Sincerely, Willis Wayde

by John P. Marquand

  “Besides,” Bess said, “you were born with a spoon yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Why, yes,” Mr. Harcourt said. “It’s something I’ve always tried to remember, and see you don’t forget it either, Bess.”

  “All right,” Bess said, “but I’m tired of being told about advantages.”

  Mr. Harcourt took a cigar cutter from the low coffee table and snipped the end from his cigar.

  “This is a hard world, Bess,” he said, “with a great many ruthless people in it. It’s always useful to remember what you are. It’s easy to pretend that you’re something else. At least I’ve always found it so.”

  The Bryson Harcourts lived only a few blocks away on the water side of Beacon Street. When Bess said it was time for her to go home, it was only natural for Willis to ask if he might not walk home with her. When he said good-by to Mrs. Harcourt, she told him he must be sure to come again, and that at any rate she would see him soon in the country.

  “I’m afraid perhaps we haven’t acted as though you were company,” Mr. Harcourt said, “but then perhaps you aren’t.”

  “Of course Willis isn’t company,” Bess said.

  She wore a gray squirrel coat, and when they were on the street with the glass and iron doors closed behind them, Bess was like a stranger until she abruptly put her arm through his.

  “It’s funny seeing you here,” she said. “You really look very nice in Boston.”

  “How did you think I was going to look?” Willis asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “Worse than you do, I suppose. How did you think I was going to look?”

  “I didn’t think,” Willis said, “because I didn’t know you’d be there.”

  “We always have to go there when we’re asked,” she said. “You never can tell what my grandfather’s going to say, can you? It makes me feel creepy the way he watches everyone. He was watching you tonight.”

  “Was he?” Willis asked.

  “Of course he was,” she said. “You know he was.”

  Willis did not answer.

  “I was glad to see you. I didn’t think I would be. Were you glad to see me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I guess I was,” he said.

  “Of course you were,” she said. “You kept looking at me. You’re not the way you are in the country.”

  “Well, you aren’t either,” Willis said.

  “Of course I’m not,” she answered. “Why should I be? Bill’s been taken into the A.D. Club, you know. That was what they were talking about tonight.”

  “What’s the A.D. Club?” Willis asked.

  “That shows you don’t know anything,” she said, “but you look as though you did. What do you do in Boston, Willis?”

  “I go to B.U. and I study,” he said.

  “But you must know some girls.”

  “I haven’t time to know any girls,” Willis said.

  “That isn’t so,” she said. “You have time to see Winnie Decker week ends.”

  “Who told you that?” Willis asked.

  “Steve Decker, of course. I see him at the dances. He’s on the list.”

  “What’s the list?” Willis asked.

  “Oh, never mind,” she said. “You must be hard up if there’s only Winnie Decker.”

  It was only a short walk through that dark night, along Commonwealth Avenue and right on Clarendon Street and across Marlborough and then up Beacon Street, where the wind was beginning to blow hard across the Charles.

  “Well, here we are,” she said.

  She stopped at the steps of one of those brownstone houses that still impressed Willis as more aloof and forbidding than any houses in any other city he had known.

  “You might as well come in for a minute,” she said. “Nobody’s at home.”

  The hall lights were on and she turned on the lights in a small downstairs room that must have been called the reception room at the time the house was built.

  “Thanks for seeing me home,” she said.

  Then, perhaps before either of them knew it, or before they thought of it, they were in each other’s arms.

  “I’m an awful fool,” she whispered. “Oh dear, I wish that things were different.”

  VI

  Willis always admitted that his characteristics of aggressiveness matured in him later than they did in some young men. He had qualities of patience and a sort of modesty that combined to keep him from pushing ahead in any annoying manner.

  This slow development of Willis Wayde probably explained why he had never attracted great attention during the summers he worked at the mill, but later all sorts of people remembered him. Both of his contemporaries, Bill Harcourt and Steve Decker, who had been sent to learn the business when Willis Wayde was there, had their own pictures of Willis. Mr. Henry Hewett, after he was retired, added more to the portrait, as did Mr. Briggs, but then Mr. Briggs was bitter after Mr. Bryson Harcourt had accepted his resignation.

