Carney's House Party/Winona's Pony Cart Read online

  Carney’s House Party

  and

  Winona’s Pony Cart

  Two Deep Valley Books

  Maud Hart Lovelace

  Illustrated by Vera Neville

  Contents

  Foreword

  Carney’s House Party

  Winona’s Pony Cart

  Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World

  About Carney’s House Party

  About Winona’s Pony Cart

  About Illustrator Vera Neville

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by The Betsy-Tacy Books

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  I feel like I’ve known Betsy, Tacy, and all their friends my whole life, but the truth is we didn’t meet until my early twenties. I was an editorial assistant at HarperCollins’s children’s division in 1994, and the series was being reissued with covers by Diane Goode. I can’t remember if I first picked up Betsy-Tacy as a work assignment—a big part of my job involved reading books and writing catalog or back cover copy for them, a gig which seemed too good to be true—or whether it was one of the dozens of books I devoured on the long subway ride home and brought back to work the next day. I do know that by the time Betsy and Tacy had recovered from their rocky start at Betsy’s fifth birthday party, I was hooked. I thought each new (to me) Maud Hart Lovelace book was my favorite until I encountered the next one. I felt forlorn when I finished Betsy’s Wedding, the final title on the list of Harper Trophy’s Lovelace reprints. That was it: The End. There were no more books in the series.

  Or so I thought. A fellow editorial assistant, Susan Chang, told me there were three out-of-print companion volumes about characters who play supporting roles in the main books—or, in the case of Emily of Deep Valley, don’t appear in the Betsy books at all. When I heard there was such a book as Carney’s House Party, I shrieked. When I heard HarperCollins was going to reprint that book at long last, I shrieked louder. Carney is one of my favorite characters in Betsy’s high school Crowd, and if ever a character deserved her own book, it is Caroline Sibley, that warm-hearted, capable, mirthful, intelligent girl whose home is the setting of so many lively Deep Valley adventures. Carney, with her one dimple and her eyes twinkling behind glasses. Carney, hostess of countless parties. Carney, one of the first girls (or boys, for that matter) in Deep Valley to learn to drive an automobile.

  Part of Maud Hart Lovelace’s genius was her ability to create real, believable, multifaceted, imperfect, likable characters—not just memorable eccentrics like the Ray family’s “hired girl,” Anna, with her quirky vocabulary and her penchant for invoking the perfect McCloskey family of her past, but everyone from teachers to townsfolk to the hordes of teenagers who descend upon the Ray house every Sunday night for Mr. Ray’s famous onion sandwiches. Over the course of the Betsy books, we meet dozens of her friends, and each of them is a vivid, fully realized character with a unique and quite recognizable—but never stock—personality.

  There’s Cab Edwards, the affable neighbor boy who drops out of high school to take over the family furniture business after his father dies. Ralph Maddox, the gorgeous football hero who holds back for fear of damaging his handsome profile. Bashful Tacy who bubbles over with a rather impish spirit when she is comfortably out of the spotlight. Joe Willard of the swinging walk: proudly independent, stubborn, sensitive. Winona Root, mischief-maker, with her snapping eyes and white teeth, introducing a spark of competition into all the Crowd’s antics.

  And there is Carney. When Betsy first meets Carney, in Heaven to Betsy, she isn’t at all sure she’s going to like her—and neither are we. After all, Betsy’s mother is pushing Carney so hard.

  Mrs. Ray never mentioned Caroline Sibley without adding that she was a lovely girl, which always annoyed Betsy.

  “Caroline Sibley is a stick,” she said.

  “Why, Betsy, you hardly know her. I’m sure she isn’t a stick. And they have such a big beautiful lawn, and there’s always a crowd of young people there…”

  When Betsy does get to know Carney, she immediately realizes she has been unfairly prejudiced against her. Although Carney is indeed the kind of impeccably tidy and beautifully mannered girl a mother is bound to gush about, she is also frank and funny and not a bit pretentious. What she has is a zest for fun, and the kind of natural enthusiasm that is irresistible to her friends. Many of the Crowd’s best in-jokes—O di immortales and the Triumvirate of Lady Bugs, for starters—originate with Carney.

