Carney's House Party and Winona's Pony Cart

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  “Oh, Horace!” Mrs. Root cried despairingly. “You don’t know the trouble I have making Winona ladylike. She isn’t like the other girls. She’s more like you.”

  “I had a pony,” Mr. Root said. “I didn’t grow up until I had a pony.”

  “But you were a boy! And a Westerner, too!”

  Winona heard her father give a little laugh. She was listening hard now. She knew very well what was being decided. Maybe, she thought, she ought to pray. But she couldn’t stop listening.

  “Agatha darling,” Mr. Root said, “you’ve never gotten over the feeling that when you came to Minnesota, you came to the Wild West. But more ladies ride back East than they do here. You’ve seen them yourself in Central Park. Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Astor, Lillian Russell…”

  Father’s voice was teasing now; it seemed a little risky.

  “Why, Queen Victoria rides!” he said. “Or she did when she was young.”

  “Mother,” said Bessie, and Winona could tell from the sound of her voice that she was crying, “Winona could wear divided skirts.”

  “She could ride sidesaddle,” pleaded Myra between sniffs. “Our minister would think it was all right. I’m sure he would.”

  “All I want,” said Mrs. Root, “is what is best for Winona.”

  Her voice was trembling and Mr. Root answered gently, “Of course, dear! We all understand that. Well, you know more than I do about raising girls!”

  There was silence.

  It was decided, Winona realized feeling empty inside. She couldn’t have a pony.

  She didn’t want to cry any more. She had cried all the tears she had. She had lost Jingle; that was all there was to it. But she would never forget him.

  “I’ll love him as long as I live,” she thought. “I’ll love him whether he’s mine or not.”

  She remembered him trotting around and around under the red and yellow trees.

  It had been a wonderful party, she thought, almost smiling. And after all she had her big doll. And the little printing press. They weren’t as nice as Jingle but they were very nice. How Betsy Ray had liked that printing press!

  Winona remembered the newspaper they were going to have. Betsy was going to write stories for it, and Tib was going to draw pictures, and Tacy was going to peddle the papers. She herself would be editor like her father.

  “Maybe we’ll make money enough to buy Jingle!” she thought, and jumped up, and dried her wet cheeks with her hands, and shook out the crumpled red dress.

  She didn’t really believe they would, but it was fun to pretend.

  Her father and mother and Bessie and Myra were looking at her anxiously.

  “Father,” said Winona. “I’m going to get my printing press. Will you show me how it works?”

  A smile broke over his face. “You bet I will, Win,” he answered.

  “What a little brick!” she heard him say as she went out. That made Winona feel proud.

  She got the printing press from the bedroom where her presents were arranged, and when she crossed the hall again she saw through the open library door that her father was walking up and down with his hands behind his back. He wasn’t smiling any more.

  “It was all my stupid fault!” he burst out unexpectedly, to Winona’s surprise. “I should have told her the pony was just rented for the afternoon! I should have known what she’d think…after she’d asked me for a pony.”

  “So should I,” said Mrs. Root. “She asked me, too. It was my fault, too.”

  Suddenly her voice took on a different tone. She sounded happy and excited.

  “Horace!” she said. “Horace! Let her have the pony!”

  Winona stood perfectly still. She had to. Her feet seemed to be rooted to the carpet. And something rushed over her; it was like a wind full of joy and love and gratefulness. She was grateful for everything—not just the pony. For the party, and her presents, and her father and mother and sisters.

  “Winona!” her mother called.

  “Come a-running, Win!” her father shouted.

  Winona’s feet came loose. She went a-running.

  “Winona,” her mother began, “we’ve decided….”

  But Winona interrupted. “Oh, Mother!” she cried.

  “You don’t need to tell me. I heard.”

  She threw her arms around her mother’s neck and hugged her. She hugged with such violence, and her mother was so frail, that Winona almost knocked her over. But Mrs. Root seemed to like it. She hugged back.

