Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (35 page)

“T
HAT
K
ERR!” SAID
M
R
. R
AY
, chuckling. “What do you suppose he's made me do now?”

The family, and Tacy, who had come to supper, looked up expectantly. For months they had been hearing anecdotes about Mr. Kerr, the super salesman. He had talked Mr. Ray into putting a line of knit goods into the shoe store. “Although I didn't
want it,” Mr. Ray always said, “any more than a cat wants nine tails.” He had achieved the virtual miracle of getting his knit goods into the shoe store's display window.

“What has he done now?” Betsy asked.

“Now, by George, he's wangled an invitation to come here for Sunday night lunch. He's coming next Sunday if that's all right with you, my dear,” Mr. Ray ended, addressing his wife.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Ray. “I'm dying to meet him. Is he married?”

“No. A bachelor.”

“How old is he? I ought to find him a girl.”

“Oh, twenty-seven or twenty-eight.”

Betsy groaned. “Heavens! How ancient! Why do your interesting friends all have to be gray-beards, Papa?”

Tacy looked up innocently. “Why,” she said, “I don't think twenty-seven is so old.”

Everybody laughed and Tacy blushed, as only she could blush, to the roots of her auburn hair.

“All right, honey,” Mrs. Ray said. “You can look after Mr. Kerr.”

“I'm not even coming for Sunday night lunch this week,” Tacy said hastily.

“Oh, yes, you are!” answered Betsy. “Don't you remember? We're invited to Mrs. Poppy's that afternoon,
you and Tib and Tony and Dennie and I. She has some plan she wants to talk over. Then we're all coming back here for lunch.”

On Sunday, Tib had a cold, but the others went down to the Melborn Hotel, and Mrs. Poppy's plan proved to be engrossing. Her brother, who was an actor, was coming to visit her and put on a home-talent play. Mrs. Poppy wanted Tacy and Tony both to sing solos, and Tib to do a dance. The prospect was so exciting that it drove gray-beards of twenty-seven completely out of mind.

When they neared the Ray house, a stream of music told them that Winona had arrived. The quartet burst in and found that Cab and Lloyd were there, too. Then they saw Mr. Kerr, who was sitting in the parlor with Mr. and Mrs. Ray, somewhat removed by age, as well as by the archway, from the noisy music-room group.

Mr. Kerr was a fine-looking young man, very well groomed. He was moderately tall, with broad shoulders and a frank open face, lively blue eyes, fresh color, strong white teeth. He looked very good-humored, but something in the set of his jaw showed the determination Mr. Ray had described. He looked predominately likable.

He and Mr. Ray had been talking business, Mrs. Ray said.

“We'll never get any sandwiches made at this rate,” she remarked briskly. “Tacy, Mr. Kerr is your responsibility now.”

Tacy blushed again as only Tacy could. Mr. Kerr surveyed her with his bright appraising eyes.

“And is Tacy my responsibility?”

“She certainly is.”

“I agree, if Tacy does,” he said.

Mr. Ray went out to make the sandwiches, and Tony strolled negligently after him. Tony, although he acted so lazy, knew how to be useful, mixing an egg with the coffee, filling the pot with cold water, and setting it to boil. Betsy put Anna's cocoanut cake on the dining room table, along with pickles and olives, cream and sugar, cups and saucers. Winona was playing the piano and the Crowd was singing, when they weren't joking, teasing, scuffling, and yelling. Mr. Kerr took everything in with a lively, observant twinkle.

Mr. Ray spoke in an undertone to Tony and Betsy.

“You're seeing,” he said, “a smart young man in action. That Kerr is in command of a difficult situation. He doesn't hold himself aloof from those kids, but he doesn't mix too much either. He mixes just enough to make everyone at ease, but not enough to lose his dignity.”

Betsy watched and saw that what her father had said was true. Mr. Kerr was completely poised with
the pretty girls, the clamoring boys. He didn't make himself one of them. They all called him Mr. Kerr. But he wasn't a wet blanket.

“Smart,” Mr. Ray said, as he applied a different sort of skill to buttering bread, slicing ham, adding mustard, salt, and pepper, and cutting the double sandwiches in two halves, slantwise, until a large platter was heaped.

Betsy noticed something else as the evening progressed. Mr. Kerr had been told to take charge of Tacy, and he was certainly doing it. Tacy was habitually shy, and sometimes in a crowd she went off by herself. Tonight, Mr. Kerr followed. Tacy was plied with sandwiches. Her coffee cup was never allowed to be empty. She had the choicest piece of cocoanut cake.

