Sincerely, Willis Wayde Read online

  “This is Claude Little,” Laura was saying, and there was Claude Little, who was the syndicated columnist today, a very interesting man and a good contact in Washington.

  There must have been a dozen others—graduate students working for their doctorates and others in the Law and Medical Schools. There was Roy Fitzroy, for instance, who later became an authority on nutrition, and Hank Parkinson, who ended up in the Manhattan Project. They all looked uneasily at Willis when they heard he came from the Harvard Business School, but they were very interesting contacts, and it paid to know how to get on with this type of person.

  “Supper’s ready,” he heard Sylvia calling.

  There was chicken salad and cocoa and prune soufflé in the dining room, and everyone seemed hungry except Bill Harcourt.

  After supper everyone drew lots for a team to do the dishes. Willis was on the team with Bill Harcourt and Hunter Baxter and Laura. Although Willis was not used to the routine, he was good at doing dishes, and everyone began looking at him approvingly.

  While the team worked, Willis could hear calls from the parlor for Red Flyrood to get out his guitar and sing some Western songs, and Red sang “Home on the Range” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” in a voice loud enough to be clearly heard at the kitchen sink. When he began to sing about the caissons rolling along, Laura asked Willis if he would mind going to her father’s study across the hall to get the dishes there. Mr. and Mrs. Hodges always had their supper alone in the study.

  “Well, well,” Mr. Hodges said. He was sitting behind his desk with a pile of manuscript in front of him. “Would you mind closing the door so I won’t have to hear Mr. Flyrood quite so clearly?”

  “Now, Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “the young people are having a good time, and it’s very sweet of Mr. Wayde to enter in.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Hodges said. “Yes, Martha. Did you ever take a course in geology, Mr. Wayde?”

  “No, sir,” Willis told him.

  “It’s a pity,” Mr. Hodges said. “It’s very good for the soul.”

  “Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “Mr. Wayde is busy with the dishes.”

  “Yes, Martha,” Mr. Hodges said. “On an evening like this it’s pleasant to think of geological time. It’s reassuring, to me at least, to realize that our lives are only a fraction of a second in that scale. I wish we lived back in the Devonian era with the ganoids.”

  “Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “Mr. Wayde isn’t interested. Sylvia tells me you went to school with Mr. Decker, Mr. Wayde.”

  “Yes, that’s so, Mrs. Hodges,” Willis said.

  Mrs. Hodges smoothed her dress.

  “I’m sure Stephen was very popular,” she said.

  “Who’s popular?” Mr. Hodges asked.

  “Stephen Decker, Homer. He went to school with Mr. Wayde.”

  “I really can’t see what Sylvia …” Mr. Hodges began, but Mrs. Hodges raised her voice.

  “We mustn’t keep Mr. Wayde any longer,” she said. “They’re waiting for him in the kitchen.”

  It was surprising how quickly they got the dishes done, and when they were all back in the parlor Simeon Flyrood wanted to sing “Danny Dever” but Sylvia stopped him.

  “We’re going to choose teams now,” Sylvia said. “I’ll take one team and Tom will take the other. I choose Steve Decker. Pass the pencils and papers, Laura.” Willis, too, was on Sylvia’s team, and the first thing they did was to write down in two minutes all the rivers they could remember beginning with the letter “M.” It was still pleasant for Willis to recall that he had turned up with the largest number and that he had also come up with the longest list of Roman emperors in their proper chronological order.

  You could not help but feel a warm glow of satisfaction when you did well at anything. Sylvia really noticed him when he remembered all the emperors, and she looked sorry when Bill Harcourt said they really had to go. He didn’t want to break anything up. They were having a wonderful time, but he did have a lot of studying to do. Sylvia went with them to the hall and stood talking to them while they looked for their overshoes and coats.

  “You must be sure to come back again,” she said, “and thanks for winning with the emperors, Mr. Wayde.”

  She looked at him questioningly, and he knew she was asking him whether he had not had a good time, and he knew that she hoped he had.

