Betty Cavanna Page 10

  “‘With a hey-nonny-nonny and a hot-cha-cha!’”

  Rette had to yell; she had to bounce up and down on her bicycle seat; she was overflowing with exuberance, and she had to spill some of her excitement or burst.

  “So you had fun!”

  From the same spot long the airport fence where she had met him on that other Saturday came Jeff Chandler’s voice. Embarrassed that he had caught her acting like a youngster, Rette tried to cover her confusion with a flip retort.

  “Swell fun, but isn’t this where I came in?”

  Jeff laughed, bearing no malice. “Are my eyes green?” he asked. “They should be.”

  Suddenly Rette was contrite. “I’m sorry, Jeff. I wish it could have been both of us.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jeff said. “I saw you land. At least I think it was you. In a Cessna 120. Right?”

  “Right!” Rette’s eyes glowed, and she began to forget herself. “It’s difficult, Jeff, different from anything else in the world. I wish I could explain—”

  She found herself talking without restraint, because Jeff was really interested. He wasn’t just asking questions out of courtesy. He was as avid as she.

  It was wonderful, in her present mood, to have a good listener. Rette forgot that Jeff was one of the most popular boys in high school. She talked to him without self-consciousness, her words tumbling one over the other, her natural enthusiasm bubbling up like a spring.

  She dropped her bike on the grass and leaned against the fence and watched planes take off and come in, still talking about flying. Jeff talked too now. He knew things about airplanes, technical things, that were beyond Rette’s comprehension but still interesting to her. They chattered away like fast friends.

  Finally Jeff glanced at his wrist watch, then whistled. “It’s lunch time,” he said. “I thought I was getting hungry. Better be starting back to town.”

  “My family will think I’ve crashed,” Rette giggled as she picked up her bike. “Mother was all hepped up about feminine equality until I won the prize, but since yesterday she’s been treating me the way she treated Tony before he went off to the wars. As though I might never come back.”

  Jeff chuckled. “What about Tony? Was he surprised?”

  “He doesn’t know about the prize yet. He’s been off on a business trip since Thursday, but he’s getting home today.”

  “And Gramp?”

  “Pleased as Punch!” Rette said. “And a little jealous, I think. He’s afraid I won’t have enough time for our pinochle games.”

  They rode along in silence for a few minutes. Then Rette said: “Dad’s not too keen about it all. I guess he thinks that one flyer in a family is enough.”

  A truck roared toward them, and Rette and Jeff separated, one hugging the grass on one side of the macadam road, one on the other. When they met again the first houses of Avondale were in sight, and somehow the spell of the morning was broken. Rette was aware that her short hair was wind-whipped and untidy, and Jeff seemed in a hurry to get home.

  At the turn into Cherry Tree Road, Rette would have muttered a “‘By now,” and ridden off without stopping, but Jeff halted her with an unexpected question.

  “Who’re you going to the dance with tonight?” he asked.

  There was no way to dodge out of a clean admission. “I’m not going,” Rette told him, trying not to sound sullen. Gone was the exhilaration of the past hour. Her heart began to hammer and she felt as though, just on the verge of escape, she had fallen into a trap.

  “Not going?” Jeff was incredulous. “Oh, now say!” He braked, and his feet sawed the ground as he slipped off the seat of his bike.

  Rette didn’t reply. She wanted to get away, but she didn’t know how to do it. With acute personal torture she waited for his next remark.

  “But you can’t do that! Everybody’s going to be there. And after winning a prize and all.”

  Belligerence—Rette’s old defense—crept into her voice.

  “This is a free country,” she said. “I don’t have to go if I don’t want to.” Why can’t he see, she wondered? Why can’t he let me alone? She could almost hear the beat of her heart now; she could feel its overwrought pounding. Every additional word she said made her more unattractive and she knew it. But she couldn’t seem to help herself.

  Jeff still didn’t understand. With masculine impenetrability he heard only her words, not suspecting the secret they were covering. “You ought to be ashamed!” he shot back. “Where’s your school spirit, anyway?”

