Sincerely, Willis Wayde (40 page)

“Willis?” Sylvia said.

“Yes, dear,” he answered.

“How is it that someone as stupid and vulgar as Mr. Nagel can be so successful in business? I don't see that he has any brains at all, only a few slow reflexes.”

“You don't mean,” Willis said, “that old P.L. pinched you or anything?”

He was relieved when Sylvia laughed.

“Why, the thought never crossed my mind,” she said, “but I wish he had. It might have made things easier.”

Sometimes Sylvia said the most extraordinary things, considering she came from Craigie Street.

“Now, honey,” Willis told her, “you've got to—er—kind of expect that sort of thing when you get around with old men over sixty, especially if they're topflight executives.”

Sylvia laughed again and something in her mirth began to make him nervous.

“Suppose he starts,” she said. “How much should I let him pinch me?”

“Well, now, honey,” Willis said, “that's kind of a curious question. I don't see any use in crossing a bridge until you come to it, and maybe you never will.”

“You mean I'm not attractive enough?” Sylvia asked.

“Now, honey,” Willis said, “I didn't mean that. I was only sort of thinking out loud on general terms.”

“Darling,” Sylvia said, “what will I do if Mr. Nagel
does
do anything?”

“Well, honey,” Willis told her, and he tried to put his thoughts into order, “I've always thought that girls knew how to handle such situations. I don't say it's pleasant the way certain men behave, but then it's sort of an accepted human fact. You know, honey, executives around sixty are all under a heavy strain of responsibility. You ought to feel a little kindly toward them. We can't always be young, honey.”

Of course he really did not believe that last thought, because time, in those days, was entirely in his favor.

There was nothing like the Adirondacks to make one sleep when one finally did get to sleep, and there were never more comfortable beds than the twin beds in their suite at The Old Chief. In later years when Willis read the advertisements of the friendly service of certain large hotels which supplied each guest with a mattress equipped with countless thousands of tiny springs, each spring contributing to perfect posture and slumber, and on the occasions when Willis sometimes tossed restlessly upon these mattresses far away from home and worrying about some business interview, he often thought of The Old Chief. No air-conditioned room could ever duplicate the gentle breeze off the lake.

Sometime in the middle of the night, however, he was awakened by a sound from Sylvia's bed and at first he had a startled idea that she was crying, and then he was almost sure that she was laughing. Yet it seemed to him that the hour was inappropriate for joy or sorrow. He could discern the shape of the twin bed across from him, but he could not see Sylvia at all.

“Sylvia,” he said, “are you all right?”

“I'm all right,” she answered through the dark. “I just don't seem to be able to go to sleep, that's all.”

“Sylvia,” he asked her, “are you laughing or are you crying?”

There was a silence in the room that lasted a considerable time before she answered.

“I don't know what I'm doing—and don't ask questions, Willis.”

“Sylvia,” he said, “you've got to tell me what's the matter.”

“Oh, please stop it, Willis,” she said.

“If it's anything I've said, if I've been too—er—demanding or anything, honey, just tell me,” he told her.

At last he was sure that she was laughing more than she was crying.

“It isn't anything like that,” she said. “You're awfully sweet, darling, but everything's so different.”

“So different from what?” And he waited for quite a while before he asked the question.

“Oh, darling,” she said, “just so different from anything I thought anything was going to be. It's on another plane, but I'll get used to it—only please don't talk about it any more tonight.”

Often Willis said facetiously that his mind was like an alarm clock and that he never needed to put in a call at any hotel switchboard. At any rate he was always awake by seven, and Sylvia was still asleep that next morning, which was another preview of years to come.

He was delighted to see that it was a beautiful clear morning. The prospectus of Chieftain Manor had made mention of the winelike quality of the pine-bough-laden mountain air, a description that really made sense. He slid out of bed noiselessly, wrapping himself in the silk robe which he had purchased especially for the trip, and, carrying Volume II of the Five-Foot Shelf with him, tiptoed to the sitting room. He customarily did twenty push-ups, but he did twenty-five that morning, because of the elixir in the air. It was still only twenty minutes past seven when he had finished, ample time for his reading. When his fifteen minutes were up he experienced as he always did a fine sense of accomplishment that came of such a combined mental and physical workout, and the indoor swimming pool downstairs was yet to come.

