Sincerely, Willis Wayde (7 page)

“Yes,” Miss Jackman said, “but you haven't got the time today. You should have been in earlier this morning.”

“Perhaps I should have,” Mr. Harcourt said.

“The bank's called you from Boston,” Miss Jackman said. “Will you be at the meeting on Tuesday?”

“Yes,” Mr. Harcourt answered, “and I'll have lunch at the club.”

“Mr. Bryson wants to see you.”

“What does he want now?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

“It's about the sales department.”

“Oh dear me,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Tell him to see me at the house this evening.”

“They have guests for dinner tonight.”

“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “tell him before dinner. Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” Miss Jackman said, and Willis thought that she hesitated because he was there.

“Well, what is it?” Mr. Harcourt said.

“Mrs. James telephoned. She's very anxious to have you call her back.”

“She called me here at the office? She really shouldn't do that,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Well, get her for me in ten minutes. Thank you, Miss Jackman.”

Miss Jackman strode back into her own office and closed her door sharply and decisively, and Mr. Harcourt smiled.

“I'm afraid Miss Jackman is displeased with me this morning,” he said. “Perhaps I'm too dependent on her, and it never pays to depend too much on anyone. I wonder what you think of the Harcourt Mill, Willis, now you've seen it. It seemed like a big place to me when I saw it first, but it isn't really. Perhaps you'll work here some day. Would you like it if I got you a job next summer in the school vacation?”

“Yes, sir,” Willis answered. “I'd like it very much.”

Hero worship is always natural in a boy. You were always filled at that age with unfulfilled wishes, and Willis was wishing just then that he could be exactly like Mr. Henry Harcourt, without having the least idea what such a wish entailed.

Mr. Harcourt leaned back in his swivel chair and his lower lip twitched slightly.

“From what I hear,” Mr. Harcourt said, “your family moves around a lot. I used to enjoy change once myself. When I was your age I wanted to go to sea. When I was a little older my father had me travel for the mill. I always liked to see new parts of the country and to arrive in a strange town at night and move on next day, but now I'm caught in the mill machinery—not literally but figuratively. I suppose nearly everyone gets caught in some way eventually.”

“I guess Pa doesn't want to get caught,” Willis said.

“Your father has a creative mind,” Mr. Harcourt said. “It's hard for anyone to stay still who has a mind like that.”

“The last man Pa worked for,” Willis said, “was a man named Mr. Harrod Cash in Denver. He's a pretty rich man, I guess. Maybe you're acquainted with Mr. Cash.”

“Yes, I know him,” Mr. Harcourt said. “He's a lot richer man than I am, actually.”

“Well, he hired Pa to get the water out of a silver mine of his,” Willis said, “and after Pa did it Mr. Cash wanted him to run the mine, but Pa said the mine wasn't a problem any longer.”

“Your father told me about that,” Mr. Harcourt said. “What does your father want you to do, Willis?”

“He wants me to be an engineer, too,” Willis said. “He tries to get me to do logarithms and things like that. When there isn't any school around, Pa teaches me geometry and things and Ma teaches me the rest. She taught school once.”

“Do you want to be an engineer?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

“No,” Willis said. “I like making things, but I can't take machines apart.”

“Do you like to read?” Mr. Harcourt asked.

“Yes, sir,” Willis answered, “but not scientific books.”

“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “it seems to me it's time you went regularly to school. I'm going to tell you a secret, Willis.”

Mr. Harcourt's face wrinkled into a frosty smile.

“It's rather a simple secret. You can repeat it if you want to, though I'd just as soon it remained between you and me. I happen to think your father is very exceptional in many ways. I want to use you to keep him with us, Willis.”

“Me, sir?” Willis said.

“Yes,” Mr. Harcourt answered. “I'm going to talk to him about your future this afternoon.”

“I don't think he thinks much about my future, sir,” Willis said. “Pa thinks mostly about machinery.”

“Every father thinks about his son,” Mr. Harcourt said. “You'll know when you have sons of your own.”

He stopped, because the door to Miss Jackman's office had opened.

“Will you speak with Mrs. James now?” Miss Jackman said.

