Beauty Queen

frank brown eyes, which had mesmerized so many New York clients and politicians into doing what he wanted, now fixed firmly on her. She found that she could not meet his gaze, and dropped her eyes.
    "Sometimes," he said softly, "you think you're drifting. But God sees the river, and all the bends it takes, and the ocean where it's heading."
    A rush of warmth went through Jeannie. How could she have doubted her father's faith? She smiled—a real smile this time.
    "Now you know why I come trotting over here for breakfast every morning" she said, grinning. "To pick up some crumbs of wisdom from your plate."
    Her father threw back his head and laughed his hearty laugh —she had always called it his bear laugh.
    "Why don't you come with me today," he said. "Today's the big day—we close on the South Street property. Maybe
    I could tempt you to taste just a drop of champagne with
    __ _ // me.
    Jeannie considered. The thought of shuffling papers down on South Street, about which her father had talked just a little too much, didn't fit with her doomsday mood.
    "Oh, I just feel like being quiet and thinking today," she said. "How about dinner tonight?"
    "Not tonight," he said. "I've got a dinner engagement."
    "A lovely lady, I suppose?" she said.
    She was always jealous that some other woman would replace her mother. God should have put the word "remarriage" in the seventh commandment along with the word "adultery."
    Her father laughed again, not so heartily this time.
    "No," he said, "a client."
    Jeannie shrugged and picked up his copy of the New York Times. She never asked about the clients he had dinner with. They were always dull people who talked about zoning and sewers.
    She scanned the front page quickly, expertly. The Times was an infidel rag. But she would have to get back into the old routine of reading it, as well as other papers, and briefing herself on the news. And if things started going well for her again, she'd have aides who would brief her. Good aides were the key to everything these days.
    In the lower righthand comer of the front page, there was a modest headline that read, GAY RIGHTS BILL TO BE REVIVED IN CITY COUNCIL.
    Jeannie knew very well what "gay" meant. And it did not mean "happy."
    A slow prickling rush went over her—the kind of rush she thought she might feel if she ever saw Satan face to face. She had the feeling that Satan did not look like the pictures in books—a fierce-looking android with horns and bat wings. No. Satan was legion, the way the Bible said. He was a mass of lost souls, seething like maggots, as huge and as dead as the moon spinning through space. And many of those lost souls were homosexuals—more and more of them, these days, sucked into that dead mass by the forces of gravity peculiar to their condition—liquor, drugs, the evil dances in their bars, and most of all by their own perverse willfulness to ignore the written Word of God.
    Jeannie shook her head slowly. "The homosexuals never give up," she said. "They're starting it again, right here in town."
    Her father looked engrossed in Barron's, and for several moments he did not look up. Suddenly he said mildly, "What, sweetheart?"
    Jeannie's mind was already off and running.
    "The pervert bill," she said. "Councilman Matthews is introducing it again. How that pervert-lover got elected, I'll never know. You know, that's the bill that gives them the right to teach in schools, and live where they please, and so forth."
    "Why worry about it?" said her father, burying his face in Barron's again. "It always got voted down before."
    "Dad, did you ever knowingly sell a building to homosexuals?" she said.
    Barron's came down slowly, and her father stared at her.
    "What?" he said.
    "Well, did you?"
    He put the paper down on the table. "Sweetheart, I don't pry into the sexual secrets of my clients. I'm sure that even my, uh, heterosexual clients have secrets that wouldn't bear examination."
    "If every decent person refused to sell to them, or rent to them," she said, "they'd have to leave town. They'd even have to leave the country."
    "Sweetheart, many homosexuals aren't identifiable as such. How would you know them?" He sipped at his coffee. "What got you off on this tangent?"
    “Tangent?" she said. "This is no tangent, Dad. The sexual perverts never give up. That's the fourth time they've tried to get that bill through the city council." She was still skimming the article. "It says here that the homosexuals have been