Free Sincerely, Willis Wayde by John P. Marquand

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:
    â€œHow 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.
    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.
    â€œThey’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