Debutante Hill

by Lois Duncan

  After the heavier envelope, the small white one beside it felt as though it could not contain a thing. It did, however. As Dodie had anticipated, it was the exciting invitation. Lynn Chambers was being officially invited to participate, as a Rivertown debutante, in the Presentation Ball in the spring and in all the parties and festivities leading up to it during the year.

  It will be fun, Lynn thought happily, sliding the card back into the envelope and dropping it into her skirt pocket. She felt like showing it to someone, but her father was at his office and her mother did not seem to be around, either. Wandering into the kitchen, Lynn found out from Rosalie, who was busily peeling carrots for dinner, that Mrs. Chambers was at a Hospital Auxiliary meeting.

  Dodie was in her room with Janie, playing records. Lynn could hear them laughing together as she passed the door, but there was no sense of breaking in to show the invitation to Dodie. She knew all about it already.

  Stopping at the second-floor telephone, Lynn called Nancy. “Hi! Did your invitation come?”

  “Sure did! Impressive, aren’t they! And I got a letter from Ernie, too.”

  “Swell! My family will be burned up when they hear that. They haven’t even had a postcard from him.”

  The two girls chatted for about twenty minutes and then Nancy rang off because she wanted to wash her hair before dinner. Lynn replaced the receiver and wandered aimlessly into her bedroom. She decided to begin a letter to Paul.

  She had nearly finished it when Rosalie announced that dinner was ready.

  There were candles on the dinner table. It was one of the few things that Mrs. Chambers insisted upon, and, although her father scoffed at it, Lynn thought it a lovely custom. It gave the dining room warmth and grace and a kind of old-time charm. Beneath his laughing protests, she knew her father liked it, too.

  The rest of the family was already at the table when Lynn slid into her seat. Her mother turned to her with a smile.

  “Well, how was the first day of school? How does it feel to be a senior?”

  “Not too different from being a junior,” Lynn admitted. “One thing is going to be different, though. Your daughter is not only a senior this year; she is going to be a debutante.”

  “A debutante!” Her father looked up at the words. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”

  “No,” Lynn said, laughing at the surprise on his face, “and I hadn’t either until today. Mrs. Peterson is organizing it. They told me about it at school, and then the invitation came this afternoon.” She pulled the small white envelope from her pocket and slid it across the table, then turned to help herself from the plateful of rolls Rosalie was serving. “Sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun. Nancy will be one, too.”

  Her father read the invitation and handed it, wordlessly, to her mother.

  Mrs. Chambers read it and laid it aside, saying, “This is a brand new thing, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a debutante in Rivertown before.”

  “It sounds like something,” Dr. Chambers growled, “that that foolish Peterson woman would come up with.”

  “Why, Daddy,” Lynn exclaimed in amazement, “you sound as though you don’t like the idea!”

  “I don’t,” her father said shortly. “There’s enough class consciousness in this town already without starting something like this.”

  Lynn was too surprised to answer. She turned to her mother.

  “Mother—”

  “It does sound like Mrs. Peterson,” Mrs. Chambers said slowly. “She’s such an organizer. I suppose, being from Philadelphia and all that, she feels that making a debut is about the most important thing in a girl’s life. She probably doesn’t want Brenda to miss the experience.”

  “Brenda!” Dodie snorted disdainfully from her side of the table. “Brenda Peterson is a class ‘A’ drip, and no debut is going to make her anything else.”

  Mrs. Chambers shook her head disapprovingly at her younger daughter. “Dodie, that’s a horrid way to talk! You don’t really know the Peterson girl. After all, she’s in Lynn’s class, not yours.”

  “I don’t care whose class she’s in,” Dodie said decidedly. “She’s a drip and everybody in school knows it. Why, she wouldn’t be invited to anything if they didn’t live at the top of the Hill and her mother wasn’t head of every woman’s club in town.”

  “Mrs. Peterson is the head of a lot of things,” Mrs. Chambers admitted. “But I doubt that that makes a difference to the other young people.”

