Heaven to Betsy / Betsy in Spite of Herself Read online

  Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself

  Maud Hart Lovelace

  Illustrated by Vera Neville

  For

  TOM and STELLA

  All things must change To something new, to something strange…

  —HENRY W. LONGFELLOW

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Heaven to Betsy

  1. The Farm

  2. Butternut Center

  3. The Surprise

  4. High Street

  5. Anna

  6. The First Day of High School

  7. Cab

  8. The Sibleys’ Side Lawn

  9. The Triumvirate of Lady Bugs

  10. And the Triumvirate of Potato Bugs

  11. Sunday Night Lunch

  12. The Tall Dark Stranger

  13. The Freshman Party

  14. The Trip to Murmuring Lake

  15. Halloween

  16. Hic, Haec, Hoc

  17. The Brass Bowl

  18. What the Ouija Board Said

  19. The Winter Picnic

  20. T-R-O-U-B-L-E?

  21. T-R-O-U-B-L-E!

  22. New Year’s Eve

  23. The Talk with Mr. Ray

  24. An Adventure on Puget Sound

  25. Change in the Air

  26. Of Church and Library

  27. The Essay Contest

  28. Results

  29. The Hill

  Other Books by in The Betsy-Tacy Books

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  It’s a rite of girlhood that almost everyone knows. A beloved friend disappears for a year or two, during that crucial middle school period. Perhaps she lives in another school district or her family relocates temporarily for a parent’s job. Reunited with your old classmate in high school, you are shocked at how she has changed physically. Where she was once short and stocky with pigtails, she is now tall and slender, willowy even, with a cloud of dark hair. Her clothes are much more grown-up, fashion-forward. You approach this newly glamorous creature with caution, wondering if she will have any use for you. Then she throws back her head and laughs her familiar laugh, showing teeth that are still parted in the middle, and you realize she hasn’t changed in the ways that matter.

  Betsy Ray, the heroine of Maud Hart Lovelace’s beloved series, underwent such a transformation between the ages of twelve and fourteen. After four books in which she was depicted by the delightful line drawings of Lois Lenski, she graduated to high school and the dreamily flattering pen of Vera Neville. But she was still Betsy—warm, stubborn, imaginative.

  Now I read pretty widely as a kid—I am the daughter of a children’s librarian, after all—and discovered many kindred spirits in literature. But no character meant as much to me as Betsy Ray in her high school years. At a time when library shelves groaned with books about modern teenagers facing all sorts of modern dilemmas, Betsy was the most relatable character I could find. True, she was a small-town Minnesota girl at the turn of the century, and I was living in a relatively big city in the 1970s. But she seemed more real to me than my contemporaneous counterparts, the girls who watched television and cruised McDonald’s, worrying about how to fill their training bras. Sure, I did those things, too, but they didn’t define me.

  So much about Betsy elicited an inner cry of “Me, too!” She liked boys. She didn’t have a clue what to do about them. Outgoing and friendly, she also was intensely private, even within the safe confines of a loving family. She was endlessly self-critical, bemoaning her straight hair, the part in her teeth, and her freckles. Actually, I was okay with my teeth and had no freckles, but oh, how I hated my hair.

  The primary reason I identified with Betsy, however, is that she wanted to be a writer, not a wife and mother. Oh, she planned to have a family one day. But first, she had other things to do. In Heaven to Betsy, the story of her freshman year at Deep Valley High School, “she had been almost appalled, when she started going around with Carney and Bonnie, to discover how fixed their ideas of marriage were…. When Betsy and Tacy and Tib talked about their future, they planned to be writers, dancers, circus acrobats.”

  More amazingly—it is the early twentieth century, after all, before women have won the right to vote—no one close to Betsy ever tries to disabuse her of this ambition. Her family, in fact, could not be more supportive. Loyal Tacy adores everything she writes. And while her other friends tease her—the boys call her “The Little Poetess” because she once published some verse in the local paper—it’s done with admiration and affection.

