The Luckiest Girl (15 page)

“My name is Shelley Latham.” No response. “Could I—that is, do you have time to answer a few questions for my school paper?” Shelley sensed the amusement of the faculty members, but it was too late to back out now.

“Well?” said Jonas Hornbostle.

Apparently the poet meant this to be consent. At least he was looking at Shelley instead of moving toward the door. Encouraged, Shelley quickly decided she had no time for notes. She would have to remember what he said.

“Mr. Hornbostle, what do you think of Vincente—this part of the country?” she asked, looking up into the tired, impatient face.

“Does it matter what I think?” he asked ironically but not unkindly.

Shelley felt confused. Probably what he thought really did not matter, but that was not the sort of answer she expected him to give. “Well…” She gulped and tried frantically to think of a question that would sound intelligent and start him talking about himself. “Uh—how old were you when you wrote your first poem?”

Mr. Hornbostle raised one of his famous black eyebrows. “Poems?” he queried gently. “Have I written any? I am not so sure of that.”

I'm getting no place fast, thought Shelley, uncomfortably aware that the college faculty members found the whole scene amusing. “Mr. Hornbostle,” she began, determined that this time she was going to get a definite answer out of the man. “Where were you born?” That was a question that he could not evade.

Before Shelley's eyes the tired, impatient face grew more tired and more impatient. “My dear young reporter,” said Jonas Hornbostle, “the answer to that question can be found in any one of a number of standard reference books that I am sure are available for your use in your school library. Have you never heard of
Who's Who in America?
”

“Yes,” Shelley managed to whisper, unable to
take her eyes from the poet's face. This could not be happening to her. No, no. Not to her. Things like this did not really happen. It
was
happening, though.

“Then if you expect to gain practice in interviewing, I would suggest that you never ask a question that can be answered in your library.
Who's Who in America
will not only tell you where I was born, it will also tell you how many children I have and give you their names. That, I presume, was to be your next question.”

Shelley managed to tear her horrified gaze away from the famous face. She looked at the floor and whispered, “Thank you.” Then, with tears in her eyes, she turned and walked halfway up the aisle until she could stand it no longer. She broke into a run and ran the rest of the way out of the building.

Safe inside the station wagon, Shelley sat trembling behind the steering wheel. Outside the world still seemed serene. A breeze moved the pendant branches of a pepper tree in front of the car, and down the block two little girls were playing hopscotch and laughing. Shelley rested her forehead on the steering wheel. What did I expect, she asked herself bitterly, the whole world to change
because she had made a fool of herself in front of a famous man and a good part of the faculty of the Orange Belt College? And she had thought herself so smart, starting out to interview a celebrity. She had planned to impress Hartley and to knock the whole Journalism 1 class right back on its heels with her cleverness. And who got knocked back on her heels? Shelley Latham, the girl who was too stupid even to be a cub reporter. Shelley Latham, sub-cub, that was what she was. Whatever would she tell Hartley? She had promised to let him read her story and now there would be no story.

Shelley lifted her head from the steering wheel. She could not sit there all afternoon trying to pull herself together when Mavis was expecting her to return with the car. Automatically she inserted the key in the ignition and as she turned it, anger toward the poet swept over her. What a rude man he was! And where would he be without a public to admire him? And she had been his admirer. That was what hurt Shelley most—she had truly admired the poet, and then to have him be so curt to her…

Shelley drove slowly home and as she turned into the familiar streets of San Sebastian, the anger drained out of her and she felt suddenly very tired.
She could no longer be angry with Jonas Hornbostle. He was right. It was she who had been rude in expecting a tired and busy man to take time to answer her inexpert questions. Why, in every town he visited he probably met at least one journalism student along with the autograph seekers and the ladies in flowery hats. And probably they all asked him the same questions.

The words of the young man who had sat beside her came back to Shelley and she now felt that perhaps he had been right after all. Jonas Hornbostle was a poor reader of his own poetry, and for that reason she began to feel sorry for him. It must be difficult to read badly in front of an audience and then to be pestered by journalism students. He had really not been angry with her so much as terribly, terribly weary.

Shelley turned onto North Mirage Avenue and then into the Michies' driveway. She had failed. On Monday morning she would have to admit to Hartley that she had failed. Hartley, of all people. If he had gone to Vincente he would have come back with an interview. He would have gone prepared with a list of interesting and intelligent questions, because Hartley was the kind of boy who always knew exactly what he was doing.

