Beauty Queen

sight.
    Auntie Mary was standing on the porch. Mary was her mother's younger sister, who lived here year around and minded the children when Jeannie wasn't there. She was fifty-three, with a sagging face that wore an expression of dour disapproval and helpless disgust.
    "A little switching and she'll be exorcised," said Jeannie.
    As she said it, a chill went through her. She did believe in Satan—the same Satan who led homosexuals and gamblers and prostitutes to do the things they did.
    "Where are the other children?" she asked.
    Auntie Mary's reply had the tone of a tired politician who was about to write a letter of resignation, effective immediately.
    "I just caught Little Cora on the phone, talking to some boy. I don't know where Steve is, but let's assume he's not up to some evil, at least. And if you look in Jessica's room, you'll find that before she went riding she fingerpainted on the wall."
    Thirteen-year-old Cora was in her bedroom upstairs, laying across the bed in her swimsuit listening to rock music. The bed wasn't made, and clothes lay everywhere. She had put up posters of wild animals and rock stars. Jeannie slapped her, gave her the usual lecture about neatness and boys, and appropriated her radio.
    Later, when eight-year-old Jessica came tramping back to the house, dirty and glowing at her equestrian exploits, Jeannie snatched the birch switch out of her hand, stripped off her jeans and switched the little girl on her bare legs. Jessica, tough as nails, didn't cry. She just fought free and ran out of the room.
    Then Jeannie sat down at the kitchen table and cried.
    "If it wasn't for Steve," she thought, "I'd return all of these children to God for credit."
    After she'd had a good cry, she went into the library and sat down at the new white Smith-Corona electric to try and write a first draft of her Y.W.C.A. speech.
    As the cab weaved its way through noonday traffic, Bill Laird slumped back on the sticky ripped vinyl seat.
    He had told the driver to take him to the Sumptuary, on Third Avenue, and now he abandoned himself to the lurches and skidding stops of the cab ride.
    The South Street closing was over, the property was his. But right now it was hard to gloat over it. A New York State governor by the name of Jeannie Colter? he asked himself. It just didn't seem possible. It wasn't merely a question of Jeannie being a woman, and of women still being somewhat on the fringes in politics. It was also that Jeannie didn't really have the fine sense of politics, as practiced in New York, to be elected governor and survive a full term. Jeannie was a crusader in politician's clothing, not a politician. And a woman President? Even less possible, in his view.
    Still, American politics were no longer the deep safe river they had once been. These days they were full of uncharted white-water rapids and hidden sandbars. Jimmy Carter had come out of nowhere, out of a swing state, and he had ghosted the nation's vote out of Gerald Ford's hands. If Jeannie followed the Carter example, and surrounded herself with sound advisers, and listened to them, and made sound plans, she might at least make it to the State House in Albany. Or at least give her competitors a hell of a race.
    On the other hand, there was a ticking time bomb in Jeannie's political future. Namely, her father.
    Bill unbuttoned his jacket for relief from the heat. He stared out at the city real estate whizzing by on both sides— boutiques, florists, supermarkets, antique shops, delicatessens, synagogues, churches, immigrant activity centers. It seemed like his life was unreeling past him.
    Now and then, lately, he was inclined to take stock of his life. He had saved buildings from the city's dim pre-technological past and had reconnected their graceful spirit into the city's life again. They were buildings in which it was easier to remember that you were a human being, that you carried the burden of history, with its horrors and its delights. History . . . that was the key to it all, he thought.
    He smiled to himself a little. Jeannie, and nearly everyone else he knew in his church, had little sense of history. The Baptists had simply forgotten that in the seventeenth century they had come to the United States to escape bloody persecution in Europe. They staunchly claimed that they stood for religious freedom. Yet, once they were safe in the peaceful landscapes of America, many Baptists had shown a willingness to use their beloved Bible to