Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Sure,” Tom said hesitantly. “Sure, I’d love to!” Seized with a desire to get the meeting over, he added, “How about now? I could catch a later train.”

“No,” Caesar replied. “I’m on duty for another two hours. Can I give you a call sometime when I’m not on duty?”

“Sure!” Tom said. “Any time! Give me a call!”

Lights were flashing on the elevator’s control panel, and the starter was walking toward them. Tom hurried out of the elevator, waved cheerily, and walked rapidly toward Grand Central Station. He wants to see me, he thought. What about? To talk over old times, perhaps — that’s a perfectly normal thing to do. We meet and have a drink and we make jokes about the war. That’s all there is to it. What else could he do?

Blackmail. The word flashed into his mind suddenly. That’s absurd, he thought. In the first place, Caesar would never do a thing like that. He was always a decent guy. And in the second place, there’s a statute of limitations. And in the third place, he couldn’t prove anything, especially after all this time, When you come right down to it, I haven’t done anything illegal anyway, or at least nothing anyone could do anything about. Maria wouldn’t turn on me now.

Still, Caesar could make things rather awkward for me, Tom thought. Publicity — if he made any charges, the publicity alone could ruin me. And he probably thinks I’m rich, seeing me with Hopkins and all. I wonder what he’s got on his mind? Maybe he knows something about Maria, something he wants to tell me.

No, Tom thought as he got to Grand Central Station, it’s not that. Two old buddies meet and have a drink together, that’s all — that’s the convention, and Caesar’s just trying to play it according to the script. It’s ridiculous to worry. I’ve got to learn simply to relax and take things as they come. I’m tough and I’m not going to get weak-kneed now.

The next day he expected Caesar to call and was tense whenever his telephone rang, as well as whenever he got on an elevator, but he neither saw nor heard from Caesar. The day after that nothing happened, and the day after that. Probably he never will call me, Tom thought — probably this is the way it’s going to end. It’s quite possible, in fact, it’s probable that the poor guy was just trying to be polite. As more days went by with no word from Caesar, Tom’s conviction that this was so deepened. He’s probably embarrassed to call me, he thought. After all, the gulf between an elevator operator and an assistant to the president of a large corporation is greater than that between a corporal and a captain in the Army. He was trying to be polite, Tom told himself over and over, and I’ll probably never hear from him again. If we meet in the elevator, we’ll just nod at each other, and that will be that.

During the next week, Tom did four more drafts of the speech, each of which Ogden vilified and Hopkins praised highly before asking for a rewrite. Tom got to the point where he mumbled phrases from the speech in his sleep. “It’s a great pleasure. ” he groaned at three o’clock one morning.

“What?” Betsy asked, startled.

“A real pleasure to be here with this distinguished company this evening. ”

“Wake up!” Betsy said. “Wake up! You’re talking in your sleep!”

The fear that he was proving an utter failure in his new job grew. He would have quit in discouragement if it hadn’t been for Hopkins’ praise, which grew in warmth as the number of discarded efforts multiplied, and which somehow never failed to sound utterly sincere. Maybe he just goes on like that till he definitely makes up his mind to fire you and then lets you have it between the eyes, Tom thought. But why should a guy like that lie? Maybe he does think I’m doing a good job. Maybe he expects a speech to be written a thousand times.

Tom didn’t know. Every time Hopkins built him up, Ogden tore him down. “It’s getting worse,” Ogden said when he read the third draft. “Give it a fresh approach! Put some oomph into it!”

There was only one comforting thought. The speech would have to be completed before many weeks went by, if Hopkins were going to give it at all — it wouldn’t really be possible to go on rewriting it forever.

A week later, when Tom was in the middle of his sixth draft of the speech, and apparently no closer to an acceptable final draft than ever, his mind was distracted by a simple event: Betsy sold the house in Westport and agreed to get out of it within two days. Tom had been falsely reassured by the fact that not many people had inspected the house, and he had figured it probably would take some time for Betsy to put her plans into action. “But why did you agree to get out in two days ?” he asked in dismay when she told him she had accepted an offer of sixteen thousand dollars.

“He wanted to move his family in — he’s just come from Chicago,” Betsy said. “It was such a good price he offered, and I was afraid he’d get away.”

“How can we do it?” Tom asked. “We’ve got to pack china, and clothes, and everything! And I’m going to be working day and night on this speech!”

“Don’t worry about the packing,” Betsy said. “I’ll have everything ready. The movers will come Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon we’ll all pile in the car and drive to South Bay.”

The next evening when Tom got home from New York, every room in the house was cluttered with cardboard boxes and barrels.

“Daddy!” Janey said delightedly. “Momma said not to mind about keeping things neat!”

Tom looked around the disordered house, and suddenly it was unutterably dear to him. The crack like a question mark in the living-room wall, the shabby furniture, the worn linoleum on the kitchen floor — all seemed part of something precious that was slipping fast, something already gone which never could be retrieved. He went to the kitchen cupboard where the liquor was usually kept, but it was gone, and the empty cupboard was neatly lined with clean white paper.

“The liquor’s in the big red wastepaper basket,” Betsy said cheerfully.

Quietly Tom poured himself a drink.

“That Mr. Howard called again today,” Betsy said. “I told him we were moving into Grandmother’s house. He seemed quite disappointed — and no wonder. I found something out about him.”

“What?” Tom asked somberly.

“He’s a professional real-estate man — that’s a lot of malarky he gave us about wanting to buy the place for his own use. He’s the real-estate man for that restaurant company. Mrs. Reid, the agent who sold this place for us, recognized his name and told me.”

“He wouldn’t want to put a restaurant way up on that hill,” Tom said. “They build that kind of restaurant near highways.”

“Mrs. Reid says he probably didn’t want it for a restaurant — he speculates on real estate for himself on the side. He probably wanted to do just what we’re going to do with it. I think that’s a good sign.”

A good sign, Tom thought — that’s what I need. The old premonition of disaster was sneaking up on him. I’ve had it a million times before, he thought — it doesn’t mean a thing. I’m doing all right on my job. Hopkins likes me. We’re really being smart to sell this place and move to Grandmother’s house. We’re going to make a damn good thing of it!

He couldn’t convince himself. Even if I do get fired, it won’t matter, he thought. We’ve got a little cash now. I’ll get into some kind of business for myself. I’ll work full time on selling Grandmother’s house.

Suddenly he had a picture of himself hanging around his grandmother’s house, precisely as his father had, with nothing to do. He glanced down and found he was gripping his right thigh so hard that his knuckles were white. He hadn’t done that for some time. Why the hell should I get scared in peacetime? he thought. Deliberately he stood up. It doesn’t really matter, he thought. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.