Heaven to Betsy / Betsy in Spite of Herself

  Because I’m ma-a-a-r-r-ied now.”

  Again Betsy’s laughter kept away tears.

  There was something eerie and unnatural about the next morning. The Rays were up and about while it was still dark. Even Julia was up. Mr. Ray went down early to open the drafts in the furnace. Anna followed, and the rich fragrance of coffee floated though the house. They ate breakfast by gaslight, and everyone talked very fast.

  Then Julia dressed Betsy’s hair, and Margaret polished her shoes, and Anna pressed the tie of the new sailor suit, although it didn’t really need pressing. Mr. Ray went out to hitch up Old Mag. He brought her around, sleighbells chiming, while the east was still stained with red. Betsy embraced Anna, and the family went out to the surrey, Julia and Margaret carrying Betsy’s grip. Her trunk had been sent on the day before.

  The whole Crowd was at the station. Tony looked sleepy, but he was there. Dennie came tardily at a run. Some brought train letters which Betsy stuffed into her purse.

  The waiting room was crowded and gay, and brilliant jokes were bandied. The boys had, indeed, brought mistletoe, and Tony held some over Betsy’s head.

  “All Gaul is divided in three parts, and you have two of them,” said Betsy, ducking.

  There was a scuffle but she wasn’t kissed.

  The train whistled far down the track, and everyone poured out into the frosty morning. It was daylight now, but still cold. There was more laughing and joking.

  “Don’t flirt with the Milwaukee boys,” Cab called, as the great black giant of an engine rushed into the station, sending out clouds of steam which froze in the air. Its bell was swinging madly back and forth.

  “Ring out, wild bells,” Betsy whispered to Tacy, “Ring out the old, ring in the new…Betsy.”

  “Piffle! “Tacy said.

  Betsy kissed her. She kissed Margaret whose small arms clung tightly, and Julia who smelled sweetly of cologne, and her mother who smelled of violets, and her father who smelled of cigars. His face was ruddy with cold, and wore a determined smile.

  “Have a good time, Betsy.” “Remember us to the Mullers.” “Don’t drink too much of the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”

  Followed by these mingled cries and witticisms, Betsy ascended to the parlor car. Her father gave her grip to the porter, and all four Rays went inside for a minute. When they were gone, Betsy rushed to the window. She rapped on the glass and threw kisses and screamed, “What did you say?” at the frantically moving mouths outside. The boys were yelling through cupped hands.

  Then the big bell started to ring again. The whistle blew, aloof and melancholy. The train moved, and slowly the group dropped out of sight…the bright tarns of the girls, the caps of the boys pulled down against the cold, Margaret’s excited, almost anxious face, Julia’s smile, her mother’s stern look, her father’s benevolent one.

  They all passed out of sight, and Betsy turned around to the warmth and luxury of the parlor car. She settled herself in the green plush seat. She was on her way to Milwaukee.

  11

  Tib

  THE GRINDING WHEELS of a train are apt to sing a song. The song they sang for Betsy ran like this:

  “There’s a place named Milwaukee Milwaukee,

  Milwaukee, Milwauk, Milwauk EE,

  There’s a place named Milwaukee, Milwaukee,

  A beautiful place to be…”

  There was a story behind that song.

  One summer afternoon when Betsy and Tacy were five years old, they dressed up in their mothers’ clothes, took Mrs. Ray’s card case and went to call at a strange, chocolate-colored house which was their particular admiration. No one answered their ring and a neighbor shouted out that the people who lived there were visiting in Milwaukee. Betsy and Tacy were charmed by the word. Walking home, after leaving two of Mrs. Ray’s cards in the mail box, they made up a song about Milwaukee.

  Later, Mrs. Muller found the cards. Thinking that Mrs. Ray had called she returned the courtesy, and that had begun the friendship of Betsy and Tacy and Tib. They had taught Tib the song and had all sung it together, and now from that distant roseate past, it came back to Betsy as she rolled along toward the city of those dreams.

