Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe Page 2

  Phil Brandish had been the great outstanding triumph of Betsy’s sophomore year. She had tried that year to acquire a new personality, to act Dramatic and Mysterious, and in this role she had captured Phil Brandish’s interest. But she had not enjoyed pretending all the time to be something she wasn’t. She had decided before the season ended that she preferred, usually, just to be herself.

  “I learned a lot from that affair, though,” she thought now, frowning. “I’ve had more poise with boys since then. Julia says I’m more charming. Of course, I didn’t keep Phil, but then, I didn’t want to.”

  He was a sulky, aloof boy whose chief charm had been a red automobile. He and his twin, Phyllis, were grandchildren of the rich Home Brandish, who lived in a mansion on the west side of Deep Valley. Phyllis went to boarding school—Browner Seminary in Milwaukee. By a coincidence this school was attended by a great friend of Betsy’s, Thelma Muller, irrevocably nicknamed Tib.

  Betsy’s oldest and closest friend was red-haired Tacy Kelly. They had been loyal, loving chums since Betsy’s fifth birthday party. And they had been friends with Tib almost as long as they had been friends with each other. Tib was tiny, yellow-headed, as daring as she was pretty. Betsy and Tacy loved to think up adventurous things to do, but it had usually been Tib who did them. She had lived in a large chocolate-colored house. She could dance. She had exquisite clothes. Even when she was their daily companion, Tib had been a figure of romance to Betsy and Tacy.

  And when they were all in the eighth grade, she had moved away to Milwaukee.

  Last year Betsy had gone to spend Christmas with her. The visit to the big foreign-flavored city, the glimpse into Tib’s life, with its sheltered private school, its encircling Grosspapas and Grossmamas, uncles, aunts and cousins, had been an illuminating experience. It was while visiting there that Betsy had decided to become Dramatic and Mysterious. The visit had had a thrilling ending for on New Year’s Eve Tib had told her that the family might move back to Deep Valley.

  “I wonder whether she really will come some day,” Betsy thought. A breeze had sprung up, ruffling the water and bringing a faint, not unpleasantly fishy smell. The boat rocked dreamily.

  Betsy roused herself, reached for her journal. Wetting her pencil with the tip of her tongue she began to write.

  “I’m going to make my junior year just perfect,” she wrote. “In the first place I’m going to stay around home a lot. Julia is going off to the University and Papa and Mamma and Margaret will all miss her terribly—almost as much as I will.”

  It wasn’t that Julia had ever helped much around the house, Betsy thought, lowering her pencil. Anna, the Rays’ hired girl, was so efficient that there wasn’t much need for any of the daughters to help. But Julia was so loving and vital. Her personality filled the house just as her music did. Julia planned to be an opera singer and was playing and singing all day long. She played popular music, too, for the Crowd to sing.

  “I resolve next,” Betsy continued writing, “to learn to play the piano. The family has always wanted me to take piano lessons and I’ve always dodged them. But with Julia going I’ll just have to learn. I can’t imagine our house without music. I’ll start taking lessons and practise an hour every day if it kills me. (It probably will.)

  “In school,” she went on, “I want my year to be completely wonderful. I hope I’ll be elected a class officer again. And I’d like to head up a committee for the junior-senior banquet. That’s the most important event of the junior year. Above all I want another try at the Essay Contest. I want that terribly. I think I’ll have it, too. And I’m really going to study. I’m going to try to get good marks. I’ve never done my best.”

  She read over what she had written, suffused by a warm virtuous glow.

  “As for boys,” Betsy concluded, and her writing grew very firm and black, “I think I’ll go with Joe Willard!”

  She emphasized this declaration with an exclamation point and some heavy underlining, which was fitting. It was really the keystone of the structure she had built. Unconsciously, perhaps, she had figured out just what kind of a girl she thought Joe Willard would like, and that was the kind she was planning to be.

  He didn’t have money to spend on girls. He couldn’t afford frivolity. When he started going around with a girl, she would surely be the kind Betsy had just described—one who was devoted to her home, who gave her spare time to some worth while thing like music, a leader in school.

