Sincerely, Willis Wayde

by John P. Marquand

  “I guess it’s still right there,” Willis told him, “but I haven’t seen it for quite a while.”

  Willis had deliberately put the Harcourt place out of his mind for a long while, but now he found himself thinking how it would look with the pear and tulip trees about to start their bloom. He could almost smell the New England spring again, and he could almost feel that Mr. Henry Harcourt was beside him as he talked to Mr. Jacoby. He could even think later that the ghost of Mr. Harcourt must have given him advice and warned him not to miss an opportunity. At any rate Willis grasped the vital fact that the Planeroid process was a very good one. Even before he inspected the plant and the books, he had a good picture of the Rahway problem. The whole answer lay in cutting costs and concentrating first on a single line.

  “I’d like to have a look at the Planeroid division if I might,” Willis said, and he had been right. It was the only part of the plant that mattered.

  It was an opportunity and Willis had been ready for it. He already had a warm spot in his heart for Mr. Jacoby and a protective feeling that was close to loyalty. It was no wonder when little Al was christened that Willis asked Mr. Jacoby to be a godfather. Mr. Jacoby’s mind was working too, and it was pleasant for Willis to remember that Mr. Jacoby had trusted him right from the very start.

  “What I need,” Mr. Jacoby had told him late that afternoon, “is a young fellow who knows this business.”

  “Well,” Willis said, “we’ve got to look around for someone.”

  “How about you?” Mr. Jacoby asked.

  “Oh,” Willis said, “I’m unfortunately working for Beakney-Graham. I’m only here to get things started on the right track, you know, but I do think we can put this property on a paying basis.”

  “You think so?” Mr. Jacoby asked.

  It never paid to be too eager.

  “Yes,” Willis said, “I think so. I may have a few rather radical ideas, but I hope you’ll give us a chance, Mr. Jacoby.”

  “You show me how we can pay dividends on the preferred,” Mr. Jacoby said, “and you can do anything you want. I can handle my associates.”

  It had been as simple as that, but then after a certain point most negotiations were simple. If anyone wanted something you had to offer badly enough, you could always make him pay.

  From the very beginning Willis realized that it was necessary to move carefully. The Rahway Belting Company was a series of fragments that had to be welded together. The personnel and the stockholders and the sales policy were some of these fragments that he must combine without any serious mistake. He would have to use tact and persuasion and ruthlessness. Luck, of course, entered into his handling of Rahway Belt, but his own capacity was always the most important asset.

  He wanted very much to talk to someone who would listen as he thought out loud. This was why he called up Sylvia Hodges and asked her to dinner when he reached New York that night—and not because he wanted her advice or applause. He must have understood from the time he had spoken to Sylvia of that green dress in Bergdorf’s window that Sylvia was as tired as he was of the small contrivings of mediocrity. He knew that she would have been perfectly happy if he had taken her to some small restaurant in the vicinity of Washington Square, but he took her to dine instead at 21 West 52nd Street, where he had often entertained for the company. Even in those days Twenty-one was already, according to his rather limited knowledge, one of the most interesting restaurants in New York. You always saw personalities there who impressed out-of-town clients—people in the Social Register, individuals whose names were in the gossip columns, actors, Hollywood producers, and sometimes authors and playwrights.

  “I sort of thought you’d like to see this place,” he told Sylvia. “It’s rather interesting, you know. We’ll have dinner upstairs, but we might order it at the bar and have a cocktail there while we’re waiting. Would you like a Martini, Sylvia? They make very good Martinis.”

  “Why, yes,” Sylvia said, “I’d like one, but you don’t have to do these elaborate things for me, you know.”

  “I know I don’t,” he said, “but just the same, I like to.”

  “Well,” she said, “I like it more than I ought to, I guess.”

  It pleased him to observe that people were looking at Sylvia curiously. In Twenty-one people always looked curiously at everyone else, since you could never be sure what stranger might be important. Sylvia was never embarrassed by the plainness of her clothes, and Willis was almost sure that they thought she was too well-known to bother about being elaborately dressed.

  “Robert Benchley comes here quite often,” Willis said. “You know, Robert Benchley, the humorist.”

  “Oh,” Sylvia said. “He was on the Lampoon at Harvard, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, I think perhaps he was,” Willis said, “but I’m not sure.”

  It was pleasant to hear Sylvia mention Harvard, and it was pleasant to see that people were trying to catch a snatch of their conversation. It made him feel that he was almost a personal friend of Mr. Benchley, the humorist.

  “Have you read his new book, My Ten Years in a Quandary?” Sylvia asked.

  “In a what?” Willis said.

  “‘In a Quandary,’” Sylvia said.

  “Oh,” Willis said, “I get it now. No. I haven’t had much time to read lately, except for fifteen minutes with Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf before breakfast.”

  “Do you really do that every morning?” Sylvia asked.

  “Of course I do,” Willis said. “I try to finish anything I start.”

  “But, Willis,” she said, “it will take you years and years.”

