Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

by Sloan Wilson

  “You’re going up in the world fast,” Betsy said. “I haven’t been moving so slowly, either. I’ve put this house on the market. The agents are sure we can get at least fifteen thousand for it. And I’ve checked our mortgage–we’ve paid off all but about seven thousand of that.”

  “Don’t commit yourself on anything without talking to me,” Tom said nervously.

  She laughed. “I don’t guarantee anything,” she replied.

  Late that afternoon Tom steeled himself when he rang for the elevator to take him down, and he did not admit to himself how relieved he was when the operator turned out to be an old man he had never seen before. When they got to the lobby, Tom hurried to get a taxicab.

  The Park Avenue address proved to be a tall apartment house with a long dark-red awning extending over the sidewalk in front of it, under which a doorman who looked like an unemployed general stood guard. The man stepped quickly in front of him, but ceremoniously pushed the button for the elevator inside when Tom explained he had an appointment with Mr. Hopkins. When the elevator, which was operated by a young girl, arrived, the doorman said, “Take this gentleman to Mr. Hopkins’ apartment.”

  The elevator moved slowly upward for what seemed a long while. Finally it stopped, and Tom stepped into a small marble vestibule with three black doors, on one of which was a simple brass knocker. There were no name plates on the doors. Tom turned to ask the elevator operator which door was Mr. Hopkins’, but the elevator had already started down. He lifted the brass knocker and let it fall. The door was opened almost immediately by Hopkins himself. He was smiling and looked more affable than ever. “Come in!” he said. “So nice of you to come!”

  Tom stepped into a high-ceilinged room. Two walls were entirely lined with bookcases. A third wall had glass shelves holding a collection of fancy hand-painted lead soldiers. The fourth wall had a large window and two glass doors leading to a neatly kept lawn on the roof, some twenty floors above the street.

  “Won’t you sit down?” Hopkins said. “What can I get you to drink?”

  “Anything. What are you having?”

  Hopkins walked over to a table near one of the windows on which stood a small forest of bottles, a trayful of glasses, and an ice bucket. “It looks as though we have quite a collection here,” he said, as though that were the first time he had seen it. “I think I’ll have Scotch on the rocks. Will that suit you?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  Hopkins took a pair of silver ice tongs in his hand and delicately dropped ice cubes into a glass. After splashing whisky over them, he placed the glass on a small tray, ceremoniously walked over and handed it to Tom. “Thanks,” Tom said, figuring he was getting served by the highest-paid bartender in the world. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Bill Ogden will be along any minute.”

  Tom sat in a small, hard leather chair. Hopkins poured himself a drink and, acting for all the world like an anxious housewife entertaining the rector, fussed about the room, offering Tom first a plate of crackers spread with caviar, and then a porcelain box of cigarettes. Finally he sat down near Tom and sipped his drink thoughtfully. “This is an exciting new project we’re going to be working on together,” he said, making Tom a partner. “I think there’s a real need for it, and it certainly is a challenge!”

  He sounded as though the thing he wanted most in the world was a challenge. Tom, feeling called upon to match his enthusiasm, said, “I can’t think of anything more needed!”

  Luckily, there was a knock on the door before he had to elaborate on that theme. Hopkins jumped springily from his chair, dashed to the door, and let Ogden in. “Hello, Bill!” he said, as though he hadn’t seen Ogden for three months. “So good of you to give up your evening for this!”

  “Glad to, Ralph,” Ogden said urbanely, exchanged greetings briefly with Tom, and strolled over to the liquor table. “Mind if I mix myself a drink?”

  “Take what you like–take what you like!”

  Ogden poured himself a Scotch on the rocks and sat down on a hassock. “How are Helen and Susan?” he asked Hopkins.

  “Fine! Susan is entering Vassar this fall!”

  Tom glanced around the apartment. It didn’t look like a place where a family lived. Did Hopkins and his family gather to play croquet on the lawn on the roof? Then he remembered that Hopkins had just built a place in South Bay. Hopkins must keep this place just for business meetings, he figured.