  Rette could feel tears of anger and frustration sting her eyelids. She kept her head lowered, so that Jeff wouldn’t see, and then, appallingly, a tear slipped over and slid down her cheek. Quick as a flash she turned, ready to mount her bike and ride off, no matter what impression she might leave behind her.

  But Jeff had seen. Rette heard the crash of his bicycle as he dropped it against the curb. In a second he was at her side.

  “Why heck!” he said. “Why, heck, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings! Gee, Rette! Why, gee whiz!”

  Awkwardly, he patted her on the back, and because he was contrite and sympathetic Rette was still further unnerved.

  “I—I don’t think you’re being fair,” she choked.

  “But you said—”

  Then suddenly a great light seemed to dawn for Jeff. He hesitated and, without finishing the sentence, dropped his hand. “Look,” he said, without meaning to add insult to injury, “why don’t you ride over to school with Elise and me?”

  Nothing could have dried Rette’s tears more quickly. In the most scathing tone she could muster she said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Then, without a backward glance, she rode off.

  It was hard to regain her self-possession in the two blocks that lay between the corner where she had left Jeff and her home. The family would be eagerly awaiting news of her flying lesson, and she had to be ready to satisfy them. But the spontaneous enthusiasm with which she would have burst into the house was gone now. It would be an effort to put up a front.

  She put her bike away properly in the garage, instead of dropping it by the driveway in her usual headlong fashion. Fearing that traces of tears still showed, she gave herself as much time as possible before she ran up the back steps to the kitchen door.

  She needn’t have taken such pains. Far from being the center of attention, Rette came into the house practically unnoticed. Her mother, in a flowered chambray apron, was tenderly sliding a freshly baked layer of cake onto a wire rack, and Tony was helping Ellen Alden make sandwiches, which seemed to be amusing Mr. Larkin, who was leaning against the doorjamb with a pipe in his mouth.

  Tony looked up and saw Loretta and said immediately: “Here, Small Fry, you take over. I’m no good at this sort of thing.”

  Mrs. Larkin said, “Hello, dear,” abstractedly as she bent to take a second layer of the cake from the oven, and Rette’s dad simply grinned and waved his pipe. “Your brother,” he said, “acts as though a bread knife were a grass whip. Look at those slices, will you? Just look.” Rette’s first reaction was to be offended at this lack of interest on her family’s part in her morning’s adventure. Then she remembered that she had told her mother and dad that she didn’t expect to go up in the air for her first lesson. She took over Tony’s job with assumed casualness, and only after the sandwiches were spread and the crusts cut off did she say, as though in passing. “By the way, Tony, did Mother tell you about the prize?”

  “Darling!” Mrs. Larkin was repentant. “Tony and Ellen just blew in, and I was so busy with this cake I forgot.” She turned to her son. “Rette won the essay contest—you know the one—and we’re all just puffed up with pride.”

  “Rette! Wonderful!” It was Ellen speaking, before Tony could say, “Gee, that’s swell!” The older girl put her arm around Loretta’s shoulders in a spontaneous hug of approval. Her eyes were bright with congratulation. “And you’re actually going to take flying lessons? Aren’t you simply thrilled?”

/>   “Flying lessons?” Tony’s eyebrows shot up.

  Mrs. Larkin flicked a pot holder against her son’s shoulder. “You never really listen any more,” she accused him, then glanced slyly at Ellen, who was suddenly absorbed in arranging the sandwiches on a plate. “The prize is a hundred-dollar block of flying lessons. Isn’t that something, for a girl sixteen?”

  “Well, say!” Tony’s surprise was evident. “It sure is!” He looked at Rette as though he were seeing her through new eyes. “When do you start, kid?”

  Rette said with dignity, “I have started, this morning.”

  At the same time a tremor seemed to pass across Mrs. Larkin’s shoulders. “I’m not sure I’m going to like it, when she actually gets in the air.”

  “I went up today,” Rette said, “in a Cessna. It was fun.”

  The understatement had the effect of rocking the family back on its several heels.