  When, at the beginning of Betsy and Joe, Carney goes off to Vassar, the Crowd misses her deeply. Evidently, so did Lovelace’s readers. As Amy Dolnick recounts in the appendix to this volume, “It was Carney’s popularity with readers that inspired Lovelace to expand her story after completing Betsy and Joe.” The real-life model for Caroline Sibley was Maud’s friend Marnie, a.k.a. Marion Willard Everett. (That’s right, Willard—as in the name Lovelace chose for Betsy’s true love, Joe.) And like Carney, Marion Everett went off to college with an unresolved romance hanging in the air. Lovelace touchingly captures the tender affection between Carney and her beau, Larry Humphreys, an affection that thrives even years after Larry has left Deep Valley, Minnesota, for sunny San Diego—a cataclysmic move that rocks Betsy’s Crowd at the end of Carney’s sophomore year.

  When Carney’s House Party begins, four whole years have passed. Carney has just completed her sophomore year at Vassar, and her world is full of questions. Is she in love with Larry? Is he in love with her? Or rather, would they be in love if they could see each other? Their correspondence has been faithful and affectionate, but neither one of them seems able to move forward until they see each other again—and with a continent between them that seems all too unlikely.

  But Carney has more matters to reconcile than her relationship with Larry. She is headed home for the summer, and her somewhat snobbish Eastern roommate is coming with her. Posh Isobel’s arrival in dear old Deep Valley causes Carney to see her hometown—and her home life—with new eyes. It is a rite of passage most of us must go through, and what is refreshing about Lovelace’s treatment of the topic is that her heroine is neither brooding nor cynical. Carney may be sorting out her personal ideals, but she is not at all self-absorbed. When she runs into a tangle of emotions, she is able to step back and examine them with candor and common sense. She approaches self-scrutiny with the same kind of energy that propels her circle of friends from one adventure to the next during what becomes a delightfully giddy summer of parties and houseguests.

  All through the summer of her “house party”—for Betsy Ray and Bonnie Andrews have returned to Deep Valley as well, and as usual, the warm hospitality of the Sibleys attracts Carney’s friends like a magnet—Carney is reassessing relationships and examining life. Like many a college student back home for the summer, she finds herself scrutinizing the little things that make her home uniquely her home: the way her father and brothers polish their shoes every Saturday night; the suspense around the table as her father’s famous rarebit approaches readiness; the trunk of costumes in the attic that the young people raid for a masquerade—each article of clothing capturing some piece of Sibley family history. Carney cherishes these things and becomes aware of the love her parents pour into making their home a homey place.

  The rigorous intellectual training she has received at Vassar prompts her to ponder the sort of traditions she wants to carry forward into her adult life. At times her present seems maddeningly full of unanswerable questions—Larry is coming for a visit! Will they click? What if they don’t? And what is she to make of that happy-go-lucky S
am Hutchinson, who zooms around town unshaven in his Locomobile, recklessly lavishing generosity upon his friends and then, horror of horrors, telling shopkeepers to “put it on the book”? But Carney faces each question with frankness and interest, even in painful circumstances. It’s that combination of honesty and enthusiasm that makes Carney one of Lovelace’s most likable characters. She’s a real girl, rapidly becoming a real woman: a woman with integrity and vision who doesn’t look to others to solve her problems for her but instead faces them head-on, confident in her own ability to untangle muddled thinking.

