Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

by Sloan Wilson

  He almost fled from the table. When he thought of Hopkins, it seemed certain that he would get the job, for if Hopkins hadn’t liked him, why would he have been so friendly? But Ogden had been careful to pave the way for a letter ending the whole thing. Anyway, I met Hopkins, he thought. He seems like a nice guy pretty much like anybody else. Whatever it is that makes him worth two hundred thousand dollars a year is certainly well hidden.

  8

  WHEN TOM GOT BACK to his office he found a slip of paper on his desk saying that his wife had called and that it was important for him to call her back. He put the call through immediately.

  “It’s your grandmother,” she said. “She fell and broke her thigh. At her age, Tommy, bones don’t knit. She wants to see you, and you better go out there right away. I would have gone myself, but I still feel pretty rocky, and the doctor’s with her–it’s not a real emergency.”

  “I’ll go right out,” Tom said.

  The next train to South Bay was a local one, which stopped almost every five minutes. Tom sat on a soiled green seat in the smoker staring out the window. He didn’t want to think. At first there were only the dark caverns of Grand Central Station to see, with the dim figures of tired-appearing men in overalls occasionally illuminated by naked electric-light bulbs. Then the train emerged into the bright sunlight and was surrounded by the littered streets and squalid brick tenements of Harlem. Tom had passed them twice a day for years, and usually he didn’t look at them, but now he didn’t want to think about his grandmother and he didn’t want to think about Hopkins, and the tenements absorbed his attention. There was one grimy brick building with a huge billboard showing a beautiful girl thirty feet long lying under a palm tree. “Fly to Miami,” the sign said. Directly under the girl’s head, about six feet below the edge of the billboard, was an open window, outside of which an orange crate had been tied. In the orange crate was a flowerpot with a withered geranium, and as the train passed it, an aged colored woman with sunken cheeks leaned out of the window and poured some water from a milk bottle into the flowerpot.

  “Ticket?” the conductor asked. He was a stout, red-faced man. Tom gave him his commuter’s ticket.

  “We don’t go as far as Westport,” the conductor said.

  “I’m getting off at South Bay.”

  “Westport tickets are no good on this train,” the conductor said. “You’ll have to buy a ticket to South Bay.”

  “But South Bay is on the way to Westport,” Tom objected.

  “I don’t make the rules,” the conductor said.

  Tom paid for a ticket to South Bay. The whole damn world is crazy, he thought. Grandmother is hurt and probably dying, and she brought me up, and I should be thinking only the kindest thoughts about her, and I can’t.

  She’s dying, he thought. She’s lived ninety-three years, and it’s all been a free ride. She’s never cooked a meal, or made a bed, or washed a diaper, or done a damn thing for herself or anybody else. She’s spent at least three million dollars, and her only comment has been that money is boring. She’s had a free ride for ninety-three years, and I’m damned if I’ll cry about the end of it.

  Yet to his astonishment he suddenly felt like crying. She doesn’t want to die, he thought. I’ll bet the poor old lady’s scared.

  Suddenly he remembered a night soon after his mother had died when a particularly violent thunder squall had struck the old house. Although he had been fifteen years old then, he had been afraid to stay in his room alone. He had gone to his grandmother’s room, and she had played double solitaire with him half the night. If she wants me to, I’ll stay with her, he thought. I guess Betsy can get along without me for a few days.

  As soon as the taxi let him out at the front door of the big house, old Edward opened the front door for him. “The doctor’s in the living room, Mr. Rath,” he said. “He was hoping to see you before he went.”

  “Tell him to wait,” Tom said, and raced up the stairs to his grandmother’s room. The door was closed. Cautiously he opened it, in order not to awaken her if she were asleep. There was her big four-poster bed, with the old-fashioned crocheted canopy. The old lady was lying in the precise center of the bed, propped up on pillows. She was looking out the window at the Sound, where a fleet of small sailboats was racing in the distance. She turned her head quickly and smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “They’re trying to take me to the hospital.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” he said.

  “My leg broke. I didn’t fall and break it–it just broke, and then I fell.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandmother,” he said. “We’ll get you fixed up in no time.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m going to die, and I prefer to die here. I detest hospitals.”

  “I’ll talk to the doctor,” he said.

  “Never mind that. I want you to make sure they don’t take me to the hospital. They keep giving me drugs, and I don’t want to wake up in some iron cot with a lot of supercilious nurses telling me what to do.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Tom said.

  “The Senator died in this bed, and I want to die here too.”

  “I’ll talk to the doctor now,” Tom said.

  “Stay here. There’s plenty of time. I’ve got lots of things I want to tell you and I may be asleep when you come back up. Do you know I’ve left everything I’ve got to you?”

  “I didn’t, Grandmother,” he said. “I’m very grateful.”

  “There’s not much,” she said. “For the last ten years I’ve been living off capital. And there’s a small mortgage on the house. You won’t get much.”

  “Try to sleep now,” he said. “We can talk about business later.”

  “We might as well get it over with now. Did you know that most of your grandfather’s estate was lost long ago?”

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I guess you must have told me. I think I’ve always known it.”

