Betty Cavanna Page 11

  “Of course.” Always gracious, Mrs. Larkin waved them off, standing in the doorway and calling, “Have a good time!”

  Rette glanced back at her mother as at a safe haven. She experienced a moment of panic, when she wanted to bolt back to her room. But somehow she was at the door of the Carpenters’ shiny new Pontiac, and Jeff was handing her in one side while Larry crawled under the wheel on the other. Wedged between the two boys, Rette felt almost protected. She tried to settle back easily, as she’d watched other girls do. Larry turned, and started back down Cherry Tree Road toward the Wynns’.

  “Hear you’ve been up in the air already,” he said.

  Rette’s first flying lesson furnished a safe and interesting topic of conversation all the way to Elise’s house. Jeff guided the talk, but Rette hurried obediently along the roads he opened, feeling her tension slacken as he put her more and more at ease.

  “Shall I wait in the car?” she asked as Larry pulled into the Wynns’ drive.

  “Better come along in,” Jeff advised. “If Elise is ready, it’ll be the first time. When it comes to dressing for a party she’s a poke.”

  Upstairs and down, the Wynn house was ablaze with light. It was Mr. Wynn who opened the door to Jeff’s knock, saying, “Come in, come in,” as though he were annoyed at something, and standing back so that they could all troop into the broad center hall.

  Apparently it wasn’t only Elise who was dressing to go out, because Mr. Wynn was in a tuxedo, cut with precision to fit his short, stocky frame. Keen blue eyes inspected Loretta candidly. “You’re George Larkin’s daughter, aren’t you?” he asked.

  Rette remembered that once before, on one of their very occasional meetings, he had greeted her with the same remark, apparently seeing in Rette a strong family resemblance to her dad.

  “Yes, I am,” Rette said.

  “Read in the paper you’d won the flying prize Elise has been talking about. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” Rette hadn’t known that a notice had appeared in the newspaper, but to hear of it made her feel important. She mustered enough self-assurance to say to Mr. Wynn, “A girl you know is my instructor—Pat Creatore.”

  Unexpectedly Mr. Wynn’s right hand shot out and slapped Rette vigorously on the shoulder. “Best doggone instructor on the Atlantic seaboard, Patty is!” he cried. Then, as though this clinched the matter, “She taught me.”

  “I know.” Rette couldn’t help grinning at his enthusiasm. “She told me.”

  “You like her?” Mr. Wynn asked while the boys waited.

  “Very much.”

  “Sure!” Elise’s father approved. “She’s a great girl.”

  Then his sharp eyes narrowed and he seemed to be thinking. “The men in charge at Wings seem like a pretty good sort?”

  “I’d say so,” Rette replied. “Wouldn’t you, Jeff?”

  “Definitely,” Jeff agreed.

  “What are you flying?” Mr. Wynn asked Rette.

  “A Cessna.”

  “Like it?”

  “I’ve only been up once,” Rette said, “but you bet!”

  Mr. Wynn glanced toward the stairs, then at his watch, finally at Jeff. “Always late,” he grumbled. “Two slowest females in Avondale. Elise!” he bawled in a voice that vibrated against the walls.

  “Just a minute!” Elise called back from somewhere up-stairs. “I’ll be right there.” But it was a good five minutes before Elise and her mother came downstairs together, smiling and serene and unperturbed that they had kept anyone waiting.

  Mrs. Wynn wore a black dinner dress, slim and sophisticated, and Elise held up the skirts of a pink-and-white candy-striped taffeta, with a dust ruffle of vivid green. With her fair hair falling to her shoulders and her young shoulders creamy against the silk, Rette thought she looked more like a fashion model than a mere senior in Avondale High.

  Elise caught the glance of frank admiration and smiled at Rette. “You like it?” She whirled around, making the skirt flare. Then she laughed at her own conceit and wrinkled her nose at her audience. “It’s new,” she told them. “I just have to show it off.”

  Mr. Wynn grunted something intended to be appreciative as he helped his wife into her wrap and shrugged into a gabardine topcoat, but he didn’t really see the women’s clothes. “Elise,” he said as he picked up his hat from the hall table, “know who’s teaching your friend here to fly a plane? Patty Creatore.”

