With a practised hand she dropped spoonfuls of batter on top of the bubbling stew.
Betsy studied the cookbook Tib had brought. She studied it with a concentration worthy of a profound scientific work. And following Tacy’s suggestion, she mastered meat loaf. She learned to fry pork chops so they did not end up dry as chips, and to boil vegetables so they did not emerge waterlogged and soggy.
Doggedly she pushed on to lemon pie and rice pudding. The rice pudding his mother had made, Joe explained seriously, was a custard rice pudding, rich and yellow, with plenty of raisins in it.
“Betsy!” he exclaimed in delight as he ate. “You got it right!”
Tacy gave her a recipe for Never Fail pie crust. The filling was easy, and it was almost fun, Betsy admitted, to make a meringue. Certainly it was fun, when Joe came home, to escort him proudly to a golden brown pie.
He stared admiringly and cut a huge wedge.
“Joseph Willard! That’s for dessert!”
He tasted it, rolled his eyes, kissed her solemnly on the brow.
“We are now,” he declared, “officially man and wife.”
“I’ll call Dr. Atherton. He’ll be so pleased!” said Betsy.
There were still plenty of failures, and on those nights Joe helped with the dishes. They were always in a hurry to get dishes done, for evenings were beautifully cozy. With shades drawn against the wintry night, Joe settled himself in the secondhand blue armchair, to read aloud. He was reading Sentimental Tommy. Sometimes Betsy tried to darn, but darning, for her, was a major undertaking, and when she grew interested in the story she made mistakes.
Sometimes Joe would say, “Just be beautiful tonight!” And she would put on the pink negligee and let down her hair.
He talked about his work. The campaign had gone well. Minneapolis was digging deep for the Belgians, and Betsy was sure it was because of Joe’s stories. He was another Richard Harding Davis, she said.
He had a problem, though. He was not sure he wanted to stay on with the Bureau. Mrs. Hawthorne’s office, he told Betsy, was no place for him or any other man.
Mrs. Hawthorne brewed afternoon tea over a spirit lamp, sending one of the girl workers out for cakes. She took a great interest in their personal lives and was kept up to date on their beaus, their parties, their worries, and their clothes. Her warm rich laughter floated out over the office.
“She’s brilliant. She’s a whiz at her job. But I’ll get soft if I stay.”
“You’ll be going on to the Courier,” Betsy prophesied.
And that was exactly what happened.
“I can’t afford to pay you what you’re worth,” Mrs. Hawthorne told him when the campaign ended. “But my husband has a place for you now.”
To discuss this change, the Willards were invited to the Hawthornes’ for dinner. Betsy wore the dark maroon silk, dressed her hair with care, manicured her nails, added bracelets and perfume. Joe changed his tie twice, and they went out on the streetcar through a frigid December night.
The Hawthorne house stood on a corner. An arc light gleamed over the snowy lawn showing tall oak trees and a tall house with so many narrow gables that it seemed to rush up into points. Lights were pouring through the windows and a ringletted head peeked out of one.
Sally Day answered the door, wearing a reddish-brown velvet dress that matched her curls and eyes. Smiling elfishly, she drew them in and offered to play her new piano piece.
“Sally Day! Take their wraps!” Mrs. Hawthorne clapped reproving hands but the warm loving laugh Joe had described floated out over the hall.
Dinner was served by a maid in cap and apron. The atmosphere, however, was anything but formal. Mr. Hawthorne kept taking scraps of paper from his pockets, and reading aloud things he had liked and clipped or copied down. When he finished he would look around, eyes bright and eager behind his glasses.
He and Joe kept telling each other of books they ought to read, and Mr. Hawthorne kept jumping up to fetch books from the living room. At last he had a great stack beside his plate. He read aloud from Don Marquis, about archy and mehitabel, all through dessert.
Sally Day kept asking permission to play the new piece, and at last she, too, dashed into the living room, and played it. Returning to the table, she suggested that she dance.
“After a while, dear! Maybe Joe wants to walk on the ceiling.”
