Heaven to Betsy / Betsy in Spite of Herself

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  “Hello…er…Betsy, do you know who I am?”

  “N…no,” murmured Betsy, “I don’t believe I do.” Mentally she groped for her new personality, for the list she had written on the train. She laughed the low laugh she had practised in the diner. She tried to make her silence full of mystery.

  “I’m Phil Brandish. I…I’d like very much to go to that dance, but…” At the “but” her heart sank to the ground floor. “But,” he went on, “you haven’t sampled my dancing.”

  “You haven’t sampled mine!” In glad relief she gave the laugh again. “I can tell you will be a good dancer…from the way you walk, I mean.”

  “I was just going to say that about you,” he answered. This was almost more than she had hoped for. “I’m sorry that my auto is put up, but I’ll try to get the local hack.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Betsy. She could never live down going to a dance in Mr. Thumbler’s hack. “Everybody walks to Schiller Hall to parties. It’s just at the foot of our hill.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be around about…eight?”

  “Eight,” said Betsy.

  She walked back to the parlor with a thistledown tread.

  “Surprise! Surprise!” she announced to the assembled family. “I’m taking Phil Brandish to the Leap Year dance.”

  “Betsy!” cried her mother, “Why, you hardly know him…”

  “I suppose,” said Julia slyly, smiling, “he wants to find out about that dream.”

  “The Brandish boy? How did you happen to ask him?” her father inquired, sounding annoyed.

  “Oh, I just wanted to,” said Betsy, pacing excitedly about the room. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I guess not, I don’t know anything against the boy.”

  “I should think you’d take Tony,” said Margaret, looking up from Little Women. Tony was a great favorite with Margaret.

  Betsy patted her head and ran to telephone Tacy. When she returned she and Julia went upstairs.

  “It’s such fun, Bettina,” Julia said, “that you’re starting to go to dances. Now we’ll be going to them together all the time.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful!” cried Betsy.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Wash my hair!”

  “Come into my room to dry it, and we’ll talk.”

  Betsy washed her hair, adding plenty of Jockey Club to the last rinse water. She dried it over the register in Julia’s room, rubbed it and brushed it, and put it up on Wavers. Then she and Julia manicured their nails, buffing them to diamondlike brilliance, and Betsy told Julia all about the pale green note and Julia told Betsy about dances at Schiller Hall.

  “You go up three flights of stairs,” she said, “and there’s a ladies dressing room just outside the hall. You leave your cloak there, and beautify yourself at the mirrors. They’re always crowded with girls. When you come out into the hall you’re given your program, and the boys rush up to ask for dances…”

  “Rush up?” asked Betsy. “You mean they rush up to you. What do I do if nobody asks me for a single dance and my program is a perfect blank?”

  “It won’t be,” Julia said. “But if, by any chance, there’s one dance you’re not asked for, you go to the dressing room and spend the time doing your hair. You don’t sit out on the side lines and let everybody notice you’re not dancing as some dumb girls do.”

  Betsy made a mental note. “There are going to be fifteen dances,” she said. “Tacy and Alice are making the programs. They’re terribly cute, with a bar from ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’ painted on the cover. But fifteen dances, Julia! Cab will ask me for one, of course, and Tony, and Dennie, and Pin, and Al, probably, and Squirrelly, and Harry, but that’s only seven. I’ve fifteen to fill.”

  “Your escort,” said Julia, “always writes his name down for the first dance and the last one, and usually one in the middle. If he really likes you, he asks for four.” She laughed. “Harry,” she said, “wants me to give him every other dance. But I won’t. People would talk and Papa wouldn’t like it.”

  “I can just see my program,” said Betsy, “with yawning vacant spots.” She did have cold chills of fear that she would not be asked to dance, but right along with them was a warm conviction that she would be. This was her first dance. It just had to be wonderful.

  “And, Bettina,” said Julia, “I think it’s swell that you asked Phil Brandish. It’s time you stepped out and did something for yourself. But he isn’t one of the boys that comes to the house. We don’t know much about him, and if he shouldn’t be our kind, if he should be…spoony going home, let him know right off that we don’t do that sort of thing.”

