Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Read online

  “What I’m trying to say,” Dick continued, “is that working for Great Men is a profession in itself, and the trouble is that when you’re through with one Great Man, you can’t always find another.”

  He’s making it sound as though I’m going to be a professional toady, Tom thought. He’s trying to persuade me not to go. He said nothing.

  “I think I ought to add,” Dick said, “that when you leave, if you leave, we’ll have to replace you, and it might not be possible for us to find a position here for you if you returned to look for a job.”

  “Of course,” Tom said.

  Dick smiled. “Make your own decision,” he said. “Whatever you do, I wish you luck.”

  Tom thanked him and went to his own desk. If he had really wanted to keep me he could have offered me a big raise, but that would have encouraged everybody else to threaten to leave, he thought. He couldn’t do that. Or, if he wanted to keep me, all he would have to do would be to give me a bad reference. He could do it over the telephone and I’d never know about it, but Dick would never even think of that. The union of bosses is powerful, but, within its self-prescribed limits, marvelously scrupulous. Tom glanced at his watch and saw it was almost time for lunch. On his desk was a long report from a college trying to explain what it had done with a half-million-dollar grant the Schanenhauser Foundation had given it a year ago. Tom started to read it. He decided he wouldn’t go to lunch. He worked right through the day, unobtrusively making sure that Dick Haver knew it.

  When Tom got back to Westport that night he found the house spotless, and an enormous steak dinner in the oven awaiting him.

  “THERE’S AN APPLE PIE IN THE BREAD BOX,” Mrs. Manter shouted. “THE CHILDREN HAVE ET THEIR SUPPER AND ARE IN BED.”

  “Fine,” Tom said. “How is everybody?”

  “YOUR WIFE’S NOT REALLY SICK AT ALL,” Mrs. Manter said, “TAKE ME HOME NOW–IT’S ALMOST SIX O’CLOCK.”

  Before taking her home, Tom ran up the stairs to see Betsy, who was lying on a neatly made bed looking wilted. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Exhausted,” she said. “Just watching that woman makes me exhausted. Do you know what she did? She washed clothes by hand in the bathtub, and she scrubbed all the woodwork in the kitchen. She mowed the lawn. She made cookies. And the children mind her like trained seals. She tells them to keep quiet and they don’t say a word.”

  “Maybe we can learn something,” Tom said.

  “The children are in their room now keeping quiet.”

  “I’ll take her home,” Tom said. “Can you manage till I get back?”

  “I won’t tell the children she’s gone,” Betsy said weakly.

  At seven the next morning Tom awoke with the knowledge that he had to prepare breakfast for the children, get Mrs. Manter, and go into New York to have lunch with the president of the United Broadcasting Corporation. He was dismayed to find that no freshly pressed suit was in his closet, and that the one shirt in his drawer which didn’t have a frayed collar lacked two buttons.

  “Betsy!” he said. “I can’t go in to see Hopkins looking like a bum!”

  “I forgot!” Betsy replied. “I was supposed to pick up your things at the cleaners the day before yesterday. So much has been going on!”

  “What will I do?”

  “Go down and get breakfast,” Betsy said. “I’ll be pressing your gray flannel suit and sewing on buttons.”

  “Are you strong enough?”

  Betsy struggled out of bed. “You don’t have to be very strong to lift a button,” she said.

  Dressed only in his shoes, socks, and underpants, Tom went to the kitchen and fried eggs. The children, feeling much better in spite of the fact that their faces had not yet healed, insisted on having breakfast in the kitchen, instead of in bed. Tom remembered the formal breakfasts his grandmother’s butler had served during his own childhood, with silver covers on dishes of eggs and sausage, and, seeing himself in his underwear serving his children, he thought, Things sure are different for them–one thing they won’t have to get over is gracious living.

  By the time he was dressed, Tom found himself surprisingly nervous at the prospect of meeting Hopkins. He felt almost the way he had before combat jumps during the war. “Wish me luck,” he said to Betsy, after he had delivered Mrs. Manter and was leaving to catch his train.

  “You’ll get the job,” Betsy said confidently.

