Contents
1 Anybody Can Do Anything Especially Betty
2 What’s a White Russian Got?
3 Mining is Easy
4 So is Lumber
5 Nobody’s Too Dull or Too Short for My Sister
6 I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me
7 Aren’t We Going to Recognise Genius
8 You Name It, Betty Can Do It
9 All the World’s a Stage and By God Everybody in this Family is Going to the Foreign Movies and Like Bach
10 Night School
11 Bills! Bills! Bills!
12 Bundles for Bards
13 Now Listen Mother, It’s only a Fifteen Minute a Day Programme
14 Let Nothing You Dismay
15 Just Like Flying
16 Hand Me That Straightjacket—Joe, the Government
17 Anybody Can Write Books
Also by Betty MacDonald
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
‘Anybody Can Do Anything Especially Betty’
THE BEST THING about the depression was the way it reunited our family and gave my sister Mary a real opportunity to prove that anybody can do anything, especially Betty.
Mary’s belief that accomplishment is merely a matter of application, was inherited from both Mother and Daddy. Mother, who has become, through the years and her own efforts, a clever artist, inspired cook, excellent gardener, qualified midwife, skilful seamstress, reliable encyclopaedia of general information, book-a-day reader, good practical nurse, dependable veterinary, tireless listener, fine equestrienne, strong swimmer, adequate carpenter, experienced farmer, competent dog trainer and splendid stone mason, was working for a dress designer in Boston when she met my father, an ambitious young mining engineer who, though rowing in the crew, working all night in the Observatory and tutoring rich boys during the day, graduated from Harvard with honours in three years. The union of these two spirited people produced five children, four girls and one boy, all born in different parts of the United States, all tall and redheaded except my sister Dede, who is small and hardheaded.
Mary, the oldest of the children was born in Butte, Montana, and indicated at a very early age that she had lots of ideas and tremendous enthusiasm, especially for her own ideas. I, Betty the next child, emerged in Boulder, Colorado, and from the very first leaned toward Mary’s ideas like a divining rod toward water.
When I was but a few months old, Gammy, my father’s mother who always lived with us, sent Mary to the kitchen to ask the cook for a drink of water for me. Mary returned in a matter of seconds with the bathroom glass half-filled with water. Gammy, suspicious, asked Mary where she had got the water. Mary said, “Out of the toilet.” Gammy said, “Mary Bard, you’re a naughty little girl.” Mary pointed at me smiling and reaching for the cup and said, “No, I’m not, Gammy. See, she wants it. We always give it to her.”
The rest of the family proved to be a little firmer textured, not so eager to be Mary’s guinea pigs, so she has always generously allowed them to choose between their own little old wizened-up ideas and the great big juicy ripe tempting ones she offered.
My first memories of being the Trilby for Mary’s Svengali go back to that winter in Butte, Montana, when each morning Mary marched importantly off to the second grade at McKinley School, while my brother Cleve and I, who could already read and write, shuffled despondently off to Miss Crispin’s kindergarten, a gloomy institution where all the crayons were broken and had the peelings off.
The contrast between Miss Crispin’s and real school, in fact between Miss Crispin’s and anything but a mortuary, was heart-breakingly obvious even to four and five year olds, but the contrast between Miss Crispin’s and the remarkable school that Mary attended and described so vividly to us, was unbearable.
Nothing ever happened at Miss Crispin’s except that some days it was gloomier and darker than on others, and we had to bend so close to our colouring work to tell blue from purple or brown from black that our noses ran on the pictures; some days Miss Crispin, who was very nervous, yelled at us to be quiet, got purple blotches and pulled and kneaded the skin on her neck like dough; and on Fridays to the halting accompaniment of her sight-reading at the piano, we skipped around the room and sang.
Miss Crispin taught us all the verses of Dixie, Swanee River, My Country, ’Tis of Thee and Old Black Joe, and for the bottom rung on the ladder to enjoyment, I nominate skipping around the room dodging little kindergarten chairs and singing Old Black Joe.
