Beauty Queen

everything with an air of overkill. He sat wondering how he was going to masquerade his way through the coming months. Thank God that he had courage enough to hint that he couldn't support her campaign much this time around. But she would make the demand again, he knew. The pressures
    on him, from both outside and inside, would grow and grow.
    The way she was poking at the telephone made him think of a little girl poking at mud-pies to see if they were "done" yet. It was the seriousness of it—those mud pies were really fruit-and-pastry pies being baked in a real oven. Jeannie had always been so serious about everything she did.
    The tragedy was that much in Jeannie's character reflected both her parents. And her parents, over the years, had carried on a silent and undeclared war—a cold war of the heart. A "police action" within their home. Their split was faithfully reproduced in the strong conflicting emotion that often threatened to tear Jeannie apart.
    Part of the problem had been that he was a liberal modem Baptist, while his wife had been a Bible-believer and a firm conservative. The Baptist faith was being ripped like the Temple Veil. The modernists held that the new scriptural and archeological discoveries showed parts of the Bible were simply myth and history. The conservatives clung doggedly to the idea that every word of the Bible was the revealed word of God. The rift had first split the Northern Baptist Convention. The more conservative churches, disgusted at the way liberalism was infecting the Sunday schools and colleges and seminaries, voted to withdraw from the convention and become independent. Now a similar rift was tearing apart the Southern Baptists.
    Those same arguments had echoed in the Laird home— first in the third-floor walkup on Clinton Street in Brooklyn, then in every home after, finally the penthouse apartment here, where the arguments seemed to tear the draperies of Scalamandre silk. The more he insisted that she simply could not ignore the evidence of the fossils that came out of the ground, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, the more she retreated into the stark emotion of faith.
    "You like to see criminals found guilty at trial, don't
    you?" he'd yell. "You accept the evidence that convicts those criminals, don't you? Well, evidence is evidence, even in religion."
    And she would retort in her calm high voice, "It's wicked to compare cops and robbers with the word of God."
    The sad part of it was that he had cared for her—her evenness, her purity, her command of herself, the fact that she had never made heavy sexual demands on him. When they had married in 1937, they had been two good kids from Christian families who wanted to do the right thing in life. It all had seemed so simple then.
    With the arguments had come the war for possession of Jeannie's soul. Jeannie had her mother's naivete and her inability to compromise. But she also had her father's energy and his worldliness. On top of that, Jeannie had always felt far closer to her father. Jeannie's mother had hated movies and talked about the Hollywood cesspool. But Bill sometimes said phooey and took Jeannie to a movie on Saturday afternoons—a nice moral movie like Walt Disney's Snow White or Bing Crosby in Going My Way.
    So when, in high school, Jeannie started talking about an acting career, her mother was very distressed and told Bill that he was leading the innocent girl down the path to Hell. Jeannie insisted she wanted to be a nice actress. Cora insisted there was no such thing as a nice actress, that Hollywood dragged everything nice down to its own level. And when Jeannie entered the Miss Subways contest and won it, her mother wept and softly called her an infidel, although the only part of Jeannie's body ever exposed in public was her face, on the subway posters.
    The next battle was about Jeannie's education. Cora admitted that Jeannie was a bright girl and felt that she ought to attend a good Baptist college and become a woman missionary. (Good women did not, of course, hope to preach, because that was specifically forbidden by the Bible.) But Bill felt strongly that Jeannie should go to a good cultured school. By then he had made enough money that he moved the family to a nice brownstone on Prospect Park and could afford to send Jeannie to Skidmore, to study acting, and he did.
    He was sure that Cora must have discussed divorce with their pastor. He was also sure that the pastor must have discouraged her from the