“I should say he isn’t,” Tacy answered indignantly. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”
“It wasn’t lightning,” Betsy answered slowly. “He’s good. Do you know, Tacy, I wish he was in our Crowd.”
“I remember you liked him,” said Tacy, “when you met him at Butternut Center.”
That had been in summer, a year ago. Betsy was returning from a visit with the Taggarts, farm friends of her father’s. Waiting for her train in the hamlet of Butternut Center, she had gone into the general store…Willard’s Emporium…to buy presents for the family.
Joe had waited on her. He was a nephew of the Emporium Willards. He had helped her pick out the presents, and they had had fun. But they hadn’t hit it off at school, somehow.
The sun slipped behind Tacy’s cloud-built stairs, and at once the air took on a premonitory chill.
“Better get our fire going,” Tacy said briskly. She always took charge of the fire, being better at it than Betsy which didn’t, however, signify much.
She twisted the papers into a heap on the rock while Betsy brought twigs and branches. Smoke billowed generously, blackening the pail which was set precariously atop a nest of branches. It filled the air with its smell so fraught with promise, and Betsy and Tacy grinned at each other across the checkered cloth.
“I wish Tib was here,” Betsy said.
“Have you heard from her?” asked Tacy somewhat later when the cocoa had thumped in its pail, and she had poured a cup for each of them.
“Yes,” answered Betsy, spooning beans. “She’s taking dancing lessons from a very good teacher.”
“Is she going to that Browner Seminary again?”
“Yes. I wonder what a girls’ school is like? It must be peaceful. No boys around.”
“I thought you liked boys,” said Tacy, surprised.
“I do. But they’re an awful worry. At the lake, there weren’t any boys my age living near us and it made life so peaceful. When there are boys you have to worry about how you look, and whether they like you, and why they like another girl better, and whether they’re going to ask you to something or other. It’s a strain.”
“That’s why I don’t bother with them,” said Tacy. She leaned back on her arms and looked up at the sky where her stairs had dissolved into glistening gold-rimmed clouds. “I’m peaceful all the time like you were at the lake.”
“I’m not in love this year at least.”
“You soon will be,” Tacy prophesied.
Betsy too leaned on her arms, and they both stared upward while color flooded up behind the clouds as though from a geyser gushing rose. The clouds were tinged with pink, as the sky behind them paled. At last scattered clouds were pink all over the bowl of the sky.
“I saw that Phil Brandish on my way up to your house today,” Betsy volunteered at last. “How does it happen he’s coming here to school?”
“Kicked out of Cox Military.”
“How thrilling!” Betsy sat upright. “What did he do?”
“He just wouldn’t toe the mark, Tom says.”
“I remember when he and his sister used to come visiting. Don’t you? Aren’t they twins?”
“Yes. Phyllis is in a girls’ school somewhere. They sent Phil here to see if Grandpa Brandish couldn’t straighten him out. But you might as well not feel romantic about Phil Brandish, Betsy.”
“Why not? Has Irma got him?”
“No. But he’s older than we are.”
“Oh, fudge!”
“He’s going with a senior crowd,” said Tacy contentedly.
“Well, we can dream about him anyway,” said Betsy. And beginning to feel silly, as she usually did at the end of a picnic with Tacy, she started to warble “Dreaming,” inventing suitable words.
“Dreaming, dreaming,
Of your red auto I’m dreaming.”
Tacy chimed in, inventing too.
“Dreaming of days when we went to ride,
Dreaming of hours spent by your side.”
They composed joyfully.
“Dreaming, dreaming,
Of your red auto I’m dreaming,
Love will not change,
While the auto ree-mains,
Dree-ee-eaming.”
“You fake an alto,” said Betsy, and they sang their masterpiece again. They fell into the grass and laughed until echoes rolled over the hill.
But the grass was wet. It was drenched with dew.
“Golly!” said Betsy. “It’s getting late. And cold!”
They put out their fire, which wasn’t difficult and piled the empty plates and cups hurriedly into the basket. The tender pink was suddenly gone from the sky. It was gray with a star or two, and the crickets were singing.
