Sincerely, Willis Wayde

by John P. Marquand

  “Did you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered, and he looked at her steadily. “I did, and what’s more, I’m in the habit of meaning what I say.”

  His answer was unmeasured enough to give him genuine satisfaction. After all, he was thinking, now that the Harcourt-Rahway deal was finished it was not as necessary as it had been to be on good terms with Bess.

  “Don’t get angry,” Bess said. “I loved what you said, Willis, I really did. But I got you out here to tell you something else. Sylvia and I have been talking things over, and we don’t see why you don’t move up here from New Jersey.”

  “What’s that again, Bess?” Willis asked her.

  “That plant of yours in New Jersey is just a subsidiary, isn’t it?” Bess said. “This is the main plant and the main office is in Boston. Well then, why isn’t it only sensible for you to move up here?”

  Willis put his thoughts carefully together before he answered. He wanted to give a balanced reply, which could, if necessary, be quoted.

  “You know, I’ve already given that idea careful thought, Bess,” he said, “but Rahway Belt happens to be an important subsidiary, and I am more familiar with the processes there than anyone else and I also hope we’ll need more and more to cover the New York field. Besides, your father will be in the Boston office.”

  “Sylvia would love it here,” Bess said. “She says it’s terribly hot for the children in New Jersey in the summer. We were looking at some of the old houses by the river this morning, and you could live in the garden house until you got settled.”

  “You say you were looking at some houses this morning?” Willis said. “That’s awfully kind of you to take such an interest, Bess, but I really don’t think the step would be sensible.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, and Willis later wondered whether Bess Harcourt had an idea of what he was thinking. The old loyalties were all around him; the Harcourts were trying to draw him back because they needed him, and he was never coming back. Willis tossed his cigarette on the lawn and stepped on it carefully. They were standing outside the living room, and the voices of the stockholders of Harcourt Associates came to them through the open windows. It was time to make a speech that was even more sincere than the one he had delivered in the dining room.

  “I’m afraid I must speak a little as though I were addressing a meeting, even if you don’t like it, Bess,” Willis said. “If there is any problem or confusion here, I shall always come up immediately, and I shall also be making regular visits, but I don’t think it would be advisable, not for any of us, for me to be here permanently.”

  He spoke as genially as he had learned to do whenever he made a decision; he was glad to see that Bess Harcourt was impressed by what he said.

  “But, Willis,” she began, “I don’t see why you’re being so illogical.”

  Willis paused and he was always glad that he looked straight into her eyes.

  “I’m being very logical, Bess,” he said.

  He had always thought of that conversation as a clear-cut victory, and he always liked the final thing he said to Bess as they walked across the lawn.

  “Not that we won’t always be friends, Bess,” he said. “We’re bound to be, because there are a great many things that neither of us can forget.”

  Willis was glad to know that Sylvia and Bess had been looking at houses, because his knowing enabled him to handle intelligently what might have been a very difficult scene if he had faced it unprepared. As it was, the scene began five minutes after he and Sylvia were in the Cadillac on their return to Boston.

  “Willis,” Sylvia said, “Bess and I saw the dearest old house down by the river this morning. Its date is some time around the Revolution and it has all its old woodwork in very good condition. Of course it needs repairs, but it will be fun fixing it.”

  “That sounds very interesting, sweetness,” Willis said. “I’m glad you had an opportunity to see some of the old colonial houses here. I know many are considered as unique. By the way, did you see Steve Decker?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia said. “He was frightfully unattractive. I don’t know what I ever saw in him. If we have to come here to live, you don’t have to worry about Steve Decker.”

  “And now we’re on this subject,” Willis said, and he took her hand and kissed it, “you needn’t worry about Bess either. I had a few words with Bess after lunch.”

  “I’ve never been worried about Bess,” Sylvia said. “What did you say to her after lunch?”

  Willis spoke gravely but firmly.

  “Bess seemed to think it would be more efficient if we all came up here to live,” he said. “I told her it was impossible.”

  “But, Willis,” Sylvia asked, “why is it impossible?”

  Again and again Willis was to meet individuals with executive drive and brilliance who failed because they could not handle women. These people were not able to say no at the right time, or to make the negative stick. Thank heaven he had learned to say no.

  “It’s impossible for several reasons, sweetness,” he said, “one of which is because I like New Jersey. Another is that I don’t want you or me or our children to be bossed around by the Harcourts, and I really mean this, sweetness.”

  “Willis,” Sylvia said. “They’re not bossing you. You’re bossing them around.”

  “Very well, sweetness,” Willis said, “if that is so, I would rather boss them from New Jersey. I want you and me to be completely independent, honey.”

  “Willis,” Sylvia said, “no one is ever independent.”

  “And besides, I have another reason, sweetness,” Willis said, “something which I hope will be a happy surprise for you. What do you think, Mrs. Wayde? As of today you and I are the owners of an estate near Orange. The view is like the Jacobys’. You can look right across over to New York, only this home is Georgian and brick, sweetness, with a swimming pool and a three-car garage, and five acres. It’s a sweet little investment, because we can always subdivide the acreage eventually. The grounds are beautifully landscaped and there’s a rose garden. I can’t wait to see the kids playing around the lawn—slate roof, copper gutters, oil heat, an electric kitchen. They were in a hurry to settle the estate, and you’ll laugh when I tell you what I offered. You may want to pick out a few wallpapers, but we can move in any time. Don’t say I haven’t been thinking about you, Mrs. Wayde. Are you surprised? I thought you would be, sweetness.”