Tacy and Mr. Kerr ate supper together and he talked all the time. He was, Betsy observed, a great talker. Tacy didn't act shy. She was listening attentively, and now and then she laughed or asked a question.

“It's because he's so old,” Betsy thought. “She feels as though she were with her own father.”

When everyone was carrying out the dishes after supper, Betsy went up to Tacy.

“Do you like him?” she asked.

“Who? Harry? Yes, he's very nice.”

Harry! Betsy could hardly believe her ears. Harry!
Then Mr. Kerr
didn't
seem to Tacy like her father.

After a while, when the music gave way to general conversation, Mr. Kerr brought up the subject of cameras.

“Anybody interested in photography?” he asked. “I just bought a new Eastman.”

Lloyd had received an Eastman for Christmas, and he and Mr. Kerr plunged into a technical discussion. Betsy said she used a square box Brownie.

“I'm so dumb I can't take pictures with any other kind.”

“Why, you take good pictures, Betsy,” Tacy said.

Mr. Kerr turned away from Lloyd abruptly.

“I'll
bet
you take mighty good ones,” he said, smiling persuasively at Betsy. “Won't you show me some?”

Betsy brought out her bulging Kodak book, filled with pictures of the Rays, of the Crowd, of winter and summer excursions.

“Someone will have to explain this to me,” Mr. Kerr said, and presently he and Tacy were sitting on the couch while she told him who was who, laughing as she turned the pages.

“Betsy says this is me at my silliest,” Betsy heard her remark, and remembered the picnic up on the Big Hill when she had snapped Tacy acting like an Irish Colleen.

Mr. Kerr and Tacy looked at the Kodak book until the doorbell rang. One of Tacy's brothers had come to call for her.

That was the signal for everyone to go. There was a scramble for wraps and overshoes, a burst of good-nights, shouted plans to meet in school.

Mr. Kerr waited, leafing through the Kodak book until all the young people had gone. Then he closed the book and said he, too, must leave, and Mr. Ray gave him his overcoat. The young man shook hands heartily with Mrs. Ray and Betsy and said to Mr. Ray, “Would you show me which direction I start off in?”

When Mr. Ray accompanied him to the porch, Mrs. Ray turned to Betsy.

“What a delightful young man!”

“Isn't he!” said Betsy. She looked puzzled. “And wasn't he nice to Tacy?”

“They got along beautifully,” Mrs. Ray replied. “I was pleased because Tacy is usually so shy.”

“She wasn't shy with him,” Betsy said. She couldn't quite make it out.

Mr. Ray returned from the porch. He closed the door behind him slowly, and came into the parlor with a strange look on his face. He sat down, rubbing his hands over his forehead, and then put them firmly on his knees.

“Well, I don't know what to think! That Kerr just
said the most amazing thing.”

“What was it?” Mrs. Ray and Betsy cried together.

“First, Betsy, he apologized to you for having stolen one of your Kodak pictures. He said you're going to get a box of chocolates in return.”

Betsy ran to her Kodak book and riffled the pages quickly. She knew which snapshot would be missing.

“The Colleen from Hill Street!” she breathed.

That was, indeed, gone. Tacy, laughing, her braids loose, her hair blown into curls, was no longer in Betsy's Kodak book.

Mrs. Ray and Betsy stared at each other. Her mother, Betsy thought, looked actually pale.

“But that isn't all,” Mr. Ray went on. “In fact, it's only the beginning. Do you know what else he said?”

“Tell us, for heaven's sake!”

“He said,” answered Mr. Ray, “that Tacy was the girl he was going to marry. He said he didn't care how long he would have to wait. She was the girl he was going to marry.” After a pause in which no one seemed even to breathe, Mr. Ray added, “Tacy had better watch out. If Harry Kerr can talk me into putting in a line of knit goods, he can talk her into marrying him.”

“Well!” said Mrs. Ray, color coming back into her cheeks, and her eyes beginning to sparkle. “I never heard the like.”

Betsy was stunned. She was dazed and confounded. Marriage was something infinitely remote. It had never occurred to her that it could touch her circle yet. And to touch, of all people, Tacy!

She could hardly wait to tell Tacy, who would be thrilled. Or would she? You never could tell about Tacy. But she would think it was ridiculous, of course. She would laugh long and heartily and remind Betsy of how they were going to see Paris and New York and London and the Taj Mahal by moonlight.