Compare this then to the big brick school that Mary attended where everyday occurrences (according to Mary and Joe Doner, a boy at school called on so often to prove incredible stories that ‘If you don’t believe me, just ask Joe Doner’ has become a family tag for all obvious untruths), were the beating of small children with spiked clubs, the whipping of older boys with a cat-o’-nine-tails in front of the whole school, the forcing of the first graders to drink ink and eat apple cores, the locking in the basement of anyone tardy, and the terribly cruel practice of never allowing anyone to go to the bathroom, so that all screamed in pain and many wet their panties.
Naturally Cleve and I believed everything Mary told us, but also naturally, after a while, we grew blase about the continual beatings, killings and panty wettings that went on in the second grade at real school, so Mary, noting our waning interest, started the business about the ‘sausage book’ and for months kept us feverish with curiosity and acid with envy.
One snowy winter afternoon she came bursting in from school, glazed with learning, but instead of her usual burden of horror stories, she was carrying a big note-book with a shiny, dark red, mottled cover, like salami. “Look at this”, she announced to Gammy and Mother. “I call it my sausage book and I put everything I learn in it. See!” Carefully she brushed the snow off her mittens, turned back the shiny cover and with great pride pointed to the first page. “That’s what we did in school to-day, all by ourselves, without any help”, she said.
“Why, that’s beautiful, dear”, Mother said. “Just beautiful!” Gammy echoed and Cleve and I crowded close to see what was beautiful. Immediately Mary grabbed the book, snapped it shut and put it behind her back. “Hey, we want to see in your sausage book”, Cleve and I said. Mary, in a maddeningly sweet, sad way said, “I’d like to show it to you, Cleve and Betsy, I really would, but Miss O’Toole won’t let me. She said it’s all right to show our sausage books to our mothers and fathers but never ever to our little brothers and sisters.” Mother and Gammy laughed and said, “Nonsense”, so Mary stamped her foot and said, “If you don’t believe me, just ask Joe Doner.”
Day by day Mary built up the importance of the sausage book until I got so I dreamed about it at night and thought that I opened it and found it full of paper dolls and coloured pencils. But no spy was ever more careful of his secret formula than Mary with that darned old note-book. Sometimes she did homework in it but she guarded it with her arms and leaned so far forward that she was drawing or writing under her stomach; she slept with it under her pillow, she even took it coasting and to dancing school. She never was cross or mean about not letting Cleve and me see inside it, but persisted in the attitude that she was only obeying her teacher and trying to protect us, because she realized, even if Mother and Gammy didn’t, that seeing into her sausage book might lift the veil of our ignorance too quickly and send our feeble minds off balance. Our only recourse was not to show her the pictures we made at Miss Crispin’s, which she didn’t want to see anyway.
Then one day Miss Crispin ordered her kindergarteners to draw an apple tree and as not one of us little Butte children had ever seen an apple tree, she told us each to find a picture of one and bring it the next day
. We told Mother and Gammy about our kindergarten assignment and Mother found us a very nice coloured picture of an apple tree in our Three Little Pigs book. Mary looked at it critically for a minute then said, “I’ll show you a much better one”, and to Cleve’s and my absolute joy opened up her sausage book, flipped over some pages and showed us a large drawing of what looked like a Kelly-green brussels sprout covered with red dots and with a long spindly brown stem. “This,” said Mary, “is the way they draw apple trees in real school. Here,” she said, generously tearing out the page, “take this to Miss Crispin and just see what she says.” We did and Miss Crispin looked at it a long time, pulled at her doughy neck and said, “Mmmmmm.”
The next winter, when we were six and eight, I started real school and because of a shyness so terrible that I was unable to speak above a faint whisper, it took them several months to discover that I could read and write and really belonged in the second grade. When the terrible ordeal of reading, in my faint whisper, before the principal, and writing my name and several sentences on the blackboard in front of the whole giggling class, had been completed and I had been told that I was in the second grade, my first exultant thought was “Now I’ll get my sausage book.”
