American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

  All of them so chummy! I was a serious . music student! All I wanted was to be

  left alone and not to have that goddamn crown sparkling like crazy up on top of

  my head! I never wanted any of it! Never!”

  It was a great help to him, driving home after one of those visits, to remember

  her as the girl she had really been back then, who, as

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  he recalled it, was nothing like the girl she portrayed as herself in those

  tirades. During the week in September of 1949 leading up to the Miss America

  Pageant, when she called Newark every night from the Dennis Hotel to tell him

  about what happened to her that day as a Miss America contestant, what radiated

  from her voice was sheer delight in being herself. He’d never heard her like

  that before—it was almost frightening, this undisguised exulting in being where

  she was and who she was and what she was. Suddenly life existed rapturously and

  for Dawn Dwyer alone. The surprise of this new and uncharacteristic immoderation

  even made him wonder if, when the week was over, she could ever again be content

  with Seymour Levov. And suppose she should win. What chance would he have

  against all the men who set their sights on marrying Miss America? Actors would

  be after her. Millionaires would be after her. They’d flock to her—the new life

  opening up to her could attract a host of powerful new suitors and wind up

  excluding him. Nonetheless, as the current suitor, he was spellbound by the

  prospect of Dawn’s winning; the more real a possibility it was, the more reasons

  he had to flush and perspire.

  They would talk long distance for as long as an hour at a time— she was too

  excited to sleep, even though she had been on the go since breakfast, which

  she’d eaten in the dining room with her chaperone, just the two of them at the

  table, the chaperone a large local woman in a small hat, Dawn wearing her Miss

  New Jersey sash pinned to her suit and, on her hands, white kid gloves,

  tremendously expensive gloves, a present to her from Newark Maid, where the

  Swede was beginning his training to take over the business. All the girls wore

  the same style of white kid glove, four-button in length, up over the wrist.

  Dawn alone had got hers for nothing, along with a second pair of gloves—opera

  length, in black, Newark Maid’s formal, sixteen-button kid glove (a small

  fortune at Saks), the table-cut workmanship as expert as anything from Italy or

  France—and, in addition, a third pair of gloves, above the elbow, custom made to

  match her evening gown. The Swede had asked Dawn for a yard of fabric the same

  as her gown, and a friend of the

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  family’s who did fabric gloves made them for Dawn as a courtesy to Newark Maid.

  Three times a day, seated across from the chaperones in the small hats, the

  girls, with their beautiful, nicely combed hair and neat, nice dresses and four-

  button gloves, attempted to have a meal, something of each course, at least,

  between giving autographs to all the people in the dining room who came over to

  gawk and to say where they were from. Because Dawn was Miss New Jersey and the

  hotel guests were in New Jersey, she was the most popular girl by far, and so

  * * *

  she had to say a kind word to everyone and smile and sign autographs and still

  try to get something to eat. “This is what you have to do,” she told him on the

  phone, “this is why they give you the free room.”

  When she arrived at the train station, they’d put her in a little convertible, a

  Nash Rambler, that had her name and her state on it, and her chaperone was in

  the convertible too. Dawn’s chaperone was the wife of a local real-estate

  dealer, and everywhere Dawn went the chaperone was sure to go—in the car with

  her when she got in, and out of the car with her when she got out. “She does not

  leave my side, Seymour. You don’t see a man the whole time except the judges.

  You can’t even talk to one. A few boyfriends are here. Some are even nances. But

  what’s the sense? The girls aren’t allowed to see them. There’s a book of rules

  so long I can hardly read through it. ‘Members of the male sex are not permitted

  to talk to contestants except in the presence of their hostesses. At no time is

  a contestant permitted to enter a cocktail lounge or partake of an intoxicating

  beverage. Other rules include no padding—’” The Swede laughed. “Uh-oh.” “Let me

  finish, Seymour—it just goes on and on. ‘No one is permitted an interview with a

  contestant without her hostess present to protect her interests….’”

  Not just Dawn but all the girls got the little Nash Rambler convertibles—though

  not to keep. You got to keep it only if you became Miss America. Then it would

  be the car from which you waved to the capacity crowd when you were driven

  around the edge of the field at the most famous of college football games. The

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  pageant was pushing the Rambler because American Motors was one of the sponsors.

  There had been a box of Fralinger’s Original saltwater taffy in the room when

  she arrived, and a bouquet of roses; everybody got both, compliments of the

  hotel, but Dawn’s roses never opened, and the rooms the girls got—at least the

  girls put up at Dawn’s hotel—were small, ugly, and at the back. But the hotel

  itself, as Dawn excitedly described it, at Boardwalk and Michigan Avenue, was

  one of the swanky ones where every afternoon they had a proper tea with little

  sandwiches and croquet was played on the lawn by the paying guests, who rightly

  enough got the big, beautiful rooms and the ocean views. Every night she’d come

  back exhausted to the ugly back room with the faded wallpaper, check to see if

  the roses had opened, and then phone to answer his questions about her chances.