  It was the business of Miss Minton, the receptionist, to remember everyone, and Willis was tall and handsome, with nice blond hair that always needed cutting, and there were girls in the office who used to say that they would like to muss up Willis’s hair. Willis was popular but he was never fresh, the way Mr. Bill Harcourt sometimes was.

  Mr. Hewett often said that he could have told plenty, if tact had not prevented him, about the goings on at the mill in those days.

  Henry Harcourt was having his troubles with Bryson, and Roger Harcourt was trying to shoot holes in everything and waiting for Henry to die so he could muscle in on the management; and Bill had no serious interest in the plant. Mr. Hewett had been surprised when H.H. once told him that if Willis had a few more years on him he’d be management material. Old H.H. was always making plans, but Mr. Hewett could not see what old H.H. saw in Willis. Willis was a hard-working boy and a nice boy with manners, but Willis lacked in push and aggressiveness in those days.

  Mr. Briggs, being closer to the firing line in those days as sales manager, saw more of old H.H. in his last years than he had at any time previously. In spite of his age, H.H. had a mind that was twice as young as Bryson’s. He was constantly playing with ideas for enlarging the Harcourt line and he was never afraid to spend money on experiment in spite of the rest of the family. He saw that if you stood still you were lost, in an expanding era like the twenties. He was constantly calling Mr. Briggs into conferences with Alf Wayde. Alf Wayde might not have looked like much, but he had made his own refinements in the Klaus patents, and he had perfected the Harcourt interwoven joint and the machines that made six different Harcourt carcasses. Harcourt Mill was beginning to develop a line that could answer any industrial requirement, and time was all that interfered. If they had only followed the plans of expansion which were already in the works, Harcourt’s would have been the sweetest piece of property in the business. Alfred Wayde certainly knew his belting, but no one could have guessed in those days that Alf’s son Willis was good for much.

  Willis was not aware of any of the upper-level stuff that was going on at Harcourt’s in the summer after he had graduated from Boston University. He and Bill Harcourt and Steve Decker did odd jobs in the sales department and ran all sorts of errands, and Mr. Henry and Mr. Bryson Harcourt and Mr. Hewett and Mr. Briggs were distant figures. Yet everyone knew that there was a cleavage of ideas, and that before old H.H. began planning expansion, the mill had been a comfortable family business that paid excellent dividends. Mr. Bryson never saw why it should not have been kept that way and Willis had one clear glimpse of that difference of opinion between Mr. Henry and Mr. Bryson.

  During July both he and Bill were in the sales department helping one of the new assistants, a Mr. Harrow, prepare a sales folder with photographs and cross sections of the new Harcourt belting. Mr. Harrow, who had recently been imported from New York, was engaged that afternoon in writing brief descriptions of different Harcourt belts, and Willis and Bill Harcourt were preparing rough drafts for Mr. Harrow to put i
nto final form. They sat in their shirt sleeves side by side at a table upstairs in the sales department.

  “Say,” Bill was saying, “here’s a new one.”

  “Which one?” Willis asked.

  “Harcourt Oak-Heart,” Bill said. “I never heard of that one.”

  “Oh,” Willis said, “that’s the general-purpose white belting.”

  It seemed to Willis that Bill should have known by that time that Harcourt Oak-Heart was one of the most stable features in the line. The binder threads in Oak-Heart were interwoven in such a way that ply separation was entirely eliminated.

  “What’s ply separation?” Bill asked.

  It was difficult to do his own work and Bill’s at the same time, but Willis knew a lot about Harcourt Oak-Heart, and he was starting to explain the whole thing to Bill when Mr. Briggs opened the door of his corner office. Mr. Briggs was in his shirt sleeves too, and his starched collar was wilted. He was holding a sales form covered with figures.

  “Willis,” he asked, “can you drop what you’re doing?”