  That was the way she always was. During the war, he was sure, she had never worried about him–she was perfectly confident that he’d come back unhurt. Her confident letters, which sometimes had arrived when he was certain he would never survive the next jump, had made him acutely lonely, and he felt the same way now as he bent over and kissed her.

  There’s no damn reason in the world to be nervous, he thought, later in the morning, as he walked toward the United Broadcasting building. After all I’ve been through, why should I be nervous now? He wondered what Hopkins was like. What did a man have to be like to make so damn much money? It’s never just luck that lets them make it, he thought, and it isn’t just who they know–I won’t let myself fall into the trap of thinking that. Hopkins has got something, something special, or he wouldn’t be making two hundred thousand a year. What is it?

  All I have to do is be myself, he thought. Just treat him like anybody else. I wonder what it’s like to have all that money? I wonder what it’s like never to have to worry about frayed shirt collars, and cracks in the living-room wall, and holes in the kitchen linoleum, and how to pay a woman to take care of your children when your wife is sick? I wonder what it’s like to know there’s plenty of money to send your kids to college? What’s it like to be a success?

  Buck fever, he thought–I’ve got buck fever. I’ve got my sights on the guy, and my hands are beginning to shake. The son of a bitch. Why shouldn’t he like me? He may be tough all right, but I wish he’d been along with me a few years ago; I would like to have seen how tough he was when the sergeant opened the door of the airplane two thousand feet up and said, “Guess we’re getting close, sir. Are you ready?”

  I’ll bet old Hopkins has fought battles, Tom thought, but his battles paid off. Suddenly the ridiculous old resentment rose in him, the crazy anger he had felt so many times when he’d been scared and seen some poor inoffensive colonel who never had to jump sitting behind a desk, drinking coffee maybe, and wisecracking with a sergeant about when they were going to get their next leave. When he’d seen something like that, especially when he’d seen it a few hours before he knew he had to take off, this crazy anger had risen in him, and for no reason at all he felt the same way now. Then he was in the gold elevator, going up, high into the sky. He looked at the operator and was absurdly relieved to find it was not the man whose face and voice had been so strangely familiar.

  “Hello!” Walker said as Tom entered his office. “You’re right on time!”

  Tom smiled. “I try to be punctual,” he said primly, and felt absurd.

  Walker put his small puffy white hands on his desk and painfully eased his enormous bulk from his reclining chair. “We’ll pick up Bill Ogden and go on up to see Mr. Hopkins,” he said.

  Ogden looked more like a fashion plate than ever. “Glad to see you,” he said to Tom, but he didn’t sound glad at all–he didn’t sound as though he had ever been glad about anything except the happy circumstances which had caused him to be handsome and slender and well dressed and in a position of at least a little authority.

  With Ogden leading the way, and Walker puffing along behind, Tom got back into the gold elevator. Following Ogden, he stepped out at the fifty-sixth floor. The corridors there were wider, he immediately noticed. The floors were carpeted more richly, and even the light fixtures on the ceiling were of a heavier brass than on the floors below. In the air, he felt, there was almost the smell of money, impregnating everything, like musk.

  Hopkins’ outer office was a large room, in which two pretty girls and one gray-haired woman sat at
big typewriters which looked like cash registers. There were five comfortable chairs made of molded plywood arranged in a circle around an ash tray on a pedestal. Three doors, all of them shut, led from this outer office. One of these doors was especially broad and obviously led to the final retreat of Hopkins himself.

  “Mr. Hopkins is busy,” the gray-haired woman said to Walker, and smiled. Everybody in this building smiles, Tom thought–even Ogden managed a thin little twinge of the lips whenever he spoke. It must be a company rule.

  They sat in the chairs surrounding the ash tray, and Tom saw a row of carefully framed photographs on the wall in front of him. One was of Winston Churchill debarking from an airplane. Something was written in a bold script across the bottom of the photograph, but Tom was not close enough to read it, and somehow it would have been unthinkable to get up and inspect the photograph closely.

  “He has Mr. Givens with him,” the gray-haired woman said. “They’ll be through in a moment.” She smiled again, and both Ogden and Walker smiled back at her.

