The more they settled the apartment, the more beautiful it looked. They beamed upon it, eating Anna’s lunch in the bay window, and as soon as they had finished, they started working again.
“This is the last big job,” Joe said, tackling the curtains. “As soon as I finish this, we’ll go out and buy our groceries. I hope ten dollars buys a lot, Mrs. Hetty Green.” He dropped a curtain rod to come over and kiss her. There was a ring at the back doorbell.
“That will be Margaret and Louisa. The idea,” Betsy exclaimed as she ran, “of our first callers using the back door!”
Joe, returning to the curtain rod, did not follow until he heard a shriek.
Betsy was sitting on the kitchen floor beside a huge box overflowing with groceries. A smiling delivery boy was just closing the door.
“Who sent them?”
“He wouldn’t say. But they’re for us.”
Joe dropped down beside her. He lifted out a dozen eggs, a half dozen tomatoes, a cucumber, some onions—two bottles of milk, a pound of butter, bacon, a slab of strong cheese—a loaf of bread, a coffee cake, doughnuts.
“Pretty good,” he said, devouring one.
Betsy was pulling out coffee, cocoa and tea, vinegar and oil, salt and pepper, oatmeal, tapioca, molasses, raisins.
“And cocoanut!” she cried. “I can make you a cocoanut cake as soon as I learn how!”
Next came flour and sugar, baking powder, soda and vanilla. Beside a box of graham crackers stood a jar of jelly and one of pickles. Potatoes and apples spilled from their sacks.
“See here!” said Joe, presenting a large moist package on which someone had scrawled: “Joe is to broil this. Don’t trust Betsy.”
“It’s Papa’s writing.”
“You have some father!”
“We have, you mean! Oh, I wish the ’phone was connected so we could call and thank…”
A doorbell was ringing again, the front one this time. And this time it was Margaret and Louisa.
They wore their new fall suits. They wore their hats, white gloves. Betsy wiped her hand on her skirt before she offered it in welcome. But they ignored her disheveled appearance. Their manners were as flawless as their attire.
Boogie presented a bouquet of chrysanthemums. “My mother sent them. She hopes you will be very happy here, and so do Bogie and I.” Then she closed her lips, plainly resolved not to babble. Her rosy face took on an artificial smile.
“The apartment looks charming,” said Margaret.
While Betsy ducked into the bathroom to wash, Joe hung their jackets in the closet off the foyer.
“We’ll get calling cards when we graduate,” Margaret remarked, glancing at the empty silver tray.
He showed them around the apartment with his best Harvard air, and they made small admiring sounds. When they reached the kitchen, with its dazzling display of groceries all over the floor, Louisa did give one squeal, but she put her hand over her mouth. Betsy passed her a doughnut.
“Isn’t this just like Papa!” Margaret said in a fond superior tone.
Shortly she glanced at the watch Betsy had brought her from Europe. She glanced at Louisa. A first call, her look warned, only lasted fifteen minutes.
Louisa gulped her second doughnut. She sprang up and put on the artificial smile. She and Margaret shook hands with their hosts again and, with unimpaired dignity, departed.
Joe and Betsy leaned on the closed door, shaking with laughter.
Twilight was falling. Beyond their bay window, the gold of the elm tree was growing dim.
“I’m hungry as a curly wolf,” said Joe. “And it takes you longer to dress than it does me. You may have the shower while I put away the groceries. And I’ll broil the steak.”
“I’ll set the table,” Betsy said. She wanted to make it beautiful for their first dinner.
Fresh from her bath, dressed in dark maroon silk and her sheerest apron, she opened the leaves of her Grandfather Warrington’s table. She set it with a snowy cloth and napkins, and the silver with birds on the handles, and the china with pink and blue and lilac-colored flowers. She put white candles in the Hutchinsons’ candlesticks, and Boogie’s flowers in a vase.
Joe, resplendent now in white shirt and tie, was whistling as he broiled the steak. He shouted so many comments on his remarkable skill that Betsy came out to admire. He had set potatoes boiling, and she sliced a tomato and cucumber, and put bread and butter and jelly on the table. She made the coffee.