  No, the person who comes between Betsy and her writing in her first two years of high school is…Betsy. As a freshman, trying to find her place with a new crowd, she makes the mistake of thinking she shouldn’t write because the other girls don’t. She learns the hard way that her writing is a gift that she must never neglect, and that one should never follow the crowd if it means sacrificing one’s true identity.

  Then, as a sophomore in Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy has an essentially existential crisis that once again challenges writing’s place in her life. Methodically, she reinvents herself as a reserved, poised siren, a persona that helps her win the attention of a desirable boy. She gets the boy, but at what cost to her writing?

  Her new beau isn’t the only person who gets between Betsy and writing. A pedantic English teacher seems to find a strange pleasure in challenging Betsy, mocking her light verse, and downgrading her short stories for perceived factual errors. But even Betsy’s supportive father advises her that such criticism is a constant in a writer’s life.

  Consider this exchange at the Ray dinner table:

  “It wouldn’t do Betsy any harm to learn about commas,” Mr. Ray said. “I’ve noticed myself that she scatters them like grass seed.”

  “Who reads Shakespeare for the commas?” [Betsy’s mother retorted.]

  “Maybe…” Mr. Ray’s eyes twinkled. “I duck when I say it…Maybe Betsy isn’t in Shakespeare’s class?”

  That drew [older sister] Julia into the fray.

  “How do you know she isn’t? Maybe this generation is going to produce another Shakespeare and maybe it’s Betsy.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” interjected Mrs. Ray.

  Talk about Minnesota nice! I’ve met archetypal Jewish mothers who don’t have this much pride in their offspring.

  Okay, Betsy wasn’t Shakespeare, but she went on to enjoy a career not unlike Maud Hart Lovelace’s, publishing her first short stories while still quite young. The last time we see her, in Betsy’s Wedding, her husband is encouraging her to write a novel, and I firmly believe she took his advice.

  “Role model” has become a cliché, a banality, but Betsy Ray was that for me, and more, a BFF before there were BFFs. I reread these books every year, marveling at how a world so quaint—shirtwaists! pompadours! Merry Widow hats!—can feature a heroine who is undeniably modern. Today, sixty-plus years after these two books first appeared, Betsy remains a vibrant, inspiring presence, with a heart large enough to embrace many new friends. Although, just so you know: Tacy will always have first position.

  —LAURA LIPPMAN

  Baltimore, Maryland

  2009

  Heaven to Betsy

  1

  The Farm

  BETSY WAS VISITING at the Taggarts’ farm. It was Wednesday, and soon the kitchen would swim with warm delicious odors. It was ninety-six in the shade outside, and the wood-burning range gave off a fiery heat, but Mrs. Taggart baked on Wednesday just as inflexibly as she
washed on Monday and ironed on Tuesday. Heat or no heat, she would bake today…cake, cookies, pie, bread, biscuits. It was sad that Betsy who usually liked such mouthwatering items felt she would choke on every morsel.

  Betsy smiled brightly.

  “I’ll walk on down for the mail,” she said, “if there’s nothing more I can do.”

  “Not a thing,” answered Mrs. Taggart cheerfully, setting out bowls, an egg beater, a flour sifter, pans. She was a short, bright-eyed pouter pigeon of a woman in an apron that crackled with starch. “It isn’t time for Mr. Simmons yet, though.”

  “That’s all right. I like sitting down by the road.”

  “You’re sure you’re not homesick, Betsy?”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Taggart!”

  “Take Shep along for company,” Mrs. Taggart said.

  Shep plainly expected to go. In the eight days of Betsy’s visit, the old collie who had been a pet of the Taggarts’ Mattie, now married and gone, had come to look forward to this morning walk. He rose now, brushed against her ankle-length skirts, and barked.