Somehow, Betsy was anxious to hear that laughter. It was thrilling, but it was painful, too, to have Mr. Kerr in love with Tacy. She went up to bed still dazed, and early the next morning telephoned Tacy that she would walk to meet her.

“And see that you're alone! Don't be with Alice, or Tib, or anyone!”

Betsy hurried through breakfast and hurried into her winter coat, tarn, and furs. She ran out of the house, in the direction opposite the school house, down the hill to the corner where a watering trough, now frozen and rimmed with icicles, marked the junction with Cemetery Road.

When she saw Tacy coming, she ran to meet her.

“Stand still! This can't be told walking.”

She repeated dramatically what her father had said
when he came in from the porch the night before.

“He said he was going to marry you! TO
MARRY
YOU !” Betsy repeated.

Of course, Tacy blushed. Betsy had expected that, but she hadn't expected Tacy's eyes to light with such a mischievous glimmer. Betsy had expected her to be flabbergasted, dumbfounded, but she didn't seem very surprised.

When she spoke, it was in the Irish brogue she affected when she felt especially merry.

“Well, and sure now, did he?” she said, hooking her arm into Betsy's. The next moment she asked Betsy about a physics formula. Then she brought up the subject of the home-talent play.

Betsy's head was spinning. It felt actually light. Childhood seemed to be receding like a rapidly moving railway train.

“And Tib and I thought she was going to be an old maid…if we didn't help her!” Betsy marveled.

T
HERE WAS NO DENYING
that Mr. Kerr's astounding announcement and Tacy's calm reaction to it made Betsy feel blue. She was proud of Tacy's conquest; she was stirred by it. But it made her feel lonely, too.

It was strange to be excluded from something which concerned Tacy. She and Tacy had always shared everything. Tacy had shared Betsy's love affairs.
She had rejoiced with her when things went well and grieved when they went badly. Betsy would gladly have rejoiced with Tacy now, but Tacy didn't need her. She wasn't half so excited about Mr. Kerr as everyone else was. She liked him, she said; and her aura of serene radiance showed that she did. But she had no confidences to impart.

It was fortunate for Betsy that the new home-talent play came along just then. Not only did she feel blue, but school had reached its February dullness. Winter had reached its February dreariness. She needed the tinsel world of make-believe.

All Deep Valley needed it. Tired of snow and more snow, of deceptively fair days followed by rain that turned to snow and sometimes blizzards, of shoveling walks and shoveling coal, Deep Valley yielded itself joyously to
Up and Down Broadway
.

That was the name of Mr. Maxwell's production.

“I'm calling it
Up and Down Broadway
because I'm going to take a cast of amateurs and whip up a revue fit for Broadway,” he told Betsy. Broadway was Mr. Maxwell's Paradise; he talked about it all the time.

He almost overflowed Mrs. Poppy's doll-like apartment, for he was fat, like his sister. Like his sister, too, he was a figure of elegance. Blond, with side whiskers, he wore a plaid vest, a satin tie with a diamond stickpin in it, a long coat, and striped trousers.

He wanted Betsy to choose a chorus from among the high school girls.
Up and Down Broadway
wasn't just a high school affair. It was a Deep Valley affair, a benefit for the Elks Lodge. Attractive young matrons, business men with a flair for theatricals, the town's child wonders were all taking part. Most of the singers were from Mrs. Poppy's class.

“
How
I wish Julia were here!” she kept interjecting now.

Choosing the chorus, Mr. Maxwell explained to Betsy earnestly, was important.

“On Broadway,” he said, fixing her with a gleaming eye, “the chorus is more important than the principals. You have to have cute snappy broilers, Georgie Cohan always says. Can you find me thirty cute, snappy girls in Deep Valley High School, Miss Ray? They must be able to sing and dance, of course.”

“Certainly,” said Betsy. She felt that the honor of Deep Valley was at stake.

Fortunately, the high school had plenty of pulchritude. The girls in the Crowd were secured first; then the junior, sophomore, and freshman classes were searched for talent. When the thirty assembled, glowing and smiling, on the bare dusty stage of the Opera House, Mr. Maxwell surveyed them with satisfaction and said that they would be a credit to Broadway.

