“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.”
“Then we can walk,” Sylvia said. “Willis likes to walk.”
“The thing for you to remember, Wayde,” Mr. Hodges said, “is that we are only living for a split second geologically. This present interglacial epoch is only fifteen or twenty minutes old geologically. I often find comfort in this fact, and maybe you will too before you return to city life.”
“Don’t discourage him, Father,” Sylvia said. “I’ll take him to the guest coop now.”
Willis had never thought of Sylvia in this environment; she seemed surprisingly adjusted to it. When they were in the guest coop, she kissed him. It was not much of a kiss because he struck his head against a two-by-four on the roof.
“Just remember,” Sylvia whispered, “it’s only a split second geologically.”
Willis always prided himself on being able to get along with people even if their interests were quite different from his own. He liked to think that he had succeeded with the Hodgeses in a measure. But he had never been in a group in which he had felt so inadequate. He would not have minded the simple life if it had been simple, but the Hodgeses neglected the advantages of simplicity and the small creature comforts understood by practical campers. Not one of them knew how to split kindling for the stove properly or how to keep the stove going once it was lighted, and what was more, they honestly did not care. Hardly a breath of air stirred in the pine grove, the sun’s reflection glared at them from the glassy surface of the lake, but the Hodgeses did not heed the heat or the gnats.
All the Hodgeses cared about were ideas and talk. One minute they were telling jokes in French and next they were lapsing into German. Then suddenly they would be discussing the immoralities of the Emperor Tiberius and early Christianity in the Roman Empire, which led to the subject of Byzantine influence. The minds of the Hodgeses darted from point to point, like the dragonflies above the lake. They all talked at once—Mrs. Hodges, Sylvia, Mary, Laura, and Tom. It seemed to Willis that Mr. Hodges was the only one who listened, but he too enjoyed every minute of it, and he too would occasionally leap into the discussion. Admitting it was all worthwhile, Willis could find no ending and no beginning.
It seemed that Laura and Tom and Mary had just returned from Europe and they had stayed, as the Hodgeses always had, at a small pension in the rue de l’Université. Remembering what Sylvia had said about this place, Willis glanced at her sympathetically, but Sylvia seemed to have forgotten that she had complained of it. She was listening to Tom give what she called a “free lecture.” Instead of being bored by it, Sylvia exhibited a deep respect for Tom.
The inevitable conflict was starting already, Tom was saying, between Nazism and Communism. A decadent capitalistic system inevitably turned to Nazism as a last resort, like the Franco forces in Spain and the Hitler rule in Germany.
“You agree with that, Willis,” Tom said, “don’t you? Intellectually if not emotionally?”
It was very hot, and Willis kept wishing they would go for a swim but no one suggested it.
“I guess this is all a little over my head,” Willis said. “I only know what I read in the papers, like Will Rogers.” He laughed and everyone laughed too, briefly and sympathetically.
It was a great relief when Sylvia finally asked him to go for a walk. It had suddenly dawned on her that Willis had not seen anything of the lake, and this fact seemed to dawn on everyone else too at the same instant.
“Why, Willis has just been sitting here, hasn’t he?” Mrs. Hodges said.
“I hate to miss any of this wonderful talk,” Willis said, “but I would like to take a walk.”
Almost the only time the Hodgeses were silent during his visit was when he and Sylvia walked down to the lake path. It was very hot and he stumbled occasionally over pine roots.
“You have to watch where you’re going,” Sylvia said. “This is an awfully rough path.”
“You get a beautiful view from it,” Willis said.
“Willis, dear, I’m so proud of you,” Sylvia said. “Everyone thinks you’re wonderful. Mother and Laura have said so already, and Mary wishes Tom could be more like you. You’re having a good time, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Willis said, “it’s great to get away from the city and get some new ideas.”
“Can’t you stay for a day or two more and not go back Sunday night?”
“I wish I could,” Willis said, and he stumbled over another pine root. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve been walking in the woods.”
“You have to get used to it,” Sylvia said. “Father’s very interested in you.”
“I suppose he is,” Willis said. “I guess I can’t blame him much.”
“Oh, dear,” Sylvia said, “I didn’t mean it in that way, but he probably will try to draw you out. You don’t mind if he draws you out, do you?”
Of course he and Mr. Hodges would have to have a little talk sometime, but Mr. Hodges did nothing about it until Sunday afternoon, and then it happened unexpectedly.
“Say, Wayde,” Mr. Hodges said, “are you any good in a canoe?”
Willis’s father had taught him to paddle, one summer when he had been working for paper interests in Ontario, but once you learned a thing like that, you never wholly forgot it. There was another of those silences while Willis and Mr. Hodges stepped off the porch and pushed the Hodgeses’ canoe into the water. Willis was feeling tired by then, because he had not slept well in the guest coop, and his muscles were stiff from walking and swimming. You could tell from the moment anyone picked up a paddle whether or not he knew about canoes, and Mr. Hodges must have learned somewhere besides Lake Sunapee.
“You’ve been with Indians sometime, haven’t you?” Mr. Hodges said.
“Yes, sir,” Willis answered, “with my father once in Ontario.”
“You must have watched them,” Mr. Hodges said. “You can always tell. I made quite a study of Indian paddling in Minnesota once.”
Willis was not surprised, because it seemed to him that Mr. Hodges knew something of everything.
Sincerely, Willis Wayde Page 25
