Now, searching for a topic of conversation, Rette told her about the contest, with flying lessons as the prize. Ellen was easy to talk to, because she was so interested in everything. She wanted to know the essay subject, and repeated it thoughtfully.
“Not too easy, to write about intangibles,” she said.
Grateful that Ellen was talking to her as though they were on the same level, Rette expanded still farther and mentioned the phrase that had been haunting her thoughts.
“Keep it ‘well within your own world,’ Mr. Irish said. What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“I think I know,” Ellen said promptly, leaning against a table with a dish she was drying forgotten in her hand, “but it’s not an easy thing to explain.” She thought a minute. “Have you ever had an English teacher tell you to write about things you know?”
Rette nodded. “Of course. But I don’t know anything about flying. None of us do, really. We just want to learn.”
“You’re writing about the dream of flying. You know something about that.” Ellen put down the dish, took up another, and looked at Rette thoughtfully. “I’d like to give you a book, if you’ll stop in at the shop after school tomorrow. It’s a book you should read anyway, and this may be just the time. It was written by a college girl who would have understood exactly what Mr. Irish meant.”
Rette expected a book on flying, but when she took the red-jacketed book that Ellen held out to her the next afternoon she read the title in surprise. “Seventeenth Summer,” it said.
“Why—this is a novel!”
Ellen nodded. “A good one. You’ll love it.”
Curiously, Rette riffled the pages, then turned to the blurb on the back. The picture of a girl, vividly Irish, with a wealth of dark hair and with eyes that were probably the color of periwinkle, looked up at her.
“Maureen Daly,” Rette read. “Is she the author? She looks so young!”
Ellen laughed. “She was only nineteen when she wrote this story. I’m anxious to hear what you think of it. Most people agree that she’s managed to do a pretty remarkable thing.”
Ellen had the ability to fire others with her own enthusiasm, and while Loretta still couldn’t conceive what possible connection this novel about a girl’s first love might have with her own essay on flying, she hurried through her homework that night and went to bed early, taking the book with her.
“A deplorable habit, reading in bed,” her dad always said. “Bad for your eyes, bad for your posture, bad for everything.” Yet both Rette and her mother persisted in the unhealthy habit and even cherished it. “My only vice,” Mrs. Larkin told her husband firmly. “I think you should be indulgent.”
There is nothing, Rette thought, as she adjusted the shade on her bedside lamp and snuggled down under the covers, quite like starting a brand-new book. The book has to be fresh, preferably unread, so that the smell of printer’s ink and new paper still clings to it. The binding should be unbroken, and the jacket shouldn’t be dog-eared or torn. Even the first sentence is full of promise. No other feeling is quite like this.
And no other book that she had ever read, Rette decided after an hour, had quite the quality of Seventeenth Summer. There was a homeliness, a deep-rooted honesty, a youthfulness about it that made Loretta catch her breath. She didn’t live in the sort of town Angie Morrow lived in; she didn’t have that sort of family; she had yet to have a love affair. Yet the story was so real and so fresh that Rette became Angie. She shared every feeling, every impulse, every hope and every thrill and every disappointment.
How can this be, she wondered? And then she decided that it was because the author was so close to her subject that she knew infallibly how to take her heroine every step of the way. She was writing about something out of her own intimate experience—within her own world.
Rette let the book lie on the coverlet and clasped her hands behind her head. She knew now why Gramp had called her writing “dressed-up.” He meant that it was pompous. For the first time she began to think of writing not as an exercise in word arrangement, but as an effort to capture life and truth in simple terms on paper.
It doesn’t matter what a person writes about, Rette decided, as long as it’s something she knows. It doesn’t matter how conventional or unconventional a person’s terms are, so long as the language fits the subjects, so long as it rings true!
She heard the car roll up the drive, and into the garage, heard the slamming of the doors, the entry of her mother and father into the house. A few minutes later there were quick, light feet on the stairs and Mrs. Larkin pushed Rette’s door open a crack.