  Betsy nodded wisely. She remembered something Tib had said.

  “Don’t worry. I have standards. If people don’t have standards and live up to them, they don’t amount to much.”

  She went out with the thistledown tread again.

  She was still walking like thistledown when she went to school next morning. The girls in the Crowd came up as soon as she entered the Social Room.

  “Betsy,” said Winona, “have you asked anyone yet? That party is tonight, you know.”

  “Why, yes, of course,” said Betsy. “Haven’t I told you?”

  “Of course you haven’t told us!”

  “Really? I thought I had. Let’s see. Who am I taking!” Betsy rubbed her forehead.

  “You tell us!” Winona shook a warning fist.

  “All right! Philip J. Brandish.”

  For a full moment everyone thought she was joking. Irma said, “Betsy! Tell us, please.”

  “I did tell you,” answered Betsy and laughed but she was really flustered. She began to blush and blushed all the harder when necks craned toward Phil. Betsy did not look his way nor meet his eyes. It would be easier to establish that new personality when they were alone than in front of the Social Room. She was thankful that the last bell rang just then. Everyone had to hurry off.

  The boys, at the Ray house after school, were equally bewildered.

  “What are you going to take that big stiff for?” Cab demanded. But Betsy only smiled, a cool superior smile she had acquired. Cab didn’t find it attractive and he didn’t like the green bows either, nor the clouds of perfume nor the “nicht wahrs” scattered through her speech. He had told her so several times. “What’s got into you, Betsy?” he asked with irritation.

  Tony’s black eyes were laughing. Perhaps, Betsy thought, he considered himself responsible because of having told Phil about her dream.

  “I always thought,” he said, “that when you started going to dances, you’d go with me. I’d know enough to take a curling iron along in case it started to rain.”

  “Dummkopf!” said Betsy.

  “Never mind! I can mention to Brandish that he’d better put a curling iron in his pocket.”

  “Tony! You wouldn’t!”

  “I won’t take you to the party if you do,” Tacy threatened. “Come on, Betsy. We have to hurry if we’re going downtown.”

  They were going downtown because Tib, off in Milwaukee, always wore lace stockings to parties. Betsy ran up to her mother’s room and searched through the rag bag for a scrap of her pink silk dress. With this in her pocket she and Tacy went down to the Lion Department Store and bought lace stockings of the same shade of pink. Tacy, too, had purchases to make. Reassured because she was going with Tony, with whom she had long since ceased to be shy, Tacy was beginning to feel that she might like a dance.

  At supper Betsy refused dessert again.

  “It’s delicate pudding, lovey.”

  “Put mine in the icebox for me. Will you, Anna? Maybe I’ll eat it after I get home.”

  Betsy was upstairs ready to start dressing at half past six. By the time she was out of the bathroom, smelling sweetly of talc, her mother, Julia, and Margaret, with the cat in her arms, had gathered in her room. Margaret’s eyes were as big and watchful as Washington’s while Betsy pinned starched ruffles acr
oss her chest, donned her prettiest corset cover, strung with pink ribbons, three starched petticoats, the outer one also strung with pink, the pink lace stockings, her high shoes. Dancing slippers, of course, would be carried in a slipper bag.

  Julia, who was never in a hurry to start dressing, and Mrs. Ray who by now knew the entire plot, perched on the bed and made lively suggestions.

  “Tell him you dreamed he was patching a tire.”

  “Tell him you saw him staggering under a big bouquet of roses.”

  “Tell him you saw PHIL written in letters of fire.”

  Betsy laughed but for once she did not talk. Her eyes were bright, determined. Slipping on a kimono, she ran down to the kitchen to refresh her curls. As she wound her locks on the iron she thought of Tony and giggled.

  “That Dummkopf!” she said aloud. It would be fun to be going to the dance with someone she knew well like Tony but not so exciting, not so demanding, not…she felt…so good for her as this.

  She ran back upstairs.

  “Want me to do your hair?”

  “Will you, like an angel?”