Sally Day turned to Joe. “You can’t!” she challenged.
After dinner, when Joe’s transfer to the Courier was being discussed, Mrs. Hawthorne turned to Betsy.
“It will be hard for me to fill Joe’s place,” she said. “Would you like to try? I know you write. You might enjoy working in a publicity office.”
Betsy was very pleased but her answer came promptly. “Oh, Mrs. Hawthorne, I know I’d love it! Joe has told me how delightful your office is. But, Mrs. Hawthorne, I already have a job.”
“You have?” She sounded surprised.
“Yes. And it’s important, and very hard. It’s learning how to keep house.”
Mrs. Hawthorne swept her arms around Betsy with laughter. “That’s the girl!” she said.
9
A Plot Is Hatched
BEFORE JOE BEGAN THE new job, he and Betsy went to see Aunt Ruth. Betsy found it exciting to be a married woman visiting her husband’s family—and Aunt Ruth was all the family Joe had. They were not related, really; her husband had been Joe’s father’s brother. But Joe had lived with them for several years after his mother’s death when he was twelve.
Snow was packed along the flat streets of little Butternut Center. It was only a handful of houses, a church, and the general store, Willard’s Emporium. Betsy had met Joe there, the summer before they started high school.
“You were eating an apple and reading a book the first time I saw you,” she said. “Jinks, you were handsome!”
She had come again when they were eighteen and beginning to fall in love.
“That was when I met Uncle Alvin and Aunt Ruth and Homer.” He was the clerk who now was helping Aunt Ruth run the store.
She lived above the store among fat chairs and sofas, all hung with old-fashioned tidies. The rooms were stuffily hot from a glowing pot-bellied stove. She was thin, gray-haired, with a kind, sad face. Betsy did not get very well acquainted with her, for Aunt Ruth and Joe were busy talking about people Betsy did not know.
Aunt Ruth cooked Joe’s favorite dishes, and she wiped her eyes while he ate, saying how proud Uncle Alvin had been of him. “Your going through college and all!” She depended on him, too; asked his advice about the store. Joe listened thoughtfully.
“It sounds to me as though the store’s pretty hard on you, Aunt Ruth. Homer wants to buy, you say. Why don’t you sell?”
“Maybe I will,” she answered. “I might go to California and get away from these cold winters. I have a niece out there.”
But she always changed her mind.
“No,” she would say, after a while. “I’ve lived in Butternut Center all my life. I was born here. And I think I’ll stay on.”
Christmas approached. The Willard apartment had a wreath in the snowy bay window. Mistletoe, tied to a small Santa Claus, swung in the doorway. There were hospitable dishes of candy and nuts about. There was even a small Christmas tree. But the heart of the holiday remained in the Ray house to which Joe and Betsy, laden with packages, tramped through a spectral Christmas Eve.
Joe had never seen a Ray Christmas before but he joined in with enthusiasm. After carols and reading beside a tree that glittered to the ceiling, Mr. Ray turned out the lights and everyone scrambled about, filling the socks and stockings that hung around the fire. In the morning, between grabs at a buffet breakfast, they pulled out their presents in uproarious gaiety.
Joe gave Betsy a cameo brooch. She pinned it ecstatically into the cherry-red bathrobe while Kismet lunged through tissue paper after catnip and Mr. Ray paraded with a cane his wife had given him.
“Now swing it like Joe do
es!” she commanded, and Mr. Ray marched up and down, eating a sausage and imitating Joe’s swagger way with a cane.
Canes were not so common in Minneapolis as they had been in Boston. Only Jimmy Cliff, among Joe’s fellow workers on the Courier, carried one. Joe described this young man delightedly. A reporter, he was also a poet—hugely stout, wearing loose easy clothes, a slouch hat, and a Windsor tie.
“A wonderful kid who’ll never grow up. He’s married, and wants us to come out to their house and talk writing.”
Meeting Jimmy Cliff was one of the few pleasant experiences Joe had had since returning to the Courier. He had been assigned to the courthouse—not a bad run, he said—but he had found trouble there.
