Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Page 20

  Throughout the meal Pierce expounded his views on television programs, which consisted mostly of the thought that more old-fashioned shows, such as square dances, rodeos, and hymn sings, would be welcomed by rural audiences. Hopkins agreed with him heartily. At a quarter of nine, the doorbell rang again, and Hopkins jumped up to answer it. That was one of the advantages in not having a servant open the door–it gave Hopkins an opportunity to conclude interviews without being impolite. Dr. Andrews, an urbane man with prematurely white hair, walked in, carrying a small black bag. “Thank you for coming up,” Hopkins said. “I’ll be with you in a few moments. Mr. Pierce, this is Dr. Andrews–don’t go, Mr. Pierce–I had hoped to chat with you longer. Well, if you have to go, I understand. I certainly do appreciate your advice on the programs, and you can be sure it will have effect!”

  When Pierce had left, Hopkins and the doctor sat down in the living room. “How have you been feeling?” the doctor asked.

  “Fine–better than ever!”

  “Trouble getting to sleep?”

  “Not a bit!”

  The doctor opened his bag and took out a stethoscope. Hopkins took off his coat and opened his shirt. The doctor listened to his heart intently for several seconds. “It sounds pretty good,” he said finally. “Had any more dizziness lately?”

  “Not a trace of it!”

  “Difficulty breathing?”

  “No.”

  The doctor put his stethoscope back in his bag and took out his equipment for measuring blood pressure. Hopkins rolled up his sleeve and looked out the window at the green lawn on the roof while the doctor strapped the device to his arm. There was an interval of silence. “It’s up a little,” the doctor said finally. “Not badly–nothing to worry about.”

  “That’s good,” Hopkins said, relieved.

  “It’s a warning, though,” the doctor continued. “I guess there’s no use in my repeating it: you ought to slow down.”

  “I’ve been getting plenty of rest,” Hopkins said.

  “I’ll say it to satisfy my own conscience,” the doctor continued. “You ought to take a long vacation–a couple of months, just lying in the sun. You ought to get yourself a hobby, something to help you relax.”

  Hopkins looked at him intently, but said nothing.

  “You ought to cut way down on your schedule,” the doctor went on. “Start getting into your office about ten-thirty or eleven and leaving about three or four in the afternoon–there’s no reason why a man in your position can’t do that. In the long run, you’d be ensuring yourself more working hours. And cut out all these outside activities of yours–take it easy for a few years. You’ve got to slow down!”

  “Are you advising me to retire, Doctor?” Hopkins asked dryly.

  “No–I’d be satisfied if you just followed a normal, human routine!”

  “I will,” Hopkins said courteously. “I certainly appreciate your advice, Doctor, and I’ll take it. Thanks so much for coming up so early this morning!”

  When the doctor had gone, Miss MacDonald called for Hopkins’ car, a black Cadillac five years old, driven by an aging Negro chauffeur. They started driving toward the United Broadcasting building. Before they had gone three blocks the car got caught in a bad traffic jam and could barely crawl. Hopkins put his head back on the soft gray upholstery and closed his eyes. “You’ve got to slow down!” the doctor had said. It seemed to Hopkins that people had been telling him that all his life.

  It had started when he was a boy in public school. He had been editor of the school paper, and though he had been too small to excel at athletics, he had been manager of the football and basketball teams. He had stood at the top of his class scholastically, and whenever there had been a dance or a school play, he had always been chairman of the arrangements committee. “You’ve got to slow down!” the teachers had told him. “Take it easy, boy–you’ll wear yourself out!”

  At Princeton, where he had gone on a scholarship, it had been more of the same. He had headed the debating team, managed the football team, and engaged in a dozen other activities in addition to maintaining an almost straight A average in his studies. “You’ve got to slow down!” his faculty adviser had told him. “Take it easy!”

  But he had not slowed down. Summers he had worked at all kinds of jobs, always astonishing his employers with his energy. After college had come a brief stint in the Army, a period during which his friends had kidded him about wanting to be a general. Upon being released from service in 1919, he had worked for a few years at a brokerage house before going to the United Broadcasting Corporation, which had just been started. A year later he had met Helen Perry, who had at the time been a fashionable beauty in New York. He had pursued her with all the zeal he always devoted to anything he wanted, and on June 3, 1921, he had married her. Up to that time, Hopkins had never had a failure in his life.

  “You’ve got to slow down!” Helen had started saying, even before they were married, but unlike the teachers and faculty advisers, she had not let it go at that. As she discovered that it was Hopkins’ habit to spend most of his evenings and week ends at his office, she had become first annoyed, then indignant, and, finally, hurt and bewildered.

  “Life isn’t worth living like this,” she had said. “I never see you! You’ve got to slow down!”

  He had tried. Especially when their first child, Robert, had come, during the second year of their marriage, he had tried. He had come home every evening at six o’clock and conscientiously played with the baby and sat talking with his wife, and he had been genuinely appalled to find that the baby made him nervous, and that while he was talking to his wife, it was almost impossible for him to sit quietly. He had felt impelled to get up and pace up and down the room, jingling his change in his pockets and glancing at the clock. For the first time in his life he had started to drink heavily during those long evenings at home. Gradually he had started staying late at the office again–by that time he had already had a fairly important job at the United Broadcasting Corporation. Helen had remonstrated with him. There had been recriminations, high-pitched arguments, and threats of divorce.