  Mr. Briggs’s belt made a crease around his middle, and as usual he was in a hurry and as usual he spoke in the ringing tones that he used when he was addressing his salesmen.

  “Yes, sir,” Willis said.

  “Take this down to Mr. Harcourt’s office, will you?” Mr. Briggs said, and then he saw Bill Harcourt and his voice grew more cordial. “You don’t mind my taking Willis away from you for a minute or two, do you, Bill?”

  Bill folded his hands behind his head and smiled.

  “Oh no,” Bill said, “just as long as he comes back.”

  Mr. Briggs laughed heartily.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “That’s fine. Right up to your ears in it today, aren’t you, Bill?”

  “Over my head and treading water,” Bill said.

  Mr. Briggs laughed again. “Well,” he said, “that’s fine. Mr. Harrow showed me the piece you wrote about Harcourt Vulcanoid. It had a real punch to it. Take this and get going, Willis.”

  The office building, which had once seemed overambitious, was beginning to grow cramped and inadequate. The inventory department had been moved outside, and the engineering department now occupied the vacant room. Carpenters were putting up temporary partitions for the two engineers whom his father had hired recently, and Willis had a glimpse of Alfred Wayde smoking his pipe and bending over his drawing table, oblivious to the carpenters’ pounding. Things were quieter when Willis descended to the lower floor. There the illusion of the Federalist mansion still existed, and the door to Mr. Harcourt’s office was open as usual. Although Mr. Harcourt always wore his coat, he contrived to look cool in summer. He was seated in his swivel chair and the light of the window behind him, from where Willis stood, made his features shadowy, until he pivoted slightly sideways. Mr. Bryson Harcourt was seated near the corner of the desk, with the light directly on his face.

  “I only wish you’d tell me,” Mr. Bryson was saying, “what on earth you think is going to happen here eventually?”

  The chair springs squeaked discordantly as Mr. Harcourt leaned back.

  “We’ve been over that before,” he said. “It will have to be your problem eventually.”

  “Father,” Mr. Bryson began, “I wish you’d try to see this from my point of view.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Willis said. “Mr. Briggs sent this down to you.”

  “All right,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Thank you, Willis.”

  As Willis crossed the room and laid the paper on the desk, they were both looking at him uncomfortably.

  “Well, Willis,” Mr. Bryson said, “how’s Bill getting along upstairs?” His voice was friendly. The façade was back in place.

  “He’s doing fine, sir,” Willis said.

  It was one of those things that one remembered only in view of what happened later. It was not Mr. Bryson’s fault that he had not inherited the ability of Mr. Henry Harcourt. A part of old H.H. was as antiquated as the Locomobile that Patrick drove, but if he were alive today, Willis was sure that Mr. Henry Harcourt would have done very well indeed.

  When the five o’clock whistle blew that afternoon, his father asked him if he wanted a ride back home. He was still driving a T-model Ford. Its fenders were battered and its chassis creaked, but its engine ran like clockwork.

  “It’s a damn funny thing,” his father said, when they reached the driveway of the Harcourt place, “to be driving this can in these surroundings, but it runs all right.”

  “It ought to,” Willis told him. “You take it apart and put it together enough.”

  “Say,” Willis’s father said, “you’re working up there with young Bill. Is he any good?”

  “He’s all right,” Willis answered.

  “You know damn well he isn’t,” his father said. “Not that he isn’t a nice enough kid. I wish you wouldn’t play around with those Harcourts so much, Willis. It seems to me that you’re getting big ideas.”

  “What sort of ideas?” Willis asked.

  Alfred Wayde laughed harshly.

  “Like marrying the boss’s daughter, and you don’t want to marry any boss’s daughter.”

  Willis felt his face redden. The Ford had stopped in the road by the garden house, but Alfred Wayde still sat with his hands on the wheel.

  “I don’t see how you got that idea in your head,” Willis told him. “I’m not thinking of marrying anyone.”

  Alfred Wayde breathed deeply through his nose.

  “Don’t act like I’ve been spying on you, boy,” he said. “It’s only that there’s some things about you that worry me, Willis. Now listen. No man ever thinks seriously about marrying. It just comes over him when he reaches a certain age. But, God—I don’t want to give you a lecture.