  “All right,” Willis said, “but it’s just as well to read something worthwhile, and it’s only fifteen minutes a day.”

  “I wonder why they picked out fifteen minutes,” Sylvia said, “instead of twenty-five or thirty minutes.”

  “Because it sounds easier,” Willis said. “It’s like the pricing of merchandise. I’m reading Montaigne right now. He’s quite a boy, Montaigne.”

  “But I don’t see how you can get much out of Montaigne in fifteen minutes,” Sylvia said, and her forehead wrinkled. “Don’t you forget what you’ve read the day before?”

  “It was tough at first,” Willis said, “but I’m getting the hang of it now. Would you like another Martini, Sylvia?”

  “Are you going to have another?” Sylvia asked.

  “I don’t usually,” Willis said, “but I think I will. I’ve had quite a day today.”

  He did not mind if Sylvia laughed at him about the Five-Foot Shelf of Books, because he could see the humor in it too, and he knew that Sylvia was not laughing at him seriously.

  “Why did you have quite a day?” she asked.

  “That’s just what I want to tell you,” he said, “and I don’t know anyone else I want to tell.”

  Her eyes were bright and there was more color in her cheeks. He had never seen Sylvia look so attractive.

  “I guess everybody’s always waiting for his chance,” he said, “and I have a hunch mine came along today. You see this morning I was sent out to see a plant in Rahway.”

  He did not have time to go ahead just then because a waiter interrupted him.

  “Your dinner is ready, Mr. Wayde, sir,” the waiter said. They remembered him, of course, because he brought Beakney-Graham clients there often.

  Sylvia listened just the way he hoped she would when he told her about Mr. Jacoby and the Rahway Belting Company, and the way her glance met his when he was talking made everything he said sound like a tale of adventure. If there was one thing he knew, he told her, it was the belting business, and here was his chance right in front of him to put a company on its feet. He was not sure of all the details yet, but he had a general plan, already.

  “You wait,” he said. “A year from now I’ll have the Rahway Belting Company making money.”

  It was not a heroic statement but his enthusiasm gave it a ringing sound, and Sylvia must have felt its
contagion.

  “Oh, Willis,” she said, “do you really think so?”

  All words had a different ring when one was young.

  “They’ve got the Planeroid patents,” he said. “Nobody else can make Planeroid.”

  From the very beginning he was the only one who saw the full potential value of those Planeroid patents.

  “Sylvia,” he said, and he put his hand over hers without knowing he was doing it, “just wait till you see a sample of Planeroid.”

  Then Sylvia laughed, but he did not mind, because she did not know what Planeroid was.

  “We’ll sell the Ford and get a Cadillac before we’re through,” he said.

  He did not realize until the words were out that he had included Sylvia in his vision of the future. In fact he did not realize, until that moment, that he was in love with Sylvia Hodges. It was strange how unexpectedly it had all happened and how naturally they had both accepted it. If it was not all serious, it was partly so, or she would not have said what she said next.

  “Willis,” she said, “I’m going to spend my vacation with the family. They have a cottage on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. I know they’d love to see you, if you’d like to go there too.”

  He had passed through the preliminaries of courtship without his having known it. Without his ever having kissed her or said a word of love, he knew he was as good as engaged to Sylvia Hodges.

  In a busy life it was impossible to recall all dates and sequences, but Willis believed that it was in the summer of 1950 that he had participated in a very worthwhile discussion on the subject of love and marriage. The event had occurred up in Mr. P. L. Nagel’s room, where three or four congenial people had gathered, just by accident, just to get away from the noise downstairs during an especially large machine-tool convention at White Sulphur Springs. It must have been August, 1950, because there had been several speeches on the Korean War and it had been a big year for conveyor belts. At any rate there were three or four congenial people up in old P.L.’s room—not a suite due to an error of the management’s. Consequently they were sitting around on the twin beds with their coats off, relaxing, and old P.L. had a fine display of bottled goods on his bureau. They were just talking about this and that—home and kids and golf and gardens—in order to get away from business, when P.L. happened to tell how he had first met Mrs. Nagel.

  Willis loved old P.L. by then, and he realized that P.L. had a lot of mellow wisdom, no matter how much bourbon he consumed. He had a glass of it in his hand right then, and he had taken off his shirt. P.L. had met Mrs. Nagel up in the Pinckney office on the seventeenth floor of the Pinckney Building in Chicago, when he had called as a junior executive to carry a message to Jeff Pinckney the year before old Jeff had died of Bright’s disease—a tough old rooster and a good old sport, who owned about all the pulpwood in Ontario.

  Mrs. Nagel had been the receptionist out in the vestibule, and frankly she had looked like a lot of other receptionists P.L. had met. He had said, “Hello, dearie,” to her, not meaning anything at all by it, and she had said he ought to take twenty pounds off before he called anyone “dearie,” and one thing led to another, just horsing around waiting for old Pinckney, until he had asked her out to dinner, and that was all there was to it. Mrs. Nagel had been a lovely wife and now she needed to take some pounds off herself. Myrtle’s photograph was right there, on the bureau behind the bottles, and he had never regretted for a minute marrying Myrtle. Somehow in business circles if a marriage did not end in divorce no one ever appeared to regret the step.