  All right, it’s a problem, he had said to himself after a particularly bitter scene–it’s a problem that must be met head on, like all other problems. To Helen he had said, in a quiet voice, “I don’t want to have any more scenes–they wear us both out. I’m prepared to admit that whatever is wrong is entirely my fault. I am preoccupied with my work–I’ve been that way all my life, and it is nothing for which you should blame yourself.”

  She had gone pale. “Do you want a divorce?” she had asked.

  “No,” he had said. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  They had never talked about divorce again, but she had begun to refer to his preoccupation with work as a disease. “You’ve got to do something about it,” she had said, and had suggested a psychiatrist.

  For two years Hopkins had submitted to psychoanalysis. Five times a week he had lain on a couch in the psychoanalyst’s apartment on Sixty-ninth Street and recalled his childhood. His father had been a cheerful, rather ineffectual man who, each afternoon upon returning from his job as assistant manager of a small paper mill in an upstate New York village, had spent most of his time rocking on the front porch of their shabby but comfortable house. His mother had been disappointed by the modesty of her husband’s achievements and aspirations and had been bitterly condescending to him. Leaving her family to fend for itself most of the time, she had thrown all her energy into working for the local garden club and a bewildering variety of social and civic organizations. As she gained positions of leadership in these groups, her resentment at her serenely undistinguished husband had grown. Finally she had established herself in a separate room on the third floor of their house and, throughout most of Ralph’s boyhood, had conducted herself like a great lady temporarily forced to live with poor relatives.

  Hopkins was not an introspective man, but in recounting all this to the psyc
hoanalyst, he had said, “I always felt sorry for my father because my mother treated him so badly. She never gave me much time, either, except when I did something she thought was outstanding. Whenever I got a particularly good report card, or won anything, she’d take me up to her room to have tea alone with her. ‘We’re two of a kind,’ she used to say. ‘We get things done.’ I suppose I got the impression from her that achievement means everything.”

  Hopkins had felt quite proud of his efforts at self-diagnosis and had been surprised when the psychoanalyst had disregarded his suggestions in favor of much more bizarre “explanations of neurosis.” He had said that Hopkins probably had a deep guilt complex, and that his constant work was simply an effort to punish and perhaps kill himself. The guilt complex was probably based on a fear of homosexuality, he had said. To Hopkins, who had never consciously worried about homosexuality, or guilt, this had seemed like so much rubbish, but he had tried to believe it, for the psychoanalyst had said it was necessary for him to believe to be cured, and Hopkins had wanted to be cured, in order to make his wife happy.

  The trouble had been that every time he left the psychoanalyst’s office the temptation to return to his own office and bury himself in work had been irresistible. At the end of two years he had become the youngest vice-president of United Broadcasting and had told his wife he simply wouldn’t have time for psychoanalysis any longer.

  It had been shortly after this that he had rented an apartment to use for business meetings in New York and had drifted into the habit of staying away from his home, which had then been in Darien, for weeks at a time. His wife had not objected. She had gone in for horses for a while and, tiring of that, had become a relentless giver of parties. After Susan had been born in 1935, she had abruptly stopped the parties and had thrown herself into motherhood with abandon, firing the nursemaid who had taken care of her son and surrounding herself with avant-garde parents who discussed their children the way psychiatrists discuss their patients. Hopkins had never complained–he had been too grateful to her for letting him alone and, as he saw it, making up for his deficiencies as a parent.

  Things had gone pretty well until 1943, when Robert, their son, had been killed in the war. Hopkins had hurried home when his wife telephoned to tell him and had tried to sympathize with her, but all she had said was, “You never knew him! You never knew him!” Hopkins had stayed with her for three days, at the end of which time he had returned to his office and thrown himself harder than ever into his work.

  “Slow down!” the doctors had been saying regularly ever since. “You’ve got to slow down!” But Helen, his wife, had stopped saying that to him. After Robert had been killed, she had gone for a brief time to a sanitarium, leaving Susan, her daughter, with the servants. After returning from the sanitarium, Helen had started to give parties again, and had begun to plan the great show place in South Bay, and had bought the yawl, and had seemed happier than she ever had in her life.

  “This traffic!” Hopkins said now, as he sat in his limousine and looked out the window at the pedestrians on the sidewalk, who were making better time. “This traffic is terrible!” He sat back and consciously tried to relax, but it was impossible. A policeman blew his whistle sharply, and a taxi driver ahead started to curse. Hopkins shut his eyes. It was ridiculous to worry, it was unproductive. It would be better to think of the future, of things to be done. There was, for instance, the mental-health speech to revise. Hopkins took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “Miss MacDonald,” he said, “it looks as though we’re going to be stuck in this traffic for quite a while. Would you mind taking dictation?”

  23

  “THEY WANT TO USE the top of the tower for sky watchers,” Betsy said to Tom when he returned from work Friday night.

