Sincerely, Willis Wayde (11 page)

Canyon del Oro was one of those groups of ranch-type dwellings that kept springing up like mushrooms in California, each house on a lawn with its garage attached. The air was dry and the mountains behind were brown, as they were in summer, and the surroundings made Willis wonder why his father and mother had ever picked California. It took some time to find his parents' house because it was indistinguishable from other redwood, picture-windowed, wide-eaved dwellings. Its number, thirty-seven, was on the gatepost and there was a newly planted hibiscus hedge in front and an old olive tree on the lawn. His mother, wearing dungarees and sneakers, was watching a lawn sprinkler when the car stopped outside the gate. Her hair was white but she moved as fast as ever.

“Willis,” she said, “isn't it a lovely home? It's just what I've always dreamed of.”

“Yes,” Willis said, “it looks swell, Mom.”

“It'll look better,” she said, “when the vines get growing. Do you want the young man driving the car to stay for supper?”

“No,” Willis said, “he can get something to eat in San Bernardino.”

“All right,” she said. “We're having steak. Your father's taking the car apart again.” She raised her voice to a commanding shout. “Alf, Willis is here.”

His father appeared holding a monkey wrench. He had put on weight and he was puffing slightly.

“Hello, Willis,” he said. “How's tricks? Cynthia, you get supper, and Willis and I will sit in the breezeway and have a drink.”

It was hot in the breezeway, and Willis took off his coat and unbuttoned the soft collar of his shirt.

“You're all pressed up like a knife, aren't you, boy?” Alfred Wayde said, when he came out of the house with a tray and glasses. “These God-damned aluminum chairs. I always think they'll break.”

It was like old times, because nothing ever changed his father. As they sat there watching the sun drop to the west, Willis thought of the summers at the Harcourt place when Alfred Wayde and he came home from the mill together.

“It's a long way since that damned Harcourt Mill,” Alfred Wayde said.

Alfred Wayde had seen plenty of other plants since Harcourt's, but somehow the Harcourt Mill seemed clearer to them both than anything else, particularly to Willis.

“Now old Harcourt was always a good Joe,” Alfred Wayde said. “But Bryson—Jesus! How's Bryson now?”

“He isn't around much,” Willis said. “He does a lot of sailing.”

Alfred Wayde rattled the ice cubes in his glass.

“How's Bill?” he asked.

“He isn't around much either,” Willis said, looking at the cloudless sky and the burnt-orange grass in the distance. “He has a place in Marion now, but Bill's all right.”

He always did have a warm spot in his heart for Bill. But Alfred Wayde's mind was still on the Harcourt Mill. He still spoke of it as though he had been there yesterday.

“You taught me all I know about the mill,” Willis said.

“You're damned well right I did,” Alfred Wayde said. “God, you were a dumb kid.”

He must have been dumb from Alfred Wayde's point of view.

“You never could have got through Tech,” Alfred Wayde said, “not even with me on your neck. It's just as well you went to Boston University. Do you remember something?”

“What?” Willis asked.

“You asked me the dumbest question once. I guess it was the first summer, when I was trying to knock some sense into you about that mill.”

“What question?” Willis asked.

Alfred Wayde rattled the ice cubes in his glass again.

“Your mother always says I drink too much,” he said. “Hell, alcohol's never made me a failure, and I don't set myself down for one.”

“What question did I ask you?” Willis asked.

“Oh yes,” Alfred Wayde said. “You asked me if I knew so much about that Harcourt Mill, why didn't I want to run it?”

Willis did not answer but it was a question he still asked himself when he thought about his father.

“Boy,” Alfred Wayde said, “I've never wanted to run anything except machines. A good internal-combustion engine is better than a man.”

You could buy people who fiddled with machines, and the price of people who fiddled with men came higher, but Willis did not tell the old man that.

“Old H.H. was always monkeying with people,” his father said. “He couldn't keep his hands off. I saved his bacon when I got him into conveyor belts, but old Harcourt was a good Joe.”

“I owe a lot to him,” Willis said.

Alfred Wayde laughed suddenly.

