“I could make an apple cake for dessert,” said Aunt Ruth.
“Wunderschön! I’ll serve it with whipped cream.”
Betsy urged Tib to stay, but she couldn’t. “I’m meeting Rocky for a movie. He doesn’t like many movies, but he does like Charlie Chaplin.”
“It doesn’t matter to Rocky,” grumbled Betsy later, “that Tib does like movies, and the theatre, too.” But as Sunday approached she cleaned and polished, wanting the house to be a credit to Tib. She picked iris for the vases, and Aunt Ruth’s apple cake looked luscious but she would not let Joe cut so much as a sliver.
Tib came out straight from church, wearing a taffeta suit of Copenhagen blue, a tilted hat made from the same material, and a snowy feather boa. She divested herself of boa, hat, and jacket briskly and tied on a scrap of apron. She was excited and happy, chattering to Aunt Ruth, and while the beef simmered in a covered iron pot, she began to grate potatoes for the dumplings.
Betsy’s heart softened toward Rocky a little.
Maybe he is the one for her, she thought, setting the table with fastidious care. You can’t choose a husband for another woman. Maybe she likes him bossy and selfish. She certainly likes to cook for him.
He walked in shortly, in the spruce golfing knickers he liked to wear—although he scorned golf. Running his hands through his unruly hair, smiling his charming smile, he shouted, “Where’s Tiny Tib?” He sniffed and tasted and Tib’s laughter trilled.
Betsy’s heart softened more and more.
The Kerrs arrived and joined the rest in the kitchen. Tib fluttered efficiently about. The tiny apron was quite inadequate even for her tiny person, but Tib never spilled or spattered. She was as dainty at cooking as at dancing.
They all sat down to the shining table.
“Some groceries!” Rocky kept saying. And he’d blow a kiss. “Here’s to you, Tiny Tib!” Tib smiled with delight, and Tacy gave Betsy reassuring glances. He was nicer, she signaled, than she had expected him to be.
They lingered over apple cake, heaped with whipped cream, and second or third cups of coffee. Rocky was eloquent on a subject that was stirring the city. Mexican raiders under Villa had attacked a New Mexican town, and President Wilson had ordered Brigadier General John J. Pershing into old Mexico to catch the bandit. National Guard units had been called out—four regiments from Minnesota.
“It’s almost the last straw for Hobbie,” Tib said. “He’s so wild to get into a uniform! I suppose it’s being named for Hobson’s-choice-Hobson that makes him so warlike.” She repeated this family joke with her little tickled laugh, and the Kerrs and the Willards laughed too, but Rocky grimaced.
Rocky, Betsy remembered, was never very good humored when he wasn’t doing the talking himself. Tib, too, seemed to remember and fell silent. But Tacy asked about Fred, and Tib brightened. He was graduating this month.
“With honors in architecture,” she said proudly.
Rocky looked around as though appealing for sympathy. “I’ve heard of nothing but Brother Fred for a week now,” he said. “Tib wants to drag me over to the Commencement exercises. As though no other male had ever got a sheepskin! Frankly, I’m a bit bored with the Muller family.”
Betsy spoke quickly, resolved not to show her rising anger.
“The big news in the Ray family,” she said brightly, “is the new automobile which no Ray will drive. Just Joe, who’s only a Ray by marriage. Papa insisted on leaving it here tonight, on the chance we’d like a spin. Or we have some new records—‘Nola.’ ‘Poor Butterfly.’”
“What would you like to do, Tib?” Joe asked, turning toward her with emphasized courtesy. Joe was angry, too.
Tib laughed a little nervously. She said what she almost always said in answer to such a question. “Oh, whatever the rest of you want to do!”
Rocky clapped his hands to the table.
“I wish, Tiny Tib,” he said, “that just once you would express a preference. Do you really not like anything better than anything else? What shall we call her, folks? Miss Rubber Stamp? Miss Jelly Fish?”
Tib blushed to the roots of her yellow hair.
Betsy did not dare to speak. And neither Joe nor Harry—she could see by their furious faces—could be trusted either. She was thankful when Tacy took charge. The once shy Tacy had acquired poise since her marriage. Relief flooded into Tib’s face as Tacy spoke with calm decisive graciousness.