  But it would take planning to go with him, no matter how admirable she made herself. Unfortunately, Joe Willard didn’t seem to want girls in his life. It was because of his shortage of money, Betsy felt sure.

  “But I can make him see that money doesn’t matter,” she planned. “I’ll just have to lure him up to the house.” Once a boy came to the merry, hospitable Ray house he almost always came again.

  It was pleasant to sit in a gently rocking boat, listening to killdees on the shore, and think about going with Joe Willard. Betsy had liked him for several years now. She had met him the summer before she entered high school, in the little hamlet of Butternut Center where he was clerking in his uncle’s store. She was on her way home, after visiting on a farm, and he had sold her some presents to take to her family, and Tacy.

  During the two years of high school a series of small misunderstandings had kept them apart, but he liked her, Betsy felt sure, just as she liked him.

  “Not in a silly way,” she thought. “We’re just going to be wonderful, wonderful friends—for the present, that is,” she added hastily. She was quite aware that it would be easy to be romantic about Joe Willard. He was so extremely good looking with light hair cut in a pompadour, and blue eyes under thick golden brows. His red lower lip protruded recklessly. He was not downed by the fact that he had no home, no parents and very little money.

  “He’ll have more money this year,” Betsy thought. He had planned, she knew, to work with a threshing rig all summer, following the harvest northward. He had expected to earn three dollars a day and save it for his expenses during the coming school year.

  “I suppose he’ll work after school at the creamery again. That won’t matter. He’ll be able to come to see me sometimes, and we’ll talk by the hour. How he’ll love Papa’s Sunday night lunches, and the way Mamma plays for us to dance!”

  She sat still for a moment smiling at the distant chimney of the Inn as though it were Joe Willard.

  When she smiled, Betsy’s face lighted with a charm of which she was quite unaware. She didn’t like her square white teeth which were, in her own phrase “parted in the middle.” But her smile, quick and very bright, gave a hint of her response to life which was trusting and joyful.

  She was a tall, slender girl with soft brown hair worn in a pompadour over a “jimmy.” It was wavy now, but only because it had been wound the night before on Magic Wavers. She had dark-lashed hazel eyes, and a pink and white skin. This she prized mightily. It was, she considered, her only claim to beauty, and Betsy worshipped beauty.

  If a fairy godmother had ever appeared in her vicinity waving a wand and offering favors, Betsy would have cried out unhesitatingly for beauty. Her favorite daydream was of suddenly becoming beautiful with “bright hair streaming down” like the Lily Maid of Astolot’s, or dark raven tresses.

  The members of her Crowd sometimes exchanged “trade lasts”—T.L.s, they were called. A “trade last” was a compliment, heard about another person, repeated to him after he had first repeated a compliment heard about you. Betsy was always being told for a T.L. that she had been described as interesting, sweet or charming. It infuriated her.

  “I want to be pretty!” she stormed to Tacy.

  “You’re better than pretty,” Tacy answered sometimes and Betsy would respond inelegantly, “Pooh for that!”

  After smiling for a long time at the chimney which was masquerading as Joe Willard, she slapped her notebook shut, put it back on the seat and took up the oars. Instinct told her it was almost four
o’clock. Betsy often rowed over to Babcock’s Bay in the early afternoon, which was “nap time” at the Inn. She liked to be alone sometimes to read, write on her novel, or just think. But she always got back for the bathing.

  Slipping the oars into the water, she turned the boat about. She rowed unskillfully, her oars churned up showers of glittering drops, but she sent the heavy boat hurrying over the water.

  2

  Making Plans

  THE LONG INN DOCK was lined with boats and draped with fishnets. Old Pete, smoking his pipe in the lee of the boathouse, hobbled forward with rheumatic slowness to pull Betsy in. She stepped out cautiously, the boat rocking beneath her feet, and lingered to talk with him. They were great friends. He sometimes told her stories about when her mother was a girl and lived at Pleasant Park across the lake.

  “She was a handsome redhead. I used to see her out in her sailboat, ‘The Queen of the Lake.’ Her brother Keith would be with her, the one who ran away to be an actor. He was redheaded, too, and as handsome as they come.”

