Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (11 page)

She looked beyond the joy-crazed crowd to the naked brown trees on the horizon. She noticed the long, grave bands of cloud in the west. She was aware that Joe had dashed to Phyllis' auto, cranked it and climbed in. It lumbered across the field, then flew down the road, taking the story of Deep Valley's triumph to the waiting presses. She felt depressed as she swayed lightly with her arms on the shoulders of the other girls, singing, “Cheer, cheer, the gang's all here.”

“Wasn't Dave Hunt wonderful?”

“Marvelous!”

“I've yelled until I'm hoarse.”

Not only the Okto Deltas but almost the entire student body returned up Front Street blowing horns,
ringing bells, cheering, singing and yelling. The team went into the Y.M.C.A. for showers and rub downs but the hullabaloo continued in the street outside. Nearby delicatessens were raided for nourishment. The Okto Deltas secured jelly doughnuts and cream puffs.

“I dare you to give a cream puff to that policeman,” Tacy challenged Winona.

“Sure. Why not?” Black eyes shining and white teeth gleaming, Winona loped over to Patrolman Reardon who accepted the squashy pastry with a grin.

The uproar continued, but Katie said, “Tacy and I have to go home if we're going to give a party tonight.”

“Well, you're giving a party all right. A pretty important one, the first Okto Delta party with boys.”

“We must all go home and start dressing.”

“But I want to wait and see the team!” Tib cried, protesting.

Carney laughed. “Almost the whole team is coming to our party: Al, Squirrelly, Cab, Dennie. It's too bad Dave Hunt isn't in the Crowd.”

But Dave Hunt hadn't yet started taking out girls. He looked at them with his serious dark blue eyes, but he didn't talk to them. Nobody even suggested that he was afraid. Dave Hunt was afraid of nothing. He would start taking girls out when he was good and ready, everyone agreed.

T
IB WENT HOME WITH
Betsy. She had brought her “dream robe” to the Rays before the game and would return to stay all night after the party. She and Betsy burst in late for supper, windblown, ruddy, hoarse, but ecstatic.

“What did you think of the game, Mr. Ray?—Wasn't it wonderful?—Wasn't it divine?”

He forgave them for being late and Anna reheated their supper. Mrs. Ray and Margaret sat with them while they ate, listening to extravagant accounts of the Deep Valley football team's prowess.

It was almost like having Julia home again to have Tib dressing with Betsy for the party. Returning from the bathroom, freshly bathed and fragrant with talc, they laced up one another's corsets. Betsy had just started wearing a corset. Her mother had brought it to her after a trip to the cities to visit Julia. Tib's waist measured only eighteen inches but she urged Betsy to pull on the laces to make it smaller still.

Margaret brought Washington in to watch and Mrs. Ray darted in and out, as Betsy and Tib made elaborate toilets, talking, laughing, borrowing, lending, squinting into hand mirrors, revolving before the long glass.

Tib had made black and orange bows for them to wear in their hair.

“I'll do your hairs for you, Betsy,” she offered. One of Tib's small Germanisms was saying “hairs” for “hair.”

“All of them? Which ones?” Betsy teased her.

“Hair! Hair! Ach, will I never remember?”

She fluffed Betsy's hair over the wire “jimmy” into an airy pompadour.

Betsy was taking Tony to the party. She liked him
better than any other boy, although they were definitely on a brother-sister basis. He wasn't going with the Crowd so much this year. He had always seemed more mature than the others, and his new friends were older boys, who were out of school and considered a little wild. With the Rays, however, he was the same loyal, teasing, affectionate Tony. And he seldom failed to appear for Sunday night lunch.

Earlier in the season Betsy had thought it would be perfect if Tony would start going with Tib. She had hinted this to Tony but without success.

“Aw, she's still playing with doll clothes!” he would say, indulgently scornful. He patted Tib on her yellow head, swung her off the floor like a child. He was definitely not impressed.

But E. Lloyd Harrington was impressed. He had showered her with attentions and Tib had reciprocated by inviting him to the party tonight.

He called for them in his father's auto. Tony cranked, then climbed into the back seat beside Betsy, while Lloyd, with Tib at his side, proudly grasped the wheel. The cold wind blew past their faces and Betsy was glad that her carefully constructed coiffure was tied in place with a party scarf.

The Kellys lived in a sprawling old white house at the end of Hill Street. Betsy had lived in a yellow cottage opposite for the first fourteen years of her life.
Beyond these two houses, which ended the street, hills spread in a half open fan. They were brown and bleak tonight under the cold bright stars.

Betsy was pleased to be arriving in Lloyd's auto when she saw Irma alighting from Phil's machine. Inside the house there were black and orange decorations, and Winona was pounding on the piano.

