Sincerely, Willis Wayde (8 page)

All his other schoolmates were abstractions to him. The debating tests and the senior dance, and the social evenings in the parish hall of the Congregational Church which his mother made him attend, were only half-remembered interludes which had none of the validity of other aspects of his life. The high school supplied him with no love object, any more than the London streets had supplied one for Kipling's soldier fresh from Mandalay, because he was on a plane far above that of Patricia Ryan or Susy Brown or Winnie Decker. The plane, of course, was Bess Harcourt.

During all the years that his parents lived on the Harcourt place, his mother was always cheerful when October came.

“They'll be going to the city any day now,” she used to say, “and we can have everything all to ourselves.”

This was what she always said in the autumn, but she must have known that they would never have the place to themselves—except Alfred Wayde, whose obliviousness to surroundings made everything belong to him. In good weather on Saturdays or Sundays when he worked on the engine of the Ford or in the winter when he set up a bench and a metal lathe in the cellar or brought his drawing board into the living room, Alfred Wayde did not care where he was. It was different with Willis's mother, and Willis understood her moods much more clearly than his father's.

When the trees were bare and the gardens were mulched for the winter or when the snow on the lawns made the fir trees and the rhododendrons cold and dark, there were always a few lights in the big house and someone was always waiting there in case Mr. Harcourt should arrive suddenly from town. You never could tell exactly when he might arrive, and the same was true with the Bryson Harcourts, who came to their own house for the school holidays and often unexpectedly for week ends. The place would be watchful and silent one day and on the next you might hear the voices of strangers everywhere—friends of Mr. and Mrs. Bryson Harcourt's and school friends of Bill's and Bess's. If you walked through the woods by the brook, you never knew exactly whom you might meet on week ends. Sometimes Willis would meet Bess with some other girls from her Boston school, and on these occasions Bess would pass by quickly, simply saying, “Hello, Willis,” and he would sometimes hear Bess explaining him to the company.

“He lives on the place,” he would hear her say, “in the garden house.”

It was different when he met Bill or some of Bill's friends. Bill would often stop and introduce Willis to the company, and sometimes he would ask Willis to join them in whatever they were doing. Willis was never worried that he did not fit into these groups, because when they were by themselves he and Bess and Bill were friends in their own especial way, and they all knew that it was no one's fault that they were separated by circumstances beyond their joint control.

Bess explained the situation to him once that winter in the frank way that a girl of her age would—not that Bess was not always frank. Willis met her one Saturday morning when he had gone to look at the hothouse grapes, which Mr. MacDonald had said he could visit any time as long as he went in and out quickly and always closed the greenhouse door. On that sharp cold morning a fresh fall of powdery snow made everything dazzlingly white under a sunny cloudless sky. He came face to face with Bess just as he left the greenhouse. She was wearing a pleated blue serge skirt, a gray sweater, gray mittens, and a toboggan cap to match.

“Hello,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I was looking at the hothouse grapes,” Willis said.

“Well, don't eat any,” she said. “MacDonald can always tell. Where are you going now?”

“Home,” he said.

“I'm going up to the pine woods to look for animal tracks in the snow,” she said. “Would you like to come along?”

“All right, if you want me to,” he said.

“If I didn't, I wouldn't ask you,” Bess answered. “Hurry up. I'm cold standing still.”

It was hard to find the paths through the woods beneath the snow, but Bess knew them all by heart.

“I always like going places with you, Willis,” she said, “when there isn't anyone else around.”

“Is that a fact?” Willis said.

“Don't be silly,” Bess said. “When I have friends it isn't the same. They wouldn't like you and you wouldn't like them.”

“Is that a fact?” Willis said.

He said it because it was an easy thing to say, and he could afford to be amused. He was older and his age put him in a superior position.

“Don't be silly,” Bess said. “I like you when I'm alone.”

“All right,” Willis said. “I've got my own friends.”

It was pleasant in the pine woods. Beneath the trees the snow looked almost blue.

“Have you ever kissed a girl?” Bess asked him.

