Betty Cavanna Page 4

  “I haven’t. I’d like to.” Tony riffled the pages and paused at a chapter heading. “It’s supposed to be quite a book.”

  “The girl in the bookstore said it was sort of special. I didn’t know what to get—” Suddenly Rette found herself spilling over with words, with the things she had meant not to say. But Tony looked up, interested. “What girl in what bookstore?”

  “Downtown. She said she knew you.”

  “All the girls know Tony,” Mr. Larkin teased.

  “What was her name?” Tony asked, unperturbed.

  “I don’t know. She was dark, and looked as if she maybe ought to still be in college.” Rette wished she hadn’t dragged the book clerk into this.

  “Pretty?”

  “I guess so.” Rette wriggled. “She said she didn’t know you very well.”

  Tony snapped his fingers, remembering. “Ellen Alden, I’ll bet. I ought to look her up some time. She’s a nice gal.”

  Rette didn’t meet Tony’s eyes. She stared at her plate. “I’d like another piece of cake, please,” she said to her mother to change the subject. But when she began to eat it, the cake felt dry in her mouth. She was annoyed at the bookstore girl for walking in on Tony’s birthday dinner, even though she had introduced her herself.

  Because Rette was normally so brusque and casual, Tony was unaware that she felt let down. He continued to turn the pages of the book with interest for a few minutes, then slapped it shut and ran his hand over the jacket. “Thanks, Small Fry. This is swell.”

  Rette grunted an acknowledgment, glanced up and realized that her mother was aware of her discomposure. Embarrassed, she began talking again quickly. “You know the new airport they’re opening out on the Tisdale place—one of the men in charge there spoke at assembly today.”

  Both her father and Tony gave her their attention, but Gramp was slumped in an after-dinner doze.

  “His name was Stephen Irish,” Rette hurried on. “Do you know him, Tony?”

  Tony hesitated, but his dad prodded his flagging memory. “You know him and so do I. One of the boys in that big family out Mill Creek way. He was ahead of you in high school, Tony. Good-looking kid with a lot of drive. I think he flew a bomber in the war.”

  Tony’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Seems to me I know who you mean. Look as Irish as his name?”

  Rette nodded, amused at his description. “He has the Irish gift of gab too. He really sold that airport to the kids.”

  Tony looked curious. “What was the idea?”

  “The airport is sponsoring an essay contest, of all things,” Rette told her family. “The prize is pretty special—a course of flying lessons. Isn’t that something?”

  Tony caught his father’s eye in a man-to-man glance. “Must be a publicity-minded crowd.”

  “Tackling the youngsters who’ll be their future stock in trade,” agreed Mr. Larkin. “I suppose the older boys got all steamed up?”

  Rette nodded, then said hesitatingly, “I think girls can get in on it too.”

  “Heavens! I pity young Irish!” groaned her dad.

  Mrs. Larkin sprang to the defense of her sex. “I don’t see why you say that, George. Some women make very fine pilots. Look at all those ferry-command flyers during the war!”

  The men both laughed, and Nancy Larkin bridled. “Well!”

  Tony, sitting next to her, squeezed his mother’s arm affectionately, “You’d have made a cute little suffragette. Wouldn’t she, Dad?”

  George Larkin raised a militant fist. “Women’s rights!”

  His wife took the teasing good-naturedly, but nevertheless she turned to Rette for support. “Well, I just wish a girl would win the prize,” she said with a grin. “That would show them!”

  Gramp woke up. “Show them what?” he asked, afraid of missing something.

  “Show the men that women have got to be reckoned with,” explained his daughter.

  Gramp’s head dropped again. He mumbled, “That’s not news.”

  Rette laughed aloud, precipitately swept upward by the same sense of stimulation she had felt after the Claremont game. She pushed back her chair and dug her hands into the pockets of her jumper.

  “The subject of the essay’s sort of hard to make out. It’s ‘The Dream of Flying,’” she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Later that evening, Rette sat cross-legged on the hooked rug in front of her bedroom window seat. Surrounded by stacks of clippings, she was turning the pages of a big scrapbook when Tony, in pajamas and a maroon wool robe, wandered in.

