Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (29 page)

She felt happy again, but when she thought of going to the senior dance with Tony and of Joe taking some other girl, she didn't feel quite so happy as she had felt before.

She remembered a poem from Junior English about the little rift within the lute.

T
HE DANCE, HOWEVER
, was wonderful. Even if she had gone with Joe, Betsy thought, it could hardly have been nicer. The great Maddox invited Tib, to the dismay of Lloyd and Dennie, her last year's cavaliers. Cab, attending by special request of the Class of 1910, invited Tacy to go with him.

Joe, after all, went stag.

“Don't think I'm breaking my promise,” he said to
Betsy. “I'm just so darn busy that it doesn't seem worth while asking someone I don't give a…Never mind! Never mind! I'll always ask someone else when you go with someone else if you'll let me off this time.”

Gladly, Betsy let him off.

It was a wonderful party. Tib and Tacy came to dress at the Ray house, lugging satchels, for they planned to sleep that night in Julia's bed. They laced one another's corsets, tied the fashionable bands around one another's heads. Tib, of course, made Betsy's puffs.

In their pastel-tinted dresses, cut princesse, flaring at the ankles to reveal colored stockings, they looked as modish, Mrs. Ray said, as girls in a fashion magazine.

“You look as pretty as posies,” Mr. Ray declared.

“You look puny,” cried Anna, coming into the parlor where they were revolving for family inspection. Puny was Anna's word for handsome. She turned to Mrs. Ray. “Don't it make your heart ache, lovey, to think how they're growing up? They'll be leaving us soon.”

“Oh, we'll have Margaret,” said Mr. Ray. “She'll be starting off to dances.”

Margaret was watching with sparkling eyes. She had sat in Betsy's room, quiet as the cat in her arms,
all the while they were dressing. She liked it that Betsy was going with Tony, and when Tony came in, his curly black crest brushed to a glitter, a new necktie, an immaculate shirt, his suit pressed to knife-edge sharpness, Margaret smiled delightedly.

Betsy was pleased and a little touched by Tony's splendor.

“He's proud to be going out with me,” she thought. “It's very good for him.”

The resplendent Maddox arrived with Cab. Tib's light little laugh sounded continuously as the boys helped the girls into their coats and slung the ties of slipper bags over their arms. Tib had not lost her heart. She had a very cool, dependable heart. But she was elated to be escorted by the sensation of the football season. She slipped her hand possessively into his arm and tripped proudly beside him through the pungent autumn evening.

At Schiller Hall, they climbed three flights of stairs, and the girls hung their wraps in the dressing room, changed into slippers, powdered their noses, and went out into the ballroom. Mamie Dodd, who played the piano, tantalized them with chords and snatches of music while programs were being filled. Then she swung zestfully into “I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now” and couples whirled out over the shining floor.

Waiting for Tony to find her, Betsy watched Tib and Maddox. His dark curls and tall figure, Tib's delicate blondness, made an arresting contrast. Many people were watching them, including the chaperones.

“Aren't they sweet!” Betsy heard Miss Clarke exclaim to Mr. Stewart, who coached the football team and was familiarly known as Stewie.

“Handsome is as handsome does,” said Stewie.

“He ought not to play football,” Miss Clarke replied indignantly. “Think of that classic nose being broken!”

“He took pretty good care of that classic nose at the Red Feather game,” Stewie replied.

Betsy was surprised by that remark. Hadn't Maddox made the only touchdown against Red Feather? But she forgot it as Tony came up. She had always loved dancing with Tony. He was not only light and rhythmic, but gaily inventive.

“You could dance on the stage,” Betsy told him as they wove new patterns of movement to match the lilting tune.

Betsy saw Joe watching them and smiled a little anxiously. He smiled reassuringly back.

Joe had approached her as soon as she entered and asked for two dances, all it was proper to ask from another boy's girl. Except for those dances, a waltz and a two-step, he was scrupulously careful to leave her and Tony alone.

Through the whole evening, he didn't dance more than once with anyone but Betsy. He didn't stay with one girl a minute longer than he stayed with any other girl, and he ate supper with Miss Bangeter, Miss Clarke, and Stewie, seeming to enjoy their august company. In fact, he was a model, a perfect example of how the young man turned down by his girl ought to behave…if he wanted her to have a wonderful time.

