The Country Cousin

The Country Cousin

Betty Cavanna, il. Joseph Cellini (cover)

1967, William Morrow and Company

"You have this body in a raw silk right now," Eddie said of a sample he called a "very strong dress," apparently meaning it had been especially successful in the summer line. "Now we're doing it in a light-weight wool."

17-year-old Mindy Hubbard is disconsalate on her brother's wedding day. Jack, at 22, has always been her buddy and her shining star. Now, watching him move off into a new life, she's aware that it's past time she made her own mark. But how, stuck as she is on her family's beautiful but remote Berks County, PA farm?

The answer comes when a sympathetic cousin, Alix Moore, asks her to come stay and work at her dress shop, The Country Cousin, on Philadelphia's Main Line. Mindy, aware she's a little overweight, goes on a diet and sets in to learn the dress shop business. Through her mistakes and trips to New York City's garment district, Mindy learns quite a bit about the business of selling clothes, but it's through Bob, the friendly son of a dressmaker, that she realizes what she wants to do - design. He's also the first person to drop the name Parson's, and give the recent high school graduate an idea of where she'd like to further her education.

On the romance front, the newly svelte Mindy dates a bored but handsome Peter Knox, the son of a wealthy Main Line family who resents the idea of anything changing his beloved foxhunting region.

A dark, remarkably handsome boy with imperious eyebrows and the golden bloom of an early summer tan. Peter seemed aware that most girls thought him attractive, so he made no special effort to be charming, behaving correctly out of habit but barely concealing a deep-rooted ennui.

Mindy, while wistful over his good looks, quickly learns he's a jerk, but takes some convincing that shaggy-haired, bespectacled Dana is the right choice.

And here you have a perfect meeting of the old and new - the sixties hair and pseudo-intellectual glasses are overtaking the perfect physical specimen. Cavanna, you must admit, was game to change with the times. In her older books, Mindy would have wrinkled her nose at shaggy and gone tripping after Peter.

Minor quibbles - Mindy's unnervingly amiable at being told she's too fat by her cousin, and there's a feeble attempt to conceal the obvious nepotism of Alix just happening to choose her family member out of all the store's staff to go to Paris with her. If it's about family, just admit it, already.

About the Author

Cavanna grew up in southern New Jersey, attended Rutgers and worked for the Westminster Press in Philadelphia. The store in this book really did exist; The Country Cousin was a dress shop in Bryn Mawr and Strafford, PA, owned by Dorothy Lewis Lummis. The Bryn Mawr location closed down around 1996, according to the Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society History Quarterly Digital Archives.

Other Books

Accent On April

Almost Like Sisters

Angel On Skis

The Boy Next Door

A Breath Of Fresh Air

Fancy Free

Jenny Kimura

Mystery At Love's Creek

The Scarlet Sail

Passport To Romance

Stars In Her Eyes

A Time For Tenderness

Fashion note

The brand John Meyer is mentioned several times. This was a women's wear company based in Norwich, CT, and one of the places Perry Ellis worked.

Links

Merion Cricket Club (site of wedding reception)

Photo, exterior, Merion Cricket Club (clearly, the bride's family was not poor)

Parson's

Versailles

Two's Company (1951)

Two's Company

Betty Cavanna, il. Edward J. Smith

1951, The Westminster Press

Along the flat, straight road to Williamsburg the slender branches of Scotch broom were strung with flowers, but Claire Farrell, driving her new convertible slightly faster than the speed limit, saw only a blur of yellow.

18-year-old New Yorker Claire Farrell chases her winter boyfriend, actor Whit Bowden, south for the summer. He's appearing in a summer theatre near Williamsburg, and Claire has hastily invited herself to stay with her grandparents, who live in the town. Also living in their old Virginia home is summer boarder Philip Young, an architect working on the restoration, who Claire understandably dislikes from the moment he virtually carjacks her on the road to town. Over the course of the summer, Claire learns to slow down and appreciate more than her beautiful boyfriend.

Claire, a headstrong and somewhat bullying personality, isn't exactly appealing, but her struggles make her sympathetic. Her patrician old grandfather's opinion puts the reader firmly on her side.

"She's selfish," Claire's grandfather's heavy voice boomed. "Takes after me, takes after Gregory. The Farrells are all selfish. They want what they want when they want it. But it isn't becoming in a woman. She ought to be taught."