He picked up the room telephone, asking for the pool and speaking softly so as not to arouse Sylvia.

“Am I speaking to the instructor?” he asked. “This is Mr. Willis Wayde. If I came down right now could you give me a half-hour lesson with the Australian crawl?”

He was back by ten minutes past eight prepared to awaken Sylvia, only to find her awake already, with a rather ugly blue-flannel wrapper over her pajamas, which reminded him that he must take Sylvia shopping as soon as they were dressed.

“Willis,” Sylvia said, “where under the sun have you been, wandering around in your wrapper?”

“Oh,” he told her, “the usual thing—first the old setting-up exercises, and then the Five-Foot Shelf.”

“Willis,” she said, “you didn't.”

“And then,” he said, “it just occurred to me that I could have a swimming lesson in the indoor pool, you know. They've got a good instructor there. It was a nice workout, honey.”

“What under the sun were you doing that for?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, “I've always wanted to learn the Australian crawl.”

“The Australian crawl?” she repeated.

He wondered sometimes later whether he would ever have spoken of that incident at another time or place, but the air was like wine that morning.

“You know, in Clyde,” he said, “there was a young fellow who could do the crawl beautifully. I saw him do it once in the Harcourt swimming pool after he had whipped me playing tennis. His name was Ed Ewing, the one who married Bess Harcourt—not that any of it makes any difference, honey.”

And this was true. None of it did make any difference. Bess Harcourt was a memory almost as distant as his days at the mine in Colorado. He simply remembered that Edward Ewing had been very good at the Australian crawl.

“But, Willis,” Sylvia said, “I still don't see why you want to learn it.”

It was a rather difficult question to answer now that he was back with Sylvia and calling up room service for breakfast.

“Sylvia,” he said, “if we have any—er—children, we've got to get a tennis court—one of those that dries off right after the rain, en-tous-cas I think the name is. They must be taught to play tennis, and how to handle themselves—er—gracefully in a swimming pool.”

“You mean,” Sylvia said, “it's going to help them in a business way?”

He saw that she was laughing at him, but he did not mind.

“Well, seriously, honey,” he said, “both in a business and a social way.”

He was feeling wonderful. The coffee and the buckwheat cakes and the small order of breakfast steak and the toast and strawberry jam were all wonderful.

“And, honey,” he said, “we'd better lay out our program for the day. First I'll take you shopping. I want to get you some tweeds and a housecoat, and then you and I have both got to have a golf lesson and then I'm going to play a few holes with old P.L. and then it will be time for lunch. Gosh, I'm glad we're here, honey.”

He had expected a quick, sympathetic smile from Sylvia, which was the least that he deserved. Instead he was surprised that she looked dubious.

“Don't you think, Willis,” she said, “that if you play golf with Mr. Nagel, we'll have to keep seeing the Nagels all the time?”

It amazed him that Sylvia could not see the advantages of their seeing as much as possible of the Nagels.

“Now, honey,” he said, and he spoke slowly and carefully, because he knew that he was facing an important moment, “there is one thing we ought to get straight, with all kindness and without emotion. Please don't look so startled, honey.”

“Then don't look so stern, Willis,” she said. “We were only talking about the Nagels.”

“I wish you wouldn't say ‘Only the Nagels,' honey,” he told her. “They're pretty important, potentially, in my business future, but more than that they represent—well, a sort of principle, a kind of way of life for both of us.”

When you came to think of it, that phrase “way of life” pretty well dated the conversation. They were back there in the days before World War II. They were only just beginning to define democracy without knowing what the phrase meant. Still it had a solemn ring.

“For heaven's sake, Willis,” Sylvia said, “I didn't mean to upset you, but just what have the Nagels got to do with our way of life?”

