Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (2 page)

B
ETSY
R
AY SAT IN
a rowboat which was anchored in Babcock's Bay, two watery miles opposite Murmuring Lake Inn, where the Ray family had been spending the summer. The oars were folded across the boat and on the seat beside her lay a fat notebook which she used as a journal and several sharply pointed pencils. She sat with her arms bound about her knees,
staring at a gauzy-winged dragon fly which had come to rest on the prow of the boat. Her expression was serious, not to say grim. She was taking stock.

Betsy was fond of this bay. It was strewn thickly with water lilies. Their flat green pads and creamy, richly scented blossoms floated on the water all around her. The shore was lined with trees—willows, cottonwoods, box elders. In other parts of the lake rows of summer cottages or low-lying farms came to the water's edge. This cove was remote; moored here, you might have thought that you were in a wilderness except for the fact that a green wooded point, jutting into the lake to the east, showed the rooftop of the Inn.

When Betsy wished to achieve the illusion of a wilderness she did not look in that direction.

Murmuring Lake Inn was a highly social place. Crowds of young people followed a careless routine—walks, boat rides, and leisurely games of croquet; bathing every afternoon at four. Mothers rocked, read and embroidered on the shady porches and vacationing fathers fished. Mr. Ray drove out from his shoe store in nearby Deep Valley every night, and in the evening there were launch rides and informal hops in the big parlor.

Betsy had had a gay summer. She was sorry it was ending tomorrow. She wondered now, staring at the
dragon fly, and beyond him across the glassy lake, whether it had been too gay, but decided that it hadn't been.

“It's been wonderful,” she thought. “It's just the sort of summer you ought to have at sixteen.”

Betsy was sixteen and next month she would begin her third year of high school. She was exactly halfway through, which made this an excellent time for taking stock.

“I wish I was just beginning and had it all ahead of me,” she said with a long romantic sigh. But she said it because she thought it was the proper thing to say. She was really pleased to be an upper classman.

She had certainly had fun. She belonged to a flexible Crowd of a dozen or so boys and girls who stirred up fun as briskly as the cook at the Inn stirred up hot cakes for breakfast. She had really been too frivolous, Betsy decided. Yet the two years had had their perplexities, too, their worries, and even their heartaches.

She had had heartaches over boys, over wanting to be popular. The Ray house, with its three daughters, was always full of boys but boys liked Betsy usually in a friendly sort of way. She had longed to be a siren like her older sister, Julia.

In particular, during her freshman year, she had had a heartache over Tony. Although a classmate, he
was slightly older, more sophisticated than the rest. He had a bush of curly black hair, bold laughing eyes, a lazy drawling voice. Betsy had thought she was in love with him, but he had only liked her in a maddening, brotherly way. By the end of the year, however, her infatuation had ebbed away. She liked Tony still, almost better than any boy she knew, but now her feeling was as sisterly as his was brotherly.

“That's life for you,” Betsy said aloud, and appropriately, the dragon fly flew away.

In her freshman year, too, she had had a heartache over losing the Essay Contest. Every year the two societies into which the school was divided competed for a cup in essay writing. Both years Betsy had been chosen to represent her class and both years she had lost to Joe Willard. He was an orphan who was working his way through school. Betsy liked him very much but she didn't like losing the Essay Contest.

She had minded it most the first year, for then she had felt guilty. She had not prepared for the Contest properly, she had not read the material she was supposed to have read. One of the great lessons she had learned in high school had come after that defeat. She had learned that her gift for writing was important to her and that she must never neglect it.

“I haven't really neglected it since,” she thought. “I've kept up my journal, I'm writing a novel, I
worked hard on my English assignments last year and I studied for the Essay Contest. I lost it again but this time it wasn't through any fault of mine.”

She had not done her best because, by an ironical chance, the Contest had coincided with a quarrel she had had with Phil Brandish.

Phil Brandish had been the great outstanding triumph of Betsy's sophomore year. She had tried that year to acquire a new personality, to act Dramatic and Mysterious, and in this role she had captured Phil Brandish's interest. But she had not enjoyed pretending all the time to be something she wasn't. She had decided before the season ended that she preferred, usually, just to be herself.

“I learned a lot from that affair, though,” she thought now, frowning. “I've had more poise with boys since then. Julia says I'm more charming. Of course, I didn't keep Phil, but then, I didn't want to.”

He was a sulky, aloof boy whose chief charm had been a red automobile. He and his twin, Phyllis, were grandchildren of the rich Home Brandish, who lived in a mansion on the west side of Deep Valley. Phyllis went to boarding school—Browner Seminary in Milwaukee. By a coincidence this school was attended by a great friend of Betsy's, Thelma Muller, irrevocably nicknamed Tib.

Betsy's oldest and closest friend was red-haired
Tacy Kelly. They had been loyal, loving chums since Betsy's fifth birthday party. And they had been friends with Tib almost as long as they had been friends with each other. Tib was tiny, yellow-headed, as daring as she was pretty. Betsy and Tacy loved to think up adventurous things to do, but it had usually been Tib who did them. She had lived in a large chocolate-colored house. She could dance. She had exquisite clothes. Even when she was their daily companion, Tib had been a figure of romance to Betsy and Tacy.

And when they were all in the eighth grade, she had moved away to Milwaukee.

Last year Betsy had gone to spend Christmas with her. The visit to the big foreign-flavored city, the glimpse into Tib's life, with its sheltered private school, its encircling
Grosspapas
and
Grossmamas
, uncles, aunts and cousins, had been an illuminating experience. It was while visiting there that Betsy had decided to become Dramatic and Mysterious. The visit had had a thrilling ending for on New Year's Eve Tib had told her that the family might move back to Deep Valley.