  “I’m sorry things have happened this way,” she said. “The Senator and I had so much. I’ve always been sorry we couldn’t do more for you.”

  “You’ve given me a great deal,” he said.

  There was a long moment of silence during which she seemed to be breathing with difficulty, but she kept her eyes intently on his face, and he saw she didn’t want him to go.

  “I want you to do something for Edward,” she said. “He has to be kept in his place, but he’s been loyal. He’s old and should be provided for.”

  “I’ll try, Grandmother,” he said.

  She closed her eyes. “How do you think the house looks?” she asked drowsily.

  “Beautiful.”

  “I have tried to keep it up for you,” she said. “The west wing . . .”

  The sentence trailed off, and Tom saw she was asleep. After waiting a few minutes to be sure, he went downstairs. His grandmother’s doctor, an elderly man named Worthington, was waiting.

  “I’m afraid your grandmother isn’t very well,” he began.

  “How long do you think she can live?”

  The doctor took off his glasses and started polishing them with his handkerchief. “She’s broken her thigh,” he said, “and I think the pelvis may be fractured too. She took a bad fall. She says her leg just snapped and she fell, and it may actually have happened that way. We won’t be able to tell about the pelvis till we take her to the hospital and get her X-rayed.”

  “She doesn’t want to go to the hospital,” Tom said. “Is there really much point to it?”

  “We’ve got to get X rays,” the doctor replied, sounding shocked. “And we can’t give her proper care here!”

  “Won’t she die pretty soon, anyway?”

  “She will if she doesn’t get proper care!” the doctor said angrily. “With the proper care, we might be able to keep her going for quite a little while.”

  “She’ll be miserable in a hospital.”

  “I’ll call an a
mbulance,” the doctor said. “There’s no question that she has to go.”

  “I don’t think she’ll allow you to take her.”

  “We’ll fix it so she won’t know a thing about it,” the doctor said. Picking up a black bag, he climbed the stairs to the old lady’s room. Tom didn’t try to stop him. So she’s going to wake up in an iron bed in a strange room after all, he thought.

  9

  FLORENCE RATH DIED only eight days later, complaining not so much of a broken thigh and a fractured pelvis as of the refusal of the doctors to obey her.

  “They know they can’t cure me, so why don’t they send me home?” she asked Tom every day, and he was never able to invent a plausible answer.

  Perhaps on the theory that she might be sent home if she made herself unpleasant enough, she made as much trouble as possible and constantly insulted everyone.

  “The nurses are so common!” she said loudly to Tom, “and the doctors aren’t much better. They all look like a lot of druggists!” She made the word sound like an unpardonable obscenity.

  For the entire eight days, she constantly demanded services of everyone. Every few minutes she called a nurse to ask her to smooth her covers, or to change the water in the many vases of flowers with which she had surrounded herself. She asked doctors to make telephone calls for her and even asked one elderly physician to go out and buy her a paper. The night nurse simply disconnected her call bell.

  Never once, however, did the old lady complain of pain or show any fear of death. She made no attempt to solicit pity, and it would have been impossible to feel truly sorry for so imperious a figure. Tom wasn’t much surprised to find that in spite of the demands and insults she hurled at them, the doctors and nurses loved her. Tired and harried as they were, they ran errands for her and sat listening to the endless stories she told of the exploits of “The Senator” and Tom’s father, “The Major.”

  She died in her sleep, two hours after Tom had left the hospital to go back to Westport. He had visited her every evening on the way home from work, after having arranged for a taxi to take Mrs. Manter home. By that time Betsy was able to care for the children a few hours by herself.

  When the hospital called him to say the old lady had died, Tom said, “Thank you for calling,” very quietly, and put the telephone receiver carefully back on its hook.

  “What is it?” Betsy asked.

  “Grandmother’s dead,” he said.

  He went into the kitchen and got himself a drink. He was tired–for the last eight nights he hadn’t been getting to bed until after midnight, and even then he hadn’t been able to sleep. Everything seemed uncertain. He hadn’t heard a word from United Broadcasting. He had no idea whether his grandmother would leave even enough money to cover her debts. While she was in the hospital, he had asked her for the name of her lawyer, but she had seemed offended.

  “Wait,” she had said. “I’ll tell you when the time comes.”

  And she had told him, the afternoon before she died. The lawyer was Alfred J. Sims, a name Tom had never heard before in his life.

  Now the thought that there was a large house with an old man in it who had worked for his grandmother half his life and who now presumably expected a pension from him worried Tom. The thought that Hopkins might decide not to hire him worried him, and the fact that Dick Haver seemed to be growing increasingly impatient over the whole situation worried him. Every day Dick asked him whether he had heard anything from United Broadcasting–he seemed to take a wry pleasure from the question. And beyond these worries, Tom faced accumulating small debts. Mrs. Manter’s wages, the down payment on a new washing machine, and the daily taxi bill had wiped out his cash on hand, and he was charging everything he could, from groceries to medicine. Soon there would be his grandmother’s hospital bill and funeral expenses. He wondered how long it would take to settle her estate.