“Oh, yes, all right,” Mr. Harcourt said.

There were two telephones on Mr. Harcourt's desk, one for the mill and one for the outside. He lifted up the receiver of the outside telephone.

“Hello, Harriet,” he said. “I've been meaning to call you. I'll be in town on Tuesday—the bank meeting.… Yes, you can reach me at the club.… Why, that sounds delightful, Harriet. Shall we say the usual place at the usual time? … I don't really give a damn what Mildred and Bryson think. On Tuesday, then. Good-by, my dear.”

Mr. Harcourt hung the receiver back and laughed softly. He glanced in a startled way at Willis.

“Excuse me, Willis,” he said. “Miss Jackman!”

Miss Jackman opened the door quickly.

“Will you call up the house in town,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Tell them I'll be in town over Tuesday night and if Patrick's waiting I'll go home for luncheon now.”

“Mr. Bryson has asked you for dinner Tuesday night,” Miss Jackman said.

“Yes,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I know. Will you call up Mrs. Bryson and tell her that I'm sorry, I'll be in town, and you might tell her that I'm dining with Mrs. James.”

“Wouldn't it be better if you told her that yourself?” Miss Jackman said.

“No, no,” Mr. Harcourt said. “Well, Willis, we'd better be leaving now or your mother will think you're lost, and I want to thank you for your company, Willis, and for giving me a very pleasant morning.”

IV

Clyde as a town had a self-consciousness peculiar to all small towns that have been settled for several centuries. New arrivals were always set apart from everyone else in Clyde. They might live there for years, die there, and leave their children there, but they were never an integral part of the town itself.

When Willis's mother joined the Ladies' Alliance of the Congregational Church, she was always known as Mrs. Wayde from the Harcourt Mill; and his father, when he joined the Clyde Men's Club at Mr. Hewett's invitation, was always known as the Wayde who worked at Harcourt's. It seemed curious to Willis that his own position was slightly different from that of his parents. The difference must have started with high school, where he was always known by the boys as “the guy,” and by the girls as “the fellow,” who lived at the Harcourt place. He was never the smartest boy in his class or the dullest one either, and he had entered school too late to be identified with any particular group. Yet it was amazing how much people remembered about him when it became worthwhile to remember.

Several of Willis's schoolmates had exchanged photographs with him at graduation time, and were happy to exhibit these pictures in later years. Willis was younger then, of course, but who wasn't? Still, in the school picture he had all the makings of what he was later—fine broad shoulders and a handsome face, in a manly way. It seemed strange, come to think of it, that he hadn't been voted the handsomest boy in the graduating class, instead of its president, Howard Twining. The reason probably was that Willis was still a little gawky and hadn't grown up to himself. He hadn't broadened up to his tallness, and he still was outgrowing his clothes. Even so he was very neat and eagerly agreeable-looking. His hair, though a mite long, was all slicked down and neatly parted, making one recollect that Willis was one of those boys in high school who was careful to carry a pocket comb. The nice thing about that picture was the straight, reliable way in which Willis looked at you—an honest look and no smirking. His was a face you could trust, a sincere, honest, unpretentious face.

Mr. Bertram Lewis, who retired as principal of the Clyde High School in 1927, even at the age of eighty, distinctly remembered Willis Wayde. It seemed that Mr. Lewis, called Gumshoe Lewis by generations of his pupils, had realized the instant he set eyes on Willis that the young man had a future ahead of him, although Mr. Lewis did not announce his discovery for many, many years. It seemed only yesterday, he used to say, that Willis and his mother had called at the old high-school building on the day before school opened in September, 1922. He was struck immediately by the young man's fine, upstanding appearance. He could tell right away that Willis was exceptional. Often when the winter twilight fell and Mr. Lewis made a final tour before going home, he would find Willis still studying at his desk, and he remembered what Willis said, just as though it were yesterday. “When I work something out by myself,” he said, “then I know it, Mr. Lewis.”

It was strange when Willis once heard this anecdote repeated that he could not remember a single occasion when he had stayed after school, except once when Miss Minnie Wilson had kept him there after she had caught him passing a note across the aisle to Susan Brown, and it was not his note either. It was a note that Bill Ross, now owner of the Ross Garage, wanted delivered to Susan Brown.

