“Willis,” Sylvia said, “the doctor says I’m pregnant.”
He was startled, not so much by the news as by the way that Sylvia had delivered it, so loudly that he knew that Minnie must have heard it in the kitchen.
“Well, what makes you so surprised, Willis?” Sylvia said. “What did you think was going to happen? Nothing?”
Willis wished, instead of saying that she was pregnant, Sylvia had said that she was going to have a baby or something of the sort, which would have meant the same thing, but then Sylvia was Sylvia.
“Well, well,” he said, “so it looks as though we made it, does it?”
Curiously that simple remark of his seemed to startle Sylvia.
“Oh, Willis,” she said, “is that all you’re going to say?”
Then a wave of emotion swept over him. The news made everything worthwhile, and also it made Willis feel old because he was beginning to march in the procession of generations.
“Honey,” he said, “I really think it’s swell. In fact it couldn’t be sweller.”
When he sat down beside her he forgot all the problems of Rahway Belt.
“Willis,” she said, “what do you hope it’s going to be? Let’s make it a boy!” And she spoke as though they could make it anything, and then Willis had another thought.
“Gosh, honey,” he said, “I’ve really got to peel off my coat and go to work now. I want to do something for this kid, no matter what its sex. I want it to have a lot of things you and I didn’t have, honey.”
Admitted there was something in the maxim that a man with wife and children has given hostages to fortune, Willis never agreed with this entirely. A wife and one or two kids formed a steadying influence for any young fellow who could afford them. When you got beyond the two-children zone, perhaps things did get a little more complicated, but a wife and one or two kids made you feel your responsibility. In picking young executives, Willis was always partial to family men, as long as their families were within limits. Nothing pleased him so much as time went on as the news that a baby was born to someone on the office force. It was a fact that drew everyone closer together, and it always paid to make the news the subject of some sort of small festivity, like the presentation of a pair of knitted booties, or something like that, not as a gag exactly but at the same time in the spirit of fun.
The appearance of that child was a real event which marked the end of a long period of waiting punctuated by moments of being frightened for, and sometimes even of, Sylvia. The progressive change that came over her gave Willis an inordinate sense of guilt. Yet often when he showed solicitude, instead of being grateful, Sylvia seemed cross. As the months went on she snapped at him more than she ever had before and became critical of details in his habits of eating and speech. Even when he made a practice of bringing her a little gift home every day, Sylvia was very seldom grateful.
“I’d just as soon you wouldn’t bring any more flowers,” she said, “or if you do, won’t you give them to me naturally and not make an occasion of it?”
“Why, how do you mean, honey?” Willis asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “except you make me feel like someone in a shrine.”
“Now, honey,” Willis told her, “of course I don’t know what you’re going through but I can kind of imagine.”
“No you can’t,” Sylvia said. “You don’t even know what you’re going through yourself.”
Her remark only went to show that Sylvia had lost her balance.
“All right,” he said, “all right, but you know I want to help you in any way I can, honey.”
“Oh, God,” Sylvia said, and her voice choked, and she began to cry in a very hysterical manner, and then she said for no apparent reason that she was afraid he did not love her any more, and then for no obvious reason either she told him she was sorry.
“Darling,” she said, “I just don’t know what I’m saying. I really do love and I do respect you, even if you are obvious sometimes.”
Sylvia was difficult when she was pregnant, but when Willis compared notes with other men, he found that Sylvia was not exceptional. It was just as well to recognize that millions of other human beings, past and present, had shared every experience that one went through.
