Sincerely, Willis Wayde (32 page)

Though Sylvia's childhood was different from his, Willis could understand intellectually a lot of the things she had faced. Her parents had never cared about money, but they had cared deeply about education. Sylvia, as she admitted herself, had always had an ambition to excel in school and college. She had been obliged to face the hard fact that she was not popular at dancing school or dances. She had developed a contempt for clothes and lipstick, and she had carried those ideas to Radcliffe. She had managed to graduate with a
cum laude
, as her father had wanted, but what did it amount to now? It had only taught her that there were a lot of people far brighter than she would ever be, and the last thing that she really wanted was to marry some university instructor and to live the life her mother had. She wanted to have a little fun out of life for once, she said, like having dinner at a place like Twenty-one, and not have to worry about how much it cost. That was one of the wonderful things about Willis, she said—that he never appeared to worry. She wanted to go abroad—not tourist class—and she wanted to stay at hotels instead of pensions. She had seen enough churches and picture galleries to last her all her life, and pensions where girls learned French, like the one she had spent a winter in once on the rue de l'Université.

The first time Willis had ever kissed her was when she told him one June evening at Tenth Street what she really wanted to do in Paris. She made him feel how wonderful Paris was, and even made him forget the Planeroid process for a while.

“Not any stuffy pension in the rue de l'Université,” Sylvia was saying, “and not any back seat in the Comédie listening to Racine. I want to go to Foyot's and then to the Folies Bergère.”

“Would you like me to take you there?” Willis asked.

“Yes,” she said, “on the
Mauretania
.”

“All right,” he said, “I'll take you some day, Sylvia.”

“I wish we were going tonight,” she said. “They always sail at midnight.” Then she laughed. She must have been thinking of the crowds and the farewell messages and orchids and champagne and the voices of the room and deck stewards calling out that it was time to go ashore.

“Where's the best place to buy dresses in Paris?” he asked.

“I'd rather go to Worth's than any other,” she said.

“Don't worry. I'll take you there,” he told her.

It had seemed natural to kiss her then, and she had clung to him, and then she hid her face on his shoulder.

“This doesn't have to mean anything unless you want it to,” she said.

Willis had never really known Sylvia until they were married, but he did gain a faint impression of that later Sylvia and a preview of future problems when he went to visit the Hodges family that summer at their cottage on Lake Sunapee.

XV

The Columbia sociologist for whom Sylvia was working left for a six weeks' trip on the first of July to study the burial, marriage, and other habits of the Zuni Indians, and Sylvia went to stay with her parents at Lake Sunapee until he should return. Although she wrote Willis three or four times a week, letters were not the same as Sylvia. It was fortunate for Willis that complications at Rahway occupied nearly all his waking hours.

There were many later periods of crisis and negotiation in his career which were as arduous and crucial, but he had gained confidence by then so that he never again worked under such strain and pressure as he had in those six weeks. He had to show an external confidence and a serene belief in his judgments which he often did not feel. He had to demonstrate that he knew the belting business, and his comparative youth rendered this most difficult. He had to be a salesman and a promoter and a technical expert all in one, and after he had succeeded in selling the Rahway crowd, he had to go to New York and begin all over again with Beakney-Graham. He always admitted that he could never have handled the Rahway situation without the fine support that Beakney-Graham had given him, especially Joe McKitterick, and there was no wonder he always had a warm spot in his heart for that fine group. Nevertheless, as he once said facetiously later, he was like someone in the circus all that summer, riding a bicycle on a wire and carrying chairs and tables upon both shoulders.

It was all very well to think of Sylvia near a cool lake in New Hampshire, but Willis could not seem to make her understand that he could not dash away for a visit with things going as they were. Nevertheless toward the end of July Willis finally did take three days off, making reservations on the night train Thursday, with return reservations on Sunday. Without ever having been to Lake Sunapee, he had a good idea what it would be like, because he had spent a vacation at Lake Placid once and another near the base of Mt. Washington. He took his golf clubs with him, in case there was an opportunity to shoot a little golf, and his black evening trousers, a cummerbund, and one of those white linen mess jackets which were popular at the time, in case there should be a dance at the country club. He also packed his tennis clothes, because you never knew what you would run into on a three days' vacation. It was a pleasure to watch the porter carrying his golf clubs, his tennis racquet and his new pigskin suitcase when he boarded the evening train.