  “Well, it does,” Dodie insisted. “Doesn’t it Lynn?”

  Lynn nodded. “Yes, I suppose it does. Brenda is a drip, Mother, just as Dodie says. She’s not pretty; well, she’s not exactly homely either. It’s just—” She paused, trying to think of the right words. “If you took her feature by feature and asked yourself, ‘is her face all right?’ and ‘are her legs nice?’ and ‘does she have good teeth?’—you would have to answer yes. There’s nothing wrong with her exactly, but when you add everything up, she just doesn’t seem to come out to anything. She’s sort of a wish-washy little thing. Nobody really dislikes her, but nobody especially likes her either.”

  Dr. Chambers looked interested. “She seems to be at all the parties,” he commented.

  “She almost has to be. Her mother gives parties for her, and we are all asked, so, of course, when we give parties, we have to ask her back. But nobody notices her, once she’s there.”

  “She doesn’t have many dates, does she?” Dodie asked. Dodie had only recently begun to go out with boys, and this phase of life interested her especially.

  “I don’t know,” Lynn answered. “I don’t think so. To tell the truth, I haven’t thought of her enough to notice.”

  Mrs. Chambers shook her head sadly.

  “What a sad situation for a young girl. Mrs. Peterson is such a driving force, I can imagine how she reacts to having a daughter who is—well—”

  “A drip,” Dodie put in mischievously. “Go ahead and say it, Mother. A drip. It’s the only word that will do.”

  “No, I will not say it,” her mother said decidedly. “I will not call the poor little thing a name like that. But I can see how frantic Mrs. Peterson must be to organize a whole debutante system in a town this size, just to bring Brenda forth into society. She probably thinks that making a debut is a magic formula designed to—to—”

  Again she hesitated, searching for land words.

  ‘To put wings on caterpillars!” Dodie burst out laughing. “Oh, Mother, don’t look so horrified! You can’t always say nothing but nice things about everybody.”

  “And you don’t have to go out of your way to make unpleasant comparisons,” Mrs. Chambers said quietly. “Dodie, that sharp tongue of yours is not your most appealing asset.”

  Lynn turned back to her father, changing the subject. “You didn’t mean it did you, Daddy, about not liking the idea of my making a debut? Everybody is going to be doing it.”

  “Everybody in Rivertown?”

  “No, of course not but all my good friends are—Nancy and Holly and Joan, oh, all the girls on the Hill. It will be just ‘the thing’ this year.”

  “It may be ‘the thing,’” Dr. Chambers said slowly, “but that doesn’t make it right. It’s something I don’t like to see starting. There is already a disturbing quality growing in this town, a separating of the people according to where they live and how much money they have, a feeling that doesn’t belong in a place of this size. It’s bad enough when it exists among the adult population, but it’s a tragedy to carry it down into the schools. A public school should be a mixing place, an opportunity for all the young people of the town to get to know each other.”

  “But having debutantes wouldn’t change anything!” Dodie exclaimed. “The kids from the Hill go around together anyhow, so what’s the difference whether they make debuts or not?”

  Dr. Chambers turned to Lynn. “Is that so? Are all your friends from the Hill?”

  “Well, most of them, I gu
ess,” Lynn admitted. “We just sort of seem to have more in common, so we go around together.”

  “Then this debutante setup is worse than I thought,” her father said quietly. “It’s going to set the dividing line and make it official. It looks to me as though this Peterson woman is going to put the final touch on destroying what might have been a very nice town.”

  Lynn stared at her father in horror, not believing her ears. “You mean you’re not going to let me make my debut!”

  Dr. Chambers shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lynn. I just can’t go along with it.”

  Lynn turned helplessly to her mother. “Mother, you don’t agree with him, do you? Talk to him—make him see—”

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Mrs. Chambers said slowly, “but this is something for your father to decide.”

