Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Page 26

  “I see,” Tom said.

  “Now, I can’t stand up and propose a committee right off the bat–that would be pushing it too hard and would invite misinterpretation. Never forget that there are always a million cynics ready to read the worst motives into anything we do. Before I try to start a committee, I have to demonstrate my interest and my availability. What this speech should say, in effect, is that I know the problem, and Barkus is willing if wanted. That’s all. Do you get the picture?”

  “I think so,” Tom said.

  “All right. We’ve been way off base on this speech. Try it for me from scratch, will you?”

  “Be glad to,” Tom said.

  Hopkins turned his attention toward his scrambled eggs. Well, that’s that, Tom thought, feeling a peculiar sensation of letdown. It all happened awfully fast, and I’m not sure where it leaves us. Hopkins finished his eggs and glanced at his watch. “Say, I’ve got to hurry–some people are waiting for me in my office,” he said. “Can you have something for me by the end of the week?”

  “I’ll certainly try,” Tom said, paused, and added, “I was wrong in advising you to make specific recommendations–I can see that.”

  Hopkins smiled. “You’ve helped me cut through a lot of fog on this,” he said. “Can’t thank you enough!” Waving cheerily, he pushed his chair sharply backward, and at his usual brisk gait almost trotted from the room.

  That night when Tom got home to South Bay, Betsy immediately asked, “Did you see Hopkins?”

  “Yes,” Tom replied.

  “I suppose you told him his speech is great,” she said bitterly.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?” Betsy asked, her voice quickening.

  “It didn’t go the way I expected it to at all,” Tom said. “I was completely honest with him, and I think he was with me. And what’s more, he cleared up a doubt I’ve always had in the back of my mind–he showed me he’s completely sincere about wanting to do something about mental-health problems. All this talk about his starting this committee just for a publicity build-up is a lot of nonsense–I’m sure about that now.”

  “You seem so astonished,” she said, laughing. “You sound almost disappointed.”

  Tom grinned. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been worrying too much about Hopkins’ honesty and not enough about my own. Anyway, from now on I’m going to play it straight with him, and we’ll see how it goes. I’m rather looking forward to fixing up that speech.”

  “Thank God!” Betsy said. “You know, for a while there, I wasn’t sure what kind of a man I had married.”

  Tom glanced at her sharply. “Don’t let’s go into that,” he said. “Let’s have a drink. How about mixing up some Martinis?”

  30

  HOPKINS HAD TRIED to arrange to have lunch with his daughter the day after he had talked to his wife, but Susan had been busy. Now he was due to meet her in his apartment in half an hour. At quarter after twelve he said to the motion-picture producer with whom he had spent the morning, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to be going. Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got to fly back to the Coast,” the producer said. “How about lunch?”

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t today,” Hopkins said. “I’ll be in touch with you by phone.”

  The producer was an important man in the business, and he looked a little hurt. Hopkins shook hands with him, apologized effusively, and dashed for the elevator. Miss MacDonald had a taxi waiting for him. He gave the driver the address of his apartment and said, “Hurry.”

  When he got to his apartment, he let himself in and looked quickly around the big living room. No one was there. He walked through the dining room and poked his head into the kitchen, where the cook was fixing luncheon for two and the waitress was filling a silver bucket with ice cubes. “Has Miss Hopkins called?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” the waitress said. “No one’s called all morning.”

  He returned to the living room and sat down. When the waitress brought in the ice, he mixed himself a drink and glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to one. He had talked over the telephone to Susan two days ago, and she had said she would be there at twelve-thirty. Well, anyone could be a quarter hour late. He glanced out the window and was suddenly seized with the fear that she simply would not come. Impatiently he got up, walked to his desk, and took out a draft of a promotion brochure. Picking a pencil from his pocket, he sat down and began to edit it.

  A half hour later there was a timid knock on the door. He sprang from his chair, dashed across the room, and opened it. Susan stood there. “Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m late. The traffic . . .”

  “It’s all right!” he said. “Come in! Come in and sit down!”

  She walked hesitantly into the room, which she had seen only once before, long ago, after her father had taken her and her mother to the theater. She was a slight, dark-haired girl with a good figure, who in a curiously elderly way leaned a little forward as she walked. Her face was beautiful, more because of an intense quality than any unusual symmetry of feature. She sat down and nervously lit a cigarette. “You wanted to talk to me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Have a drink. Ginger ale? Coca-Cola? Or something else? I guess you’re old enough to drink now, aren’t you?”

  “It seems so,” she said, smiling. “I’ll have bourbon on the rocks.”

  He mixed her the drink, fussing perhaps a little too long with the silver ice tongs and the little tray on which he put the glass. After handing it to her and passing her a plate of canapés, he returned to his chair. She was glancing down into her glass with an abstracted look on her face, as though the glass were a crystal ball in which she could see her future. She is beautiful, he thought, and she’s no child any more. I’ve got to handle this thing carefully.