  Julia did her incomparable best.

  Betsy slipped on the pink silk dress. Julia pinned on the daisy wreath. Betsy sprayed Jockey Club perfume and her mother did not say a protesting word.

  Ready, down to a filmy handkerchief. Betsy stared into the mirror. Her pompadour made a dark cloud; her neck was white like Julia’s. Her figure in the rosy, flower-sprinkled silk looked slender, insubstantial.

  “I love the way I look,” she thought. “Thank you! Thank you!” She smiled resolutely into her own eyes.

  When the doorbell rang she felt like a racehorse, just ready to start. Anna answered and Betsy went swiftly down the stairs. Her mother did not follow immediately and her father did not look up from the paper he was reading in the parlor. Again Betsy was unutterably thankful. She could not have taken the first difficult steps with her family looking on.

  Nobody looked on and the expression in Phil Brandish’s yellow-brown eyes made it easy to act her part. She put out her hand; he took it in a large strong grip. Both of them smiled.

  Betsy heard herself chatting about the party, the sophomores’ need for funds.

  “That’s so we can entertain you juniors next year. I thought I’d start now and get in practise.”

  “An excellent idea!”

  Smiling down at her, his hat in his hand, a white muffler folded with care inside his overcoat, he was very impressive. He was tall, and a lock of his thick light-brown hair hung over his forehead. His skin was a clear olive tint. His eyes were heavily lashed.

  He had very good manners…pounded into him, Tom had said, by schools all over the country. But he had none of the easy, foolish give-and-take of the other boys she knew.

  “I want you to meet my father,” Betsy said, and led him into the parlor. Her mother came downstairs shortly, acting gracious…not at all as though she had recently been perched on Betsy’s bed and thought up ridiculous dreams.

  The great Phil Brandish held Betsy’s coat, took her slipper bag. She kissed her father and mother. Then they were out in the icy night, walking along sidewalks walled by snow, his hand protectively beneath her arm, going to the dance.

  Talking was easier than Betsy had thought it would be. He told her how sorry he was that his auto was put up. He explained what happened to autos in cold weather. Betsy, looking up, mentioned Uncle Rudy’s Steamer.

  “Steamer!” He gave a disparaging snort. His car was a Buick, he said, and he wouldn’t have anything else. He talked on, comparing Steamers and Buicks in technical detail. No one could have comprehended less of this than Betsy but at least she knew well that when a man talks it is a woman’s part to listen. She listened, starry-eyed.

  “The Buick must be ever so much better!”

  He tightened his grasp on her arm.

  “In the spring, maybe we’ll go for a whirl.”

  That brought them to Schiller Hall and the three flights of stairs. At the top Betsy left him and went into the dressing room. It was warm, crowded, smelling of mingled scents. Junior girls like Carney had been to dances before, and so had Winona since Pin was a senior, but most of the sophomore girls shared Betsy’s palpitating excitement.

  Betsy changed into her dancing slippers; she rubbed a chamois skin over her nose. The mirror was a blur of faces in which she recognized her own shining eyes. Out in the ballroom a violin was being tuned. She went to the door to peek out over the glistening empty floor. There were knots of boys talking here and there.

  At all high school dances music was provided by a violin and Mamie Dodd’s piano. Mamie was a senior but she never danced at high school parties. She earned money playing the piano for them. No one, not even Julia, could play dance music as Mamie Dodd could. She was up on the platform now, twirling the piano stool to conform to her square shortness, smiling and winking at her friends.

  On either side of the ballroom door Tacy and Alice were handing out programs. Tacy hurried over.

  “You look lovely.”

  “So do you.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Petrified.”

  “If nobody dances with us, we’ll hide in the dressing room together.”

  “Play ‘buzz,’” Betsy said.

  Alice called Tacy back to her duties and Betsy took a deep breath. She strolled through the door.

  Phil came to her immediately. Taking her program he said, “How many may I have?”

  “I believe,” said Betsy, “three is the usual thing.”

  “I want four.”

  She smiled, and he wrote his name four times.

