Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (26 page)

He was following her now with the swing in his walk more pronounced than usual, as though he were stirring up courage. When she stopped at the archway, he drew himself erect and his smile was a little fixed. Betsy was amazed, and flattered, too, that the great Joe Willard should be nervous at meeting her parents. She smiled reassuringly.

“Mamma,” she said, “Papa, it seems ridiculous that you don't know Joe Willard, but I don't believe you do.”

Mrs. Ray stood up. She gave him the gay smile all the young people loved.

“I don't know whether I'll let him come in or not,” she said. “He's the boy who always wins the Essay Contest away from my Betsy.”

“Oh, let him come in, Jule,” Mr. Ray returned. “He's quite a fellow, his picture in the paper and all.”

And then Mr. and Mrs. Ray were shaking his hand and Margaret was greeting him, too. She looked grave and appraising, as she always did with her older sisters' visitors. None of them ever quite measured up to Tony, in Margaret's opinion.

Old Mag was hitched out in front, for Mr. Ray had planned to take the family riding that night. Mr. and Mrs. Ray and Margaret left without Betsy, and Betsy
and Joe sat down on the porch steps. Betsy hoped that casual visitors like Cab, Dennie, or Tony would have sense enough not to come in when they saw them sitting there.

The twilight was crisp, filled with the smell of burning leaves. The sky above the German Catholic College on the hill was tinted by the afterglow.

Betsy asked Joe about the
Tribune
story, and he explained that the city editor had asked him for a photograph, and when Joe sent it he had found out that Joe was only seventeen. Then he had written another letter which Joe now pulled out of his pocket and showed to Betsy.

“You did a fine job. Privately, you never would have had the chance if I had known how young you were. But you wrote like a veteran. There's a place for you on the Minneapolis
Tribune
when you finish high school and come up to the U.”

“Joe, that's wonderful!” cried Betsy. “You're going to the U?”

“I'm going to start there,” answered Joe. “Say, you told me you thought
Les Miserables
was the greatest novel ever written. I think
Vanity Fair
is the greatest. Let's fight.”

Betsy accepted the change of subject. Joe would be slow to let her or anyone else look through the door of the room where he kept the problems he had met
in the past, his plans for the future. Joe Willard wasn't easy to get acquainted with. But Betsy felt a sweet, strong certainty that she would succeed in time.

They sat on the porch and talked while stars appeared above the college and a pearly glow announced that the moon would join them soon. No one else came, or if they came they went away. Betsy and Joe watched the moon rise.

“How do you like being a senior?”

“I like it.”

“I have an idea that this year is going to be perfectly wonderful.”

“I have the same idea,” Joe Willard said, looking at the moon.

A
S
B
ETSY WOUND HER
hair on Magic Wavers, preparing for her last first-day of high school, the importance of that event was dwarfed in her mind by Joe's call. In a way it was dwarfed, in another way it was glorified. The fact that Joe had sought her out, that they were obviously going to go together, put a crowning touch to her joy in being a senior.

She wound her clock briskly and set the alarm
for six. She wanted to get into the bathroom early next morning, to have time to prink. She and Tib had planned exactly what they would wear for the great day. Betsy had decided on her pink chambray dress with a wide pink band around her hair.

She slipped a kimono over her nightgown and threw a pillow to the floor beside Uncle Keith's trunk.

“I guess I'll read over my old diaries, and start the new one tonight,” she said aloud.

She got out the three fat notebooks which held the story of her first three years in high school, and the fourth one with its tantalizing empty pages. As she read, the quality and mood of each year returned like a tune.

Her freshman year, and her joy in finding a crowd, her discovery about her writing, and her yearning for Tony
.

“I've never been so much in love with anyone as I was with Tony when I was fourteen.”

Her sophomore year, and her trip to Milwaukee to visit Tib, the attempt to be Dramatic and Mysterious in order to captivate Phil Brandish, Phyllis' twin
.

“After I got him, I didn't want him.”

And last year, her junior year, when she had been all wound up in sororities, and going with Dave Hunt
.

“That was funny. We were really just friends. Not a bit of a crush.”

Through all three years, Joe Willard had stood in
the background, a figure of mystery and challenge, and now in her senior year they were going to go together. How completely and utterly satisfactory!

Betsy dipped her pen in ink.

“Three years ago this fall,” she wrote, “I began my first diary and my four years of high school loomed ahead so bigly that the start of my senior-year diary seemed but a vague possibility. Yet here I am starting it!

“How different I feel! One begins one's freshman year wild with anticipation, eager for the days to pass, radiantly happy! But one begins one's senior year with a sense of looking back, a longing to enjoy each minute to the full, a little touch of sadness.”

