Betsy-Tacy
Maud Hart Lovelace
Illustrated by Lois Lenski
To
BICK and MERIAN
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream…
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
1. Betsy Meets Tacy
2. Betsy’s Birthday Party
3. Supper on the Hill
4. The Piano Box
5. The First Day of School
6. The Milkman Story
7. Playing Paper Dolls
8. Easter Eggs
9. The Sand Store
10. Calling on Mrs. Benson
11. The Buggy Shed
12. Margaret
13. Mrs. Muller Comes to Call
14. Tib
Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a writer, and the younger I was the bigger the capital “W.” Back in Mankato I wrote stories in notebooks and illustrated them with pictures cut from magazines. When I was ten my father, I hope at not too great expense, had printed a booklet of my earliest rhymes. Soon after I started bombarding the magazines and sold my first story when I was eighteen.
For a long time now I have been happily absorbed in a succession of books for children, chiefly the Betsy-Tacy series. I began these by pure accident. Earlier, for many years, I wrote historical novels and there was a time when I would have told you I was unlikely ever to write anything else. The field delighted me. Especially, I loved the research involved.
I was well into my fourth novel when our daughter Merian was born—quite unexpectedly, because we had been married fourteen years. I finished that novel and wrote two more in collaboration with my husband. But I found myself less and less interested in inventing plots for adult readers. As Merian grew old enough to listen to stories, I loved to tell them to her and I found that most of them centered about my own happy childhood in Mankato. By the time she was seven, and my writer’s (now a small “w”) conscience was upbraiding me because I had not done a book for several years, I saw suddenly that I could make a book of the stories I was telling her.
The first of the Betsy-Tacy books resulted and ever since then I have written stories for children, most of them about Betsy who is, in some measure, myself. The Ray family is plainly the Hart family. I meet grandfathers now who tell me that they still remember my father’s onion sandwiches. It is a great joy to me to have that dear family between book covers.
I must make clear that these are books of fiction. Plots for them have been invented freely. But many—although not all—of the characters are based on real people.
This situation led me into a new kind of research. Letters began to fly. “Tacy,” “Tib,” “Carney,” and other close friends answered lists of questions from me about themselves and our doings when we were young. They drew diagrams of Mankato streets. (Mankato is the Deep Valley of the stories.) They sent old photographs of themselves and their relatives and their houses which Lois Lenski and Vera Neville enjoyed embodying in their delightful pictures. I dived into my own diaries and kodak books and memory books, while the New York Public Library—and later the Claremont libraries—helped out with old newspapers, old fashion magazines, collections of old popular songs, and Sears and Roebuck catalogues.
As our daughter grew up, so did Betsy, and there are now ten mainline Betsy-Tacy stories and three more in which Betsy appears. The letters from children which began with Betsy-Tacy flow into our mailbox and are a constant inducement to continue writing juvenile books.
1961
1
Betsy Meets Tacy
IT WAS difficult, later, to think of a time when Betsy and Tacy had not been friends. Hill Street came to regard them almost as one person. Betsy’s brown braids went with Tacy’s red curls, Betsy’s plump legs with Tacy’s spindly ones, to school and from school, up hill and down, on errands and in play. So that when Tacy had the mumps and Betsy was obliged to make her journeys alone, saucy boys teased her: “Where’s the cheese, apple pie?” “Where’s your mush, milk?” As though she didn’t feel lonesome enough already! And Hill Street knew when Sunday came, even without listening to the rolling bells, for Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly (whose parents attended different churches), set off down Hill Street separately, looking uncomfortable and strange.
But on this March afternoon, a month before Betsy’s fifth birthday, they did not know each other. They had not even seen each other, unless Betsy had glimpsed Tacy, without knowing her for Tacy, among the children of assorted sizes moving into the house across the street. Betsy had been kept in because of bad weather, and all day she had sat with her nose pasted to the pane. It was exciting beyond words to have a family with children moving into that house.
Hill Street was rightfully named. It ran straight up into a green hill and stopped. The name of the town was Deep Valley, and a town named Deep Valley naturally had plenty of hills. Betsy’s house, a small yellow cottage, was the last house on her side of Hill Street, and the rambling white house opposite was the last house on that side. So of course it was very important. And it had been empty ever since Betsy could remember.
“I hope whoever moves in will have children,” Betsy’s mother had said.
“Well, for Pete’s sake!” said Betsy’s father. “Hill Street is so full of children now that Old Mag has to watch out where she puts her feet down.”
“I know,” said Betsy’s mother. “There are plenty of children for Julia.” (Julia was Betsy’s sister, eight years old.) “And there are dozens of babies. But there isn’t one little girl just Betsy’s age. And that’s what I’m hoping will come to the house across the street.”
That was what Betsy hoped, too. And that was what she had been watching for all day as she sat at the dining room window. She was certain there must be such a little girl. There were girls of almost every size and boys to match, milling about the moving dray and in and out of the house. But she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t absolutely seen one.