“You're not upsetting me, honey,” Willis told her. “Just please let me encapsulate my thought, because it is a thought.”

“What's that again?” Sylvia asked. “What were you going to do to the thought?”

“Oh,” Willis said, and he laughed. “Maybe it's an inappropriate word. We always used to use it back at Beakney-Graham, but never mind it now, honey. You let me worry about business. I'll pay the bills, but you let me run the business end of the combination, honey, and I'll let you run the home. But the Nagels are business, honey, and you let me run business.”

Marriage in the final analysis consisted of a series of adjustments. There was, as that humorist, artist and writer Mr. James Thurber put it, always a war between the sexes, always a kind of competition, no matter how much you loved someone. Somehow he and Sylvia must have worked out those problems more easily than most of their contemporaries. The reason was, he liked to think, that they each had a real respect for the abilities of the other. Right from the beginning he had respected Sylvia's mind and cultivation, and he rather liked it when she laughed at him about words like encapsulate, but they both finally understood that cultivation didn't get you everywhere.

XVIII

Perhaps the best way of judging whether or not certain years in your life were happy might be to determine how much you remembered about them; for the happiest years were those in which events blended with each other so naturally that all that remained was a recollection of growth and achievement. Judging the early years of Willis Wayde's and Sylvia's marriage by such a standard, they were very happy ones.

Sylvia and Willis had both been very busy in different ways. The reorganizing of Rahway Belt was combined with all the routine adjustments that most young couples must make. The babies and the obstetrical bills, the buying of furniture, papering the front hall, shoveling out paths to the sidewalk in winter, New Year's Eves at the country club, formed a disconnected chain of recollection. All their friends—the Parkinsons, the Meltons, the Newhopes—friends you played bridge with and friends you just had a good time with on general principles, were also interwoven with these events into a general background. You could recall many incidents, but sometimes it was hard, even with Sylvia's help and with the photograph album, to tell exactly where those incidents belonged, chronologically.

This uncertainty about dates and facts was, perhaps, not as peculiar as it seemed, since life in Orange, when they began it, was on the unstable foundations known to all young couples who have to earn a living. None of their friends, for instance—like the Parkinsons or the Meltons—had the remotest idea that they would live where they were for long. The moment they had higher salaries they would be moving. After all, this climbing up the ladder was all part of the American way. Curiously enough, however, one was not especially conscious at the time of living on shifting sands. To put the thing in purely industrial terms, Willis and Sylvia were in the pilot-plant stage when they lived in Orange, but you learned a lot of things in a pilot plant—you spotted the bugs; you smoothed the edges off generally. When they really went into production Willis realized that they had learned a great deal in Orange.

The home which they had rented was a brown-shingled affair standing on an adequate piece of lawn and shut off from the sidewalk by a privet hedge. Willis never forgot the hedge or the lawn, because he had tended them both himself out of a natural liking for puttering around. They had selected the house with the help of Mr. and Mrs. Jacoby, who felt it was important for Rahway Belt that the Waydes should live in a suitable neighborhood. It had taken them quite a while to furnish the house, or at least it had Sylvia, since Willis had delegated the whole problem to her, Rahway Belt in those days being at least a twelve-hour-per-diem proposition. His idea had been to budget the whole business and get some store like Bamberger's in Newark to furnish and decorate for a flat sum, and they could get a loan, if necessary, from the bank. But when Sylvia objected Willis let her do the furnishing herself. This had kept Sylvia fully occupied during the first months of their marriage, not to mention bossing Minnie, their Irish maid-of-all-work, and the result was not too bad. Sometimes he had to urge Sylvia to spend more money on the right things, like a good Oriental for the living room and a real antique dining-room table, but on the whole he admired her taste. It used to be a lot of fun coming home and examining the new things Sylvia had bought, and he could sympathize, frankly, with Sylvia's greatest preoccupation. She did not want their house to look like a newlyweds' home, even if it was. She wanted it to have both a used and cared-for look.