  When I was a young fellow your age, I always liked girls. Sometimes I had four or five at once, but I never went seriously with anyone until I saw your mother in Topeka, and then it came over me the way I say. But, hell, I don’t want to deliver a lecture.”

  There were beads of perspiration on Alfred Wayde’s forehead and he rubbed his sleeve across his face.

  “I wish you’d take a few drinks sometimes, Willis, and hell around and see some girls—in your own group, I mean—not girls like Bess.”

  Willis cleared his throat.

  “What girls, for instance, Pa?” he asked.

  “Hell,” Alfred Wayde said, “it isn’t my function to pick out girls for you. What I mean are reciprocating girls.”

  “Reciprocating girls?” Willis repeated after him.

  “Now, Willis,” Alfred Wayde said, “I’m using a mechanical term, but I mean girls who are able to give you back the same that you give them. Not girls like pack rats. You remember the pack rats in Arizona?”

  “I remember them,” Willis said, “but I don’t see what they have to do with it.”

  Alfred Wayde rubbed his face with his sleeve again.

  “Sometimes I wish to God we’d stayed in Arizona, and you’d be different, son. A pack rat always leaves you something, but once one of them in Arizona ran off with a five-dollar gold piece of mine and left me a piece of horse manure. Reciprocating girls do better than that. You don’t want to end up with a cow chip, Willis.”

  Willis laughed, but he was sorry that he had when he saw his father’s face.

  “I’m no good at giving a lecture,” Alfred Wayde said. “All I mean is you ought to go around with some girls made out of the same ply as you. Instead, you run over and see Bess and those Boston girls and press your pants in the kitchen. You ought to go downtown and have a few drinks and see some real girls.”

  “But what girls?” Willis asked. It was hot in the Ford and the locusts in the trees made a buzzing noise like tea kettles.

  “Well, for a starter, why not take Mazie Minton from the reception desk to the pictures? She’s a pretty girl.”

  “She’s too old,” Willis said.

  “Well, then, some of those kids you went to high school
with,” his father said. “The town is full of pretty girls.”

  “Look,” Willis said. “I understand what you mean, partly, but I don’t have much time.”

  Alfred Wayde turned his head slowly and stared at him. He was wearing a blue work shirt without a tie. His trousers were baggy and spotted, and no amount of machinist’s soap ever completely removed the ingrained grease from his hands.

  “How do you mean you don’t have much time?”

  Willis was suddenly acutely aware of his own neat coat and tie.

  “I’ve been working pretty hard,” he said. “I got through college in three years, you know, and I’ve been working every summer.”

  “Hell,” Alfred Wayde said, “I used to work twelve hours firing a donkey engine college vacations, but I was always full of piss and vinegar at night. The thing with me was I never gave a damn. I’ll tell you what the trouble with you is.”

  Alfred Wayde snorted and looked through the windshield as though he were driving the stationary car.

  “You’re trying to be something you aren’t,” he said. “You watch it, Willis. You keep on trying to be something you aren’t, and you’ll end up a son of a bitch. You can’t help being, if you live off other people.”

  “I don’t get your point. I honestly don’t,” Willis said.

  Alfred Wayde shifted his weight and leaned his elbows on the wooden steering wheel.

  “Listen, boy,” he said. “People are divided into two parts—people who do things and the rest, who live off those who do things. Now I may not amount to much, but I’ve had a pretty happy time, because I can turn out something. I can do anything in that damn mill that anyone else can do, and they all know it, boy. Well, maybe you’ll spend your life living off other people’s doings, but if you have to, don’t fool yourself. Maybe you’ll end up like Harcourt. I don’t know. But you’ll never be like Harcourt.”

  There was a good deal in what his father had said, and Willis realized it even then. He was listening to the age-old definition of management and labor, to a description of the chasm that always divided the creator and the entrepreneur, and of course his father had been right, but Willis could only put his thoughts in a single awkward question.