The steak was lifted to a hot platter, hissing. Betsy lit the candles, took off her apron, and sat down. Joe came in, holding the platter high, and at that moment a door bell rang a third time. They looked at each other in dismay.
“Oh, dear!” said Betsy. “Who could come calling at this hour?”
“On our first evening alone!” grumbled Joe. But he put down the platter and went to the door. Betsy followed.
It was Margaret, and she looked very different now. The hat was gone. So were the gloves. Her coronet braids had come loose, and one hung over her shoulder.
“Betsy!” she cried, but had to stop for breath. Her eyes were enormous. “They ’phoned us because your ’phone isn’t connected.”
“Who did?” Betsy asked. “What is it?”
“Easy now!” said Joe.
Margaret steadied herself against the door.
“Harry Kerr! About Tacy! She has a baby!”
“Oh! Oh!” Betsy fell upon Margaret with ecstatic hugs. “And Tacy’s all right? And the baby? Does she have red hair?
Margaret’s laughter was a soft, amused fountain.
“Betsy! Keep still, and let me finish telling you! You brought that doll from Germany for nothing! It’s a boy!”
8
Of a Meat Pie and Other Things
“MRS. JOSEPH WILLARD,” read the new calling cards. Betsy looked at them with delight. She was very proud of being a wife, of Joe, of his extravagant devotion. She was radiantly happy in her new life.
It wasn’t easy, though, to become a housekeeper.
Betsy had always joked about her lack of domestic skills. She couldn’t thread a needle, she was wont to announce blithely at sewing bees, and usually read aloud.
“Here, let me do that!” Joe or Cab or almost any boy in the Crowd would offer when Betsy started to make cocoa or scramble eggs.
“Liebchen,” Tib used to say, preparing a snack, “you sit down and watch. What you don’t know about cooking would fill one of those books you plan to write.”
It had been funny, but it wasn’t funny now, with Joe coming home from work, smiling and hungry. He wanted something more for dinner than place mats and candlesticks. After kissing her fondly, he would go, sniffing, out into the kitchen.
“What’s to eat?” he would ask.
That was a terrible moment!
Keeping the small apartment charming was not hard. It was a pleasure to wash the new dishes, to make the white bed with care, to dust the wedding presents and run the carpet sweeper up and down the living room, looking out into the elm and watching its leaves—as the days rolled by—turn from gold to brown, and fall, revealing a pattern of boughs which became, at last, narrow shelves for snow.
She did not do the heavy work. Joe had insisted on a weekly cleaning woman. Betsy had scoffed at the idea, quoting their split-penny budget.
So much for rent, so much for food and clothing, so much for telephone, gas and electricity, for the wet wash (she would do the ironing herself) and their personal allowances. A casual sum called incidentals was to cover the doctor, dentist, and amusements. Joe’s insurance premiums must be paid. And they had resolved that ten dollars would go into their savings account every month if they had to live on corn meal mush.
“No!” Betsy had insisted. “No cleaning woman at two dollars a day!” And really, she explained earnestly, a child could keep their tiny apartment clean!
Joe, however, was adamant. And when Joe was adamant, Betsy soon discovered, he was even more adamant than
she could be herself, although Betsy was famous for a will of iron. If her will was of iron, she thought now, there must be some undiscovered metal, even stronger, to describe Joe’s will.
“I observed you, Mrs. Willard, on your honeymoon, and I feel sure you have never scrubbed a floor.”
“I’m not too old to learn.”
“I concede that it would be foolish for the average wife not to save two dollars weekly out of one hundred and fifty-five a month, by dispensing with outside help. But you’re not the average wife.”
“That’s what every husband thinks.”
“You want to be a writer. You want that more than anything else in the world.”
“No,” Betsy interrupted. Her voice was sober, “There’s one thing I want more, Joe. I want to be a good wife to you—and a good mother to our children.”
Joe patted her cheek. “We’ll put it this way,” he said. “You are a writer. You’ve always been writing stories, and the last few years you’ve been selling them.”
“But except for that beautiful surprise when I got a hundred dollars from Ainslee’s, I’ve never sold one for more than ten or twelve.”