  Ten minutes later a tall, distinguished-looking man emerged from the largest of the three doors and walked briskly through the outer office toward the elevators.

  “You can go in now,” the gray-haired woman said.

  Following Ogden, Tom entered a large rectangular room with big windows on two sides of it. The view of the city was breath-taking–the floor seemed almost like a platform suspended in mid-air. At the far end of the room, behind a huge rectangular desk, sat Hopkins. He was small, not more than five feet three or four–somehow Tom had expected him to be seven feet tall. He was pale, slender, and partly bald. His eyes were deep set, the face narrow, and the nose short like the nose of a child. His smile was curiously boyish. He was dressed in a brown worsted suit.

  “Hello!” he said, getting up from his chair and walking briskly around the end of the desk. “Good morning, Gordon! How are you, Billl And you’re Tom Rath! I certainly do appreciate your taking the time to have lunch with us!”

  His manner was both warm and deferential. He shook Tom’s hand heartily, and without making it necessary for him to say more than “How do you do?” kept up a steady patter of conversation.

  “I hear you’re working with the Schanenhauser Foundation,” he said. “My, that’s a fine outfit! I’ve done a little work with Dick Haver on committees. . . .”

  He moved toward the door and, after insisting that everyone precede him out, walked beside Tom to the elevator, still talking. Gradually, Tom found himself relaxing. It was ridiculous to be nervous with this friendly little man who seemed so anxious to please him. Now that Tom had met him, the conversations he had had with Bill Hawthorne seemed absurd.

  When they got on the elevator, Tom saw immediately that the operator was the familiar-appearing man he had seen before. The elevator man glanced at him, then quickly looked toward Hopkins.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hopkins!” he said in his deep voice, and shot down to the ground floor without any intermediate stops. Hopkins insisted on being the last man out of the elevator. As they walked out of the building, Tom glanced over his shoulder and saw the elevator operator standing there at the door of his car watching them. Tom looked away quickly. Hopkins led the way across Rockefeller Plaza to another building, at the top of which was a club with a large dining room overlooking the city. They sat down at a corner table, and a waitress took orders for cocktails.

  “I understand that Bill and Gordon here have told you something about the new project we’re thinking of starting,” Hopkins said when the drinks had arrived. “What do you think of it?”

  “I don’t know any of the details yet, but it certainly sounds interesting,” Tom replied, trying to combine wariness, sagacity, and enthusiasm.

  “We don’t know the details ourselves yet,” Hopkins said. “It all started when a group of doctors called on me a few months ago. They apparently felt that there is too little public understanding of the whole question of mental illness, and that a campaign like the fight against cancer or polio is needed. I was impressed by the statistics they gave me. Do you know that more hospital beds are occupied by the mentally ill than by all the cancer, heart, and polio patients put together?”

  “I’ve heard that,” Tom said. “Did the doctors have any specific program to suggest?”

  Hopkins smiled. “I’m afraid it’s up to us to develop a program,” he said. “What would you do?”

  “I suppose we could, in general, divide the operation into two parts,” Tom said, “publicity and action.”

  “Which do you feel is the more important?” Hopkins asked mildly.

  “I don’t think their importance can be rated,” Tom said, “for the purpose of publicity would be to get action.”

  “That’s very true,” Hopkins said, as though he had just heard something very profound. “What kind of action do you think we should try to get?”

  A waitress came and replaced the empty cocktail glasses on the table with full ones. “Of course, I’m just talking off the top of my head,” Tom began, “but theoretically I suppose we could urge people to donate more money for research on mental illness, we could try to get them to vote more state and federal funds for mental hospitals, and we could suggest some kind of direct action at the local level, such as the organization of community psychiatric clinics.”

  “How would we do that?” Ogden asked in an unmistakably bored voice which contrasted sharply with Hopkins’ enthusiasm.

  “I suppose we’d have to consult with a lot of people to determine that,” Tom said quickly, “I certainly couldn’t tell you now.”

  “Of course,” Hopkins said reassuringly. “None of us can spell anything out at this stage.”