She had watched all day, and now the dining room was getting dark. Julia had stopped practicing her music lesson, and Mrs. Ray had lighted the lamp in the kitchen.
The March snow lay cold and dirty outside the window, but the wind had died down, and the western sky, behind the house opposite, was stained with red.
The furniture had all been carried in, and the dray was gone. A light was shining in the house. Suddenly the front door opened, and a little girl ran out. She wore a hood beneath which long red ringlets spattered out above her coat. Her legs in their long black stockings were thin.
It was Tacy, although Betsy did not know it!
She ran first to the hitching block, and bounced there on her toes a minute, looking up at the sky and all around. Then she ran up the road to the point where it ended on the hill. Some long-gone person had placed a bench there. It commanded the view down Hill Street. The little girl climbed up on this bench and looked intently into the dusk.
“I know just how she feels,” thought Betsy with a throb. “This is her new home. She wants to see what it’s like.” She ran to her mother.
“Mamma!” she cried. “There’s the little girl my age. Please let me go out! Just a minute! Please!”
Mrs. Ray was moved by the entreaty. She looked out at the colored sky.
“It does seem to be clearing up,” she said. ??
?But you could only stay a minute. Do you want to go to the bother of putting on your things…”
“Oh, yes, yes!”
“Overshoes and mittens and everything?”
“Yes, really!”
Betsy flew to the closet, but she could not find her pussy hood. The mittens were twisted on the string inside her coat.
“Mamma! Help me! Please! She’ll be gone.”
“Help her, Julia,” called Betsy’s mother, and Julia helped, and at last the pussy hood was tied, and the coat buttoned, and the overshoes buckled, and the mittens pulled on.
Outside the air was fresh and cold. The street lamp had been lighted. It was exciting just to be out at this hour, even without the prospect of meeting the new little girl. But the new little girl still stood on the bench looking down the street.
Betsy ran toward her. She ran on the sidewalk as far as it went. Then she took to the frozen rutty road, and she had almost reached the bench when the little girl saw her.
“Hello!” called Betsy. “What’s your name?”
The other child made no answer. She jumped off the bench.
“Don’t go!” cried Betsy. “I’m coming.”
But the other child without a word began to run. She brushed past Betsy on her headlong flight down the hill. She ran like a frightened rabbit, and Betsy ran in pursuit.
“Wait! Wait!” Betsy panted as she ran. But the new child would not stop. On fleet, black-stockinged legs she ran, faster than Betsy could follow.
“Wait! Wait!” pleaded Betsy but the child did not turn her head. She gained her own lawn, floundered through the snow to her house.
The entrance to her house was through a storm shed. She ran into this and banged the door. The door had a pane of glass in the front, and through that pane she stared fearfully at Betsy.
Betsy stood still, winking back tears, a mittened finger in her mouth. At last she turned and trudged slowly back through the snowy dark to her house.
She had almost reached her porch when the door of the storm shed opened. The new little girl stuck out her head.
“Tacy!” she shouted.
“You needn’t call names!” Betsy shouted back. Tacy was shouting her own name, really. But it was such an odd one, Betsy didn’t understand.
She trudged on into the house.
The lamp hanging over the dining room table was lighted now. A delicious smell of fried potatoes floated from the kitchen. “Well,” her mother called out cheerfully. “Did you get acquainted?”
“What’s her name?” asked Julia.
“I don’t know. I don’t like her. I’m mad at her,” said Betsy. It was all she could do not to cry.
That was as near as Betsy and Tacy ever came to a quarrel. And of course it didn’t count. For they weren’t friends yet.
They began to be friends next month, in April, at Betsy’s birthday party.
2
Betsy’s Birthday Party
THE TIME in between was lost because of bad weather. It was filled with snowing and blowing, raining and sleeting. It seemed as though spring never would come. But up in the hills pasque flowers were lifting their purple heads; and down in the valley beside the frozen river, the willow twigs were yellow. Birds were back from the south, shivering red-winged blackbirds and bluebirds and robins. Betsy and Tacy peeped out their windows at them, and if they saw each other they made faces and pulled down the blinds.
However, when it came time to make out the list for Betsy’s birthday party, Betsy’s mother included Tacy.
“Of course we’ll invite the little girl from across the street,” she said. And she spoke to Julia. “Will you find out what her name is?”
For Julia, who was eight years old and went to school, was acquainted now with Tacy’s older sister. Katie was her name; she was eight, too.
Julia came home next day at noon and said, “Her name is Tacy.”
“Tacy!” said Betsy. “Tacy!”
She felt herself growing warm. She knew then for the first time that Tacy hadn’t been calling names when she put her head around the storm shed door, but had meant to say that she wanted to be friends after all.
