BETSY AND JOE

(By Maud Hart Lovelace; see here, here, and here for previous installments in the series.) Against the usual backdrop of wholesome high-school fun (picnics, auto rides, football games, dances, movies at the Majestic, ice cream at Heinz’s, singing around the piano), abundant food porn (“cold ham and chicken, potato salad, green corn on the cob, baking powder biscuits, and plum cake,” a midnight snack of “milk, cold sausages, and part of a chocolate cake,” Christmas dinner with “four kinds of dessert—caramel ice cream, mince pie, fruit cake, and plum pudding,” a party spread of “ice cream and cake and cookies and jelly roll and soda pop and rye bread and egg salad and sausage and cheese,” a breakfast—breakfast!—of “coffee cake and a plateful of cookies, thickly sliced homemade bread, and a bowl of milk”), and baffling old-timey fashions (“serge bathing suits, trimmed with white braid around collars, sleeves, and skirts, long black stockings, laced bathing shoes, bandanas on their heads,” “a tweed suit with a brown velvet collar and a brown tricorn Gage hat,” “the pink chambray dress which was made in princesse style, long and close-fitting, with white rickrack braid,” a coveted opera cape of “pale blue broadcloth lined with white satin, trimmed with silk braid and gold and blue buttons,” “coquettish little mobcaps, trimmed with lace, flowers, or bows of ribbon,” “a pale blue picture hat with the sweeping pale blue plume”—and what the heck is a “cravenette”? I’m not even going to get into the mystifying hairstyles), change and adulthood loom large during Betsy’s senior year (Class of 1910, woot!). I think that’s why I never liked this book as much as the previous three when I was younger; I wanted to read about kids, not grown-ups, and wanted everything to stay the same, even though of course that wouldn’t make for much of a plot. Among the major developments: Betsy’s older sister, Julia, is studying opera in Europe; several members of the Crowd go off to college; Betsy finally wins that darn essay contest; and shy, uninterested-in-boys Tacy is wooed by 27-year-old salesman Mr. Kerr (a bit creepy when you remember she’s only 17, but things were different back then, and Kerr is a good guy; the plotline seems much sweeter to me now than it did when I was a preteen and 27 seemed incredibly old).

As the title suggests, the main event here is that Betsy is finally dating Joe Willard, who after three years of holding himself aloof from a normal social life has become class president, a star reporter for the town paper, and a fixture at the Ray house. At the same time, however, Tony Markham, Betsy’s freshman-year crush before they settled into a sibling-like friendship, has suddenly developed romantic feelings, and because Tony is always just on the verge of getting into wild and dangerous pursuits (he’s now hopping freight trains up to Minneapolis and threatening to drop out of school), Betsy leads him on to some extent, for fear of alienating him. Juggling two beaus is fun for a while, but then it leads to hurt feelings all around (Joe briefly dates the Crowd’s most alluring girl, Irma; Tony runs away to sing on Broadway; and Betsy is generally miserable) before Betsy and Joe eventually reconcile and end the book making plans for the future.

I continue to like Joe much more than I did as a kid, when fun Tony seemed like the more dashing option. Having mostly shed his Mr. Darcyesque pride from the earlier books, which was sexy while it lasted but would make for a frustrating boyfriend, Joe comes off as smart, funny, noble, and respectful of Betsy’s intellect, if a tad overidealized (it’s a mutual lovefest between Joe and Mr. Ray, for instance). Naturally, I’m going to be sympathetic to any relationship built on a love of books, so for me the moment where Betsy and Joe accidentally give each other the same Christmas present, a copy of As You Like It (apparently, back then, “It was proper for a boy to give a girl only books, flowers, or candy”), was perhaps the most romantic moment, even above the scene where Joe declares that he likes Betsy’s hair in its naturally straight style (significant because Betsy has spent the last four years obsessing over curling it every night; Betsy thinks, “If he had looked through all the poetry books in the world he couldn’t have found a better compliment to pay her”). Of course, it was also hard to suppress an “Awwwww” after reading this:

Then he kissed her. Betsy didn’t believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn’t mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.

This was the first of the books that I’d read in the awesome new editions, which include biographical information about Maud Hart Lovelace specific to each book. The most interesting thing that I learned about Betsy and Joe was that “Almost every character in the high school books, even the most minor, can be matched to an actual person living in Mankato in the early years of the twentieth century”—with one notable exception: Joe. Although Joe is based on Maud’s husband, Delos Lovelace, (a) Delos was two years younger than Maud, and (b) the couple didn’t meet until after high school, so everything about their academic rivalry and halting courtship is fictionalized (in reality, Maud’s opponents in the essay contents were other girls). However, Joe’s life and character are still based entirely on Delos’ background, so you can read the books as a romanticized if-only-we’d-met-earlier version of their relationship.