  Willis could never have acquired the Browning place in Northfield Park at the figure he offered except for a chain of favorable circumstances each of which was linked with the other in a way that only happens once or twice in a lifetime. The affairs of Mr. Hubert H. Browning, the owner, were found to be in a highly tangled condition after his decease. Also, large pieces of real estate were growing hard to move. You could not blame anyone in June, 1940, or the next year either, for waiting to see which way the cat was going to jump. Later, when the cat had jumped, a number of good friends told Willis Wayde confidentially that he had certainly had a hell of a nerve to buy the Browning place.

  They said this in a laughing way, of course, at lunch at the outdoor grill or around the swimming pool, which was not a bad pool considering its rather small size. They would never have elected Willis treasurer of the country club if they had known he was up to his ears in debt when he bought the Browning place. He had a hell of a nerve to do what he did, the kind of nerve you only had when you were just a kid and knew everything was going your way.

  Nerve was a mighty useful asset if you could back it up by faith. They were getting into a seller’s market and Willis had faith that it was going to last for years. He knew as sure as fate no matter what the international situation might be, and no matter what punitive taxes the Roosevelt administration might slap on business, Harcourt Associates was going to amortize its obligations and would pay dividends on its common stock in a year or two.

  There was seldom anything dramatic in building up industrial units
, since progress was only made by sticking everlastingly at what you were doing. Years, when Willis came to think of it, blended all together into a larger unit when you looked at the Associates picture. When he thought along these lines, he always liked what he had once written about Harcourt Associates:

  I was one of those instrumental in combining Rahway Belt with Harcourt Mill in the spring of 1940. The Planeroid of Rahway and the Hartex line of Harcourt met shoulder to shoulder the shock of Pearl Harbor with a staunchness that would have been impossible for either individually. They went to war shoulder to shoulder, doing yeoman service in production lines everywhere in America. They are still doing yeoman service in this uncertain period of reconstruction.

  This was one way of putting it, and a somewhat conservative way, considering the Harcourt profits. Right from the start it had been an essential industry, and as one who headed its management, Willis often felt that he had been in the war himself. In fact he had seen much more of wartime Washington than many army officers who were stationed in that city. Harcourt won the Army-Navy “E” award three times, beginning with the autumn of 1942, and if Willis had joined the armed services, he would not have made the contribution to his country that he had. He was told this personally by Rear Admiral Charles G. Spoonholm over cocktails in the men’s bar of the Hotel Mayflower. Admiral Spoonholm, on this occasion, had told Willis that he was more valuable than a destroyer screen—an exaggeration but a pleasant one to remember. Also at a cocktail party in the same hotel Brigadier General Hugo A. Brass had said affectionately that he wouldn’t swap Willis Wayde for a couple of North African combat teams.

  It was a pleasure sometimes to read the many kind things that had been said about Harcourt Associates from the first days of its inception. There were some fine clippings from the financial pages of New York and Boston dailies and from Chicago, including a nice picture taken after Willis assumed the presidency of Harcourt, when Mr. Bryson Harcourt was elected chairman of the board in 1943. The items that interested Willis most were the pieces about Harcourt Associates that began to appear in market letters and in Washington gossip sheets. He particularly liked the piece which appeared in Crown Capital News in 1944 under the title “Thought of the Week.”

  Harcourt Associates

  Although common shares were split five for one recently, these are still closely held and not yet available on the big board, where we predict they will be eventually. Though called today a war baby, Harcourt Associates has placed itself in a fine position to reap rewards in the field of consumer production. A small company, compared to its larger competitors, such as Simcoe Rubber, its compact size has added to its mobility under the efficient and aggressive leadership of its president, Willis Wayde, whose face is well known here in Washington at the WPB and Army and Navy Departments. The dividend on Harcourt common, initially declared a year ago, was raised for the last quarter to two dollars, which is said to be a fraction of the current earnings. Several investment trusts and the trust department of a large New York bank are now taking a lively interest in the Harcourt picture.

  On the whole this piece was factually correct. As Willis always said when he was asked how things were going, Harcourt could speak for itself. Once things were shaken down, there was a fine team at Harcourt, and he had contacted some very nice young bright army and navy boys who augmented that team splendidly when the war was over. As Willis often said facetiously to Sylvia, what would they have done if they had moved up to Clyde, Massachusetts? Sylvia would have been a real war widow then, whereas living in Orange, Willis simply had to drive to Newark and get a train to Washington in no time flat. With earnings rising as they were, and with all the red tape and renegotiation of contracts, a small suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington became a legitimate company expense. There wasn’t much home life in wartime but there was more in Orange than there would have been if they had moved to the vicinity of Boston.

  When Harcourt began paying dividends on the common, Willis was even able to talk to Sylvia facetiously about the Browning place and to remind her how shocked she was when she had first seen it. In fact at one point she had begun to weep.

