Heaven to Betsy / Betsy in Spite of Herself

  “And I wish I could find a nice sophomore boy for you,” said Betsy. “Not that you need anybody found for you,” she added, and repeated what Cab had said about Bonnie having greatly increased attendance at Christian Endeavor.

  “How silly!” said Bonnie. “I try not to think about boys at Christian Endeavor.” She looked so sincerely devout that Betsy was impressed.

  They parted at a point on Plum Street which was exactly halfway between High Street and Broad.

  Betsy instead of Julia was late for supper that night. Her father gave her a reproving glance when she entered the dining room, but he relented quickly; she looked so radiantly happy. She was full of talk all through supper. Anna, clearing the plates, paused to listen.

  “But who is this Bonnie?” Mr. Ray asked.

  “Bonnie Andrews. Her father is the new Presbyterian minister.”

  “And Carney?”

  “Caroline Sibley. Don’t be surprised, though, if I call her Julius Caesar. We’ve formed a Triumvirate.”

  “What is a Triumvirate?” asked Margaret, looking up from her plate.

  “She doesn’t even know what a Triumvirate is! O di immortales!” Betsy cried.

  9

  The Triumvirate of Lady Bugs

  CAB APPEARED AS USUAL the next day to walk to school with them, and Betsy and Tacy had small chance for private conversation. During the morning, however, Betsy was able to give some idea of the fun she had had at the Sibleys. And at noon they walked around and around the school block for a really confidential talk.

  Betsy told her about Carney and Bonnie.

  “They’re oceans of fun. You’ll be crazy about them.”

  She told her about the two Triumvirates.

  Tacy was not the kind of best friend who felt jealous of a Triumvirate of Lady Bugs which left her out. Of course she and Betsy both knew that any group which included Betsy would shortly expand to take in Tacy too. Betsy said as much and Tacy agreed, but with a reservation.

  “You know, Betsy, I’m not interested in boys. When those Triumvirates do things together, I’d just as soon not be there.”

  “But what do you have against boys?” asked Betsy. “You like Cab, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Cab’s nice.”

  “You always liked Tom Slade.”

  “Yes, but he’s gone away. And anyway, Betsy, it’s not that I don’t like boys all right. I don’t know how to act when they’re around like you and Julia do.”

  Betsy was flattered to be classed with Julia.

  “You’re just bashful, Tacy. But, listen! I’ve got a plan. Herbert Humphreys has a crush on Bonnie, and Bonnie doesn’t want him because he’s a freshman. So she said she’d hand him over to me, but I don’t really need him because I’ve got Cab, sort of. So I could hand Herbert over to you.”

  Tacy burst out laughing.

  “You can’t hand boys around as though they were pieces of cake,” she said. “Don’t worry about getting a boy for me, Betsy. Boys just don’t seem important to me. They don’t seem any more important to me than they ever did.”

  “Tacy!” said Betsy. “You’re beyond me!”

  “Well!” said Tacy. “That’s the way I am.”

  So after school she went off contentedly with Alice, who was a friend from the Hill Street neighborhood, a tall blonde girl with glasses, and Betsy dropped her books at home, preparatory to going down to the Sibleys’. She took Carney and Bonnie in to meet her mother. They liked her, as all the girls did, and chattered easily while Betsy foraged. She came back from the kitchen flourishing a box of crackers.

  “Nourishment for the ride!”

  “I’ll get some olives at home,” Carney said.

  “Those old Romans didn’t eat crackers and olives,” objected Bonnie with her bubbling laugh.

  “They drank wine,” said Carney. “But don’t forget you’re a minister’s daughter, miss.”

  At the Sibleys’, they went in to speak to Mrs. Sibley, a slender dark-haired woman with twinkling eyes who looked much as Carney would look at her age. Carney got the olives, and the three girls hitched the bay horse to the surrey.

  “I like horses better than automobiles. Don’t you?” asked Betsy.

  “Yes. Papa’s threatening to get an automobile, though.”

  “Are you allowed to take Dandy out often?”

  “Quite often. Papa walks to the bank.”

  “Papa lets Julia and me drive Old Mag too. I love to go riding,” Betsy said.

