Pageantry

It was a brisk, overcast March day, a Tuesday, I believe, the first in March of the year 2000. I was frittering my time away online, out of work, wearing a dirty bathrobe, and whining about my hangover from the night before, when I missed a phone call from my mother informing me that my grandmother had died. Her voicemail was disjointed. She didn't know any more details . . . they hadn't set a funeral date yet . . . well, of course, it had only just happened . . . she'd call again when she knew more. . . .

It was no surprise. My grandmother had been bedridden for some time. Mutely I put on some nightclubby attire and left the house. I stopped off at a trendy cafe called the Blue Cat, where I drank an eight-dollar martini with familiar strangers and held forth on the sort of bullshitty topics one discusses at stuck-up martini bars in the midafternoon. When they asked me how my day had gone, I lied and said, "Oh fine. Same old same-old." The rest of my evening is blurred beneath a puddle of gin.

I spent a lot of time over the next two days wrestling with whether or not I should try to get to Tennessee in time for the funeral, which I'd found out was on Friday morning. From the distant vantage point of the telephone, it had seemed almost as if my mother didn't wish me to come ("It's up to you. We'll understand if you don't want to fly down."), though I had the impression my dad distinctly wanted me there, the grandma-in-question being his own mother, after all.

After traveling for a total of nine hours from doorstep to doorstep, I collapsed in a chair in the kitchen of the home in which I grew up. We ordered steamed hoagies from my favorite local deli and huddled around the kitchen table, chewing thoughtfully and talking about everything but death, until at one point my father said, "Tomorrow I must bear the pall." We sat in silence like inscrutable cats, then retired to our rooms. I crawled into bed with a book titled The Alienist and drifted off to an unusually dreamless and stony sleep.

The next day, we breakfasted at an IHOP and drove the hour to Morristown, a small Appalachian village where the funeral was held. My mother's family has lived there for generations, and my father's parents had moved there from Ohio during Dad's high school years. It's a sleepy town where most everyone knows everything about everyone else . . . not much different than a stuck-up martini bar scene, actually, minus the $200 haircuts and noodley jazz in the background.

We dropped by my aunt and uncle's house--a house they'd recently bought, very old, lovely, full of sturdy old furniture and framed daguerreotypes. Clean hardwood floors, odd nooks and crannies filled with stacked quilts and depression glass; the type of house in which I want to spend my mid-to-late-forties out on the Cape writing novels on an old Underwood and drinking Glenmorangie at night in the sea air. My uncle had been with my grandmother at the time of her death, and from him I learned that my grandmother's cryptic last words were ostensibly a morphine delusion: "You must earn the color purple." I do not know if she had ever read Alice Walker.

Later too, after he'd gone to pick up my grandfather from the nursing home to ferry him to the memorial, my aunt confided in me that, as my grandmother lay dying, once she could speak no more and only breathed in shallow, ragged moans, yet still before the horrid mouthfoaming death rattle, my uncle had sung to her a Bob Dylan song:

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum.

Something big caught in my throat; I blinked rapidly and tried to swallow but could not.

Lest you think I was overcome with grief, let me explain that I most certainly was not. I barely knew my grandmother. She was in life one of those distant, fake women who insist on pressing their powdery cheek to yours at the holidays but who respond to attempts at serious conversation with a dismissive smile, nodding, and unfocusing their eyes. My upchoked tears weren't for the loss of a woman who, but for blood, was a stranger to me; they were spawned in sympathy, sympathy for the grief I knew that my father was feeling, my uncles and aunt to whom she'd been a mother. Her loss was to me little more important than an unfinished book left on the subway or a favorite hat blown away in a gale, but to them, people I did know and love and care for, she was a piece torn away, an amputated part of their history and family and essence.

Before we left to join my uncle and grandfather at the funeral, my aunt presented me with a large box of documents--letters, clippings, photographs. These were, she explained, given to me to do with as I wished. As I began desultorily paging through them, something reached out, curled a hand around, and pulled me in. The story in them was lurking, submerged, bigger than I yet knew.

My grandmother, Janis Marie Pollock, a young mother of four children, was crowned Mrs. America in 1946 in New Orleans. She entered the contest on a dare, never expecting to win, and when she did it turned her life on end; acceptance of the crown required her to make a six-month modeling tour of the country, which her husband flatly forbade.

The press seized on her indecision. Post-World War II America was having a hard time pushing women back into the home, and a woman on the brink of giving up a glamorous opportunity like the Mrs. America pageant crown out of dedication to her "vocation as a homemaker" was trumpeted in the newspapers as "a true patriot." After a few days of quiet deliberation, Janis abdicated to the first runner-up, a Mrs. Fredda Acker, and forewent the modeling tour, sacrificing her crown for--as the papers parsimoniously crowed--"her devotion to her husband and family, as a real Mrs. America should."

She'd meticulously collected and saved every clipping, photo, fan letter, pamphlet, and program pertaining to the pageant. Among them there were memos from companies soliciting her services as spokeswoman, a full-color program of the Rose Parade that she had been invited to lead, and handwritten letters from earnest teenage girls who named her as their "role model." It was an exhaustively complete compendium of memorabilia, yet, other than in media quotes, completely devoid of her own words and thoughts. None of her own letters, no journal, not even any scribbled notes on the contestant list and pageant rules. I'd been given the record of what might have been the most exciting event in her life, yet it contained no indication of her feelings about it. She might have been sitting before me again with the dismissive smile, her gaze adrift, polite and impenetrable.

