Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

She died in her sleep, two hours after Tom had left the hospital to go back to Westport. He had visited her every evening on the way home from work, after having arranged for a taxi to take Mrs. Manter home. By that time Betsy was able to care for the children a few hours by herself.

When the hospital called him to say the old lady had died, Tom said, “Thank you for calling,” very quietly, and put the telephone receiver carefully back on its hook.

“What is it?” Betsy asked.

“Grandmother’s dead,” he said.

He went into the kitchen and got himself a drink. He was tired — for the last eight nights he hadn’t been getting to bed until after midnight, and even then he hadn’t been able to sleep. Everything seemed uncertain. He hadn’t heard a word from United Broadcasting. He had no idea whether his grandmother would leave even enough money to cover her debts. While she was in the hospital, he had asked her for the name of her lawyer, but she had seemed offended.

“Wait,” she had said. “I’ll tell you when the time comes.”

And she had told him, the afternoon before she died. The lawyer was Alfred J. Sims, a name Tom had never heard before in his life.

Now the thought that there was a large house with an old man in it who had worked for his grandmother half his life and who now presumably expected a pension from him worried Tom. The thought that Hopkins might decide not to hire him worried him, and the fact that Dick Haver seemed to be growing increasingly impatient over the whole situation worried him. Every day Dick asked him whether he had heard anything from United Broadcasting — he seemed to take a wry pleasure from the question. And beyond these worries, Tom faced accumulating small debts. Mrs. Manter’s wages, the down payment on a new washing machine, and the daily taxi bill had wiped out his cash on hand, and he was charging everything he could, from groceries to medicine. Soon there would be his grandmother’s hospital bill and funeral expenses. He wondered how long it would take to settle her estate.

“Isn’t it funny she never told you her lawyer’s name before?” Betsy asked.

“She never talked about business.”

“Don’t you think you should get a complete accounting from the lawyer? I mean an accounting for all the money she lost — it seems awfully funny that she lost so much. For all we know, the lawyer’s been cheating her for years.”

“I’ll get a complete accounting,” he said.

That night he slept hardly at all. In the morning he telephoned Sims, who apparently had only a residence in New York and no office. The lawyer’s voice was high pitched, with a pronounced Boston accent. “I’ve been expecting to hear from you,” he said. “Your grandmother’s death was a great shock to me. Her papers are all in order, and I don’t think you need expect any difficulty.”

Sims’s house was a brownstone structure on Fifty-third Street. After telling Dick Haver he wouldn’t be in all day because of his grandmother’s death, Tom took a taxi there. A uniformed maid opened the door and ushered him into a dimly lit study lined with books. Sims, a gaunt-faced man about sixty years old, was sitting in a wheel chair behind a desk littered with papers.

“I’m glad to see you, Tom,” he said. “Excuse me for not getting up. And excuse me for using your first name — I’ve known your family far too long to use anything else.”

“I’m glad to meet you,” Tom replied.

“Your grandmother was a great woman,” Sims said. “She’s the last of her kind.”

“I know,” Tom replied abstractedly. He was staring at a photograph of a young man, a rather faded photograph which he was quite sure was of his father. The photograph was in a leather frame on Sims’s desk.

“You recognize the picture?”

“My father?”

“Of course. Your father and I were good friends. We were classmates at college, and we were in France together.”

“I never saw that picture before,” Tom said. He picked the frame up and inspected the photograph more closely. It showed a man five or six years younger than himself. The man wore a tweed cap, and he was smiling boyishly. Tom put the photograph down. Somewhere in the back of the house a clock struck the quarter hour.

“Now about your grandmother’s estate,” Sims said, picking up a folder with a blue cover from his desk. “As I presume you know, you are the sole heir.”

“She told me,” Tom said.

“And I presume you also know that there isn’t much in the estate.”

“How much?”

“This may come as something of a shock to you, but when the estate is completely settled, I don’t think you’ll have much except for the house. There are some securities of course, but there’s also a mortgage on the house, and there’ll be an inheritance tax. And I suppose you’ll want to do something about Edward.”

“I’ll have to see,” Tom said. “Just what is the value of the securities?”

“I haven’t checked the current market value recently, but there will be about twenty thousand dollars. Not much more. If your grandmother had lived a few more years, I don’t know what we would have done.”

“And the mortgage? How much is that?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“I don’t understand it!” Tom blurted out. “Do you have any idea how much Grandmother inherited from her father and from Grandfather, and how she managed to lose it?”

“What has she told you?”

“Nothing!”

“But you knew she had lost a great deal.”

“She told me just before she died, and I guess I’ve always assumed it, from the way she had to economize.”

Sims sighed. “What do you know about your father?” he asked.

“What kind of man was he?”

“He was delightful,” Sims said. “He was possibly the most charming, talented man ever born. That’s why I wish you could have known him — you would be proud of him.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know — it’s pretty hard to explain what happens to people. When we were in college together, Steve could do anything. During the first few weeks we were overseas, he was the best officer I’ve ever seen. He was the last man I’d ever expect to have a nervous breakdown, but that’s what he had. In those days we called it shell shock. They sent him home, and after he had spent a few months in a hospital, he got a job with Irvington and Wells — that used to be just about the best brokerage house on the street. He tried awfully hard there — I guess I’m one of the few people who really knows how hard he tried, and how much he wanted to succeed — but he wasn’t well. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, and sometimes he got so nervous during conferences that he’d have to get up and walk out of the room. Old Wells loved him like a son — everyone loved your father — but finally he had to ask him to take some time off and try to get himself under control. Your father had just been married a few months, and it was a great blow to him. He and your mother lived with your grandmother, and the idleness didn’t do him any good. He asked your grandmother if he could handle her estate, and your grandmother thought it might give him confidence to let him try. He made some bad mistakes — that can happen to anyone. Your grandmother was patient, but he got panicky — he was determined to get back everything he’d lost. He started taking long shots on the stock market and losing more and more. I tried to reason with him, but getting back all the money he had lost seemed a matter of life and death with him. I talked it over with your grandmother, and she finally decided she had to take what was left of her estate out of his hands. The night she told him that, he started driving off somewhere and was killed.”