“Yes, I have,” Willis answered.

“Oh,” Bess said. “Where was that?”

“Back in Colorado.”

“Oh, was she prettier than me?”

“Yes,” Willis said, “and she was more grown-up.”

“Well,” Bess said, “a lot of girls in my class have kissed boys.”

“Is that a fact?” Willis said.

“I wish you wouldn't keep saying that thing,” Bess said. “I've never kissed a boy. I suppose I'll have to sometime.”

“Is that a fact?” Willis said.

“I wish you wouldn't keep saying that thing,” Bess said again. “Would you like to kiss me?”

“No,” Willis said, “not especially.”

“Well,” Bess said, “go ahead anyway. I've got to kiss a boy sometime, and I may as well get it over with. Go ahead.”

She shut her eyes tight and clenched her fists and turned her face up toward him.

“Well,” she said, “that wasn't much.”

“No,” Willis answered, “it certainly wasn't.”

“It's silly, isn't it?” Bess said. “But we can try it again sometime.”

The next time he saw Bess was an evening two weeks later, when he and his father and mother were asked quite suddenly by Mr. Harcourt to come to supper at the big house—informally, Mr. Harcourt said—and he apologized for the abruptness of the invitation. Bryson and Mildred and Bill and Bess would be there, he said, and he would appreciate having someone outside the family, if Mrs. Wayde would agree on such short notice. He had seen a great deal of the family lately in Boston, and perhaps there was such a thing as too much unadulterated family.

The big house was always wonderful in winter. Once you were in the hall, with the heavy-framed pictures and Selwyn, there was no sign at all of winter, and there was a summer smell of hothouse flowers. The Bryson Harcourts had arrived already, and everyone was in the drawing room.

“Mr. Harcourt's expecting you, sir,” Selwyn said to Mr. Wayde. “Would you mind finding your way to the drawing room yourself while I hang up the wraps?”

It was Selwyn's way of saying that they were welcome guests. As usual the rugs deadened the sound of footsteps so that no one heard the Waydes when they arrived at the open door of the drawing room, and thus they had an unanticipated glimpse of the Harcourts around the open fire. Mr. Harcourt in his dinner coat was facing the marble mantel, and Mr. Bryson Harcourt, in a brown tweed jacket, stood beside him. Mrs. Harcourt was seated in a light armchair looking up at them with the firelight making an attractive sort of halo around her head. Whatever they had been saying seemed to have caught her full attention and had given her good-natured florid face an anxious look. Bill and Bess were seated side by side on a sofa like two bored spectators who wished they were somewhere else—Bill in a dark blue suit, and Bess in a young girl's dress of English silk.

“I don't mind in the least your being frank, Bryson,” Mr. Harcourt was saying.

His voice sounded light and untroubled. It was one of those moments when one did not know whether to interrupt or to stand there listening, and the Waydes paused indecisively at the door of the drawing room.

“I think you should give more consideration to the family point of view, Father,” Bryson Harcourt said. “The business is going beautifully and no one sees any need for turning everything inside out.”

“No doubt I'll hear all about it at the June meeting,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I'm customarily blamed for something there. But just remember this.” Mr. Harcourt touched his lip with his forefinger. “The whole lot of you together can't outvote me, can you? I suppose I sound arrogant. I dare say I am.”

Then he stopped. His glance had traveled to the drawing-room door. The façade was up again, and the Harcourts were again a united family. Bryson Harcourt hurried across the room to shake hands with Mrs. Wayde, and Mrs. Bryson Harcourt had risen and was smiling. Mr. Harcourt patted Willis on the shoulder.

“Willis,” he said, “you're growing all the time. You'll have a Martini, won't you, Alfred?”

“I certainly will,” Mr. Wayde answered.

“Hello, Willis,” Bill said. “How have you been?” And then Willis shook hands with Bess.

“Hello,” she said, and she drew her hand away quickly, looking as though she had never seen him before.