“Let’s drive around the lakes,” she said. “I love to see the street lamps making exclamation points in the water. Tib, that Sauerbraten was perfect.”
She smiled. But alone with Betsy, when they went upstairs for wraps, her eyes flashed.
“I wish this tramp newspaper man would tramp on to Timbuctoo and leave our precious little Tib alone.”
“The trouble is,” said Betsy slowly, “I don’t believe she wants him to. Oh, Tacy!”
16
“Everything’s Almost Right”
ONE HOT JULY DAY JOE did not write for just two hours as usual, but all afternoon. The study door did not open. The typewriter clacked on, and on, and on.
“We won’t disturb him,” Betsy said. “Not for anything.” And she broke an engagement they had with the Rays. She and Aunt Ruth went softly around the house which was closed and darkened against the soaring heat.
“I wonder why he’s writing so long,” Aunt Ruth whispered.
“Oh,” answered Betsy, “something just hit him!”
Pondering what it might be, she recalled a conversation early that morning. It had stayed hot all night and she and Joe had sat a long while on the porch where there was a little freshness. She had told him one of Aunt Ruth’s stories of harvesting around Butternut Center.
“I remember that,” Joe had said abruptly. “I was visiting there with Mother. It was before she died, and I was a very little boy. Someone let me take water to the men working in the fields.”
“Maybe that set him off,” Betsy thought.
She and Aunt Ruth were in the kitchen, preparing a cold supper, when they heard the study door open. Joe came downstairs looking fagged, and handed Betsy a sheaf of papers.
“Tell me what you think of this, will you?” he asked, and went outside, and began to water the lawn.
Betsy was making a salad, but she put it aside, washed her hands, and took the story up to her bedroom.
It was laid in the harvest fields. It was named, “Wheat.”
When she finished reading it, she ran down to the yard. Joe dropped the hose and she threw her arms around him.
“I think it’s perfectly wonderful!” she said.
“Any criticism?”
“No!” Her voice was puzzled. “It’s rough. If it were my own, I’d polish it, probably.”
“Then why shouldn’t I?”
“Because it seems meant to be like that. It has a vigor, a power—you might polish that away. I think you’d better just copy it and send it off. Let me copy it for you.”
“I wish you would,” Joe said, “I don’t want to look at it again.”
That night after Aunt Ruth went to bed, Betsy typed the story in her best style, and the next day she and Joe mailed it to The Thursday Magazine.
Usually after they sent off a story, they discussed it endlessly. Would it sell? And for how much? And what would they do with the money? But about “Wheat” they did not say a word. It seemed to go off into a void. It was lost like a stone thrown in a lake.
Julia and Paige arrived, and the Willards were caught into a whirlwind. Julia always created an aura of excitement and gaiety. She was telling stories of the opera in New York, practising for a summer opera engagement near Chicago, trying out people’s voices. She scolded Tacy lovingly for neglecting her music.
“The more babies, the better you should sing. Look at Schumann-Heink!”
Julia played for everyone to sing.
“There’s a long long trail a-winding…”
“Sing it in parts!” she commanded, and Bill and
Bub produced magnificent tenor and bass. Paige whipped out his flute and invented an obbligato.
He liked best to play his flute and go for automobile rides. Minnesota was so wonderful after New York, he kept exclaiming, although he and Julia loved New York; they wouldn’t live anywhere else. Joe took them for countless rides. Wind rushed past their faces and they left the heat behind. There were thunder showers and ear-splitting crashes, and jagged arrows of lightning, and pouring rain.
“Sounds like the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony,” Paige remarked.
After the rains, the leaves and roadways glistened. The birds sang and the wet lawns smelled of clover.
They took a picnic to Fort Snelling. Betsy loved the old army post—the round tower with its ancient musket slits, the commandant’s house looking proudly down on the meeting of the waters. They went to Lake Harriet for band concerts and to Cedar Lake to swim.
Julia’s skirts, Tib observed, came only to her shoe tops, and Tib turned up her own. She brought Rocky to meet Julia, who observed him closely for she knew all Betsy’s qualms.