Joe told Betsy about it cheerfully at first. The two rival reporters were older, and cronies. They made the rounds of the courthouse offices together, and had not suggested that he join them.
“In fact, they froze me out.”
Joe had not minded making the rounds alone, but he had found news sources equally difficult, especially one bearded official who was the political bellwether of the building.
“I don’t know what the old fellow has against me.”
“What could he have against you?” It was inconceivable to Betsy that anyone should dislike Joe.
“Plenty, evidently! He never gives me any news that isn’t already public property.”
In a few days an important courthouse story appeared on the front page of the two other newspapers. It was missing from the Courier. Joe was humiliated and ashamed.
“Hawthorne chewed me up,” he said.
“That nice Mr. Hawthorne?” Betsy cried in indignant astonishment.
“Friendship doesn’t hold him back when the paper is scooped, and it darn well shouldn’t!”
After this incident, Joe stopped talking about his work, and he cut Betsy short if she brought up the subject. She started to read all three newspapers, and one day she found that the Courier had missed another big courthouse story. It happened a third time.
Joe started coming home late, looking grim. He was almost always in the mood of intense concentration he had shown the day he was hunting for a job. Betsy knew he was trying desperately to solve his problem. She tiptoed about, trying not to disturb him.
One evening, in spite of herself, she chuckled out loud. She was reading a feature story on the front page of the Courier. It was only a paragraph long, but very funny—about a will that concerned seven Siamese cats. Joe looked up darkly, and she hastily grew sober.
But the next night she chuckled again, over a similar brief story about a suit filed by a party-goer who had been brought low by a two-inch femme fatale—his host’s daughter’s dolly.
“Who’s writing these?” She looked at Joe suspiciously. “They sound like you.”
“I’m writing ’em,” Joe said, but so glumly that she did not say more. She kept looking for the little features, though, and they kept on appearing, and a night came when Joe burst into the apartment, grinning from ear to ear. He handed her the Courier, and the biggest story on page one was a courthouse story signed by Joseph Willard.
“Darling!” Betsy hugged him, and he hugged her until she pulled away to sit down and read. “But how did you get it?”
He began to talk excitedly. “I was sunk. I couldn’t get any news, and Hawthorne kept chewing me up. So, trying to make up for the stories I was missing, I started spending hours in the document room. The other boys never go in there. It’s just a morgue for papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“Oh, papers filed by citizens having court troubles—complaints, countercomplaints, bills of particulars, suits for damages. You have to dig to find one with a story in it. And even when you’ve found one”—Joe looked mischievous—“you have to know how to put in the twist that makes it funny, or tragic, or heart-warming.”
“You have to write like Joe Willard!” said Betsy. “But you found those features there!”
“Yes, and Hawthorne played them up. And today came the pay-off. The other boys approached me, sweet as pie. The reason I hadn’t been getting all the news, they said, was that the old bellwether didn’t like me. He felt the paper had insulted his dignity by sending a kid to the courthouse. He didn’t like my way with words. He didn’t like my cane.
“‘But he isn’t a bad sort,’ the boys said. ‘You start making the rounds with us. When he sees you’re one of the gang, he’ll come around.’ And he did.” Joe thumped the paper. “He not only gave me this story—he started kidding me about my cane!”
“But those miserable reporters!” cried Betsy. “What brought about their change of heart?”
“Why, their city editors were chewing them up because they were missing the stories I’d dug out of the document room. Those boys are swell, really, Betsy. They just hadn’t seen any reason why they should drop in my lap news sources they’d spent years developing. But they see now, and they’ve smoothed things out for me, and naturally they’ve suggested that when I find a good story I might just tell them which document to look at.”
“And will you?”
“Of course.”
Betsy bounced. “A lot of good it will do them! They can’t write like Joe Willard! Oh, Joe, I’m so happy!”
She was very happy—because of his triumph, and because his low mood was gone. But although things went smoothly on the Courier after that, Joe’s low moods came back sometimes.