Betsy was soon encircled. She was joyfully aware that she attracted boys more easily this year. Even Phil was looking at her with interest and when someone started to play “The Merry Widow Waltz,” which had woven itself through their romance last spring, he came over to her.

She looked up at him, widening her eyes into what she hoped was a soulful gaze.

“I wondered whether you would come.”

“Did you, really?”

“As long as I live I'll never hear ‘The Merry Widow Waltz' without thinking of you.”

They danced, and Betsy's dancing was one of her strong points. He was so fascinated that Irma was obliged to make an effort to recall him. True, it wasn't much of an effort. It was hardly more than lifting her finger. But to force Irma to any sort of effort was a triumph. She attracted simply by existing, a fact which continued to exasperate her Sistren in Okto Delta.

The success of the party was surpassed only by the terrific success of the refreshments. Everyone always looked forward to refreshments at the Kelly house. Tactfully seizing a moment when Katie's chocolate cake, smothered with thick fudge frosting, was being cut, the girls said what fun it would be if the boys got up a fraternity.

Lloyd seemed to like the idea. “We could have a fraternity house like the boys have up at the U. My Dad's made our barn into a garage, and there are a couple of rooms above it. I have a phonograph up there and some books. It would make a swell clubhouse.”

Tony scoffed. “I don't like fraternities. Too many fellows left out. Besides, I wouldn't tie myself down about what I'm going to do every Saturday night.”

But for a number of Saturday nights following the Kellys' party, boys, as well as girls, were busy with Okto Delta. Okto Delta meetings were practically parties, parents complained. Tib didn't complain. Just out of a girl's school, away from the strict influence of
Grosspapas
and
Grossmamas
, she was intoxicated with the freedom of life in Deep Valley. Tib, who could cook and sew, who had always been famous for her practicality and common sense, now thought of nothing but fun.

She and Betsy pursued it together. Tacy would have
been a welcome third but she wasn't interested in boys. She enjoyed hearing Betsy and Tib talk about their adventures, the plots and counterplots by which they proposed to snare this boy or that, but she took no share in such enterprises. She was studying singing with Mrs. Poppy; that was romance enough for her.

This was in November, when waves of ducks were passing through Minnesota on their way to the north country. Mr. Muller and Fred went hunting every Saturday, and Betsy took to going home with Tib after church for Sunday dinner: duck with apple dressing, dumplings, brown gravy, served with butter-drenched sweet potatoes and often topped off by apple pie which came to the table under a crown of whipped cream.

After these succulent feasts they sat in Tib's room and talked.

They talked about clothes, about the new princesse style party dresses they were having made for the holidays, about the furs—like Phyllis Brandish's—they hoped they would get for Christmas. They talked about face powders and finger nail polishes. They talked about perfumes. But especially they talked about boys.

Betsy, having seen so much of boys during the past two years, didn't think they were quite so wonderful as Tib did, but she considered them important. Like
most high school girls, she wanted more than almost anything else to be popular with boys. And this year she could call herself that. Of course, she didn't have Irma's magic appeal nor Julia's devastating effect, but she had a little more than her share of attention.

She was gratified to discover that she could hold her own with Tib. Tib was so pretty, so enchanting, so beautifully dressed, Betsy wouldn't have been surprised nor even very resentful if Tib had put her in the shade. But she didn't. It was true that the boys who liked Tib thought of Betsy only as Tib's best friend, but it was equally true that the boys who liked Betsy found Tib merely “cute.” Like Tony, they patted her on the head and forgot her. Just as Betsy had foreseen long ago in Milwaukee, she and Tib made an excellent team.

They often spoke of Dave Hunt, the most desirable unattached boy in school. Last summer at the lake, Betsy had thought he was drawn to her, but she was beginning to doubt it. She wasn't the only girl he gazed at, and because his blue eyes were so deep-set and serious the gaze seemed to hold more significance than, perhaps, it had.

As for Tib, although she valued the prestige created by Lloyd's admiration, her affections leaned toward Dennie. He was an ingratiating Irish boy with a curly tangle of hair, fuzzy eyebrows and a dimple in his
chin. He liked to sing and act the clown. Dennie and Cab, Tib and Betsy made a rollicking foursome.

They planned little parties for four which they called “soirees.” Betsy and Tib secretly nicknamed each other Madame DuBarry and Madame Pompadour. They addressed each other as “M.P.” and “M.D.,” to the boys' mystification. Tib loved to cook dainty little suppers, which she served by candlelight. Betsy enjoyed trying out dishes she had learned in Domestic Science, especially English Monkey, made in a chafing-dish.

They undeniably had fun. School, of course, suffered.

