Dwyer agreed finally to come down to Atlantic...
Dwyer agreed finally to come down to Atlantic City had been due to the persuasive skills of Dawn's favorite aunt, Peg, her mother's sister, the schoolteacher who'd married rich Uncle Ned and taken Dawn as a kid to the hotel in Spring Lake"It would make any father uncomfortable seeing his baby up there," Peg had told her brother-in-law in that gentle, diplomatic way Dawn always admired and wanted to emulate"It brings certain images to mind that a father would just as soon not have associated with his daughterI'd feel that way if it were my daughter," she told him, "and I don't have what it is that fathers naturally feel for their daughtersIt would bother me, of course it wouldI would think that what you feel is the case with a lot of dadsThey're really proud, their buttons are popping and all that, but at the same time, 'Oh, my God, that's my baby up there' But Jim, this is so clean and beyond reproach there is just nothing to worry aboutThe trashy ones get sifted out early--they go on to work the truckers' conventionThese are just ordinary kids from small towns, decent, omega constellation price sweet girls whose fathers own the grocery store and don't belong to the country clubThey get them up to look like debutantes but there is nothing big in their backgroundsThey're just good kids who go home and settle down and marry the boy next doorAnd the judges are serious peopleJim, this is for Miss AmericaIf it were compromising to the girls, they wouldn't allow it
Dawn wants you there to share in that honorShe will not be very happy if you are not there, JimmyShe will be crushed, especially if you are the only father who isn't there
"Peggy, it's beneath herIt's beneath all of us So that's when she laid into him about his responsibility not merely to Dawn but to the nation"You wouldn't come when she won at the local levelYou wouldn't come when she won at the state levelAre you now telling me that you are not going to come if she wins at the national level? If she is awarded Miss America and you're not there to walk up on the stage and hug your daughter with pride, what will they think? They'll think, 'A great tradition, a part of the American heritage, and her father balenciaga bag isn't therePhotographs of Miss America with her family, and her father isn't in a one of them' Tell me, how's that going to go down the next day?"
And so he humbled himself and he did it--against his better judgment, consented to come for the big night to Atlantic City with the rest of Dawn's relatives, and it was a disasterWhen Dawn saw him waiting there in his Sunday suit in the lobby with her mother and her aunts and her uncles and her cousins, every last Dwyer in Union and Essex and Hudson counties, all she was allowed to do by her chaperone was to shake his hand, and he was fit to be tiedBut that was a pageant rule, in case anybody who was watching might not know it was her father and see some kind of embrace and think something untoward was going onIt was all so that absolutely nothing smacked of impropriety, but Jim Dwyer, who had only recently recovered from the first heart attack and so was on edge anyway, had misunderstood, thinking that now she was such a big shot she had dared to rebuff her own dad, actually given her father the cold shoulder, and in public, vintage omega watches before the entire public
Of course, for the week that she was in Atlantic City under the watchful eye of the pageant, she had not been allowed to see the Swede at all, not in the company of her chaperone, not even in a public place, and so, until the very last night, he'd just stayed up in Newark and had to be content, like her family, to talk to her on the phoneBut Dawn's sincerity in recounting to her father this hardship--of her being deprived, for a whole week, of the company of her Jewish beau--did not much impress him when, back in Elizabeth, she attempted to assuage his grudge at what he remembered for many years afterward as "the snub
"That was just an Old World hotel that was the most wonderful place," Dawn was telling the SalzmansSomething you see in a movieBig rooms overlooking Lake GenevaI'm boring you," she suddenly said
"No, no," they replied in unison
Sheila pretended to be listening intently to every word Dawn spokeShe had to be pretendingNot even she could have recovered so completely from the eruption in Dawn's studyIf she had--well, it would be hard chanel classic handbag then to say what sort of woman she wasShe was nothing like the one he had imaginedAnd that was not because she had been passing herself off with him as something else or somebody else but because he had understood her no better than he was able to understand anyoneHow to penetrate to the interior of people was some skill or capacity he did not possessHe just did not have the combination to that lockEverybody who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be goodEverybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyalEverybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligentAnd so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress--probably had never even begun to see into himselfWhat was he, stripped of all the signs he flashed? People were standing up everywhere, shouting "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea of who or what they were than he hadThey believed their flashing signs chanel pearls too