Beauty Queen

where she sat at the wrought-iron breakfast table, toying restlessly with her empty juice glass, she could let her eyes leap along the horizon and see all the great suspension bridges—the Triborough, the Queensboro, the Brooklyn, the Verrazano, the George Washington, even the little Willis
    Avenue bridge up in Harlem—that linked Manhattan Island's insanities with the rest of the world. Psychiatrists, in their godless and detached scientific way, agreed with believers that big cities like New York were a magnet for psychotics. Sometimes she wondered why she still linked her life with this evil place. Maybe it had something to do with her mother, who had managed to keep her innocence in this valley of the shadow of death.
    It was 9 a.m. that summer day. The morning sunlight struck fiery reflections from the windows of tall buildings facing the sun. On the East side the FDR Drive was a river of fire, as sunlight ricocheted off the thousands of cars jammed there. Down in the streets, people teemed like ants—her husband Sidney was down there somewhere, on his way to the New York News building downtown. And every one of those ant-like persons carried a staggering burden of sin, and had to be saved.
    She raised her eyes to the west. Far out in Jersey, where industries dotted the flats) a black column of smoke rose, filling the whole sky there. In reality it was probably a fire at a tank farm, near one of the refineries. But the menacing cloud made her think of doomsday—her imagination swept her closer to it, so that she could hear the rumble of flames and the screams of sinners. Thank heavens this would never happen to her.
    "More juice, sweetheart?"
    Her father's deep voice broke in on her apocalyptic reverie.
    "No thanks, Dad, this is fine," she said, forcing a smile.
    "You won't gain any weight back that way," he said.
    "Maybe God wants me to be skinny now," she said, giving the smile another try. "Anyway, I weigh the same now as I did when I was nineteen."
    Her father returned her fake smile with a real one. Sitting across from her, William Laird was reading Barron's with all the attention that one of Manhattan's biggest real-estate executives would give it. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal lay, already read and folded carelessly on top of Fortune and Dun’s, beside his half-empty cup of coffee.
    At sixty-one, with a net worth of over forty million dollars (mostly in real estate), she thought, her father could allow himself the luxury of morning coffee, and a 10 a.m. arrival at his downtown office. Bill Laird was not your typical businessman with relentless drive and a cardiac arrest coming up. He knew how to soften up a little and enjoy life—a quality that was somehow un-Baptist and un-Christian, Jeannie thought. Yet she had never actually known him to backslide. He was, well, a gentle and low-key Christian. That was all right, wasn't it?
    Her father was dressed up this morning—he was wearing the black pinstriped suit that she had always admired. Often he slopped around the city in old slacks and sweaters with the elbows falling out, carrying blueprints, and his homed-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose, looking half in a dream. His face, still faintly tanned from a week in the Florida Keys a month ago, was lined in all the right places, giving him an air of one of those dignified handsome middle-aged models in the New Yorker ads. Standing six foot one, he had the rugged look and lonely eye of a yachtsman, and in fact he did have a silly thing about the sea.
    In a few minutes, he would leave for the office, and then she would have to go home and decide what to do with her day. She would have to sit in her suddenly hushed study, and read what was left of her mail, and brood on all the things still undone.
    "You're quiet today," said her father.
    Jeannie sighed.
    "It's starting to get to me a little," she said. "I really have to get myself together. I pray and pray. I read the Bible like it's going out of style. But somehow . . . nothing happens. That has to be my fault, of course."
    Her father put down his Barron's, and refilled his cup from the sterling antique coffeepot on the table.
    "After what you've been through, there's no need to rush things," he said.
    She rested her eyes on him thoughtfully. Taking it easy was not really a Christian concept, was it? It was curious that she should find herself questioning him.
    "I've drifted long enough," she said, a little sharply.
    Her father's