  Walker sat looking amused and saying nothing. Tom’s nervousness was returning. A waiter took orders for food.

  “I hear you live out in Westport,” Hopkins said to Tom. “I live out that way myself–I just got a place in South Bay.”

  “South Bay!” Tom said. “I was born there. My grandmother lives out there now.”

  It was ridiculous, but Tom found it somehow impossible to think of Hopkins in South Bay. It seemed to Tom that everyone in South Bay either was something like his grandmother and her friends, or was a buyer of one of the unlikely-looking houses which had been built on the golf course. Certainly Hopkins fitted neither category.

  “We just built a little place down by the water,” Hopkins said. “It’s a beautiful town, isn’t it?”

  He must have bought the old yacht club’s land–I heard it was for sale, Tom thought. I wonder what kind of a place he’s got. Aloud he said, “I think you’ll like it there–I’ve always thought South Bay the nicest town within commuting distance.”

  “Stop in next time you visit your grandmother,” Hopkins said. “We’d be delighted to see you.”

  He sounded as though he meant it. Tom suddenly saw himself and Betsy and the three children, all with the chicken pox, descending on the Hopkins household. What kind of a wife did Hopkins have? Bill Hawthorne had mentioned all sorts of rumors, but it didn’t seem possible that they could be true.

  “Do you play croquet?” Hopkins asked.

  “Yes,” Tom said, though he hadn’t played for fifteen years. He had a vision of himself playing croquet with Hopkins, using solid gold balls and silver mallets.

  “We’ll have to have a game sometime,” Hopkins said. “I used to play tennis, but I’m getting a little too old for it. . . .”

  Throughout the meal, Hopkins continued to chat as though the luncheon were strictly a social occasion, rather than an opportunity for him to inspect a prospective employee. Before dessert was served, however, he glanced at his watch. “My!” he said. “I’ve got to be getting back to the office! Would you people excuse me?”

  Before the others could stand up, he waved cheerily and dashed toward the elevators.

  “Coffee?” Walker asked Tom.

  “Please,” Tom said.

  There was a heavy silence
, while Tom wondered what, if anything, had been decided. What was the next step? Would Hopkins and Walker and Ogden all get together now and decide whether to hire him, and if so, when would he hear?

  “Cigarette?” Ogden asked.

  Tom accepted one. It seemed funny they didn’t give him some kind of hint about what to expect. Maybe Hopkins hadn’t liked him and had kept up the friendly patter just to get through a difficult lunch. Maybe he would get a letter in a couple of days which would begin, “We tremendously enjoyed talking with you, but we’re sorry to say there have been some changes of plan. . . .”

  Walker painfully pulled himself to his feet. “Got to be getting back,” he said. “Nice to have seen you, Mr. Rath.”

  He sounded friendly, but noncommittal. Ogden made no motion to get up. “See you,” he said to Walker and poured himself another cup of coffee.

  Maybe he’ll tell me now, Tom thought. Maybe he’ll just be frank and say, “I’m awfully sorry it didn’t work out. . . .” Still, how could he know what Hopkins had thought? He hadn’t had a chance to speak to Hopkins while Tom wasn’t there. Maybe they have some signal, Tom thought. Thumbs down.

  “It was a very nice lunch,” Tom said tentatively. “Thank you very much. . . .”

  “Glad you could come,” Ogden said. “More coffee?”

  Coffee was the last thing Tom wanted, but apparently Ogden didn’t want him to leave yet. He accepted the coffee and waited. Ogden sat staring expressionlessly out the window, and for a long while said absolutely nothing. The tension mounted. Tom couldn’t make up his mind whether Ogden was just being completely matter-of-fact about the luncheon, or whether this was an act of deliberate cruelty.

  “We’ll be in touch with you before long,” Ogden said finally. “Mr. Hopkins has got to go to the West Coast tomorrow, and we may have to wait until he gets back before making any final decision. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t count too heavily on anything. It’s not entirely definite yet that we’re even going to tackle this mental-health project.”

  “I understand that,” Tom said, and hurriedly added, “I’ve got to be getting back to my office now–thanks again for the lunch.”