  Carney’s high-school chum Winona Root—one of Betsy Ray’s earliest friends-slash-rivals—is another of Lovelace’s most vivid characters. From her first appearance in Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Winona, who is a composite of two of Lovelace’s real-life friends, adds a dash of spice to every scene she inhabits. I suppose it’s no accident that the word “dash” inserted itself into that sentence—Winona is always “dashing” somewhere with her eyes “flashing.” The summer of Carney’s house party, Winona hosts a gathering:

  …a jolly party. Winona’s parties were just like Winona, full of careless gaiety. There were tables for cards but no one played much five hundred. They sang around the piano to Winona’s dashing accompaniment. They played wild games, and raced up and down stairs and in and out of doors.

  Winona loved races, fights, and scuffles. She would be a teacher soon. She had learned how to assume an expression of gentle sweetness. But tonight her black eyes flashed and her white teeth gleamed….

  Dashing piano accompaniment! There it is again! I love this description of the nearly adult Winona. It gibes completely with Lovelace’s depiction of the young girl who races Betsy to be the first kid in town to ride in Mr. Poppy’s automobile, way back in Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. It’s especially fun to compare college student Winona’s party to eight-year-old Winona’s birthday party in the second book reprinted in these pages: Winona’s Pony Cart. Carney’s House Party was written first; Winona’s Pony Cart takes us back in time to Winona’s eighth birthday, when the thing she wants more than anything is her very own pony—just the thing for a girl who loves to dash around town, right?

  It’s not surprising that Winona begins the book in disgrace; a girl with that much dash is bound to get into scrapes. In this case, it’s because she has soaked her best dress trying to ride the bird bath like a horse. Her mother wishes she would be more sedate and dignified. On party day, Mrs. Root will come to find her own sense of composure challenged when she discovers her friendly, outgoing daughter has unexpectedly doubled the guest list. Later it is the dignity with which Winona accepts a fate she cannot control—her mother is dead-set against Winona having a pony—that causes her parents to reassess the situation. Likewise, Winona’s openness and friendliness help her mother to look at people—such as the washerwoman’s twin daughters and some Syrian children from the other side of the Big Hill—in a new way.

  Indeed, if it is dignity and manners Mrs. Root wants to foster in her daughter, she could hardly do better than the example of the children from Little Syria. One of Lovelace’s best themes is the slow unfolding of relationships between the German, Scandinavian, Irish, and New Englander residents of Deep Valley and the small community of Lebanese Americans over the hill—a subject she explores with great attention in what is arguably her finest book, Emily of Deep Valley. In Winona’s Pony Cart, we get just a hint of these broadening perceptions; and just as Winona’s mother gains a new understanding of her Syrian neighbors, Winona, too, gains a new perspective of a boy she would rather not have invited to her party, the seemingly odious Percy. Despite his aloofness and ruffled blouse, Percy proves to be quite courageous, keeping his head—and his seat—when a pony runs away with him.

  Winona looked at Percy, thinking hard.

  “Maybe,” she thought, “if I were a boy, Mother would make me wear a ruffled blouse.”

  This subtle character growth is what Lovelace does best, and it is why her work endures. Winona—like Carney, like Betsy, like Joe, like Tony, like Tib, like Mr. and Mrs. Ray and Mr. and Mrs. Root and all the rest of our Deep Valley friends—is, to quote Betsy’s commencement address, “essentially human.” Betsy is referring there to the heroines of Shakespeare. I wish Lovelace had given us a peek at the rest of that address because I’d like to see how Betsy developed the thought. I suspect that what Betsy was getting at is that Shakespeare populated his plays with real, believable, imperfect, changeable people. They make mistakes. They puzzle things out. They struggle past their own weaknesses. They grow. As do the heroines of Lovelace, from eight-year-old Winona swallowing her tears and mustering gratitude for the presents she did get, to brokenhearted Betsy determinedly putting on a smile so as not to spoil Christmas Day for her family, to Carney searching her heart for her true feelings about Larry Humphreys.

  I’m the mother of many daughters now—four of them, and two small sons—and as my girls grow to womanhood I hope they will become, to quote Dickens, the heroines of their own lives, facing life’s challenges with Carney’s integrity, Betsy’s determination, and Winona’s sense of fun.