  “I’ll ride sidesaddle, Mother,” Winona cried. “I’ll wear divided skirts. And I’ll drive out in the little cart just like you and Bessie and Myra drive with Florence.”

  Her mother started to cry.

  Winona flew to her father. She hugged him and kissed him and hugged him.

  “Father,” she said, “I’ll learn to play the piano good. I’ll never whirl the stool when I ought to be practicing, and I’ll never, never push the clock ahead.”

  “Why, you little monkey!” said her father. “Is that what was the matter with that clock?”

  Winona got up and danced around the room. She kissed Bessie. She kissed Myra. They looked funny with their faces streaked with tears when they were still wearing their party dresses. The library still looked like the party. The white sheet, full of crumbs, was still on the floor.

  Selma came to the door. She had been crying, too.

  “Selma,” Winona cried, running to hug her, “I can keep Jingle! Jingle is my pony!”

  Ole came running in, blowing his nose on a bright red handkerchief.

  “Ole!” Winona cried. “I can keep Jingle. And he won’t be a bit of trouble to you, Ole. I’ll feed him and water him and curry him and clean out his stall. He’ll give me a great sense of re-re-responsibility, Ole.”

  “Ya, ya!” Ole said.

  “See here!” said her father. “You’re going to have a pony. But maybe you don’t want Jingle…he’s had a hard life. He’s gone around with that young man for years entertaining children.”

  Winona gazed at her father with black reproachful eyes. “Why, of course I want Jingle! He’s my pony!” she said.

  “Oh, all right, all right!” her father replied.

  In the morning when the young man returned, Mr. Root bought Jingle and his harness and the pony cart. He wrote the young man a check.

  “Glad to get it!” the young man said, looking at it with a pleased expression before he folded it up and put it in his pocket. “I’ve been wanting to get out of this business. I think I’ll find a merry-go-round.”

  “I’ll take good care of Jingle,” Winona said.

  And she did.

  Ole insisted upon cleaning his stall. He thought Winona was pretty little to clean stalls. Besides, her mother didn’t want her to do it. But Winona learned how to feed Jingle; she learned how to give him his oats and hay…and a little bran mash now and then.

  She learned that his drinking water should be fresh but never cold and that she shouldn’t feed or water him while he was hot. If he was warm when she brought him home, she unharnessed him and threw a blanket over him.

  She learned how to brush him and curry him.

  This wasn’t easy in the winter. Then Jingle had a very heavy coat. It was almost waterproof. In the spring his shaggy coat hung in untidy rags and tatters. He would rub himself on the ground to try to get rid of part of it. Ole clipped him then, while Winona watched. He trimmed Jingle’s white mane and tail.

  In the summer Jingle’s coat was shiny and handsome.

  Winona learned how to harness him to the little cart. She learned how to saddle him. Jingle didn’t like to be saddled.

  “He doesn’t like to be saddled whatsoever!” Winona would shout. For whenever she started to put on the saddle he would blow out like a balloon. Later, of course, the girth wouldn’t be tight enough.

  Ole suggested giving him an apple when she came out to saddle him.

  Jingle loved apples. In fact, as his late owner had said
, he loved to eat. He would nose into people’s pockets for sugar. He crunched on carrots with delight.

  He loved freshly cut grass. He loved clover. He liked to graze on the lower lawn and nibble. But once he ate some little evergreens Mr. Root had bought to plant along the alley. Once he ate some flowers from Mrs. Root’s garden. Once the baker’s boy left four loaves of bread on the back porch, and Jingle chewed into them all.

  He would go up to Selma’s kitchen door and whinny, and Selma would say, “You’re as bad as Toodles!” but she always found something for him to eat.

  Jingle liked to come into the house. If he found a door open he would walk right in and down the front hall. Winona’s mother didn’t like that. Winona had to train him not to do it.

  Toodles didn’t like it either.

  Toodles loved the pony cart, though. He was so fat that Winona had to lift him in and out, but he would ride contentedly for hours. He would sit beside her looking around at the streets, with his tail curled as tight as a doughnut.

