Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  “It’s almost time to talk to Papa about this church business.”

  “I know it,” said Julia looking troubled.

  “The confirmation class begins in February; along about Lent.”

  “And that’s another thing, Betsy. We’ll want to keep Lent this year.”

  Julia was incredibly bold at times. Betsy had thought, of course, about keeping Lent after she became an Episcopalian. She had dreamed about giving up something for Lent, as Tacy did. It had seemed delightfully romantic. But she had played with these ideas only in reveries. Julia was actually proposing to carry them out.

  “Do Episcopalians eat fish on Friday?” Betsy asked weakly.

  “I’m not sure,” said Julia. “There’s High Church and Low Church. I think we’re Low Church here in Deep Valley. But Anna wouldn’t mind cooking fish for us.”

  “Julia!” cried Betsy, shuddering. “Can you imagine Papa?”

  “It’s pretty awful,” Julia agreed. “What shall we do, Bettina?”

  After some thought Betsy asked, “Do you suppose Papa would think we knew our minds by now?”

  “We’ve been singing in the choir all winter.”

  “We go back to school a week from tomorrow. Let’s talk to him a week from today.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Julia said.

  The second week of vacation was outwardly much like the first. Boys and girls dropped in, and there were parties. But Betsy ploughed through the parties as though they were ordeals comparable to the examinations looming ahead in school. Tony and Bonnie came to everything together, late usually, looking moon-struck. Tony dropped in at the Ray house, but in the flesh only; his thoughts were plainly on Broad Street.

  It helped, Betsy found, to adhere to her resolutions as though they were laws laid down. No matter how tired she was at night she brushed her hair a hundred strokes before rolling it up on Magic Wavers. She banished Robert W. Chambers from her room and brought in Longfellow, Whittier and Poe. She ruled Tony sternly from her thoughts. And the Sunday before school resumed, in the robing room at church, she said to Julia: “Today is the day we talk to Papa.”

  Julia looked grave and beautiful in her black robe and the black four-cornered hat.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Queer in my stomach. And why do we always say, ‘talk to Papa’? We have to talk to Mamma, too.”

  “We know Mamma will understand,” said Julia. “She’s a very Episcopalian type. But Papa is such a Baptist!”

  “And you remember all he told us about his mother. It’s going to be hard,” Betsy said gloomily.

  “Bettina,” said Julia. “When you pray in church this morning, pray about it, and so will I. Maybe we can find a chance to pray alone after everyone is gone.”

  That was the sort of thing that Betsy thought of doing, and Julia boldly did.

  Organ music sounded, and the girls formed into a line, two abreast, for the processional. They marched and sang:

  “Clear before us through the darkness,

  Gleams and burns the guiding light,

  Brother clasps the hand of brother,

  Stepping fearless through the night.”

  When she came to “Brother clasps the hand of brother,” Betsy glanced at Julia. Julia wasn’t looking at her, of course. Nothing ever disturbed Julia’s rapt expression when she was singing. Betsy doubted that it would alter if the church burned down. But surely, Betsy thought, she must see the significance of the hymn. Change that “Brother clasps the hand of brother,” to “Sister clasps the hand of sister,” and how perfectly it fitted!

  “Let us pray,” the Reverend Mr. Lewis said.

  The Reverend Mr. Lewis as usual prayed for a number of things, for remission of sins, for peace, for grace, for the President of the United States, for the Clergy and People, and for all conditions of men. But whenever the ritual permitted a personal supplication, Betsy made only one prayer.

  “Please help us to tell Papa,” she prayed, digging her forehead into her curved arm, forgetting even to try to look pretty.

  After the service Julia with calm authority told Fred and Herbert not to wait for them. She and Betsy went down into the body of the church and said their special prayer.

  Walking home through the bleak cold, Betsy said, “Now after dinner today, we’ll do it.”

  “After his nap,” Julia added.

  After dinner and his nap their father, as usual on Sundays, settled down in the parlor with the Sunday paper. He liked best to sit in a curved leather chair that his Lodge had given him after he was Grand Master and to cross his feet on an ottoman in front. With a cigar in his mouth and the paper folded neatly, he read with absorption.

  Today Mrs. Ray was reading, too. And Margaret and Washington were looking at the funnies. Julia and Betsy came down the stairs together, as though still marching two abreast in a procession.

  “Papa,” said Julia, “Betsy and I want to have a talk with you.”

  Mr. Ray looked up, and he must have seen from their faces that they had a serious matter on their minds, for he put the paper down, and placed his cigar carefully across an ash tray.

  “Do Mamma and Margaret get in on this?” he asked them.

  “Yes,” said Julia. “They might as well.”

  “Sit down, then,” said Mr. Ray, and they sat down gingerly on the edges of their chairs. Mr. Ray took his feet off the ottoman, crossed his legs and leaned back calmly, tucking a thumb into his striped Sunday vest.

  “Go ahead,” he said, looking from Julia whose pointed face was pale under her pompadour to Betsy whose cheeks were red as fire.

  “Papa,” said Julia, “Betsy and I want to join the Episcopal Church.”

  Mr. Ray continued to lean back, but no longer calmly. Julia’s announcement had really startled him.

  “You do, eh?” he said. He kept his tone offhand, but he sounded as startled as he looked. “What do you think of this, Jule?” he asked, playing for time.

  “I’ve seen it coming,” Mrs. Ray answered.

  “Do you mean,” he said to Julia and Betsy, “that you like all that kneeling down and getting up, kneeling down and getting up?”

  He was talking fast, half jokingly. He was…Betsy knew…trying to adjust himself to their bewildering idea.

  “Papa,” said Betsy, “don’t joke. Julia and I know that you’ll feel terrible. In the first place it will be so embarrassing to you; you’re a prominent Baptist. People will think it strange of you to let us join the Episcopal Church. They’ll criticize you, and we can’t stand the thought of that. And yet we both want to be Episcopalians. That’s why we thought we’d ask you to…sort of…talk it over.”

  Mr. Ray grew serious then. Still with a thumb in his vest he looked at them out of wise, kindly eyes.

  “Let me set you right on one thing first of all,” he said. “We aren’t going to decide this on the basis of what people will say. You might as well learn right now, you two, that the poorest guide you can have in life is what people will say. What the Baptists in Deep Valley will think of mother and me if our girls go off and join the Episcopal Church has nothing to do with the matter.”

  Margaret got to her feet, standing straight like her father. Crossing the room she rubbed against his knee and he made a place for her in his chair. He kept his arm around her while he talked, and Margaret stared at her sisters with black-lashed disapproving eyes.

  “Don’t you agree with me, Jule?” Mr. Ray asked.

  “Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Ray. “I’ve done lots in my life the Baptists didn’t approve of. Papa has too. We belong to a dancing club; we play whist; we go on picnics sometimes on Sundays. But we don’t do anything we think is wrong, and the Baptists respect us. They even asked Papa to be a deacon.”

  “But there’s another thing,” said Betsy. “We know how much the Baptist Church means to Papa. We know about Grandma Ray starting the church down in Iowa. It makes Julia and me feel bad to stop being Baptists.” Her eyes filled wit
h tears. “It makes us feel terrible,” she said.

  Julia’s eyes filled with tears too, although she didn’t cry as easily as Betsy did. She winked violently, and then took out a handkerchief. But since Betsy was groping vainly for a handkerchief and needed one even more, Julia passed hers along and kept on winking. Betsy wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “See here,” said Mr. Ray. “Anybody would think from the way you talk that I was the one who had a problem about what church to join. You are the two who have the problem. What makes you think you want to be Episcopalians, anyway?”

  But now Betsy was tongue-tied. Not because she was afraid she would cry, although that entered in, but because she was shy of putting into words deeply felt emotions. She didn’t mind putting them into written words. She could have written her father an essay on her feeling for the Episcopal Church, but she couldn’t tell it to him.

  Julia spoke eloquently. “It’s the beauty of the service, Papa,” she said. “Betsy and I both respond to it. The music lifts us up, and the ritual is like a poem. We were just made to be Episcopalians.”

