Sincerely, Willis Wayde (16 page)

Sylvia had answered the doorbell herself. She wore an inexpensive dark-red velvet dress which gave the impression of being too large for her, and her straight dark hair was unbecomingly bobbed. Willis remembered that Bill had mentioned being stuck with Sylvia at a dance, and he could understand the reason. He had not the experience, in those days, to perceive what a well-cut dress and a more sympathetic hairdo might have done for her.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Harcourt,” Sylvia said to Bill. “I was beginning to be afraid you'd found something better to do.”

“Oh no,” Bill said, “and I've brought a friend from Business School—Willis Wayde.”

“That's awfully nice,” Sylvia said. “Mother was hoping you'd bring someone. How do you do, Mr. Wayde. Is Business School fun?”

Sylvia spoke so rapidly that she gave Willis no time to tell her whether Business School was fun or not.

“Leave your galoshes and coats anywhere,” she said. “It's funny I've never met anyone from Business School except Mr. Harcourt, but, oh—” Sylvia pivoted around nervously—“here's someone who says he knows you. You know Steve Decker, don't you? He's second-year Law, you know.”

Then Willis saw that Steve Decker was standing behind Sylvia, and they must have been talking together in the hall when the doorbell had rung.

“Hello, Bill,” Steve said. “Hi, Willis.”

“Oh,” Sylvia said, “do you know Mr. Wayde too?”

There had to be a time when you first became interested in someone. Though Willis could not say that he was interested in Sylvia at the moment, he felt sorry for her, because she was trying so hard to make things go, as her mother would have expressed it.

“Yes,” Steve Decker said. “Willis and I are schoolmates. We wear the old school tie.”

“That's right,” Willis said, but he resented the way Steve smiled at him.

“Then you must tell me all about Steve,” Sylvia said. “Steve and I took a long walk this afternoon. Steve was hard to keep up with but it was fun slopping through the slush, wasn't it, Steve?”

“Yes,” Steve Decker said, “there was a lot of slush.”

It was strange how one could sometimes guess things immediately. Nothing more needed to be said for Willis to be absolutely sure that Sylvia Hodges was crazy about Steve Decker.

“And now come in and meet the family,” Sylvia said. “I'll be back in just a minute, Steve, and maybe you won't mind helping me bring the salad from the kitchen.”

“All right,” Steve Decker said, “I'll be right there, Sylvia.”

Steve Decker's words were polite, but there was something patient in them, something condescending.

Willis was not personally impressed by Sylvia Hodges. She was too thin and too intense for his taste. It never occurred to him that she was the sort of girl who might grow prettier as she grew older. But suddenly he wanted to be kind to her if only because Steve Decker was not. He found himself hoping that he was the only one who could tell what was happening.

He remembered that he spoke to Sylvia as he walked with her to the parlor.

“My mother says I'm pretty handy around the house,” he said, “if there's anything I could do to help.”

“Oh no,” Sylvia said, “you're company. Mother, this is Mr. Harcourt and this is Mr. Wayde.”

If Mrs. Hodges had thought more about her clothes, she would have been handsome in her middle age. Her face and figure were fuller than Sylvia's. Her eyes were deep brown like Sylvia's and her features were composed. If he had looked more closely at Mrs. Hodges he might have seen that Sylvia possessed many possibilities.

“Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “this is a friend of Sylvia's. Oh dear, I'm very bad at names.”

“It's Wayde,” Mr. Hodges said. “In my classes I always begin to forget when I get down to the W's myself.”

Mr. Hodges looked at Willis with the expression of someone who has seen too many young male faces. He was a thin man, and his gray mustache, slightly stained by tobacco, concealed the corners of his mouth.

“Did you ever take my introductory course, Mr. Wayde?”

“No sir,” Willis answered, “I went to Boston University.”

“Dear, dear,” Mr. Hodges said, “I attended the University of Chicago myself once, but I finally contrived to live it down. Don't you think so, Martha?”

“No, Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said. “You've never lived down anything.”

“You see,” Mr. Hodges said, “Mrs. Hodges is a Cambridge girl herself. What are you doing now, Mr. Wayde?”

“I'm at the Harvard Business School, sir,” Willis said.