  He never came to love Jingle as much as that kitten loved the pony named Traveler. Toodles wouldn’t have liked sleeping in the barn. He liked to sleep with Winona. And when winter came he liked to lie by the fire. But he did love riding in the pony cart.

  Sometimes Winona used to drive up to the high school to call for Bessie and Myra. She would wait for them out in front, sitting up straight, holding the whip in her hand. Of course, she never used it.

  Mrs. Root used to smile with pleasure when Jingle came trotting up the street with Winona driving her sisters home from school.

  Winona used to hitch up Jingle and drive downtown to see Joyce. It didn’t matter now that Joyce lived far away. Winona could go to see her just as well as not and take her riding in the pony cart.

  Winona took Lottie and Lettie riding. They went out to Page Park for a picnic.

  She took Scundar and Marium riding, and little Faddoul. Her mother never forgot how much they had helped her by bringing a cake to Winona’s birthday party.

  She took Dennie riding. She and Dennie would plan about her Dog and Pony Show. They would teach Toodles to do tricks, Dennie said.

  “And maybe Percy would ride standing up on Jingle’s back,” said Winona.

  “I’ll bet he could!” Dennie replied.

  Sometimes Percy and his father and Winona and her father went riding together. They liked to go early on a summer morning before it got hot.

  Betsy, Tacy, and Tib went riding in the pony cart, of course. But only once or twice. They got busy giving a show, or playing store, or having a club, or something. And of course they lived several blocks away. And Winona made friends with lots of other children, near at hand on School Street.

  For a long time Winona and Betsy and Tacy and Tib didn’t see each other except in school. Later on, though, they had lots of fun together.

  Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World

  Maud Hart Lovelace in her 1910 high school graduation photo

  Estate of Merian Kirchner

  MAUD HART LOVELACE was born in 1892 in Mankato, Minnesota. She always believed she was born to be a writer. From the time she could hold a pencil, she was writing diaries, poems, plays, and stories. When Maud was ten, her father had a booklet of her poetry printed, and by age eighteen, she had sold her first short story, for $10, to the Los Angeles Times.

  The Hart family left Mankato shortly after Maud’s high school graduation in 1910. They settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. In 1914 she sailed for Europe and spent the months leading up to the outbreak of World War I in England. In 1917 she married Delos W. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter and popular writer of short stories. They had one daughter, Merian.

  In 1926 her first novel, The Black Angels, was published. Five more historical novels followed. Maud wrote two of them, One Stayed at Welcome and Gentlemen from England, in collaboration with her husband.

  With the publication of Betsy-Tacy in 1940, she began the successful series known as the Betsy-Tacy books, which were based on the lives of Maud (Betsy) and her best friend, Bick (Tacy). The stories of her childhood in Mankato (the fictionalized Deep Valley), small-town life, family traditions, and enduring friendships continue to capture the hearts of her fans.

  Maud died on March 11, 1980, in Claremont, California, and as she requested, she was returned to her beloved Mankato and is buried in Glenwood Cemetery. Her legacy lives on in the books she created and in her legion of fans, many of whom are members of the Betsy-Tacy Society, a national organization based in Mankato, Minnesota.

  —Based on Maud Hart Lovelace’s Deep Valley

  by Julie A. Schrader. Copyright © 2002

  by Julie A. Schrader. Published by

  Minnesota Heritage Publishing.

  The Betsy-Tacy Society

  P.O. Box 94

  Mankato, MN 56002-0094

  www.betsy-tacysociety.org

  The Maud Hart Lovelace Society

  277 Hamline Avenue South

  St. Paul, MN 55105

  www.maudhartlovelacesociety.com

  About Carney’s House Party

  Marion Willard at Carleton College in 1910

  Collection of Marion Willard, reprinted with permission of Louise King

  “I WOKE UP the other morning with an idea for a Deep Valley story which I thought I’d like to do, but before beginning it I want to consult you, for it’s a book about Carney.”