  “You’ve thought this over? It isn’t just a whim?”

  “We’ve thought it over for weeks and months,” said Julia, glad to be able to say so. “We’re sure of everything except whether or not we ought to hurt you and…”

  “Julia,” said Mr. Ray. “You’d never make a lawyer. I repeat that mother and I don’t enter into this. You’re seventeen years old, and Betsy’s past fourteen. Both of you are almost women, and personally I’m glad to discover that you’ve given some thought to religion. It’s a right thing to do when you begin to grow up. It’s what I did, and what your mother did, and what…I am sure…your Grandmother Ray would approve if she were here. The important thing isn’t what church you want to join but whether you want to join a church at all.

  “Certainly you can be Episcopalians. I’m sure mother agrees. Don’t you, Jule?”

  Mrs. Ray nodded and reached for the handkerchief Julia had given Betsy.

  “And I hope,” Mr. Ray continued, “I hope very much that if you’re going to be Episcopalians, you’ll be good Episcopalians.”

  “We’ll try to be,” Julia said quickly.

  “But that isn’t what I hope most,” Mr. Ray added. He knotted thoughtful fingers around his chin.

  “Yes, I hope you’ll be good Episcopalians,” he repeated. “I hope you’ll go to church as regularly as mother and I do. We miss a Sunday now and then, when it’s fine picnicking weather. We know that God made the out-of-doors, too. But year in, year out, we go to church pretty regularly.

  “And we support the church. You have to think of that. Churches need an income just as a family does; and it is your duty to support your church if you join one. With more than money, too. A church needs members who take an active part in the church work. Mother and I don’t do as much as some, and some folks overdo it, in my opinion, but we try to carry our load. My point is that if you’re going to join a church, you want to be prepared to support it, both with money and time.”

  “Yes, Papa,” Julia and Betsy said.

  “But that’s just the beginning,” Mr. Ray went on, and sat straight in his chair. “It isn’t enough to go to church, and to support the church. The most important part of religion isn’t in any church. It’s down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, in the way you treat other people. It’s honesty, and unselfishness, and kindness. Especially kindness.”

  He paused.

  “Well, that’s that,” he ended, his face breaking into a smile. “You two go and be Episcopalians, if you can stand that everlasting kneeling down and getting up. I never could. Everything’s settled now, until Margaret here comes and tells us that she wants to be a Mormon.”

  “I won’t,” said Margaret, sitting very straight. “I don’t know what a Mormon is, but I want to be a Baptist. I’m always going to be a Baptist.” And she turned and buried her face in her father’s striped Sunday vest.

  Mr. Ray hugged her. He got up. And everyone got up, Mrs. Ray, and Julia, and Betsy, and Margaret. They all embraced in a big family hug, tighter and tighter.

  “Now,” said Mr. Ray. “I’d better go put the coffee pot on.” For that was what the family always did in moments of stress. Margaret didn’t drink coffee of course, and Betsy’s Sunday cup was mostly cream and sugar. Yet they understood what their father meant when he moved with a competent tread toward the kitchen.

  24

  An Adventure on Puget Sound

  THE NEXT DAY they went back to school, and it was an excellent time for being religious, for being serious-minded, for being heart-broken. The thermometer was far below zero and examinations were looming ahead. Stiffly wrapped, Betsy and Tacy hurried along High Street muttering Latin conjugations. When boys and girls dropped into the Ray house after school, they all studied. Tacy, Alice and Winona came to stay all night and study.

  “Why do you have to study together?” Mr. Ray asked. “When I was a boy we didn’t study in droves. And what help is all the fudge?”

  “Nourishment, Papa, nourishment,” Betsy explained. “We need strength. Composition is a cinch, of course; and history won’t be bad, Clarke is such a darling. But Latin and algebra! Wow!”

  Julia too was ferociously intent upon study. She was going to no dances; she quarreled with Fred and refused to make up.

  “I’m tired of him anyway,” she confided to Betsy. “And it’s a very convenient time to be between beaux…examination week.”