  Betsy took a sunbonnet from a row of hooks on the kitchen wall and climbed to the prim, low-ceiled room which had once been Mattie’s. She crossed to the bureau and tied on her sunbonnet, looking anxiously into the mirror.

  Every time she looked into a mirror Betsy hoped to find that her looks had changed. They had certainly changed enough in the last two years. At twelve she had been short, straight and chunky with perky braids and a freckled smiling face. At fourteen she was tall, very slender, with a tendency to stoop. Her brown hair waved softly by reason of eight kid rollers, four on either side, in which she slept at night. Her one braid was turned up with a large hair ribbon, red today, matching the tie of her dark blue sailor suit. Freckles were fading out of a pink and white skin, the delicacy of which she guarded carefully.

  “It’s the only pretty thing about me,” she often muttered savagely while rubbing in creams at night. “Straight hair! Teeth parted in the middle! Mighty good thing I have a decent complexion!”

  As a matter of fact what one noticed first and liked best in Betsy were her eyes, clear hazel, under dark brows and lashes. But her frown, as she tied on the sunbonnet, expressed disapproval of her entire physiognomy. She picked up a pad of paper and a pencil, ran down the stairs and out the kitchen door, saying good-by to Mrs. Taggart gaily, and calling out to Shep an invitation to race. This, in view of the heat and his age, he sensibly ignored.

  Shep was not fooled by Betsy’s vivacity. And in spite of laughing denials, Betsy was homesick. She was…to put it mildly…wretchedly, desperately, nightmarishly homesick, and had been ever since she came to visit the Taggarts.

  Mr. Taggart, a friend of her father’s, had come into the store to buy shoes. Seeing Betsy and noticing her droopy thinness, he had told her father that the young lady needed some country milk and eggs. How about letting her come out to visit Mrs. Taggart who felt lost since Mattie had married? Betsy had felt important and flattered. She had been delighted to go.

  Tacy Kelly, her best friend, who lived across the street, had been thrilled too. When Betsy drove away on the high seat of the farm wagon beside bearded, mild Mr. Taggart, Tacy waved enthusiastically along with Betsy’s sisters, Julia and Margaret. Betsy waved back with a shining face but she had not left Deep Valley behind before this sickish misery invaded her being.

  It seemed to her that she had to burst out crying and ask Mr. Taggart to turn around and go back. She couldn’t do that, of course, and they drove farther and farther away…out Front Street and through the wooded river valley, scene of so many family picnics. They climbed Pigeon Hill, and it was worse after that for the country was not even familiar.

  The town of Deep Valley was set amidst hills, and Hill Street where Betsy had lived all her life was barricaded by tree-covered slopes. Beyond Pigeon Hill lay prairie, treeless except for planted groves around the widely separated houses. There were only telephone wires for the birds to perch on. Prairie, poles and wires! Prairie, poles and wires! On the seat beside Mr. Taggart Betsy grew quieter and quieter.

  “See what I’ve brought home, Mamma.” Mr. Taggart had presented her proudly in the dooryard of a small grey house dwarfed by a windmill and a big red barn and the planted windbreak of trees.

  In response to Mrs. Taggart’s welcoming kindness, Betsy had ground her teeth and smiled.

  It was Julia, and not Betsy, who had a talent for the stage, but Betsy had done a wonderful job of acting through eight endless days. She had swallowed food over a lump in her throat and exclaimed over its goodness. She had chatted in a grown-up way borrowed from Julia, listened radiantly to Mrs. Taggart’s brisk domestic conversation when she could hardly keep the tears back. Sometimes she knew she could not keep them back and fled to the barn pretending sudden interest in the calf or baby pigs. There in dark solitude she buried her head in her arms while waves of desolation broke against her.

  The hardest time of each day came at the end. Every evening her family called her on the telephone.

  It was one thing to fool Mr. and Mrs. Taggart. They were strangers, and easily taken in. Fooling her loving, keen-witted mother was quite another matter. But Betsy felt she would rather die than let her family know that she was homesick. Julia went visiting alone, and she was only two years older.