“He’s wrong for Tib,” Julia agreed. “I don’t like it at all.”
Julia wore her hair in deep soft waves—marcel waves, she said they were called. She took Betsy to a hairdresser for “a marcel.” It was vastly becoming but the heat soon flattened it out.
“Never mind!” said Julia. “They’re perfecting a machine that will put waves in permanently.”
“Isn’t science wonderful?” cried Betsy.
They talked war—and politics. The British had opened an offensive on the Somme. And in the United States a presidential contest was raging. It was Wilson against Hughes. Mr. Ray groaned at Wilson’s campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.”
“He doesn’t dare let them say, ‘He’ll keep us out of war.’ He knows as well as Teddy does that war is coming.”
“Papa! You must admit he’s made the Germans restrict submarine warfare!” Julia had turned Democrat. Mr. Ray could hardly believe it. But the arguments were exhilarating, especially when Joe was around to bolster his father-in-law. Mr. Ray always hinted that Joe had inside information, straight from Colonel Teddy.
One Saturday afternoon Joe and Betsy stayed late at the Ray house, arguing.
“I won’t have time to eat supper,” Joe said, as they hurried home. “I’ll just grab a sandwich.”
Aunt Ruth was waiting on the porch.
“Any mail?” Joe called, as he always did.
“There’s a letter for you,” she answered, and he took the steps, two at a time.
The letter, lying on the old-fashioned table, was from The Thursday Magazine. “Wheat” was accepted. The editor hoped four hundred dollars would be satisfactory. He would like to see more of Mr. Willard’s work.
Betsy flung herself into Joe’s arms, crying and laughing. He was laughing, and almost crying, too. They caught Aunt Ruth into their hug.
“Oh, I’m so proud!” she cried.
“You helped!” Joe said. “Something you told Betsy about harvesting in Butternut Center started me off.”
“Aren’t you glad, Aunt Ruth,” Betsy sang, “that we kept quiet while he was writing?”
“Oh, I’m so proud!” Aunt Ruth kept repeating. “Won’t I have something to tell my niece, and her friends in California!”
Betsy rushed to ’phone the Rays. Their wild joy reverberated over the wire.
“Promise me you’ll tell Brad,” Betsy said when Joe had to leave, “and I’ll ’phone Eleanor.”
“All right,” said Joe. “But don’t tell the whole town.”
So Betsy only telephoned Mrs. Hawthorne, who was rapturous, and the Cliffs, who cried out that they would dust the Naughty Chair at once, and the Kerrs, whose cheers woke Kelly, and Tib. Betsy did not expect to find Tib at her boardinghouse on a Saturday evening, but for a wonder she was!
“I’m so tickled!” she cried. “I’m coming right over. Could you put me up tonight?”
“Could we! On that couch in Joe’s study. Aunt Ruth and I are simply bursting to talk.”
Tib came as fast as the trolley would bring her, and Betsy showed her the wonderful letter and the check. Aunt Ruth stirred up some cup cakes and they had a powwow over the evening tea. When Aunt Ruth went to bed, Betsy and Tib washed up the cups, chatting more quietly.
“Why aren’t you with Rocky tonight?” Betsy asked.
“I wouldn’t see him,” Tib replied. She dropped her head forlornly on Betsy’s shoulder.
“Liebchen,” she said, “you’re lucky to have a husband like Joe.”
“I know it,” Betsy answered soberly. “He really loves me.”
“Ja, and he respects you. He confides in you, listens to your opinions, asks your advice. He thinks your work is important. He thinks you are important—as a human being, not just as a girl.”
Betsy hugged her, wanting to cry.
“Rocky and I,” Tib said, “could never be partners like that. He loves me but he’s always so contemptuous. He thinks I’m silly and prudish. Maybe I am prudish, but that’s the way I intend to stay.” After a moment she said, “I ought to go away.”
“Tib, darling,” Betsy began, but she was interrupted by a pounding on the porch door.
“Anyone home? Betsy—it’s Rocky. Is Tiny Tib here?”