  “But, why?” Lynn cried. “Don’t you see what this will mean? All my friends are going to be debutantes. There will be all the parties and dances. It’s going to last the whole year long. What good is it going to do the town not to have me part of it? They’re going to have debutantes anyway. If I decline the invitation, they’ll just pick somebody else to take my place.”

  “Lynn will be out of it all,” Dodie chimed in. “It will be like she was in jail or somewhere fenced off. She can’t go to anything!”

  Lynn was momentarily surprised at her sister’s ardent defense. Then she realized that Dodie was probably looking further ahead, to the next year, when she herself would be a senior and eligible to be a debutante.

  “I am sorry,” Dr. Chambers said. “I don’t want to make you girls unhappy, but I feel very strongly about this. It is something of which I do not approve. I am going to fight it every step of the way, and I can’t very well talk publicly against it if my own daughter is part of it.”

  Lynn’s eyes filled with angry tears.

  “But, Daddy—”

  Her mother leaned forward, placing a warning hand on her tense fingers.

  “All right, Lynn, I think that’s enough discussion for the moment. Let’s drop the whole thing for now. You and your father both think it over, and we’ll talk about it again in the morning.”

  After she had excused herself from the table, Lynn went upstairs to her room and picked up her letter to Paul. It was practically complete, but she sat down at her desk and added another page, telling him about the dinner table discussion and about her father’s attitude.

  She wrote bitterly:It’s not fair. It’s just not fair. You know what it would mean, Paul; that we couldn’t go to anything during Christmas vacation! Not anything! That’s when all the big dances will be, and then the Presentation Ball in the spring, and you would be home for that, too!

  She wrote on, becoming more and more angry. When she finished, she folded the pages, put them into an envelope and wrote Paul’s college address on the front. Then she sealed it and went downstairs to find a stamp.

  She paused at the door to the living room, seeing her mother alone, watching television.

  “Has Daddy gone out?”

  Her mother looked up. “Yes, dear he has gone out on an emergency call. One of the Turner children fell on the stairs. Her mother called in a panic; she says the child can’t seem to move her legs.”

  Lynn exclaimed, “The poor little thing!” Having a doctor for a father, she was used to hearing about accidents and injuries, but their constant occurrence never served to make them less frightening and heartbreaking. “And the poor mother,” she added. “She has a lot of children, doesn’t she? I think there is a Turner boy in Dodie’s class, and I saw him after school the other day, shepherding a whole flock of little ones.”

  Mrs. Chambers nodded. “I think there are five children. It’s a shame, because Mr. Turner was killed in an automobile accident two years ago, and Mrs. Turner is at her wit’s end, trying to support the family and take care of the babies at the same time. Yes, Ronnie, the oldest boy, is about Dodie’s age, I think. He works at Lawton’s Pharmacy after school and in the evenings. That helps some, but it’s still rough going for Mrs. Turner, and this latest tragedy isn’t going to make it any easier.”

  Lynn looked at her mother in surprise.

  “How do you know all that about the Turners? Surely, Mrs. Turner isn’t the sort of person who would be in your bridge club or the Hospital Auxiliary or anything.”

  “No,” Mrs. Chambers said, “I only know about her from your father, who has taken an interest in the family. He was the one who tried to save Mr. Turner after the accident, and later he helped Ronnie get the job at the pharmacy. He says Ronnie is a brilliant boy and a hard worker. Imagine a child that age working all afternoon and all evening to help support his family!”

  Lynn said, “He must be a fine person.”

  Her mother was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was very serious. “Lynn, you think your father was unfair about forbidding you to be one of the debutantes. Perhaps he was. I doubt whether Nancy Dunlapp’s father will forbid Nancy, or Mr. Taylor prevent Holly from joining. But your father is a little different from their fathers, dear, because of his profession. He doesn’t just go to business conferences all day and then come to the Hill at night. He sees people, all kinds of people, people like the Turners, and he gets to know them because he takes care of them. He has a chance to see how many good, fine, interesting people there are who don’t live exactly the way we do. Ronnie Turner for instance. He would never be invited to one of the debutante dances, but I imagine he is a lot finer person than many of the boys Dodie is beginning to date.”