The service itself was odd. Open caskets terrify me. I looked instead at the easelled photograph of my grandmother in her mid-twenties, the very photograph that won her a place in the pageant as Mrs. Ohio, and thought, "Dear God, when I die, just burn me and dance, and skip this drab ritual of papery handshakes and chill rooms."

My grandfather had to be helped to the casketside, where his attendants deposited him in an armchair from which he doddered at the guests and pissed his trousers. The preacher spoke as if he'd known my grandmother well, though he'd admitted prior to the service he'd never met her, and sang a few hymns in a quavery Sinatra style. One of my aunts and her husband read scriptures and poems, and my father spoke extemporaneously, pausing at odd intervals so his voice wouldn't break. I looked at my shoes and clicked my fingernails together.

The hearse was white, and our car was second in the cortege just behind the limousine. We had a small purple flag on our hood that said FUNERAL. I felt again the bigness in my throat as we traveled to the cemetery; all ongoing traffic consistently came to a halt to pay respect to the deceased along the way. A bushy-bearded white-haired old biker stood up off his Harley and bowed his head to my grandmother in her hearse as we passed. I think that might have been the most noble gesture I've witnessed from a stranger to another in a long, long while.

The cemetery they'd chosen was one of those horrid ones of rows of flat stones topped by identical vases full of bright plastic flowers. The flowers around the grave were all real though; the plastic ones you must bring later. There were three men from the funeral home who had, I supposed, been hired to fill out the cadre of six pallbearers, my grandmother having only had three sons and none of the other grandchildren having bothered to attend. The men were professional mourners, like Oliver Twist, but in their late teens and jarringly sexy, which rendered them rather ineffective as velorios. They stared at me, the only mourner under the age of 50 in attendance, caught themselves, and looked away. After the brief prayer, I took a red rose from the casket spray and stood watching small yellow butterflies in the field as my father walked my mother to the car.

It began, gently, to rain.

I stood unwound beneath the skies
And clouds unbound by laws.
The cryin' rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause.

Later, as I read and reread what I came to think of as the "Mrs. America Documents" from the vantage point of a twenty-first-century woman, I was stunned and saddened by the events described therein. It is difficult for me, as an extremely independent, outspoken, strong-willed, unmarried, and childfree woman, to comprehend these events in my grandmother's life; the concept of touring the country as a 1940s pageant queen is just as foreign to me as that of a homemaker raising four children. The narrative called to me though, whispering along the edges of the onionskin carbon-copies of the letters in the files, the musty, yellowed, spongy news clippings, and the still faintly scented pastel stationery of the fan mail.

In the course of my research, I discovered that Fredda Acker, the runner-up who assumed the throne in the wake of my grandmother's abdication, did in fact go on the tour, leaving her young son in the care of her sister, a professional pitcher on one of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League teams. In the course of a resulting correspondence with an archivist at the Baseball Hall of Fame, it came to light that, following her modeling stint, Fredda herself joined her sister's baseball team for a year as a pitcher and spokesmodel.

The juxtaposition of Fredda's postwar life as a wife, mother, model, and professional baseballer with Janis' choice to put home before all else struck me as a tale of both grand and intimate proportion. What might have been the motivation behind Janis' abdication, and what family dynamics afforded Fredda the freedom to do the many "liberated" things she did? Janis and Fredda both are dead now, so it is left to my imagination. Was Fredda's husband an unbearable boor, or perhaps her son a colicky unquiet baby? Perhaps one of Janis' children was ill at the time of the pageant and she feared the worst might happen in her absence. Or perhaps she had a milkman lover she couldn't bear to leave for six months on the road.

An essential part of my own sense of feminism is the remembrance and preservation of women's heritage, both the women who painted their lives in extraordinary swaths of color across the canvas of the world, and women who recorded them calmly and quietly in the crabbed handwriting of secret journals and family recipe boxes, and the carefully clipped newspaper announcements of weddings and births and beauty pageants. The speculation is only a secondary entertainment.

I received one other package with a final clue to my grandmother--perhaps the most revealing--a thin photo album of fading Polaroids, sent apparently surreptitiously by my uncle, several months after the funeral. A scrawled note encouraged me to "do whatever you want with these. Your grandpa asked me to burn them but you're the only one that might understand why I didn't."

They were naked pictures. In them, she is revealed, radiant, righteous. Janis topless, laughing, striking coquettish poses that are generally clichéd these days thanks to the overexposure of Bettie Page, but which retain a sense of naive sexuality in these snapshots. Naked on a bed, her chestnut hair upswept in a 1940s style, smiling, she's caught in a moment of supreme intimacy and frankness; she's focusing on the camera, her smile anything but dismissive. Her eyes speak of lust, and of love, and of her delight at the marvel of technology her husband holds in his hands--the Polaroid camera that affords her the possibility of being a sexy pinup model in the privacy of her own home, under the controlled gaze of only herself and her husband. And now me.

In this moment, I sit speechless. I realize that now, on some level, that yes, I do know the woman in these photos.

Today we visited my grandmother's grave. We brought her real flowers, not the plastic kind. The yellow butterflies were there again, and the gentle rain. No traffic stopped for us, and I saw a biker but he just gave me the bird as he cut me off. My father was humming a tune, and the words came back to me.

Struck by the sounds before the sun,
I knew the night had gone.
The morning breeze like a bugle blew
Against the drums of dawn.

Tonight, as we drove down the winding mountain roads back to the house that was my home, I stared mutely at the blackest-black backcountry night sky and thought, "Rest in Peace, Janis Marie."

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Tue, Dec 9, 2003.