  It was a perfect day for a ride. The sky was greenish blue and misty over Deep Valley’s hills. The air was warm, and smelled of bonfires.

  They left Broad Street at the Episcopal Church and took the road leading to Cemetery Hill. They passed the watering trough and the little store where Margaret had bought candy, and the road began to climb.

  Carney knew this hill as Betsy and Tacy knew the Hill Street Hill. She coasted down it every winter.

  “Larry steers. He’s wonderful,” she said. “How he misses the watering trough is just beyond me!”

  The dry gulch beside the road became a brook in the spring, she said. She and her brothers used to float boats there.

  Today it was full of yellow leaves and bordered by flaming sumac. On the right, at the crest of the hill, rose the solemn white arch of the cemetery gate.

  “Shall we go in?” asked Betsy. “I love to look at gravestones.”

  “Not today,” said Carney. “I’m not in the mood for it.”

  “Neither am I,” said Bonnie. “I feel perfectly wild.”

  “Let’s scream then,” said Betsy, and she screamed, and they all screamed. Dandy didn’t turn his head, but a flock of blackbirds rose in alarm.

  “I think I’ll ride Dandy. Would he mind?” Betsy asked.

  “Not a bit. He’s used to it.”

  “I could climb on from that fencepost. Pompey always rode horseback.” Betsy scrambled down.

  “He didn’t either,” shouted Bonnie. “He rode in a chariot!”

  “They raced,” yelled Carney. “Whoopee! Remember Ben Hur?”

  But Betsy thought Dandy’s back was better than any chariot. She sat astride, pretending to be a cowboy, while Carney and Bonnie rolled in the seat with laughter. Her hair came down, and lost its curl in the breeze. Her waist pulled out of her skirt. She didn’t mind.

  “Look what I see!” she cried suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Grapes!” She pointed to an old elm, laden with clustering vines.

  “Pompey has discovered wine!” shrieked Bonnie.

  “He’s the noblest Roman of them all,” cried Carney. She and Bonnie tumbled out of the surrey while Betsy, with some difficulty, got down from Dandy’s back. The grapes were ripe and they picked handfuls.

  “There’s a good place to eat,” said Carney pointing to a field that was empty except for golden-rod, asters and thistles and a jeweled apple tree.

  “Swell! We can steal apples.”

  “Listen to the minister’s daughter!”

  “I’ll get some. My father is only an elder.” Carney ran to the tree, returned with six apples and tossed two to each of the girls.

  “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.”

  “Amo, amas, amat,” shouted Betsy, not to be outdone.

  “Freshie!” the others yelled.

  Carney loosened Dandy’s checkrein, and he stood without hitching during the Roman feast.

  While they ate they talked about boys. Betsy repeated Tacy’s remark about passing boys around like pieces of cake. Carney and Bonnie thought it was killing. Bonnie said she was going to entertain the two Triumvirates Friday night. She bewailed Herbert’s youth, and Betsy said she was going to ask Julia to look out for a junior boy for Bonnie.

  “A junior! Betsy, you angel!”

  “Do you like them?”

  “I adore them!”

  “Larry is nicer than any old junior,” said Carney, munching her stolen fruit.

  “He is not.”
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  “He is so.”

  “Herbie’s nice too.”

  “That baby!”

  They had a wonderful time, and after eating they made themselves as tidy as they could. Bonnie and Carney weren’t very mussed, but they tucked in Betsy’s waist and tied her hair up with a ribbon.

  “Heavens, I hope we won’t meet any boys going home!” Betsy said. “If we do, make Dandy gallop; will you, Carney?”

  “He forgot how years ago.”

  “Besides, if we galloped the boys would think they had to rescue us,” said Bonnie.

  “Let ’em try,” said Betsy. “They couldn’t catch up. And we’d yell, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ like this. ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

  They raced across the field crying, “Help! Help! Help!” Fortunately nobody heard them but Dandy who ignored them. Laughter drifted behind them like smoke all the way down Cemetery Hill.

  Betsy parted from Carney and Bonnie at the watering trough. She raced home through the early twilight and had just time to wash before supper. She could use, she found, a good bit of washing.