  “Pat?” Elise cried. “She’s wonderful! I’ve met her.”

  Mr. Wynn tapped his hat thoughtfully against his hand. Then he seemed to make a decision. “How’d you like a course of lessons for a graduation present, Lise?” he asked his daughter.

  Elise turned, her eyes widening, quite overcome. “Daddy! Do you mean it?”

  “Carter—” Mrs. Wynn started to protest, but her husband waved his hand imperiously.

  “Been thinking about this,” he said, “for quite a while. If Pat Creatore and Stephen Irish are both out at this new airport, that’s a good enough recommendation for me. And here’s a girl to talk flying with, besides. The time is ripe. You think it over, Lise, and if you want the lessons more than some folderol like a wrist watch or—or whatever girls get nowadays—you may as well begin next week.”

  Elise was so astonished that she couldn’t find adequate words in which to say thank you, but she crossed the hall with flying steps and flung her arms around her father’s short neck. Carter Wynn, pleased but a little embarrassed by such demonstrativeness, grinned at Rette and the boys over Elise’s shoulder and carelessly slapped his hat on the back of his head.

  “Let me go, Baby!” he told her boyishly. “Were late, and so are you kids.” He shook hands hastily with Jeff and Larry. “Have fun,” he called back over his shoulder as he followed his wife out of the door, “and get the girls home at a decent hour.”

  “We will,” Jeff told him. “And now let’s get going,” he suggested to Elise. “You can enthuse as we ride along.”

  Sitting on the back seat of the car beside Jeff, Elise kept saying: “I just can’t believe it. I never dreamed!” For the moment the surprise of her father’s offer overshadowed the coming party and everything else.

  Jeff was rather quiet, but Larry teased. “I can’t see you flying an airplane, Elise. If you want to go in for sports, why don’t you do something decorative? You’d be a knockout on an aquaplane.”

  “See you in the Sunday supplement,” Elise retorted, but her mind wasn’t really on the repartee. She sat with her hands clasped tightly around her little evening bag, looking like a Meissen figurine but with a light in her eyes that Rette recognized. Temporarily Elise had left them; she was living in a world of dreams.

  Her social conscience began to return as they approached the high school, however, and Elise walked up the broad stone steps beside Jeff, talking and laughing with her customary poise. With Rette, she went to the girls’ locker room to drop her coat and give her hair a final inspection. Then, just as they were about to turn away from the mirror, she caught Loretta’s eye.

  “You aren’t—mad?”

  “Mad?” Rette pretended to be nonplussed. “Why should I be?” Yet a nagging imp of jealousy belied her tone. She was ashamed of herself, but she couldn’t help feeling a little resentful that Elise should so neatly steal her thunder. It was natural that Rette should consider the flying lessons something special, something apart, something that was hers alone. And now she would have to share the thrill, the interest, the acclaim...

  “Daddy’s so—impulsive,” Elise said slowly. “When he wants to give me something he never thinks how it looks.”

  Rette knew that Elise was concerned because her father’s manner of making the gift might have seemed arrogant or self-important. But she didn’t try to reassure her. She just stood and waited for her to go on.

  Elise’s next words came as a surprise. “Jeff ought to try to get a job out at the airport, afternoons and Sundays,” she said firmly, her attention no longer di
rected toward Rette. “Maybe he could save enough money to take some flying lessons himself.” She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know! I’m all mixed up.” Then, noticing Rette’s puzzled expression, she added: “It doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should just have things handed to me. In comparison, Jeff has so little.” Abruptly, as though she had already said too much, Elise stopped.

  But Rette picked up the last word. “Little?” It seemed to her that Jeff Chandler had a great deal—a big position in the class, a way with girls like Elise, brains along with some very attractive brawn.

  Elise met Loretta’s eyes. “Jeff and his mother have a pretty rough time. You know his dad died years ago, and Mrs. Chandler does monogramming and fancy sewing for a big store in the city. Haven’t you ever met her? She’s awfully sweet.”

