Her knees formed little hills, poking up through the yellow cloth. Her father’s words came toward her like a blizzard of dots.
On that day she liked the world.
CHAPTER THREE
Marriage, 1927
MRS. JOSEPH FRANZMAN entertained at luncheon yesterday in honor of Miss Daisy Goodwill of Bloomington. Covers were laid for ten.
Mrs. Otis Cline received at tea this afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-elect. Miss Goodwill is a graduate of Tudor Hall and of Long College for Women.
Mrs. Alfred Wylie entertained at a kitchen shower Thursday afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-to-be. The rooms were prettily decorated with wisteria, bells, and streamers. Guests included Mrs. Arthur Hoad, Mrs. Stanton Merrill, Mrs. A. Caputo, Mrs. B. Grindle, Mrs. Fred Anthony, Miss Labina Anthony, Miss Elfreda Hoyt, and the Misses Merry Anne and Susan Colchester.
During the afternoon, Miss Grace Healy contributed several delightful vocal and piano selections.
A “white” dinner in honor of Bloomington bride-elect Daisy Goodwill and groom-to-be Harold A. Hoad was held at the Quarry Club last night. The menu included bay scallops, fillet of Dover sole, supreme of chicken served with an accompaniment of creamed onions, and a dessert of vanilla chantilly ice molded in the form of twin doves. Guests were Mrs. Arthur Hoad and sons Lons Hoad and Harold A. Hoad, Mr. and Mrs. Horton Graff, Mr. and Mrs. Hector MacIlwraith, the Misses Labina Anthony and Elfreda Hoyt, Mr. Dick Greene, Mr. and Mrs. Stanton Merrill, and Mr. and Mrs. Otis Cline. The artistic table, centered with a profusion of summer blooms and lighted by ivory tapers, was presided over by Mr. Cuyler Goodwill, the host for the evening and the father of the bride-elect. The silver-tongued Mr. Goodwill, a partner in the firm Lapiscan Incorporated, concluded the evening’s festivities with a few eloquent and thought provoking words on the benefice of time and coincidence.
“Time,” Cuyler Goodwill tells his audience of fifteen, that genial after-dinner assembly who sit now with their chairs pulled back from the table a comfortable inch or two, a burr of candlelight softening their features, “time teams up with that funny old fellow, chance, to give birth to a whole lot of miracles. It was, after all”—and here Mr. Goodwill lifts an expository finger—”it was the lucky presence of a warm, clear and shallow sea, some three hundred million years ago, only think of it, my friends — that combination produced the remarkable Indiana limestone which has served all of us here so well.” (At this there is appreciative applause all around.) “Now, if that water,” Mr. Goodwill continues, “had been just a little cooler, the billions and trillions of little sea creatures might never have got themselves born, and their shells wouldn’t have got piled up down there on the seabed like they did. And if the water in that peaceful old ocean had been less clear, there would sure as anything have been clay and other deposits to affect the sedimentation. Finally, my good friends, if those ancient marine-waters had been an inch or two deeper, there wouldn’t have been any wave action to break down the shell material to uniform size and spread it across the many square miles of the sea floor. In short, ladies and gentlemen, our beautiful white Salem stone, our great gift from the earth, would never have existed. It was a miracle, and I think you’ll agree, all these various aforementioned items coming together at the very same time and bestowing on us the triumphant trinity of challenge”—he pauses dramatically—”of prosperity”—another pause—”and happiness.”
The port is low in the glasses now; the lovely candles flicker — for a window has been opened to the breezes of the night. Mr. Goodwill pulls back his small compact shoulders and warms to his thesis.
“By a similar stroke of luck, my good friends, it is exactly eleven years this month since my daughter, Daisy, and I arrived in Bloomington. I think often how providential was our timing, since this last decade, as we all know, has been one of unprecedented expansion for the limestone industry. But it seems to me even more remarkable that my daughter and I should have been welcomed”—here he lifts his arms in a magnanimous gesture to suggest an embrace—”welcomed by friendship and by opportunity. And, of course, I was honored, some years ago, when Mr. Graff and Mr.
MacIlwraith, both of them present at this table tonight along with their charming wives, invited me to join with them in their new enterprise, and I believe all of you here will attest to the good fortune that smiled on our venture. Not that we can claim credit for our success. We have time itself to thank.” Here he stops, looks slowly around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. “Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.”
The waiters hover in the shadows, anxious for the evening to conclude so they can go home to their beds, but Mr. Goodwill has not yet finished.
“And, looking at our young couple here this evening — Daisy, Harold — how can any of us believe that they are not also favored by time and chance. We are living in the extraordinary year of 1927 AD. The modern era has truly begun, and if any of us had harbored doubts about the future, we have been convinced otherwise one month ago by a certain Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.” (This timely allusion touches the very pulse of the gathering, and Goodwill himself leads a round of enthusiastic applause, the ladies clapping spiritedly, their lovely white hands uplifted, and the gentlemen thumping the table top.) “Furthermore, my friends”—he is winding down now, his coming-home cadence beautifully calculated—”at this very point in history the remarkable profile of a great building is about to rise in the Empire State of our nation — as noble a testimony to the powers of Salem limestone and to human ingenuity as any of us would have dreamed. From this moment we can only go forward.”
Hear, hear!
“And now, may I ask you to rise, one and all, and drink to the happiness of our young couple. Chance has brought the two of them together, and time has smiled warmly on them both.”
How did my father, Cuyler Goodwill, come by his silver tongue?
At fifty, he is quick of movement, all pep and go, all point and polish. He wears marvelous shirts of English broadcloth, dazzling white, professionally laundered, a fresh one every single day of the week. His suits are made for him in Indianapolis or Chicago, and they fit his form — no ready-to-wear for him: he has shed such embarrassments as a snake sheds its skin, not that there is anything snakelike or sly about Goodwill’s open, energetic businessman’s countenance. His physiognomy, naturally, has changed very little.
He will always be a man who is short of shank and narrow of shoulder, but this rather abbreviated body is not what people register.
People look into Cuyler Goodwill’s small dark compacted face, wound tight like a clock, full of urgency and force, and think: here stands a man who is vividly alive.
Energy shoots from his very eyes — which have kept their youthful whiteness, their intensity of fixation. He is an impressive figure in the community, respected, admired. But it is when he opens his mouth to speak that he becomes charismatic.
That silver tongue — how was it acquired? The question — would anyone disagree? — holds a certain impertinence, since all of us begin our lives bereft of language; it is only to be expected that some favored few will become more fluent than others, and that from this pool of fluency will arise the assembly of the splendidly gifted. Call it a dispensation of nature — a genetic burst that places a lyre in the throat, a bezel on the tongue. A dull childhood need not disqualify the innately articulate; it would be arrogance to think so; a dull childhood might indeed drive the parched intelligence to the well of language and bid it drink deep.