Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  The Okto Deltas had no difficulty watching the game as a unit, at least so far as girls were concerned. No other girls approached them. Most of the boys they knew were either on the football team or among the scrubs who were also in uniform, hoping to be called as replacements. Lloyd Harrington wasn’t on the team and he joined Tib at once, remaining beside her to instruct and explain. Tib was an excellent vacant-lot football player herself, but she asked naive questions and listened round-eyed.

  Another boy on the side lines was Joe Willard.

  Joe had never been able to go out for football because he worked after school. Heretofore, he had not been able even to come to the games. But he was here today as representative of the Deep Valley Sun. Bareheaded, wearing a heavy blue turtle-neck sweater, a swatch of yellow copy paper stuck in his hip pocket, he dashed up and down the side lines abreast of the battling teams. His face was glowing with excitement and Betsy remembered Cab telling her last year that Joe was good at football. He could have been an outstanding athlete, Stewie, the coach, had said. Joe had never seemed to mind not having time for athletics. He had said offhandedly that he would play in college. But watching him now, Betsy realized that it must have been a real deprivation.

  Just as the first half ended without a score, Joe’s peregrinations brought him upon the Okto Deltas. They were standing in front of their decorated auto.

  “Hey, what’s all this?” he asked, looking at Betsy.

  “Haven’t you heard about the new sorority? I thought you were expected to keep up with the news.” Betsy smiled saucily, glad that there were plenty of curls pulled out beneath her tam.

  “Only important news. What’s the name of the thing?”

  “Okto Delta. Greek letters, you know.”

  “Greek letters?” Joe looked puzzled. “I got ambitious and tried to learn some Greek one time. Okto isn’t a letter; it’s a word.”

  “Oh, don’t be like Gaston,” said Betsy. “The effect is Greek letters.”

  “The effect,” said Joe, his blue eyes roving over the group, “is kind of cute,” with which remark he sauntered off. The disgustingly general compliment gave Betsy no pleasure. He was freer with compliments these days, which meant, in her opinion, that they were meaningless. She would have preferred the pretended insults she was sure he heaped on Phyllis.

  The Okto Deltas, eight strong, began to shout:

  “We’ll whoop her up for D. V.

  We’ve got ’em on the run,

  We’re going to beat St. John’s boys,

  And the fun is just begun.

  There’s Larson, Hunt and Edwards,

  They’ll hit that line a few,

  With such an aggregation,

  We won’t do much to you.”

  Betsy shouted along with the rest, but her eyes followed Joe’s retreating figure.

  Phyllis Brandish was sitting in her auto. He joined her and sat there until the second half. When he got out, she followed, a chic, distinctive figure in a russet red suit, fur boa and muff. Furs were the rage that year. For a while she accompanied him in his rovings up and down the field. At last, with a small intimate wave of her hand which seemed to say that she couldn’t keep up with him, she retired to her auto again.

  In the second half each team made a touchdown. Then Dave Hunt, providentially long-legged, kicked a goal and Deep Valley won the game. The clamor was terrific. Joe Willard was bellowing like a madman. The Okto Deltas were screaming and jumping and hugging one another, and Betsy acted as frantic as everyone else. Yet she didn’t feel particularly happy.

  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.

  12

  Agley-er and Agley-er

  TIB 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 Smit
h 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.

  “You are my Rose of Mexico,

  The one I loved so long ago….”

  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.