“Are you still reading?” There was the gentlest sort of reprimand in her tone.
“Just stopped.” Rette countered with another question. “Was the movie good?”
“So-so.” Her mother dropped down for a moment on the edge of Rette’s bed, unbuttoning the throat of her fly-front wool sport dress. “Some of the situations Hollywood dreams up are so artificial, or maybe Dad and I are just getting old.”
Rette laughed. Her mother looked far from old.
“If you want an antidote, you ought to read the book I’m reading. It’s awfully good.”
Mrs. Larkin picked up the book and glanced at the title. “Seventeenth Summer. Where did you get this?”
“Ellen gave it to me. I don’t know quite why she should be so generous, but it’s a wonderful book!”
Mrs. Larkin’s eyebrows raised impishly, and she smiled. “Ellen,” she said, “is a clever girl.”
“Why?”
“Winning over Tony’s young sister is part of the game.” Rette was shocked. “O Mother, she wouldn’t!”
“Why wouldn’t she?” asked Mrs. Larkin. “I did.” She leaned back and hugged one knee with her hands. “I remember the first time I met Dad’s family. I wanted them to like me—desperately! And I think they did, except for Peter. It took me months and a trip to the shore to win him over. But it was worth it.”
“Uncle Pete didn’t like you?” Rette was incredulous. Her dad’s younger brother adored his sister-in-law now.
“He thought I was an interloper. He was as crazy about George as—as you are about Tony. He thought no girl could possibly be good enough for his brother.” Mrs. Larkin smiled again.
“But—but, Mother. You don’t think, with Tony, there’s anything really serious?” She paused, trying to accustom herself to such an idea.
“I hope there is,” replied her mother confidentially. “Ellen is a fine girl, attractive, level-headed, and feminine enough to be artful. Tony could go far and do a great deal worse.”
“You mean—you’d like him to marry her?”
Mrs. Larkin’s eyes twinkled and she pursed her lips in a little moue. “I would.”
While Loretta regarded her in frank astonishment, Mrs. Larkin leaned on one elbow and tried to explain. “Tony needs to be married, Rette. You’re old enough to understand. He’s mature for his years. The war has seen to that. He’s high-strung and affectionate and he’s—” she waved her free hand, seeking for a word—“he’s sort of foot-loose right now. He’s outgrown us, Rette. He’s a man, and he should have his own home and his own life.”
After her mother had left, Rette lay in the darkness and thought about their conversation for a long time. She was proud to be taken into her mother’s confidence; it made her feel adult and responsible. But she still couldn’t quite face the probability of Tony’s marriage. When she contemplated the gap it would leave in the household, it made her stomach feel empty and aching. She didn’t want him to go away—with Ellen or any other girl.
Rette recognized the sensation of emptiness. She had experienced it first when she was six, and her mother had gone off for a week on a trip with a friend. Dad was home, and so was Tony, along with a temporary housekeeper, but it wasn’t the same without Mother. Rette had wandered around the place like a lost puppy, feeling miserable and alone.
Again, but to a lesser degree, Rette had felt
desolate when Tony went off to war. Pride had bolstered her courage then, along with the firm belief that he would soon be home again.
Marriage, however, was final, too final to contemplate. Restlessly, Rette punched at her pillow. Life was getting too complicated entirely. Between Tony and the essay contest and her own inner confusion she felt tossed and pommeled.
And that wasn’t all! There was a basketball game tomorrow, and her algebra grades were still in the depths, and spring sports were already being talked about at school. Rette wondered whether things seemed so critical to older people. She decided they didn’t. Older people seemed to develop a sort of crust, through which their feelings never quite bubbled. In a way that would be comfortable, but in another way it would be upsetting. She was afraid that when the bubbling stopped, so would the sense of feeling vitally alive.