  “For this time of night,” he said, “you look busy.”

  Loretta glanced up. “I wish I’d pasted up all this stuff as I went along,” she said. “Now it’s mixed up and I forget.”

  “What stuff?” Tony crouched and picked up a clipping.

  “The things that were printed about the 82nd. I kept a scrapbook. Don’t you remember? I showed it to you.”

  “Of course, I remember now.” Tony’s rejoinder was a little too quick to be convincing. “That was a swell thing for you to do.”

  “There isn’t much about flying, anyway,” Rette said. “I’d sort of hoped there was.”

  Tony looked incredulous. “Not much about flying? In clippings about the 82nd Airborne?”

  “I mean small-plane flying. Oh, there’s lots about paratroopers and gliders and stuff!”

  Tony picked up another clipping. “You really followed the boys, didn’t you, Rette? For a kid, that’s kind of amazing. From Casablanca to Berlin.”

  “That’s what I ought to call my scrapbook,” Rette said. “From Casablanca to Berlin.”

  Tony rocked back on his heels, his arms crossed on his knees. “It was a long haul,” he said. “Not many of ‘em made it.” Then, as though he suddenly realized what he was saying and regretted it, he stood up. “There’s a book out called the Saga of the All American. It tells the story of the Division in pictures. Someday I ought to look it up.”

  “You ought to buy a copy,” Rette said firmly. Her eyes twinkled and she added, “For your grandchildren.” She started to gather up the little piles of newspaper clippings, which were already growing brittle and yellow. My scrapbook will have turned to dust by then.”

  Tony ruffled Rette’s hair gently, the way her dad often did. “I wish I could have been a paratrooper for you, Baby. They were the real glamour guys of our war.”

  Rette’s chin lifted defensively. “I don’t think so at all. I think you liaison pilots did the most important job. After all, if it hadn’t been for you—”

  But Tony cut her off with a laugh. “Family loyalty’s a fine thing, but don’t overdo it,” he cautioned over his shoulder as he sauntered out of the room.

  Packing the rest of the clippings away, Rette came across a picture of a tiny Cub, the type of plane Tony had flown for the artillery. It looked scarcely bigger than a bird, photographed as it was with a long-range lens. She wondered how it felt to pilot a plane like that.

  Rette had flown just once, when she and her mother and dad had gone by United Air Lines to New York to meet Tony on his return from overseas. The big, four-motored plane had seemed impressive and powerful, but it was hard for Rette to think of it in the same terms as one of the light trainers that had taxied around the outskirts of each airfield like a flock of day-old chicks around a big mother hen.

  She wished she could get inside Tony’s mind, could know how he felt about flying. It was a subject on which he seemed utterly inarticulate—or perhaps, Rette thought, he was simply disinclined to discuss anything connected with the war. That could be the answer.

  She put the scrapbook back into the long drawer under the window seat and undressed slowly, trying to imagine what it would be like actually to sit behind the controls of a plane. She wondered whether she’d be scared. She didn’t think so. She planned what she would wear—slacks and a short coat. Then, with a shake of her shoulders, she mumbled, “I’m certainly putting the cart before the horse.” Bu
t after she was in bed, with the down quilt pulled high under her chin, she kept on dreaming—dreaming “with her eyes wide open”—just as her mother had said.

  So self-absorbed was she that Rette forgot, until she walked into her home room at school the next morning, that the date on the calendar had been turned to February 14. A single white envelope lay on the top of her desk, but two aisles away Elise Wynn was exclaiming over a pile of assorted missives.

  “I think valentines are silly, at our age,” Rette said to Margaret Lewis as she dropped into her seat. “Don’t you?”

  Margaret, much as she admired Rette’s athletic ability, refused to be bulldozed. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think they’re sort of fun.”

  Rette snorted, and glanced again toward Elise, around whose desk several of her friends were gathering. “Kid stuff,” Rette said.