  Ogden glanced at his wrist watch. “I’ve been giving a good deal of thought to this speech you’ve got scheduled in Atlantic City,” he began. “I figure we ought to pitch it chiefly on the need for more public understanding. . . .”

  For half an hour Ogden elaborated on this, saying about what he had told Tom that morning. Hopkins sat listening and nodding his head appreciatively, but saying little. His chief preoccupation seemed to be keeping everybody’s glass full. At about a quarter after eight, a uniformed maid came in from the door near the shelves of lead soldiers and announced dinner. They all went into a small dining room and were served cherry-stone clams, rare roast beef, and apple pie. All through dinner, Ogden kept talking about the speech. When they returned to the living room, Hopkins cleared his throat and said, “That’s very helpful, Bill. Now let me see if I can draw some of it together.”

  “Take notes,” Ogden hissed at Tom.

  Tom quickly took a pad from his pocket and sat with pencil poised. “Point number one,” Hopkins said. “The medical profession has done a wonderful job on mental-health problems. Point number two: the public must supply more money and understanding. Put in a lot of ‘Too few people realize this’ and ‘Too few people realize that.’ Point out that there are special funds for polio and cancer and heart disease. Say too few realize there’s no such fund for research on mental illness and that the mentally ill fill more than half the hospital beds. Mention the publicity job that made it respectable to talk about venereal disease. Talk about the amount of money a mentally ill patient costs the state a year. Say someone should start a national committee on mental health. Say it should be a doctor–use the phrase, ‘some fully qualified person. . . .’ ”

  He paused. “No, darn it,” he said. “I think we’re hitting it too directly. Maybe we could start with some sort of historical parallel. What do you . . .”

  There was a knock at the door, and Hopkins leaped to his feet to open it. Two imposing-looking men carrying briefcases entered. “So nice of you to come!” Hopkins said heartily. “Sit down! We’ll be through here in just a minute. Brandy? A liqueur?”

  “Thanks, Ralph,” the bigger of the two men said. “Anything you’ve got. Good evening, Bill.”

  After brief introductions, and after everyone had a drink, Hopkins said, “Now, Tom, do you think you have the hang of what I want to say in Atlantic City?”

  “I guess so,” Tom said.

  “Would it be putting you to too much trouble to ask for a rough draft in, say, three or four days?”

  “I’ll have something for you,” Tom said.

  “Fine! Thanks so much for coming up. I know how hard it is to stay in town late when you live in Connecticut. I certainly appreciate it!”

  Bill Ogden stood up. “Thanks for everything, Ralph,” he said. “I’ve got to be running.”

  “Thank you, Bill!” Hopkins said.

  This is the most polite damn bunch of people I’ve ever met, Tom thought. As he and Bill Ogden went out the door he heard Hopkins say to the other two men, “I certainly appreciate your giving up your evening for this! Have you got some of those promotion plans we were discussing last week spelled out a little more?”

  It turned out that Ogden lived in Stamford, and he rode to Grand Central Station in a taxi with Tom. They had just missed the nine-thirty-five train, and there wasn’t another one for more than an hour. They went to the bar on the lower level of the station and ordered highballs.

  “I can’t help being cu
rious,” Tom said. “Does Mr. Hopkins work every night?”

  “He often takes long week ends on an island he has up in Maine,” Ogden said.

  Tom reflected upon this for a few moments. “You mean he just lives alone in that apartment and has business appointments every evening?” he asked incredulously.

  “Oh, he goes out to his place at South Bay quite often,” Ogden said. “He sees a lot of his family–especially around Christmas time.”

  Tom took a few swallows of his drink.

  “He never gets tired,” Ogden said. “Lots of guys work hard, but he’s always fresh. I’ve never seen him tired in my life.”

