They rose reluctantly, and Joe dropped an arm around Betsy’s shoulders. They looked up at the wild bronzy bank, the yellowing trees, the little cottage standing sturdily on stilts.
“I hate to leave it,” Joe said. “I hate to leave our golden world.”
“But our own apartment will be nice,” said Betsy. And they climbed the steep stairs, stopping to pick some wild grapes from the flaming vines that loaded the trees.
“I’ll get supper,” said Joe, when he was dressed.
“All right,” answered Betsy. “And I’ll pack. But Joe, I’m going to learn to cook. It’s the very first thing I’m going to do.”
“All I ask,” he answered, getting out the bacon, “is for you to learn to make two things: rice pudding and lemon pie.”
“Rice pudding and lemon pie,” Betsy repeated obediently. “I promise.”
Her wedding dress was hanging in the rough damp closet. It looked remote, ethereal, draped in its white veil.
“I’m never going to put it on again,” Betsy said dreamily. “Not once! Except, perhaps, for our golden wedding anniversary. Of course, Bettina can wear it for her wedding if she wants to.”
“Sentimental!” Joe scoffed. But he looked pleased, and left the bacon to help her fold the dress carefully into a big box which Tacy had remembered to put in the car.
Betsy opened her suitcase and took down the pink negligee. Joe left the bacon again and came over to rub his cheek against hers.
“My pink silk wife!” he said. He liked to say that. After a while he went back to the bacon.
“Shall I pack my husband’s things, too?” Betsy asked.
“Certainly. Don’t you know your duties as a wife?” he replied, chopping cold boiled potatoes with the top of a baking powder can. He was very proud of this accomplishment. “I ought to make a sour-cream cake,” he remarked. “Leave it for the Kerrs.”
But there wasn’t time. Supper was hurried. And Betsy washed the dishes while Joe mopped the floor. They wanted to leave the cottage as neat as they had found it.
When they had finished, they put on their wraps, and locked the door, and went down the steps to the rowboat where Joe stowed away the bags. He got the oars and slipped them into the oarlocks.
“I haven’t taken one of those streetcar boats for years,” he said as they pushed off.
“They’re yellow like the streetcars. They’re fun. And the streetcars going in from Minnetonka are fun too. They go like lightning, and there’s one motorman—or used to be—who puts his hands behind his head and doesn’t touch the wheel.”
“He’s probably been fired by now.”
They talked fast and did not look back at the cottage.
The sun had disappeared, and the lake was dull. It was slate-colored, under a slate-covered sky, flecked with pale gray clouds.
A motorboat approached, its prow lifted, throwing out spray. A hunter hailed them, and his boat went on, leaving a widening avenue behind. Waves set the rowboat rocking.
Neither Joe nor Betsy spoke.
When it was quiet again, Joe folded the oars across each other. Moving carefully, he came and sat down beside Betsy. He put his arm around her.
About that time the pink of the afterglow stole into the west. It spread over the sky. It spread over the lake, growing rosier and rosier, and even seemed to tint the gulls who swept back and forth as though reveling in this bath of beauty. The gray clouds became gossamer pink. Joe pointed to one.
“That cloud,” he said, “makes me think of you in your pink silk negligee. You’re my pink silk wife. You’re my wife made out of flowers.”
No matter what Joe said, Betsy knew she was just Betsy. But she loved to hear him say these beautiful things. He kept on saying them so long that they almost missed the streetcar boat which took them to the streetcar where they sat on the back seat and held each other’s hands.
The motorman drove with his hands behind his head, but Joe and Betsy didn’t even notice.
7
Three Rings of a Bell
IT WAS MARGARET WHO found Joe and Betsy their first home.
They had been living for a week at the Ray house—Joe working with great satisfaction at the Hawthorne Publicity Bureau, Betsy dashing all over Minneapolis to look at apartments. She went alone, with her mother, in Carney’s automobile. Tib was now living in town; she had found a job in art-advertising with one of the department stores. But she was too busy to help, and Tacy wasn’t feeling well.
“I’ll be glad when that baby gets here,” Betsy confided to Carney as they drove up and down the autumn-tinted streets. “I’ll be glad for Tacy, and, besides, I want to see the little redhead. I know she’ll be adorable.”