  “There’s a place named Milwaukee, Milwaukee,

  Milwaukee, Milwauk, MilwaukEE…”

  There was a second verse. It had something to do with Tacy, Betsy remembered. Something about going to Milwaukee with Tacy “ahold of her hand.” She wished Tacy were with her now. Not that Betsy, at the moment, felt the need of anyone’s hand. She felt poised and confident, and at least thirty years old. But she wished that Tacy were going, just for the fun of the thing.

  She rummaged in her pocket book, and found Tacy’s train letter, and read it. It was full of love and joy in Betsy’s good fortune. Tacy didn’t say in the letter…she had never once said…“I wish I were going.” She was never envious, no matter how many nice things happened to Betsy.

  This struck Betsy suddenly. She wondered for the first time how she would feel if Tacy were going to visit Tib and she were staying at home. It could just as well have happened that way if the Rays instead of the Kellys had had ten children. Frosting has to be spread thinly over a large cake.

  “Tacy,” Betsy thought, “is a wonderful person.” It was the first time she had ever consciously estimated her friend.

  The porter, a colored man in a white jacket, took her hat and put it in a paper bag, which he tucked into the rack over her head. She folded her coat neatly, and put that there too, and looked around the parlor car, which was impressive with wide windows. There were only two or three other passengers, not especially interesting. So she just sank deeply into the soft chair and looked out the window.

  The countryside was spread thickly with snow, against which bare trees showed purplish brown. They were in planted groves mostly, except for scattered oaks in the fields and yellow willows along the frozen streams. The farm houses were small, the red barns big with advertisements for Peruna painted on them. Fences and telegraph poles, horses, sheep and cattle and black and white pigs rushed past.

  It was prairie country at first. But near the Mississippi the bluffs began. After leaving Winona, named for the same Indian maiden from whom Winona Root took her name, Betsy gazed with her own eyes on the fabled Mississippi. Her train crossed the river. She was in Wisconsin.

  “I’ve left my native state,” she remarked in a jubilant half whisper.

  She could hardly wait for noon, having heard about dining cars from Julia after the California trip. When the bluffs flattened out into rolling prairie again, a waiter came through the train calling, “Dinner served in the dining car! First call for dinner!” Betsy was the second person in. She was second only because she waited for someone else to lead the way, and she followed close on the heels of this experienced traveler.

  The diner surpassed all expectations. It was pure romance to sit at a table spread with glossy linen and eat a delicious meal while looking out at a flying white landscape. She began to think about her great project of changing herself.

  “Two weeks is an awfully short time,” she thought. “But two weeks away from home is longer than two ordinary weeks. How shall I change? Shall I change my hair-do? I’m not good at that. Shall I change the way I talk? Make my voice low and musical, and my laugh sort of mocking? That would be good!”

  She tried it out softly, but the waiter heard her.

  “Is anything wrong, miss?” he asked, looking startled.

  “Nothing, thanks,” murmured Betsy, blushing. She went on planning.

  “Maybe I can copy Aunt Dolly. But she’s a different type. I think I’ll just try to act worldly and a little bored. The trouble is I never get bored.”

  She paid for her dinner and left a tip, as her father had done at the Moorish Café.

  She had been cautioned in the most urgent terms against talking with strangers…indiscriminately, that is. “Probably a woman with small children would be all right,” her mother had said.
She was delighted on returning to the parlor car to find a woman with a baby. Betsy offered to hold the baby, and soon was in conversation.

  Mrs. Gulbertson had been visiting her sister in Baraboo and she told Betsy all about her sister’s troubles with her husband. Betsy reciprocated by telling all about Tib, and after Mrs. Gulbertson had left the train, Betsy kept on thinking about Tib.

  “I wonder what she’ll be like now. She’s fifteen, the same as I am. Freddy must be about thirteen and Hobbie is Margaret’s age.” Frederick and Hobson were Tib’s brothers.

  Twilight descended and night came on with a rush. The porter pulled down the shades and turned on the lights. Betsy began to feel strange, speeding away through darkness to a big and unknown city. She started to wonder what the family was doing at home, then decided she had better not think about that. She read the last of her train letters, and was glad when the waiter came again calling, “Supper served in the dining car!”

