Show 0 GINGER ROGERS DENNIS if JAMES Gladys Cooper by-SAM WOOD INSTALMENT NINE SYNOPSIS Kitty Foyl and a summer ot the and are invited by Rosty one ot the Stain Liner to him and kit at their place at Cape So at last Little though frightened to has the thrill of one of the she has dreamed Pop rather but befriended by has made a contact which it to prove of valne m later CHAPTER VIII You can't clean up all Uncle Elmer as he savaged over the trying to collect every stray leaf and twig and rubbish Hattie called it taking out He a permanent callus on his finger from using the clippers on the edge of the concrete The grass was trimmed as sharp as one of those corn belt Unless you've gone through a high school graduation you don't know how the world really can be cleaned up and regulated and shampooed to a What Nans some of those prairie folks would make if things happened that How they eat up mass doings with flags and silver and reassuring 1928 was the first class that had its whole four years in the new building and our graduation was a Maybe someone should write a his- Reminds me how I always had to explain to Wyn that Princeton didn't mean New Out that way there's only one They were our rival m debating and football and When the Princeton high school band went into uniform we nearly went crazy until we got one We had a girl drum major in silk shorts long before anybody else thought of it Seems but I really went to town on my Some ways I was a sort of both m Frankford with Pop and in at I had a I was a little outside of whai the crowd was sort of watching the game like what Mark Eisen calls a But I got interested in the work and had more than the 15 units needed for entrance at Uncle and Auntie offered to put me through college and old Pop was awfully Warming up for a high school graduation in Illinois would be good training for international I wonder if anyone takes Harvard and Yale commencements as hard as those kids do their diploma stuff in Manitou And were we the clerk of the Board of Education fell sick or something and we were handed dummy diplomas that hadn't been lettered just blank rolls of paper tied with and we were tipped off not to open them in Of course all the parents Kitty Foyle takes care of who is crippled with Cossart as Ginger Rogers as tory of those new high schools that were being all over the it would be That was the time the Real Estate Board figured the only serious problem was how everybody on Thanksgiving Avenue was going to have a two-car garage without making the street From Easter on all of us kids were caught in a rising flood of I wouldn't be surprised it's good for people to feel so we were regular little Molly and Peg and I were taken into a secret society that was under solemn pledge to elevate the tone of the female side of the schooL Fedor was editor of the senior and he made us work like We tramped the town digging up ads from the It was a thrill when Molly and I cracked down on the Mode in Paris and sold them a full page on the promise we would buy our graduation dresses Some of the girls who had fat legs tried to start a movement in favor of longer but it didn't get anywhere because of course they wouldn't admit what was worrying Part of the pledge was that before being initiated you had to say if you had done anything to damage the school Like a fool I took this seriously and when the committee hidden behind the screen asked me the question I admitted that at the Princeton game Freddie Unruh kissed me back of the I could hear them pretending to be shocked then they couldn't help laughing and said Shall we tell The point was that most of the kids in had been kissed by usually at Clubfoot which was his romantic I don't guess anybody east of the knows how much innocent kissing can be done in a field of tall except it tickles your the com We were all a pushover for Freddie who was our triple threat and in a He wasn't much threat in his he got the idea of wearing dark glasses because he said the light hurt his eyes but actually it was so he could lake a little nap in Latin He always carried a comb in his you could tell when he was awake because he'd run it through his Sheldon said if you'd comb the text as faithfully as you do your hair I could give you a belter Freddie didn t he was a star halfback and already had a scholarship offer from a State wanted to look at them as we stood at the reception and the kids had to make all sorts of Mr the grand old Latin vho knew about winked to me in private and said remember your diploma's a blank sheet of that's the most valuable suggestion in your whole I didn't quite know what he meant but I get it One of the tough spots was something you wouldn't Uncle Elmer was on the Board of Education and was to give out prizes so he had to wear his evening That was always a crisis because he needed a whole bathroom to himself for I don't know how He said he had to lie in soak in a hot tub for at least half an hour to get his beard soft enough to With Auntie in one bathroom and Uncle in the other there was hardly time enough for me to get