The Night She Won Miss America

by Michael Callahan

  And who would offer her sympathy? Who wanted to hear how she had suffered? How she had almost been raped in New York, had slowly discovered she had put her trust in a young man battling demons the naked eye could not see? That would have to wait for another hour, another day. Today was about closing the door on all of this for good. For making amends. For letting go.

  The car turns left onto a long drive, slows as it approaches the guard at the front gate. Betty cannot look at the guard, so she keeps her eyes peeled out the passenger window, gazing over the trees and flowers everywhere, her sight inching up the lush front lawn that lies beyond the tall metal fence to the imposing white columned building beyond.

  It’s in the thicket of rural Burlington County, just over an hour from Longport, so it will be uncomplicated for his family to visit him, which fills Betty with an undeserved sense of relief, like the thief who is grateful that the bank has stepped in to make full restitution to his victims. She wonders how often they will visit, how much they can bear. How much she has caused them to bear.

  Honor was in the hospital for a little over a week. The bullet had missed a vital artery by inches; she’d had additional injury to her damaged foot from the fall. But she has recovered, the way such steely roses do, though the scar that counts—the one on her heart—is the one that will never evanesce.

  Betty wrote Honor three times asking for permission to see him and got no reply. The last letter contained outright begging. By that time Betty had little regard for her own pride. How could she? She knew nothing except that she had to see him again. And then finally she had received a letter from Martha, explaining all that had happened in these last few months, and as Betty went paragraph by paragraph through the prose, standing in her bedroom, she had felt herself falling, as if she were sinking in quicksand. She had pressed her back against the bedroom wall and actually slid to the floor, a bit at a time, as she read Martha’s explanation, written in her girlish, overly round script, and absorbed the reality of the ghastly bargain Honor had struck with the authorities to ensure that Griff was not sent to prison. “We are sustained by the knowledge that his acute suffering has come to an end, and he can live his remaining days in peace, surrounded by beauty and nature and those who can give him the care he needs.” Poor Martha, robbed of her own days in peace. It would only be a matter of time before she, too, despised Betty, resented her for all of it.

  The gate opens and the car slowly winds its way up the pebbly drive, the only sounds the crunching of the tires, the sweet singing of blue jays in the just-budding trees. It stops in front of the white marble steps that lead into the place. She’s worn her Sunday best: a green crepe afternoon dress with embroidered detailing, with a light off-white coat with raglan leg-of-mutton sleeves. She had debated the hat for an hour—a braided snood, to show modesty and contrition, or the matching hat made of light green netting and large fabric roses, to show effort? In the end she chose the hat. Her hair is back to its natural strawberry blond shade. She has color on her lips, blush on her cheeks, Shalimar on her neck and wrists. She wants to look nice when she sees him. She owes him that.

  She takes a deep breath, steps out of the car, prays that the knots in her stomach will unfurl as she walks inside.

  ༶

  She follows the well-starched nurse down a corridor that seems to stretch for miles. Amid the drab off-white and gray surroundings, Betty suddenly feels showy and self-conscious, like she’s worn a gown to a backyard picnic.

  They push through a set of double doors that lead to a garden in the back, a pleasant space marked by brick paths that bifurcate another large, lush lawn. Several other nurses sit with patients, and as Betty passes them, she notices a towheaded boy of about twelve, who sits at a table rolling a marble inside a large metal mixing bowl, over and over and over. He looks up and their eyes meet briefly, but his look is hollow, faraway, as if he is looking at something a great distance behind her.

  Betty and the nurse finally turn into a small glen with a gently tinkling fountain, where Betty glimpses the form of a lone young man, his back to her, sitting on an ornate white metal settee.

  “There he is,” the nurse says impassively. “Remember, you’ve only been approved for fifteen minutes. I’ll be back to pick you up. Dennis over there will be watching in case you need help.” She points to a lithe young orderly in a white shirt and matching pants, standing sentry about twenty feet away, his look bored, like his only thought is how much he’s dying for a smoke.