But the whole morning went by and I didn’t. I peered from under my eyelids at the other children and they didn’t seem to have them either. Finally in desperation I raised my hand to ask the teacher and she, misinterpreting my wants, said, in a loud voice, “Number one or number two, Elizabeth.” I said, “When do we get our sausage books?” She said, “Your what?” I repeated a little louder, “Our sausage books.” She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, now open your reading books to page three.”
I got up and went home. I didn’t even stop for my coat or rubbers but ran sobbing through the streets and burst in on Mother and Gammy who were having a cup of coffee. “We don’t get them”, I shrieked. “Don’t get what?” Mother said. “Sausage books”, I said. “I’m in the second grade and I asked the teacher and she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Mother explained that I had a different teacher from Mary’s and that she probably didn’t use sausage books. I refused to be comforted. School had come to mean but one thing to me. A sausage book of my very own filled with secret things that I’d let Cleve, but not Mary, see. I bawled all afternoon and finally Mother, in desperation, went down town and bought me a new Lightning Glider sled.
When Mary came home from school, I was out in the back yard, a steep slope about a hundred feet long, reaching from a woodshed and toolhouse at the very back of the lot down to a small level place behind the house still red-eyed and snuffling, coasting down our little hill on my new sled.
When I told Mary about my second grade teacher not giving us sausage books, Mary was so outraged she was going right back to school and mark on the desks and put paste in the inkwells, but to her relief I pleaded with her and finally talked her out of this dangerous act of loyalty. So as a reward she tried to invent perpetual motion and knocked out all my front teeth.
The back yard was a dandy place to slide and for a while, until Mary had her inspiration, we happily climbed up the little hill and coasted down again, climbed up and coasted down, on the big new shiny sled. Then suddenly at the bottom of the hill, Mary jumped off the sled, dashed into the cellar and came out brandishing the clothes pole.
“Betsy”, she said. “I have a wonderful idea. We’ll both get on the sled at the top of the hill, I’ll hold this pole out in front of us (the pole was about eight feet long) and when we slide down the pole will hit the house and push us back up the hill again. Then down we’ll go, then up, then down, then up and we’ll never have to climb the hill.”
It sounded like a terribly good idea to me so, when we had pulled the sled back up the hill to the woodshed, I climbed on the front and put my feet up on the steering bar, and Mary got on the back, and we both held the pole out in front of us in a direct line with my mouth. Mary gave us a big shove to send us off and whee! how we flew down the little hill. Then everything went black and I began spitting blood and teeth on to the white hard-packed snow, for the pole, when it hit the house, had been forced well back into my mouth. “Oh, Betsy,” Mary said, her face so pale her freckles looked like brown moles, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m so sorry”, and I knew she was because she gave me her old sausage book. Anyway they were only first teeth.
The next victim of Mary’s ideas was my brother Cleve, then a sturdy little boy of five, with red hair and a deep mistrust of his sister Mary and her red-haired friend Marjorie.
It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring and we were playing circus, or rather Mary and Marjorie were directing a circus which had all the neighbourhood children as paid admissions, and Cleve and me and Snooper, our dog, as the reluctant performers. Mother and Gammy had gone to a tea and left Sarah, our maid, to ‘keep an eye on us’, but Sarah, who loathed children, especially red-haired children, was in the kitchen ironing, with her back to the window and the back door locked.
As it would have been her great pleasure to see one or all of our lifeless bodies laid out ready to be carted away, she paid absolutely no attention to the blood-curdling yells and piercing screams which arose from our back yard, as Cleve and I, for the benefit of the assembled neighbourhood, and after a great deal of persuasion, performed whatever daring feats Mary and Marjorie thought up. We had already jumped off the woodshed into the sandpile backward, put lighted matches in our mouths, drunk castor oil and heart medicine (bitter cascara), and ridden around the yard on Snooper, but the biggest act was yet to come.
Cleve was going to walk the two-by-four which supported our cellar doors.