“It’s an odd name,” said Mrs. Ray. “What does it stand for?”
“Anastacia. She’s Anna Anastacia.”
So Mrs. Ray wrote out the invitation, inviting Tacy to Betsy’s birthday party. She invited Katie, too, to be company for Julia. She invited fifteen boys and girls in all.
“I hope to goodness it will be nice weather,” said Betsy’s mother. “Then they can play out of doors.”
For the Ray house was small. But the sloping lawn was big, with maples and a butternut tree in front of the house, and behind it fruit trees and berry bushes and a garden, and Old Mag’s barn, and the shed where the carriage was kept.
It would be much more fun if they could play out of doors, Betsy thought.
She was excited about the party, for she had never had one before. And she was to wear her first silk dress. It was checked tan and pink, with lace around the neck and sleeves. Her mother had promised to take her hair out of braids for the party. She had promised to dress it in curls.
Sure enough, on the night before the party, after Julia and Betsy had had their baths in the tub set out before the kitchen fire, Betsy’s hair was rolled up on rags. There were curl-making bumps all over her head. And either because of the bumps or because the party was getting so near, Betsy could hardly sleep at all. She would wake up and think, “There’s going to be ice cream!” And then she’d go to sleep again. And then she’d wake up and think, “I wonder if Tacy will come.” And so it went, all night long. When she woke up finally it was morning, and the sun was shining so brightly that it had quite dried off the lawn, which had been free of snow for several days.
Betsy flew downstairs to breakfast.
“Dear me,” said her father, shaking his head when he saw her. “Betsy can’t have a party. She’s sick. Look how red her cheeks are! Look at those bumps that have come out on her head.”
Betsy’s father loved to joke. Of course there were bumps on her head, because the curls hadn’t been unwrapped. They weren’t unwrapped for hours, not until almost time for the party. Betsy’s hair didn’t take kindly to curls.
But her hair was good and curly when the rags were removed. It stood out in a soft brown fluff about her face, which was round with very red cheeks and a smile which showed teeth parted in the middle.
“When Betsy is happy,” her mother said, “she is happier than anyone else in the world.” Then she added, “And she’s almost always happy.”
She was happy today…although she had little shivers inside her for fear that Tacy wouldn’t come. The silk dress rustled beautifully over two starched petticoats which were buttoned to a muslin underwaist over woolen underwear. The legs of the underwear were folded tightly under her white party stockings and into the tops of her shoes. They made her legs look even chunkier than they were. She and Julia had hoped that their winter underwear would come off for the party. But their mother had said, “In April? Certainly not!”
At one minute after half-past two, the children started coming. Each one brought a birthday present which he gave to Betsy at the door. Each one said, “Happy birthday!” and Betsy said, “Thank you!” And one little boy who was named Tom said, “Let’th thppeak pietheth.” (He meant to say, “Let’s speak pieces,” but he couldn’t, because he had lost two teeth and the new ones weren’t in yet.)
Betsy kept waiting for Tacy to come. At last she saw her crossing the street, hanging on to Katie’s hand. Tacy held her head down, so that her long red ringlets almost covered her face. You could hardly see what she looked like.
She handed Betsy a package, looking down all the while. The present was a little glass pitcher with a gold painted rim. She wouldn’t look up when Betsy thanked her. She wouldn’t say, “Happy birthday!”
“She’s bashful,” Katie explained.
She certainly was bashful. She hung on
to Katie’s hand as though she were afraid she would be drowned if she let go. She wouldn’t join in any of the games. She wouldn’t even try to pin the tail on the donkey.
The sun shone warmly so that they could play their games on the lawn. Betsy’s mother gave prizes. To please the little boy named Tom she let them all speak pieces. He knew a piece…that was why he had been so anxious to have them spoken.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little thtar,” he said, his eyes shining like big brown stars.
But all the while Tacy kept her head snuggled against Katie’s arm.
At last Julia formed the children in a line. Betsy’s mother would play a march on the piano, she explained. Betsy, because she was the birthday child, could choose a partner and lead the line. They would march into the house for their refreshments.
The music started, and when Tacy heard the music she tossed back her curls a little. Betsy was sorry she had made that mistake about saying, “Don’t call names!” so she chose Tacy for her partner. And Betsy and Tacy took hold of hands and marched at the head of the line.
They marched around and around the house and in and out of the parlor and the back parlor. Betsy’s mother loved to play the piano; she came down hard and joyously on the keys. Every once in a while Tacy would look at Betsy sidewise through her curls. Her bright blue eyes were dancing in her little freckled face, as though to say, “Isn’t this fun?” They marched and they marched, and at last they were told to lead the way to the dining room. There the cake was shining with all its five candles, and a dish of ice cream was set out for every child.
Betsy kept hold of Tacy’s hand, and they sat down side by side. From that time on, at almost every party, you found Betsy and Tacy side by side.