Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (5 page)

He looked quickly away from the bench which had become so
strangely surrounded by bushes, and continued along the driveway. It led to the top of the hill, on the highest point of which was the old mansion itself, a tall Victorian structure with a tower at one end that had been designed to appear even larger and more grandiose than it was. The wind that almost always blew there seemed full of voices.

“It’s a dwarfed castle,” he remembered his mother saying bitterly the year before she died of pneumonia, when he was fifteen years old. “When your father first took me here before we were engaged, he joked about dwarfs in armor behind the parapets at the top of the tower. . . .”

“Here, it’s for you!” he remembered another voice saying, the voice of his grandmother. She had been holding a beautifully polished, old-fashioned, deep-bellied mandolin out to him–he couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old at the time. “Your father used to play it,” she had said. “Maybe you’d like to learn.”

Now Tom paused at the top of the hill. There was a breath-taking view of Long Island Sound, with the bright water mottled by the shadows of clouds. The grass on both sides of the driveway had grown long. Looking at it, Tom remembered the days when it had been kept as carefully as a putting green and felt the first pang of the rising annoyance he feared every time he went there, the rage at his grandmother’s refusal to sell the place, and her calm willingness to pour into it what little was left of the money she had inherited from her husband and father.

“I love this place, and I’ll keep it as long as I can pay the taxes on it,” she had said when, shortly after the war, Tom had suggested that she move.

He left his car by the front door. Edward, a tall old man who long ago had served as her butler and now acted as a man of all work, let him in. “Good morning, Mr. Rath,” he said deferentially. “Mrs. Rath is waiting for you in the sunroom.”

Tom found his grandmother seated in an armchair, dressed in a long white gown. In her hand was a gnarled black walnut cane which looked almost like an extension of her withered fingers. She was ninety-three years old.

“Tommy!” she said when she saw him, and leaned eagerly forward in her chair.

“Don’t get up, Grandmother,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

The old lady peered at him sharply. He was shocked at how much she had aged during the past two months, or perhaps it was just that he persisted in remembering her as a younger woman and was surprised now, each time he saw her. And she in turn was shocked to see Tom, whom she remembered as a young boy. She continued to stare at him, her old eyes bright and disarmingly kind.

“You look tired, Tommy,” she said suddenly.

“I feel fine.”

“You’re getting a little stout,” she said bluntly.

“I’m getting older, Grandmother.”

“You ought to go riding more,” she said. “The Senator always said riding is the best exercise. He used to ride for an hour almost every morning.”

There it was, her terrible projection of the past into the present, which was more a deliberate refusal to face change than a passive acquiescence to senility. And there too was her elaborate myth about the Rath family’s accomplishments. “The Senator” was the phrase she always used for her dead husband, Tom’s grandfather, who had served one term as a State Senator in Hartford during his early youth, and who had spent most of the rest of his life doing absolutely nothing.

“I’ve got a few things I want to talk over with you,” Tom began, trying to change the subject.

“You mustn’t get stout,” the old lady went on relentlessly. “Your father never got stout. Stephen was always slender.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” he said. Sometimes he imagined that she deliberately dwelt upon painful subjects, for she enjoyed talking about his father with him, presenting a caricature of a hero, elaborated by all kinds of distorted facts, hidden among which Tom often caught glimpses of what he suspected were unpleasant truths. What were the facts about his father? Tom had had to piece them together from trifles. “I don’t know why, but Stephen never played the mandolin after the war,” the old lady had told him once long ago. “At college he was in the Mandolin Club, and even as a boy he played beautifully, but after the war he never did it any more.”

His father had been a second lieutenant during the First World War. He had been sent home from France several weeks before the Armistice for unexplained reasons and had for a while worked with a large investment firm in New York. As far as Tom could make
out from the dim echoes of rumor which survived, Stephen Rath had either quit work or been fired about two years before he died, and during his remaining days had simply lived a life of leisure in the big house with his wife, mother, and son. Presumably he had not been happy; he had never played the mandolin any more. Tom suspected that there must have been quite a chain of events leading up to the night when Stephen had backed his Packard out of the carriage house and careened down the road to the waiting rocks at the turn. But of all this Tom could learn nothing from his grandmother’s conversation. According to the old lady, Stephen had been a great military hero, and over the years she had advanced him by her own automatic laws of seniority to the rank of major.

“I hear you’re getting ahead very well at the foundation,” the old lady was saying now.

“I think I may leave the foundation, Grandmother,” he said. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Leave? Why?”

How difficult it was to explain to an old lady who had never earned a penny in her life, and who had never even bothered to conserve what she had inherited, that he needed more money! He said, “I may have an opportunity offered me that’s too good to turn down.”

“I was telling Mrs. Gliden the other day how well you’re doing at the foundation,” the old lady said. “I told her it might not be long before you were chosen as director. I hear that man Haver may be leaving.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I don’t remember,” the old lady said. “There is a rumor. . . .”

That was the trouble–he never could be sure whether his grandmother was simply ensnaring him in her dreams of family glory, or whether the old connections with prominent people which she treasured so carefully actually resulted in useful information. But on the face of it, the thought that he might be chosen to head the Schanenhauser Foundation was ridiculous, regardless of whether Haver was leaving or not. There were at least twenty people who would be chosen first.

“Are you thinking of going into government?” the old lady asked unexpectedly.

“No–I’m thinking of going into business.”

“Your great-grandfather was very successful in business,” she said.
“At one time he owned a fleet of twenty-eight vessels. Are you going into shipping?”

“No,” Tom said. “This will be a little different, Grandmother. There’s nothing definite about it yet, but I’ve mentioned it to Dick Haver, and I thought you ought to know.”