  This time Betsy was first into the diner.

  She began to think about Milwaukee. She had tried to learn a little about it, and she knew that it had been founded almost a hundred years before by a French Canadian named Solomon Juneau. Before his arrival there was only an Indian village and a fur trading post on the bay where the Milwaukee River emptied into Lake Michigan. Juneau married the half-Indian daughter of the trader, and their seventeen children gave the new town a flying start.

  In Europe, through those years, a great hope had swelled that the people could rid themselves of despotic rulers. Starting in France in 1848, a series of revolutions had gone off like a string of firecrackers. But in Germany and Austria the revolts had been quickly crushed, and many of the brave men who had started them had fled to the new world, to Milwaukee in Wisconsin. Forty-eighters, they were called.

  More men followed from Germany, and Austria (including Bohemia, an unwilling part of Austria), and other European countries. They were very industrious, skilled in many trades; and they made Milwaukee a prosperous, well-governed city. But more than most immigrants they had clung to homeland ways. Milwaukee was truly like a foreign city, Betsy’s father had said. She could hardly wait now for her first sight of it.

  After supper the time dragged. Although not due at Milwaukee until almost half past nine, Betsy went into the washroom at eight o’clock. She washed and shook pink powder into a chamois skin and rubbed it over her nose. She combed her hair and redid her pompadour, very high and stiff.

  Back in the parlor car she made friends with a spin-sterish lady and told her all about Tib. A married couple from Waukesha made overtures and she talked about Tib to them, too. At last the man pulled up the shade and said, “I believe we are coming into Milwaukee.” And the porter came in and started brushing people.

  Betsy watched closely and when her turn came she didn’t make any mistakes. He took her new red hat out of the bag and brushed it and she put it on. She stood up while he brushed the red and green sailor suit and wiped off her shoes. When he had helped her into her coat and furpiece, she gave him fifty cents and he said, “Thank you, miss. I hope you have a good time in Milwaukee with your friend Tib.”

  With her grip close beside her feet, she sat down and waited tensely. The train was running through lighted streets now, and it seemed to Betsy she could not endure the few remaining moments. Then the passengers rose and formed a line and the train entered the station.

  “Milwaukee!” shouted the porter, and suddenly she felt very young, nervous, and inadequate. She found herself out on the platform with her grip at her feet.

  “Red cap? Want a red cap?” Her father had told her a red cap was a boy who would carry her grip. One was standing beside her now, smiling. She nodded.

  “Where to, Miss?” Where to, indeed! Other passengers were scurrying away. If the Mullers did not meet her…

  “Betsy, darling!” Betsy heard a familiar, high sweet voice. She turned to see a slight figure running toward her, a girl in a purple coat with yellow hair shining beneath a flowered hat. Betsy threw her arms around Tib.

  She had forgotten how tiny Tib was. They hugged and kissed, and Mr. Muller, looking just as he had always looked, large, blond, stoutish, watched them smilingly.

  “The little Betsy!” he said, shaking hands. “But she is a young lady now, nicht wahr, Tib?”

  “Ja, Papa,” said Tib, “und sie ist sehr schön.”

  “Tib!” cried Betsy, “You’re talking German.”

  “Natürlich,” Mr. Muller said.

  Laughing they swept down the platform.

  Betsy felt self-possessed again. She heard herself talking like Julia, very grown-up.

  “Yes, I had a pleasant trip. The meals on the diner were delicious.”

  “Before we start home,” Tib said, “we thought we’d take you up Grand Avenue to see the Christmas crowds.”

  “What fun!” Betsy cried.

  She had never seen a big city at night, or at any other time for that matter…and she found it breathlessly exhilarating. The streets were as bright as day, but the brightness had a different quality. There were trolley cars with glittering windows and a press of horses and carriages, and autos with clamoring horns. The store windows were full of beautiful things to buy.

  She and Tib and Mr. Muller pushed merrily through the crowds. Soon, however, they reached a hackstand and Mr. Muller helped them into a horse-drawn hack.

  “We must get home,” he said. “Mamma and the children, too, are anxious to see Betsy.”