  Yet curiosity made her open the sealed white envelope on her own desk before the assembly bell rang. Occasionally—and, Rette felt, absurdly—there surged in her heart the hope that she might have an unknown admirer. She secretly cherished the outside chance that someone—someone unidentifiable but very masculine—might think the boyish type of girl was appealing.

  But not today.

  The valentine, a cut-out of a girl with a basketball, was initialed quite openly “M.L.” It was from Margaret, of course—simply a friendly gesture. Rette could have bitten her tongue for what she had just said.

  Sheepishly she glanced at the girl across the aisle. “Golly, thanks. I’m sorry—”

  Margaret waved her hand in a gesture of negation. “Skip it.”

  “I pull the most awful boners.” Rette tried to laugh at herself.

  “We all do,” Margaret said. “I know how you feel about the valentines. It’s just one of those things.”

  Rette let it go at that, but Margaret didn’t really know how she felt, Rette thought, as she went to assembly. Margaret didn’t know that actually she was envious of Elise, that her scorn grew out of disappointment. It was something that, except when she was in a mood for self-castigation, she refused even to admit to herself. Usually she sought to convince herself that she was just different, that the interest most of the girls showed in boys was silly, or that actually she was a little superior to the common clay.

  But none of it was true. In her heart Rette knew that she was only making one excuse after another for a lack she felt deeply. Surreptitiously she watched the popular girls when they talked to boys. How were they different from her, she wondered? What did they do?

  Actually to Rette, they often seemed self-conscious and coy. She didn’t think their antics were too attractive, but the boys seemed to like them, and she would have been glad to copy their technique if only she could.

  But somehow Rette always missed the cue. She either talked too earnestly, or laughed too boisterously, or she became tongue-tied in the presence of a lone boy and couldn’t talk at all. Lately, she had given up her unsuccessful experiments and adopted a swaggering, I-don’t-care attitude, trying her level best to dismiss the entire subject of the opposite sex from her mind.

  Of course she might as well have tried to stop the sun from shining. Boys, like death and taxes, were in Avondale to stay. Rette met them at every turn of the high-school corridor. She sat beside them in classes. She rubbed elbows with them in the lunchroom.

  She even bumped smacked into Jeff Chandler as she turned into the principal’s anteroom, having finally gathered courage, during assembly, to stop in for her own copy of the contest rules.

  “Whoa!” Jeff backed off like a wary prize fighter.

  “I’m sorry.” Rette plunged past him, too embarrassed to apologize with a smile.

  She grabbed a sheet from the diminishing stack of mimeographed forms and turned to go out. Jeff was standing just where she had left him, reading the rules.

  He glanced up. “You aimin’ to sign your name to an essay, Rette?”

  Rette ducked her head and shrugged. “I just thought I’d like to see what it was all about.”

  “It’s a toughie,” Jeff said. “But, boy, would it be worth working for! That’s some prize.”

  “It is,” Rette agreed. “Why don’t you get busy and win it?”

  Jeff’s glance was level. “You’re good in English. Why don’t you?”

  Rette laughed shortly. “I don’t honestly think a girl will stand a chance.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Jeff replied. “It’s a free country.” He let Loretta go out of the door in front of him. “Elise Wynn and Judy Carter both claim they’re going to give it a whirl.”

  “Elise?” Astonishment was written on Rette’s face. She knew Judy was apt to tackle anything in a spirit of good-natured playfulness, but Elise—?

  “Why not?”

  “I’m just surprised,” Rette admitted. “I wouldn’t think Elise—”

  “Would have the guts to want to learn to fly?” Jeff finished the sentence for her.

  Rette didn’t want to seem disparaging. “I just meant—Elise never goes in for sports much—” She hesitated, ill at ease.

  Jeff grinned. “I understand flying takes brains, not brawn,” he said as he left Rette at the end of the corridor. Rette walked away from him rapidly, feeling muscular and inadept.

  Still, hard as she tried, she couldn’t quite believe that Elise would be seriously interested in taking flying les-sons. Could it be a bid for attention, Rette wondered. Was Elise simply planning to make a rather astute play to the only gallery she ever courted—the boys?

