Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (18 page)

“Who are you?”

“I’m the office girl. I deliver the interoffice mail. Did you buzz for me?”

“By mistake,” Tom said. “Thank you very much.”

She left, and he sat examining the other buttons with interest. Maybe the second one’s for a redhead and the third one’s for a brunette, he thought. After a moment of hesitation, he pushed the second one. This time Miss Lawrence came in. “Yes?” she asked.

“What’s the third button for?”

“Nothing,” she said, grinning. “It’s for men who have two secretaries. Do you know how to use the interoffice communication system?”

He said no, and she showed him. She also explained the telephone system and brought from her desk a stack of papers for him to sign which placed him officially on the pay roll and insured him against almost everything in the world but getting fired. Just as he finished signing them, his interoffice communication box uttered some ominous crackling sounds, like a radio in a thunderstorm. He flicked a switch on it, and Ogden’s voice suddenly shouted at him so loudly that he jumped, “Are you there, Rath?”

Tom turned the volume down to make Ogden more polite. “Just got here,” he said.

“Come up and see me in half an hour,” Ogden almost whispered. There were more noises like static.

“I’ll be there,” Tom said.

There was no reply, and he shut off the box. For a moment he busied himself looking through the drawers of his desk, inspecting with admiration a typewriter which pulled out on a special shelf. Then he turned his chair around and stared out the window. Below him, the city stretched like a map. Far away in the Hudson River a flotilla of destroyers was getting up steam. One of them was using a signal light. Tom could still read Morse Code. “Where in hell is the liberty boat?” the signalman was asking.

Twenty minutes later Tom started toward Ogden’s office. Down the hall he took a wrong turn at a junction of corridors and wound up at the entrance to an enormous room in which about thirty clerks worked at desks in neat rows as in a schoolroom. When he found Ogden’s office it was five minutes past the time set for the appointment, but that didn’t make any difference, because Ogden kept him waiting another hour.

“Glad you could start work today,” Ogden said when he finally had the girl in the pink sweater show him in. “Is your office all right?”

“It’s fine,” Tom said casually.

“About a title for you,” Ogden said. “I suppose we should give you a title. You’ll be responsible directly to me, of course, but I think we’ll call you ‘Special Assistant to Mr. Hopkins.’ There will be times when that title will be useful.”

Ogden paused, and Tom said, “That sounds like a fine title.”

“Just remember that it doesn’t apply to company business,” Ogden said. “You’re special assistant to Mr. Hopkins on this special project–nothing else. That will be made clear inside the company, but of course there will be no need to spell it out anywhere else.”

“Of course,” Tom said.

“Can you have dinner with Mr. Hopkins tonight?”

“Yes,” Tom said, trying not to sound surprised. “I think I can arrange it.”

“Meet us at seven-thirty at his apartment,” Ogden said, and gave a Park Avenue address, which Tom wrote down on a pad and put in his pocket.

“Now let me give you the pitch,” Ogden continued. “There’s a . . .” Before he could go on, his telephone rang. “No,” Ogden said into the receiver. “Absolutely not.” He listened for a full minute before adding, “I’m still not convinced. Contact me on it later. Good-by.”

He hung up and shifted his gaze to Tom. With hardly a pause, he said, “The pitch is this. There’s a big convention of medical men in Atlantic City on September 15th. Hopkins has been asked to speak, and he figures it will be a good time for him to send up a trial balloon on this whole project. He can’t mention the small group of doctors who got him interested in all this. We’ve got to help him with the speech.”

“Does that mean you want me to write it?”

Ogden looked at Tom with distaste. “We don’t write speeches for Mr. Hopkins,” he said. “He writes his own speeches. We just help him with the research and try to get something on paper for him to work with.”

“I see,” Tom said, feeling he had made a strategic error.

“Tonight we’re going to kick the speech around,” Ogden said. “You better be thinking about what he should say. He’ll want your ideas.”

Tom didn’t have any idea in the world what the president of United Broadcasting should say to a convention of physicians about mental health. “Did the doctors suggest any topic when they invited him?” he asked.

“No.”

“I suppose he could talk about increasing public understanding of the mental-illness problem,” Tom said tentatively. He was tired of that thought already.

“Maybe. But keep in mind the purpose of the speech. If we achieve our purpose one hundred per cent, the audience should rise as one man when he’s through and demand that he start a national committee on mental health immediately. He shouldn’t propose such a thing, understand–they should suggest it to him. If this is the kind of speech it should be, every newspaper in the country should have it on the front page the next morning. Requests for him to form a national committee on mental health should pour in from all over the nation.”

“It’ll have to be quite a speech,” Tom said.

“Perhaps we can’t expect to achieve our purpose one hundred per cent, but we ought to keep the goal clearly in mind. And we also must not forget the possibility of a one hundred per cent failure. Do you know what that would be?”

“No response at all,” Tom said.

“No–a negative response. If the speech went one hundred per cent wrong, the doctors would all get together to
prevent
the formation of a national committee on mental health. Mr. Hopkins would be accused of meddling in things he didn’t know anything about. United Broadcasting would be described as a sinister influence trying to muscle in on the doctors for mysterious reasons. People would say we want socialized medicine, or that we are reactionaries fighting co-operative health plans. Hopkins would be accused of being a publicity hound. Rumors would start that he had political ambitions. If that sort of thing happened, the whole project would of course have to be abandoned.”

There goes my job, Tom thought. Bill Hawthorne’s already chipping away at it. He said, “I don’t think there’s much danger of that happening. After all, the doctors invited him to speak.”

“That was arranged by a small group,” Ogden said. “If the speech backfired, they’d be the first to claim they had nothing to do with it.”

As soon as he got back to his own office, Tom telephoned Betsy. “I’ve already started work for United Broadcasting and I won’t be home for dinner tonight,” he said. “I’m having dinner with Hopkins in his Park Avenue apartment.”

“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?”