  They rode for a long time, leaving the business district behind. They didn’t talk very much, and whenever they passed an arc light Betsy stole a look at Tib. Usually Tib was looking at her. She seemed younger than Betsy and not only because she was small. She was still wearing a hair ribbon.

  “You have your hairs up, haven’t you?” she asked suddenly. She said “hairs,” Betsy noticed, and not “hair.”

  “Yes,” said Betsy. “I started last year.”

  “I put mine up for parties.”

  “Have I changed much?” Betsy asked.

  “Have you changed!” Tib gave her little fluttery laugh. “I should say you have changed.”

  “Jawohl, Jawohl,” said Mr. Muller.

  They paused at last before a square redbrick house which had lights in every window and a wide entrance door.

  “This is our house. It’s a duplex,” Tib said. “I guess I told you about it in my letters.” She had, but Betsy had not been able to visualize a duplex. There were no duplexes in Deep Valley. “The first floor is our house. The second belongs to someone else,” Tib explained.

  Betsy was fascinated. “Why, it’s like living in a sandwich.”

  Mr. Muller laughed. “A sandwich, ja? Well, we’re going to live in this sandwich only until we decide a few things.” Betsy wondered what he meant by that.

  Inside she seemed to be back in the Muller home in Deep Valley. For Mrs. Muller, who kissed her affectionately, looked just the same. She was still short and square with yellow hair like Tib’s and she wore diamond ear rings. The boys were taller, but Fred was still slender and artistic, while Hobbie’s face was dimpled and full of mischief. Matilda still wore her hair in braids around her head, and spectacles, and a stiffly starched apron. The lines in her forehead made her look cross, but she smiled when she greeted Betsy.

  “This is good!” she said in broken English. “This remembers me of Deep Valley.”

  The duplex was very spacious. In the big front parlor were a sofa and chairs covered with blue velvet, which Betsy remembered. The dining room had the remembered display of heavy silver and cut glass. Matilda’s kitchen, as always, shone like a polished pan.

  Betsy was still looking furtively at Tib. Although she was so small she had a rounded bust above a very slender waist. She was feathery-light in her movements as Tib always had been. She was still Tiblike.

  She wore a shirt waist and skirt, but it didn’t look tailored like other peoples’ shirt waists and skirts. There was a fluffy coll
ar on the waist and the skirt was draped up with a velvet bow. She had a new foreign accent. Betsy thought it was cute.

  They sat down in the back parlor and Matilda brought Mr. and Mrs. Muller steins of foamy beer, milk and cookies for the children. They were Christmas cookies, kuchen, they were called, some with colored sugar on them.

  “I remember these from Deep Valley, Mrs. Muller,” Betsy said in Julia’s tones, nibbling.

  At last Betsy and Tib went down the hall to Tib’s room which was fancifully gay.

  “I’ll bet we’ll talk all night,” Betsy said as Tib turned back a white organdy spread lined with blue silk.

  But they didn’t. They weren’t well enough acquainted yet. Betsy was still using her company manners and Tib was a little formal herself bringing out towels and wash cloth for Betsy with a perfect hostess air.

  Tib put on a thin night gown trimmed with pink rosettes. She tied up her hair with a pink ribbon. Betsy wound hers on Magic Wavers. She hated to, but she wanted curls next day. She was glad that although her night gown was of flannel it was new and pretty with sprigs of blue flowers in it.

  They knelt down to say their prayers on opposite sides of the bed.

  “I wrote you, didn’t I,” said Betsy, rising, “that I’m an Episcopalian now?”

  “Yes. Would you like to go to church tomorrow?” Tib asked politely.

  “I’d love to,” Betsy said. And she added as they climbed into bed, “Now we mustn’t talk too late!” But they didn’t talk at all. They kissed each other good night and Betsy lay in the dark thinking how strange, how almost fantastic it was that she was here in Milwaukee of which she had heard so much for so many years.

  “There’s a place named Milwaukee, Milwaukee,

  A beautiful place to be…”

  The words sang in her ears just as though the wheels of the train were still turning. They sang themselves over and over until she fell asleep.

  12

  Sunday in Milwaukee