There had been a lot of talk about the best obstetrician. It seemed that there were a good many of them in the Oranges, which was as it should be with so many young couples making their first homes there. Mrs. Jacoby recommended one, and the Newhopes, who had more recent experience than Mrs. Jacoby, mentioned another whom Mrs. Newhope called a lamb. His name was Dr. Castlebar, and he had played tackle on a Midwestern football team. He was what the New Yorker magazine—a periodical which Willis was beginning to read thoughtfully—might have termed affable, florid, and tweedy. He smoked a straight-stemmed pipe and always referred to Willis as “fella.” Obviously the main part of Dr. Castlebar’s business was to bring babies into the world in rapid succession. Also, since in many ways he acted as a liaison officer between the sexes, his function was highly confidential. Dr. Castlebar’s main idea was seemingly that childbirth and the parental manifestations connected with it were really a lot of fun, at least that was what Dr. Castlebar told them on his first visit.
“Now, my dears,” he said, “just remember this whole thing is in my hands, and we’re going to have a lot of fun out of this before we get through.”
Sylvia started to laugh in an alarming way.
“That’s all right,” Dr. Castlebar said. “Don’t worry about her, fella. Let her have her little laugh out, and go fetch her a drink of cold water, will you, fella?”
Willis never knew what was done in his absence, but when he returned from the kitchen with the water, Sylvia had stopped laughing. She was even talking to Dr. Castlebar in confidential tones.
“Now, fella,” Dr. Castlebar said, “if the little lady is ever high-strung, just remember that high-strung women make the best mothers, in my book. But as I was saying, we can all get a lot of fun out of this. We will have our ups and downs as month moves into month—and remind me, will you, fella, we’ve got to be clear on the approximate time of arrival—but there’s always one thing to remember.”
Dr. Castlebar paused, drew out his briar pipe and tobacco pouch.
“There’s going to be a baby at the end of it, and once you see your baby, well, everything you’ve gone through begins to seem like fun.”
Willis could not help but be fascinated by Dr. Castlebar’s philosophy. It was like a sales approach, and in fact it was one. Dr. Castlebar, in his simple, direct way made both of them want that baby. When he pointed his finger at Willis and looked hard at him, and said, “Now, fella, you wanted this baby, didn’t you?” Willis was able to answer as he should have.
“You bet I did,” he said.
The doctor leaned forward and slapped him affectionately on the knee.
“Well, that’s fine, fella,” Dr. Castlebar said. “Let’s hope this will be the first of many and consider this a trial run, shall we? The more you have the easier it gets, and now one thing more.”
The doctor looked at the bowl of his pipe and then pointed its stem at Sylvia aggressively.
“I want a breast-fed, not a bottle baby.”
All right,” Sylvia answered, “anything you say.” And then she began to laugh again.
“Stop it,” Dr. Castlebar said. “This isn’t any joke.”
It was remarkable how expertly he could keep Sylvia from laughing.
“Now let’s see,” Dr. Castlebar said. “The date ought to be August fourteenth, and it cuts right into my proposed vacation.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Sylvia said, “but I don’t see how I can help it now.”
Dr. Castlebar shook his finger at her.
“You can’t,” he said. “That’s why I’m against autumn marriages. Next time I want a January baby.”
This remark seemed to strike him as highly amusing.
“Go ahead,” he said, �
�laugh. It’s a joke. I told you we were going to have a lot of fun out of this.”
Willis believed that no man could possibly forget any detail of the experience of becoming a father for the first time, but even so his acutest recollections of parenthood eventually became confused. This may have been only the trick that old Mother Nature plays on men, in a mild way, as well as on women. Willis could remember a lot of things that happened around hospitals while he waited during nervous hours for news, but he could no longer decide whether these events had heralded the appearance of Alfred, who was born in August, 1937, or Paul, in 1940, or Louise, right in the middle of the war.
It often amused Willis to hear Republicans refer scathingly to the Roosevelt administration as “a government by crisis,” not that he was not a good Republican himself, or that he approved for a minute of the creeping socialism of the New Deal. Life for any married man was one crisis after another, business or domestic. If a nation was merely a conglomeration of homes, as politicians liked to say, how could government possibly avoid crises?