Betsy had known, of course, that he had low moods, just as he had high ones, but she had not known the low ones reached such subterranean depths. For a time they made her deeply anxious. Was she to blame? Did he regret his marriage? Not love her any more? But she knew that wasn’t true.
Joe, she came to realize, had a complex temperament, quite different from her own which was simple and easily understood. He had boundless courage. In a bad situation he always fought back. But he worried to a degree incomprehensible to Betsy.
He had told her he worried about money. That was why he wanted her to manage the budget. She found out now that he worried about his work, about his contacts with people.
It’s astonishing, when he’s so wonderful, she thought, trying with might and main to understand.
Perhaps his imagination was too vivid? He could invent too many possible bad happenings. Or perhaps being orphaned so young—those years of loneliness—had been harder on him than he knew?
When he was feeling gloomy he did not want to be praised or encouraged. He wanted to be let alone. All she could do, she decided, was what she did instinctively—show him always that she loved him and admired him and was proud of him.
And so she adjusted herself to Joe’s low moods.
“He’s probably adjusting himself to plenty of things about me. My cooking, for example.”
That was improving, and so was her ironing. At first, she felt sure, Joe had not dared to take off his coat in the office. But now she could manage those awkward collars and cuffs. She had almost stopped scorching. And as housework grew less demanding, she had more time for other things, especially—being Betsy—her writing.
It was good for her writing to be alone all day in the quiet apartment. Sometimes there were frost patterns on the windows, strange scenes that had never been created before and would never be created again. Sometimes a fierce, brilliant bluejay perched on their elm. After a snowfall blankets of white covered the boughs, the lawns, the rooftops. It was all clarity and purity, up and down Bow Street.
Betsy would stand looking out the window. Then she would get a tablet and some pencils and start a story.
In the evenings Joe read her stories and made suggestions for improving them. “Silver Hat” paid Marta for a month. Joe made up a plot, and Betsy wrote the story, and he rewrote it. “Mr. Forrester Leaves for Tibet,” signed by both of them, paid Marta for six weeks more. Joe started another. Betsy couldn’t help with that one; it was about a prize fight and she couldn’t understand it. But “The Uppercut” paid Marta tw
elve weeks into the future.
Joe and Betsy began to dream great dreams.
The dreams filled many evenings, which was well. If the budget was to operate—and it did, with the help of corn meal mush now and then—they could not go, as the Hutchinsons did, to the Symphony Orchestra concerts or, like Tib and her beaus, to the plays that came to the Metropolitan. They went to the stock company, sometimes, on passes picked up at the Courier, and to the movies to see long-curled Mary Pickford and that funny, sad man, Charlie Chaplin. But for the most part their lives were quiet, and Betsy was pleased when Tib called one morning and asked her downtown for lunch.
“There’s a cute new place. You telephone your order from the table.”
Betsy enjoyed dressing up in her Paris suit and hat, her high pearl-buttoned shoes and heavy coat. She took the streetcar downtown, and Nicollet Avenue was crowded, shop windows were exciting, and the new restaurant was gay.
Betsy arrived first, and heads turned when Tib came in, walking haughtily on her high heels. Perhaps because she was so diminutive, Tib affected a disdainful air. It was confusing, like so many things about her, for she was the soul of good nature.
Her dark coat sprang out below her tiny waist in fur-edged tiers. A fur cap sat on her sunrise hair.
“Mrs. Vernon Castle in person!” Betsy cried, for that goddess of the dance affected caps.
Tib gave her tickled little laugh. “Well,” she answered factually, “I’m going dancing after the store closes.”
“One of the Lausbub’n?”
“No, Fred.”
Her brother Fred was studying architecture at the University. A slender, fair-haired young man, he danced as beautifully as his sister did and often took her to his fraternity parties or a Thé Dansant.
When Tib had efficiently telephoned their order, Betsy asked, “What happened to the Lausbub’n?”
Tib gave her airy shrug. “Oh, they always find out that I’m not what they think I am. I could tell them in the first place. In fact, I try to. I’m not a flirt. The trouble is they never believe me.”