Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  Both letters had been written on board the Romanic, en route to Naples. They were long letters. Julia remarked that people said she spent most of her time writing; but she wanted her family to take the trip right along with her. And if ever one person took four others through Europe by means of pen and paper, it was Julia that summer.

  The Rays lived a double life. They rested and ate, fished and bathed at Murmuring Lake in Minnesota. But they also took the Rev. Mr. Lewis’ “personally conducted tour.”

  Although landbound, they felt the lazy charm of shipboard life, sitting in deck chairs watching the ever-changing water. The steward prepared salt baths for them. They had breakfast at nine, broth at eleven, luncheon at half past one, tea on deck at four, and dinner at seven.

  They went to church in the salon and heard the Church of England clergyman pray for King Edward and Queen Alexandra. They heard Julia, in her little black silk dress, sing at the Ship’s Concert. They ate at the Captain’s dinner and danced at the Grand Ball.

  At the Azores they felt the intoxication of a first encounter with a tropical island—purple bougainvillea climbing over everything; narrow streets with tiny plaster houses painted white, blue, yellow, and pink; whining beggars, clamoring vendors, women wrapped in shawls.

  They went on through Italy, Switzerland, up the River Rhine, into Holland, Belgium, France, and England.

  Julia enjoyed everything five times as much as the average traveler, she said. “I think of each one of you and look at everything just five times as hard.”

  Bettina (Julia’s name for Betsy) must learn languages at once. “Every cultured person should know at least French.”

  She was buying presents for them madly. The Rev. Mr. Lewis had promised to bring a box home in the fall when Julia went on to Berlin and her study with Fraulein von Blatz.

  “Oh, I’m so happy! I can’t believe it is I, Julia Ray, who is traveling in Europe, having all her cherished dreams fulfilled.”

  Letters, more than anything else, characterized this summer vacation for Betsy. The Ray cottage was set out on a point with a view across the lake to Pleasant Park, where Mrs. Ray had lived as a girl. Sitting on the porch of the cottage or down on the sandy isolated Point, Betsy wrote to Julia. She wrote to Tacy and to Tib; to Leonard, the sick nephew of Miss Cobb, her music teacher. She wrote to Joe Willard.

  Betsy had answered Joe’s first letter with praise and encouragement. His reply came, brimming with elation. A land-swindle trial had been going on in Wells County when he arrived in June. It had started out quietly; a crook, Joe said, had been indicted. But the case had developed national ramifications when the crook was discovered to have been aided by a senator. Court was continued in session.

  Joe had seen the importance of the case and had started filing the story every day for the Minneapolis Tribune. The stories were published, and he was paid space rates. On the day he wrote Betsy, the Tribune editor had telephoned, long distance.

  “Ordinarily,” this august personage had said, “with a story which has ballooned like this one, we would send a correspondent to Wells. But we like your stories. You may handle the case for us.”

  Joe had accepted with some misgivings. He had not concealed his age, but neither had he mentioned it.

  “I’d just as soon they didn’t find out how young I am,” he wrote. “So I wish you’d keep the assignment a secret. I haven’t told anyone what I am doing except you and Mr. Root.”

  When Betsy received that letter, she went down to the boathouse, took out a boat, and rowed to Babcock’s Bay. She liked this quiet backwater, where trees grew close to the shore, making golden-green aisles when the sun shone. She read Joe’s letter a second time and a third, then held it between her hands and looked off across the quiet, gleaming water.

  “I haven’t told anyone except you and Mr. Root.” He had picked her for a confidante!

  She took out her paper and a pencil and wrote an answer, reading through what she had written, correcting and interlining as she did with her stories. When she returned to the cottage, she copied it all on scented paper and sealed it with green sealing wax.

  Joe’s typewritten letters and Betsy’s scented, green-sealed replies went back and forth regularly after that.

  Betsy took to reading the Minneapolis Tribune. She looked for Joe’s stories and one day she noticed with excitement that the story was signed at the top, “Joseph Willard.”

  “Isn’t it a terrific honor,” she wrote to Joe, “having your name signed to a story in a newspaper?”