That summer was very hot in Rahway, and a simplification of the Planeroid process was just going into production. When everything at the plant had demanded his constant personal attention Willis had to remember that Sylvia also might go into production at any moment. Dr. Castlebar had given them a good idea of how the thing would start. First the little fella would have to drop down lower than he was. The fun, as Dr. Castlebar put it, might start unexpectedly after that. It was perfectly simple to tell when the fun was going to start and there was no reason to get into a panic. There would be a series of pains. Never mind one pain, because everybody living could have one pain, even—ha, ha—a prospective father. Hadn’t Dr. Castlebar told them they were going to get a little fun out of this?
It was advisable, though not obligatory, to pack a small suitcase with a bed jacket and comb and brush and things like that, and keep it ready. All Sylvia needed to do was pick up the telephone and tell Miss Crump at Dr. Castlebar’s office what was going on. There was only one other thing to remember. Never forget it’s no disgrace to be having a baby, since it was about the swellest and most natural and useful thing that a woman could do in the world. Everyone always loved a gal who was having a baby and always wanted to help.
Little Al was always a good boy, and it was not his fault that he caused any undue trouble coming into the world. That was something you could blame on Dr. Castlebar, although Dr. Castlebar said it was all a part of the fun that he could not be located and arrived at the hospital only two minutes ahead of Al. After all, he got there, didn’t he?
Dr. Castlebar actually was correct in most of his predictions. Even if the whole episode, perhaps, had not been as much fun as the doctor said it would be, there were lighter moments. It surely was amazing how time glossed over grimmer ones. Once you looked through the plate-glass window of the hospital’s antiseptic crèche at little Al, you were convinced that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Finally there was nothing so triumphant as the ride home from the hospital and the sight of Al in his own bassinet in the hall bedroom. The world was never the same once you had a baby and once you joined the ranks of parenthood. You were immediately a wiser and a more useful citizen and you had a real stake in the community. It was almost like being gifted with a new language, once you had a baby.
There were plenty of things, businesswise, to take up Willis’s attention in those last years of the thirties. There was no doubt—with the assistance of a new sales manager and a general shakeup in the office force, plus the new funds loaned the company by Mrs. Jacoby—that he was getting Rahway Belt into a real competitive position. Willis had made it his personal task to visit every one of Rahway Belt’s customers, sitting down with them and talking over their production problems. Also he devoted countless hours to the sales force. He respected the accumulated sales wisdom of several of the older salesmen—in fact he always had an idea that a wise older man equaled an overenergetic and impulsive younger one, but he also injected new blood. Jack Nelson, for instance, now vice president of Briggs, Bryant, had started with him at Rahway Belt, and Buzz Page, whom he first saw as an office boy out in Toledo, was with him still, and there would be no trouble making the list longer.
Yet you always had to remember that a sales force, no matter how effective it might be, was hopeless without a product in which it could believe. It was odd how many people, even in large organizations, were prone to neglect this simple fact. Willis lived, ate, and slept with Planeroid belting. He was only too glad to share his ultimate successes in this regard with Jerry Bascomb, whom he was lucky enough to hire in June ’37, just after Jerry graduated from Tech. From the very start Willis insisted on naming Jerry’s inventions that improved the Planeroid process the Bascomb patents. This was a good means of insuring loyalty, and to prove it Jerry was with him still, and Willis was the godfather of one of Jerry’s lovely children. By the beginning of 1940, the Planeroid line was better than it had ever been, and sales figures and earnings showed that it was going places in a modest way.
XIX
The year 1940, when you came to think of it, was a headache year for nearly everyone in America, and Willis’s personal and private affairs offered no exception. They moved, like nearly everyone else’s, against a background of shock and crisis. To begin with, young Paul arrived that February. Rahway Belt was picking up and they could afford with difficulty a nurse for the children. Willis’s whole budget was thrown out of balance but this was only the domestic side of the picture. Besides an uncertain business situation and restlessness among plant workers, Mr. Jacoby’s health suddenly became so bad that he was obliged to cancel his usual winter trip to Arizona. Willis felt a premonition when he went to call on Mr. Jacoby. Without knowing anything about illness, Willis could tell that Mr. Jacoby, in spite of his high spirits, was far from well, and Willis’s gloomiest conclusions were confirmed when he met Mrs. Jacoby downstairs in the living room.