The other women in the book are, basically, women who have learned to appear unselfish. Grandmother, after a lifetime in Virginia, still retires to her bedroom to nap with a hanky over her face when it's hot - selfish, posing as delicate. Aunt Rosemary is sweet and quiet and retiring - and manages to attract and land a famous, wealthy movie director by book's end. Lida Belle, the Southern vixen and rival for Whit's affections, purrs like a kitten and bravely - if pointlessly - neglects to ask for assistance when she's hurt in a car accident.

Claire's a very strong, real character, unlike most of the others in the book, who tend to serve only as tests for the heroine. Claire draws enormous strength from her surroundings - her smart convertible, her good clothes, her own physical beauty - and is deflated when deprived of any of them. She consciously carries her own story around with her - Sophisticated New Yorker - and is very unhappy when anything disturbs her sense of that story. She's very realistic, if not always very pleasant.

But to chug out the Jamestown Road in Philip's decrepit automobile destroyed something of the effect she had planned. She couldn't conjure up the feeling which usually sustained her - that she was a sophisicated young New Yorker down here on holiday. For all anyone could tell she might be just another Williamsburg girl out with her beau. The convertible had been desirable. Without it, Claire felt uncomfortable and even chagrined.

As usual, Cavanna's sense of place is strong. She paints a vivid portrait of a southern summer before air-conditioning:

All over the house blinds were drawn against the heat, which nevertheless lay like a blanket over each and every room, smothering the house as it did the town.

And she evokes a sense of the old Colonial village at the heart of Williamsburg, an atmosphere of brick sidewalks shaded by old trees that lies at the heart of many East Coast towns and cities.

Pulling the car off the road to a stretch of grass which bordered the worn brick sidewalk, Claire parked close to the gnarled paper mulberry which was one of her earliest recollections of Williamsburg. The mimosa and the paper mulberry - these two - spelled the house off Prince George Street to her. They had always stood sentinel in her mind to a quaint, out-of-this-world existence which brushed her life only briefly at irregular intervals.

Anachronisms

Apart from the gender issues and pre-central air era mentioned above, there is a black maid/cook given the standard servant treatment, and a fairly scary car accident in which it is all too obvious that this is an era before seat belts.

Claire realized that her head had hit the windshield with a thud, but for the first few instants she was too dazed to feel anything but relief that none of the three of them had been thrown completely out.

Links

William & Mary Lake Matoaka Amphitheatr

Colonial Williamsburg

Angel On Skis
Betty Cavanna
1957

Then, as Angela leaned foward, testing the sensation of crouching, she felt herself take off downhill. Instinctively she did the right thing. She kept her ankles bent, her skis parallel, the tips together. She was moving fast for one wonderful moment, and then she saw a snowbank looming ahead and toppled sideways as she tried to swerve. One ski stuck up in the air; the other raced downhill without her, but it didn't matter. She lay in the snow and smiled up at the unblinking moon.

Angela Dodge's mother has moved her and her little brother Chip from Philadelphia to a village in Vermont after their father's death in a plane crash reveals the family's precarious finances. All three are struggling to make a success of their new inn, which caters to the winter skiers. A chance encounter with a local boy and a pair of broken skis interests the restless, athletic Angela in skiing, and she sets out with single-minded obsesion to learn the sport. But it's an expensive pasttime, winter afternoons are short and she's needed at the inn. Can Angela juggle her ambitions, so like her father's, and her responsibilities to her family? And can she really interest both local boy Dave and college guy Gregg?

And instinctively, she knew how to react. Lowering her lashes, she murmured in a voice with just a suggestion of Ellen Whipple's purr, "You don't have to do a thing you don't want to, Dave, but I'd be awfully thrilled."

Well, it is Cavanna so you knew there'd be a romance there. Angela is one of her most modern heroines - ambitious, driven, athletic in a way that could lead to the Olympics instead of to healthy young motherhood. And Angela, unlike most of Cavanna's heroines, is not just the recipient of lucky kindness on the parts of others, she's often the architect of her own good luck. She is, in short, an operator. Cavanna's earlier characters had pluck; Angela has chutzpah. But in the end, Angela is still a Cavanna creation - at one point she wonders which is better, to compete herself or watch Gregg compete, and the last word in the book belongs to Gregg.

Cavanna also manages to include her animals - Angela's new friend loves horses and riding as Angela loves skis and ski'ing, and her little brother Chip adopts an Irish Setter puppy named Christie.

Settting
Vermont

Editions
1988, Troll Books, cover il. Isabel Dawson (shown)