“Ten dollars,” Joe replied triumphantly, “would pay your woman for five weeks.”
She was stubbornly silent.
“It will be hard enough for you, honey,” he ended, “just to learn to cook. You’ve promised to learn to make lemon pie and rice pudding. Remember?”
So Betsy juggled the budget and engaged a stout Marta to come every Friday, and soon she was very glad that Joe had overruled her. Learning to cook gave her plenty to do. Cooking was harder even than algebra had been.
She was thankful for her high school Domestic Science training, distant as that was. She still had the Dom. Sci. cookbook, but it was regrettably full of things like English monkey, banana and nut salad, and cream puffs.
She yearned to produce some of Anna’s masterpieces, but when she asked about fried chicken:
“Why, lovey, you just put it into a skillet and fry it.”
And about Lady Baltimore cake:
“I’ll send one over to you tonight. Margaret can bring it.”
Mrs. Ray’s recipes called for too many eggs and too much butter and whipping cream for the Willard budget. And she, also, was vague. Of her divine pie crust, she would say, twinkling her fingers, “You just put in lard till it feels right.”
Betsy tried hard—with the pie crust and everything else. She did not forget the resolution she made on her wedding morning: Learn to cook. She did not forget the other resolutions, and was curled, powdered, perfumed, and wearing a pretty dress when Joe burst in after work. His face when he saw her was more than worth the trouble. But then would come that terrible question.
“What’s to eat?”
One night when he went out to the kitchen, sniffing expectantly, the odor was acrid and smoky.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing much,” Betsy answered lightly. “I’ve made a meat pie and a little spilled and burned on the bottom of the oven.”
“I love meat pie,” said Joe, and went, whistling, to wash.
Betsy approached the oven dubiously. The accident had been a little more than “nothing much.” She had thought she remembered just how Anna made meat pie—cutting leftover meat into chunks, and dropping it into gravy along with potatoes and onions and carrots, spreading biscuit dough on top. But something had gone wrong. The dough had overflowed and stuck to the floor of the oven, and burned. She had scraped it off, and scraped and scraped, but it kept on overflowing and sticking and burning and she had run frantically to fling up all the windows and run back to scrape some more. Eventually she had decided that the oven wasn’t hot enough and had turned it up as high as it would go. Then the top of the depleted crust had burned.
Her meat pie didn’t look like Anna’s but she carried it bravely out to the dainty table.
Joe served it, and there was nothing else to serve, except sliced cucumbers. The value of a meat pie, she had been told, was that everything necessary to a nutritious meal could be included in it.
Joe took a bite. So did Betsy. Where the crust wasn’t burned, it was soggy, and the vegetables tasted very queer. Joe took a second bite.
“A mighty good idea,” he said briskly, “using up that pot roast in a meat pie. It’s tasty, too.”
Betsy put down her fork and tears came into her eyes.
“Why, honey!” Joe exclaimed. “What’s the matter?”
Betsy began to cry. She pushed back her chair and ran out of the living room and threw herself across the white bed.
Joe followed. “What is it?” he asked anxiously. “Didn’t I say your meat pie was good?”
“That’s just the trouble!” Betsy sobbed. “It’s so awful—and you were so—so—nice about it!”
At this Joe laughed his ringing laugh and kissed her tears away. “Next time I’ll beat you.”
“Next time,” said Betsy, wiping her eyes fiercely, “it’s going to be good! At least it’s going to be fit to eat.”
The following afternoon she went to see Tacy and the baby. She had seen the baby first in the hospital, and had been disappointed again. Kelly Kerr not only wasn’t a girl—the next one would be, Tacy promised—but he wasn’t at all pretty. He was red and had hardly a spear of hair. When Betsy started the soft admiring coos that people make over babies, Tacy had stopped her. She looked beautiful, sitting up in bed, her long red braids against the white pillow, but her eyes were a little anxious.
“Don’t say he’s handsome,” she had said, “for I know better. He’s going to develop a wonderful personality, though. That’s what people do when they’re not good looking, Harry says.” And she cuddled the mite protectively.