  When Tom got back to Westport, the first thing he noticed when he stepped in the front door of his house was that everything looked suspiciously neat, and a table with a large vase of hollyhocks had been moved against the living-room wall to obscure the crack in the plaster. Betsy was waiting. “How did it go?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “I got to write a speech. I mean, I have to help Mr. Hopkins with a speech. I might as well get the terminology of this thing straight from the beginning.”

  To his surprise, Betsy looked hurt. “I wish you’d stop being so damn bright and cynical,” she said. “It’s no way to start a new job. You ought to be enthusiastic. Damn it, Tommy, try being naïve!”

  “What’s got into you?” he asked, looking puzzled.

  “I’ll bet Hopkins doesn’t go around making wisecracks!” she said. “Does he?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody does who gets anywhere. You’ve got to be positive and enthusiastic!”

  “How come you know so much all of a sudden about how to get ahead?”

  “I just know,” she said. “I’m sick of being smart and broke.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be owl-faced. My whole interest in life is working for mental health. I care nothing for myself. I am a dedicated human being.”

  “All right, be witty. But I’ve been worried about this for a long time. You’ve always been talking about Hopkins’ mental-health project with your tongue in your cheek, and if you feel that way about it, you ought not work for the man. You ought to be thinking it’s the best idea in the world! And why isn’t it a good idea, when you come right down to it? What’s wrong with trying to do something about mental illness? Why do you have to be so damn cynical about it?”

  “From now on I’ll be pious,” he said, “if you promise to stop being insufferable.”

  “I just want you to start off on the right foot,” she said. “Do you like Mr. Hopkins?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You should try to like him! Give him the benefit of every doubt. Or quit working for him right now!”

  “I love him,” he said simply. “I adore him. My heart is his.”

  “You scare me, Tommy,” she said. “I’m dead serious. You scare hell out of me when you’re like that. To me it means you’re going to be unenthusiastic about everything for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m going to try to do this job right,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to try.”

  “Sit down now and have a drink,” she said. “Three people looked at the house today, and one may be coming back.”

  15

  JUST as Tom and Betsy were preparing to go to bed, the telephone rang. It was Lucy Hitchcock, who lived next door. “Hi!” she said with slightly alcoholic jubilation in her voice. “Could you and Tom come over for cocktails tomorrow night? Bob just got a wonderful raise, and we’re going to celebrate.”

  “Congratulations,” Betsy said. “We’ll be there.”

  “I’ve got to call twenty other people,” Lucy said. “Good-by!”

  Filled with sudden distaste, Betsy put the telephone down. In this invitation tendered so late in the evening to a party for the celebration of an increase in salary received by the host, Betsy found concentrated everything she disliked about Greentree Avenue. The intensity of her displeasure surprised her, and long after she had gone to bed, she lay awake trying to analyze it.

  It’s not that I’m a snob–it’s more than that, she thought fiercely. There are all kinds of reasons. Slowly she counted them off.

  The first reason the invitation annoyed her was that she felt obligated to accept it. She and Tom had already declined invitations to two of the Hitchcocks’ parties, and Lucy would interpret a third refusal as a slight, regardless of what excuse were given.

  The second reason was that like most cocktail parties on Greentree Avenue, this one would be an exhausting exercise. On Greentree Avenue cocktail parties started at seven-thirty, when the men came home from New York, and they usually continued without any dinner until three or four o’clock in the morning. It was almost impossible for the owners of the small houses to provide dinner for their guests–on that street the custom of asking people in for dinner had almost disappeared. The kitchens were small, dining rooms were almost nonexistent, and after the women had put the children to bed, they were in no mood to fix company meals. Cocktail parties were an easier form of hospitality, and the only trouble was that anyone who went home for dinner was considered a spoilsport. Somewhere around nine-thirty in the evening, Martinis and Manhattans would give way to highballs, but the formality of eating anything but hors d’oeuvres in between had been entirely omitted.