He arrived at the junction bright and early the next morning, and Sylvia was there to meet him in the Hodgeses' four-year-old Ford runabout. When you were away from someone for some time, perhaps you always built pictures, and somehow Willis had thought that Sylvia would be wearing some sort of print dress. Instead she had on slacks, a man's shirt with a frayed soft collar, and sneakers, and he never forgot her expression when she saw the golf clubs.

“Oh, Willis,” she said, “there isn't any golf.”

“Oh, that's all right,” he said. “I just brought the clubs along in case.”

“And there isn't any tennis either,” she said. “I don't know why I should have thought you'd know.”

“Oh, that's all right,” he said. “I'm not any good at tennis anyway.”

But she still looked at him doubtfully as he put his suitcase and golf clubs into the rumble seat of the old Ford.

“I don't know why I never described things to you,” she said. “We're just here camping out, you know, doing our own work, and I'm afraid you thought there would be a butler.”

Of course he had not thought there would be a butler but Sylvia made him feel out of place, even at the junction.

“Well, that's fine,” he said. “I've always liked camping out.” He did like camping out, although he had never done any of it since he was fifteen, and he was used to housework too, and Sylvia should have known it.

“Willis,” she asked, “didn't you bring any old clothes?”

If she had only told him, he could have bought some khaki trousers and sneakers at Abercrombie & Fitch. He could have bought a pocket flashlight too, which he found he needed badly after he discovered that the Hodgeses had no plumbing.

“Well, I haven't got anything exactly old,” he said, “just some tennis clothes and bathing trunks, but I'll get along all right.”

Sylvia looked relieved when he mentioned bathing trunks.

“You can wear those most of the time and a shirt on top,” she said. “Mother always insists on a shirt when we're on the porch.”

“Well, that's fine, if it isn't cold,” he said.

“It won't be too cold except at night,” she told him, “but there are gnats sometimes. Maybe you'd better buy a pair of khaki trousers before we start.”

It was a fine idea, and he told her so.

“You pick them out, Sylvia,” he told her. “I really do like camping out.”

Then in a helpless way she said, “Oh dear, I don't mean to laugh but you keep wanting to buy me ball gowns, and I'm going to buy you a pair of khaki trousers—a present from me to you. Don't you see it's funny?”

It had been a long time since he had seen a small-town men's toggery, but he was able to get into the spirit of it, and it annoyed him that Sylvia seemed to think he couldn't. He was just as good at camping out as she was, he told her, and he liked to fish, he told her. Nothing was more fun than going fishing.

The only trouble was that he had never camped out with any people like the Hodgeses, and that place at Lake Sunapee was different from anything he had ever known. The Hodgeses lived in a shingled cottage on the edge of the lake in a pine grove a long way from anywhere.

“Father bought it for almost nothing during the depression,” Sylvia told him, when she tried to explain things while the Ford jolted over a very rough country road.

“Oh dear,” Sylvia said, “there's something else I should have told you. Father's against drinking at the cottage, but we could have bought a bottle of something. Maybe Tom has some. He does sometimes.”

“You know I don't drink much, Sylvia,” Willis said. “It doesn't matter at all.” But frequently that week end he would have been less nervous if he could have had a drink.