“I wonder whether she really will come some day,” Betsy thought. A breeze had sprung up, ruffling the water and bringing a faint, not unpleasantly fishy smell. The boat rocked dreamily.

Betsy roused herself, reached for her journal. Wetting
her pencil with the tip of her tongue she began to write.

“I'm going to make my junior year just perfect,” she wrote. “In the first place I'm going to stay around home a lot. Julia is going off to the University and Papa and Mamma and Margaret will all miss her terribly—almost as much as I will.”

It wasn't that Julia had ever helped much around the house, Betsy thought, lowering her pencil. Anna, the Rays' hired girl, was so efficient that there wasn't much need for any of the daughters to help. But Julia was so loving and vital. Her personality filled the house just as her music did. Julia planned to be an opera singer and was playing and singing all day long. She played popular music, too, for the Crowd to sing.

“I resolve next,” Betsy continued writing, “to learn to play the piano. The family has always wanted me to take piano lessons and I've always dodged them. But with Julia going I'll just have to learn. I can't imagine our house without music. I'll start taking lessons and practise an hour every day if it kills me. (It probably will.)

“In school,” she went on, “I want my year to be completely wonderful. I hope I'll be elected a class officer again. And I'd like to head up a committee for the junior-senior banquet. That's the most important
event of the junior year. Above all I want another try at the Essay Contest. I want that terribly. I think I'll have it, too. And I'm really going to study. I'm going to try to get good marks. I've never done my best.”

She read over what she had written, suffused by a warm virtuous glow.

“As for boys,” Betsy concluded, and her writing grew very firm and black, “
I think I'll go with Joe Willard!
”

She emphasized this declaration with an exclamation point and some heavy underlining, which was fitting. It was really the keystone of the structure she had built. Unconsciously, perhaps, she had figured out just what kind of a girl she thought Joe Willard would like, and that was the kind she was planning to be.

He didn't have money to spend on girls. He couldn't afford frivolity. When he started going around with a girl, she would surely be the kind Betsy had just described—one who was devoted to her home, who gave her spare time to some worth while thing like music, a leader in school.

But it would take planning to go with him, no matter how admirable she made herself. Unfortunately, Joe Willard didn't seem to want girls in his life. It was because of his shortage of money, Betsy felt sure.

“But I can make him see that money doesn't matter,”
she planned. “I'll just have to lure him up to the house.” Once a boy came to the merry, hospitable Ray house he almost always came again.

It was pleasant to sit in a gently rocking boat, listening to killdees on the shore, and think about going with Joe Willard. Betsy had liked him for several years now. She had met him the summer before she entered high school, in the little hamlet of Butternut Center where he was clerking in his uncle's store. She was on her way home, after visiting on a farm, and he had sold her some presents to take to her family, and Tacy.

During the two years of high school a series of small misunderstandings had kept them apart, but he liked her, Betsy felt sure, just as she liked him.

“Not in a silly way,” she thought. “We're just going to be wonderful, wonderful friends—for the present, that is,” she added hastily. She was quite aware that it would be easy to be romantic about Joe Willard. He was so extremely good looking with light hair cut in a pompadour, and blue eyes under thick golden brows. His red lower lip protruded recklessly. He was not downed by the fact that he had no home, no parents and very little money.

“He'll have more money this year,” Betsy thought. He had planned, she knew, to work with a threshing rig all summer, following the harvest northward. He
had expected to earn three dollars a day and save it for his expenses during the coming school year.

“I suppose he'll work after school at the creamery again. That won't matter. He'll be able to come to see me sometimes, and we'll talk by the hour. How he'll love Papa's Sunday night lunches, and the way Mamma plays for us to dance!”

She sat still for a moment smiling at the distant chimney of the Inn as though it were Joe Willard.

When she smiled, Betsy's face lighted with a charm of which she was quite unaware. She didn't like her square white teeth which were, in her own phrase “parted in the middle.” But her smile, quick and very bright, gave a hint of her response to life which was trusting and joyful.

She was a tall, slender girl with soft brown hair worn in a pompadour over a “jimmy.” It was wavy now, but only because it had been wound the night before on Magic Wavers. She had dark-lashed hazel eyes, and a pink and white skin. This she prized mightily. It was, she considered, her only claim to beauty, and Betsy worshipped beauty.

If a fairy godmother had ever appeared in her vicinity waving a wand and offering favors, Betsy would have cried out unhesitatingly for beauty. Her favorite daydream was of suddenly becoming beautiful with “bright hair streaming down” like the Lily
Maid of Astolot's, or dark raven tresses.

The members of her Crowd sometimes exchanged “trade lasts”—T.L.s, they were called. A “trade last” was a compliment, heard about another person, repeated to him after he had first repeated a compliment heard about you. Betsy was always being told for a T.L. that she had been described as interesting, sweet or charming. It infuriated her.

“I want to be pretty!” she stormed to Tacy.

“You're better than pretty,” Tacy answered sometimes and Betsy would respond inelegantly, “Pooh for that!”

After smiling for a long time at the chimney which was masquerading as Joe Willard, she slapped her notebook shut, put it back on the seat and took up the oars. Instinct told her it was almost four o'clock. Betsy often rowed over to Babcock's Bay in the early afternoon, which was “nap time” at the Inn. She liked to be alone sometimes to read, write on her novel, or just think. But she always got back for the bathing.

Slipping the oars into the water, she turned the boat about. She rowed unskillfully, her oars churned up showers of glittering drops, but she sent the heavy boat hurrying over the water.