  “He’s still an actor. He’s with Mr. Otis Skinner this season in The Honor of the Family,” Betsy had answered, glowing. Her mother’s brother, Keith Warrington, was very close to Betsy although she had seen him only once.

  She used his old theatrical trunk for a desk. She kept her manuscripts, notebooks and pencils in the tray, and wrote on the smooth top with pleasure, feeling that in some intangible way the storied background, the venturesome travels of the trunk added magic to her pencil. The trunk had come to represent her writing, her dearest plans for her life.

  Old Pete said now only that there was going to be a change in the weather.

  “This gloriously perfect summer can’t last forever,” answered Betsy. She ran up a steep flight of stairs, which spanned the high bank through a tangled growth of bushes and trees.

  At the top she was greeted by a delicious smell from the Inn kitchens—baking cake, she thought. A clothes line hung full of bathing suits and stockings. Betsy selected her own and paused at the pump which stood at one end of the porch just outside Mrs. Van Blarcum’s office.

  Mrs. Van Blarcum was small, spare, vivacious, always busy from morning until night. Mr. Van Blarcum was courtly, with drooping white mustaches, always leisurely. They had operated the Inn for many years and the same families returned summer after summer from Deep Valley and other Minnesota towns, as well as from Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri.

  The Inn was old. It had received so many additions at different periods that it had quite lost its original shape and sprawled in strange directions, unified only by white paint and a narrow open porch across the front.

  Guests overflowed the main building and slept in cottages. These ranged in an uneven semicircle among old apple trees around the smooth green lawn. The Rays had the cottage on the end of the point. It consisted only of two bedrooms with a porch in front. Unplastered, it smelled freshly of the lake which could be seen in a rippling silver sheet through the foliage outside the windows.

  The three sisters occupied one bedroom. Julia and Margaret were there putting on their bathing suits, when Betsy dashed in. The bathing suits were all of heavy blue serge, trimmed with white braid around the sailor collars, the elbow-length sleeves, and the skirts which came to the knee over ample bloomers. With them the girls wore long black stockings and neatly laced canvas oxfords. Julia was tying a red bandana around her dark hair.

  She was a beautiful girl with violet eyes, a classic nose, and white teeth which, unlike Betsy’s, were conventionally spaced. She was shorter than Betsy, but made the most of every inch of height, longing to be tall because of her operatic ambitions.

  “How’s the novel going?” she asked Betsy, adjusting the ends of her kerchief artfully and looking in a hand mirror to see the effect.

  “I wasn’t working on that today; just writing in my journal. I’m making wonderful plans for next year. Gee, it seems funny to be an upper classman!”

  “It doesn’t seem a bit funny to me to be finished,” Julia said. “In fact I feel as though I should have finished long ago. Eighteen years of my life gone and I haven’t yet got down to music in a serious way! Come here, Margaret dear,” she added to the younger sister, “and I’ll tie your bandana.”

  “Yoo hoo, Betsy!” came voices from outside.

  “No matter where we live or go,” Julia said, laughing, “there’s always someone yoo-hooing outside for you, Bettina.”

  This was true, and Betsy liked to hear it.

  “There’s been a grand crowd out here this summer,” she replied, scrambling into her suit.

  She had enjoyed getting acquainted with people from other places. There were two boys her own age from Deep Valley too. Betsy looked for them now as, tying her kerchief hurriedly, she rushed out the door.

  Dave Hunt had already run down the stairs. He ignored girls and usually went fishing with the men. Yet his presence had added an extra fillip to the summer, for now and then Betsy found him staring at her out of deep-set dark blue eyes. He was over six feet tall and very thin, with a stern, spare face.

  E. Lloyd Harrington was highly social. He, too, was tall, but fragile. He had beautiful manners and loved to dance. He usually wore glasses and was blinking now without them.

  Julia was joined by Roger Tate, a University student. For a week he had been trailing her, talking about the U, as he called it, and making plans for the days following her arrival there. He was going to take her, Julia told Betsy, to a fraternity dance—whatever that was; riverbanking—that meant walking along the Mississippi, he explained; to lunch in Minneapolis tea rooms. He was teaching her to swim.

  “Today I want you to go as far as the buoy,” he said.

  “I’ll try.” Julia lifted her violet eyes, smiled with intention. Roger blushed and began to talk hurriedly, almost senselessly, about side strokes and breast strokes. Betsy shook her head. She had seen plenty of Julia’s conquests and they always amused and interested her. But she didn’t like it at the end when Julia threw her victims over.

  Dave went so far out into the lake that Old Pete blew a horn and summoned him back. Betsy could swim only a little, but she had fun with water wings and floated a long time, looking up into the blue world of the sky, thinking about next winter.

  At five o’clock everyone went dripping back to his room to dress for supper.

  A day at Murmuring Lake Inn did not have one climax; it had three: the three superb meals. Guests rose from the enormous breakfast swearing that they could never eat again. Yet they were waiting hungrily on the porches when the dinner bell rang. And although the noon meal was abundant beyond all reason, everyone was waiting shamelessly for the supper bell.

  The Ray girls and their mother waited on the porch of their cottage. Julia and Betsy had changed into white dotted swiss dresses, Margaret into a yellow sailor suit. Mrs. Ray wore crisp pale green trimmed with bands of plaid.

  “Papa’s late tonight,” she said. “He’s almost always here by now.”

  An inadvertent tinkle sounded as one of the maids came out on the porch carrying a big brass bell. Before she had a chance to ring it guests started streaming toward the dining room. She swung it heartily and the loud metallic clangor caused those guests who were housed in cottages to start from their porches, except for the Rays.

  “I’m starving,” Betsy said.

  “So am I,” answered Mrs. Ray. “But it isn’t civilized not to wait for Papa.”

  “At least three minutes,” Julia said.

  “There he is now,” Margaret said.

  Sure enough, a fringed surrey had stopped at the far side of the Inn, and Mr. Ray alighted.

  “Why, he’s helping somebody out,” said Mrs. Ray. “I wonder who it can be.”

  Curiosity born of their quiet days sent them hurrying over the lawn.

  They saw a small, golden-haired figure, very chic in a high-waisted, lilac-sprigged dress. Betsy stared. Then she shrieked. Then she began to run.
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  “Tib!” she cried. “Tib Muller!”

  She and Tib flung their arms about each other.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I rode out from Deep Valley with your father.”

  “But you belong in Milwaukee.”

  “No,” said Tib. “We’ve moved back. I live in Deep Valley now. I’m going to go to the Deep Valley High School right along with you and Tacy.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes, almost tearful with joy. Then Tib embraced Mrs. Ray, Julia and Margaret.

  “Take her to Mrs. Van Blarcum and get her a room,” said Mr. Ray, looking pleased with himself. He was a tall, dark-haired man, with hazel eyes like Betsy’s.

  Hand in hand, in a quiver of excitement, Betsy and Tib ran to Mrs. Van Blarcum. The room must be big enough for Betsy, too, they insisted, hugging each other; they refused to be separated. They reached the supper table late, but by this time they had quieted down enough to remember that they were sixteen, and they walked demurely across the dining room.

  Mrs. Van Blarcum had put a chair for Tib at the Ray family table. Everyone was happily agitated by her arrival.

  “When did you get back?” Mrs. Ray asked, as Betsy and Tib helped themselves liberally to crisply-fried lake fish, cottage-fried potatoes, stewed fresh tomatoes, green corn on the cob, cold slaw and muffins still warm to the touch.

  “Just yesterday,” said Tib. “Mamma and Matilda are very busy settling, but they said I might come out when Mr. Ray invited me. I was so anxious to see Betsy.” She spoke with a slight foreign inflection, a result of the years in Milwaukee with her German relatives.

  “Have you seen Tacy?” asked Julia.

  “Yes,” said Tib. “I went up to her house last night. I could hardly believe it, how tall and grown-up she was. But after I had talked with her a minute I could see that she hadn’t changed.”

  “Tacy is always the same.”

  “Margaret has changed, though,” said Tib, smiling at Betsy’s younger sister. “You’re ten years old now, aren’t you, Margaret?”