Beauty Queen

idea of divorce. The pastor was realistic enough to see that, despite her liberal education and her new sophistication, Jeannie didn't smoke or dance when she came home to visit. But when she was a junior, she entered the Miss New York contest, and she won it. Mortified at the idea of her daughter walking down a runway in a bathing suit before thousands of men's eyes, Cora could only turn her face away and weep. Then came Jeannie's nearvictory in the Miss America contest, runner-up with her dramatic recital of a modern Iphigenia, and her being signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in a starlet role, and her engagement to Sidney.
    By then Jeannie had learned to sip at a cocktail (never more than two). She tried hard to explain to her mother that she was still pure, but her mother didn't believe her, until she had her examined by the family doctor.
    The gentle cold war went on after Jeannie's wedding. Bill liked Sidney—Cora did not "The boy is unsaved—he doesn't even go to church regularly," Cora said, blinking her soft gray eyes.
    As Jeannie's children came, Cora didn't approve of the way Jeannie was bringing them up. "Too much permissiveness. No Bible reading at home." Cora was pleased when Jeannie's acting career crumbled, but she was displeased when Jeannie went into politics. "It is wicked for a woman to teach men, or to hold authority over men." In vain Jeannie protested that she wasn't teaching men, just trying to get them to vote the right way.
    In 1976, when Jeannie had her nervous breakdown, Cora was already dying of cancer and high blood pressure. Vainly, Jeannie assured her mother that now she was saved. Very softly, very bitterly, her mother said, "Just in time for you, and just in time for God. But too late for me. You've helped to kill me."
    Then there had been the matter of Bill's slow-growing awareness of his gayness.
    He had never been sure if Cora knew about it. He did sense, sometimes, that she suspected something. Sometimes she wept and whispered with terrifying intensity about his "wicked" ways of living, but she never made specific accusations.
    She came down so hard on Jeannie about an innocent seventh-grade crush on her pretty English teacher, Miss Wilkins, that Jeannie's ability to have close friendships with other women was badly damaged. As for openly gay men, whom Cora sometimes saw on the streets of New York, she considered them the most infidel of the infidels.
    Now that he thought about it, it was possible that Jeannie had learned her homophobia from her mother.
    Bill's pragmatic mind led him early to recognize that he liked men better, just as it had led him to see the sense in evolution. But that was in the 1950s, when gay life in New York was still a limbo. A few clandestine visits to bars convinced him that the fear of the police raids destroyed one's dignity as a human being.
    Instead, he found his way to the West Side Discussion Group. In those days, the Group met quietly in members' apartments, and he became known as "John." He wasn't too surprised to meet a liberal Presbyterian minister in the group, who sat down with him one day and showed him the truth about the Holy Bible. Even today, he could still hear the man's voice, could still see his finger pointing out the passages.
    "There doesn't have to be a conflict between your Baptist beliefs and the Bible," the minister had said. "Read the Bible carefully, especially Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Numbers. These are the chapters where God gives all his laws to the Israelites. And you will see that homosexuality clearly falls into what we now call the ceremonial laws, as distinguished from the moral laws. Homosexuality was forbidden to men only— nothing is said about lesbians. Yet adultery, which is clearly in the moral law, is specifically forbidden to both sexes."
    As the minister talked, Bill had felt a slow ecstatic brightening of the mind. The Bible called homosexuality an abomination—but it also labeled as abominations the eating of shellfish and blood, the failure to practice ritual cleanliness after childbirth, and the imitating of Canaanite tattoos.
    "Think about it," the minister had said. "In the United States we put men in jail for twenty years for sodomy. But we don't put them in jail for twenty years for eating a rare steak or telling fortunes. Yet the Bible says that all those things specifically deserve the death penalty."
    That conversation, as much as his first shy sexual contacts with men, was the turning point of