“Ja, I’m here,” called Tib, and they went out to the shadowy porch, and Tib sat down in a corner of the swing as Betsy opened the door.
Rocky was coatless, and his hair stood on end.
“Whew!” he said, pushing it back. He stood looking down at Tib. “You led me a chase, little one! No message at your boardinghouse. I’ve been kicking my heels for hours.”
“I told you I was busy tonight.”
“I can’t get along without you. You’ve gotten to be a habit. You’re my opium.”
Betsy started to go inside but Tib said, “Wait, Betsy! Please!”
“At least,” Rocky said, “I can walk you home.”
“I’m staying here all night,” Tib replied.
“Then how about walking down to the lake a few minutes?”
“I’m sorry, no. But would you like me to make you some coffee?”
“No, thanks,” he answered, almost gently. He sat down and stared at the floor.
“How about tomorrow?” he asked at last.
“Call me,” said Tib.
“Couldn’t I pick you up at church?”
“Just call me,” Tib replied.
He went over and took her small face between his hands. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and hurried out.
Tib was quiet in her dim corner. Betsy locked the porch door.
I wish I could lock him out of Tib’s life! she thought.
She did not speak, and neither did Tib. Fireflies flickered under the shadowy maples. Down the street a phonograph was playing.
Tib stood up. “I’m going to call home,” she said. “It’s late, but Mamma won’t mind.”
They went inside and after Tib had given the Long Distance operator the number, she said in a shaky voice, “Mamma’s worried about Hobbie. And Hobbie and I are good pals. I have quite a little influence with him. I think I’ll be more useful there this summer than I would be in Minneapolis.” She turned back to the phone. “Is that you, liebes Mamma?”
Betsy went out to the kitchen. She buried her head in her arms but she could hear Tib’s voice. It sounded cheerful and natural. But when Betsy went back Tib was sitting in Joe’s chair and tears were running down her cheeks. She didn’t try to speak, but looked up at Betsy with a wordless appeal. Betsy hugged her closely and cried, too.
“Darling, if it’s any comfort, I think you’re doing the right thing.”
“I know I am,” Tib said in a small voice through her tears. “That’s how I can do it.”
She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and spoke firmly. “I told Mamma I’d be down on the early train. So I won’t stay here, after all. I’ll go back now to my place and p
ack.”
“I’ll go with you,” Betsy said. “I’ll ’phone Joe to pick me up there.”
“I’d like to have you.”
“Well, you have me! You have both of us.”
She had them, as a matter of fact, until her train left. Joe waited on the boardinghouse porch until she was packed. And then it was too near morning to go to bed. They went to the depot, and drank coffee, and Joe joked, and Betsy hung on to Tib’s hand.
Rocky went down to Deep Valley, Joe reported, on Monday. But he came back the same day.
“He seemed dazed. He couldn’t believe any girl would turn down the Great Rocky. He resigned, and is off to Chicago.”
Tib’s letters did not mention this visit. Fred, she wrote, was going into their father’s office; they’d be architects together. Her boss wanted her back. He didn’t want to lose her. Nice, nicht wahr? But she was going to stay home until the start of Hobbie’s senior year—and the football season. He was sure to be the quarterback. And he’d be all right then.
Julia and Paige were gone, and Aunt Ruth had bought her ticket, when Joe telephoned one August night to tell Betsy that he had some news. He wouldn’t say what it was, but as soon as he stepped off the streetcar, it came tumbling out.
“Brad is putting me back on the day side. To write. Features, mostly. He said I had what a feature writer needed—wit, a light style, an eye for the angles, and a gift for getting on with all sorts of people, from stage stars to truck drivers.”
“Good!” exclaimed Betsy. “Every word true!”
“He said,” Joe went on, “that he’d put me on the night side last fall for two reasons. First, he’d had a hunch I could use more money, and that was the only spot in which he could give it to me. But second, because a young man who showed promise ought to be shifted around.
“‘But now,’ he said, ‘it’s time for you to get back to writing. We can use a writer who sells to The Thursday Magazine.’”
“Joe! Joe! Joe!” Betsy cried, unable to express her prideful joy.
Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Page 38
