This time she had me born on a farm in central Florida, as usual gave me only a high school diploma and had me the hired manager of a beach concession which sold sports equipment in order to explain our exclusive address. I discovered I had confessed to a steady income of forty-eight hundred a year, out of which I had managed to save slightly more than a seven-thousand-dollar nest egg.
Mavis had mentioned herself as my younger sister who lived with me and held a minor stenographic position. And as usual she had carefully inserted the information that I expected my sister to continue to live with me in the event I married.
Aside from that, the only real information she had given out was that we had no relatives, having decided to dispense with a pair of aged parents on this trip. She had been purposely vague concerning the business-partnership angle mentioned in my ad, merely saying that I was investigating several alternatives.
When Mavis finished briefing me on what had passed between me and Helen Larson, I got out the Atlas and located St. Joseph, Missouri.
“About fifty miles from Kansas City,” I said after studying the map for a few moments. “If she doesn’t know anybody, that ought to be far enough away to meet her. Write her a letter and mention that I plan to be in K. C. soon. Don’t pin it down to a definite date, but ask if she’d be interested in meeting me and talking things over in person.”
“All right,” Mavis said.
She got out her portable typewriter, and for the rest of the evening I watched television while she typed.
We got an answer from Herman Gwynn four days later, which led me to believe he was anxious to unload the store. In his letter Gwynn explained that his reason for wanting to sell out was that his wife’s health required movement to a warmer and drier climate. He gave additional details about the business, including that the building was located on Main Street in the heart of West-field’s shopping district and that there were still six years to run on its ten-year lease, with an option to renew when the lease expired. He employed one male clerk and one female combination bookkeeper-clerk, both of which I could either keep or replace as I desired, as neither was under contract and could be discharged on fifteen days’ notice.
Gwynn also enclosed a financial statement showing that the business was unencumbered and that its net profit for the past two years had run $5,412.13 and $4,928.17 respectively.
Noting that the financial statement listed the bookkeeper-clerk’s salary as $2,500, it occurred to me that if Mavis and I hadn’t been interested in the store merely as a decoy, it actually might make a pretty good legitimate business enterprise.
I said to Mavis, “I think we’d better sink our hooks into this thing fast before somebody really looking for a business makes him an offer. If Gwynn hasn’t doctored his figures, a man and wife operating the place together and letting one employee go could net seventy-five hundred a year.”
Just to satisfy my curiosity I got out a paper and pencil and figured out how long it would take to retire a fifteen-thousand-dollar mortgage at four percent interest if the principal was paid off at the rate of twenty-five hundred a year. It worked out to six years, with the first year’s payment being thirty-one hundred and reducing at the rate of one hundred dollars a year, so that the final payment would be only twenty-six hundred.
Mavis had been watching me as I figured. I looked up at her and said, “If a couple with ten thousand dollars to put down could squeeze by on forty-four hundred the first year, and an increase of a hundred dollars a year for the next five years, they’d end up with a clear business bringing in about seventy-five hundred a year.”
Her eyes turned bright. “Why don’t we take it, Sam? I mean really.”
I scowled at her and the brightness in her eyes faded. “In the first place we haven’t got ten thousand dollars. In the second place, I’m not sweating away six years of my life for the privilege of spending the rest of it in a one-horse town. Not while this racket continues to pay what it does.”
“What good does it do us?” she asked quietly. “After five and a half years we’ve got two thousand dollars less than we had after pulling our first job together in Los Angeles.”
I crumpled up the paper I had been figuring on and dropped it in an ashtray. “The good it does us is that we work less than six months a year, and not very hard even then. And live in luxury the rest of the time.”
Mavis didn’t say any more about it.
The reply from Helen Larson came the day after we heard from Herman Gwynn. She said she’d be delighted to meet me in Kansas City to talk things over, and wanted to know just when I planned to be there.
Three days afterward a letter came from the West-field Chamber of Commerce which read:
Dear Mr. Howard:
I have your inquiry re: the Farmer’s Appliance Store of Westfield, and glad to be able to report the following:
The present owner, Mr. Herman Gwynn, has been a resident of this village for forty years and we consider his character and business integrity beyond question. He has owned and operated the Farmer’s Appliance Store for approximately twenty-five years and has been a member of this chamber for the same length of time.
As you probably know, the nature of the business is the retailing of all types of farm appliances except motorized equipment; i.e. it does not include heavy machinery such as tractors, harvesters and so on. But it offers for sale a variety of smaller farm equipment ranging from milking machines, pumps and cream separators all the way down to simple items such as buckets.
As Chautauqua County is one of the richest dairy and fruit sections in New York State, there is a steady market for this type of equipment. Nearly every city and town in the county contains at least one similar store, but there is no competition in Westfield itself, and the nearest competitor is in a town approximately eighteen miles away.
We do not have a locally-owned bank in West-field. The only banking service is offered by a branch of the Chautauqua National Bank and Trust Company of Jamestown, New York. There is, however, a Westfield Savings and Loan Association.