Tony had somehow got wind of the fact that Joe had asked Betsy to the party. He was beginning to be aware of Joe's feeling for Betsy, but he had no inkling of Betsy's feeling for Joe. He took the matter lightly, being well accustomed to rivals at the Ray house. He liked Joe and beckoned him good-naturedly to their circle at supper, but Joe couldn't be won away from the faculty.

Tacy and Tib praised both boys' attitudes as they talked the party over in Betsy's room. Betsy was winding her hair on Magic Wavers and Tib was rubbing cream into her satiny face while Tacy watched benevolently, doing nothing to make herself more beautiful. Her thick auburn braids hung over her shoulders down the blue-striped flannel nightgown.

“Joe and Tony were absolutely noble. That's what they were,” said Tib.

“They were perfect Galahads,” said Tacy.

“I have a good effect on people. Me and the
Blessed Damozel,” said Betsy, fastening the last Waver and beginning on the cream. She applied it with strokes suggested in the women's magazines, upward and outward, smoothing out wrinkles which had not yet appeared, and giving brisk pats with the back of her hand underneath her chin.

“What are you doing that for?” Tacy wanted to know.

“It takes off double chins.”

“But you haven't got a double chin. You're as thin as a rail.”

“Well, I don't want to get one,” said Betsy, and continued to slap vigorously.

“She wouldn't have two boys quarreling about her if she had a double chin,” said Tib, beating a tattoo on her own flawless underjaw.

“They didn't quarrel. They were models. That's what we were saying,” said Tacy. “I heard lots of compliments about you and Ralph Maddox, too, Tib.”

“So did I,” said Betsy. “Everyone was watching you.”

“We did look nice,” Tib acknowledged. “He's certainly handsome. But I'm more interested in his football.”

Maddox's honors in that sphere didn't pile up so rapidly as Tib would have wished. Football games dotted the calendar, but Deep Valley just couldn't
seem to win. The team was admittedly weak, and at first nobody blamed Maddox. But soon disappointment in him began to find expression.

He played right half. He was a magnificent broken field runner and in every game made at least one spectacular touchdown. He was beautiful cutting trickily down field, dodging this tackle, stiff-arming that. But the tricky runs never added up to enough first downs to beat the enemy, and the spectacular touchdowns never added up to enough points to win the game.

And then suddenly, all in a day, the school was talking about the amazing fact that Maddox never got banged up. Dave's nose was knocked south-by-west, Stan lost a tooth, and Dennie always had one black eye when he hadn't two. But Maddox came out of every battle his handsome, perfect self.

Perhaps Stewie had started the talk with that remark which others besides Betsy had overheard. “He took pretty good care of that classic nose at the Red Feather game.”

Stewie had followed this up with another cryptic comment to Maddox himself one afternoon during football practice.

“The great mystery, Maddox,” he had said, “is that a marvelous runner like you ever is tackled.” Maddox had colored in gratification, but he colored
deeper with some other emotion when Stewie said, “Mystery is right! Because you have a genius for ending every run out of bounds.”

He had said in almost so many words that Maddox shied away from the bruising body contacts which the other men in the backfield accepted with a grin, sometimes twisted with pain, but a grin nevertheless.

Betsy talked the scandal over with Joe.

“Don't make any mistake,” Joe cautioned her. “Maddox isn't yellow. But he just plain doesn't want to spoil that classic phiz. So he doesn't like to hit that line. He doesn't like to block. And he doesn't like to tackle. Above all, of course, he doesn't like to be tackled. My guess is that at St. John his team didn't have much competition and he could win with tricky, fast running and never risk his beauty.”

“We simply can't go on losing games like this.”

“No, we can't.” Joe's eyes darkened, and Betsy knew he longed to be on the team. Over the autumn she had realized more and more plainly what it had meant to him not to play football.

Since he couldn't play, he was throwing his heart into his newspaper stories. If rhetoric had been able to win, Deep Valley would have had a championship team. But none of Joe's fighting descriptions stirred Maddox. As October progressed, Deep Valley continued to lose.