Miss Minnie Wilson, who had taught English and kept Room 3, remembered Willis too. Willis wrote beautiful compositions, the best of which was entitled “The First Snowstorm of Winter.” There was one thing about Willis that was very sweet. She thought he was just a little bit in love with her—you know how boys were sometimes. When she kept him after school once for passing the note to that little blond girl, Susan Brown—who was a flirt, if Miss Wilson did say so—she never forgot what Willis had said after they had been alone for a whole hour.

“You won't do it again, will you, Willis?” she had asked him.

“No, Miss Wilson,” he had answered.

He had said it looking straight into her eyes. He was really saying that he had no use for any little flirt like Susan Brown and he cared for someone else, and she could tell who that someone was.

As years passed Susan Brown, too, became able to recall more and more about Willis Wayde at school. She had left high school abruptly in the middle of her senior year to marry Gerald Holtz, who was learning to compound prescriptions in Wilson's Drugstore. Since she had been going with a lot of other fellows, including Bill Ross, various individuals began counting on their fingers when their first child was born, but information as to the date of birth was vague, because Susan had been visiting cousins in Keene, New Hampshire, when this happened. By the time the last of the five Holtz children had reached school age, Susan remembered so much about Willis Wayde that she was finally able to reveal that she could have started going with Willis Wayde instead of with Gerald Holtz any time when they were at high school. Her desk was just across the aisle from his in old Minnie Wilson's room, and Willis Wayde was always leaving mash notes in her desk. She could have married Willis just as easily as not, and if she only had, as she frequently told Gerald, she wouldn't be living in any two-family house on Center Street doing all the work, and she would have known all those stuck-up Harcourts too. In fact, Willis had proposed to her four times.

Gerald Holtz only said, that was Susy for you. You got to know who was going with who if you jerked sodas at Wilson's. Willis Wayde never bought a soda for a girl, let alone Susy, except once when he treated Winnie Decker, Steve Decker's sister, to a strawberry nut sundae.

Steve Decker had been in Room 3 with Willis too. They had studied plane geometry and Latin together, taught by old Gumshoe Lewis, and old Gumshoe was always bawling Willis out because Willis was pretty slow. Willis's old man knew his old man out there at Harcourt's. That was why he had Willis over to the house sometimes, and once they were on the debating team together. The subject was “Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?” Steve also remembered the time when Willis had treated Winnie to a strawberry sundae. Willis had been asked to supper, and after supper Willis had said suddenly:

“How would it be, Winnie, if we went down to the drugstore and I was to buy you a soda?” It was a fact that Willis said “was,” not “were,” in those days.

Howard Twining, who later started Twining, Inc., Real Estate and Insurance, with offices in the Purdy Block on Dock Street, was president and valedictorian of the high-school class of 1924, and of course he remembered Willis Wayde. He and Willis and Steve Decker were almost inseparable, and Howard Twining himself had seen that Willis was on the committee of the senior-class dance, and Willis had walked in the grand march with Patricia Ryan, who was voted prettiest girl in the class. Frankly, he knew for a fact that Willis was sweet on Winnie Decker, who was in the sophomore class. Willis used to take her to Wilson's Drugstore constantly and buy her sodas. Howard always knew that Willis was the most likely to succeed in the class of '24.

Other people whose names and identities Willis had entirely forgotten began to remember the youth of Willis Wayde. Their insignificant reminiscences were like the calcified remains of coral animalcula, building up the reef of Wayde legend until it rose above the surface of fact and became impervious to the dashing waves of truth.

The truth was that his school career in Clyde left only a vague impression on Willis. He never had the time to appreciate the town or the acquaintances he made there. He must have felt that he was only passing through, like the drummers who spent a night at the hotel. Every morning he would meet Granville Beane at the gate of the Harcourt place and would walk to the car stop at Sudley Road and take the trolley car to town. The personality of Granville was more definite to Willis than that of any other of his schoolmates, because Granville and he took those trips together, walking through the autumn leaves, and through the snow, and later through the slush and mud of early spring.