  Such is how Maud Hart Lovelace described her idea for a book about Carney Sibley to the real-life Carney, Marion Willard Everett. It was Carney’s popularity with readers that inspired Lovelace to expand her story after completing Betsy and Joe. As with the other Betsy-Tacy books, the fictional story is based on actual people, places, and events.

  “I want to ask your permission to write such a story because of course Carney is really you,” Lovelace wrote in that 1948 letter. “And although I will embroider the tale and put in all sorts of fictional incidents, the outline of the plot will be true to your story, as I know it. From reading the Betsy-Tacy books, you know pretty well how I work. I use the actual facts just as a spring board. Nevertheless Carney will be recognizably you, and I wouldn’t write the book unless you were willing.”

  Marion Willard’s house, with the sleeping porch on the back, in 2009

  Jennifer Hart

  Marion Everett was happy to oblige and shared detailed memories and information about her years at Vassar, her husband’s family, their courtship, and countless other details that make Carney’s House Party come to life.

  After graduating from Mankato High School in 1909, Marion “Marnie” Willard went to Carleton College in Minnesota for a year. She was unhappy there and transferred to Vassar in the fall of 1910. Vassar placed Marion in the freshman class, dubious perhaps about the educational standards at her small Midwestern college.

  The Daisy Chain at Vassar in 1912, the semester before the House Party takes place

  Collection of Marion Willard, reprinted with permission of Louise King

  Dorothy Brinsmade, “Isobel,” in her Class Day dress, 1914

  Collection of Marion Willard, reprinted with permission of Louise King

  Vassar College was less than fifty years old when Marion moved into her room in Old Main’s North Tower. The idea of higher education for women was still relatively new, and the stringent guidelines for students’ behavior were designed to keep students focused solely on their studies. The strict rules described in Carney’s House Party were indeed enforced, but Marion and her friends still managed to have lots of fun without male companionship. Sports, plays, step-singing, and evening “bats” filled their free time.

  In Carney’s House Party, Carney’s roommate, Isobel Porteous, is a glamorous, slightly devious beauty from the East who wangles an invitation to Deep Valley. Marion’s roommate, Dorothy Brinsmade, was very beautiful and popular, but she lacked the guile of her fictional counterpart. “Dot” was a star tennis player and all-around athlete. Wherea
s Isobel is engaged to Howard Sedgwick, a Harvard man with a future in the Minnesota milling industry, Dot’s husband was a Princeton-educated doctor. Dot met Arthur Jackson at their Connecticut tennis club, the Washington Club, where both were frequent champions. In 1914—the year Dot graduated from Vassar—they were the mixed-doubles champions, thereby sealing their fate.

  Marion rowing in 1914, the year of her graduation from Vassar

  Collection of Marion Willard, reprinted with permission of Louise King

  Marion in her Class Day photo carrying the roses that Tom Fox sent to her

  Collection of Marion Willard, reprinted with permission of Louise King

  Rupe Andews (Larry Humphreys) in his high school track team photo

  Collection of Marion Willard, reprinted with permission of Louise King

  Marion had a talent for making and keeping friends. Her children recall her saying that one of the reasons for her popularity at Vassar was that she never tried to steal anybody’s beau. Some of Marion’s closest friends—Adeline deSale, Annie Green, and Marguerite Butler—appear as Win, Winkie, and Peg. They remained close friends throughout adulthood, writing, visiting, and even vacationing together.

  Other Vassar characters are also based on Marion’s time there. Her favorite teachers became Carney’s favorite teachers: Miss Chittenden for piano and Miss Salmon for history. Marion even kept her doll, Suzanne, at French Professor Bracq’s house in the summers. Mrs. Bracq was a hometown friend of her mother’s, and the Bracqs’ daughter, Florence, was a friend and classmate.

  Throughout her college years, Marion corresponded weekly with Rupe Andrews (Larry Humphreys) at Stanford, just as Carney does. And, like Carney, Marion was piqued by a letter Maud Hart sent from California, where she was visiting. Marion wrote her mother: