Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

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.”