  It wasn’t necessary for her to stay. The merest hint over the ’phone, and her mother would find a reason for summoning her home. But Betsy wouldn’t give it. She had been invited for two weeks, and she would not by her own act cut those two weeks short. Betsy looked these days like a somewhat wilted lily, but going into her teens hadn’t changed one thing about her. She was still as stubborn as a mule.

  A hundred times a day she checked off on her fingers the days that must elapse before she went home. She checked them off now…one, two, three, four, five, six…as she walked down the long narrow road to the mailbox. This was the happiest hour of her day; not because of the walk…that was hot and dusty…but because of the blessed anticipation of mail. Tacy wrote faithfully, and sometimes there were letters from Tib, who used to live in Deep Valley but had moved back to her native city of Milwaukee.

  Betsy and Tacy had mourned at first when Tib moved away. They had not known then the fun and fascination to be found in correspondence. Now letters flew from Deep Valley to Milwaukee and back like fat, gossipy birds.

  “Maybe there’ll be a letter from Tib today,” thought Betsy as she and Shep plodded along in the burning heat.

  The roadsides offered no shade, only thickets of purple spiked leadplant and gaudy butterfly weed. To the right and the left stretched golden fields where rye was in shock. But down at the main road where the Taggart R.F.D. box waited hungrily on a fence post, stood an elderberry bush. Betsy sat down in its patch of shade and Shep gratefully eased himself to the ground. She took off her sunbonnet. Her curls had quite flattened out in the heat, but fortunately she did not know it. She fanned herself and Shep with the generous bonnet.

  A short yard away a picket pin gopher appeared, erect on his haunches. From the telephone wire a meadow lark soared into the air, broke the hot stillness with a cool cascade of notes, dropped into the meadow. Betsy groped in her pocket for the pencil and the pad of paper. She scribbled dreamily:

  “I sit by the side of the road,

  Thinking of times gone by,

  Thinking of home far away,

  ’til a tear springs into my eye.

  Then a gopher springs up to amuse me,

  And a meadow lark sings me a song,

  When the world is so full of God’s creatures,

  To be homesick is certainly wrong.”

  She read this over and changed the first “springs” to “wells.” She read it over again, and frowned. The word “certainly” didn’t seem very poetic. But before she had found an adverb she liked better, she heard a clop clop of hoofs and saw the mail wagon’s halo of dust. She jumped to her feet. Mr. Simmons, red faced and genial, handed her
a card from Sears Roebuck for Mrs. Taggart, and a letter bearing Tacy’s dear angular script.

  “But it’s thin,” Betsy thought as she told Mr. Simmons that Mr. Taggart was haying today, that it was hot enough for her, and that she would see him tomorrow.

  When he was gone she sat down again. She did not hurry about opening her letter. The moment was too precious to be hurried. She examined the postmark: Deep Valley, Minn. July 25, 1906. Sometimes Tacy enlivened the envelope by putting the stamp on upside down to signify love, or by addressing her with some grandiloquent string of names such as Miss Elizabetha Gwendolyn Madeline Angeline Rosemond Ray, or by adding BC for Best Chum or HHAS for Herbert Humphreys Admiration Society. Herbert Humphreys, large and bright-blond, had been the beau ideal of the girls through grade school.

  Today, however, Tacy’s envelope was lacking in lively decorations, and when Betsy opened it, there was, as she had feared, only a single page inside. But its message was potent to hold homesickness at bay.

  “Dear Betsy. I don’t dare to write much for fear

  I’ll give something away. Your mother said I

  could tell you that they have a surprise for you,

  but of course I can’t tell you what it is. It’s nice

  for you, but not so nice for me, but that’s all

  right. In a way it’s nice for me, too. I’d better

  stop. You see how it is. If I write I’m sure to give