  “You went up?” Mrs. Larkin squealed. “Well, why didn’t you tell us? For heaven’s sake!”

  Rette’s dad chuckled. “She hasn’t had a chance.” Then, his voice holding a slight trace of anxiety, he asked quickly, “Was Mr. Irish along?”

  Loretta shook her head. “No. My instructor’s a girl. Pat Creatore, her name is.”

  “I’ve heard of her!” Ellen said. “She was a Wasp—a ferry-command pilot, I think.”

  “That’s right,” Rette was able to say. “She’s had almost three thousand hours in the air.”

  “Three thousand hours?” Mrs. Larkin asked. “Is it possible?”

  “Even probable,” Tony replied. “Some of the gals really piled ‘em up.”

  Almost shyly Ellen asked Rette, “Was it as exciting as you’d hoped?”

  “Exciting?” Rette pondered. Could that sweeping elation be called excitement? “I don’t know—It’s entirely different from anything I’ve ever done. And I was so busy!” she added. “I’ve never been so busy in my life.”

  Tony laughed out loud. “You’ll get over that,” he told her in big-brotherly fashion, “when the newness has worn off.” He picked up the plate of sandwiches and carried it in to the dining-room table as Ellen filled some glasses with milk and Mrs. Larkin started to ladle cream of tomato soup into white ironstone plates.

  “Will you get the bowl of salad out of the refrigerator, Rette?”

  One minute she was soaring through space, and the next she was obeying mundane instructions from her mother. Rette marveled at the complication of her life and wondered if Tony ever felt like two persons, instead of one. She carried the bowl in to the table, pulled up chairs, and sorted through the silver box to find the salad set, just as though it were the most natural thing in the world, but every gesture seemed to her astonishing and separate, and she couldn’t tell which was the real world, which the dream. She smiled at Ellen vaguely, bit into a sandwich, and said, “Mmm. Good!”

  It was while they were all still sitting at the lunch table that the phone rang. Tony, who was nearest the dining-room door, answered, and called, “Rette!”

  “Who is it?” Rette asked as she scraped back her chair.

  “I don’t know. A girl.”

  Of course it would be a girl. That went without saying. Rette blamed herself for a ridiculous and quickly stilled flutter of her heart. She went to the telephone, said, “Hello,” rather stolidly and then added, in some surprise, “Oh, Elise?”

  “How did you like your flying lesson?” Elise asked.

  “It was fun!” Rette told her, without attempting to convey the impossible.

  “I’ll bet! I want to hear all about it, but just now I’m in a tear.”

  That was nothing new. Elise was always in a tear, and Rette couldn’t help wondering whether she really did want to hear, or whether she was just saying so. But the thought was just a flash, here and gone, because Elise was racing on.

  “What I really called about was tonight. I wanted to know if you wouldn’t go over to the gym early with Jeff and Larry Carpenter and me. We’re renting a juke box, you know, and there’s that to see to, and Dora was going to take tickets but she’s in bed with the grippe and I thought maybe you’d fill in for her. I really need some help.”

  Her voice was so light and breathless over the wire that Rette had to listen carefully to catch every word, but gradually it dawned upon her that Elise, with admirable tact, was offering her a chance to go to the Senior Ball in Dora’s place and at the same time to save face by having a job to do. It would practically amount to a double date with Larry and Elise and Jeff. She wondered how much Jeff had had to do with this proposal and bit her lip, ready to flare up angrily at the mere possibility of being patronized.

  But Elise was hurrying on, still breathlessly, giving Rette no chance to refuse. “We’ll stop by for you about seven thirty if that’s all right. ‘By now. I’ve really got to run.”

  Rette was torn by conflicting emotions. On the one hand she was ashamed and embarrassed that Jeff must have interceded in her behalf; on the other hand her heart leaped at the thought of appearing at the party in her new guise as student pilot. She was aware that she had become, overnight, a kind of public figure in the eyes of the senior class, and that failure to appear would invite inevitable Monday-morning questions to which she had no convincing answers. She couldn’t just blurt out the truth: “I didn’t come to the party because I didn’t have a date.”