Early Saturday evening the telephone rang. “It's for you, Shelley,” said Katie. She added in a whisper, “It's a boy.”

“Hello?” said Shelley, wondering what boy could be calling her. Maybe Philip's father had relented after all.

“Hi, Shelley,” answered Hartley. “Did you get the interview?”

“No,” answered Shelley reluctantly, but feeling that she might as well bring to an end the whole unpleasant incident as soon as possible. And just when she had succeeded in attracting Hartley's interest once more, too.

“How come?” There was disappointment in Hartley's voice. “Wouldn't he talk to you?”

“Oh, he talked to me all right,” said Shelley, not wanting to admit what had happened.

“Well, come on, tell me about it,” persisted Hartley. “If he talked to you, you must have an interview.”

“Oh, no, I don't,” said Shelley.

“What happened?” asked Hartley.

Shelley was silent a moment. “Wait a minute!” she exclaimed. “Maybe I do have a story after all.” Briefly she described the episode. “And how do you think it would be,” she concluded, “if I wrote
it straight and told what really did happen? I mean, wouldn't that make a story?”

“Sure it would,” said Hartley enthusiastically. “That would be a better story than if he had answered your questions straight.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Shelley eagerly.

“I know it,” said Hartley.

“Then I'll do it,” said Shelley. “It will make me look like an awful idiot but I don't care.”

“Don't worry about that,” Hartley reassured her. “We all have to learn sometime and besides, the fact that you had a hard time asking questions will make a good angle. You know, a headline something like ‘Famous Poet Gives Cub Reporter Lesson in Interviewing.'”

“That's so,” agreed Shelley. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“Say, Shelley,” said Hartley, as if he had just had another idea. “If you aren't doing anything this evening, maybe I could come over and help you write the story.”

“Why—I'd love to have you come over,” said Shelley truthfully. She had not expected this much.

“Swell. I'll be over in about an hour,” said Hartley.

“Do you have a date?” asked Katie eagerly when Shelley had hung up. She had been following the conversation from the living room.

“Yes,” said Shelley happily. “At least a sort of date. Hartley is coming over to help me with my journalism.”

“That counts as a date,” Katie assured her. “Would you like me to bake a cake?”

Shelley laughed. “I'm sure Hartley would enjoy a piece of cake.”

“I can make cocoa, too,” said Katie. “Like we made at school. Of course at school we called it breakfast cocoa but I don't see why it wouldn't taste all right at night.”

“It will probably taste better,” said Shelley. “And now I've got to change my dress.” Blessings on thee, Jonas Hornbostle, thought Shelley, as she ran up the stairs to her room. Poor tired old poet.

Dear Mother and Daddy, Shelley mentally wrote as she opened the door for Hartley. This evening Hartley, the boy who took me to Vincente that time when I first came down here, came over to see me and we worked on our journalism assignment….

“Hello, Shelley,” said Hartley as he entered. “I hope you won't write like the
Argus-Report
and call a poet a bard.”

Shelley laughed. “
Bard
is a funny word to use, now that I stop to think about it, but the
Argus-Report
uses a lot of funny words. Like
tot
. They use that a lot—I suppose because it is easy to fit into a headline.”

“There is a ‘Dog Bites Tot' or a ‘Tot Lost' story in almost every issue,” Hartley agreed with a grin.

Tom was attending a meeting and after greeting Hartley, Mavis excused herself, saying she was going to her studio. Shelley produced the rough draft of the interview that she had managed to write, and she and Hartley sat down in the living room at the long table below the handmade hooked rug that hung on the wall—Tom could not bear to see anyone walk on Mavis's hard work, so the Michies had hung the rug on the wall. Shelley felt perfectly natural sitting there with Hartley, almost as if they had sat there together often. This rather surprised her, but she decided she must feel at ease with him because he sat behind her in her registration room at school.

Shelley was not disturbed by Luke's sitting in his favorite chair studying a catalogue of motorcycle parts nor was she annoyed when Katie, in a fresh cotton dress, wandered in and out of the room. She was amused that Katie had dressed up for her date and she knew that Katie was interested in everything she and Hartley said. Katie was thinking that someday she could have a boy come over to study, too.

Hartley read Shelley's interview and they talked
it over. He made suggestions, Shelley made suggestions, and they had one argument. Hartley thought that after the first sentence she should refer to Jonas Hornbostle as Mr. Hornbostle.