  A few nights later, her father looked up from his reading.

  “I wonder whether this Joseph Willard who writes for the Tribune is any relation to the Willard boy who works on the Deep Valley Sun?”

  “Yes, he is,” Betsy replied.

  “Uncle, or something?”

  “Something,” Betsy murmured noncommittally. She felt guilty but she stood by her promise. “Joe has mentioned that case to me. We correspond, you know.”

  “You certainly do,” Mrs. Ray remarked. “You’re keeping the mails busy. I don’t remember his ever coming to the house, though.”

  “He never has,” Betsy replied. “But he will!” she thought, and smiled to herself.

  She clipped all the Joseph Willard articles and kept them in the box with her own stories.

  Betsy found time for stories in spite of the time she gave to letter writing. And that summer she started in earnest trying to sell to the magazines. When she finished a story she copied it neatly and sent it away with return postage enclosed to The Ladies’ Home Journal or The Delineator, The Youth’s Companion or St. Nicholas. As regularly as she sent them out, they were returned.

  But Betsy was stubborn. If a story came back in the morning from one magazine, it went out in the afternoon to another. She kept a record in a little notebook of how much postage each manuscript required, when it went out, and when it came back. She was not at all sensitive about her campaign and the family took a lively interest in it.

  “Uncle Sam ought to manufacture round-trip postage stamps,” Mr. Ray chuckled. “They would certainly be a convenience to Betsy.”

  “My stories will start selling some day. You’ll see.”

  “Of course they will,” Mrs. Ray put in, with her usual monumental confidence in her daughters. “The magazines are full of stories not half so good as Betsy’s.”

  “I like them just as well as the stories in my fairy books,” said Margaret.

  Margaret, eleven years old now, was up to Betsy’s shoulder, and as straight as her father. She was immaculately neat, very quiet and self-contained. She wore her braids crossed in back with big taffeta bows behind her ears. Her serious freckled face was illumined by star-like eyes.

  She and Betsy liked to take books down on the Point. The steep bank hid the Inn from their view. Little white-edged waves lapped at their feet, small stilt-legged birds ran along the sand, and reeds at the water’s edge made a forest for a Thumbelina.

  Margaret read from her fairy books and Betsy read Les Miserables. She had begun Victor Hugo’s tome in a zest for self-improvement, having heard it called the greatest novel in the world, but she soon became deeply engrossed.

  She was following Jean Valjean’s adventures one Sunday afternoon, with Margaret deep in the Blue Fairy Book beside her, when she heard a rustling on the bank and looked up to see Tony descending.

  He had come several times since the day he gave Betsy the letters and she was pleased to be succeeding in her enterprise. It was fun, too, to have a cavalier. There weren’t many young people at the Inn this season. She jumped up to greet him and Margaret followed, her face wreathed in smiles.

  “Something for you, Margaret,” he said carelessly, thrusting a box of candy into her hands. He always gave Margaret the candy he brought. Tony’s visits seemed to be to the entire family, although he was Betsy’s classmate.

  They went up to the cottage to dress for a swim. Betsy and Margaret put on blue serge bathing su
its, trimmed with white braid around collars, sleeves, and skirts, long black stockings, laced bathing shoes, bandanas on their heads.

  “Very skippy,” Tony said.

  In the water he romped with Margaret, who was paddling about on water wings. Betsy swam with a joyfully vigorous breast stroke. Then she found a sun hole and floated, staring up at faraway swirls of cloud.

  Tony was playing croquet with the family when Betsy emerged from the cottage, dressed for supper. She had put on a filmy pink dress and wore flowers in her hair. Tony leaned on his mallet, his dark eyes teasing.

  “Look at Betsy! I swear she’s gunning for me. It’s no use, girl. I’m hooked. Margaret’s got me.”

  He stayed for supper, of course, and although the Inn had provided a gigantic Sunday dinner, supper was also an abundant affair, with cold ham and chicken, potato salad, green corn on the cob, baking powder biscuits, and plum cake heaped with whipped cream.