CHAPTER NINE
During the next two days it rained with dreary persistence. Then a March wind whipped the rain to ice on the sidewalks of Avondale and everybody kept saying, “Isn’t this miserable weather?” But Rette didn’t notice.
Rette was in Fond du Lac with Angie Morrow, enwrapped in a summer romance that was mysterious and sweet and exciting, and so real that the experience didn’t seem vicarious at all.
Seventeenth Summer went everywhere with Loretta until she finished it. The book was opened behind her American History in study hall; it found its way into English class and replaced Algebra III on her desk at night. On Wednesday evening, when Rette came to the end, she heaved a languishing sigh. She wanted the story to go right on, like the series books of her childhood.
The amazing part of it was that Angie Morrow and Jack Duluth didn’t seem like book characters at all. They were just like any girl and boy that Rette might be going to school with, except that she knew more about them, about the way they thought and felt, than she did about any of her friends.
At first all Rette’s consciousness was so much part of the story that she couldn’t analyze the writing, couldn’t consider it dispassionately, as Ellen had intended that she should. But gradually she began to see that the author had captured, with extraordinary sensitivity, an experience that, because of its very nature, no older writer could have touched. She had written about something only possible within her own youthful world.
On Thursday, before dinner, Rette read over her essay for the contest and, compared with Maureen Daly’s writing, it seemed stupid and stale. She consoled herself that no essay could possibly duplicate the natural style of such a novel; but, later, as she sat at the table and listened to her family’s routine conversation, she was preoccupied. What had Ellen expected of her, she wondered? Why, at what seemed to Rette to be the eleventh hour, had she insisted that she read this book?
Gramp was trying to break into her reverie. Lark, Rette awoke to hear him saying, “isn’t tomorrow the big day?”
“What big day?” As though Rette didn’t know perfectly well that the fifteenth was the due date for the essay.
“‘Beware the ides of March’!” Gramp quoted in a stentorian voice, not put off by her question, and because the rest of the family began to look at her, Rette pushed back her chair and grumbled: “Oh, you mean the essay! I think I’m going to skip it. I haven’t got a chance anyway.”
But after dinner, instead of doing her homework, she shut herself in her bedroom and put a clean sheet of copy paper into her dad’s typewriter.
“The Dream of Flying,” she wrote at the top.
Then, for a long while, she just sat.
How would it sound, she wondered, if she really wrote about it flying from her heart, if she tried to put down, in all honesty, the dream that was hers and that must have been, to a fullness that her mind could not encompass, the dream of every man who ever dared think of conquering the air?
She let her thoughts drift, and she was filled with a strange elation, a sense of power that was new to her, that had nothing to do with the feeling she had on the basketball court or when she held a tennis racket in her hand.
Finally, halting every few words, she started to put sentences on the blank paper.
“Everything important that has ever happened,” she began simply, “first of all was a dream.
“Every great painting was once a dream in the artist’s eye. Even’ book is a dream, every building. If we couldn’t dream, we wouldn’t keep on growing. Our world would just stop.”
Rette paused and sat with her hands in her lap staring into space.
“The dream of flying.” she wrote after a while, “is thousands of years old and yet it is as young as a little boy watching the flight of his first homemade glider. Daedalus and Leonardo and Besnier were the visionaries. Octave Chanute and the Wright brothers took up their dreams and made them into fact.”
She paused again thinking of her own dream of flying, which had begun in the days when she had sat beside Tony’s worktable, watching him fashion model airplanes with infinite care. She remembered a time when he was a smooth-faced lad in corduroy pants and she was in first grade just learning to read. He had waved an unfinished model in her face one day and said, very firmly, Someday I’m going to fly one of these jobs.”
“Me too” she had promised just as firmly, because everything that Tony did she had wanted to do.
The door opened gently and Cramp’s head appeared and retreated, but Rette didn’t hear or see. Dreams have curious beginnings, she thought, and tried to put something of her own dream of learning to fly down on paper, not trying to sound original, but writing about her early desire to emulate Tony in a frank and unvarnished way.