“I’m sorry you have to go into business,” she said soberly, “but I suppose it’s necessary. Business is such a bore–The Major never could stand it, and neither could The Senator. But I suppose it’s necessary. Come, let’s talk about something more cheerful. How do you think the place looks?”

“Fine,” he said.

“I can’t afford to keep the lawns up, but the house itself is in as good repair as ever.”

“It looks beautiful.”

“I hope that when I go, you and Betsy will be able to live here,” she said. “I’m trying to keep it up for you. I don’t want you to mention it to a soul, but I had to take a small mortgage on the place to have the roof fixed and to have an oil furnace put in. Edward is getting old, and he can’t shovel coal any more.”

A furnace, Tom thought–I’ll bet that the price of a furnace for this place would send all three of my kids through a year of college. He felt the old double, contradictory anger rising in him, the familiar fury at his grandmother for dissipating money which ordinarily would come to him eventually, and the accompanying disgust at himself for lusting after an old lady’s money. He tried to feel the gratitude which, after all, was due the person who had brought him up, and paid for his education, and treated him with kindness and love.

“She’s selfish, but I could forgive her that,” Tom remembered his mother saying about the old lady. “What I can’t forgive is the arrogance, and the deliberate pretenses she inflicted on her son, and everyone around her. Poor Steve was raised on lies. . . .”

His mother hadn’t been talking to him when she had said that; she had been talking to a minister who visited her quite often after her husband’s death, and the minister had noticed that Tom, who was only twelve years old then, had come into the room, and he had said, “Hush–the boy’s here. How are you, Tom? It won’t be long before you’ll be going to high school!”

Now Tom wondered whether he should try to work with the old
lady’s lawyer to straighten out whatever might be left of her estate. When he had come home from the war, he had, after tortuous examination of his own motives, asked his grandmother whether he could help manage things for her, and she had turned him down abruptly. She had never mentioned money to him in all the years he had lived with her, except to say that it didn’t matter, that it was a frightful bore.

“If you want any help, let me know,” he said now. “I don’t think it’s wise for you to be taking out mortgages–there might be ways to avoid it.”

“The bank was very helpful,” she said. “I haven’t got many more years to go, and I think the lawyer has arranged for me to be taken care of quite nicely. The important thing is to keep this house in shape for you and Betsy.”

“I doubt whether we’ll be able to afford such a place,” he said. “Not many people can these days.”

“Nonsense!” she replied. “You’re going into business, aren’t you? Perhaps you’ll be able to improve it. The Senator always wanted to put another wing on the south side of the house. Come, and I’ll show you where.”

She walked with astonishing agility and pointed with her cane to show just where the billiard room should go, and a glass-walled conservatory for raising orchids.

There were really four completely unrelated worlds in which he lived, Tom reflected as he drove the old Ford back to Westport. There was the crazy, ghost-ridden world of his grandmother and his dead parents. There was the isolated, best-not-remembered world in which he had been a paratrooper. There was the matter-of-fact, opaque-glass-brick-partitioned world of places like the United Broadcasting Company and the Schanenhauser Foundation. And there was the entirely separate world populated by Betsy and Janey and Barbara and Pete, the only one of the four worlds worth a damn. There must be some way in which the four worlds were related, he thought, but it was easier to think of them as entirely divorced from one another.

T
HE FOLLOWING
T
UESDAY
Tom left the Schanenhauser Foundation at ten-thirty in the morning to keep his appointment with Walker. It was not necessary for him to give any excuse for leaving his desk, but he felt vaguely guilty as he told his secretary he probably wouldn’t be back until noon. He walked quickly up Fifth Avenue and across Rockefeller Plaza, so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he hardly noticed the people he passed. When he got inside the United Broadcasting building, a starter wearing a fancy, silver-braided cap directed him into one of the waiting gold-colored elevators.

“Floor please?” the elevator operator said. He spoke in a deep voice with a slight Italian accent. Tom glanced at him. The man was wearing a plum-colored uniform and had his back turned toward him. He was a stout, dark-complexioned man about thirty years old with thick black hair only partly covered by a plum-colored cap shaped like an army overseas cap. Across the back of his thick neck, just visible above his collar, was a long, thin white scar. There was something startlingly familiar about the slope of his narrow shoulders and the deep voice. Tom stepped to one side to get a better look at him, but the elevator was getting crowded, and he couldn’t see the front of the man’s face.

“Floor please?” the elevator man repeated as people filed into the car. “Floor please?”

“Thirty-six,” Tom said. The man turned toward him, and their eyes met. The elevator operator’s face was fat, almost round, and he had a thin, incongruously dapper mustache. His eyes were black and unblinking. He stared at Tom for several seconds. There might have been a quickly suppressed flicker of recognition, but Tom couldn’t be sure. The face seemed impassive. Tom looked away. The elevator doors rumbled shut, and the machine shot upward. There was an instant of silence before it stopped, and the doors rumbled open. Tom started to get out.

“This is twenty,” the operator said in his deep voice.

Tom edged back into the elevator. When he got out at his floor, he felt oddly flustered. Down the hall he saw a men’s room and went there to wash his face and comb his hair before going to see Walker. It was absurd to attach such importance to a chance encounter with an elevator man. Even if it were someone he had known, what possible difference could it make?

A few minutes later Tom found Walker reclining as usual in his adjustable chair. Sitting in front of Walker’s desk was a handsome, angular man whom Walker introduced as Bill Ogden. Ogden shook hands with Tom rather stiffly and said almost nothing during the remainder of the interview. Apparently he was there simply as an observer.