The Secret Lane was already broodingly dim.
“This lane reminds me,” said Betsy, “of something I wrote in my journal this morning.”
“What?”
“That starting a new journal, and our sophomore year was like being ushered into the Winding Hall of Fate. This lane doesn’t wind, but it’s certainly like a hall.”
“What do I see ahead?” asked Tacy dramatically. “Methinks I see Betsy Ray in a bright red auto!” And that was a signal for them to burst again into song. Arms bound around each other’s waists, for it was both scarily dark and frostily cold by now, they began to sing. They sang all the way through the Secret Lane, and when they came out to a light-sprinkled view of the town, and down the rough bumpy road that led to Tacy’s house.
“Dreaming, dreaming,
Of your red auto I’m dreaming….”
At the end Tacy changed from alto to tenor with a stunning dramatic effect:
“Love will not change,
While the auto REE-mains,
DREE-EE-EAMING.”
3
Ivanhoe
WHEN BETSY AND TACY reached the Kelly house they saw Old Mag hitched out in front and Julia, Hugh, Tom and Cab sitting with Katie and Leo in the front parlor.
“They drove up to get you,” Tacy hazarded. “It got so dark.”
“Let’s go in the back way; we look like frights,” Betsy said. They stole up to Tacy’s room, washed their faces, brushed and braided their hair. Betsy borrowed a little powder from one of Tacy’s grown-up sisters, and they entered the parlor with good effect.
“We’re discussing the noble work of Ivanhoe,” said Cab. He was short but springy and vigorous with a dark Welsh face full of fun and sparkle. His suits were always meticulously pressed, his shoes well polished. Tom, on the other hand, was burly and carelessly dressed.
“I’m about halfway through,” said Tacy.
“I haven’t started it,” said Cab. “Don’t ask me in when we get home, Betsy. Don’t suggest fudge or singing or anything else. I have to read Ivanhoe.”
“Hully gee, I’m glad I go to Cox!” said Tom. “They never heard of the thing.”
“Did we read Ivanhoe when we were young?” Julia asked Katie.
“I have a faint recollection of it,” Katie answered. “Isn’t there a tea kettle boiling in the first chapter?”
“That’s Cricket on the Hearth,” said Hugh who was studious and serious.
When the Rays started home Tom wanted to stay, but Tacy would have none of him.
“I have to read Ivanhoe. GOOD NIGHT.”
Back on High Street, Betsy did not mention fudge but when Cab saw Tony and Carney in the lighted parlor, he went in.
“I can’t stay, I can’t stay,” he kept repeating. “I have to read the noble work of Ivanhoe.”
“You can’t read it on an empty stomach,” Tony said.
“Cab told me not to mention fudge,” said Betsy. “But there’s chocolate and sugar in the kitchen.”
So they all went to the kitchen, except for Julia and Hugh who remained in the parlor, and Tony put on an apron. Just as the fudge reached a boil, Winona and Irma, and Pin, a senior boy, dropped in.
Winona inquired at once, “Say, who’s read Ivanhoe?”
“What’s Ivanhoe? Sounds like a cigar,” said Tony, stirring.
“It’s a noble work which I propose to read as soon as Betsy will let me go home,” said Cab.
“I’m simply struggling with it,” said Irma, and at once all the boys looked sympathetic and as though they wished they could be helpful.
“What is it about Irma?” Betsy thought.
She had, as Betsy had told her journal, a beautiful figure, and round soft eyes and a round soft mouth. And she was sweet. The girls liked her usually, but when boys were around she was exasperating.
“Betsy’s read it,” Cab remarked.
“But not this summer,” Betsy hastened to explain. “I just happened to read it when I was a child. Had a sore throat, or something.”
“Well, gosh! When are we going to read it?” asked Winona who was perched on the kitchen table swinging her long legs.
Tony poured the rich dark mass he had been stirring into a buttered pan. “While the fudge cools?”
“Here! Let me lick that spoon!” Winona hopped off the table.
“Not much! I lick the spoons around here.”
The long sticky spoon waved wildly above wildly bobbing heads.
