She went to Avon to get away from her beauty, but Dawn couldn't get away from it any more than she could openly flaunt itYou have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything elseAs with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional--and enviable, and hateable--to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you're well advised to develop a sense of humorDawn was not a stick, she had spirit and she had spunk, and she could be cutting in a very humorous way, but that wasn't quite the inward humor it took to do the job and make her freeOnly after she was married and no longer a virgin did she discover the place where it was okay for her to be as beautiful as she was, and that place, to the profit of both husband and wife, was with the Swede, in bed They used to call Avon the Irish RivieraThe Jews without much money went to Bradley Beach, and the Irish without much money went next door to Avon, a seaside town all of ten blocks longThe swell Irish--who had the money, the judges, the builders, the fancy surgeons--went to Spring Lake, beyond the imposing manorial gates just south of Belmar (another resort town, which was more or less a mixture of everybody)Dawn used to get taken to stay in Spring Lake by her mother's sister Peg, who'd married Ned Ma-honey, a lawyer from Jersey CityIf you were an Irish lawyer in that town, her father told her, and you played ball with City
chanel earrings Hall, Mayor "I-am-the-law" Hague took care of youSince Uncle Ned, a smooth talker, a golfer, and good-looking, had been on the Hudson County gravy train from the day he graduated John Marshall and signed on across the street with a powerful firm right there in Journal Square, and since he seemed to love pretty Mary Dawn best of all his nieces and nephews, every summer after the child had spent her week in the Avon rooming house with her mother and father and Danny, she went on by herself to spend the next week with Ned and Peg and all the Mahoney kids at the huge old Essex and Sussex Hotel right on the oceanfront at Spring Lake, where every morning in the airy dining room overlooking the sea she ate French toast with Vermont maple syrupThe starched white napkin that covered her lap was big enough to wrap around her waist like a sarong, and the sparkling silverware weighed a tonOn Sunday, they all went together to StCatherine's, the most gorgeous church the little girl had ever seenYou got there by crossing a bridge--the loveliest bridge she had ever seen, narrow and humpbacked and made of wood--that spanned the lake back of the hotelSometimes when she was unhappy at the swim club she'd drive beyond Avon into Spring Lake and remember how Spring Lake used to materialize out of nowhere every summer, magically full blown, Mary Dawn's BrigadoonShe remembered how she dreamed of getting married in StCatherine's, of being a bride there in a white dress, marrying a rich lawyer like her Uncle Ned and living in one of those
tiffany and co necklace grand summer houses whose big verandas overlooked the lake and the bridges and the dome of the church while only minutes from the booming AtlanticShe could have done it, too, could have had it just by snapping her fingersBut her choice was to fall in love with and marry Seymour Levov of Newark instead of any one of those dozens and dozens of smitten Catholic boys she'd met through her Mahoney cousins, the smart, rowdy boys from Holy Cross and Boston College, and so her life was not in Spring Lake but down in Deal and up in Old Rimrock with Mr"Well, that's the way it happened," her mother would say sadly to whoever would listen"Could have had a wonderful life there just like Peg'sMargaret's are thereCatherine's is right by the lake thereBut Mary Dawn's the rebel in the family--always wasAlways did just what she wanted, and from the time she marched off to be in that contest, fitting in like everybody else is apparently not something she wanted
Dawn went to Avon strictly to swimShe still hated lying on the beach to take the sun, still resented having been made to expose her fair skin to the sun every day by the New Jersey pageant people--on the runway, they told her, her white swimsuit would look striking against a deep tanAs a young mother she tried to get as far as she could from everything that marked her as "a former whatever" and that aroused insane contempt in other women and made her feel unhappy and like a freakShe even gave away to charity all the clothes the pageant director (who had his own idea of what
rolex watches ladies kind of girl should be presented by New Jersey to the Miss America judges) had picked out for her at the designers' showrooms in New York during Dawn's daylong buying trip for Atlantic CityThe Swede thought she'd looked great in those gowns and he hated to see them go, but at least, at his urging, she kept the state crown so that someday she could show it to their grandchildren And then, after Merry started at nursery school, Dawn set out to prove to the world of women, for neither the first time nor the last, that she was impressive for something more than what she looked likeShe decided to raise cattleThat idea, too, went back to her childhood--way back to her grandfather, her mother's father, who as a twenty-year-old from County Kerry came to the port in the 1880s, married, settled in south Elizabeth close to StMary's, and proceeded to father eleven childrenHis living he earned at first as a hand on the docks, but he bought a couple of cows to provide milk for the family, wound up selling the surplus to the big shots on West Jersey Street--the Moores from Moore Paint, Admiral "Bull" Halsey's family, Nicholas Murray Butler the Nobel Prize winner--and soon became one of the first independent milkmen in ElizabethHe had about thirty cows on Murray Street, and though he didn't own much property, it didn't matter--in those days you could let them graze anywhereAll his sons went into the business and stayed in it until after the war, when the big supermarkets came along and knocked out the little manDawn's father,
gucci women's watches Jim Dwyer, had worked for her mother's family, and that was how Dawn's parents had metWhen he was still only a kid, before refrigeration, Jim Dwyer used to go out on the milk truck at twelve o'clock at night and stay out till morning delivering milk off the back of the truckThe heck with that, he finally said, and took up plumbingDawn, as a small child, loved to visit the cows, and when she was about six or seven, she was taught by one of her cousins how to milk them, and that thrill--squirting the milk out of those udders, the animals just standing there eating hay and letting her tug to her heart's content--she never forgot With beef cattle, however, she wouldn't need the manpower to milk and she could run the operation almost entirely by herselfThe Simmental, which made a lot of milk but was a beef animal as well, still weren't a registered breed in the United States at that time, so she could get in on the ground floorCrossbreeding--Simmental to polled Hereford--was what interested her, the genetic vigor, the hybrid vigor, the sheer growth that results from crossbreedingShe studied the books, took the magazines, the catalogs started coming in the mail, and at night she would call him over to where she was paging through a catalog and say, "Isn't that a good-looking heifer? Have to go out and take a look at her Pretty soon they were traveling together to shows and salesShe loved the auctions"This reminds me just a little too much," she whispered to the Swede, "of Atlantic CityIt's the Miss America Pageant for
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