  “And thanks for helping with the dishes,” Sylvia said. “I told you it was just an informal pickup supper. Now be sure to come again.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Bill Harcourt said, when they were outside on Craigie Street, “I really didn’t know I was getting you into anything like that. I guess the old man’s right when he says you know how to get on with people.”

  There was no reason for Bill Harcourt to apologize. If Willis had said that he had enjoyed the party, he knew that Bill would not have believed him, and perhaps Willis had not actually enjoyed it, and he was not sure that Sylvia had really enjoyed the party either. He was not sure that she had even liked the pencil-and-paper games, but she had wanted him to come back again and she had known that Bill Harcourt never would. Willis never ventured to tell Bill that he went back to Craigie Street again the next Sunday.

  During the winter and spring when they first met, Sylvia had been very obviously in love with Steve Decker, and all she had wanted of Willis was to talk about Steve in an awkward sort of way. Willis would never have gone for walks with Sylvia around Fresh Pond or have been Sylvia’s harmless confidant if Bess Harcourt had been different, but then she had not been. One sad thing about being young was that you did not have the sense developed by later experience, and when you finally did gain that sense and understood a few principles regarding the workings of a woman’s mind, it was too late to use them, because you had been caught years before in the emotional meshes of natural selection. You could listen to the advice of your elders—and sometimes, perhaps, basically approve, but the only way you could acquire experience was by experience itself. Willis had listened to what his father had told him about reciprocating girls and about playing around with girls in one’s own group and had only thought that the old man was a lovable but deluded old character. Now he could see of course that the old man had been perfectly right—now that it was all too late. He could only blame his own ambition that had always made him interested in girls from the right side of the tracks, not that he did not detest the expression.

  VIII

  The summer preceding the winter that Willis had met Sylvia had been one of the happiest of his life. He had completed his first year at the Harvard School of Business Administration as one of the top men of his class. He was being trained as an executive assistant to Mr. Henry Harcourt, a new position created with the approval of the managerial firm of Beakney-Graham, who were making recommendations for the personnel reorganization of the Harcourt Mill; and he had been assigned a private room adjoining Mr. Harcourt’s office, with a buzzer on his table so that Mr. Harcourt could call him.

  It had been a busy summer at the Harcourt Mill, and an uncertain one for many people, a summer of hiring and firing that bewildered many older employees. Mr. Bryson Harcourt was one of those who could not understand the reason for so many radical changes, but Willis had always got on well with Mr. Bryson.

  “I’ll say one thing,” Mr. Bryson had told him. “Frankly I was appalled when Father told me about the plans he had for you, but you’ve made good, Willis. I know you’re going to be a great help to Father and the rest of us. You’re a friend of the family now, and I know you’re loyal, Willis.”

  As far as warmheartedness and generosity went, there never was anything wrong about Mr. Bryson Harcourt. There were a lot of intangibles one could buy, such as technical skill, but loyalty was a commodity that varied with each individual. The Harcourts did not need to buy Willis’s loyalty.

  When he had come under Mr. Henry Harcourt’s personal supervision, Willis could not help but see that he was regarded in a new light by everyone in the plant. The wor
kmen he had always known were as friendly to him as ever. Labor, he was to learn later, seldom could be made to take an interest in management; but it was different in the office, where people he had known through many summers now gave him appraising, suspicious looks. Willis could sympathize, because he had been pushed forward above the heads of many who had been working there for years. He knew that Mr. Briggs in the sales department disapproved of his promotion. Mr. Briggs had told him that he had worked at Harcourt for fifteen years before he had been pulled off the road to be assistant sales manager. You worked your way up from the bottom in those days, and the way to learn business was doing business, instead of studying at some school. Mr. Hewett had a more generous attitude, perhaps because he knew that his days at the mill were almost over. Mr. Hewett often told Willis to watch this or that, because Willis might be in his shoes some day. He spoke only half seriously, and Willis was under no illusions, since it would obviously be years before he could ever manage Harcourt’s.

