Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19 page)

“Thanks, Ralph,” the bigger of the two men said. “Anything you’ve got. Good evening, Bill.”

After brief introductions, and after everyone had a drink, Hopkins said, “Now, Tom, do you think you have the hang of what I want to say in Atlantic City?”

“I guess so,” Tom said.

“Would it be putting you to too much trouble to ask for a rough draft in, say, three or four days?”

“I’ll have something for you,” Tom said.

“Fine! Thanks
so
much for coming up. I know how hard it is to stay in town late when you live in Connecticut. I certainly appreciate it!”

Bill Ogden stood up. “Thanks for everything, Ralph,” he said. “I’ve got to be running.”

“Thank
you
, Bill!” Hopkins said.

This is the most polite damn bunch of people I’ve ever met, Tom thought. As he and Bill Ogden went out the door he heard Hopkins say to the other two men, “I
certainly
appreciate your giving up your evening for this! Have you got some of those promotion plans we were discussing last week spelled out a little more?”

It turned out that Ogden lived in Stamford, and he rode to Grand Central Station in a taxi with Tom. They had just missed the nine-thirty-five train, and there wasn’t another one for more than an hour. They went to the bar on the lower level of the station and ordered highballs.

“I can’t help being curious,” Tom said. “Does Mr. Hopkins work every night?”

“He often takes long week ends on an island he has up in Maine,” Ogden said.

Tom reflected upon this for a few moments. “You mean he just lives alone in that apartment and has business appointments every evening?” he asked incredulously.

“Oh, he goes out to his place at South Bay quite often,” Ogden said. “He sees a lot of his family–especially around Christmas time.”

Tom took a few swallows of his drink.

“He never gets tired,” Ogden said. “Lots of guys work hard, but he’s always fresh. I’ve never seen him tired in my life.”

When Tom got back to Westport, the first thing he noticed when he stepped in the front door of his house was that everything looked suspiciously neat, and a table with a large vase of hollyhocks had been moved against the living-room wall to obscure the crack in the plaster. Betsy was waiting. “How did it go?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said. “I got to write a speech. I mean, I have to help
Mr. Hopkins with a speech. I might as well get the terminology of this thing straight from the beginning.”

To his surprise, Betsy looked hurt. “I wish you’d stop being so damn bright and cynical,” she said. “It’s no way to start a new job. You ought to be enthusiastic. Damn it, Tommy, try being naïve!”

“What’s got into you?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“I’ll bet Hopkins doesn’t go around making wisecracks!” she said. “Does he?”

“No.”

“Nobody does who gets anywhere. You’ve got to be positive and enthusiastic!”

“How come you know so much all of a sudden about how to get ahead?”

“I just
know
,” she said. “I’m sick of being smart and broke.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be owl-faced. My whole interest in life is working for mental health. I care nothing for myself. I am a dedicated human being.”

“All right, be witty. But I’ve been worried about this for a long time. You’ve always been talking about Hopkins’ mental-health project with your tongue in your cheek, and if you feel that way about it, you ought not work for the man. You ought to be thinking it’s the best idea in the world! And why isn’t it a good idea, when you come right down to it? What’s wrong with trying to do something about mental illness? Why do you have to be so damn
cynical
about it?”

“From now on I’ll be pious,” he said, “if you promise to stop being insufferable.”

“I just want you to start off on the right foot,” she said. “Do you like Mr. Hopkins?”

“I guess so.”

“You should
try
to like him! Give him the benefit of every doubt. Or quit working for him right now!”

“I love him,” he said simply. “I adore him. My heart is his.”

“You scare me, Tommy,” she said. “I’m dead serious. You scare hell out of me when you’re like that. To me it means you’re going to be unenthusiastic about everything for the rest of your life.”

“I’m going to try to do this job right,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to try.”

“Sit down now and have a drink,” she said. “Three people looked at the house today, and one may be coming back.”