  “What?” he asked in astonishment.

  “It’s Civilian Defense–they’re making a plan for Civilian Defense here. They want to use our tower for airplane spotters until they get a permanent place for themselves.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Tom groaned.

  “Don’t you approve?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “I don’t know, it sounds so absurd. What do they want us to do?”

  “Just let them use the tower for a few weeks. It’s the highest place in South Bay, they said, and has the best view. Why is it absurd?”

  “It’s not,” he said. “I’m just tired, and I don’t like thinking about another war. I have a million other things to do.”

  “Sit down and have a drink,” Betsy said. “Dinner will be ready in a few minutes.”

  That night Tom lay awake a long time worrying about Maria, about old Edward’s claim on the estate, about zoning laws, and about the meeting he was to have with Bernstein in the morning. When he awoke he felt exhausted and so irritable that the high-pitched voices of the children at the breakfast table annoyed him. “Be quiet!” he said sharply to Janey when she said, “Daddy, can I have the milk? Can I have the milk? Can I have the milk?” She looked so hurt that he hastily added, “I’m sorry,” gave her the milk, and himself kept quiet for the rest of the meal.

  “I’ll drop you off at Judge Bernstein’s office,” Betsy said after he had finished his second cup of coffee. “I’ll take the kids with me and enroll the girls at school.”

  “I don’t want to go to school,” Janey said. “I never want to go.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Barbara said thoughtfully. “I only hate it a little.”

  “Can I go?” Pete asked.

  “Nobody has to go for another month,” Betsy said.

  They got in the car and drove slowly to the main street of South Bay.

  “Now don’t take any nonsense from him,” Betsy said as Tom got out of the car in front of the building in which Bernstein had his office. “We ought to have our first ten houses for sale next spring, and if we’re going to do that, we should start right away.”

  Bernstein was sitting behind his scarred pine desk when Tom came in. He glanced up at Tom sharply–somehow he hadn’t expected Mrs. Rath’s grandson to be so tall. “Sit down, Mr. Rath,” he said cordially. “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to get some idea of how long it will take for Mrs. Rath’s estate to go through the Probate Court,” Tom said, “and I want to learn about zoning laws around here. We’ve got an idea we may want to put up some kind of a housing development.”

  “I see,” Bernstein said, and waited.

  “How long does it generally take for an estate to be settled?”

  “Not long, if there are no complications. A man by the name of Schultz was in here to see me a few days ago. Edward Schultz. Name mean anything to you?”

  “He used to work for my grandmother. I want to do what I can for him, but I have to wait until the estate is settled.”

  “Mr. Schultz tells me he believes Mrs. Rath meant the entire estate to go to him,” Bernstein said quietly.

  “That’s absurd! My grandmother talked to me about him shortly before she died.”

  “Apparently he believes he’s entitled to the house,” Bernstein said dryly.

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Why do you suppose he thinks he has a claim?”

  “I think he must be a little crazy,” Tom said. “I don’t know–I feel pretty badly about this. Mrs. Rath was ninety-three years old when she died, and possibly she gave him some reason for hoping she would leave him everything.”

  “Do you think she could have promised him the estate in return for his services for the rest of her life?” Bernstein asked mildly.

  “No! She would have told me! Just before she died she told me she was leaving everything to me, and that’s the way the will is written.”

  “Mr. Schultz claims that he asked Mrs. Rath for a salary increase about a year before she died, and that she said she couldn’t afford to give him one, but that if he’d stay as long as she lived, she’d leave everything to him.”

  “I want to try to be fair about this,” Tom said. “We can’t pro
ve whether she said that or not. She was old and confused, and I suppose it’s possible she said that and forgot it. All I know is she used to talk all the time about saving the house for me, and that’s the way the will is written.”

  “Mr. Schultz seems to feel an attempt is being made to cheat him.”

  “I can’t help the way the old man feels!” Tom said. “I can’t afford to have the settling of the estate delayed indefinitely! How can he hold things up? He hasn’t got any proof!”

  “He says he has,” Bernstein said.

  “What kind?”

  “He told me he has everything in writing from her, postdating the will Mr. Sims sent me.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “That’s what he says. I have asked him to have a photostat of his document sent to me, and he agreed to.”

  “Have you received it yet?”

  “No–there hasn’t been time.”

  “I can’t understand it!” Tom said. “She wasn’t like that. She never would have done a thing like that without telling me!”

  “The court will have to examine both documents and make a decision.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “That depends on a lot of things. It may be necessary to get a lot of information together. It could be a matter of months, or even more.”

  “Meanwhile, I’m living in my grandmother’s place. What would happen if the court awarded it to him?”

  “He could dispossess you and perhaps charge you rent retroactively, I suppose.”

  “Is it legal for me to be there now?”

  “When a property is in dispute, it’s hard to tell what to do with it. I don’t think Mr. Schultz is trying to dispossess you before the court makes a decision.”

  “That’s nice of him,” Tom said bitterly. There was a moment of silence before he added, “I guess I should ask Mr. Sims to represent me–I’ll need a lawyer, won’t I?”

  “That would be advisable.”