The joke of it was that now he was getting pretty. He wasn’t so red any more; light curls were sprouting; and he had Tacy’s Irish eyes.
“I never saw such a change in a child!” Betsy cried, and Tacy let her hold him while she went out to the kitchen.
Over coffee and gingerbread, Betsy poured out the tale of the meat pie. Tacy was comforting, as always.
“Meat pie is hard,” she said. “I still can’t make a good one. I think, Betsy, you’d better stick to easier things for a while. Pork chops and baked potatoes. Meat loaf. Macaroni. Joe will like them just as well.” She passed the gingerbread. “Learn to make this, before you try a Lady Baltimore cake.”
It was good advice and was backed up shortly by a gift from Tib.
“This cookbook,” she declared, presenting a businesslike-looking volume, “tells all about everything. It practically says, ‘take an egg and break it.’ It’s just right for people like you, Betsy, who otherwise might think the egg went in, shell and all.”
Betsy burst into laughter. The practical gift was so in contrast to the appearance of the giver! Tiny, delicately formed, with a shower of golden curls, Tib seemed to have strayed out of a fairy tale. But cookbooks, Betsy well knew, were more in her line. She was highly proficient in all the domestic arts. When she came out to the Willards’, she would find Betsy’s mending basket and empty it while they talked. Or if it were near mealtime, she would tie on an apron.
She did that now, after taking off a feathered hat and the jacket of a pale green velvet suit. The skirt was draped to show a pleated underskirt.
“Pretty. Nicht wahr?” she asked. Tib often threw in German words, and her English had a little foreign twist. “I made it myself. It may not be just the thing for the office, but I dress as I please.”
“It’s simply darling! So original! But Tib, what heels! You need a husband to look after you!” said Betsy. “When are you going to settle down?”
“Settle down?” Tib gave an airy shrug. “Why should I settle down? I’m good at my job. Saving money. Like my boardinghouse. And one young man takes me to the dancing teas—all the hotels have them now—and another one takes me to everything good that comes to the Met.”
“Like either of t
hem?” asked Betsy cannily.
Tib got down a crockery bowl and the flour. She proposed to make dumplings for a lamb stew Betsy had on the fire. “They’re Lausbub’n!” she replied. “That’s what Grosspapa Hornik used to call the silly boys who kept ’phoning me in Milwaukee. Wanting to spend their money! Falling in love! And all because I have a few yellow hairs.”
Betsy chuckled appreciatively.
“What does Lausbub’n mean?”
“Oh, good-for-nothing scalawags! It’s slang. But they were all nice boys. Grossmama had to approve of them or I couldn’t accept their invitations.”
“How are your grandparents?” Betsy asked. She had visited Tib in Milwaukee and knew her relatives there. On the Muller side they were German, and rich. The Horniks, with whom Tib lived during her college years, were Bohemians from Austria. Grosspapa Hornik was a tailor.
“They’re fine,” Tib replied. “Of course they’re upset about this dreadful war. So am I.”
“Of course!” Betsy’s voice was sympathetic. The war must be hard on German-Americans like Tib who naturally would favor the Germans.
“The President asks us to be neutral,” Tib went on.
“You try to be, I know.”
Tib looked up in surprise. “Lieber Gott, I’m not neutral!”
“You’re not?”
“Not by a jugful! And neither are my brothers!” She stirred vigorously. “Germany ought to get rid of that Kaiser. Lausbube!” she added scornfully.
Betsy burst into laughter again.
“I thought,” she explained, “that you meant you weren’t neutral because you favored the Germans.”
“Ach, Betsy!” Tib replied. “Of course I love the German people. But you must remember that Grosspapa Hornik was a Forty-eighter.”
“I know,” answered Betsy. “He told me all about it. He came to this country in 1848 when he was a little boy. There had been a revolution in Austria, and his parents were in it, and they had to get out fast.”
“Well,” said Tib, “why do you think they objected to the old country? Too many uniforms! Too many wars! ‘Kaisers are nicht gut!’ Grosspapa is always saying. He mixes up German and English. But nobody loves America more than Grosspapa Hornik.”