  “I suppose Mother told you I don’t want to go to college, and now you’re going to try to persuade me,” she said suddenly without looking up.

  “Of course I’m not!” Hopkins said without hesitation. “I don’t want you to go to college if you don’t want to!”

  He had answered automatically, from instinct and long training in the handling of people, in spite of the fact that he had of course intended to try to persuade her. She glanced up at him, surprised. “What do you want to see me for, then?”

  The arguments he had planned could not be used now. “I just want to talk to you in general about your future,” he said. “Obviously, there’s no point in our trying to send you to college if you don’t want to go, but what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, appearing a little confused. “I want to get married. Maybe before long.”

  “Anybody particular in mind?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “After marriage, what?”

  She shrugged. “I’d like to travel,” she said.

  He sipped his drink slowly. “I’ve got a problem I’ve never discussed with you,” he said. “It’s a rather hard one to talk about, but perhaps we should.”

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “It’s difficult to describe. You are aware, I suppose, that the world has treated me pretty well. Over the years, I have gradually accumulated a good many responsibilities. I have been lucky, because they came to me gradually, and I had plenty of time to learn how to handle them. The curious thing is that all these accumulated responsibilities, or at least, a good many of them, could easily fall upon your shoulders quite suddenly, and you’ve had no opportunity to get ready for them. . . .”

  “Are you talking about money?”

  “In part.”

  “I’m not interested in money. I think it’s a bore.”

  “No sane person is interested in money as such,” he said.

  “You’ve always seemed to be. I always thought it was all you were interested in. That’s what everybody says.”

  “I’m sure they do,” he said. “Susan, what’s a million dollars?
”

  She shrugged.

  “Go on–think about it and tell me.”

  “A lot of money, I guess.”

  “You’d be surprised how little. A million dollars is about half a small hospital. With a million dollars you could give all the children in a place like, say, South Korea, maybe one cupful of milk at each meal for two days. It isn’t much, really, when you come to think of it, yet it represents the entire life earnings of about six average men–the whole working energy of six men during their entire lives. A million dollars is a lot of things. It’s a college education for maybe a hundred boys. It’s a home of their own for maybe seventy-five people. It’s a pursuit plane for the Army, it’s a new television station, but one thing it’s not: it’s not something any intelligent person can consider a bore.”

  “You’re saying it’s power,” she said. “I’m not interested in power, either.”

  “Of course not. Neither am I. I wasn’t trying to say money is power. I’m saying that when you hold a million dollars in your hand, you are in a very real sense holding the entire working lives of six men, and you better be damn careful what you do with it!”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’re going to leave your money to charity?”

  “I don’t know. I’m saying that we’ve got a problem we ought to start working on together, a responsibility that is mine, which someday may be yours. I got a lot of training before I was given any responsibility, and I am appalled to think what you may have to do without any training at all. Susan, do you know I have a bad heart?”

  “No! No one told me.”

  “I never told your mother–there didn’t seem to be any point in worrying her. It’s not very bad, but it’s at least conceivable that I could die any time. And frankly, Susan, leaving a lot of money to you would be like giving a gun to a baby!”

  “I’m not going to let that part of it worry me,” she said. “I hope nothing happens to you, but I’m not going to worry about money. I’m not going to let money ruin my life the way it’s ruined yours and Mother’s.”

  “Let’s at least be accurate,” he said dryly. “Money has not ruined your mother’s life, and it has not ruined mine. I’m not willing to concede that either your mother or I have been more unhappy than most people, but if we have been, it’s not because of money. The money has come as a by-product.”

  “It’s stupid, the way you work all the time!” she said. “You don’t know how to live. If I’d been Mother, I would have divorced you long ago. I don’t know why you have to work all the time–ever since I can remember! I think you must have a guilt complex. You’re a masochist!”

  “Which of your friends is an amateur psychoanalyst? The playwright?”

  “He understands people,” she said in confusion.

  “Tell him to stop trying to give pat explanations of men and women,” Hopkins replied. “If he had learned that, his play might not have closed down so quickly.”

  “It was a great play!” she said. “The public just doesn’t . . .”

  “. . . appreciate great art,” Hopkins finished wryly for her. “I know. But Shakespeare didn’t do badly in his time, and not many good plays today shut down as soon as they open. If you war to know what the public wants, I’ll tell you: great art on the extremely rare occasions when it’s available, but no phony art–they’d rather have good honest blood and thunder. The public doesn’t like fakers, and neither do I. If you want to meet some playwrights, tell me, and I’ll get some good ones up here for you.”