Then, because it seemed to follow naturally, she wrote about the war, and the years in which her beautiful dream of flying had turned into a nightmare of wordless fear for her brother. But Tony had come home, with his own faith in the air still high, and Rette had begun to dream again.
She wrote about the way her trips to the airport made her heart quicken, the lift and urgency she felt as she watched an ascending plane, the keen thrill of her first flight, when she had looked down on a tidy, spacious earth from the strange and delightful viewpoint of a bird.
But that trip in a commercial air liner she recognized as nothing in comparison to the thrill of learning to master a small plane. Then, suddenly, her experience stopped. Her story ended, but not her dream.
“For I shall always dream of flying,” she finished, “as long as I am young.”
When she took the last sheet of paper out of the typewriter Rette felt suddenly tired. Her back ached and her eyes were heavy. She couldn’t even bear to think of reading over what she had written, she was so anxious to get in bed.
The next morning she overslept, and gathered up the papers on her desk hastily, slipping both the new and old versions of her essay between the pages of her black-bound notebook. She’d read them over, she decided, and make a decision between them, when she got to school.
The rain had stopped, but the bare limbs of the trees were still coated with melting ice, and drops of water hit the pavement with a monotonous rhythm. There was a dull red blush of buds along the maple branches, but Rette didn’t discover this precursor of spring. She felt listless and heavy and uncomfortably aware that she had done no homework at all, not even math. Gone entirely was the stimulation of last night.
When she reread the newer version of her essay, she felt even worse. It was simple, all right—so simple that it seemed childish. It also seemed disturbingly intimate. How could she have thought that all that stuff about Tony and herself had any meaning? She slapped the papers back between the leaves of the notebook and began sorting books for her morning classes with a dismal sense of inadequacy.
“Maureen Daly,” she muttered, “my eye!”
“What did you say?” asked Corky, from behind her.
“Nothing,” Rette returned.
“Well, you needn’t be disagreeable.”
“And you needn’t be nosy,” Rette shot back without a smile.
The dro
ne of familiar voices laboring through French translation soothed her a little. They were reading La Tulipe Noire, and Rette found the story easy enough to follow, even without preparation. Her French vocabulary had always been good, and she never had much trouble in hitting upon apt English synonyms. But when she entered Mr. Scott’s room her heart fell to the soles of her saddle shoes. He was writing questions on the blackboard for what was obviously a sprung quiz.
Rette hadn’t cracked an algebra book for a week now. Between one thing and another—reading and writing, to be exact—there just hadn’t been time. The problems posed looked more like Greek than anything she had previously encountered. They were tolling a death knell to a place on the tennis team. Rette’s ears positively rang with the imagined sound.
Through half the period she sat making meaningless marks on paper so that she would look busy. Then she simply sat, facing the fact that this situation couldn’t go on. She’d have to confess to Mr. Scott that she had fallen hopelessly behind, and she’d have to face his inevitable suggestion—a tutor. How she could ever broach the subject of a tutor to her family, who had always exhibited the most trusting confidence in her brains, she didn’t at the moment know.
At the end of the period Rette crumpled the test paper in her hand and dropped it into the wastebasket at the front of the classroom. She waited until the rest of the pupils had left, then approached Mr. Scott.
“I’m not handing in a paper,” she told him. “Things seem to have gone from bad to worse. I guess I’ll have to have some help if I’m ever going to pass this course.”
Mr. Scott didn’t have to tell Rette that in her senior year such a situation was serious. She knew. He looked at her quietly and said, “You mean you’d like me to suggest a tutor?’ and mutely Rette nodded her head.
Mr. Scott consulted some names in the back of his roll book. “I’m all filled up,” he told her, “and so is Miss Carpenter. There are some senior boys who have asked for some tutoring work though. I’ll have to see who can take you on.”
Betty Cavanna Page 7