  After supper she was supposed to do homework but first she telephoned Tacy to tell her about the ride. And Bonnie telephoned to giggle over how funny Betsy had looked on Dandy. And Betsy telephoned Carney to bring her up to date on the other two conversations.

  Julia was out at choir practice, and when she returned Betsy went into her room to drum up a junior boy for Bonnie.

  Betsy always liked to go into Julia’s room. It smelled like her, of a sweet cologne she used. It was often in disorder for Julia was untidy, but she was untidy in a dainty way. The pile of clothes that Betsy now moved from the window seat, in order to sit down, was fresh, lacy and sweet-smelling.

  Betsy loved this window seat, which looked up at the Catholic College. She settled into it cozily now while Julia in a white night gown sat down at the dressing table to take pins out of her hair. Julia didn’t wear a hair ribbon any more. She wore her hair in a pompadour all around her head with a knot on top.

  Julia was not one of a crowd of girls as Betsy was. She never had been. Katie and Dorothy were her friends, but she didn’t feel that she must telephone them every night, nor see them every day. She wasn’t inclined either toward a crowd of boys. She preferred one completely devoted swain, but she always tired of him and went on to another, indifferent to the sufferings of the discarded one.

  “He’ll get over it,” was her callous answer to tender Betsy’s protests.

  She had liked Jerry best, but he had gone away to West Point, and none of them could compete in her interest with music. Her mind was upon music now, while Betsy talked.

  “Of course I’ll introduce Bonnie to some junior boys,” she said. “But Bettina, listen! The choir needs altos badly and Mrs. Poppy wants you to come and try out.”

  “I’d love to!” cried Betsy. She thought rapturously of wearing vestments and of marching through candlelight. “But, Julia, I’m sure I can’t sing well enough. Mrs. Poppy just thinks I can because I’m your sister.”

  “No, Bettina, you could do it. I wouldn’t say so if I didn’t believe it. You’re really musical. Perhaps because we’ve always had so much music at home.” She laughed as she shook out her hair. “You know, Mamma raised us on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. She sang them to us while we were nursing. And I’ve been banging a piano in your ears for centuries now. You could carry the alto part without coming up to the soprano all the time the way so many girls do.”

  “The way I used to do when Tacy and I sang the Cat Duet,” said Betsy.

  “You’ve learned since then,” said Julia, “shouting around the piano.”

  “Do you suppose Papa and Mamma would mind?” asked Betsy after a thoughtful moment. “They don’t mind your doing it because you have such a talent for music, and they know it’s good training. But they might not like to have me going all the time to the Episcopal Church.”

  “They’d still have Margaret to go to the Baptist Church with them,” said Julia. She turned from the mirror to look solemnly into Betsy’s face.

  “Bettina,” she said. “I love the Episcopal Church. I want to be an Episcopalian.”

  “Julia!” cried Betsy, hardly believing her ears.

  “I don’t think I was ever cut out to be a Baptist,” Julia said.

  Betsy was genuinely shocked. It had not occurred to her that one could change one’s church any more than one could change one’s skin. She was silent, and Julia went on:

  “Just because Papa and Mamma are Baptists is no reason I should be a Baptist. People are different. I’m myself.”

  “But Julia!” Betsy protested. “You’ve been baptized.”

  She well remembered Julia’s baptism several years before. At the front of the Baptist Church, behind the pulpit, hung a painted landscape of the River Jordan. Where the canvas river ended there was a deep recess which could be made into an actual pool. On the days when people were baptized, the minister stood there in a rubber coat; each devotee in turn walked down the steps and was dipped beneath the water.

  Julia had seemed like an angel coming down. The other girls had looked self-conscious or frightened, but Julia had looked rapt and grave. The people were singing, “Shall we gather at the river?” and Julia had looked as though she were listening to heavenly choirs. The other girls had come up from their immersion sputtering and gasping, but Julia, although her long hair hung like sea weed, had kept a grave, rapt profile.