  She was one of four or five girls whose photographs kept appearing in the

  papers, and everybody said that one of these girls had to win—the New Jersey

  pageant people were sure they had a winner, especially when the photographs of

  her popped up every morning. “I hate to let them down,” she told him. “You’re

  not going to. You’re going to win,” he told her. “No, this girl from Texas is

  going to win. I know it. She’s so pretty. She has a round face. She has a

  dimple. Not a beauty but very, very cute. And a great figure. I’m scared to

  death of her. She’s from some tacky little town in Texas and she tap-dances and

  she’s the one.” “Is she in the papers with you?” “Always. She’s one of the four

  or five always. I’m there because it’s Atlantic City and I’m Miss New Jersey and

  the people on the boardwalk see me in my sash and they go nuts, but that happens

  to Miss New Jersey every year. And she never wins. But Miss Texas is there in

  those papers, Seymour, because she’s going to win.”

  Earl Wilson, the famous syndicated newspaper columnist, was one of the ten

  judges, and when he heard that Dawn was from Elizabeth he was reported to have

  said to someone at the float parade, in which Dawn had ridden along the

  boardwalk with two

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  * * *

  other girls on the float of her hotel, that Elizabeth’s longtime mayor, Joe

  Brophy, was
one of his friends. Earl Wilson told someone who told someone who

  then told Dawn’s chaperone. Earl Wilson and Joe Brophy were old friends—that was

  all Earl Wilson said, or was able to say in public, but Dawn’s chaperone was

  sure he’d said it because after he’d seen Dawn in her evening gown on the float

  she’d become his candidate. “Okay,” said the Swede, “one down, nine to go.

  You’re on your way, Miss America.”

  All she talked about with her chaperone was who they thought her closest

  competition was; apparently this was all any of the girls talked about with

  their chaperones and all they wound up talking about when they called home, even

  if, among themselves, they pretended to love one another. The southern girls in

  particular, Dawn told him, could really lay it on: “Oh, you’re just so

  wonderful, your hair’s so wonderful… .” The veneration of hair took some

  getting used to for a girl as down-to-earth as Dawn; you might almost think,

  from listening to the conversation among the other girls, that life’s

  possibilities resided in hair—not in the hands of your destiny but in the hands

  of your hair.

  Together with the chaperones, they visited the Steel Pier and had a fish dinner

  at Captain Starn’s famous seafood restaurant and yacht bar, and a steak dinner

  at Jack Guischard’s Steak House, and the third morning they had their picture

  taken together in front of Convention Hall, where a pageant official told them

  the picture was one they would treasure for the rest of their lives, that the

  friendships they were making would last the rest of their lives, that they would

  keep up with one another for the rest of their lives, that when the time arrived

  they would name their children after one another—and meanwhile, when the papers

  came out in the morning, the girls said to their chaperones, “Oh God, I’m not in

  this. Oh God, this one looks like she’s going to win.”

  Every day there were rehearsals and every night for a week they gave a show.

  Year after year people visited Atlantic City just for the Miss America contest

  and bought tickets for the nightly show and

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  came all dressed up to see the girls on the stage individually exhibiting their

  talent and performing as an ensemble in costumed musical numbers. The one other

  girl who played piano played “Clair de Lune” for her solo performance and so

  Dawn had to herself the much flashier number, the currently popular hit “Till

  the End of *’ Time,” a danceable arrangement of a Chopin polonaise. “I’m in show

  business. I don’t stop all day. You don’t have a moment. Because New Jersey’s

  host state there’s all this focus on me, and I don’t want to let everybody down,

  I really don’t, I couldn’t bear it—” “You won’t, Dawnie. Earl Wilson’s in your

  pocket, and he’s the most famous of all the judges. I feel it. I know it. You’re

  going to win.”

  But he was wrong. Miss Arizona won. Dawn didn’t make it even into the top ten.

  In those days the girls waited backstage while the dinners were announced. There

  was row after row of mirrors and ables lined up alphabetically by state, and

  Dawn was right in the liddle of everyone when the announcement was made, so she

  had i start smiling to beat the band and clapping like crazy because she had

  lost and then, to make matters worse, had to rush back onstage and march around

  with the other losers, singing along with MC Bob Russell the Miss America song

  of that era: “Every flower, every rose, stands up on her tippy toes … when

  Miss America marches by!” while a girl just as short and slight and dark as she

  was—little Jacque Mercer from Arizona, who won the swimsuit competition but who

  Dawn never figured would win it all—took the crowd at Convention Hall by storm.