J
UST
as Tom and Betsy were preparing to go to bed, the telephone rang. It was Lucy Hitchcock, who lived next door. “Hi!” she said with slightly alcoholic jubilation in her voice. “Could you and Tom come over for cocktails tomorrow night? Bob just got a wonderful raise, and we’re going to celebrate.”

“Congratulations,” Betsy said. “We’ll be there.”

“I’ve got to call twenty other people,” Lucy said. “Good-by!”

Filled with sudden distaste, Betsy put the telephone down. In this invitation tendered so late in the evening to a party for the celebration of an increase in salary received by the host, Betsy found concentrated everything she disliked about Greentree Avenue. The intensity of her displeasure surprised her, and long after she had gone to bed, she lay awake trying to analyze it.

It’s not that I’m a snob–it’s more than that, she thought fiercely. There are all kinds of reasons. Slowly she counted them off.

The first reason the invitation annoyed her was that she felt obligated to accept it. She and Tom had already declined invitations to two of the Hitchcocks’ parties, and Lucy would interpret a third refusal as a slight, regardless of what excuse were given.

The second reason was that like most cocktail parties on Greentree Avenue, this one would be an exhausting exercise. On Greentree Avenue cocktail parties started at seven-thirty, when the men came home from New York, and they usually continued without any dinner until three or four o’clock in the morning. It was almost impossible for the owners of the small houses to provide dinner for their guests–on that street the custom of asking people in for dinner had almost disappeared. The kitchens were small, dining rooms were almost nonexistent, and after the women had put the children to bed, they were in no mood to fix company meals. Cocktail parties were
an easier form of hospitality, and the only trouble was that anyone who went home for dinner was considered a spoilsport. Somewhere around nine-thirty in the evening, Martinis and Manhattans would give way to highballs, but the formality of eating anything but hors d’oeuvres in between had been entirely omitted.

It can’t be true that the whole street is like that, Betsy thought–it must be just the people we know. For a long while after she went to bed, she lay thinking of the various families up and down the street. Almost all the houses were occupied by couples with young children, and few people considered Greentree Avenue a permanent stop–the place was just a crossroads where families waited until they could afford to move on to something better. The finances of almost every household were an open book. Budgets were frankly discussed, and the public celebration of increases in salary was common. The biggest parties of all were moving-out parties, given by those who finally were able to buy a bigger house. Of course there were a few men in the area who had given up hope of rising in the world, and a few who had moved from worse surroundings and considered Greentree Avenue a desirable end of the road, but they and their families suffered a kind of social ostracism. On Greentree Avenue, contentment was an object of contempt.

No one here is evil, Betsy thought defensively. In spite of all the drinking, the young couples were usually well enough behaved at the cocktail parties. Sure, there were sometimes a few kitchen kisses and an occasional high-pitched argument, but usually the men and their wives just sat talking about the modern houses they would like to build, or the old barns they would like to convert into dwellings. The price the small houses on Greentree Avenue were currently bringing and the question of how big a mortgage the local banks were offering on larger places were constantly discussed. As the evening wore on, the men generally fell to divulging dreams of escaping to an entirely different sort of life–to a dairy farm in Vermont, or to the management of a motel in Florida–but for the most part, the cocktail parties simply gave everyone a chance to prove he considered Greentree Avenue no more than a stepping stone to the same kind of life on a bigger scale. There’s nothing wrong with that, Betsy tried to tell herself. This isn’t a bad place to be, it’s just . . .

Dull. That was the word she usually used for Greentree Avenue, but tonight she rejected it. If this were just a dull place, I wouldn’t
mind it so much, she thought. The trouble is, it’s not dull enough–it’s tense and it’s frantic. Or, to be honest, Tom and I are tense and frantic, and I wish to heaven I knew why.