  Betty cannot move. She insisted on coming here. And now that she is here, her feet feel like they’re made of cement, planted in this garden like a statue of Venus. She finally walks toward him, gently, timidly, like Dorothy first approaching the wizard. She wills herself on, remonstrating her own recalcitrance.

  She turns to the left, decides it’s better to approach from the empty side of the settee. She’s afraid of seeing the damage too close.

  From the side he looks much the same—even remarkably well, one might say. His hair is longer now, no doubt on Honor’s orders, so that the surgical scars are not visible. But his face is clean shaven, his skin bright and clear. His profile remains intact, striking and Roman, the face of a god. He wears a loose, blousy shirt and matching oversize pants; there is a pair of leather slippers on his bare feet. His hands remain fixed in his lap, and even as she draws near, enters his sightline from the side, he never looks over, never acknowledges anyone is there.

  Betty gingerly takes a seat on the other end of the settee. “Griff,” she says, “Griff, it’s Betty.” She wants to touch him, to take his hand in her own. It isn’t permitted.

  He remains still for a full minute, so long that she is about to address him again when he slowly turns his face in her direction.

  It’s the eyes. Dead, horrible, unblinking. He might as well be a mannequin, staring vacantly out of the window of John Wanamaker. He says nothing.

  “Griff, it’s Betty,” she tries again, a bit louder this time, almost beseeching, trying to excavate a trace of the young man she knew.

  The young man she destroyed.

  “I’ve come from Delaware to see you. I . . . I wanted to bring you a present, some of those butterscotch candies you like, but they wouldn’t allow me to. I’ve been thinking of you so often, hoping you’re well. I only found out just a few weeks ago you were here.”

  He says nothing but does not turn away. Which forces Betty to do so instead. “It’s rather gay here,” she says, taking in the grounds. “Very green and bright and wide.”

  In her letter, Martha had warned her. But how could Betty have foreseen this? She bites her lower lip, fights tears as she fishes through her bag for a handkerchief.

  “Pretty,” he says finally. She pivots around, looks again for something in his eyes, something . . . there.

  “You’re pretty,” he repeats, slowly, wondrously.

  “Thank you, Griff,” Betty says. She dares to lean a bit closer, her eyes searching his face for something to hold on to. “Griff, do you know who I am?”

  A barely discernible smile forms at the edge of his mouth, the mouth she had kissed, so many times, passionately and hungrily, on the Boardwalk, on the beach, on the daybed in New York, the mouth that had told her he had a plan, that it was all going to be okay, until it wasn’t okay at all. “Pretty,” he repeats. And for the first time she hears his voice, hears it as it is, not as it was. It is the timbre and diction of a four-year-old. The ensuing years and all of their many complications and demons, removed by the surgeon’s scalpel.

  Betty stands, tosses the handkerchief back into her clutch and closes it. Griff looks back out to the meadow, as if she is merely a shadow that has briefly passed over and is now gone. She dares to bend over and place a gentle hand on his shoulder, kisses him softly on the cheek. “I’m so very sorry, my love. You’ll never know how much.”

  And then she walks away, and as she trudges up the steps and back through the hospital, her pace picks up, more of a stride t
han a walk, and she feels her face tighten with the bubbling of resolve.

  ༶

  Outside, Eddie leans against the passenger side, arms folded in front of him. Her barreling out of the front door appears to catch him by surprise.

  “How did it go?” he asks, walking toward her.

  Betty brushes past him, reaches for the car door, then stops.

  “It was difficult,” she says, turning back to him. Even now, in the mild spring temperatures of April, he is perspiring slightly at the temples, his blond hair matted down at the brim of his fedora. She wonders if he is someone who is simply always warm, even in the coldest of climes. And she wonders what might have happened if she had met him in a different climate, a different city, at a different time, and whether there might have been a different outcome for them if she had. For she knows there is no chance for them now. He has yet to accept it, but he will. He must. “I thank you so much for bringing me, Eddie. You have been so good to me. I don’t deserve it.”