His pleasure in them was short-lived. His good humor, they were to find, was spasmodic. When coats were doffed and the girls began singing timidly, dancing self-consciously in response to his suggestions, Mr. Maxwell changed completely. His rosy face grew purple. He shrieked and pounded the piano. He told them they were nitwits and dunces, clodhoppers, gawky as a bunch of milkmaids. He made Irma cry. Some of the girls told Betsy that they wouldn't be in
Up and Down Broadway
, after all.

But while they were huffily putting on their wraps, Mr. Maxwell changed again. He moved about jovially, making jokes, beaming. He told them that they mustn't mind him. That was the way Broadway producers always yelled at the broilers. He said they were so cute that he wished Flo Ziegfeld could see them.

After a while, the girls grew accustomed to his rapid changes of mood. It was nervous work, though, singing and dancing to please Mr. Maxwell.

Usually, after they had rehearsed, the broilers sat on boxes or folding chairs around the stage to watch the principals perform…especially those from the high school.

Tib's Dutch Girl number was good from the start. She could not sing, but she could talk a song with airy coquetry, and her dancing was light, feathery,
and bewitching. Mr. Maxwell wasn't cross with her long, for she was always able to do exactly what she was told. He would stand at the edge of the stage to watch her practise and say to Mrs. Poppy, “That girl has talent. Broadway needs that girl.”

When Tacy first heard Mr. Maxwell rave and rant, she withdrew hastily from her scheduled solo. But Mr. Maxwell and Mrs. Poppy pleaded with her to reconsider, and she did. After that, Mr. Maxwell was gentle with Tacy.

She was to sing that all alone on the stage, looking at an artificial moon.

Dennie was to be a ballet dancer. Tony was singing an old Joe Howard success:

He had sung it for years at the Ray piano; it was a favorite song of Mr. Ray's, and Mrs. Poppy had
transposed the music to suit Tony's deep bass voice. Betsy liked to hear him rehearse it, but Tony almost drove Mr. Maxwell to distraction. Mr. Maxwell liked him, of course. Everyone liked Tony. But he was late at rehearsals. He didn't learn his lines. He was always clowning.

At the back of the stage among dusty piles of scenery, Tony would take off Lillian Russell, or he would borrow spectacles to imitate the church choir tenor, whose solo was one of the classical highlights of the show. When there was music, he and Betsy waltzed in the wings. Sometimes they wandered through the empty Opera House, which always reminded Betsy of Uncle Keith.

When she came there to plays, it seemed elegant beyond description—the glittering crystal chandelier, seats upholstered in red velvet, boxes hung with red velvet draperies tied back with golden cords. Now it was dark and chilly and the curtain (which showed a sedan chair and ladies in hoop skirts) was half way up, revealing the barnlike stage. But Betsy was still enchanted by it.

“I even like the smell,” she said to Tony, sniffing.

“I feel at home here myself,” he replied thoughtfully, gazing around.

Rehearsals were glamorous. They made many new matches—and revived some old ones. Take Dennie
and Tib! Maddox was the star of the basketball team now, but such was the influence of Thespis that Dennie was crowding Maddox out of Tib's life.

All the girls were thinking that perhaps they should go on the stage, that their talents were better suited to Broadway than to Deep Valley High School.

Of course, everyone was getting behind in school, and Betsy was dimly worried because she wanted to make the Honor Roll. She knew that she ought to be practising, too, “A Night in Venice” for Miss Cobb's recital. And Joe grew stiffer and stiffer in the classroom, and she heard that he had bought two tickets for the show. But none of this seemed as real as it would after
Up and Down Broadway
was over. What was real now was the big, bare Opera House filled with staccato excitement.

The dress rehearsal was terrible. Mr. Maxwell shouted at the top of his voice. The girls wept and the boys stormed, but nobody could possibly have been persuaded to leave.

On the day of the performance, it snowed, as heavily, as persistently, as though there hadn't been a flake all winter. But nobody minded. The house had been sold out for weeks, from the first row in the parquet all the way to the rafters.

After Betsy was dressed for the opening number in her glow worm costume, she visited Tacy and Tib in
their dressing room. Tib was cool and poised, arranging her yellow curls under a winged cap. Tacy was so pale that the paint on her cheeks looked grotesque, and her hands were as cold as ice.

Betsy kissed her on the top of her head.

“Cheer up!” she said. “It will all be the same a hundred years from now.”

But Tacy was too wretched to joke. She was stiff with wretchedness.

On the stairs which lead up to the stage, Betsy met Tony. He was wearing a plain dark suit, but his face was painted, and charcoal made his black eyes look even wickeder than usual.