“Dear, dear,” Mr. Hodges said, “that model village across the river that has the answer to everything?”

“Oh, Father!” Sylvia said. “Here's Mr. Harcourt, Father. He says he was in your course.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Hodges said, and his expression brightened. “If it isn't my old friend Harcourt. Fancy meeting you here, with your taste for geology.”

Bill Harcourt began to laugh.

“I had a fine time, sir,” he said, “and anyway I got a ‘C.'”

“Yes,” Mr. Hodges said. “I was going to give you a ‘D' but I couldn't when I remembered your necktie. You see, Mr. Wayde, mine is what is sometimes called a necktie course.”

“Oh, Father,” Sylvia began.

“Be at ease, Sylvia,” Mr. Hodges said. “In just a moment your mother and I will go to my study and eat our chicken salad. But we understand each other, don't we, Harcourt?”

“Yes, sir,” Bill said, “I guess we do.”

“There's nothing like a necktie course,” Mr. Hodges said, “or at least nothing exactly like it.”

But Sylvia was speaking quickly again, because Steve Decker was in the hall.

“I wish Father wouldn't tease everyone,” she said. “Every boy—I mean man—I ever ask around here has to go through with it, but you really mustn't mind him.”

“I don't,” Willis said, because he was anxious to say something pleasant. “I think he's wonderful.”

As Bill said afterwards, it was one of the damnedest evenings he had ever spent, what with old Hodges and the pencil-and-paper games. But Willis had meant what he said that night. He never did get to understand Mr. Hodges, because they were poles apart, but there really had been something wonderful about him. Whenever Willis thought about him, he always admitted that Mr. Hodges had something that he would never have, and he was sure that Sylvia understood this, although she very seldom mentioned it.

“Laura,” Sylvia said to her younger sister, “will you please take Mr. Harcourt and Mr. Wayde around and see that they meet everybody?”

Laura Hodges gave them a panic-stricken look.

“Can't you do it, Sylvia?” she asked. “You know everybody better than I do.”

“No, I can't,” Sylvia answered. “I have a lot of things I have to attend to.”

“I know what you have to attend to,” Laura said.

“Laura,” Sylvia said. “You do what I say or I'll speak to Mother.”

“Don't worry about us,” Bill said. “We'll get along all right.”

Sylvia had left them while Bill was still speaking, and Laura blushed unbecomingly.

“I didn't mean it that way,” she said, “but Sylvia's always bossy.”

“That's all right,” Bill Harcourt told her. “Big sisters always are.”

“She knows I don't like introducing people,” Laura said, “but we'll have to do it now, or Sylvia will find out later.”

It interested Willis to remember that it was Sylvia's younger sister, and not Sylvia, who introduced him to that new world of Craigie Street. Though Willis became well acquainted with most of them later, he always thought that those people who came to Craigie Street on Sunday evenings were a peculiar crowd, but he was always grateful for the contacts, because it was an education to meet people out of the ordinary run. In memory, he could still hear Laura's strained voice as she led them around the room.

“This is my brother Tom,” Laura said, and there was Tom Hodges, who always did strange things, like voting for Henry Wallace.

“This is Henry Halstead,” Laura said. She could never introduce people gracefully. Instead she pointed them out like books on a library shelf. And there was Henry Halstead, an instructor in one of Mr. Hodges's courses who later became an oil geologist.

“This is Norma Ritchie,” Laura was saying, and there was Sylvia's Radcliffe classmate Norma, the girl with acne, who was studying social sciences and who later had something to do with the United Nations and who sent Christmas cards of little-known saints from odd corners of French cathedrals.

“This is Hunter Baxter.” And there was Hunter Baxter, the poet, who never used rhymes and who later lectured to women's clubs and was investigated by the Un-American Activities Committee.

“This is Simeon Flyrood,” Laura was saying, and there was Tom's Law School classmate Simeon Flyrood, who liked to have his friends call him “Red” because of his ginger hair and freckles. He was the same Simeon Flyrood who later had something to do with the National Labor Relations Board, until he got mixed up with Communism in China.