  “And she’s a lovely hostess,” P.L. said. “If you want a lovely hostess, marry a receptionist. Isn’t she a lovely hostess, Cal?”

  He was speaking to Cal Biggers, president of Biggers Link and Forging, with whom Willis had been teamed in a foursome that afternoon.

  “She isn’t any better than Eugenia,” Cal Biggers said, “and Eugenia wasn’t any receptionist.”

  “You don’t mean Mrs. Biggers?” P.L. said, and he winked to Willis.

  “Who the hell else should I mean?” Cal Biggers said.

  “I thought Mrs. Biggers’s name was Ginny,” P.L. said. “I never knew it was Eugenia.”

  “Ginny’s short for Eugenia,” Cal Biggers said. “Mrs. Biggers doesn’t like the name Eugenia.”

  Mr. Nagel threw his arm over Mr. Biggers’s shoulders.

  “Cal, you old sweetheart,” he said, “nobody can grill steaks like Ginny, but that isn’t my point.”

  “What the hell is your point?” Mr. Biggers asked.

  P. L. Nagel got up, crossed over to the bureau, and poured himself another bourbon.

  “Fellas,” he said, “I love everybody in this room like my own brother, not that I ever had a brother.”

  P.L. was a real wit, and it was really pleasant to be up there informally, because he didn’t invite just anybody.

  “My only point is,” P.L. said, “that marriage is an accident. You don’t know when you’re going to get into it and you really don’t know why. If I hadn’t gone up to the seventeenth floor of the Pinckney Building, there would have been a different Mrs. Nagel. You don’t know what you’re getting into until it’s over. In fact I didn’t really know Mrs. Nagel well until after we were married, and she’s developed into a very lovely character.”

  That was how it was, Willis thought, with him and Sylvia. He had just started going around with her, and finally neither he nor she was going around with anybody else.

  Perhaps it was impossible to understand character until after you were married, no matter how much two people had seen of each other before—and he had certainly seen quite a lot of Sylvia the summer he had been working on the reorganization of Rahway Belt. They had fallen into the habit of having a bite to eat together every evening after Willis returned from Rahway—usually at Tony’s Italian Restaurant on Bleecker Street—and afterwards they had got in the habit of sitting around awhile in Willis’s apartment on Tenth Street, never for very long because Willis had figures to organize and work over every evening. His ideas about the Planeroid process, which did so much to influence his whole career, were already assuming a definite shape. Although Planeroid was designed as power belting, he already believed that some changes in the manufacturing technique could adapt the economical carcass of Planeroid into conveyor belting which would be cheap enough to enter the competitive field.

  It was this idea, of course, that finally made Rahway Belt the company that it turned out to be and which helped to make his own industrial reputation. He must have already been thinking of the name that pulled sales promotion together—the Planeroid Carry-All line—but of course all his creative plans were then only in the thought stage. When you had an idea as big as Planeroid Carry-All, you needed to dream dreams. You had to reach the point where you knew those dreams had essential validity before you cut them down to size and began playing with finance and organization. It was a pleasure to tell Sylvia about what he wanted to do, although for some reason he was reticent regarding his earlier days on the Harcourt place, and even at the Harcourt Mill.

  Though Sylvia’s childhood was different from his, Willis could understand intellectually a lot of the things she had faced. Her parents had never cared about money, but they had cared deeply about education. Sylvia, as she admitted herself, had always had an ambition to excel in school and college. She had been obliged to face the hard fact that she was not popular at dancing school or dances. She had developed a contempt for clothes and lipstick, and she had carried those ideas to Radcliffe. She had managed to graduate with a cum laude, as her father had wanted, but what did it amount to now? It had only taught her that there were a lot of people far brighter than she would ever be, and the last thing that she really wanted was to marry some university instructor and to live the life her mother had. She wanted to have a little fun out of life for once, she said, like having dinner at a place like Twenty-one, and not have to worry about how much it cost. That was one of the wonderful things abou
t Willis, she said—that he never appeared to worry. She wanted to go abroad—not tourist class—and she wanted to stay at hotels instead of pensions. She had seen enough churches and picture galleries to last her all her life, and pensions where girls learned French, like the one she had spent a winter in once on the rue de l’Université.

  The first time Willis had ever kissed her was when she told him one June evening at Tenth Street what she really wanted to do in Paris. She made him feel how wonderful Paris was, and even made him forget the Planeroid process for a while.

  “Not any stuffy pension in the rue de l’Université,” Sylvia was saying, “and not any back seat in the Comédie listening to Racine. I want to go to Foyot’s and then to the Folies Bergère.”

  “Would you like me to take you there?” Willis asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “on the Mauretania.”