“Come on!” he said, catching her hand. “Let's take a look at the audience.”

Sets were being run into place on the stage, and they made their way cautiously to the curtain, found two peep holes, and looked out.

The audience was streaming in. Betsy saw her father and mother and Margaret. Where the dress circle met the parquet, in the very center of the house, were two wide, well-padded seats. These had been built especially for the excessively stout Mr. and Mrs. Poppy, who were seated in them now, Mr. Poppy in a dress suit, Mrs. Poppy in a low-cut gown, with plumes in her yellow hair.

Joe was coming in with a girl Betsy didn't know.
She was very, very pretty. They talked all the way down the aisle, and she kept turning around to smile into his face while he was helping her off with her coat and laying it over the chair.

Betsy felt that pressure about her heart. She turned and smiled meaningfully into Tony's black-rimmed eyes. This was unfair to Tony, and she knew it, but she didn't seem to care.

“Take a look at Margaret,” she said. “She looks so serious. I know she's praying for you.”

“You praying for me, too, Ray of Sunshine?”

“You don't need anybody's prayers. You're wonderful.”

“Say that again.”

But the orchestra was tuning up now, and Mr. Maxwell, suave and smiling in a dress suit, called everyone out on the stage. He told them he knew the performance was going to be fine, because it was good luck to have a dress rehearsal go badly.

“On Broadway we're scared to death if the dress rehearsal goes well. I've known Belasco to call off a performance just because the dress rehearsal clicked.”

Betsy thought this sounded a little excessive, but she had to admit that in spite of last night's mistakes and wearisome confusion,
Up and Down Broadway
went off to perfection.

The high school chorus opened the show:

The stage was dark at first, and the girls carried phosphorescent wands. Then the lights went on, and the girls in their black and orange costumes were themselves the glow worms. The audience stamped and whistled. It seemed that Deep Valley thought broilers important, just as Broadway did.

The leading lights of the town did their numbers, and the high school celebrities did theirs. Dennie, with his cherubic face, made a fetching ballet dancer. He wore a short-skirted tulle dress, a feather headdress, ropes of pearls, earrings, and long white gloves with bracelets and rings outside. A big spangly ornament on one black-stockinged leg almost brought the house down.

Tacy came out on the stage like a sleep-walker. Her dress was of old blue Liberty silk, covered with gauze of changing coppery colors. Mr. Maxwell had wanted her to wear a picture hat, but Tacy had unexpectedly objected. People didn't go out singing to the moon in picture hats, she said. She hadn't even dressed her hair in the fashionable puffs, but wore her familiar coronet braids. And although she looked beautiful, she looked just like Tacy when the curtain rose and the spotlight found her gazing at a tinsel moon.

The house was very quiet listening to Tacy's harp-like voice. At the end there was a burst of applause, and after Tacy reached the wings where Betsy and Tib were listening tensely, there was another burst so loud that she had to go back. She was slow returning this time.

“What can it be?” asked Betsy, peeking.

“Flowers, probably,” said Tib.

Every girl performer received a bouquet. Their families sent them if no one else did. But Tacy came into the wings with a bouquet no father would have sent. It was the biggest bouquet anyone had received that evening. Her arms could hardly hold the dozens of long-stemmed yellow roses.

Betsy and Tib spoke together, the same words, “Mr. Kerr?”

Tacy nodded happily. “He came all the way from St. Paul just to see the show.”

The most professional number on the program was undoubtedly the Dutch Girl's song and dance. The quaint costume with its many petticoats emphasized Tib's tiny waist, and she didn't forget one of the winning smiles or dainty gestures Mr. Maxwell had
taught her. The chorus came out and danced behind her for many, many encores, and she had flowers galore.

Yet Tib wasn't the hit of the show. To everyone's surprise, especially Mr. Maxwell's, that honor went to Tony.

When the music for his song began, he strolled carelessly out on the stage and straddled a chair. He got out his pipe and filled it, tamping down the tobacco as thoughtfully as though he were sitting in the Rays' parlor, with all the time in the world. The orchestra kept on playing. Then, holding the pipe in his hand, his arms folded on top of the chair, he began to sing:

His lazy charm, his rich deep voice won the audience completely. He was called before the curtain again and again. He sauntered out, at ease and smiling, saluted nonchalantly, retreated. He couldn't sing an encore, for he had none prepared. At last Mr. Maxwell signified to the orchestra that Tony could repeat the chorus, and he did.