Chapter XIII

The desk phoned at eleven-thirty the next morning to tell me I had visitors in the lobby. Mavis and I had been up and dressed since eight, but had stuck to our room awaiting the call, even having breakfast sent up so that we’d be sure not to miss the Larson woman when she arrived.

I said into the phone, “Tell them to wait and I’ll be right down.”

“Them?” Mavis asked when I hung up.

“She must have brought her kid brother along,” I said. “Glad she did. It’ll give us a chance to size him up. You ready?”

Mavis checked her reflection in the mirror a final time to make sure that she was. Watching her, I thought it was amazing how much difference clothes and hairdo and manner could make in her appearance. More than actual beauty it was Mavis’s mobility and the aura of sexiness about her which made her such a desirable woman. With her normally flowing movements restrained to a kind of stiff primness, half of the impact she had on males was destroyed. And no woman could have looked sexy in the severely-tailored suit she wore, which made her look flat-chested and hipless.

As we went down the stairs, I couldn’t help feeling proud of the excellent job of training I had done on Mavis.

There were several people in the lobby, but we didn’t have any trouble picking out Helen Larson and her brother. They were seated side-by-side on a sofa facing the stairs, self-consciously trying to appear at ease.

As we reached the bottom of the stairs, the woman glanced at me without recognition, which wasn’t surprising in view of the fuzzy picture Mavis had mailed her.

I had no trouble identifying her, though. As she had written, she had changed very little in the three years since the picture she sent had been taken, the only difference being that her hair was now drawn straight back and clasped at the base of her neck by a metal circlet instead of being allowed to hang on both sides of her face. And that was no improvement.

She wore a cheap and shapeless wool dress cut like a sack, which made it impossible to judge what kind of figure she had, except that it was on the slim side. But there was some promise in the visible portion of her legs. Despite gray cotton stockings and low-heeled shoes, I could see that her calves were nicely rounded and her ankles pleasantly slim.

As indicated in her photograph, I saw that her features were regular enough. But her steel-rimmed glasses plus an innately corn-fed appearance spoiled the effect of whatever natural attributes she had.

Her most attractive quality at first sight was cleanliness. She was scrubbed so thoroughly, she literally shined. For a startled instant I thought I recognized in her a resemblance to Hannah Stokes, my first lonely-hearts bride. Then I realized it was only her freshly-scrubbed appearance, which Hannah had possessed too, and that there was no physical similarity between the two women at all.

Before crossing over to the sofa, I paused to study the brother, too. He wasn’t an unhandsome lad in an awkward and farmer-like sort of way, I noted. He was lean and big-boned and had large-knuckled hands which he didn’t seem to know what to do with. He looked Swedish, mostly because of blond hair the same color as his sisters. His hair needed cutting so badly, it hung over his tight collar at the back.

The thing I liked best about him was the utter stupidity on his face. It had occurred to me that a twenty-two-year-old boy might be mature enough to be wary about his sister getting involved with a complete stranger. But after one look at this lad, I knew there was little danger of his creating an awkward situation.

I suspected that what the woman had written about his being able to support himself was merely hopefulness, because he didn’t impress me as having sense enough to come in out of the rain.

When I had completed my study, I touched Mavis’s arm and we continued on across the lobby. Stopping before the couch, I said in a polite voice, “Miss Larson?”

The woman looked almost frightened. Then she blushed scarlet and jumped to her feet. When her brother rose more slowly, instead of looking at me her eyes sought his face in a plea for moral support.

I was used to this reaction. Like all the others in the past five years, she had probably never before even been looked at by a man. And now, meeting for the first time the man she had been dreaming might become her husband if arrangements worked out to our mutual satisfaction, her tongue simply deserted her.

She was probably also a little flabbergasted by my appearance. Though nearing thirty-six now, I didn’t look much different than I had when Mavis and I first met. Much swimming during our frequent vacations had kept me lean and hard, and at the moment I was deeply tanned from the Florida sun we had just left. Also Mavis had often told me I have an air of virility about me which appeals to women. Once when I tried to pin her down as to exactly what she meant by that, she explained it by saying, “You just look like you’d be pretty terrific in bed.” Then she had generously added, “Which you are, as it happens.”

I don’t suppose the woman had expected to meet a matinee idol through a lonely-hearts ad, but I was probably better looking than she had expected.

I said in a kindly voice, “I’m Sam Howard and this is my sister Mavis.” I thrust out a hand at the young man. “You must be Helen’s brother.”

Reaching out gingerly, he gave my hand a jerky shake. “Yeah.”

He nodded shyly at Mavis, then looked at his shoes.

Mavis greeted them both politely and Helen said something in a barely audible voice which I took to be acknowledgement of the introductions.

I said to the young man, “Helen never mentioned your name in her letters.”

“Huh?” he said, looking up briefly. “Oh. It’s Dewey. Dewey Larson.” His feet shuffled in embarrassment and his gaze dropped to them again.

“It’s nice to meet you in person finally,” I said to Helen.

Her blush had faded, but now she flamed red again. She cast a covert side glance at her brother and didn’t say anything.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had lunch, have you?” I asked.

This time she looked at me and managed a faint, “No, sir.”

I grinned at her. “You make me feel like a grandfather. Let’s start out on an informal basis right from the start. You call me and my sister Sam and Mavis, and we’ll call you Helen and Dewey. Okay?”

She smiled shyly. “All right, Mr. — ” She paused, looked stricken and hurriedly amended it to, “All right — Sam.”

“Suppose we get acquainted by having lunch together here in the hotel restaurant? It’s a little early, but there’ll be less of a crowd now.”