  Rette shook her head. She had never met Mrs. Chandler, nor had she realized that Jeff’s lot wasn’t easy. But Elise had explained a good many things—the reason Jeff had taken the tutoring job, the reason the flying prize would have meant so especially much. Come to think of it, too, Jeff had always worked on a grocery truck, summers. He became, seen in this new light, more real in Rette’s eyes, less a superior being. He had problems—different from hers, but still problems. She could understand him better now.

  Voices, raised in laughter, drifted through the swinging door. “Come on!” Elise said. “You’d better get out to the ticket table, Rette. People are beginning to come.”

  To be chained to the ticket table for a full hour and a half was a chore to which Dora Phillips would have submitted only because it gave her prestige as a member of the Senior Ball committee. But it suited Rette right down to the ground. It gave her something to do with her hands, and it used up the awkward part of the evening—the time when girls inevitably congregated in the locker room or in little knots in the gym, waiting for the party to get going without making much effort to start it off.

  Of course, now that they were seniors, there wasn’t the protracted period of horseplay to live through; the boys were older, more assured. It wasn’t necessary for a chaperone to round up the stragglers and blow a whistle for a Paul Jones. Elise and her helpers could be counted upon to see that things ran smoothly enough.

  Larry, with customary nonchalance, had disappeared the moment the girls had left their escorts to go into the locker room, and Rette didn’t see him all during the time she sat in the hall taking tickets and making change for the stragglers who were paying on the spot. When it became quite obvious that even late-comers had checked in, Rette stacked the tickets neatly in their box and prepared to close up shop, though she felt reluctant to join the noisy crowd in the gym.

  Suppose nobody asked her to dance? Oh, Jeff would get around to it, probably, because he had a certain obligation. And Corky Adams would want to hear about the flying lesson. But suppose Larry avoided her all evening, in payment for being practically forced to drag her along? He was capable of such treatment, Rette could believe. She frowned and shivered, feeling suddenly chilly in the empty hall.

  The gym doors opened, and Elise swished through, with Dick Sharp at her heels. “Why, Rette! What are you doing out here? I thought you had finished long ago!”

  Rette made a feeble excuse, embarrassed because she was afraid Elise suspected the real reason for her delay. “I was just coming,” she said. “But first I’ll have to drop this stuff in my locker, to be sure it’s safe.”

  In the locker room she dawdled, repowdering her nose, chatting with a couple of girls who wandered in. But eventually she had to go into the gymnasium, alone.

  She chose a time when there was a break in the music, and slipped through the swinging doors as inconspicuously as possible, sliding along the wall in search of some friend she could join. Couples were sauntering off the floor, and it was Judy Carter who hailed her, running forward with little bouncing steps.

  “Rette, I’ve got to talk to you! Isn’t it too divine about Elise? And she’s been telling me you’ve actual been flying a plane yourself. I want to hear all about it, but everything!”

  Judy’s partner trailed in her wake, interested too. It was a novelty in Avondale for a high-school girl to be learning to fly. And now that Elise Wynn planned to take it up, the interest had doubled. Several other heads turned at Judy’s cry, and before she knew it Rette was the center of a group.

  “But isn’t it hard?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Aren’t you scared—now tell the truth?”

  The girls’ questions seemed silly to Rette, but the boys asked sensible things.

  “Are you flying a Cub?”

  “Who’s your instructor?”

  “How many hours before you can solo?”

  Rette, hesitant for the first few moments, soon found herself talking as spontaneously as though she were at home. The girls were interested in emotion, the boys in action. And until Elise had actually done some flying, it was Rette Larkin who could give them the real low-down on some things they wanted to know.

  When the couples began to drift back to the floor Loretta knew a moment of panic. Suppose she were left all alone? But then Chet Currier, a boy with whom she had never exchanged more than half a dozen words, asked her to dance.

  Chet wasn’t a glamour guy, but he did nicely for a start. He danced rather heavily but with direction, so that Rette’s unfortunate tendency to lead was overcome by sheer force. With the next break in the music Chet delivered her back to the side lines, but Corky Adams was there waiting, and then, a little while later, Jeff Chandler came up with Larry in tow.