dressed Auntie got peeved at last and started hammering on the going to be you or Uncle was in there mumbling to himself because he had to make a I think he was disappointed because I didn t get any of the But I was one of those who had to stand up when our names were read out as for High Moral I was never so All the graduates sat on a sort of grandstand built up on the None of us were used to such high heels and each girl as she stood up pretty nearly took a The pure and eloquent blood spoke that time all and I wondered ii Freddie was Uncle's speech was awful He had to get in something about Standing With Reluctant There weren't any reluctant feet when the Board of Education got through with us and the reception for parents and families was The gang got together out at Clubfoot Lake where they had a dance platform right by the water and were no longer responsible for community It was queer to feel all of a sudden to grown-up in our heads and yet so light on our Those wide swishy dresses do make your legs feel But it was really a very orderly hule somehow we felt the world hadn't changed as much as we thought it was going There was a fellow there from Peoria who bootlegged a jug of rum and we all had a shot in our which brightened us a bit The music in the pavilion was a big which tangled up every now and then with the mechanical piano in the Log Cabin Sometimes I'd sit out with while Molly was dancing and I told him she was the prettiest of the crowd because she hadn't had her shingled like most of I he is the way she parts it with that little bend in the middle oi the 1 hat's really I didn't tell Molly lias a couldn't part it 1 love it's so much a part oi herself and her We must run grooves in that Blue Room Dancing is wonderful training for it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he docs You find yourself laughing and sav having W ith the right kind of partner you don't have to you know with perfect move he'll make You know it sooner than he Clubfoot isn't much of a at least not by Eastern but there's a good-sized moon that rises over the icehouse and puts a yellow stripe across the water Freddie thought it would I nice to irn swimming and see if we could find where the moon really came but we had Fedor along and thai was always a good excuse for anything we didn't feel I will be sitting up for and he's getting wasn't the only one who was getting 1 could tell it in Pop by the way he crabbed l inn changes in The L Main were too much for but once and a while we'd get on a trolley car and make the long ride downtown for him to visit his I wish I'd listened more to things he I could have learned a lot about the old In hi cricketing days he associated so much with gentry and went around to the swell places like Bookbinder's and and he loved to remember some particular Fish-house Punch that laid them out in rows and w here to get Delaware shad and and those little pink oyster-crabs and the ing Terminal But like all kids my mind was mostly inside my own head and I was thinking about Molly and I kept up a big correspondence abou what we were going to do at college that Mac was married now ami living in he got a good opening in a big radio That was how we got a radio at trade we set it up in the kitchen and Pop would sit and listen for But he never got so he could do something else at the same and when he wanted to look over his cricket pictures or read the Ledger we had to turn it Also he said he missed hearing Myrtle sing to herself while she was I knew he was a bit shaky when he slowed down on whiskey and even got a kind of religious used to go round to Friends' been down a lot of back-alleys in my time but it's good to come back to Orthodox he He was great on the subject of the which was a That pleased him because h liked to remember the I used to trim up the back Pop was too rickety to do it There was a hot little corner down back of the 1 guess I was kind of I used to like to stand in there and get what 1 called the be-alone In the house I was all the time right up against Pop or Myrtle or somebody or You need that be-alone When I had it I didn't feel quite right about going back to maybe I ought to stay home and look after the old But he had set his heart on my getting a chance at Mac said he didn't think I ought to miss it Mac was in great shape that Come to think of he was just the same age I am and 1928 must have been a good year to be that age He married a who also had Even Pop liked Martha He said him and Martha would come over regularly to see Pop was O and of course Myrtle was there I didn't like the idea of Pop being alone at night but Mac said he could afford to get a phone put Mac figured that all business problems were Radio was red hot nd their machine he said was the Tin Lizzie of music Then I got that form letter from the Dean of Women at Prairie saying freshmen would report such and such a date for the week of Registration and Wyn always loved to have me tell about my College Because that week of Registration and and a purple felt was about all I got be Copyright 1939 by Morley |