  Rette knew that it was an uncharitable question to raise, so she kept it to herself. But that afternoon, when she happened to sit next to Elise in art class, she kept looking at her covertly, and she was more than ever dubious. Elise had the delicacy of a Staffordshire figurine. Even the crayon sketch she was making at the art instructor’s behest was pastel and thin-lined—typical, Rette thought, of her personality. She sighed and looked down at her own robust effort in strong reds and browns, contrasting the two drawings as she had always contrasted their separate skills.

  Elise glanced at Rette, then at her drawing. “That’s good,” she said.

  Rette made a gesture of demurral. “It looks sort of slapdash next to yours,” she said honestly. Then, encouraged by Elise’s overture, she brought up the subject of the contest. “Jeff Chandler was telling me you’re going to submit an essay.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Elise seemed hesitant. “I was talking about it. But I’m not really very good at composition, you know.”

  This was an angle that hadn’t occurred to Rette, but now that she thought about it, she realized that math, not English, was Elise’s forte.

  “I didn’t even know you were interested in flying.”

  Elise picked up a blue crayon and returned to work on her drawing. “I am,” she said. “I guess it’s partly because of Daddy. He’s been keen on it for years. And now that his plant is making airplane parts, and he’s getting around to the big factories, he talks about aviation a lot. He makes it sound exciting and—well, sort of tempting. Like Mr. Irish.”

  Rette had met Mr. Wynn only once or twice, but she could imagine what Elise meant. He had Stephen Irish’s vigor, his forthrightness, his drive. Rette knew that Mr. Wynn had the reputation of being quite successful. Elise and her mother always had lovely clothes, and Mrs. Wynn drove her own car.

  Elise exchanged her blue crayon for a yellow one. “A couple of weeks ago.” she continued conversationally, “Jeff was over one night and he and Daddy got started on flying.” She smiled to herself, then looked up. “Jeff’s the boy who really ought to win the prize.”

  “Why?” Rette asked.

  “He’d get so much out of the flying lessons,” Elise said.

  The art teacher appeared at Rette’s shoulder, ready to offer criticism, and then went on to Elise. Conversation was impossible for the rest of the period, although Rette would have liked to pursue the subject. She put her drawing materials away thoughtfully,
deciding that Elise had showed considerable perception. Jeff Chandler always got a lot out of everything he did, from editing the Arrow to playing end on the varsity football team. Jeff was a versatile and intensely alive sort of boy.

  Loretta walked upstairs from the basement art room slowly, then paused at the bulletin board because a crowd of seniors were gathered around it, craning her neck in idle curiosity to see what was causing the crush.

  Judy, ducking out of the crowd from a position at center, told Rette the reason for the scrimmage. Everyone was signing up to go on a field trip to the airport. “With Mr. Irish the feature attraction.” Judy rolled her eyes.

  Rette waited around and added her name to the already long list. “A bus will leave at 3 P.M. from the main door on Monday, February 18,” read the notice. “All upperclassmen desiring to attend please sign here.”

  “At this rate, they’ll need two buses,” said Corky Adams, at Rette’s shoulder. “I can’t understand why so many girls are going. Can you?”

  Rette could, but she didn’t feel called upon to enlighten him. “Corky,” she said to confuse the issue further, “you’re positively out of this world.”

  Feeling pleasantly superior, Rette turned away, but the unaccustomed feeling didn’t last long. Mr. Scott, standing in the doorway of the empty math classroom, touched her on the arm.

  “Could you stop in and talk with me for a few minutes after school?” he asked.

  Rette’s nod was full of concern. She waited for the closing bell anxiously, and then walked with reluctant feet back to see Mr. Scott. He had a paper on the desk when she arrived, and his eyes, when he held it out to her, were grave.

  “It seems,” he said without a flicker of a smile, “that you have very little fundamental conception of what this is all about.”

  Rette didn’t have to glance at the paper to know that it was the math test, but her eyes automatically sought the grade at the top of the sheet. She might as well know the worst.

  The worst was very bad indeed—a round and staring “50.” Mr. Scott hadn’t even bothered to dignify it with the inevitable letter E.