  By now Rette had sufficient self-confidence so that her recalcitrant escort failed to intimidate her. When he muttered the thought that they might as well dance, Loretta assented casually, looking neither pleased nor displeased. She hadn’t expected the world on a silver platter. She was getting through the evening without being a wallflower and that was enough.

  When he led her to the floor Larry was already looking around for a partner to succeed Rette. He took her in the circle of his long arms with bored condescension and languidly started to follow the music, trying none of the trick steps for which he was famous and which had earned him a reputation as one of the best dancers in Avondale High.

  Larry didn’t start a conversation, so Rette didn’t either. She refused to chatter like a silly magpie to a boy who was being supercilious and practically rude. But she did concentrate on her dancing. To the best of her ability she let herself relax, and, under the guidance of a really adroit partner, she found herself responding to the music as she never had before.

  Rette had the natural co-ordination, the ease of the born athlete. She could dance, given the opportunity, as she could do most other things that require balance and physical skill.

  “Say, you’re not bad,” Larry admitted after a few minutes.

  It was a backhanded compliment, but better than nothing. “You’re not bad yourself—only a little monotonous,’ Rette dared to return, with a grin to soften the barb.

  “Oh! So?” Immediately Larry led her through a series of steps that left her breathless. She laughed up at him without constraint now, her eyes sparkling.

  “Do that again,” she urged the boy. “That’s fun!”

  It wasn’t every girl who could follow Larry Carpenter when he improvised, and Rette wasn’t as smooth a dancer as Elise Wynn or Dora Phillips, but she was adequate.

  “Very adequate,” Larry told her when he left her. “We’ll try it again.”

  He was as good as his word. After Rette had danced with Jeff, and again with Corky, Larry came back and introduced her to still further variations in his technique. Finally he took her back to join Elise and her escort, and he wasn’t supercilious now, only faintly condescending, treating Loretta like a little girl in whom he had discovered an inclination that might be developed into a talent some day.

  Rette was actually surprised when it was time to go home. She was flushed and excited and prettier than usual, with her hair curling
in damp tendrils on her forehead and neck.

  When she was delivered at her door she thanked everyone warmly, directing her glance especially at Jeff.

  “I had a lovely time,” she said, and was surprised to find that she meant it.

  “Really, I did have a lovely time,” she told her mother a few minutes later, sitting on the edge of her bed in the darkened bedroom. “Larry Carpenter is a marvelous, dancer, and he showed me a lot of new steps.”

  Whispering, so that they wouldn’t wake Rette’s dad, the two discussed the party. Finally Mrs. Larkin reached out and patted her daughter’s hand. “You’d better run along now,” she said. “It’s pretty late.” Then, when Rette bent to kiss her, she added, “I’m glad you had fun.”

  And Loretta, humming softly as she went back to her own room, never remembered that just a week before she had insisted to her mother, “School dances are simply too dumb!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  During the next two weeks Rette discovered that there were two entirely different attitudes concerning the art of flying an airplane. Friends of the family met her on the street and questioned her with incredulity.

  “Don’t tell me you’re actually going to learn to fly? But aren’t you scared? Well, I don’t know—this younger generation—”

  Rette smiled and answered them with common courtesy. “It’s really lots of fun.”

  But she found that older people often considered her quite daring and that many of them were ready to insist that she was even foolhardy. More than one friend of her mother’s phoned and said: “Nancy, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. Why, Loretta’s just a baby! Of all the ridiculous things—”

  Mrs. Larkin and Mrs. Wynn clung together and managed to weather the storm of protest from conservative Avondale but the censure left scars. Rette’s mother began to watch her anxiously, and obviously wasn’t sorry when a week of April rain and fog forced both girls to cancel their flying lessons and remain safely on the ground.

  Out at the airport, however, the attitude toward flying a plane was completely reversed. It was something that a person did, just as one ate and slept and walked and drove a car. It wasn’t considered in the least unusual: it was the norm.