  In a split second, now, she had to decide what course to follow, whether to accept the cover of Elise’s fabrication, or whether to refuse the indignity of playing second fiddle to Dora Phillips and stick to her original contention that she considered class parties “dumb.”

  Weakly, she heard herself saying into the mouthpiece: “All right. I’ll be glad to help out if I can.” Then she put the receiver back into the cradle gently, making no noise, and stood by the telephone half despising herself for such frailty, half pleased that she would be going to the dance under the sponsorship of such a popular group.

  The sound of repartee floated in from the dining room, followed by Mrs. Larkin’s light-hearted laugh. I’ll have to press my plaid taffeta, Rette was thinking, and wash my hair. She glanced at her nails for the first time in days and frowned. She’d need a manicure too. Then she looked at the dock. It was already two thirty. The afternoon would be too short for all she had to do.

  Walking back to the dining room, to slip inconspicuously into her place, she couldn’t help wishing that she had a new dress. Practically all the girls got new frocks for the Senior Ball. Still, the taffeta wasn’t too bad. It had a low, round neck and the shortest of puffed sleeves, and the skirt was simply yards around. With Grandmother’s cameo locket strung on a velvet ribbon to set off the neckline—Rette reached for the last sandwich on the plate automatically and began to plan.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There’s no doubt about it, Rette decided as she stood before the mirror on the door of her bedroom closet, a long skirt certainly does something for a girl.

  She turned, and the skirt swished. She glanced over her shoulder, admiring its sweep. Then, in the mirror, she saw Gramp’s reflection. He was standing in the doorway, swaying back and forth on his heels, his hands behind him.

  “You look a great deal like your grandmother,” he said.

  Rette knew that he was paying her a supreme compliment. In Gramp’s eyes there had never been a girl so beautiful, never would be. There was something in the way the old man stood there, looking at her, that made Rette’s throat tighten and her eyes smart. She ran to him and threw her arms impulsively around his neck.

  “You’re sweet,” she said.

  Gramp held her off and looked at her again. “It’s a relief,” he said, changing his tone abruptly, “to see you in decent clothes for a change.” His nose wrinkled. “Those pants you wear—”

  Rette giggled. “They’re called bluejeans.”

  She went back to the mirror and repaired any possible damage to the powder on her nose. Once more she ran a comb through her
short hair, and once more wished it were long—shoulder-length like Elise’s, and blonde instead of brown.

  Under her grandfather’s admiring scrutiny, however, she felt attractive, and certainly more self-confident than usual.

  “You’ll be the belle of the ball,” Gramp said.

  Rette laughed. “Hardly that.” If she sounded cynical she had good reason, Loretta thought, considering the number of parties she had suffered through. All she hoped for the evening was that, due to the winning of the flying prize, she would not be too obviously neglected. Taking tickets would help fill in time until the dance was well under way. Then maybe everybody would be too busy to notice whether she stood on the side lines or repaired to the locker room more often than most.

  Downstairs the doorbell pealed, and Rette grabbed her coat off the bed. She had butterflies in her tummy in earnest now. She was more nervous than when she had stepped into the Cessna and buckled her safety belt, but in a different way.

  Both Jeff and Larry were standing in the living room, self-conscious and a little abashed, as in Rette’s experience boys always were before a party. Mrs. Larkin was valiantly making conversation when her daughter came down the stairs, but even her best efforts were unappreciated tonight.

  Rette was afraid that Larry might be resentful of the part he was unexpectedly playing. He was a tall boy, thin and fair-haired, with the reputation of being sophisticated, and she was consequently afraid of him. She didn’t meet his eyes as she murmured: “‘Lo, Jeff. Hello, Larry,” trying to keep her voice as light as her mother’s and overcome the tendency to sound gruff and boyish.

  “Hi,” Jeff greeted her hurriedly, while Larry jerked his head and muttered something unintelligible. “All set?

  “We’ve got to get going. Work to do!” He turned to Mrs. Larkin. “You’ll excuse us?”