The two-by-four was only about six feet long but the cellar stairs were dark and steep and there wasn’t anything to hold on to. It was a daring and dangerous feat and one which Cleve was not anxious to perform. “I don’ wanna”, he kept saying stubbornly.
“Now, Cleve,” Mary and Marjorie said, “don’t you want to be known as the bravest child in this whole neighbourhood?” “No”, Cleve said, patting Snooper. “Look, Cleve,” Mary said, “I’ll walk it first”, and she did with light dancing steps, back and forth, back and forth. It didn’t look too hard. “Why don’t you do it for the circus?” Cleve asked. Mary said, “Because I’m the announcer. That’s why.” Cleve said, “Why doesn’t Marjorie do it then?” “Because Marjorie’s the ticket taker”, Mary said. “You and Betty are the performers. Now come on.” Cleve said, “I don’ wanna.” Then Mary and Marjorie said they would give him twenty-five cents of the gate receipts and that clinched things. Twenty-five cents would buy thirty pieces of ‘pick’ candy (penny candy), six picks for a nickel, and we’d do anything for it.
“Ladees and Gentlemen!” Mary announced in a loud voice. “Come and watch this brave little child walk the tightrope across a deep black hole full of live snakes.” She pointed dramatically to Cleve, who had crawled up and was standing on one of the folded-back cellar doors, clutching the twenty-five cents and looking suspiciously first at Mary and then at the narrow two-by-four. Mary’s sudden inspiration about the black hole full of live snakes hadn’t helped his courage any. All eyes were upon him but Cleve, suddenly deciding that he wasn’t going to walk Mary’s tightrope, sat down and started to slide down the cellar door.
Mary said, “Look, ladees and gentlemen, see how brave he is. That little tiny child has turned around so he won’t have to look at those wreathy writhy snakes. But he is the most famous tight-rope walker in the whole world and he is going to walk that dangerous tightrope, or you won’t get your twenty-five cents”, she hissed sotto voce at Cleve.
Cleve looked at the twenty-five cents and then at the two-by-four and finally stood up and started across. His fat little legs wobbled and when he tried to get his balance his arms went around like windmills and at the exact centre, and just as Mother came home, he fell and landed on his back on the cellar stairs.
Mother carried him i
nto the house and put him in a tub of hot water and when the doctor came he tested his reflexes and said Cleve wasn’t hurt at all, but it was a long time before he would take an active part in any of Mary’s and Marjorie’s schemes, particularly when he learned that he had dropped his twenty-five cents when he fell and some little ghoul had stolen it.
As I look back on it, I couldn’t have been too bright, because only one year later when I was seven, Mary and Marjorie got me to jump from the loft of a neighbour’s stable on to a very small armful of straw, which they had carelessly thrown on top of an upturned rake.
We were playing vaudeville this time, because Mary and Marjorie had recently been taken to their first vaudeville, whose wonders, substantiated by Joe Doner, had included a human bird and a man who balanced steel balls on his ears. I couldn’t balance steel balls on my ears but I could be Betty, the Human Bird, the Greatest Jumper of All Times, which was why on that bright summer morning I was standing shivering in the little doorway of the unused loft. It was only about a ten or twelve-foot jump but I’ll never forget how high up I felt.
Big Butte, an extinct volcano which had always seemed to us to be the highest mountain in the world, was right in front of me. The big M-1915, painted in white on its black rock side by the daring School of Mines boys, was now at eye level. I could see the School of Mines where Daddy taught. I could see Mary the Cook hanging out washing in our back yard. I could see hundreds of great big blue mountains. I could see Mary marching around the yard with a stick pointing at me and shouting, “Ladees and Gentlemen! Look up at her, Betty, the Human Bird, the bravest child in the whole world, just a little girl of seven who will jump from that terribly high building down on to this little pile of straw!”
I looked down at the pile of straw and it certainly was little. “That’s not enough straw”, I said, backing away from the edge of the doorway. “Sure it is”, Mary said. “Anyway that’s all Mr Murphy would let us have. Hurry up, Betsy, it’ll be fun”, she called running a few wisps of straw through her fingers to prove it.