“Still on the same beam, aren't you?” he said. “Listen, boy. I've told you we don't owe them one God-damned thing any more than the engine in my Buick owes anything to me.”

There was such a thing as loyalty, but Willis did not bring it up. His mother was calling them in to supper, and he had not known that his father owned a Buick. He never would have owned one if Willis had not been more like Mr. Henry Harcourt than Alfred Wayde.

If Mr. Harcourt had taken an interest in Willis he had always known where to draw the line between interest and partiality. There were never any favorites or white-haired boys when Mr. Harcourt ran the mill. No one was rewarded for anything but merit. Mr. Harcourt never forgot the faces or the characters of his employees, and he knew their wives and children, and he always asked kindly questions when there was illness or trouble. If anyone was in trouble, even the lowest man on the wage scale, he could always see Mr. Harcourt at the office or at six o'clock at the big house, where Mr. Harcourt always kept an hour open before dinner.

Mr. Harcourt treated Willis the same way he treated everyone else, and when Bill Harcourt worked there for a month there was no way of telling that Bill was his grandson, except that Mr. Harcourt expressly told the foremen in Building 3 that Bill was lazy and not to let him get away with anything. If Bill did not like it he could always leave like anybody else, and Bill took it very well too, because he was always good-natured about everything.

When Mr. Harcourt used to meet Willis on the Harcourt place, he hardly ever alluded to the mill, but he often asked Willis about his high-school studies. When Willis took his college-board examinations, Mr. Harcourt asked about his marks, and seemed relieved that Willis had not done badly. Willis had got eighties in physics, mathematics and elementary French, and Mr. Harcourt did not take the dim view that Alfred Wayde took.

Alfred Wayde had never thought that a son of his would get a low seventy in geometry, and a sixty-eight in trigonometry. After all the work he had done with Willis on wintry evenings, it simply did not seem possible.

“He ought to have been allowed to study last summer,” Mrs. Wayde said, “instead of working in that mill. It's what comes of us always moving around, Alfred. Willis has never had the chance.”

They were still talking about his marks when he walked out of the house feeling hurt and angry. It was the beginning of summer again, a gray and chilly day for June, and the weather was as unsettled as his thoughts.

There was never a time in life when you took things harder than when you were seventeen. Willis wanted to be alone and he was thinking of the pine woods on the hill beyond the brook. The last person he wanted to see was Mr. Henry Harcourt, but there he was, in the vegetable garden.

“Hello, Willis,” he called. “Have you heard from your examinations yet?”

“Yes, sir,” Willis said. “The marks came in the other day. I passed but they weren't much good. Maybe I'm just dumb.”

Mr. Harcourt glanced at him in a quick, hard way.

“Oh no, Willis,” he said, “you're not dumb.”

Willis often thought that this was the kindest thing Mr. Harcourt ever said to him. His voice was soft and casual, as it always was, but the words had a complete validity.

Willis knew very little about colleges. The question that mattered most was how you could buy a college education on the most reasonable terms, because the Waydes had not been able to lay aside much in the way of savings. There was Technology, but Willis had no head for mathematics. There was Mass. Aggy, where Granville Beane was going. Then there was Harvard, where Bill and Steve Decker were going. The other schools, like Amherst and Brown and Dartmouth, were only names, and they were too far away, his mother said. She wanted Willis somewhere near so that he could come home for Sunday. That was how Boston University entered into the discussion, being a good school, as she said, right in the middle of Boston, without too many rich boys going to it. Willis had no fixed idea one way or the other, and the chances were he might not have gone to B.U. at all if Mr. Harcourt had not called from the big house on the telephone the Sunday morning after Willis had told him about his marks.

Mr. Harcourt called to ask if he might drop in after church to talk over a matter to which he had been giving some thought. They were having a boiled dinner that day, and the living room was filled with the aroma of cabbages and turnips, but Mr. Harcourt had said there was nothing so good as a good boiled dinner. As he sat in the living room, his church clothes—his striped trousers, his black coat, his stiff collar, and his severe gray tie—made all the rest of them look very simple.