One afternoon in March, in that tedious time of year when you became uncertain whether winter would ever end or not, the word came from Mr. Beane that no one would be on the place for the week end, and there was also a rumor that Mr. Harcourt had gone suddenly to Florida. On Saturday afternoon Willis's father had asked him to get a good hot fire going in the kitchen stove and then to come down cellar to help while he attached an electric motor to a centrifugal machine that he had been working on for several weeks.

“It's about time you learned to use your hands, Willis,” his father had said. “My God, I've never seen a boy so clumsy with his hands.”

Some time before, Alfred Wayde had brought home a bag of potato chips, of which he was very fond, and, while eating them, he had begun to wonder whether it would not be possible to slice and fry bananas in the same manner. He had found that he could slice bananas and cook them in deep fat and the immediate result was satisfactory, but an hour later the banana chips became limp and spongy. Banana chips, Alfred Wayde had discovered, were deliquescent, and now he was thinking of some way to get the water out of them, and he had put together a centrifugal machine.

The device, which roughly resembled a windmill, and which was to be turned by a small electric motor, was going to get every bit of water and excess grease from the bananas.

“What are you going to do next if it does?” Willis asked his father.

Alfred Wayde looked at Willis impatiently.

“How's that again, son?” he asked.

“What are you going to do if it does work?” Willis asked.

“It doesn't make a damn bit of difference,” Alfred Wayde answered. “I only want to see whether it will. What made you ask such a fool question, son?”

“I thought maybe you could patent it and sell it,” Willis said.

“Well,” Alfred Wayde said, “why should I? I'm only doing this for my personal enjoyment.”

“But there might be money in banana chips,” Willis said.

“Money in banana chips?” Alfred Wayde answered. “My God, I don't want to go into the banana business. Now hand me the small wrench and the box of nuts, and don't spill them all over the floor.”

“If they keep absorbing water out of the air,” Willis said, “why does it do any good to get the water out of them?”

“Listen, son,” his father said, “I don't give a damn what happens to them later if I can get the water out of them just once, and now you'd better go for a walk and not ask any more fool questions.”

It was half past five in the afternoon. The sky outside was leaden gray, but there was still plenty of light because the days were certainly getting longer. There were icicles on the eaves of the big house, which looked more solid than ever behind the swaying limbs of the bare trees around it. The snow along the wood path by the brook was slippery and wet, and as Willis walked along he began thinking what the woods must have been like a hundred years ago, before there was any Harcourt place. Some of the larger trees had been growing then, and he could imagine that they were speaking among themselves of the past, as the wind moved through their tops. He could imagine, too, that he heard voices. He thought that he heard Mr. Harcourt's voice—which he knew was impossible, since Mr. Harcourt was in Florida. He was very much astonished when he suddenly saw Mr. Harcourt walking toward him.

Mr. Harcourt was dressed in the black broadcloth coat with the fur collar that he usually wore when he motored from the city. He was accompanied by a slender, middle-aged lady whose hat and whose fur cape looked more like the city than the country. She was holding Mr. Harcourt's arm.

“Why, hello,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I never expected to see anyone out here. Why aren't you in the house like sensible people, Willis?”

“I've been working down cellar with Pa, sir,” Willis said. “He's making a machine to get water out of bananas. He's just doing it for fun.”

“Well,” Mr. Harcourt said, “everyone to his own taste, I suppose. I suppose we're out here for fun ourselves, aren't we, Harriet? This is Willis Wayde, the son of my plant engineer. They're living in the garden house, you know.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Mrs. James said, and she smiled at Willis and held out a gray-gloved hand.

“Mrs. James and I have been motoring,” Mr. Harcourt said, “and I suggested that we might stop for a cup of tea before returning to Boston.”

“Yes, sir,” Willis said.

Mr. Harcourt touched his lower lip, and suddenly he began to laugh at some private joke of his own.

“I really thought I'd never see anyone at this time of day, but you never can tell, can you? Won't you join Mrs. James and me in a cup of tea?”

“I guess I ought to be getting home, sir,” Willis said.