  There was a brief silence during which he got up and poured himself another drink. While his back was turned she said passionately, “I want to get some happiness out of life! I don’t want to be like you and Mother. I want to have a good time. And no matter what you say, there’s nothing wrong with that!”

  He turned toward her slowly. “Of course there isn’t,” he said. “I just want to see that you set about it properly.”

  “I don’t need any help. Not from you, anyway. I don’t think you’re anyone to be giving lessons!”

  “I’m not trying to give you a lesson,” he said. “I think we’re getting a little off the subject. I’m talking about learning to handle responsibilities.”

  “I don’t want to handle responsibilities. I want to get some fun out of life. It’s time somebody in this family did!”

  “How would you set about getting fun out of life?”

  “I’d give parties. I’d give beautiful parties. I wouldn’t try to change the world. I don’t have any God complex. I just want to have a good time!”

  “You’ll get tired of parties,” he said.

  “Maybe. But by then I’ll have had a good time!”

  She was breathing hard, and he saw that she was upset. “Believe me, I want you to have a good time,” he said gently, “but people who have that primarily in mind rarely accomplish it.”

  “What do you want me to do? You must have asked me up here alone for some reason. You never did anything like this before!”

  “Look, Susan,” he said. “I don’t want you to continue accusing me and your mother. I’m quite ready to admit that I’ve made a great many mistakes, and that a great many things are the matter with me. I’m not apologizing to you–there would be no point to that. And there’s no point in continuous accusations. The main thing is for us to see if we can start working together on what really are common problems. I can’t undo the past, but I’m going to try to be of more help to you in the future.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. Let’s think it over. I have a number of ideas. If you’d like, it might be nice if you moved into this apartment for a while–we could see each other evenings. Perhaps it would be fun for your mother and you and me to take a trip together somewhere. Someday it might be possible for me to arrange for you to get some sort of job working closely with me, if you’d like that. We both should think this whole matter over.”

  “I don’t want to work with you!”

  “You don’t have to. I’m just trying to think of ways in which you might get some training if you don’t want to go to college, and ways in which we might grow closer together.”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone? You always have!”

  “Susan,” he said quietly, “when I was your age, I didn’t have much money, and nobody paid much attention to me. I had a good chance to grow up. Now I’ve made a lot of money–I’ve never thought about it in this way before, but I suppose that if everything I have were liquidated today, there would be more than five million dollars. I know this talk of money shocks you–undoubtedly you think it vulgar. But I think this is a time for plain talking. For better or for worse, you’re rich. It’s nothing for you to be ashamed of, or proud of, or to worry about–it’s just a fact. Now there are two kinds of rich–foolish rich and responsible rich. I’ve hated the foolish rich all my life, and I’ve never seen anybody who was foolish rich and happy for long. It seems to me that you’re getting a good start on the way to being foolish rich. If you keep on the way your mother says you have been, you’re going to make yourself miserable. You’re going to get involved in a lot of half-baked marriages and divorces, and by the time you’re thirty, you’re going to find there’s no way in the world for you to have a good time. A lot of this is my fault, but I refuse to go into that now. What I’m trying to do is help you and myself too. This is just as much my problem as it is yours, and I plan to do something about it. I’m asking your help.”

  She stared at him a moment. “Why are you doing this?” she asked finally. “Why the long speeches all of a sudden?”

  “Because you’re my daughter,” he said. That sounded strangely inadequate, and he added awkwardly, “Because I love you.”

  “That’s not true!” she exclaimed. “Don’t be a hypocrite! You’ve hardly bothered to see me since I was born!”

  He was shocked at her vehemence. “People love in different ways,” he said.

  “Why can’t you be honest? You don’
t love me and you don’t love Mother. To tell the truth, I don’t think you love anyone–I don’t think you love anyone in the whole world! And I don’t want to be like that!”

  Before he could say anything, she got up and fled from the apartment, slamming the door behind her. “Susie!” he called, getting up and following her. “That’s not true!”

  Frantically she rang for the elevator. He stood in the door of his apartment and said, “Come back and sit down. Let’s be reasonable.”

  “I don’t want to be reasonable,” she replied. “You and Mother have been reasonable all your lives. I’m going to try something else.”

  Before he could answer, the elevator doors slid open, revealing the calm and aloof face of the girl who operated them. “Going down,” she said. Susan stepped into the elevator, and the doors rumbled shut behind her. Hopkins was left alone.

  31

  EDWARD SCHULTZ WALKED UP the stairs to Judge Saul Bernstein’s office. He wore a shabby raincoat over his uniform. He had always had his uniforms provided by his employer and for years had refused to buy a suit to wear on his day off. He walked into Bernstein’s office boldly, without knocking, and stared for a moment at a man sitting in a wheel chair there. Then he turned and looked at Bernstein, who was sitting behind his desk. “You wanted me?” he asked harshly.