I am sure that with ten thousand dollars in cash to invest, you would have no trouble raising an additional fifteen thousand from either institution, providing you can supply adequate character references and satisfy them as to your ability to run the business profitably.
I hope this information will be of service to you, and I will be looking forward to meeting you if you decide to become a member of this community.
Sincerely,
James Hope,
Secretary.
I put in a long-distance call to Herman Gwynn. When I got him on the phone, I said, “This is Sam Howard, Mr. Gwynn. The man who wrote you about your store, you know. I’m phoning from Florida.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “How are you, sir?” He had a rather pleasant voice, just beginning to turn high with age.
“Fine, Mr. Gwynn. I’m very interested in your proposition, and would like to come to Westfield to discuss it further. But I don’t want to make that long a trip and have it turn out to be a wild goose chase. Is there any chance of your closing a deal with someone else within the next couple of weeks?”
“Well, a couple of other fellows have inquired about it,” he said cautiously. “I couldn’t rightly guarantee not to sell out if I got the right offer.”
“Naturally not,” I said. “That’s why I called. To make you an offer which will protect us both. I’m willing to send you a check for two hundred dollars as a guarantee of good faith providing you’ll guarantee me first crack at the store. The agreement won’t bind either of us to any particular price, but will merely give me the privilege of meeting any offer you get from any other source before you close the deal.”
He thought this over a minute before he said slowly, “How soon you planning to come up here, Mr. Howard?”
“I can’t make it in less than about two weeks.”
“That’s hardly no time at all,” he said. “You don’t need to send any check, Mr. Ho
ward. You sound like an honest man to me. And in these parts a man’s word is as good as his signature. I won’t guarantee not to bargain with no one else, but I’m willing to guarantee not to close any deal within the next two weeks, so you can get up here, look the business over and make an offer.”
“Fine,” I said. “You sound to me like an honest man too.”
He asked me to let him know when I expected to arrive, and he’d meet me at the railroad station.
I said, “I may arrive by car. And I’m not sure, but I may be on my honeymoon. I’ll phone you when I get there.”
He sounded pleased that I was getting married. “I’ll look forward to meeting you and your bride then,” he said.
All that was left then was to check train schedules and wire Helen Larson the date I expected to arrive in Kansas City. It was then Friday, the thirteenth of November, and I actually planned to arrive in K.C. on the seventeenth. But I gave myself a day’s leeway and asked her to meet me at the Croissant Hotel on Wednesday, the eighteenth.
When Mavis and I took the train from Miami we were still the rich and well-dressed Howards. We didn’t change clothes and character until we got to Memphis, which was at the end of our train ride.
In Memphis we put into storage all of my tailored clothes and Mavis’s evening gowns, expensive dresses and furs. I switched to the good grade but slightly ill-fitting suit which made me look like an honest but not-too-well-off clerk of some kind. Mavis returned to her staid ready-made suits, her prim hairdo and the sedate manner of an inhibited spinster.
I bought a secondhand Ford in Memphis and drove the last four hundred and seventy miles.
Mavis and I checked into adjoining rooms at the Croissant at six P.M. on November seventeenth. The Croissant was a good second-class hotel, fully respectable enough to match our supposed middle-class respectability, yet with rates within the means of the frugal characters we were supposed to be.
That night when Mavis slipped into my room through the connecting bath and crept into my arms, she said, “Oh, Sam. I can’t bear to think of the next two months, watching you with another woman again. Couldn’t we at least talk to this Gwynn man with the eight thousand we have?”
“No,” I said. “And I don’t want to hear you mention it again.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE DESK PHONED at eleven-thirty the next morning to tell me I had visitors in the lobby. Mavis and I had been up and dressed since eight, but had stuck to our room awaiting the call, even having breakfast sent up so that we’d be sure not to miss the Larson woman when she arrived.
I said into the phone, “Tell them to wait and I’ll be right down.”
“Them?” Mavis asked when I hung up.
“She must have brought her kid brother along,” I said. “Glad she did. It’ll give us a chance to size him up. You ready?”
Mavis checked her reflection in the mirror a final time to make sure that she was. Watching her, I thought it was amazing how much difference clothes and hairdo and manner could make in her appearance. More than actual beauty it was Mavis’s mobility and the aura of sexiness about her which made her such a desirable woman. With her normally flowing movements restrained to a kind of stiff primness, half of the impact she had on males was destroyed. And no woman could have looked sexy in the severely-tailored suit she wore, which made her look flat-chested and hipless.
As we went down the stairs, I couldn’t help feeling proud of the excellent job of training I had done on Mavis.
There were several people in the lobby, but we didn’t have any trouble picking out Helen Larson and her brother. They were seated side-by-side on a sofa facing the stairs, self-consciously trying to appear at ease.
As we reached the bottom of the stairs, the woman glanced at me without recognition, which wasn’t surprising in view of the fuzzy picture Mavis had mailed her.