When the maples rose like flames along High Street and the hills were russet and gold, the Rays drove out to Murmuring Lake. They went every year at this season to celebrate Mr. and Mrs. Ray's wedding anniversary. It was a little hard to make the familiar excursion with Julia so far away. But they went, and when they had started they enjoyed it heartily.

Betsy told Joe all about it that evening after their return. They were making fudge, or rather, Joe was making it. He scorned Betsy's cooking and fancied his own, so he took charge of the bubbling pan while Betsy watched from the kitchen table.

Joe smiled as he stirred.

“You go every year? Your father and mother must be glad they got married.”

“They certainly are,” Betsy said. “They always show us where they got engaged. Papa was camping with some other young men on the lake shore and he came up to the house to borrow a cup of salt. Mamma says he didn't need the salt at all. Papa says they needed it desperately. Anyhow, they sat down under an oak tree in the moonlight and got engaged. They always show us the tree.”

“Did he get the salt?”

“He went off and forgot it.”

“What else do they show you?” asked Joe.

“They show us the bay window where they were
married,” Betsy answered dreamily. “It looks down a long avenue of evergreens to the big front gate. Mamma's room was just above it and she says that on her wedding day she sat in an upper window and looked down that avenue, waiting for Papa to come. She was wearing a tea gown, she says. At last she saw a pair of dappled gray horses and a surrey with Papa driving. He had hired a livery rig, a very stylish one.”

“He wasn't so rich as your mother's stepfather,” Joe suggested, “if he had to hire a livery rig.”

“He certainly wasn't,” Betsy replied. “He came from an Iowa farm, one of eleven children, and his mother died when he was a boy. She asked him to look out for his sisters and he did.

“He came up to Deep Valley to work and sent money home so his sisters could go to school. Papa wanted to be a lawyer. He would have made a good one, too, but he couldn't afford to go to college himself.”

Joe listened thoughtfully, still stirring.

“By and by, though,” Betsy said, “his sisters all got educated, and he started his shoe store, and he met this red-haired Julia Warrington, and they fell in love and got married.”

“Did your grandfather object?” Joe asked.

Betsy laughed out loud. “Heavens, no!” she said. “How could anyone object to Papa? Grandpa Newton
knew that character is more important than money.”

“Character's all we've ever had in our family,” Joe replied.

It occurred to Betsy that there was a similarity between her father and Joe Willard. Both of them had been forced to be independent when they were very young, and it had given them strength beyond their youth. Both of them, without money, had made themselves persons of quality. Bob Ray had married Julia Warrington. And any girl in school would have been proud to go with Joe Willard. The rich and fashionable Phyllis Brandish had considered him a catch.

“Tell me about your father and mother, Joe,” Betsy said.

But again she found herself facing the stone wall of his reticence. He smiled off her request.

“I've read about families like yours,” he remarked. “I've learned about all sorts of people from books. Did I ever tell you about the time I resolved to read every book in the library?”

“No. Do,” Betsy replied.

She knew that during the years he had been going to high school he had rented a room from a widow in the north end of town. Mrs. Blair had been kind to him, but his real home had been the library. Miss Sparrow, the librarian, was one of his closest friends. He had learned about the world, he had molded his
ideals, he had even acquired his manners from the dozens and hundreds of books, books without number, he had read day in and day out, week in and week out, in the Deep Valley Library.

“I was about fourteen,” he said, dropping a spoonful of fudge into cold water. “I started with the A's, progressed to the B's, and read straight along the shelves. I bogged down about the time I reached the M's.”

“Mrs. Muhlbach was too much for you,” Betsy joked.

“Not a bit of it. I liked the old girl. It was George Barr McCutcheon who stopped me.”

The fudge had formed a ball in the cold water, so Joe poured it into a pan which Betsy had already buttered. They left it on the back porch and went into the dining room and sat down before the fire.

“While we're waiting for that fudge to harden,” said Joe, “tell me some more about your family.” He liked to hear about the traditions, the holidays, the family jokes, and the simple everyday doings of the Rays.

There were evenings by the fire with Joe and evenings by the piano with Tony. It wasn't bad, Betsy decided, having two boys crazy about you. She wondered why the idea had distressed her so much at first.