  His father’s attitude was what disturbed Willis most.

  “Son,” his father said one evening, “I had a friend once, out in San Francisco. We’d been working together building dams for Pacific Gas and Electric, and then he joined up with Standard Oil. I remember when he took the boat to China. We had quite a lot of drinks the night before, telling each other what we were going to do, because we were pretty young then, and kids all want to be American heroes. Now I suppose you want to be one too, but I don’t any more. It’s hard enough to try to be what you are. Well, anyway, I stood on the pier seeing Bill off, and I had quite a head that morning. I was there quite a while watching the ship pull out, seeing it get smaller, and I knew Bill was going somewhere I wasn’t ever. Well, it’s the same with you. Only just remember this one thing. Every now and then take a look at yourself, and try to be sure where the hell you’re going. I can’t tell you because I wouldn’t know.”

  Willis always remembered that expression, and he often quoted it afterwards—take a look at yourself and be sure where you’re going. It might have been a good thing if he had taken more of a look at himself that summer, but when you’re young, you simply go.

  His mother felt, too, that she was standing on a pier watching him move away. Alfred Wayde had been working on the model of a new impregnating machine that summer, the patents for which eventually became the property of the Harcourt Mill and were a projection of the Klaus patents and the Klaus methods. He was constructing his small working model in the cellar, where he had installed a formidable line of machine tools, some borrowed from the mill machine shop and some bought with his own savings. It was his habit that summer to go down cellar directly after supper and work for several hours, so that when Willis and his mother sat in the upstairs parlor, they could hear the whirring of the lathe and Alfred Wayde’s footsteps on the concrete floor and occasionally the muffled sound of swearing. His mother, while she darned the socks and sewed buttons on the shirts, often said she was sure that she did not know what Willis’s father was doing, but it was all to the good, because he was never restless when he was working on machinery. She hoped that Willis would always remember that his father was a sort of genius like Eli Whitney, or Mr. Henry Ford. She knew that Alfred could have invented a horseless buggy himself, if that sort of thing had ever interested him. His one trouble was that he was restless.

  It was hard for her sometimes to think that Willis was all grown-up and was doing so well. She only wished that Willis had time to see more young people, but she knew he was working very hard. She wished that Willis would not see so much of Bess and Bill Harcourt, or not quite so much, although she did not mean that Bess was not a nice young girl, but sometimes she was afraid the Harcourts were making use of Willis.

  She hoped that Willis remembered the old days, when he was five or six or ten. Did he remember the winter they had spent in Steamboat Springs in Colorado? She wished the air here in Massachusetts were more like Colorado. Did Willis remember the little Navajo Indian boy he had played with in New Mexico? And the adobe schoolhouse where he had gone one winter? Did Willis remember the summers they had spent at Grandfather’s farm in Kansas and what a fine man his grandfather was? Did he remember his aunt and his cousins and those Sunday dinners when everyone had too much to eat? Of course Willis did remember. He remembered the summer heat that everyone always said was so good for growing corn, and he remembered the white-faced steers being fattened for the market, and his grandfather carrying buckets to the pigpen, but it was all a very long while ago. His childhood seemed longer than a lifetime.

  Well, Willis was all grown-up now, his mother said. He was all through college now, and she was proud that Mr. Harcourt thought so much of him. She had been very worried when Willis had accepted that loan from Mr. Harcourt to go to the Harvard Business School, but now she could see that Willis had been right. After all, that three thousand dollars had been a loan, and she knew that Willis would not forget it. It was fortunate, perhaps, that her father had died during Willis’s first year in Business School. When the farm was sold in Kansas, she had planned to give Willis some of her share of the money to pay off the loan, and this was exactly what she did, and it was something to remember that he had paid off every cent of that loan to Mr. Harcourt before he died, with interest at six per cent.