“Of course,” Carney chuckled, “she could be a ‘he.’”
“Tacy isn’t the type for a boy,” Betsy answered loftily.
Tacy, too, expected a girl, and the doll Betsy had brought from Germany flaunted her pink plume and yellow curls among the couch cushions in Tacy’s living room. Betsy and Carney dropped in there often after the day’s hunt was ended.
Day after day, it was a fruitless hunt. Betsy had budgeted Joe’s salary of $155 a month—the budget was her department, he had said—and she would not pay more than thirty dollars for rent.
“Not more than thirty,” she insisted, “if we have to sleep in the park!”
The search for an apartment at that figure took them all over Minneapolis, and Betsy thought often how beautiful it was—set on the storied Mississippi, glimmering with lakes. A chain of lakes ran actually through the city. Their shores were lined with homes, and even closer to the water lay the public boulevards, scattered with picnickers, fishermen, children with buckets, adventurous masters of sailboats and canoes. Betsy had taken all this for granted once, but not now, remembering the war-stricken cities of Europe.
“How lucky we are to live here!” she exclaimed.
“Nice place to bring up Judy,” commented Carney, glancing at a cozy bundle in a basket on the back seat.
When not apartment-hunting, Betsy sat with her mother on the bright glassed-in porch, hemming dish towels. (Mrs. Ray hemmed six to Betsy’s one.) After school Margaret and Louisa blew in, the green-and-white ribbons of their high school streaming from their coats.
Blooming, wide-eyed Louisa was always bursting with talk.
“There’s nobody, absolutely nobody, left on the football team, Mrs. Ray! And Mrs. Willard, too, of course. That is, if I call you Mrs. Willard. I suppose I do. It seems funny, though. Last year we were champions but everybody graduated. Absolutely everybody! It’s simply awful! It makes me feel as though Bogie and I ought to play. I stopped the coach in the hall and asked him why girls couldn’t help out in an emergency like this. He seemed surprised, but I mean it! I’m awfully husky, and Bogie is perfectly healthy. Isn’t she, Mrs. Ray?”
Louisa paused for breath and gazed at them beseechingly.
Next day it was something else.
“There’s a tall skinny boy works in the lunch room. He’s crazy about Bogie, Mrs. Ray, and Mrs. Willard. If I call you Mrs. Willard?”
“Oh, please say Betsy!”
“All right, but it doesn’t seem respectful. You are married, you know. But he just piles gravy on Bogie’s roast beef sandwich. Honestly, he does! Mashed potatoes, too. The rest of us don’t get a bite, hardly.”
“Boogie!” Margaret choked.
“It’s true, Bogie. You can’t deny it. And I like mashed potatoes. Especially with gravy. I get hungry….”
“How about some cookies and milk while you’re doing your homework?” Mrs. Ray suggested.
Mr. Ray and Joe came home from work, and dinners were jolly. Betsy’s father was already Dad to Joe, but Joe and Mrs. Ray had animated discussions about what he should call her: Mother, Mamma, Ma…
His preference was for Jule, Mr. Ray’s name for his wife, and at last Mr. Ray gave him written permission to use it, sending Margaret for pen and ink while Betsy contributed green seal
ing wax to make the paper official.
“Stars in the sky!” Bringing in peach cobbler, Anna shook with laughter.
Evenings, they talked around the fire. Her husband and Joe talked war too much, Mrs. Ray declared. The German advance had been stopped at the Marne by a heart-stirring effort of all the French people. Even the Paris taxicabs had rattled up to the front with troops. But the Rheims Cathedral was bombed. A church! An art treasure! It seemed impossible.
That night none of them could talk of anything but war.
Mrs. Ray recalled that her father had fought in the Civil War. And Betsy told a story her grandmother had told her.
“They were living in Indiana, in a log cabin. Grandpa was teaching country school. Lincoln had called for volunteers, but Grandma didn’t want Grandpa to enlist. Uncle Keith was only a baby. You weren’t born yet, Mamma. One afternoon she saw him coming through their cornfield—tall and thin and redheaded, she said. And he was carrying all the school books in a pile, with the school bell sitting on top. The minute Grandma saw it, she knew what had happened, and she began to cry.”
