Beauty Queen

chance."
    "That's just what I'm saying," Danny said.
    "It's a big chance," she said.
    "What isn't?" he said.
    "If your big tough friends keep things quiet, that's great," she said. "But if things get ugly, then we're right there in the middle of it."
    "What the hell," he said. "We can fake. Wave your stick around. Make it look like you're going for the money. Look," he said, "you know I'm a gambler at heart. And I know you're a gambler. Your dad would bet his last hundred bucks on a hundred-to-one shot, right?"
    Mary Ellen started to laugh.
    "All right," she said. "We'll gamble. I just hope that these three guys you talked to are on the level."
    "See you at work, sweetheart," Danny said.
    Bill heard the news about the thirty-two-to-seven vote while he and his brother A1 were out on the harbor in the new cabin cruiser, South Street, a 25-foot fiberglass Marine King.
    He and A1 were sitting about one hundred yards offshore, in the channel, and they had cut the motor to drift a little, look at the shoreline, and talk It was a muggy day, a real scorcher, and both he and A1 were in shirt sleeves. A thick haze hung over Manhattan, and the Jersey shores had a far-off mysterious look
    Casually Bill flipped on the radio, and tuned it to WQXR to catch the noon news broadcast. After all, they both wanted to know how the vote had gone.
    A1 was talking about the possibility that the city would back off on the urban-renewal project in the South Street block next to theirs, owing to cutbacks on funds. If that happened, he said, Laird & Laird might be able to get a line on the property.
    Bill listened, nodding and asking the right questions out of pure habit, but his ears were tuned to the radio.
    Then he heard the Times station's news broadcaster saying in his crisp cool voice:
    "Today the New York City Council voted down the so-called gay rights bill, now famous as Intro Two. The bill would have made it illegal to discriminate against anyone in housing, employment, insurance and other areas because of sexual preferences. The vote was thirty-two to seven. This makes the fourth time that Intro Two has been defeated."
    Bill felt a little sick to his stomach, sitting there in the heat, with the sun beating down on his head. The rotten-seaweed and sewage smell of the harbor clogged his nostrils.
    Uncle A1 grinned proudly.
    "Good for Jeannie. I'll bet Jeannie is tickled pink," he said.
    "I'm sure she is," said Bill, trying to look happy himself.
    They discussed the vote briefly, then went back to discussing their life passion.
    ". . . Trouble is," A1 was saying, "that the city already demolished one building in that block. So it's debatable whether we could . . ."
    Bill sat there and kept on talking to A1 as if his mind had been put on automatic pilot.
    His imagination wiped out the image of A1 sitting there, and replaced it with the image of Marion, smiling, hair blowing in the salt breeze.
    A memory came back to haunt him, of the day of the tall ships in New York Harbor, during the Bicentennial. Some friends, the Scribners, had invited him and A1 to sail around the harbor with them in their 35-foot ketch that day. He had connived to get Marion invited also, and—as a cover—one other good friend of his and Al's.
    The little ketch had tacked gracefully around the harbor, its modest sails overshadowed by the tall masts and the clouds of canvas on the visiting sail ships from all over the world. They were careful to give the old-time monsters all the right of way they needed. From water level, they waved cheerfully up to the crews on the Nippon Mam, and the Deutschland, and the Enchantress, and the Flying Cloud. They had eaten a picnic lunch on board, and drunk a little wine.
    Bill would never forget the sad magic of that day—being out there in the harbor with Marion, so close to freedom, yet unable to look at him as he would have liked, or talk to him the way they would if they were alone.
    Now, listening to the WQXR newscaster reading the baseball scores, he felt that the city council's vote had set the seal of finality on his freedom. It would never happen. He would never have the courage.
    Mary Ellen arrived at the station house with the coppery taste of fear in her mouth. As a cop, she had learned to live with fear long ago—ordinary fear. But today, it was more than fear. It was the clear knowledge that the next few hours might catapult her safe, meaningful life into the unknown. The station house was buzzing with talk about