  Other boys pressed in upon them. Pin with senior confidence asked for a schottische…they were hard to do. Tony, with typical Tony bravado, asked for nothing but wrote his name down for a two-step and a waltz.

  “I brought that curling iron…” he whispered.

  Cab and Dennie had been watching. They nerved themselves visibly, came up and took her program. The other boys in the Crowd came, and Julia’s late lamented Hugh, and Stan. In no time at all her program was full, even the four extras at the end. In fact she had to divide one extra between Al and Julia’s Harry who arrived late, of course, because of Julia.

  Betsy and Phil went to speak to the chaperones, Miss Clarke and Mr. Gaston. Miss Clarke beamed while Mr. Gaston looked sardonic. Betsy gave him her cool, superior smile.

  Then Mamie Dodd brought her hands down on the keys in warning chords. The violinist following, she swung into a waltz. Betsy in Phil’s assured arms swung out on the polished floor.

  The waltz was one they sang around the piano:

  “Waltz me around again, Willy,

  Around, around, around.”

  Phil waltzed her around, and around, and around. He was an easy dancer; not inspired, as Tony was. Dancing was one of Betsy’s few accomplishments. She loved it, down to her feather-light toes. She even breathed in time to the music and lifted a radiant face.

  All too soon the waltz ended and Cab came up for his two-step. He was annoyed by Betsy’s faraway look. But they had fun two-stepping…just as they did it in the Ray front parlor.

  Pin came up for his schottische.

  “First the heel and then the toe…”

  Away they went, Pin’s long legs quick and deft. Next she danced with Phil again, and the words of the song caused smiling faces to turn in their direction.

  “Come away with me, Lucille,

  In my merry Oldsmobile…”

  “Only it isn’t an Oldsmobile,” he murmured in her ear.

  She went from Phil to Dennie, to Tony. Dancing with Tony was cloudless joy as always. She smiled beatifically at Tacy…who also seemed to be enjoying herself…at Julia, who was dancing with Harry. But Julia looked rapt and uplifted.

  “That’s the way I ought to look,” thought Betsy, and remembered her resolution not to smile so much. She quickly assumed a wistful expression. But it didn’t last, for next on th
e program came the circle two-step.

  When this dance was under way, the violinist called out to make a circle. The company joined hands and circled gaily around the big room until he called again, “Grand right and left.” Then you did the grand right and left until he shouted, “Everybody two-step,” and you two-stepped with whomever you found yourself facing, until he cried, “Everybody circle,” again.

  It was glorious fun. Betsy met Pin; she met Cab; she met Tony.

  “Well, look who’s here!” “Of all the luck!” “Where did you drop from!” Those were the proper things to say.

  Blissfully two-stepping, Betsy glanced toward the doorway and saw a familiar blond head. Joe Willard was leaning against the door jamb, hands in pockets. He was smiling, a somewhat superior smile, Betsy thought.

  She waved, and he waved back, and she concentrated on her dancing, thinking that if he noticed her admirable performance he would ask for a dance. Of course, her program was full. But it would be a satisfaction to have him know it. And she might, she just might, split another extra. But when she looked toward the doorway again, he was gone.

  The ninth waltz was her third dance with Phil. He walked toward her eagerly. He really liked her, Betsy realized, and not just as Cab and Tony did. He looked actually…infatuated.

  “I’ve been talking with Mamie Dodd,” he said. “I’ve made some special arrangements…”

  “What,” Betsy wondered, “did he mean by that?”

  She soon discovered. Mamie smiled and her fingers, roving up and down the keys, seemed to say, “You’re going to like this one.” Then piano and violin together began famous and now familiar strains:

  “Tho I say not,

  What I may not,

  Let you hear…”

  It was “The Merry Widow Waltz.”

  Betsy looked up at Phil and smiled. He smiled back, but neither of them spoke. The waltz rocked through the artless opening phrases. They whirled in happy harmony.

  Then the swing grew longer, the rhythm stronger. The words sang dreamily in Betsy’s head.

  “Every touch of fingers,

  Tells me what I know

  Says for you,