As soon as Winona arrived at any gathering, a scuffle ensued. Winona loved scuffles. Her black eyes and white teeth gleamed, her long black braids came loose, fudge streaked her face as she scuffled with Cab and Tony. Pin watched her, grinning, and Irma giggled, a soft alluring giggle.
“It makes me lonesome for the Humphreys to have the Crowd together,” Carney said to Betsy. She meant “for Larry,” Betsy knew.
It made Betsy wish for Herbert too, although she and Herbert had not “gone together” as Carney and Larry had. But it would have been nice to have Herbert around. Especially since Cab now looked at Irma with such admiring eyes.
“What’s going on out here?” Julia demanded, appearing in the doorway.
She wanted to get away from Hugh, Betsy suspected. Julia was growing bored with Hugh, as she did with all her beaus. She cast off beaus with the utmost callousness, and kept Betsy busy comforting them.
“Come on in and sing while the fudge cools,” Julia suggested now.
“I can’t stay, I can’t stay,” Cab kept murmuring, but he stayed. Arms locked, the Crowd sang around the piano. When Julia started “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” Tony flipped back the rug and asked Betsy to dance. Mrs. Ray’s curly head popped over the banisters.
“Pardon me for mentioning it, but isn’t tomorrow a school day?”
“We’ll go home,” Tony said. “But it isn’t a school day, really. We just go over to register. Cab can read Ivanhoe all afternoon.”
“The noble work!” said Cab. “We’ve made fudge, Mrs. Ray. May we stay to eat it?”
“Eat it in a hurry, and go home,” said Mrs. Ray, and smiled, and disappeared.
The fudge was brought out hastily and cut.
“Darn your Ivanhoe!” said Carney who was a junior. “I thought we could go to the Majestic tomorrow afternoon.”
“It’s a grand idea,” Betsy cried.
“Why, we can read Ivanhoe in the evening, can’t we, Cab?” Tony asked.
Cab looked gloomy. “There are five hundred and thirty-four pages in the noble work,” he said.
“I wish that Gaston was boiling in oil,” remarked Winona, munching fudge.
As Tony had said, there were to be no classes the following day, but it was officially the first day of school so Anna made muffins for breakfast.
“The McCloskeys always had muffins for breakfast on the first day of school,” she said when she brought them to the table around which, to Mr. Ray’s satisfaction, the entire family was gathered…Mrs. Ray tall and slim in a starched yellow morning dress, Julia and Betsy in new shirt waists and skirts, Margaret in a new striped gingham with a big striped bow atop her head. Tacy, too, was present, having called for Betsy early.
The McCloskeys were a family for which Anna had worked in a legendary past. She never told where the McCloskeys had lived nor whither they had gone, but she held them over the Rays’ heads. New members of the family turned up in her talk whenever she needed them to make a point. The Rays found it hard sometimes to live up to the McCloskeys. But again, as now, they were true friends.
“Why did the McCloskeys have muffins on the first day of school, Anna?” Betsy asked.
“Maybe the little McCloskey girl didn’t like new teachers,” offered Margaret. She looked sober.
“Why, Button,” said her father. “You wouldn’t like to stay in Miss Parry’s room forever.”
“Yes, I would. After a while I could help her teach.”
“Have some plum jam on your muffin, lovey,” Anna said. “I bet you’ll have a puny teacher.” Puny, which Anna thought meant handsome, was her word of highest praise.
“I certainly need muffins,” Mrs. Ray remarked. “This is the last fall Julia will be starting off to high school. Isn’t that perfectly awful, Bob? Did you dream when she started kindergarten that such a day would ever come?”
“I suspected it,” said Mr. Ray.
“And Betsy and Tacy are sophomores!”
“Just think,” said Betsy, “how old we’ll seem to the freshies. Remember how old the sophomores seemed to us last year?”
“Old and know-it-all,” said Tacy.
“Remember how we hurried over early to get those back seats? This year we’re not in any hurry at all. Have another muffin, Tacy.”
“This year,” said Tacy, “I’m positively nonchalant.”
“I’ll stifle a yawn as I stroll in.”
“Ho hum! High school! What a bore!”