  Mr. Ray and Tony talked baseball. Mr. Ray enjoyed Tony’s accounts of the Minneapolis League baseball games.

  “But I don’t like your transportation, Tony,” he said. “You might lose a leg some day, hopping a freight.”

  “Oh, they slow down for me!”

  “What do you do with your time up there in the cities after the game is over?”

  “I hang around with Jake and Harry. They’re my brakemen pals.”

  “Aren’t they a lot older than you are?”

  “Sure. Ten years or so, but I like to hear them talk. They’re full of the darndest yarns.”

  Betsy was listening intently. She could tell her father was troubled. Tony turned and tweaked her nose.

  “What makes you listen so good?” he asked in affectionate derision. “You don’t understand about baseball or railroading, either.”

  After supper, Tony asked Betsy to go rowing. They went down to the boathouse and Old Pete gave them a boat. Tony took off his coat and folded it over the seat, fitted the oars into the oarlocks, and rowed to the middle of the lake.

  The water was as smooth as glass. Now and then an insect skimmed along the surface, making a crack in the mirror. Tony rowed lazily, while the sun sank out of sight and diaphanous clouds all over the sky turned pink.

  He crossed the oars, looked up and around him.

  “Nice. Isn’t it?” he said.

  Tony never talked much. He teased, joked, and clowned, but he seldom talked about anything important to him. Betsy thought sometimes how little she knew of Tony’s life. Other boys talked about school and sports, their larks and scrapes, their girls, books they were reading. A few of them talked about ideas that stirred them. Tony was either fooling or he was silent.

  He could listen, though. Betsy talked more about herself with Tony than with any boy she knew. He understood what her writing meant to her. He had shown the same sensitive insight into Julia’s music.

  Tony loved to sing himself and had a fine deep voice. Basso profundo, Julia called it. Julia had been quite excited for a time by Tony’s gift as a singer. But he had no ambition to sing professionally or to do anything else except enjoy life as it passed.

  Betsy told him now about the story she was working on. It concerned a New York debutante.

  “Sort of a Robert W. Chambers story,” she explained.

  “But you don’t know anything about New York debutantes, Betsy.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I make it up.”

  He started rowing again and they found themselves near Pleasant Park. The old house was surrounded by tall trees that almost hid it from view. The lawn was enclosed on three sides by a white picket fence. On the fourth side, the land sloped to the water, and there were a boathouse and docks.

  “Just think!” Betsy said. “That’s where Mamma grew up. A farmer lives there now.”

  “Your grandfather is in California, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. He’s Mamma’s stepfather. Hers and Uncle Keith’s. She was married in that house.”

  “Well,” Tony said. “It was some marriage! I don’t know another family that gets along as yours does, Betsy. Honest to gosh, I’ve always been sort of glad I got acquainted with you Rays!”

  And then, having been betrayed into what he considered sentimentality, he changed the subject.

  “Let’s sing,” he said.

  They sang while the stars came out and the color of the sky deepened to a rich dark blue. The first sprinkle of stars was followed by armies of them.

  They sang everything they knew, beginning with old songs like “Annie Laurie” and “Swanee River”; going on to “What’s the Use of Dreaming,” Mr. Ray’s favorite, and “My Wild Irish Rose,” which the beloved Chauncey Olcott had brought to Deep Valley every autumn since Betsy could remember. They sang the songs associated with each high school year.

  “Dreaming, dreaming,

  Of you, sweetheart, I am dreaming….”

  That had been the hit of their freshman year. From the sophomore year they sang:

  “Come away with me, Lucille,

  In my merry Oldsmobile….”

  They sang last year’s “Howdy Cy, Morning Cy,” and finished in style with the duet from “The Red Mill”:

  “Not that you are fair, dear,

  Not that you are true….”

  They had sung it many times beside the piano at the Ray house. Their timing was perfect, and their voices blended warmly. Someone sitting in darkness on the distant point applauded.

  “Say,” Tony exclaimed. “We’re pretty good. Broadway doesn’t know what it’s missing!”

  “Yes,” Betsy agreed, “you and I make a good team.”