“Say, Mr. Harcourt,” Alfred Wayde said, “how about a little rye and ginger ale?”

“Not at the moment, thank you, Alfred,” Mr. Harcourt said, “but don't let me stop you.”

“You sit down, Alf,” Mrs. Wayde said. “Mr. Harcourt says he wants to talk to us about something.”

Alfred Wayde sat down heavily, and Mr. Harcourt smiled.

“It won't take more than a minute, Alf,” he said. “I only wanted to say a few words about Willis.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Wayde said, “has Willis done anything?”

“No, no,” Mr. Harcourt said. “This isn't anything about what Willis has done. I hope you're planning to send Willis to college.”

Willis saw his mother straighten herself in her stiff-backed chair, and he was thinking that she never leaned against anything when she was talking to Mr. Harcourt.

“Why, yes,” she said, “we are hoping to, Mr. Harcourt.”

“I'm delighted to hear it,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I hope you're going to send him to Harvard. Bill's going there next year.”

“Well,” Mrs. Wayde said, “Alfred and I think it's too expensive a school for Willis.”

“Oh, I would hardly say that,” Mr. Harcourt said. “There will be expense anywhere.” He touched his lower lip with his forefinger. “It occurred to me last night that I might be of some help along those lines. I'm sending Granville Beane to Massachusetts State. It would give me great pleasure—a selfish sort of pleasure—to help send Willis to Harvard, Mrs. Wayde.”

There was a moment's silence and Alfred Wayde pulled a bag of tobacco and some cigarette papers out of his coat pocket, but he did not speak. He and Willis both looked at Mrs. Wayde.

“That's very kind and thoughtful of you, Mr. Harcourt,” she said, and she folded her hands carefully in her lap. “I guess Alfred and I are independent people. It will mean more to us if we can do this without help, and more to Willis, I'm very, very sure, and Willis has his own savings, working summers.”

Mr. Harcourt nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I respect your point of view. As long as Willis is going somewhere to college. Where are you thinking of sending him, Mrs. Wayde?”

“We haven't made up our minds yet,” Mrs. Wayde said, “but we're thinking about Boston University.”

“My God, Cynthia,” his father said, after Mr. Harcourt had gone, “why shouldn't old Harcourt have sent the boy to college?”

“Because it wouldn't have been right, Alf,” she said. “I wish he wouldn't always be trying to do things. We're obligated enough to the Harcourts, living here, and I don't want Willis to be weak.”

During that summer, whenever Willis saw Bill and Bess, their relationships were the same as they always had been. The Bryson Harcourts asked him twice to supper, and he had been over to play tennis sometimes on Sunday afternoons. On Sundays after church he had fallen into the habit of walking by the brook, and it generally happened that he would meet Bess there, although neither of them had ever made open plans. Then, one Sunday in October, just after he had started college, everything changed.

He saw Bess coming toward him, and in the distance she looked the same as she always had, but not when she came nearer. All of a sudden Bess was all grown-up, unapproachable and unattainable. Her tawny hair was pinned up in a knot, and she had powder on her nose, which looked more like the noses in the Harcourt portraits than it ever had before.

“Why, Willis,” she said, “you look like someone else. You look all grown-up.”

“Well, so do you,” he said.

“Why shouldn't I?” she asked. “I'm going to the junior dances now.”

“Are you really?” he asked.

“Anyway,” she said, “you don't say, ‘Is that a fact?' any more. That's something.”

“Yes,” he said, “that's something.”

She stood looking at him critically.

“You've got a new suit of clothes, haven't you?” she said. “Where did you get it?”

“Downtown,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, “it looks it. Well, how do you like Boston University?”

“It's all right, I guess,” he said.

She swayed slightly, from one foot to the other, moving her head as though she heard distant music.

“You were an awful fool,” she said, “not to go to Harvard when Grandfather offered to send you.”

“Harvard isn't so hot,” he said.

“Don't be silly,” she said. “Nobody goes to Boston University.”

“That's all you know about it,” Willis told her.

“You wouldn't look so bad if you had a different suit,” she said. “Do you remember when I used to let you kiss me? It seems ages ago, doesn't it?”