“Aren’t they bright, Papa?” Julia asked.
“Teachers are underpaid,” said Mr. Ray. “I’m going to speak to a friend on the school board and get raises for the lot.”
“Not for Gaston, Mr. Ray!” cried Tacy. “Not after he made us read Ivanhoe this summer!”
“That Gaston!” said Betsy. “He doesn’t appreciate my flowery style of writing!”
“No wonder!” said Julia scornfully. “He came to Deep Valley to teach science. He’s a science teacher, really.”
“Maybe he won’t be teaching English this year. Maybe he’ll be teaching his beloved biology, and we’ll have a new English teacher. Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Tacy cried.
She made this heartening suggestion to Cab who joined them on High Street. High school-bound boys and girls crowded the sidewalk, filling the golden morning with noise and excitement. But Cab was still gloomy.
“Naw, we’d have heard. And I’m in a heck of a spot. My father asked me if I’d finished Ivanhoe, and I said I had. I’m not a liar. I read the last page. But what about the other five hundred and thirty-three?”
The wide-flung doors of the turreted red-brick high school sucked them all in. On the landing as they clattered upstairs, Mercury welcomed them with up-flung arm. In the large upper hall they separated, Betsy and Tacy going to the girls’ cloak room to hang up their hats and look in the mirror. For all their boasted unconcern Tacy’s cheeks were scarlet, and Betsy’s pink.
They passed on into the assembly room, which was large, with a turret-alcove. Betsy and Tacy found adjoining seats about halfway along the second of the sophomore rows. Leaving tablets and pencils to prove ownership of their desks, they strolled back to the hall.
Here they paused before a glass-covered case in which three silver trophy cups were displayed. These were the cups…for athletics, debating and essay writing…for which the two high school societies annually competed. The athletics cup bore the turquoise blue of the Zetamathian Society to which Betsy and Tacy belonged. The bows on the other two cups were Philomathian orange.
Betsy stared at the Essay Cup and something of the self-condemnation she had felt last spring when she lost the freshmen points flooded into her heart. Tacy read her thoughts.
“Not this year, Joe Willard!” she said, shaking her fist at the cup.
Betsy laughed. “Let’s go into the Social Room. Impress the freshies.”
No written law barred freshmen from the Social Room. It was merely a classroom, designated as a gathering place during school intermissions. But sophomores, juniors and seniors claimed it as their own. Betsy and Tacy, sailing in, threw condescending glances at the freshmen in the hall.
Betsy looked for Joe Willard, but she did not see him. Carney approached with junior sangfroid.
“Just think!” she said to Betsy. “The Humphreys are registering out in San Diego.”
“It must seem funny,” Betsy said.
She tried to imagine not living in Deep Valley. She tried to imagine graduating as Julia would do this year…not coming back to the high school when September touched the leaves with gold. Julia, she knew, was longing to be free of it. She didn’t even want to go to the state university. She wanted to be studying acting and singing out in the Great World. That was what she always called it, “the Great World.” Betsy planned to see the Great World too, of course. Oh, yes, she and Tacy planned to circle the globe. But they weren’t in a hurry to start.
“I love it here,” Betsy said abruptly. “I just love it.”
Carney flashed the lone dimple which changed her face from demure reserve to mischief. “There’s Phil Brandish, the red auto boy.”
Betsy looked around. He was in a corner with a noisy crowd. He stood out from the rest both because he was better dressed and because he was taller. He had straight light brown hair that fell down over his forehead.
“Tacy says he’s in with a senior crowd.”
“Yes, he’s just a junior, though. But he doesn’t interest me. He’s too sophisticated. I don’t like sophisticated boys.”
The first gong clanged, and out in the hall freshmen scrambled. The sophomores in the Social Room smiled tolerantly. They strolled into the assembly room just as the second gong sounded.
Up on the platform Carney, who played the piano, was already at her place. Miss Bangeter, the principal, rose from her arm chair and walked to the reading desk. She was a tall, queenly woman with a mass of slippery black hair, and piercing eyes. Speaking with a Boston accent she announced the opening hymn.
Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself Page 23
