Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (9 page)

“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.”

He almost fled from the table. When he thought of Hopkins, it seemed certain that he would get the job, for if Hopkins hadn’t liked him, why would he have been so friendly? But Ogden had been careful to pave the way for a letter ending the whole thing. Anyway, I met Hopkins, he thought. He seems like a nice guy pretty much like anybody else. Whatever it is that makes him worth two hundred thousand dollars a year is certainly well hidden.

W
HEN
T
OM GOT BACK
to his office he found a slip of paper on his desk saying that his wife had called and that it was important for him to call her back. He put the call through immediately.

“It’s your grandmother,” she said. “She fell and broke her thigh. At her age, Tommy, bones don’t knit. She wants to see you, and you better go out there right away. I would have gone myself, but I still feel pretty rocky, and the doctor’s with her–it’s not a real emergency.”

“I’ll go right out,” Tom said.

The next train to South Bay was a local one, which stopped almost every five minutes. Tom sat on a soiled green seat in the smoker staring out the window. He didn’t want to think. At first there were only the dark caverns of Grand Central Station to see, with the dim figures of tired-appearing men in overalls occasionally illuminated by naked electric-light bulbs. Then the train emerged into the bright sunlight and was surrounded by the littered streets and squalid brick tenements of Harlem. Tom had passed them twice a day for years, and usually he didn’t look at them, but now he didn’t want to think about his grandmother and he didn’t want to think about Hopkins, and the tenements absorbed his attention. There was one grimy brick building with a huge billboard showing a beautiful girl thirty feet long lying under a palm tree. “Fly to Miami,” the sign said. Directly under the girl’s head, about six feet below the edge of the billboard, was an open window, outside of which an orange crate had been tied. In the orange crate was a flowerpot with a withered geranium, and as the train passed it, an aged colored woman with sunken cheeks leaned out of the window and poured some water from a milk bottle into the flowerpot.

“Ticket?” the conductor asked. He was a stout, red-faced man. Tom gave him his commuter’s ticket.

“We don’t go as far as Westport,” the conductor said.

“I’m getting off at South Bay.”

“Westport tickets are no good on this train,” the conductor said. “You’ll have to buy a ticket to South Bay.”

“But South Bay is on the way to Westport,” Tom objected.

“I don’t make the rules,” the conductor said.

Tom paid for a ticket to South Bay. The whole damn world is crazy, he thought. Grandmother is hurt and probably dying, and she brought me up, and I should be thinking only the kindest thoughts about her, and I can’t.

She’s dying, he thought. She’s lived ninety-three years, and it’s all been a free ride. She’s never cooked a meal, or made a bed, or washed a diaper, or done a damn thing for herself or anybody else. She’s spent at least three million dollars, and her only comment has been that money is boring. She’s had a free ride for ninety-three years, and I’m damned if I’ll cry about the end of it.

Yet to his astonishment he suddenly felt like crying. She doesn’t want to die, he thought. I’ll bet the poor old lady’s scared.

Suddenly he remembered a night soon after his mother had died when a particularly violent thunder squall had struck the old house. Although he had been fifteen years old then, he had been afraid to stay in his room alone. He had gone to his grandmother’s room, and she had played double solitaire with him half the night. If she wants me to, I’ll stay with her, he thought. I guess Betsy can get along without me for a few days.

As soon as the taxi let him out at the front door of the big house, old Edward opened the front door for him. “The doctor’s in the living room, Mr. Rath,” he said. “He was hoping to see you before he went.”

“Tell him to wait,” Tom said, and raced up the stairs to his grandmother’s room. The door was closed. Cautiously he opened it, in order not to awaken her if she were asleep. There was her big four-poster bed, with the old-fashioned crocheted canopy. The old lady was lying in the precise center of the bed, propped up on pillows. She was looking out the window at the Sound, where a fleet of small sailboats was racing in the distance. She turned her head quickly and smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “They’re trying to take me to the hospital.”

“I’ll talk to them,” he said.