  Betsy had not yet been baptized. And she knew that she could not hope to emulate Julia. She was religious. But she was religious only when she prayed, and when she wrote poetry, and when she talked with Tacy about God and Heaven. Her religion had nothing whatever to do with the Baptist Church. It came to her now that perhaps she, like Julia, was not cut out to be a Baptist.

  “But you can’t hurt Papa’s and Mamma’s feelings,” she said, coming back to Julia’s problem which was suddenly unmistakably her own.

  “I’d die first,” said Julia.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to help me, Bettina.”

  Julia had a way of leaning on Betsy, of coming to her for advice, which was wine to Betsy’s soul. Julia was looking at her now out of tragic, dark-blue eyes, her classic face strained.

  “Betsy, I have to be an Episcopalian!”

  “Girls!” came Mrs. Ray’s voice. “It’s ten o’clock.”

  “I’m going to bed, Mamma,” Betsy called. She whispered to Julia, “I’ll think up something.”

  “Thank you, darling. Turn out the light, will you?” Julia asked, jumping into bed.

  Before she turned out the gas Betsy looked at the vivid face framed in a cloud of dark hair on the pillow. Julia had no need to put her hair up on curlers. She hadn’t put cream on her face or rubbed her hands with lemon or done a single thing to make herself look pretty on the morrow. But Betsy knew how pretty she would look.

  Betsy turned out the gas and went to the bathroom to begin her nightly ritual. She loved Julia dearly, and could not be jealous of her. Yet as her thoughts returned to the two Triumvirates, to Bonnie’s party, boys, she felt a little bitter. She wound her hair on Magic Wavers, and scrubbed her face and rubbed in the freckle cream; it was supposed to remove freckles practically overnight, but Betsy had been using it for two weeks now, and the soft brown sprinkle on her nose was as plain as ever.

  10

  And the Triumvirate of Potato Bugs

  AS BONNIE’S EVENING PARTY for the two Triumvirates drew near, Betsy began to worry. It was not the first time she had gone to a party boys attended, but it was the first time since boys had emerged from the pest and nuisance class. She wished ardently that one of them would ask to be her escort.

  Thursday night, after winding her hair on the Wavers with special care, she even included in her prayers a request that a boy invite her to the party. It seemed a little frivolous, but she felt sure God wouldn’t mind.

  C
ab walked to school with her Friday morning, and she thought he would surely mention Bonnie’s party, but he didn’t; he talked about the scrub football team. Betsy listened with what she hoped seemed radiant attention.

  “Did I act interested in that football business?” she asked Tacy in the cloakroom.

  “You certainly did,” Tacy replied. “You acted as though your life depended on whether he made the team or not.”

  “That’s the way you have to be with boys,” said Betsy. “Beam about their old football when you’re dying to know whether they’re going to take you to a party.”

  Tacy knew all about Betsy’s worry.

  “Of course, he’ll ask you,” she said. “Hasn’t he called for you almost every morning since school began? I think you’re foolish to want to go with boys, but I must say you’re not having any trouble doing it.”

  Betsy glowed at this. She had a secret suspicion that the easy hospitality of her home attracted Cab at least as much as she did, but it was gratifying to hear Tacy’s opinion.

  “Well, if he’s going to call for me, why doesn’t he ask me?” she groaned.

  “Oh, boys just like to be annoying.”

  Betsy waited hopefully for Cab to drop in that afternoon. He didn’t. But of course, she consoled herself, the scrubs might be practising late. As supper time approached she waited for the telephone to ring. It didn’t.

  During supper, her mother said casually, “Betsy’s going out tonight, a party at Bonnie Andrews’.”

  “What time shall I call for you?” her father asked.

  Betsy was grateful to them for assuming that she would be called for as usual when she went out in the evening.

  “I’ll telephone you,” she said.

  “Not to come,” added Julia in a whisper. This was cheering, for it meant that though Julia had noticed no boy was taking her, she felt sure one would ask to walk home with her, Betsy’s spirits began to rise. She excused herself while the rest were still eating dessert and went upstairs to dress.

  She wished she could take a bath in the tub but she didn’t dare; the steam would uncurl her hair. She sponged carefully, however, put on her prettiest underwear, and pinned starched ruffles across her chest to give her figure an Anna Held curve.