Once, shortly after Willis had met Lydia Hembird, Lydia had invited him to visit her family in Montclair for a week end, and this had been Willis's only previous experience as an eligible young man. He had not forgotten the embarrassment caused him by the covert watchfulness and elaborately careless questions of Lydia's parents. Yet somehow it had never occurred to Willis until his arrival at Sunapee that his visit to the Hodgeses would offer a similar ordeal. He should have known, of course, from Sylvia's nervousness, and from the moment he saw the family all waiting for him on the front porch, that his visit had an obvious implication. They were a welcoming delegation there to meet him, and he was sure they had been discussing him ever since Sylvia had driven to the station, and, since there were only board partitions between the rooms, Willis heard his name coupled with Sylvia's frequently during his stay, although in tactful whispers.

“They won't be around after supper,” he heard them whisper. “Sylvia will want to take him out in the canoe.”

“He's really very nice,” he heard them whisper. “It isn't his fault that he thought we were living on a golf course.”

This last remark had been made by Mr. Hodges, hardly in a whisper. No matter what you might say, Mr. Hodges was a broad-gauged man who knew his way around, even if he seldom went anywhere.

As Willis told Sylvia later, he had been there on approval, like a new vacuum cleaner that could be sent back if it didn't work, not that there were any electric outlets in the cottage. In fact they cooked on a wood stove and went to bed by lamplight, and as Mrs. Hodges said right away, he was a member of the family. Mrs. Hodges, who looked more like a frontierswoman than a professor's wife, shook hands with him warmly and understandingly.

“Of course I remember Willis, dear,” she said to Sylvia, “and now you'd better go and peel the potatoes for lunch. You can bring them out on the porch here, dear, and perhaps Willis would like to help you after he puts on some camp clothes, and we can all go on talking about Hitler and the Rhineland and whatever is going to become of it.”

“Yes, yes, Sylvia,” Mr. Hodges said, “my memory isn't so dim that I don't recall your young gentleman.” Mr. Hodges had not shaved that morning, and he wore khaki shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. “There's only one rule around here, Wayde. We wear shirts when we're on the porch. For some reason Mrs. Hodges objects to bare torsos. You'd better strip down, Wayde, and excuse my legs. I admit I have varicose veins.”

“I understand they have something they can inject into them now, sir,” Willis said.

“Yes,” Mr. Hodges said, “silicate, I believe, but I'll leave mine just the way they are. You remember Laura, don't you?”

Of course Willis remembered Laura. Laura was wearing slacks like Sylvia and she looked frankly and adjustedly ugly.

“I choose you for my team if we play games tonight,” she said. It touched Willis that Laura remembered that he had been good at pencil-and-paper games.

“Mary, dear,” Mrs. Hodges said, “I don't believe you've ever met Sylvia's young man, have you? This is Tom's wife, Willis.”

Mary Hodges was a stocky, red-faced girl in shorts. It seemed to Willis that girls with ugly legs always wanted to show them off.

“Hi,” she said, and she shook hands aggressively. “You're sleeping in the guest coop.”

The guest coop, Willis found out later, was a remodeled brooder house that Tom had purchased from a nearby farm. Tom was always working on what he called “improvement projects.”

“Hi, Willis,” Tom said. His shirt and bathing trunks and bare arms were caked with clay. “You look as though you've been battening off the workers down there in New York.”

Willis felt his face redden. Sylvia had told him that Tom was interested in the CIO, and he certainly did not want to get into a labor argument.

“The way I feel, Tom,” he said, “is that the workers are feeding off management just at present. At least that's the way it is down at my belting company.”

He should not theoretically have called it his company, but he felt that he had to make some sort of impression.

“You come with me,” Tom said, “and you'll see what labor means. Mary and I are laying a new pipe from the spring to the kitchen.”

Willis must have looked startled. Sylvia might have warned him about the absence of plumbing, and Tom burst into a roar of laughter.

“There's no private bath, no telephone—and no water if we don't get busy. Come on, Mary, or we'll have to haul it in buckets.”

Willis did not mind about the plumbing, but he had never dreamed there would not be a telephone, and he had some notes in his pocket for a call he wished to make to Rahway.

“Don't worry, Willis,” Sylvia said, “there's a telephone half a mile down the road and I can run you there any time.”

“No you can't,” Laura said. “It's my turn for the Ford.”