  He looks at her, his eyes baby blue and mirthful, swimming with the love he thinks she can no longer see. “I think you deserve to be happy, Betty.”

  She leans up, kisses him tenderly on the cheek. It is that kind of day. A day for goodbyes. “Let’s go home.”

  As they pull away, she studies his profile in the driver’s seat. She knows she will again break his heart, this time for good. But he will be better for it. He will recover; he will put all of this behind him and marry a nice girl and have nice children. He will have the life he was supposed to have before she showed up on the Boardwalk with her bathing suit and sassy answers, derailing his life. His, and so many others’.

  As the car rolls back to Atlantic City, Betty presses her bag closer to her, thinking of her return bus ticket back to Delaware, safely tucked inside. But she will not stay in Delaware, trapped in her parents’ house. Their windows of concern are now frosted over, covered by the sheen of stinging disapproval that will last a lifetime.

  She will go somewhere where no one knows her. Betty has an aunt in Colorado. Colorado. That would be fine. She will bury her past, so deep no one will ever find it. She leans her head back onto the seat, watches her life unfurl inside her head, as if she’s turning the pages of a photo album. She will transfer to another college. Change her name, introduce herself everywhere as Jane. She will change her hair, her clothes. Invent an entire new history. She will meet and accept the courtship of a nice, bland, simple young man whose obsessions lay with his hometown baseball team and keeping his whitewall tires pristine, and who has no interest whatsoever in the Miss America Pageant. They will have lovely children and live in a lovely house. And she will never eat another slice of lemon cake for as long as she lives.

  Epilogue

  His leg aches. It’s to be expected, the doctors have told him, especially in rainy weather such as this. And even though he is only twenty-six, this—the dull, twinging stiffness, the occasional jolts of pain like when ice cream hits a sensitive tooth—will be with him until he is an old man, assuming he makes it to be an old man. Once you smash your femur into powder and break three ribs, then throw a blood clot in your lung for good measure, you don’t walk away unscarred. Actually, you don’t walk anywhere for eight months.

  Bron parks the car. He has just started driving again. It feels odd, new. He cannot believe it has been a year since he was last here, walking backwards down the driveway, looking at this house and wondering how he was ever going to convince the old woman inside it to talk to him. And then the car, roaring up seemingly out of nowhere, slamming into him as he feebly threw his arms out at the last minute, as if he were Superman stopping an oncoming train. It was eleven hours before he even woke up, lying in a bed at Bryn Mawr Hospital, his leg in pieces.

  He cracks open the car door, grabs the cane from the passenger seat. He hates using it, feels that after all of the physical therapy he has been through, he shouldn’t need it anymore, but the doctors have warned that rain is a wild card that will, for now, make it necessary. He worries that she will see him hobbling in and think he is trying to manipulate her, guilt-trip her. Though he suspects she is not a person who is easily influenced by such things. By anything.

  She was the one who called the police, ordered the ambulance. He still doesn’t know whether she watched the whole mess from behind her curtains, or whether the awful shriek of the crash sent her scurrying to the front door to survey the carnage. Doesn’t matter. He was surprised when she sent a card to the hospital. Brief, just signed, “So sorry for your accident. Wishes for a full recovery, Jane Proctor.”

  He wrote her a month ago, relaying his journey back to health and thanking her for calling 911. He also asked her if he could see her, to talk to her about the story he wants to do about her, about her journey, and why she should trust him to write it. It took him two days to find the right language to imply, but not specifically say, “Look, you owe me.” To his surprise she responded a week later, calling his office at six in the morning, when she knew he would not be there to pick up. Her voicemail was crisp, offering this date and time for a meeting, and little else. Though she did make it clear she would agree only to a “conversation,” not an interview.

  He has brought his digital recorder and notebook just in case, tucked away in his jacket pocket. The last thing he wants is to scare her off.