  She hesitated, trying to see what impression she was making on her daughter. Finally, when Lynn remained silent she continued, “What Daddy wants, dear, is for you not to separate yourself so entirely from everybody who isn’t exactly like you. You need to know and like all kinds of people, if you aren’t going to grow up into a—a—” She repressed a smile. “Dodie would love this—into a Mrs. Peterson.”

  Lynn nodded. “I know; I can see that It’s just—oh, Mother, it will be so hard! I’ll be shut out of everything!”

  “No,” her mother said softly. “It may seem that way at first, but you will find, I think, that when some doors are closed to you, others will open.... Lynn, when I was a young girl, living in Atlanta, I was one of the charmed so-called ‘social set.’ I was the most popular debutante of the season, and, if you knew Atlanta society, you would know what that meant. When I met your father, he was an intern at a local hospital. He had worked his way through medical school and was living on nothing but ham sandwiches. My parents could never see how fine and brilliant and ambitious he was. All they could see was that he was not a member of Atlanta ‘society.’ We eloped, and they never forgave us. They died, still feeling that way.”

  Lynn’s eyes grew larger. “So that’s why Daddy feels so strongly about this?”

  “Yes,” her mother said softly, “that’s one of the reasons.” Lynn lay awake a long time after she went to bed. It was almost midnight when the door to her room opened softly and she saw her father standing in the doorway. She could not see his face, but by the hall light shining behind him, she could see he was stooped a little, the way he always stood when he was weary.

  He whispered, “Are you awake?”

  Lynn raised her head. “Yes, Daddy. How is the Turner child?”

  “She’s going to be all right.” Her father did not come into the room. He merely stood there, looking at her. He did not say things easily. Finally he said, “About our conversation tonight; I’ve been thinking it over. If it means so much to you, Lynn—well—”

  “That’s all right,” Lynn assured him. She heard her voice saying it, as though it were someone else’s voice. “That’s all right Mother and I talked about it. I—I can see that you’re right.”

  “No hard feelings?”

  “No hard feelings.”

  He looked so tired, standing there in the doorway, his shoulders sloped forward, his head bent a little.

  Lynn relaxed on h
er pillow and said something she had not said for a long long time.

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  Dr. Chambers did not answer at once. When he did he said only, “And I you, Daughter.” Then he closed the door.

  3

  Lynn got up the next morning feeling as dedicated, strong and purposeful as a Christian martyr going forth to face the lions. However, by the time she had washed her face, brushed her teeth, dressed and put on lipstick, her purpose was beginning to falter a little. It was fairly easy to be noble at night, in a moment of sentiment, but in the bright light of day, the thought of the morning ahead of her was a little more difficult.

  Dodie did not help matters.

  “You’re crazy,” she said at breakfast, helping herself to a handful of toast. “You should never have let Daddy talk you into something like this. I’m darned if anybody’s going to talk me out of being a debutante next year. I’m going to be the debutantiest one of them all.”

  “I’ll bet!” Lynn said irritably. “Just you wait Daddy will have something to say about it when the time comes.”

  “He can say what he wants,” Dodie declared, “and it won’t make any difference. I’ll kick and scream and throw things at the walls. Daddy can’t hold out against something like that and he wouldn’t have held out against you either, if you had stood your ground. You just give in too easily.”

  Lynn thought of her father the night before, standing in the doorway. He had been ready to give in then. He had said, “If it means so much to you, Lynn—” All she would have had to reply was, “It does, Daddy. It means everything.”

  But she had not said it. Now she wished she had—but now it was too late. Her decision was made, and she was stuck with it.

  Lynn swallowed her orange juice and blotted her mouth carefully with a napkin, so as not to blur her lipstick. “Ready to go?” she asked her sister.

  Dodie glanced at her watch. “You go ahead. I told Janie I’d stop by her house and walk over with her.”