“But I never think of him as Mister,” Shelley protested. “Of course I called him Mr. Hornbostle when I spoke to him, but writing is different. Nobody writes about a poet as Mister. They are called by their full names or just their last names.”

“But he's a human being,” Hartley pointed out. “Why shouldn't he be called Mister?”

“It doesn't sound right. Did you ever hear anyone call Shelley—Percy Bysshe, that is—Mr. Shelley?” Shelley asked. “Of course not. It is always just Shelley or Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

“I guess that's right,” admitted Hartley. “But on the other hand, I'm sure that I have read about T. S. Eliot as Mr. Eliot.”

“That does sound sort of familiar.” Shelley ran through the names of all the male poets she could think of. Browning, Keats, Longfellow, Sandburg—Mr. Sandburg? “Hartley, you're right!” she exclaimed, and wondered why she sounded triumphant when she had lost the argument. “It's dead poets that you don't call Mister. Jonas Hornbostle is alive so it is all right to call him Mister.”

Together they rewrote the interview. Hartley read the new version. “That's good,” he said seriously. “Mrs. Boyce should give you an A on it. It tells a lot about the poet—about his being tired and impatient and all possibly because he knows he is not very good at reading his own poetry—most people don't think of a poet as being that human—and it tells what was wrong with a cub reporter's interview. It is different from most school interviews.”

“Thank you, Hartley,” said Shelley, pleased by his approval. “The
Bastion
does seem to publish a lot of silly interviews.” She should know. She was still embarrassed by the memory of the interview she had given.

“A silly interview in the school paper is such a permanent fixture in San Sebastian that nobody really sees it anymore,” said Hartley jokingly, “just like—”

“—a cannon from the first World War in the park,” finished Shelley.

“Exactly,” agreed Hartley, laughing.

“When I first arrived, I thought a cannon was such a funny thing to put in a park,” Shelley said, “and now it seems a perfectly natural part of the landscape.”

Luke closed his catalogue of motorcycle parts and stood up. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” said Shelley. “I hope we aren't driving you away.”

“No,” answered Luke good-naturedly. “I smelled cake baking and I thought I would see if Katie had taken it out of the oven yet.”

The room was silent. Shelley and Hartley had no reason to discuss the interview any longer. Shelley looked at the boy beside her and a tiny thought, a thought that she felt was disloyal, intruded. It was a relief to be free of Ping-Pong, to sit and talk to a boy about something that interested them both instead of batting that exasperating little ball back and forth. Why, I'm having fun, thought Shelley, surprised—more real fun than I ever had with Philip.

Katie appeared, bearing a tray with two pieces of cake and two cups of cocoa. Shelley, touched by the sight of her in her fresh dress and carefully cleaned shoes, said easily, “Katie, why don't you join us?” When Philip had come she had always wanted to show him off to Katie and then get him out of the way before Katie could do or say something awkward. It was different with Hartley. He would understand about Katie. Of course he
would, and Shelley had been foolish not to explain about Katie on the refrigerator long ago.

Katie was obviously delighted to be invited to share Shelley's evening with a boy. She carried in another piece of cake and another cup of cocoa and sat down at the end of the long table.

“Blue frosting looks sort of funny on a cake,” she said shyly. “I thought it would look prettier.” She ate carefully, taking small bites and sitting up very straight. Just watching her made Shelley feel good.

“Blue frosting is good,” said Hartley. “You could call it Surprise Frosting. Everyone expects something flavored with mint to be green, so when you bite into blue frosting and find it mint flavored, it is a surprise.”

Shelley could see that Katie was pleased, and she knew that Hartley understood that Katie was thrilled to be included and was trying to act grown-up. Katie was even more pleased when Hartley ate a second piece of cake.

Shelley studied Hartley thoughtfully. She liked a boy who would go out of his way to be nice to a junior high school girl. When they had finished eating they all carried their dishes into the kitchen. Hartley was the kind of boy who was at ease in the kitchen. He rinsed and stacked the
plates as if working at the Michies' sink was the most natural thing in the world. It was easy to picture him helping with a batch of fudge and enjoying himself if a girl could think of no better way to entertain a boy.

When they had finished with the dishes, Shelley and Hartley returned to the living room. Katie went upstairs to her room, and from the garage came intermittent
pop-pop
s from Luke's motorcycle. At last Shelley felt that she could talk freely to Hartley. “Do you remember that night we went to Vincente to eat the doughnut holes?” she asked, determined to be forthright.

“Of course. The night you talked about the pomegranates,” said Hartley. “Does San Sebastian still seem like a beautiful place to you after the smudging we went through?”