  They are reading my Betsy-Tacy and Deep Valley books to tatters, so I’d say we’re off to a good start.

  —MELISSA WILEY

  Carney’s House Party

  For

  BILL and TED

  Contents

  1. Sunset Hill

  2. Isobel’s Man

  3. The Dress Suit and Suzanne

  4. Deep Valley

  5. East Is East

  6. Bonnie

  7. The Masquerade

  8. Purple and Dove Gray

  9. Carney’s Future in a Handbasket

  10. The Little Colonel’s House Party

  11. Young Lochinvar

  12. Baseball for Bobbie

  13. Rarebit for Bonnie

  14. Roses for Carney

  15. Orono

  16. Somebody Elopes

  17. The Hutchinson Dance

  18. Betsy Gives Advice

  19. And Carney Follows It

  20. Sunset Hill Again

  1

  Sunset Hill

  CARNEY WAS CLIMBING Sunset Hill.

  Far below she could hear a group of her classmates, like herself just released from examinations, singing as they strolled beside the brook.

  “Where, oh where are the gay young Soph’mores,

  Where, oh where are the gay young Soph’mores,

  Where, oh where are the gay young Soph’mores,

  Safe now in the Junior class.”

  Well, she had passed all her exams, she felt sure. But sophomores wouldn’t be juniors, really, until fall. They were staying on for Class Day, seniors and sophomores being sister classes. Twenty-four of the prettiest sophomores, including Isobel, would carry the Daisy Chain. The rest had to pick the daisies, and there were awful rumors of a shortage. But then there were always such rumors, and always enough daisies in the end.

  “They’ve gone out from their Soph’more Lit Oh,

  They’ve gone out from their Soph’more Lit Oh…”

  Carney began to hum it from force of habit, but she stopped because she didn’t feel like humming. She had a problem to think out, which was the reason she was climbing Sunset Hill. She didn’t like unsolved problems hanging over her, any more than she liked unpaid bills or unaccomplished duties. Whatever Carney Sibley had to do, she liked to do with efficiency and dispatch.

  Sunset Hill was scattered on the lower reaches with small gnarled old apple trees and, of course, with evergreens. The spicy odor of evergreens was everywhere about the college. In the tall grass were red clover and white yarrow, buttercups and daisies like those the sophomores must gather next week.

  Benches here and there invited one to stop and look at the brook, at the roofs of the college, at the flag on Main where Carney roomed with Isobel. But Carney wouldn’t stop until she reached the top. There was a bench up there, with a view of rolling blue hi
lls, to which she had brought all her problems during her two years at college.

  She passed the ancient apple trees, which had been part of Matthew Vassar’s orchard back in 1865. It was 1911 now, but the sophomores down by the brook were singing about him.

  “Oh, young Matthew Vassar was a boy of no renown,

  He was born in merry England o’er the sea,

  He sailed across the ocean,

  In Poughkeepsie settled down,

  Where in course of time he built a brewery…”

  And the brewery had made his fortune, Carney remembered. He had labored and prospered and when he came to dispose of his wealth it occurred to him that injustice had been done to woman’s brains.

  “What a pity undeveloped they should be.

  So Matthew, Matthew Vassar

  Built a college then and there…”

  The song died away, for Carney had left the sloping green meadow behind and was entering a growth of tall, dark evergreens. They were almost as tall as those down on the campus; the branches of the Norway spruces trailed on the ground like ladies’ skirts. She passed the outdoor theatre, a green knoll with a semicircle of pines behind it on a lower slope.

  How lovely Isobel had looked there, in her Greek robe and fillet, at the Founder’s Day Pageant!

  Carney reached the summit and her bench, made of wood and cement like all the Vassar benches, with V. C. carved on the side. The woodsy path went on, downward now, to a rendezvous with the brook in a green-gold glen. Sitting down in the aromatic shade, Carney looked off at the hills and felt at home. Hills also surrounded Deep Valley, the Minnesota town in which she had grown up.