  Willis would have thought that anyone would have fallen in love, as he had, at first sight with the bronze of the casement windows and the forced hot-air heating and the laundry with its electric clothes dryer, but he was soon to learn that women as a whole never cared for basic beauties of construction. It took Sylvia a long while before she realized that they had really got in on the ground floor when they bought the Browning place and that it could not possibly have been duplicated for many times the original investment. The truth was that the Browning place may have been a little too large for them in the beginning and a little tough to swing, but they grew up to it pretty quickly, and Sylvia did wonders with it, once she got the spirit of the thing.

  Willis had arranged that Sylvia and he should see it just by themselves and he had looked forward with keen pleasure to Sylvia’s reaction. It disconcerted Willis to have her laugh, when he stopped the car in front of the Georgian doorway, with ivy swarming up the warm brick façade and with those completely satisfying copper conductors and a fine original bronze ship’s lantern to light the steps at night.

  “What’s so funny, honey?” Willis asked.

  “Now, Willis,” Sylvia said, and she still laughed, “let’s get out of here and go where we’re going before someone sees us and asks us what we want.”

  “What’s that again?” Willis said. “I don’t quite follow you, honey.”

  “Oh, Willis,” Sylvia said, “a joke is a joke. Let’s get on and look at the new house. I’ve got to get back and see about the children.”

  That first reaction of Sylvia’s was really something to remember and to tell about in later years.

  “But, sweetness,” Willis said, “believe it or not, as Mr. Ripley says, this really is the house, and all of it is yours, Mrs. Wayde.”

  “Oh, come now, Willis,” Sylvia said, “it’s awfully tiresome to go too far with a practical joke.”

  “But, honey,” Willis said, and he opened the door of the car and got out and took the front-door key out of his pocket, “it isn’t a practical joke. It all belongs to you and the children, honey, and don’t you ever say I didn’t get you something. Look at those casement windows—all bronze framed—and wait till you see the plumbing. You and I are each going to have a bathroom—in fact everybody’s going to have a bathroom.”

  Sylvia said, “Oh no, Willis.”

  It was a little hard to follow her mood but he tried to do his best.

  “I frankly felt a little the same way when I saw it first myself,” Willis told her. “It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Now you get out of the car and I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll carry you over the threshold.”

  “Oh, Willis,” Sylvia said. “Have you really bought it?”

  “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” Willis said. “But it’s really and truly ours, sweetness. Now step into the front hall and wait till you see the woodwork.”

  Every guest who ever came to “Waydeholm”—a name which they finally adopted at Willis’s suggestion in order to have something to put on the social note paper—always commented favorably on the beauty of the hall, which ran spaciously through the house, and on the fine broad staircase. It was disappointing that Sylvia had different ideas when they first entered Waydeholm.

  “If you have really bought this,” Sylvia said, “can’t you sell it over again?”

  “Well, for goodness gracious sakes alive,” Willis said. “That’s the queerest question I’ve heard in a dog’s age, sweetness.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sylvia said, “I think I’m going mad.”

  “What’s that one again?” Willis said. “I don’t get you, honey.”

  “Either I’m going mad or you are,” Sylvia said, “and I don’t think it’s me,” and then she began to cry.

  It was hard to follow Sylvia, but the fact that she had made a grammat
ical error showed how upset she was.

  “Now, honey,” Willis said, “tell me what’s the matter and let’s see if I can’t fix it.”

  “I always thought you had common sense,” Sylvia said. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  “You mean,” Willis told her, “that you don’t consider this a practical home, Sylvia? If that’s what you mean, I really just don’t get it.”

  “Oh, please,” Sylvia said, “don’t say any more about it, Willis.”

  “But I got it for you and the boys, sweetness,” Willis said. “Can’t you visualize the children in a year or two sliding down the banisters?”

  Somehow or other the mention of Al and Paul seemed to calm Sylvia. At least she opened her purse and took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. At least she listened to him and gave him a chance to convince her that they really had a home.

  “You’ve got to get the whole picture, dearest, before you jump to conclusions,” Willis said, “and then you’ll have the same vision I have. I know you will.”

  “Willis,” Sylvia asked, “for heaven’s sake, what sort of vision?”

  “A vision of the future, honey,” Willis told her. “I don’t even have to shut my eyes to picture you and me eventually entertaining all sorts of people here. For instance when we are once established we will be able to ask Mr. and Mrs. P. L. Nagel out for a week end when they come to New York. This is going to be a real center for you and me and the children, and it’s also going to offer a type of business entertainment which I am very confident can be written off on the income tax.”

  At least Sylvia was listening to him and thank goodness she had stopped crying. “I never thought you could be so fantastic, Willis,” she said. “Have you ever thought that it will take three servants to run this place, let alone a nurse, and those lawns, Willis—you’ll need a man all the time.”

  Willis was glad at last that they were getting down to brass tacks. In the last analysis, taking over a house like Waydeholm was a simple question of faith and courage. It had never occurred to him until he had observed Sylvia’s reaction that women, as a rule, were more timid and conservative than men.