Betsy, Tacy and Tib had let autumn slip into winter without starting their herbariums for botany. The fall flowers were gone, withered and dead beneath the first delicate fall of snow.

“What will we do about it?” Tib asked anxiously.

“We'll just have to find more flowers in the spring. That's when they bloom, tra la.”

Dennie gave a hint which retarded their progress in United States History.

“Know what I do when I haven't got my lesson? I yawn. Clarke always has to yawn back and when she gets started she can't stop. It slows things up a lot.”

Betsy tried it and was fascinated by her success. Miss Clarke yawned so prettily, too, tapping her lips
with white, almond-tipped fingers.

Miss Erickson couldn't be persuaded to yawn, and Betsy was cold to the eloquence of Cicero.

She worked for Miss Fowler in Foundations of English Literature but so far Miss Fowler hadn't given her exceptionally high marks. Her stories and essays were returned critically marked up with red pencil.

One day Miss Fowler asked her to stay after class. The little Bostonian looked up at Betsy with her very bright dark eyes.

“Betsy,” she said in that odd accent like Miss Bangeter's, “I want to tell you a secret. Can you keep a secret?”

“Why, yes.”

“You may have noticed that I am harder on you than on the others. I'm harder on you and Joe Willard. And I want you to know the reason why. It's because you have more talent than the others.” She paused, then added earnestly, “I think you have a real gift for writing, and I'd like to help you develop it.”

Betsy was so taken aback that she could hardly speak.

“I'd like to have you do that, Miss Fowler,” she faltered. She blushed like a freshman. “I'll work hard.”

Miss Fowler smiled. “I said the same thing to Joe. You two are going to be picked on.”

After this Betsy worked even harder on Foundations
of English Literature. And she enjoyed the Girls Debating Club which argued in November that “Immigration should be further restricted.” She and Hazel Smith were given the affirmative side. The more Betsy saw of Hazel the better she liked her. It would be fun, she thought, to have her at a party. But this was not immediately possible for she gave so many Okto Delta parties that she couldn't very well have the ordinary kind.

She continued to work hard on her music. She practised daily and looked forward to her lessons, although she felt increasingly sure that, in this field, she had no talent. But she liked Miss Cobb and her visits to the small, warm, geranium-scented house.

Always sociable, Betsy fell into the habit of going into the back parlor after her lessons and talking with Leonard. He liked to hear about Okto Delta, and leaning his bright head on a frail hand, his eyes smiling and his cheeks flushed, he listened to Betsy's stories about the meetings.

Last year at this time he had been out on the football field. This year his illness was so pronounced that his aunt talked of sending him to Colorado. Betsy remembered that his older brother and sister had already died of this disease, and she tried to make the Okto Delta meetings sound even funnier than they were.

“I wish you came for a lesson every day,” Leonard told her, weak from laughter.

“You'd be practically an Okto Delta if I did. You're getting to know all the secrets of our order.”

Leonard approved of Okto Delta, one of the few outside the membership who did.

Julia came home for Thanksgiving. The train swept down the track with a special brilliance because it carried Julia. She alighted looking citified, and soon filled the Ray house with color and excitement.

She had joined the Dramatic Club. She had been singing solos everywhere. Roger Tate was coming for the weekend.

She brought all the newest songs.

The Crowd harmonized richly, standing around the piano. Tom Slade's violin accompanied them, for he had arrived from Cox Military, bringing, as usual, the latest slang. “Ain't it awful, Mabel!” reverberated through the Crowd.

The Rays and the Slades always had Thanksgiving dinner together. It was at the Ray house this year and was followed about twilight by Mr. Ray's turkey sandwiches and coffee, and Grandma Slade's stories.

Listening to these from a pillow in front of the fire, Betsy saw canoes on the river, the raw log cabins of the earliest settlers straggling along the river bank, the Indian Agency at the top of Agency Hill and the Indians coming to take possession of it. They had come in canoes and in dog carts, riding ponies and on foot; a picturesque invasion; not terrifying like the one some years later, when red men came down the Valley pillaging, burning and killing. Deep Valley, now so peaceful, had been a perilous frontier.

The day after Thanksgiving Roger arrived. With his padded shoulders and condescending air, he cut a swath in Deep Valley. Betsy didn't like him very well, although he brought her a fraternity pennant. Julia still gazed at him with the soulful look her sister tried to imitate, yet Betsy felt sure his time was running out.

He and Julia talked about Greek letter organizations. Four sororities were rushing Julia now, but she still preferred Epsilon Iota.

“You're an Epsilon Iota type,” Roger assured her profoundly.

Of course, she couldn't be asked to join until spring, but the girls were still showering her with subtle attentions—sweet notes, wee bouquets, affectionate strolls on the campus.