told me straightaway that he was not going to be Miss America’s boyfriend. That the stress of it would prove too much. And I didn’t care, because it never occurred to me that I could actually be Miss America. And even after I won, I didn’t think about it. I just thought it was something he’d said, that when he saw me—”

  “Like I saw you.”

  She nods. “Like you saw me. Yes. The truth is I wanted him to look at me the way you did after you came back to retrieve your hat.”

  “So you were kissing some image of him, then? Not me?”

  She takes a deep breath in. “No. I certainly knew it was you.”

  “And yet you’re still in love with him.”

  “It’s more fraught than that. I owe him.”

  “For what? For being your escort for a week?” His tone is sardonic, laced with a virulent jealousy that makes him ugly. He hates himself for it.

  Betty wants to see his eyes, but his sunglasses obscure them. Instead he keeps looking off intently at the sun-dappled water, as if he’s trying to catch the end of a yacht
ing race in the distance.

  “Griff made his position perfectly clear right off the shake: I ignored his concern, and I swept away the warning signs of his illness because they didn’t fit in with the summer romance I was having. And then, to make things all the worse, when he simply kept his word by breaking things off, I not only had Ciji track him down, but I begged him to take me away, to let us go someplace, just the two of us. He did everything I asked. And now, because of that—because of my selfish actions—his sickness has become much more grave, and his judgment’s impaired, and Reeve is dead, and the scandal grows bigger by the day. And all of it is my fault, don’t you understand? I can’t just toss him aside now, discard him like some old garment that no longer fits. It’s not who I am. Surely you see that.”

  So Griff killed Reeve.

  Eddie ponders her words, feels his heart constricting as silence descends once more, like a curtain coming down between them. For a while the only sounds are those of idle conversations that grow louder and then softer as people pass, and the gentle ripple of the breakers.

  “So we walk him down to the police, all of us. We tell the truth—”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is that simple. It’s the only thing that makes sense, to stop this madness.”

  “He has a gun.”

  “What?”

  “He has a gun. I don’t know where he got it, and it doesn’t matter. But he has it. I’ve seen it. Only he keeps changing where he keeps it.”