Everyone was silent.
“But she was proud of him, she said,” Betsy added.
“And I have the letters they wrote to each other while he was away. Regular love letters!” Mrs. Ray made her tone light for Margaret had jumped up, blowing her nose, and gone to find the cat.
Oftener they didn’t talk about war. Betsy told them about Europe, and Joe told them about Harvard, and Mr. Ray told them funny things that had happened at the store. And every evening there were wedding presents to unwrap. Betsy never opened them until Joe came home.
Her parents had given them a set of plated silver. There was a bird in the pattern; Joe and Betsy had picked it out themselves. And they had selected their china, English china, with pink and blue and lilac-colored flowers. Paige and Julia had started them on that. Margaret gave them a statuette of three little monkeys. One was covering its ears, and one its eyes, and one its mouth, and the legend read: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.
“Boogie helped me pick it out. We thought it was funny. And instructive, too,” Margaret said.
Tacy and Harry gave them framed prints of two Maxfield Parrish pictures, “Homekeeping Hearts are Happiest” and “The Hanging of the Crane.”
Tib sent a cookie jar. “Now learn how to fill it!” she wrote.
The Hawthornes sent a mantel clock. Joe’s aunt sent a carving set. Betsy tried to imagine Joe carving at the head of his own table! There were candlesticks from Sam and Carney, a tray from Katie and Leo. There were books and bonbon dishes, vases and jelly spoons, a tea wagon.
“Fine! Fine!” Joe exclaimed. “But where are we going to put all this? Maybe we ought to go up just a little on the rent. Thirty-five, say?”
“Not more than thirty,” answered Betsy, “if we look forever.”
And it seemed as though they might, indeed, look forever, but on the second Sunday Margaret, who had gone off with Louisa, came into the house with star-bright eyes.
“You know, don’t you, that Boogie lives in an apartment? Well, her mother owns the building! And she has an apartment for rent. The people just moved out.”
“How—how much?” asked Betsy from the couch where she and Joe sat poring over real estate advertisements.
“Twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents!”
“What a sister-in-law!” Joe shouted, whirling Margaret who was trying to act calm. Betsy ran for a hat and jacket.
“And it’s just around the corner on Bow Street!” Mrs. Ray cried joyously as Margaret, Joe, and Betsy hurried out.
Louisa was waiting at the foot of the Ray porch. She exploded into speech.
“I thought it was more tactful not to come in. But if you rent it, Betsy, Bogie and I can come in to see you every day after school. We can keep you from getting lonesome. That is, I imagine you’ll get lonesome. Going away from home all alone with just a husband! Oh, excuse me, Mr. Willard!” she added in confusion as Joe grinned at her.
Bow Street was an old street. The elms were old and had turned yellow and were spattering the lawns with leaves. The houses were old, with spacious porches; and few of the barns had been made into garages. In front of one house, a horse and buggy was hitched.
“It’s like Deep Valley,” Betsy said, clinging to Joe’s arm for he was striding along so fast she could hardly keep up with him.
The apartment building was set on a large elmy lawn. It had an entrance porch with fat fluted pillars, and looked like a large, stone, private house except for sets of triple windows, bulging out.
Oh, I hope we get one of those bays! Betsy thought.
She waited in a rapturous daze while the girls ran to call Mrs. Hilton and Joe walked briskly around the building.
“Looks fine! Looks all right!” he said, returning. His golden eyebrows bristled with excitement.
Bogie and Boogie emerged with Boogie’s serene, white-haired mother. They all followed her inside, up a flight of carpeted stairs, to the left-hand back apartment. Betsy calculated quickly. “It will face south and east!”
They entered a small foyer, shiningly empty, but she envisaged a slim table with a silver tray for cards. They turned left into the empty living room, and Betsy ran forward, for at the end was one of those three-winged bay windows. And it looked straight into a yellowing elm tree! Right into the branches!
“Oh, what luck!” she thought. “What luck!”
Joe turned right, into the small kitchen. He returned in a flash to the living room and turned right again, through an archway, into the bedroom. He peeked into the bathroom, and came up to Betsy who was still looking out blissfully into the elm.
