Beauty Queen

his life. Often, when he had arguments with Cora, he longed to tell her that she was an infidel because she loved shrimp cocktails.
    Love had come only later.
    He had met Marion at a quiet little men's dinner party in Soho, in 1966. Marion was at the peak of his career as a Class A racing driver, and was passing through New York on his way to the Indy. A friend brought him to the party, and all the guests were devastated by the thoroughbred intensity and blond good looks of the young Englishman, who even then was taking reckless peeps out of the closet.
    Bill was astonished to find that, of all the men there, he was the one provoking Marion's interest. He drank too much wine, and they talked intensely.
    When Marion left New York, Bill recklessly invented a business reason to fly out to Indiana. There, lost in the godless crowd, his ears deafened by the scream of the engines and the rock music, he died a thousand deaths watching Marion drive the Lotus to second place, and knew that he was in love.
    He and Marion didn't even go. to bed together until three weeks after they met, and a week after the Indy, when they were both back in New York.
    Now Bill was jolted out of his reverie. Jeannie was dialing again, stabbing childishly at the dial buttons on the phone. She was talking to her attorney, George Meers. It seemed that George was delighted at her decision, and ready to help.
    He stood up, feeling a little panicked, and picked up his briefcase.
    Jeannie moved the mouthpiece away from her lips, and raised her face to be kissed, smiling trustfully.
    "I have to go," Bill said, pecking her cheek. "I'll be downtown all day. Maybe I'll see you later."
    And he fled.
    Chapter 4
    Bill Laird went striding into his office, carrying his little briefcase with yesterday's closing papers in it. The deal had been consummated, the money had changed hands. Now, with the aid of federal tax incentives given for private urban renewal, all he and A1 had to do was make it work. Today he was going to spend the entire day downtown inspecting his dream.
    If it weren't for Jeannie and her cockamamie political venture, it would be a beautiful day.
    He strode among the desks, throwing little smiles at his people. "Hello, Jamie." "How's the new grandchild, Mrs. Markstein?"
    He stopped at the desk of his executive secretary, Mrs. Voeller, and gave her the papers from yesterday to file.
    Then he stuck his head in his brother's door, and said, "Hi, Al, come on in for a cuppa."
    His brother Allen looked up from a South Bronx memo he was reading.
    Allen was three years younger than Bill, but looked ten years older. He was tall, very thin, a little stooped, with a fringe of snow-white hair around his skull and a shiny pink pate. He had the air of a small-town bank vice-president, and, in fact, he was content to sit at his desk and play with calculators and computers, and figure out all the minute financial and legal angles, and nitpick and worry. He was the visible Laird partner, the one who sat on the city planning board and was quoted in Barron's. He preferred to leave the visions and the creativity to his shyer, less publicly visible older brother. They agreed that they made a good pair, and in fact they had never had a major quarrel regarding the business.
    Now and then they traded jokes about how they were the mini-Rockefellers. "After all," A1 was fond of saying, "we're Baptists too, we do a little bit of philanthropy, we've got a tight little family. We've got a little money, and a little real estate, and even a little piece of politics in New York State. The only difference," he'd add, "is that our grandfather didn't get his start selling patent medicine."
    When asked what their grandfather had gotten his start at, A1 would answer with a perfectly straight face, "Oh, he was a horse thief."
    For all their jokes about the Rockefellers, however, the two brothers still felt the weight of their declasse Brooklyn background. They were not to the purple born, and knew it, and had no pretensions.
    For much of his life, however, Bill Laird had a deep-down worry about his brother. A1 was every bit as rigid a Baptist as Cora, every bit as puritanical, and every bit as ready to call something "infidel" if he didn't understand it. For this reason, Bill had felt increasingly remote from his brother over the years, as his inner commitment to being gay broadened. He shuddered to think of what would happen to Laird & Laird if A1 found out that he was gay. His