  Tony didn’t answer, and her words lingered in the air as words do sometimes, taking on undue significance by reason of the fact that they are left suspended. He picked up the oars and started rowing toward the lights of the Inn, gleaming through the trees.

  The next afternoon, when Betsy and her mother were rocking and mending on the porch of the little cottage, Mrs. Ray said suddenly, “Betsy! I think Tony is getting a little…well…sweet on you.”

  “Heavens, no!” said Betsy, startled. “Tony is just like a brother.”

  “He used to be,” said Mrs. Ray. “But…I have intuitions sometimes where my children are concerned. I think Tony’s feeling toward you is changing. I don’t like it.”

  “Why don’t you like it?” asked Betsy. “Why wouldn’t you like it, if it were true, I mean? Lots of boys have had crushes on me and you never minded.”

  Mrs. Ray answered slowly, “We’re all so fond of Tony.”

  “Of course!” cried Betsy. “Papa likes him better than any boy that comes to the house. In fact, we all do. So what’s wrong?” Her mother didn’t reply and Betsy added, “I suppose you don’t like those freight-hopping trips to Minneapolis? I don’t myself. Maybe I can talk him out of them.”

  “How do you feel about Tony, Betsy?” asked Mrs. Ray. “You aren’t…serious…are you?”

  “Heavens, no!” said Betsy again, and felt suddenly very old. Her mother’s tone was the searching one Betsy had heard her use with Julia. It seemed strange to think that she was old enough so that her mother worried about one of her crushes being serious.

  “I haven’t a crush on Tony or on anyone else,” she said, but she felt herself blushing and jumped up hurriedly, pretending to have lost her thimble. She had thought suddenly about Joe Willard’s letters, how she looked forward to them, how hard she worked over her answers. She hoped that her mother would not extend her questioning to Joe.

  Happily, perhaps deliberately, she didn’t.

  “Betsy,” said Mrs. Ray briskly, when her daughter had shaken her skirts and sat down. “What do you think of the new, long-sleeved tucked waists? Would you like one to go with your suit?”

  “Yes,” answered Betsy, “I think I would.”

  3

  Back From the Lake

  BETSY ALWAYS LOVED the late summer return from Murmuring Lake to the house on the corner of High Street and Plum. Mr. Ra
y had always mowed the lawn. He had clipped the hydrangeas and bridal wreath and set the sprinkler going. Anna, the hired girl, had usually come back a few days earlier, so the house was aired and clean. But it never looked like home until Mrs. Ray had scattered books and magazines about, and the girls had cut flowers for the vases.

  This year there was no Julia to run to the piano, but Betsy unlocked it and dashed off a few scales just to let the neighbors know that the Rays were back.

  The piano had photographs of Julia at all ages ranged along the top. It stood in a light, square hall which Julia had grandly named the music room. To the right, a golden oak staircase curved upward. To the left, an archway led into the parlor, a warm, friendly room, with crisp lace curtains, sofa pillows, pictures and books, a green-shaded lamp, and a brass bowl holding a palm.

  The dining room was just behind. It was papered in a dark, fruity pattern above a well-filled plate rail. A gold-fringed lamp hung by a chain over the center of the table. There was a fireplace in one corner, a gong in another, and a fine display of cut glass and hand-painted china on the sideboard. A swinging door led to the pantry and Anna’s kitchen.

  Anna had already started baking cookies, wearing a broad, pleased smile. Margaret was smiling, too, as she wandered through the house with Washington, the cat, in her arms.

  Washington and his companion, Lincoln, the Spitz dog, had spent the summer on Anna’s brother’s farm. Abe Lincoln had been excited by the return. He had run around barking sharply, jumping upon forbidden chairs. Washington had relaxed on his favorite pillow with a supercilious air. But he had started purring when Margaret picked him up.

  Betsy began joyfully to telephone. It was fun getting back to the Crowd. Carney, who had been graduated from high school in June, was busy getting ready for Vassar.

  “Mother and I are going up to the Cities to buy my clothes,” she said.

  “What joy! When?”

  “Tomorrow. So let’s go riding tonight. We’ll pick up the bunch.”