She didn't feel at all sad but she thought that sounded good.

“I would like to stop the clock right here and take a little breathing spell. As Mary Ware said, ‘It's so nice to be as old as seventeen, and yet as young as seventeen.' But time goes on, on, on….”

She meant to develop that but she couldn't think just how. Besides, she was getting hungry. She always got hungry when she stayed up late. She opened the door of her room into a dark sleeping house, and crept softly down the stairs.

Out in the kitchen, she lit the gas light and foraged. Finding milk, cold sausages, and part of a chocolate
cake, she tiptoed with them back up to her room.

How handsome Joe had looked! How thrilling that he had come to see her on his first night home! When her lunch was eaten, she turned out the gas, opened her window wide, and crept into bed.

The next thing she knew the alarm clock was shrilling and she jumped to her feet, remembering drowsily that if she wanted a leisurely time in the bathroom, it behooved her to get there. After her father started shaving, she wouldn't have a chance. And if she got in just ahead of him, he was sure to rap on the door, saying, “Hurry, Betsy! Remember, I must shave.”

She was amply early, and when the breakfast gong sounded she emerged from her room looking as she had planned to look, in the pink chambray dress which was made in princesse style, long and close-fitting, trimmed with white rickrack braid. The wide pink band was tied around her Magically Waved hair; her fingernails were buffed to a pink shine.

Margaret joined her in the hall. It was hard to know whether Margaret, too, had been up early prinking, for she was always so fastidiously neat. She wore a new white middy blouse with a red tie, and the red bows which tied her braids behind each ear were gigantic. She carried a pile of last year's books under her arm.

The tempting smell of muffins filled the air. Anna always made muffins for the first day of school. A plateful of the fragrant, tender pyramids was already on the table, and she brought another shortly, for Tacy and Tib dropped in to call for Betsy. The two girls were full of excitement about Joe Willard's picture in the paper.

“He's back. He dropped in last night,” Betsy said, offhandedly.

“He dropped in?” cried Tib. “Betsy Ray! Tell us about it.”

“What is there to tell?”

“Do you like him as well as you thought you would?”

“I like him as well as I always did. I've known him for three years.”

“She's just being irritating,” Tacy said. “You tell us what happened, Mrs. Ray.”

“I don't know,” answered Mrs. Ray. “We tactfully retreated, didn't we, Margaret?”

Margaret nodded, beaming.

“There's a poem I learned in school,” said Mr. Ray. He threw back his head and began a sing-song chant:

“Papa!” protested Betsy, blushing. But she wasn't annoyed. “We just had a nice sensible time.”

“On the porch in the moonlight,” put in Mr. Ray.

“He's so handsome,” said Mrs. Ray, “I could have a crush on him myself if I didn't have such a crush on my husband.”

“He's not so nice as Tony,” said Margaret, in a distant tone.

“Oh, but Tony's different, Margaret,” Tacy replied. “There's no fun teasing Betsy about Tony. He hasn't a crush on her.”

“And she hasn't a crush on him,” Tib added. “You'll understand when you're older.”

“Perhaps,” said Betsy, “we'd better go to school.”

They called out to Anna that the muffins were marvelous and descended the porch, arm in arm, into High Street. The vine over the porch was turning red; and in spite of the summerlike green of the trees, the petunias, zinnias, and nasturtiums still blooming in the borders, Betsy felt the impact of the coming season, the melancholy of September.

For the first time, she missed Cab.

“It'll seem funny not to have Cab walking to school with us,” she said, and tried to imagine what it would be like to be giving up school in your senior year. She wondered how Cab was feeling about it, down at the furniture store.

“We'll miss Carney, too,” said Tacy.

“She's coming to visit today,” Tib announced. “She's going to classes with us.”

The school-bound parade surged along High Street: freshmen looked frightened and eager; sophomores, proud; juniors, complacent. Betsy wondered whether she and Tacy and Tib betrayed their consciousness of being seniors as they chatted loftily, well aware of admiring eyes.

They went through the big doors, climbed the stairs past their old friend Mercury, so lightly poised that Betsy never quite believed he was made of stone, and paused in the upper hall. Here was the case which held the silver trophy cups for which the school societies, Philomathian and Zetamathian, competed annually—in athletics, in debating, and in essay writing. The Essay Cup made Betsy think of Joe.

“How will we feel competing against each other this year…when we're going together,” she wondered.

He didn't appear in the Social Room. He seldom came there. Having a job in addition to his school
work, he usually reached school with the last gong and hurried away at the end of each session.

Ralph Maddox appeared, however. The new senior athlete from St. John caused a sensation.