I had no trouble identifying her, though. As she had written, she had changed very little in the three years since the picture she sent had been taken, the only difference being that her hair was now drawn straight back and clasped at the base of her neck by a metal circlet instead of being allowed to hang on both sides of her face. And that was no improvement.
She wore a cheap and shapeless wool dress cut like a sack, which made it impossible to judge what kind of figure she had, except that it was on the slim side. But there was some promise in the visible portion of her legs. Despite gray cotton stockings and low-heeled shoes, I could see that her calves were nicely rounded and her ankles pleasantly slim.
As indicated in her photograph, I saw that her features were regular enough. But her steel-rimmed glasses plus an innately corn-fed appearance spoiled the effect of whatever natural attributes she had.
Her most attractive quality at first sight was cleanliness. She was scrubbed so thoroughly, she literally shined. For a startled instant I thought I recognized in her a resemblance to Hannah Stokes, my first lonely-hearts bride. Then I realized it was only her freshly-scrubbed appearance, which Hannah had possessed too, and that there was no physical similarity between the two women at all.
Before crossing over to the sofa, I paused to study the brother, too. He wasn’t an unhandsome lad in an awkward and farmer-like sort of way, I noted. He was lean and big-boned and had large-knuckled hands which he didn’t seem to know what to do with. He looked Swedish, mostly because of blond hair the same color as his sisters. His hair needed cutting so badly, it hung over his tight collar at the back.
The thing I liked best about him was the utter stupidity on his face. It had occurred to me that a twenty-two-year-old boy might be mature enough to be wary about his sister getting involved with a complete stranger. But after one look at this lad, I knew there was little danger of his creating an awkward situation.
I suspected that what the woman had written about his being able to support himself was merely hopefulness, because he didn’t impress me as having sense enough to come in out of the rain.
When I had completed my study, I touched Mavis’s arm and we continued on across the lobby. Stopping before the couch, I said in a polite voice, “Miss Larson?”
The woman looked almost frightened. Then she blushed scarlet and jumped to her feet. When her brother rose more slowly, instead of looking at me her eyes sought his face in a plea for moral support.
I was used to this reaction. Like all the others in the past five years, she had probably never before even been looked at by a man. And now, meeting for the first time the man she had been dreaming might become her husband if arrangements worked out to our mutual satisfaction, her tongue simply deserted her.
She was probably also a little flabbergasted by my appearance. Though nearing thirty-six now, I didn’t look much different than I had when Mavis and I first met. Much swimming during our frequent vacations had kept me lean and hard, and at the moment I was deeply tanned from the Florida sun we had just left. Also Mavis had often told me I have an air of virility about me which appeals to women. Once when I tried to pin her down as to exactly what she meant by that, she explained it by saying, “You just look like you’d be pretty terrific in bed.” Then she had generously added, “Which you are, as it happens.”
I don’t suppose the woman had expected to meet a matinee idol through a lonely-hearts ad, but I was probably better looking than she had expected.
I said in a kindly voice, “I’m Sam Howard and this is my sister Mavis.” I thrust out a hand at the young man. “You must be Helen’s brother.”
Reaching out gingerly, he gave my hand a jerky shake. “Yeah.”
He nodded shyly at Mavis, then looked at his shoes.
Mavis greeted them both politely and Helen said something in a barely audible voice which I took to be acknowledgement of the introductions.
I said to the young man, “Helen never mentioned your name in her letters.”
“Huh?” he said, looking up briefly. “Oh. It’s Dewey. Dewey Larson.” His feet shuffled in embarrassment and his gaze dropped to the
m again.
“It’s nice to meet you in person finally,” I said to Helen.
Her blush had faded, but now she flamed red again. She cast a covert side glance at her brother and didn’t say anything.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had lunch, have you?” I asked.
This time she looked at me and managed a faint, “No, sir.”
I grinned at her. “You make me feel like a grandfather. Let’s start out on an informal basis right from the start. You call me and my sister Sam and Mavis, and we’ll call you Helen and Dewey. Okay?”
She smiled shyly. “All right, Mr.—” She paused, looked stricken and hurriedly amended it to, “All right—Sam.”
“Suppose we get acquainted by having lunch together here in the hotel restaurant? It’s a little early, but there’ll be less of a crowd now.”
Helen agreed for both herself and her brother, who seemed incapable of speech except in answer to direct questions.
During lunch I made no attempt to discuss either our possible business partnership or our possible marriage, preferring merely to size Helen and her brother up and at the same time put them at ease so that they could form some opinion of us.
Gradually both thawed out when they discovered conversation was going to stay on a small-talk level. When the coffee arrived, they were still hardly vivacious luncheon companions, but at least Dewey had stopped looking at his feet, and Helen no longer blushed every time I spoke to her.
I discovered to my pleasant surprise that the woman wasn’t unintelligent in a quiet sort of way. She wasn’t completely uneducated either, apparently having read a surprising number of books, though she confessed to an almost total lack of formal education. I guessed that books had been her substitute for social life, for she seemed woefully ignorant of any actual experience outside of what had occurred to her on the farm.
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