  It can’t be true that the whole street is like that, Betsy thought–it must be just the people we know. For a long while after she went to bed, she lay thinking of the various families up and down the street. Almost all the houses were occupied by couples with young children, and few people considered Greentree Avenue a permanent stop–the place was just a crossroads where families waited until they could afford to move on to something better. The finances of almost every household were an open book. Budgets were frankly discussed, and the public celebration of increases in salary was common. The biggest parties of all were moving-out parties, given by those who finally were able to buy a bigger house. Of course there were a few men in the area who had given up hope of rising in the world, and a few who had moved from worse surroundings and considered Greentree Avenue a desirable end of the road, but they and their families suffered a kind of social ostracism. On Greentree Avenue, contentment was an object of contempt.

  No one here is evil, Betsy thought defensively. In spite of all the drinking, the young couples were usually well enough behaved at the cocktail parties. Sure, there were sometimes a few kitchen kisses and an occasional high-pitched argument, but usually the men and their wives just sat talking about the modern houses they would like to build, or the old barns they would like to convert into dwellings. The price the small houses on Greentree Avenue were currently bringing and the question of how big a mortgage the local banks were offering on larger places were constantly discussed. As the evening wore on, the men generally fell to divulging dreams of escaping to an entirely different sort of life–to a dairy farm in Vermont, or to the management of a motel in Florida–but for the most part, the cocktail parties simply gave everyone a chance to prove he considered Greentree Avenue no more than a stepping stone to the same kind of life on a bigger scale. There’s nothing wrong with that, Betsy tried to tell herself. This isn’t a bad place to be, it’s just . . .

  Dull. That was the word she usually used for Greentree Avenue, but tonight she rejected it. If this were just a dull place, I wouldn’t mind it so much, she thought. The trouble is, it’s not dull enough–it’s tense and it’s frantic. Or, to be honest, Tom and I are tense and frantic, and I wish to heaven I knew why.

  Betsy sat up in bed and, in the dim light from the window, glanced at Tom. He was asleep and, at least for the moment, looked entirely serene. She fumbled on the bedside table, found a cigarette, and lit it. A feeling of black pessimism and self-reproach overtook her. With Betsy, such moods were extremely rare, but when she fell victim to them, every humiliating experience she had suffered since early childhood sprang to life, and all comforting thoughts fell from
beneath her, as though she had been standing on a trap door. At such times, the big brick house on Beacon Street in which she had been brought up came back to her memory not as a cheerful place, with pine logs roaring in the living-room fireplace on winter afternoons, but as a cavernous building with a long dark staircase with a creak in every step which she had been obliged to climb alone early each evening, leaving her older sister, Alice, to bask in the warmth below. Betsy had had a rather lonely childhood–her sister was eight years older than she, and her parents had been quite old when she was born and had lacked the energy, if not the will, to give much time to a small child. Almost from the beginning, Betsy had been a rather adult child. She had rarely cried, and although she had been terrified by the shadows on the wall of the stairs and the darkness in the hall above, she had never confided her fears to anyone. Instead, she had hummed to herself determinedly while going up to bed, with lips compressed and fists tightly clenched as she edged along the shadows and into the blackness of the hall, where anything could lurk. Because her parents had not approved of night lights for children, she had slept in the dark, with her ears straining for the comforting sound of voices on the floor below and the occasional laugh of her older sister. Now, lying in the dark beside Tom, Betsy found herself half expecting to hear the sound of that laughter again.

  “Mark my words . . .” her sister Alice had said. That had been much later, when Betsy had told her family she wanted to marry Tom. “Mark my words,” she had said. “If you get married now, you’ll regret it. You’re too young. Someday you’ll remember I told you that and wish you had taken my advice. Wait till after the war. A girl your age who marries a man just about to go in the service is crazy.”

  “But I’ve known him for three years,” Betsy had said.

  “But you don’t know how either of you will feel after he gets back.”

  “We’ll always feel the same as we do now!”

  How bravely the words came back to her! Why should I think of Alice now? Betsy thought. She leaned over to an ash tray and extinguished her cigarette. Beside her, Tom stirred restlessly in the bed.