Betsy sat up in bed and, in the dim light from the window, glanced at Tom. He was asleep and, at least for the moment, looked entirely serene. She fumbled on the bedside table, found a cigarette, and lit it. A feeling of black pessimism and self-reproach overtook her. With Betsy, such moods were extremely rare, but when she fell victim to them, every humiliating experience she had suffered since early childhood sprang to life, and all comforting thoughts fell from beneath her, as though she had been standing on a trap door. At such times, the big brick house on Beacon Street in which she had been brought up came back to her memory not as a cheerful place, with pine logs roaring in the living-room fireplace on winter afternoons, but as a cavernous building with a long dark staircase with a creak in every step which she had been obliged to climb alone early each evening, leaving her older sister, Alice, to bask in the warmth below. Betsy had had a rather lonely childhood–her sister was eight years older than she, and her parents had been quite old when she was born and had lacked the energy, if not the will, to give much time to a small child. Almost from the beginning, Betsy had been a rather adult child. She had rarely cried, and although she had been terrified by the shadows on the wall of the stairs and the darkness in the hall above, she had never confided her fears to anyone. Instead, she had hummed to herself determinedly while going up to bed, with lips compressed and fists tightly clenched as she edged along the shadows and into the blackness of the hall, where anything could lurk. Because her parents had not approved of night lights for children, she had slept in the dark, with her ears straining for the comforting sound of voices on the floor below and the occasional laugh of her older sister. Now, lying in the dark beside Tom, Betsy found herself half expecting to hear the sound of that laughter again.

“
Mark my words
. . .” her sister Alice had said. That had been much later, when Betsy had told her family she wanted to marry Tom. “
Mark my words
,” she had said. “If you get married now, you’ll regret it. You’re too young. Someday you’ll remember I told you that and wish you had taken my advice. Wait till after the war. A girl your age who marries a man just about to go in the service is crazy.”

“But I’ve known him for three years,”
Betsy had said.

“But you don’t know how either of you will feel after he gets back.”

“We’ll always feel the same as we do now!”

How bravely the words came back to her! Why should I think of Alice now? Betsy thought. She leaned over to an ash tray and extinguished her cigarette. Beside her, Tom stirred restlessly in the bed.

Nothing’s wrong with our marriage, or at least nothing permanent, Betsy thought. We can’t be like a couple of children gaily playing house forever.

That’s the way it had been before the war–
like children playing house
, she thought, but even the sarcasm of the phrase couldn’t tarnish the memory. They had had only three months together before Tom went into the Army. How exciting those days had been! He had spent an absurd proportion of his savings on her engagement ring and a diamond-sprinkled wedding ring to match. At the time she had remonstrated with him, and it was curious to remember now that that jewelry, bought with a brave gesture of gallantry, had turned out to be the only shrewd investment they had ever made. The last time she had had the rings cleaned, the jeweler had offered her far more than Tom had paid for them, because diamonds had increased in value a great deal since the war.

That somehow seemed typical of the way everything had turned out, Betsy thought. The foolish gesture had turned out to be a shrewd investment, and most of their careful planning had led to nothing. I would like to go back to the beginning, and follow the years along, and find out what went wrong, Betsy thought. After she and Tom had been married, they had moved into a tiny apartment in Boston, and upon her request, Tom had immediately bought a Saint Bernard puppy and a white Angora kitten with blue eyes, because in the old house on Beacon Hill, her family had never allowed her to have pets. Now her clearest memory of those three months before the war was of the great clumsy puppy and the wide-eyed kitten and Tom and herself, all rolling and tumbling and playing together on the floor, with the sunshine streaming in the window on a big red and gold oriental rug someone had given them for a wedding present.

Like children playing house
, she thought. During the first two days they lived in that apartment, she had ordered milk from two milkmen, because the second one had been a very aggressive salesman, and the icebox had been jammed with milk bottles until Tom
straightened the matter out. The kitchenette had been fragrant with spices throughout those three months–she had experimented with almost every recipe in the cookbook. Meals had not seemed simply a chore to get through as quickly as possible then.