  When Fred telephoned Julia was out. When he came Julia was busy. She wouldn’t make up. Fred grew haggard. His eyes showed sleepless nights.

  “This is pretty hard on Fred,” said Betsy indignantly. “He’s going to flunk everything, because he’s worrying about you.”

  “Very foolish of him,” said Julia, settling down to her Cicero.

  The last examination came on Friday, and after school The Crowd surged into the Ray house not only to make fudge but to sing and to ask the Ouija Board who had passed and who had not. Saturday night The Crowd went sleighing. Bells jingling on the frosty air tried to compete with harmonizing from the boys and girls tucked under robes in the big sleigh. Tony and Bonnie sat side by side, his arm draped along the back of the seat. It was a horrible party for Betsy who remarked at frequent intervals that she never had had so much fun in her life.

  Monday, the new term began and Betsy found that she had passed in everything. She squeezed through algebra by a breath, through Latin by a hair. Her history mark was fair, but gentle Miss Clarke was disappointed that students who were so brilliant in class made such a poor showing on examination papers.

  “You must have been nervous,” she said consolingly to Betsy.

  Mr. Gaston, although he had seemed so unappreciative of Betsy all term, gave her a high mark…ninety-six. It was topped in the class only by Joe Willard’s ninety-seven. And shortly Betsy was given another proof of her composition teacher’s good opinion.

  Miss Clarke approached her after school.

  “I’ve been talking with Mr. Gaston,” she said, “and he and I both think that, although you are only a freshman, you can write an essay good enough to be read at Rhetoricals.”

  “Really?” cried Betsy. Her modest surprise was assumed, but her pleasure was genuine.

  “Aren’t you proud?” Miss Clarke asked, patting her shoulder. “We are planning an All-American program, and we want you to write a paper on Puget Sound.”

  “Puget Sound?” Betsy echoed vaguely.

  “Just go to the library,” Miss Clarke said, “and read all you can find on Puget Sound. Then write an interesting essay about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Betsy.

  She was delighted with the assignment. It not only provided a highly creditable excuse for absenting herself from the gatherings of The Crowd and the presence of Tony and Bonnie, but it poulticed her sore heart. An essay for Rhetoricals on Puget Sound!

&
nbsp; She told the family about it at supper, and they were pleased and impressed.

  “Your Aunt Flora lives on Puget Sound,” Mr. Ray observed. “You might write her for some material.”

  “Where is Puget Sound?” asked Margaret, and Betsy, who had not yet looked it up, was relieved when her father answered for her.

  “It’s an arm of the Pacific extending into Washington state. Seattle where your Aunt Flora lives is built on Puget Sound.”

  “Papa and I once took a trip on the Sound,” Mrs. Ray added. “We went from Seattle to Olympia on the Steamer Princess Victoria.”

  They talked about the trip throughout supper.

  After supper Betsy collected all the pencils she could find. She took them to the kitchen and sharpened them while Anna looked on admiringly. She hunted up a notebook and wrote on the first page, “Puget Sound.” The next day after school she ignored the social advances of her friends and turned toward the library.

  There was a driving north wind. The cold air stung her cheeks above the grey fur piece and numbed her hands. Her feet were numb too, inside her overshoes, as she crunched along the snowy walk. But she was happier than she had been for days. She felt a fierce proud satisfaction. It was an adventure to be going to the library to learn about a strange new place called Puget Sound.

  “I think I’ll name my essay that,” she planned. “‘An Adventure on Puget Sound.’ I don’t believe Clarke would mind if I worked a little story in.”

  Miss Sparrow, the small twinkling-eyed librarian, was glad to see Betsy. They were old friends.

  “You haven’t been down for a long time,” she said. She unearthed endless fat and fascinating volumes on the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest and Puget Sound.

  Betsy walked home through a cold even sharper than she had faced coming down, but she didn’t mind. She was thinking of pines standing ruggedly above green water, of Mt. Rainier rising white and fair, or colored like candle flame by sunset. She didn’t think once of Tony and Bonnie.