  Afterward, at the farewell ball, though it was for Dawn a terrific letdown, she

  wasn’t nearly as depressed as most of the others. The same thing she had been

  * * *

  told by the New Jersey pageant people they’d been told by their state pageant

  people: “You’re going to make it. You’re going to be Miss America.” So the ball,

  she told him, was the saddest sight she’d ever seen. “You have to go and smile

  and it’s awful,” she said. “They have these people from the Coast Guard or

  wherever they’re from—Annapolis. They have fancy white uniforms and braid and

  ribbons. I guess they’re

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  considered safe enough for us to dance with. So they dance with you with their

  chin tucked in, and the evening’s over, and you go home.”

  Still, for months afterward the superstimulating adventure refused to die; even

  while she was being Miss New Jersey and going around snipping ribbons and waving

  at people and opening department stores and auto showrooms, she wondered aloud

  if anything so wonderfully unforeseen as that week in Atlantic City would ever

  happen to her again. She kept beside her bed the 1949 Official Yearbook of the

  Miss America Pageant, a booklet prepared by the pageant that was sold all week

  at Atlantic City: individual photos of the girls, four to a page, each with a

  tiny outline drawing of her state and a capsule biography. Where Miss New

  Jersey’s photoportrait appeared—smiling demurely, Dawn in her evening gown with

  the matching twelve-button fabric gloves—the corner of the page had been neatly

  turned back. “Mary Dawn Dwyer, 22 year old Elizabeth, N.J. brunette, carries New

  Jersey’s hopes in this year’s Pageant. A graduate of Upsala College, East

  Orange, N.J., where she majored in music education, Mary Dawn has the ambition

  of becoming a high school music teacher. She is 5-2V2 and blue-eyed, and her

  hobbies are swimming, square dancing, and cooking. (Left above)” Reluctant to

  give up excitement such as she’d never known before, she talked on and on about

  the fairy tale it had been for a kid from Hillside Road, a plumber’s daughter

  from Hillside Road, to have been up in front of all those people, competing for

  the title of Miss America. She almost couldn’t believe the courage she’d shown.

  “Oh, that ramp, Seymour. That’s a long ramp, a long runway, it’s a long way to

  go just smiling….”

  In 1969, when the invitation arrived in Old Rimrock for the twentieth reunion of

  the Miss America contestants of her year, Dawn was back in the hospital for the

  second time since Merry’s disappearance. It was May. The psychiatrists were as

  nice as they were the first time, and the room was as pleasant, and the rolling

  landscape as pretty, and the walks were even prettier, with tulips around the

  bungalows where the patients lived, the huge fields

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  green this time around, beautiful, beautiful views—and because this was the

  second time in two years, and because the place was beautiful, and because when

  he arrived directly from Newark in the early evening, after they had just cut

  the grass, there was a smell in the air as fresh and sharp as the smell of

  chives, it was all a thousand times worse. And so he did not show Dawn the

  invitation for the 1949 reunion. Things were bad enough—the things she was

  saying to him were bizarre enough; the relentless crying about her sh
ame, her

  mortification, the futility of her life was all quite sad enough— without any

  more of the Miss New Jersey business.

  And then the change occurred. Something made her decide to want to be free of

  the unexpected, improbable thing. She was not going to be deprived of her life.

  The heroic renewal began with the face-lift at the Geneva clinic she’d read

  about in Vogue. Before going to bed he’d see her at her bathroom mirror drawing

  the crest of her cheekbones back between her index fingers while simultaneously

  * * *

  drawing the skin at her jawline back and upward with her thumbs, firmly tugging

  the loose flesh until she had eradicated even the natural creases of her face,

  until she was staring at a face that looked like the polished kernel of a face.

  And though it was clear to her husband that she had indeed begun to age like a

  woman in her mid-fifties at only forty-five, the remedy suggested in Vogue in no

  way addressed anything that mattered; so remote was it from the disaster that

  had befallen them he saw no reason to argue with her, thinking she knew the

  truth better than anyone, however much she might prefer to imagine herself

  another prematurely aging reader of Vogue rather than the mother of the Rimrock

  Bomber. But because she had run out of psychiatrists to see and medications to

  try and because she was terrified at the prospect of electric shock therapy

  should she have to be hospitalized a third time, the day came when he took her

  to Geneva. They were met at the airport by the liveried chauffeur and the

  limousine, and she booked herself into Dr. LaPlante’s clinic.

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  In their suite of rooms the Swede slept in the bed beside hers. The night after