  There was certainly no reason for his mother to have worried about Bess that summer. Bess had come out the winter before at a large ball at the Copley-Plaza, and though Willis had been invited, he had not gone, and that summer she had nearly always been away somewhere. Thus Willis had only an occasional glimpse of her, and even then Bess was always with other friends, playing tennis or sitting around the swimming pool. She was a debutante, she said, and for a few months everyone rushed you and invited you to so many parties that you were a physical wreck. Willis must realize to look at her that being a debutante was terrible—no sleep, big dinners and whirls around the dance floor with all sorts of men about whom you cared nothing at all but to whom you had to be especially nice or else they would not dance with you. Then you were a faded, broken blossom after a year of it and the stag line paid no attention to you any more, and Bess could not wait until she was a broken blossom. Then she and Willis would see as much of each other as they had before—and everything. She knew that Willis understood and she was glad that he was so understanding.

  Her activities did not matter very much to Willis that summer, because he was going through a critical part of his development. He was emerging from the stage of taking orders to giving them, or at least of transmitting some of Mr. Harcourt’s orders and seeing that they were carried out; and it was necessary to do this tactfully, without offense.

  Actually Bess had hardly any time to see him for more than a moment until late in August. He never expected she would call him at the mill, and he still recalled the intense pleasure he felt when the telephone on his table rang and he heard her voice. It was just after four o’clock one Saturday, and the office building was already deserted and everything was quiet outside because the machines had stopped at noon. Mr. Harcourt had left at noon himself and had told Willis to leave as soon as he had finished his work.

  “I am feeling my age today,” Mr. Harcourt had said. “I’m going to look at the swans and take a walk along the brook, and then do nothing all Sunday except lunch with Mrs. Harcourt. Just finish that digest on Vultex. I’ll need it the first thing on Monday morning. The Meader people are sending over a man from Providence.”

  Harcourt Vultex, which Willis had helped Mr. Harcourt to christen, was a new addition to the Harcourt line. It was a conveyor belt designed by the engineering department to meet demands of food-processing factories, and it had only the week before been placed in full production. The sales department had been asked for a popularized description and Mr. Harcourt had wanted something shorter and less florid than the one Mr. Briggs had offered. Willis had finished his final draft by four o’clock that Saturday. It was ready for Miss Jackman to type, when the telephone on
his table rang and he heard Bess Harcourt’s voice.

  “Willis,” she said, “whatever are you doing?”

  “I’m just here at the old salt mine,” Willis said. He was getting good at little jokes like that. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh,” Bess said, “I’m not doing much of anything.”

  “Well, that’s quite a novelty, isn’t it?” Willis asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Willis, can’t you come over and play some tennis and have a swim?”

  “You know I’m not much good at tennis,” Willis said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Bess said. “It will just be comedy tennis.”

  “Is anyone else over there?” Willis asked.

  There was a short pause and then he heard Bess laugh.

  “No,” she said, “not really. There’s just another boy here, but he’s going home in a little while. Please come over, Willis. I haven’t seen you for simply ages.”

  Willis had a mortifying memory of his haste to get home and to prepare himself fittingly for a late afternoon of tennis at the Bryson Harcourts’, and he was ashamed of his naïve pride in having the right things for the occasion, all except a tennis racquet. At home Willis planned his appearance in accordance with the illustrations he had seen in current magazines. He took a bath and put on clean B.V.D.’s, the conventional underwear of the period. He also selected a clean white shirt, but not a new one, because he was going to play tennis, and no tie of course, and he left the soft collar open at the neck of course, and then slicked down his hair and brushed it carefully. Then he put on the white flannels that he had purchased that spring at the Harvard Co-operative Society. His sneakers were immaculate and he had a light pullover sweater resembling one that Bill wore, of natural wool and imported from England. When he saw all he could see of himself in the mirror above his bureau, he was satisfied that he did not look badly—careless, athletic, and accustomed to that sort of thing. Then he took a briefcase from his closet, a new and rather polished acquisition, in which he packed a new set of underwear and another clean shirt to put on after swimming, and one of his newer ties with stripes.