“This is Elsie O'Donnell.” And there was Sylvia's Radcliffe classmate Elsie O'Donnell, whose hair never looked washed, no matter how often she washed it, and who became a script girl in Hollywood and finally did very well writing the Jack and Josie Breakfast Series on the radio, a daily drama of married life—although Elsie never did marry anyone.

“This is Claude Little,” Laura was saying, and there was Claude Little, who was the syndicated columnist today, a very interesting man and a good contact in Washington.

There must have been a dozen others—graduate students working for their doctorates and others in the Law and Medical Schools. There was Roy Fitzroy, for instance, who later became an authority on nutrition, and Hank Parkinson, who ended up in the Manhattan Project. They all looked uneasily at Willis when they heard he came from the Harvard Business School, but they were very interesting contacts, and it paid to know how to get on with this type of person.

“Supper's ready,” he heard Sylvia calling.

There was chicken salad and cocoa and prune soufflé in the dining room, and everyone seemed hungry except Bill Harcourt.

After supper everyone drew lots for a team to do the dishes. Willis was on the team with Bill Harcourt and Hunter Baxter and Laura. Although Willis was not used to the routine, he was good at doing dishes, and everyone began looking at him approvingly.

While the team worked, Willis could hear calls from the parlor for Red Flyrood to get out his guitar and sing some Western songs, and Red sang “Home on the Range” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” in a voice loud enough to be clearly heard at the kitchen sink. When he began to sing about the caissons rolling along, Laura asked Willis if he would mind going to her father's study across the hall to get the dishes there. Mr. and Mrs. Hodges always had their supper alone in the study.

“Well, well,” Mr. Hodges said. He was sitting behind his desk with a pile of manuscript in front of him. “Would you mind closing the door so I won't have to hear Mr. Flyrood quite so clearly?”

“Now, Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “the young people are having a good time, and it's very sweet of Mr. Wayde to enter in.”

“Yes,” Mr. Hodges said. “Yes, Martha. Did you ever take a course in geology, Mr. Wayde?”

“No, sir,” Willis told him.

“It's a pity,” Mr. Hodges said. “It's very good for the soul.”

“Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “Mr. Wayde is busy with the dishes.”

“Yes, Martha,” Mr. Hodges said. “On an evening like this it's pleasant to think of geological time. It's reassuring, to me at least, to realize that our lives are only a fraction of a second in that scale. I wish we lived back in the Devonian era with the ganoids.”

“Homer,” Mrs. Hodges said, “Mr. Wayde isn't interested. Sylvia tells me you went to school with Mr. Decker, Mr. Wayde.”

“Yes, that's so, Mrs. Hodges,” Willis said.

Mrs. Hodges smoothed her dress.

“I'm sure Stephen was very popular,” she said.

“Who's popular?” Mr. Hodges asked.

“Stephen Decker, Homer. He went to school with Mr. Wayde.”

“I really can't see what Sylvia …” Mr. Hodges began, but Mrs. Hodges raised her voice.

“We mustn't keep Mr. Wayde any longer,” she said. “They're waiting for him in the kitchen.”

It was surprising how quickly they got the dishes done, and when they were all back in the parlor Simeon Flyrood wanted to sing “Danny Dever” but Sylvia stopped him.

“We're going to choose teams now,” Sylvia said. “I'll take one team and Tom will take the other. I choose Steve Decker. Pass the pencils and papers, Laura.” Willis, too, was on Sylvia's team, and the first thing they did was to write down in two minutes all the rivers they could remember beginning with the letter “M.” It was still pleasant for Willis to recall that he had turned up with the largest number and that he had also come up with the longest list of Roman emperors in their proper chronological order.

You could not help but feel a warm glow of satisfaction when you did well at anything. Sylvia really noticed him when he remembered all the emperors, and she looked sorry when Bill Harcourt said they really had to go. He didn't want to break anything up. They were having a wonderful time, but he did have a lot of studying to do. Sylvia went with them to the hall and stood talking to them while they looked for their overshoes and coats.

“You must be sure to come back again,” she said, “and thanks for winning with the emperors, Mr. Wayde.”

She looked at him questioningly, and he knew she was asking him whether he had not had a good time, and he knew that she hoped he had.

“And thanks for helping with the dishes,” Sylvia said. “I told you it was just an informal pickup supper. Now be sure to come again.”