She smiled at him. He smiled at her.
“We’ll take it,” he said to Boogie’s mother. “May I write you a check?”
And Betsy kissed Margaret, and hugged Louisa, and said to Mrs. Hilton in a housewifely tone, “We’ll eat our meals in front of this window sometimes.”
The home Margaret had found for them was perfect, family and friends agreed—near a streetcar line so Joe could get to work conveniently, near the Ray house so Betsy could get back often, not too expensive, and not too big. That last was a factor for it must now be furnished.
They had discovered, in the Rays’ basement, an old drop-leaf table. Mrs. Ray’s father, when he came to Minnesota after the Civil War, had made it himself out of a black walnut tree. Mrs. Ray, who didn’t like old-fashioned furniture, used it to hold the laundry basket. Joe and Betsy dragged it out in triumph.
In a secondhand store, Betsy and her mother found two small walnut chairs. They were just the period of the table and upholstered in rose damask. They found a big armchair for Joe, upholstered in blue.
In a new furniture store, they bought a handsome bookcase, and a blue and rose rug, and blue and rose draperies to hang at the sides of the triple-winged bay.
“No lace curtains! Nothing to hide my elm tree,” Betsy insisted.
They bought a white-painted bedroom set, stenciled in blue and rose, and white ruffled bedroom curtains, and blue checked kitchen ones. All these treasures, along with a broom, dustpan, carpet sweeper, and shiny pots and pans! Betsy’s desk came over from 909. And Mrs. Hawthorne gave Joe Saturday off, to settle.
“By afternoon,” Betsy said at breakfast, “we’ll be ready for callers. Why don’t you be our first caller, Margaret, since you found us the apartment?”
“May I bring Boogie?” she asked eagerly.
“Of course.”
“But don’t come too early,” Joe warned. “For after we get settled, we’ll have to go out and stock up with groceries. And I mean stock up!”
“I’ve allowed ten dollars,” Betsy said firmly.
Laden down with bags, and boxes full of wedding gifts, and a picnic lunch from Anna, Betsy and Joe went over to their apartment. Mrs. Hilton gave them the key. They went in, and closed the door, and hugged each other. Then Betsy tied an immaculate apron over an i
mmaculate house dress, and Joe rolled up his sleeves.
They started by laying the blue and rose rug on the gleaming varnished floor. Next, they placed the bookcase against the right-hand wall, and settled their books. They wound the Hawthornes’ clock and put it on top, in the center.
“Listen to it tick!” Betsy cried, as though no clock had ever ticked before.
On one side of the clock they put a dark blue vase that Joe’s mother had treasured because Joe had bought it for her with money he had earned selling papers. On the other side they put a tall cup, striped in pink and blue and gold. It had been given to Betsy by a young baroness in Munich, and the poet Goethe was said to have drunk from it.
Opposite the bookcase, they placed the old-fashioned table, one leaf raised to lean against the wall. Betsy put more books on this, between book blocks, and a small pottery angel which had been made and given to her by the Christus of the Passion Play in Oberammergau.
She arranged the chairs, and Joe brought out a tape measure and a hammer which Mr. Ray had thoughtfully loaned, and hung the pictures where Betsy wanted them hung.
“Homekeeping Hearts are Happiest” and “The Hanging of the Crane” were spaced precisely to the left and the right of the clock, above the bookcase. Over the old walnut table went Lenbach’s “Shepherd Boy.” Margaret’s three monkeys fitted into a niche beside the bay, and Joe’s Harvard etchings hung in the foyer. They would make a dignified impression, Betsy said.
Van Dyke’s “Flight Into Egypt” went into the bedroom, and a Japanese print of a long-legged bird in a marsh was hung above Betsy’s desk. It had always hung there. For some mysterious reason, Betsy claimed, it made her feel like writing.
Everywhere were framed and unframed photographs of Betsy’s family, Joe’s father and mother, his uncle and aunt, their friends from high school and college. On the bureau stood Betsy in her high school graduating dress, and a snapshot of Joe which she had steamed out of a kodak book and carried through Europe.