Shelley spoke seriously. “It was unpleasant at the time, but you know, I think it was exciting the way the whole town cared about the oranges. Every time I eat an orange I'll think about that cold spell and the way the boys who worked in the groves came to school greasy and tired and fell asleep in class and the teachers didn't even say anything. I've never lived where people were concerned about crops before. I mean, I have read about dam
age to wheat or something in the papers, but I never understood how the people felt before.”

Shelley was silent for a moment. She wanted to bring the conversation to its starting point. She looked straight into Hartley's dark eyes. “I've always wanted to explain why I acted so sort of funny when we said good night that time after we went to Vincente,” she said, and noticed Hartley suddenly look as if he were on his guard. She did not care. She had to explain, because the matter had been on her conscience so long. “That night I happened to look up and see Katie looking through the open transom—you know how the refrigerator is against the door we never use between the living room and the kitchen. She was kneeling on top of the refrigerator watching us say good night so she would learn how to act when she has dates. I was so embarrassed I—well, I just acted funny, is all. It seems silly now, but that is the way it was.”

Hartley threw back his head and laughed. “So that's what was the matter! I didn't know why you were suddenly acting so stiff and formal. I thought you had had a good time and I didn't know what was wrong. I thought maybe you didn't like it when I came right out and said I liked you so soon, or something.”

“Oh, no,” said Shelley, relieved that she had finally explained. “I was terribly pleased to come to a strange town and get to know a boy who liked me right off.”

“And then you seemed so interested in Phil,” Hartley went on, “that I didn't feel I should ask you for another date.”

“I was interested in him,” admitted Shelley, looking down at the table. This was touching on a painful subject. “He is one of the nicest fellows I have ever known, but I don't know—I guess we don't have an awful lot in common.” Until Shelley spoke the words it had never occurred to her that she and Philip did not have much in common. They had really found very little to talk about. She had not enjoyed Philip himself as much as the admiration of the other girls who liked him and the thought that he looked like the kind of boy her mother would like her to know. She frowned a moment before she said, “You know, now I'm not sure it was Philip I liked so much after all. I think maybe it was just that I saw him that first day of school and I was so excited to be in San Sebastian with real palm trees and oranges growing on trees and everything. He was so good-looking I just thought he was the boy I had always wanted to
meet. In my mind I turned him into the boy I wanted him to be. And he wasn't at all. He doesn't even want to go to college. I really feel sorry for him.” She stopped, afraid she might have said too much. She did not want to criticize Philip.

Hartley raised one eyebrow and said wickedly, “You looked at me the first day of school, too.”

“I don't mean that you aren't good-looking, too,” Shelley said hastily. “You are, you know, in a different way.”

Hartley grinned at Shelley, enjoying her discomfort. “I understand exactly what you mean about Philip. And you know something else? I think maybe you liked him because he was not the boy at home you were telling me about—the one who always said, ‘Penny for your thoughts.'”

“I guess you're right,” said Shelley thoughtfully.

Hartley leaned closer and spoke softly. “I still like you, Shelley.”

Shelley looked into Hartley's serious brown eyes and was ashamed. She had maneuvered this evening just so she could write to her mother about another boy to make her mother think she had lost interest in Philip because of Hartley. She was trying to use him to shield her own mistake. And that was all wrong.

“I like you, too, Hartley,” said Shelley honestly, realizing how much she really did like him. How foolish she had been not to understand this before. Little things should have told her, things like her boredom with Ping-Pong and the way she rushed to confide in Hartley about her D in biology because she knew he would understand how important good grades were. She recalled a remark Mavis had made about the boy she called the Great White Hunter, something about girls in their teens always fancying themselves in love with the wrong boy. Shelley had not really fancied herself in love with Philip—her feeling had been excitement at knowing a new boy and pride in showing others that he liked her—but now she understood what Mavis meant.

Hartley put his hand over Shelley's. “Good,” he said. “We like each other. That makes it unanimous.”

Shelley laughed. “Two votes and it is unanimous.” She felt a sudden urge to talk to Hartley about everything in the world—school, and their plans for the future, and people they had known, and the mistakes they had made that had once seemed painful and now seemed funny. She wanted to make up for all the time they had lost.

But as Shelley sat with Hartley's hand over hers, she was disturbed by an elusive unhappy feeling. She liked Hartley, but Philip still liked her. Poor Philip, who had flunked biology and lost his chance to play basketball because of her.