  He rings the bell, and a woman who is not Jane Proctor answers. She is short and squat, in her early fifties, with a wide, pleasant face and short reddish hair, wearing a baggy aqua sweatsuit with running shoes. “Come in, come in,” she says. “I’m Karen. I help Mrs. Proctor out a few days a week. Oh Lord, it’s really raw out there. Here, let me take your coat.”

  Bron shakes off the jacket and then follows Karen into a sitting room, where Jane is perched on a petite floral sofa perpendicular to an old stone fireplace. A well-laid fire smokes, sparks, crackles. The room is dim, worn, cozy, like the set of a Christmas special. There is a full tea service and a covered cake dish on the mahogany table in front of the sofa, with two comfortable club chairs in faded yellow upholstery on the other side. Jane is wearing a pale blue blouse with embroidery and dark slacks, a navy cardigan sweater thrown around her shoulders. She carries a slightly royal air, like the matriarch of a political dynasty.

  Bron hobbles in with the cane, extends a hand to her. “Thank you so much for having me.”

  She nods primly, waves him into a chair. “I’m sorry to drag you here in such terrible weather. Did you drive yourself?”

  “Yes, yes. Just back behind the wheel. Few weeks now. The leg gets creaky in the rain, but it still works on the gas pedal, thankfully.” They make idle chitchat for a few more minutes—his rehab process, the colder-than-normal spring, his neighborhood in Fairmount—as Jane pours the tea, adds lemon for him, cream and sugar for herself. Karen throws another log onto the fire, then disappears.

  “Thank you for having me,” Bron repeats. He cannot believe how nervous he is. Why is he so nervous? He has interviewed all sorts of people, many of them wary. But in every case there was some crack, some opening, some place to wedge in and pull back the casing, to dig to the person underneath. He looks at Jane Proctor, at her icy hazel eyes, and sees nothing but armor.

  It is almost impossible to believe that this woman was once Betty Jane Welch, Miss America 1950, the girl who at nineteen abdicated her title the night she won it; ran off with her boyfriend while being chased by private detectives, the police, and the press; then found herself mixed up in a toxic web of deceit, scandal, and murder that was eventually splashed onto the front page of every newspaper in the country. And then who, perhaps more amazingly, managed to vanish yet again.

  Jane gently places her cup and saucer on the table, then leans back into the sofa, eyeing him cautiously. “There is a reason, Mr. McCall, I have never spoken of the events of 1949,” she says, slowly, deliberately. Like she’s rehearsed. “And that should be obvious. I realize in this age we now live in, where everyone wants to
go on the Internet and be as famous or infamous as possible, the notion of wanting to avoid it just as passionately must seem rather strange. Or at least quaint. I was a public figure but for a brief moment in time. And I would very much like to keep it that way.”

  “But you have such an amazing story to tell,” he says. “You must know that. I mean, all of your privacy issues aside, objectively speaking, you must realize that your story is an incredible one.”

  “My ‘story,’ as you put it, is that I was a naïve girl of nineteen who got in over her head. I am hardly the first woman to have that in her past, I dare say.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Proctor, that’s a rather broad simplification of what happened.”

  She folds her arms. “What possible benefit—other than that of feathering your own career—can my rehashing all of this possibly hold? News vans outside my door all day and night? Strange people calling? My face plastered on the Today show? Tell me: Why on earth would I ever subject myself to that, subject my children and grandchildren to that, relinquish the quiet, orderly life I have spent the last sixty-five years building?”

  It is a good question. Actually, it is the question. But mercifully he has known it would be coming. A clear and honest answer, he is certain, is his only shot at getting her to lower the emotional drawbridge she’s kept raised for more than half a century.

  “I would say only this to you,” he replies. “We do not get to decide what history is. History decides what history is. And I think we, as a civil society, as a society of people who want to learn where we have been and where we are going, have a duty to record history as it happened, as accurately and comprehensively as possible. Yours has not been recorded at all. It’s a hodgepodge of rumor and speculation and some old tabloid headlines aggregated on Wikipedia. You are the only person who knows what really happened that fall of 1949.”