  “Isn’t it funny she never told you her lawyer’s name before?” Betsy asked.

  “She never talked about business.”

  “Don’t you think you should get a complete accounting from the lawyer? I mean an accounting for all the money she lost–it seems awfully funny that she lost so much. For all we know, the lawyer’s been cheating her for years.”

  “I’ll get a complete accounting,” he said.

  That night he slept hardly at all. In the morning he telephoned Sims, who apparently had only a residence in New York and no office. The lawyer’s voice was high pitched, with a pronounced Boston accent. “I’ve been expecting to hear from you,” he said. “Your grandmother’s death was a great shock to me. Her papers are all in order, and I don’t think you need expect any difficulty.”

  Sims’s house was a brownstone structure on Fifty-third Street. After telling Dick Haver he wouldn’t be in all day because of his grandmother’s death, Tom took a taxi there. A uniformed maid opened the door and ushered him into a dimly lit study lined with books. Sims, a gaunt-faced man about sixty years old, was sitting in a wheel chair behind a desk littered with papers.

  “I’m glad to see you, Tom,” he said. “Excuse me for not getting up. And excuse me for using your first name–I’ve known your family far too long to use anything else.”

  “I’m glad to meet you,” Tom replied.

  “Your grandmother was a great woman,” Sims said. “She’s the last of her kind.”

  “I know,” Tom replied abstractedly. He was staring at a photograph of a young man, a rather faded photograph which he was quite sure was of his father. The photograph was in a leather frame on Sims’s desk.

  “You recognize the picture?”

  “My father?”

  “Of course. Your father and I were good friends. We were classmates at college, and we were in France together.”

  “I never saw that picture before,” Tom said. He picked the frame up and inspected the photograph more closely. It showed a man five or six years younger than himself. The man wore a tweed cap, and he was smiling boyishly. Tom put the photograph down. Somewhere in the back of the house a clock struck the quarter hour.

  “Now about your grandmother’s estate,” Sims said, picking up a folder with a blue cover from his desk. “As I presume you know, you are the sole heir.”

  “She told me,” Tom said.

  “And I presume you also know that there isn’t much in the estate.”

  “How much?”

  “This may come as something of a shock to you, but when the estate is completely settled, I don’t think you’ll have much except for the house. There are some securities of course, but there’s also a mortgage on the house, and there’ll be an inheritance tax. And I suppose you’ll want to do something about Edward.”

  “I’ll have to see,” Tom said. “Just what is the value of the securities?”

  “I haven’t checked the current market value recently, but there will be about twenty thousand dollars. Not much more. If your grandmother had lived a few more years, I don’t know what we would have done.”

  “And the mortgage? How much is that?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t understand it!” Tom blurted out. “Do you have any idea how much Grandmother inherited from her father and from Grandfather, and how she managed to lose it?”

  “What has she told you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “But you knew she had lost a great deal.”

  “She told me just before she died, and I guess I’ve always assumed it, from the way she had to economize.”

  Sims sighed. “What do you know about your father?” he asked.

  “What kind of man was he?”

  “He was delightful,” Sims said. “He was possibly the most charming, talented man ever born. That’s why I wish you could have known him–you would be proud of him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know–it’s pretty hard to explain what happens to people. When we were in college together, Steve could do anything. During the first few weeks w
e were overseas, he was the best officer I’ve ever seen. He was the last man I’d ever expect to have a nervous breakdown, but that’s what he had. In those days we called it shell shock. They sent him home, and after he had spent a few months in a hospital, he got a job with Irvington and Wells–that used to be just about the best brokerage house on the street. He tried awfully hard there–I guess I’m one of the few people who really knows how hard he tried, and how much he wanted to succeed–but he wasn’t well. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, and sometimes he got so nervous during conferences that he’d have to get up and walk out of the room. Old Wells loved him like a son–everyone loved your father–but finally he had to ask him to take some time off and try to get himself under control. Your father had just been married a few months, and it was a great blow to him. He and your mother lived with your grandmother, and the idleness didn’t do him any good. He asked your grandmother if he could handle her estate, and your grandmother thought it might give him confidence to let him try. He made some bad mistakes–that can happen to anyone. Your grandmother was patient, but he got panicky–he was determined to get back everything he’d lost. He started taking long shots on the stock market and losing more and more. I tried to reason with him, but getting back all the money he had lost seemed a matter of life and death with him. I talked it over with your grandmother, and she finally decided she had to take what was left of her estate out of his hands. The night she told him that, he started driving off somewhere and was killed.”

  “Was it suicide?”

  “I don’t know. He left no notes. When we looked into things, we found he had recently taken out some life insurance that had a suicide clause in it. The insurance company paid. We also found that his losses had been worse than we knew. Four fifths of your grandmother’s estate was gone.”

  Sims paused. “In 1928, I managed to build up the estate a good deal, and we were lucky enough to get out before the crash,” he continued. “I must admit, though, that I never could get your grandmother to live on a budget–she always felt that she was entitled to a certain standard of living, and that she would maintain it as long as she had a cent. I don’t know what she would have done if she had been forced to sell that house–I’m glad I never had to find out.”