Helen agreed for both herself and her brother, who seemed incapable of speech except in answer to direct questions.

During lunch I made no attempt to discuss either our possible business partnership or our possible marriage, preferring merely to size Helen and her brother up and at the same time put them at ease so that they could form some opinion of us.

Gradually both thawed out when they discovered conversation was going to stay on a small-talk level. When the coffee arrived, they were still hardly vivacious luncheon companions, but at least Dewey had stopped looking at his feet, and Helen no longer blushed every time I spoke to her.

I discovered to my pleasant surprise that the woman wasn’t unintelligent in a quiet sort of way. She wasn’t completely uneducated either, apparently having read a surprising number of books, though she confessed to an almost total lack of formal education. I guessed that books had been her substitute for social life, for she seemed woefully ignorant of any actual experience outside of what had occurred to her on the farm.

Even after he lost his initial embarrassment, Dewey confirmed my first opinion of him. He not only possessed no more worldly experience than his sister, he seemed to have read nothing in his life but comic books and pulp magazines. Mentally, he seemed to be still in his teens.

I decided that if Dewey were capable of earning his own living, as Helen had suggested in her letters, it would have to be by some manual endeavor. Probably he could make a go at farm labor, since he’d been raised on a farm, but I doubted that he’d even make a howling success at that. He had the physique for it, though, even if he did lack the brains. He exuded the rugged good health of outdoor living, his youthful face still showing sun wrinkle about the eyes even after six months off the farm.

When the check came, Helen started to fumble at her cheap cloth purse. I smiled at her.

“I invited you and your brother to lunch, Helen.”

She stopped fumbling and looked at me, her eyes wide behind their glasses. Then she smiled back.

I guessed it was probably the first time in her life a man had ever taken her to lunch.

As we all moved back toward the lobby, I said, “Now that we’re all acquainted, suppose all four of us go up to my room and discuss what we want to come of this meeting.”

For the first time since she had begun to relax, Helen blushed again. But she said in a steady enough voice, “All right, Sam.”

There were only two chairs in my room. I let Helen have the easy chair, Mavis the straight one and I told Dewey to sit on the bed. I remained standing myself.

I started out by saying, “Helen, we both know that at least half the reason for this meeting is that we’re both lonely people and we hoped we’d find in the other a suitable spouse. I don’t know what your opinion of me is, but you’re everything I expected to find and a little more.”

“Oh, I think you’re very nice,” she blurted, then blushed furiously.

I said, “Even though we liked each other right off, I’m sure neither of us wants to decide on the basis of such a short look. You planning on staying over here tonight?”

Helen said, “Well, I don’t know. We didn’t really make any plans. I mean—” She trailed off and looked at her brother, who merely gazed back at her vacantly.

“Why don’t you let me see if I can get you and Dewey rooms here at the hotel?” I suggested. “Then we can spend all afternoon and this evening getting acquainted. Meanwhile, we’ll just table marriage talk until morning.”

“All right,” Helen said. She seemed both relieved at the postponement and slightly disappointed at the same time.

Picking up the phone, I got the desk and discovered that there was a pair of connecting rooms available right across the hall from Mavis’s and mine. I told the clerk to hold them for a Mr. Dewey Larson and a Miss Helen Larson, who’d be down to register for them later.

When I hung up, I said, “While we’re getting acquainted, there isn’t any reason I can’t explain the business partnership end of this thing, in case we decide to get together. I’ve been checking a number of small businesses recently. In fact one was in Independence, only a few miles from here, which is what brought me and my sister up this way. It petered out, though. The best prospect seems to be a farm appliance store up in West-field, New York.”

Helen said, “Farm appliances. Oh, I’d like that. I know something about them.”

Opening my suitcase, I got out the correspondence concerning the business and showed it to Helen. She read it all carefully, paying particular attention to the financial statement Herman Gwynn had sent. When she got to the copy of my letter to the Westfield Chamber of Commerce and its reply, she looked up at me with an expression of startled respect.

“I would never have thought of writing to the Chamber of Commerce,” she said. “You really know a lot about business things, don’t you?”

Mavis said primly, “Sam will make an excellent businessman. He should have been in business for himself long ago, but he’s never had the stake to get started.”

“Here’s the way I figure it if we do manage to take over the business,” I said. “If we both work in the store, we can let the bookkeeper-clerk go and boost our net income to seventy-five hundred a year.”

In detail I went over the same figures I had explained to Mavis. When I finished, I could see that Helen was already sold.

“How about Dewey?” she asked. “Could he take the place of the clerk they have now?”

I glanced at Dewey, who sat with his large-knuckled hands dangling between his knees, looking like a handsome version of Mortimer Snerd. If I’d actually planned to invest in a business, I wouldn’t have hired him to sweep the place out. But since I had no intention of finally closing the deal, a promise was easy.

“Sure,” I said. “According to the financial report, the male clerk gets two thousand and eighty dollars a year, which comes to forty dollars a week. Dewey might as well get it, and we’d still have the same net profit. He’d just be on salary, though. It isn’t a large enough business for more than two partners.”

“Oh, Dewey wouldn’t expect an interest in the business,” Helen assured me. “The folks left the farm just to me anyway, so the money from its sale is all in my name.” She glanced at Mavis timidly, “How about your sister?”

“I’ll get some kind of stenography job,” Mavis said. “Don’t worry about me being a burden on you. I’ve always paid my share of the expenses with Sam.”

Helen blushed. “I didn’t mean that,” she said flusteredly. “I mean, it hardly seems fair putting my brother in the store and leaving you out.”

“I wouldn’t clerk in a store where you have to stand on your feet all day for half-interest in the business. I’ll get a job, all right.”

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