“My leg broke. I didn’t fall and break it–it just broke, and then I fell.”

“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” he said. “We’ll get you fixed up in no time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m going to die, and I prefer to die here. I detest hospitals.”

“I’ll talk to the doctor,” he said.

“Never mind that. I want you to make sure they don’t take me to the hospital. They keep giving me drugs, and I don’t want to wake up in some iron cot with a lot of supercilious nurses telling me what to do.”

“I’ll do my best,” Tom said.

“The Senator died in this bed, and I want to die here too.”

“I’ll talk to the doctor now,” Tom said.

“Stay here. There’s plenty of time. I’ve got lots of things I want to tell you and I may be asleep when you come back up. Do you know I’ve left everything I’ve got to you?”

“I didn’t, Grandmother,” he said. “I’m very grateful.”

“There’s not much,” she said. “For the last ten years I’ve been living off capital. And there’s a small mortgage on the house. You won’t get much.”

“Try to sleep now,” he said. “We can talk about business later.”

“We might as well get it over with now. Did you know that most of your grandfather’s estate was lost long ago?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“How did you know?”

“I guess you must have told me. I think I’ve always known it.”

“I’m sorry things have happened this way,” she said. “The Senator and I had so much. I’ve always been sorry we couldn’t do more for you.”

“You’ve given me a great deal,” he said.

There was a long moment of silence during which she seemed to be breathing with difficulty, but she kept her eyes intently on his face, and he saw she didn’t want him to go.

“I want you to do something for Edward,” she said. “He has to be kept in his place, but he’s been loyal. He’s old and should be provided for.”

“I’ll try, Grandmother,” he said.

She closed her eyes. “How do you think the house looks?” she asked drowsily.

“Beautiful.”

“I have tried to keep it up for you,” she said. “The west wing . . .”

The sentence trailed off, and Tom saw she was asleep. After waiting a few minutes to be sure, he went downstairs. His grandmother’s doctor, an elderly man named Worthington, was waiting.

“I’m afraid your grandmother isn’t very well,” he began.

“How long do you think she can live?”

The doctor took off his glasses and started polishing them with his handkerchief. “She’s broken her thigh,” he said, “and I think the pelvis may be fractured too. She took a bad fall. She says her leg just snapped and she fell, and it may actually have happened that way. We won’t be able to tell about the pelvis till we take her to the hospital and get her X-rayed.”

“She doesn’t want to go to the hospital,” Tom said. “Is there really much point to it?”

“We’ve got to get X rays,” the doctor replied, sounding shocked. “And we can’t give her proper care here!”

“Won’t she die pretty soon, anyway?”

“She will if she doesn’t get proper care!” the doctor said angrily. “With the proper care, we might be able to keep her going for quite a little while.”

“She’ll be miserable in a hospital.”

“I’ll call an ambulance,” the doctor said. “There’s no question that she has to go.”

“I don’t think she’ll allow you to take her.”

“We’ll fix it so she won’t know a thing about it,” the doctor said. Picking up a black bag, he climbed the stairs to the old lady’s room. Tom didn’t try to stop him. So she’s going to wake up in an iron bed in a strange room after all, he thought.

F
LORENCE
R
ATH DIED
only eight days later, complaining not so much of a broken thigh and a fractured pelvis as of the refusal of the doctors to obey her.

“They
know
they can’t cure me, so why don’t they send me home?” she asked Tom every day, and he was never able to invent a plausible answer.

Perhaps on the theory that she might be sent home if she made herself unpleasant enough, she made as much trouble as possible and constantly insulted everyone.

“The nurses are so
common!
” she said loudly to Tom, “and the doctors aren’t much better. They all look like a lot of
druggists!
” She made the word sound like an unpardonable obscenity.

For the entire eight days, she constantly demanded services of everyone. Every few minutes she called a nurse to ask her to smooth her covers, or to change the water in the many vases of flowers with which she had surrounded herself. She asked doctors to make telephone calls for her and even asked one elderly physician to go out and buy her a paper. The night nurse simply disconnected her call bell.