“He's beautiful!” cried Winona.

“He's ravishing!” cried Hazel Smith.

“He's absolutely pulchritudinous!” cried Betsy—all this in hushed voices, of course.

“Hmm,” said Tib. “I don't mind getting
him
for the Zets.”

Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark washboard curls rising above a classic profile, he looked kin to Mercury out in the hall. He moved a little self-consciously through the buzzing room. Of course, thought Betsy, if you were that handsome you couldn't help but know it.

Carney joined the girls just as the gong rang and accompanied them into the Assembly Room.

“Gosh, I feel superior,” she said, “watching the rest of you start the same old grind!”

As usual, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib headed for back seats and found three together. Miss Bangeter announced the opening hymn. Boys and girls stood and sang with a will. They sat, with much banging of seats and scraping of feet, and Miss Bangeter read from the Bible.

She read from the Bible every morning and it was
one of the things, Betsy realized, she would remember from high school. She liked the magnificent prose as it rolled from the lips of the principal, who was magnificent herself, in a dark, austere way.

“I'm sorry for high schools that haven't Miss Bangeter for principal,” Betsy thought.

Miss Bangeter read this morning from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.

“‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'”

Betsy was listening dreamily when the familiar words flashed out with sudden meaning.

“‘When I was a child,'” read Miss Bangeter, “‘I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.'”

Betsy looked across the aisle at Tacy and saw that Tacy was looking at her. She reached for a tablet and a pencil and thought she would write the words down, but she stopped, for she knew she would remember them. They were so apt, so significant, at the beginning of the senior year.

“I put away childish things.” You didn't want to, perhaps; but you did. She would have to, and so would Tacy and Tib and all of them.

Betsy felt a wave of that sadness she had not felt at
all last night when she told her diary she felt it. But it was soon dispelled. They went the round of their classes, Carney making derisive remarks.

Spurred by Julia's constant references to the need of modern languages out in the Great World, Betsy had registered for German. Her father had been pleased.

“We have so many Germans in Deep Valley, all over the county, in fact. Lots of them who come into the store can hardly speak English. It's a language you can really use, Betsy.”

“That's right,” Betsy said. “Why, Tib's father and mother often speak to each other in German. I can talk it with them. And I can talk it with Tib. And I can go to hear sermons at the German churches.”

“Besides,” said Mrs. Ray, “you can speak it with Julia when she comes home.”

“And I can teach it to Margaret.
Nicht wahr
, Margaret?”

“Say
Ja
, Button,” Mr. Ray advised.

“
Ja, ja
,” said Margaret, full of laughter.

These fine plans filled Betsy's mind now as she left Tacy, Tib, and Carney and went alone into the first-year German class. Her classmates were mostly awestruck freshmen. Her teacher was the blond Miss Erickson, who had tried to teach her Latin.

Tacy and Tib joined her for physics under Mr.
Gaston. They knew this subject would be hard and had dodged it in their frivolous junior year.

They could relax in the civics class, next on the schedule. Miss Clarke, who had taught them Ancient History, Modern History, and United States History, was a girlish, indulgent teacher.

Last of all came Miss Bangeter's Shakespeare class.

Miss Bangeter didn't teach many subjects. But her senior Shakespeare class was famous. She loved Shakespeare; she had specialized in his works in college. Her class read some of the comedies and tragedies aloud, parts being assigned to the various students.

Betsy had looked forward to it ever since Julia had taken it two years before, and she welcomed it also for another reason. Joe would be there. Even when they hadn't been friends, held apart by that curious hostility which, for a time, had stood between them, they had always enjoyed being together in English class.

He came into the classroom now with that swinging walk which was so much a part of him, and looked around at once for Betsy, who was also looking for him. They smiled at each other.

As soon as class was dismissed, he came over to her.

“I have to get down to the
Sun
,” he said. “But not
until I settle something important. When am I going to see you again?”

Betsy thought quickly. Winona was entertaining the girls Friday night for Carney. Saturday night she was going to the Majestic with Tony.

“Why don't you come up Sunday night?” she asked. “Come to lunch. That's what we call Sunday night supper at our house. I don't know why, but we do.”

“Seeing as how it's lunch and not supper, I'd love to come,” answered Joe. He smiled at Tacy, Tib, and Carney and went out of the room.

The three girls looked at each other.

“Well!” said Tacy.

“About time!” said Tib.

“Hurray!” cried Carney. “I'm glad it happened before I went to Vassar. Betsy's going to go with Joe Willard,
at last
!”

“Don't be silly!” Betsy answered, blushing as pink as the pink chambray dress.