He must have made this call several days after Paul was born, because he remembered apologizing to Mrs. Jacoby for not having come sooner. Willis often thought that everyone’s life consisted of a series of repetitions. He had once been the young confidant of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Harcourt, and now his relationship with the Jacobys was on a larger scale, but there was the same atmosphere of trust and friendship. If Rahway Belt meant little to Mrs. Jacoby, except as something that made her husband happy, Willis knew that she appreciated what he had done by way of putting the investment on a paying basis.
Only a few days before his call, Mr. Henry Peters, who was a stockholder in Rahway Belt, had offered Willis some shares of Rahway Belt common. If Willis were to buy this stock, his holdings would be nearer 40 than 30 per cent. This was something which in all honesty he should tell Mrs. Jacoby, but he did not do so immediately when he met her downstairs, because he was still shocked by Mr. Jacoby’s appearance.
There was never any use mincing matters with Mrs. Jacoby. She looked worried and unhappy, but like the late Seth Wilfred she knew how to cut her losses.
“There’s a heart complication,” she said. “Manley won’t go to the hospital. He has superstitious ideas about hospitals.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” Willis told her. “I didn’t know things were as serious as this.”
“Well, they are,” Mrs. Jacoby said, “but something serious happens to everyone some time. Sit down, and I’ll ring for Henry to get you something.”
“Oh, no thank you, Mrs. Jacoby,” Willis said. “I mustn’t keep you from anything you’re doing.”
“Sit down,” Mrs. Jacoby said. “You’re only keeping me from worrying. How are things at Rahway?”
“Everything’s going pretty well,” Willis told her.
“I know it is,” Mrs. Jacoby said, “and it’s a great comfort to Manley. He was reminding me only this morning how I had advised him to sell that plant.”
Willis smiled, but at the same time he had a qualm of apprehension. If M
r. Jacoby should die, there might be every reason for Mrs. Jacoby to sell out her interest in Rahway Belt.
It was time to mention the common stock he had been offered. He did not want for a moment to have Mrs. Jacoby gain the idea that he was trying to get control of Rahway Belt. He wanted to explain his motives very clearly, but Mrs. Jacoby spoke again before he could start.
“Henry Peters says you want to buy his stock,” she said.
Although Willis was beginning to pride himself on his ability to handle situations, he found himself pausing clumsily.
“Peters offered it to me first, of course,” Mrs. Jacoby said, before Willis had a chance to speak. “But I didn’t want any more. Why should I, with Manley the way he is?”
Willis often thought it was a pity that Mrs. Jacoby had not been a man.
“I am very glad that Mr. Peters consulted you first about this matter,” Willis said, and he hoped he was not speaking too quickly or eagerly. “I was just going to take up the question with you myself, but seeing Mr. Jacoby so ill made it completely leave my mind.”
There was a pause, a very brief one, but it was long enough to make Willis highly uncomfortable.
“I’m sure you were,” Mrs. Jacoby said.
“I really was, Mrs. Jacoby,” Willis answered.
It was a very silly remark to make, and besides, he had answered much too quickly.
“Of course you would really,” Mrs. Jacoby said. “You’re too shrewd to play around behind my back.”
“I’m awfully glad you realize that, Mrs. Jacoby,” Willis told her.
“Of course I realize it,” Mrs. Jacoby said. “There is no need to worry about me, Willis. I don’t want to have control of Rahway Belt”—she lowered her voice slightly—“if Manley should pass on.”
Sincerely, Willis Wayde Page 32