Together they constituted a kind of sorority,...
Together they constituted a kind of sorority, these former Miss New Jerseys, and for a while there in the fifties they all attended one another's weddings, so that he must have met up with at least ten girls who had won the state crown and probably twice as many who'd become friends of this or that bride during the days of rehearsal for the state competition, girls who'd gotten as far as being Miss Shore Resort and Miss Central Coast and Miss Columbus Day and Miss Northern Lights, and there wasn't a one who could rival his wife in any category--talent, intelligence, personality, poiseIf he should ever happen to remark to someone that why Dawn hadn't become Miss America was something he would never understand, Dawn always begged him not to go around saying that, because it gave the impression that her having not become Miss America was something she was embittered about when, in many ways, losing had been a reliefJust getting through without humiliating herself and her family had been a reliefSure, after all the buildup the New Jersey people had given her she was surprised and a little let down not to have made the Court of Honor or even the top ten, but that, too, might have been a blessing in disguiseAnd though losing would cambon chanel not be a relief for a competitor like him, not a blessing of any kind, he nonetheless admired Dawn's graciousness--gracious was how the folks over at the pageant liked to describe all the girls who lost--even if he couldn't understand it
Losing allowed her, for one thing, to begin to restore the relations with her father that had nearly been ruined because of her persisting at something he so strongly disapproved of"I don't care what they're giving away," MrDwyer said when she tried to explain about the pageant scholarship money"The whole damn thing," he told her, "is about being ogledThose girls are there to be ogledThe more money they give for it, the worse it isDwyer agreed finally to come down to Atlantic City had been due to the persuasive skills of Dawn's favorite aunt, Peg, her mother's sister, the schoolteacher who'd married rich Uncle Ned and taken Dawn as a kid to the hotel in Spring Lake"It would make any father uncomfortable seeing his baby up there," Peg had told her brother-in-law in that gentle, diplomatic way Dawn always admired and wanted to emulate"It brings certain images to mind that a father would just as soon not have associated with his daughterI'd feel that way if it were my daughter," she told him, "and I omega seamaster fake don't have what it is that fathers naturally feel for their daughtersIt would bother me, of course it wouldI would think that what you feel is the case with a lot of dadsThey're really proud, their buttons are popping and all that, but at the same time, 'Oh, my God, that's my baby up there' But Jim, this is so clean and beyond reproach there is just nothing to worry aboutThe trashy ones get sifted out early--they go on to work the truckers' conventionThese are just ordinary kids from small towns, decent, sweet girls whose fathers own the grocery store and don't belong to the country clubThey get them up to look like debutantes but there is nothing big in their backgroundsThey're just good kids who go home and settle down and marry the boy next doorAnd the judges are serious peopleJim, this is for Miss AmericaIf it were compromising to the girls, they wouldn't allow it
Dawn wants you there to share in that honorShe will not be very happy if you are not there, JimmyShe will be crushed, especially if you are the only father who isn't there
"Peggy, it's beneath herIt's beneath all of us So that's when she laid into him about his responsibility not merely to Dawn but to the nation"You wouldn't come when she won at the local fendi spy replica levelYou wouldn't come when she won at the state levelAre you now telling me that you are not going to come if she wins at the national level? If she is awarded Miss America and you're not there to walk up on the stage and hug your daughter with pride, what will they think? They'll think, 'A great tradition, a part of the American heritage, and her father isn't therePhotographs of Miss America with her family, and her father isn't in a one of them' Tell me, how's that going to go down the next day?"
And so he humbled himself and he did it--against his better judgment, consented to come for the big night to Atlantic City with the rest of Dawn's relatives, and it was a disasterWhen Dawn saw him waiting there in his Sunday suit in the lobby with her mother and her aunts and her uncles and her cousins, every last Dwyer in Union and Essex and Hudson counties, all she was allowed to do by her chaperone was to shake his hand, and he was fit to be tiedBut that was a pageant rule, in case anybody who was watching might not know it was her father and see some kind of embrace and think something untoward was going onIt was all so that absolutely nothing smacked of impropriety, but Jim Dwyer, who had only recently recovered from the first rolex chain heart attack and so was on edge anyway, had misunderstood, thinking that now she was such a big shot she had dared to rebuff her own dad, actually given her father the cold shoulder, and in public, before the entire public
Of course, for the week that she was in Atlantic City under the watchful eye of the pageant, she had not been allowed to see the Swede at all, not in the company of her chaperone, not even in a public place, and so, until the very last night, he'd just stayed up in Newark and had to be content, like her family, to talk to her on the phoneBut Dawn's sincerity in recounting to her father this hardship--of her being deprived, for a whole week, of the company of her Jewish beau--did not much impress him when, back in Elizabeth, she attempted to assuage his grudge at what he remembered for many years afterward as "the snub
"That was just an Old World hotel that was the most wonderful place," Dawn was telling the SalzmansSomething you see in a movieBig rooms overlooking Lake GenevaI'm boring you," she suddenly said
"No, no," they replied in unison
Sheila pretended to be listening intently to every word Dawn spokeShe had to be pretendingNot even she could have recovered so completely from the eruption in Dawn's balenciaga bag study