Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

The hotel was a large one, twenty stories high, without a room to rent for less than twenty-two dollars a night, and please make reservations well in advance. Tom looked up the manager and found him eager to co-operate in making things satisfactory for Ralph Hopkins. The right sort of lectern was procured, and the loud-speaker system proved suitable. The manager felt that a bridal suite, ornately furnished with pictures of French courtiers on the wall, was just the thing for Mr. Hopkins. Ceremoniously Tom lay down on the large double bed and pronounced the mattress too soft. Four housemen quickly brought another. Feeling like Goldilocks in the house of the Three Bears, Tom pronounced it too lumpy. Grumbling, the four housemen brought a third mattress, which Tom decreed just right.

“I want the stems really long ,” he said to the hotel florist. “There ought to be about four dozen roses on a table in the living room and two dozen in the bedroom.”

“You can rely on me,” the florist said.

By seven o’clock in the evening Tom had completed his arrangements. He went to the hotel bar and ordered a Martini. It was an ornate circular bar, in the center of which a lighted pyramid of bottles revolved slowly. Somewhere in a near-by room an orchestra was playing dance music. Suddenly a group of young people in evening clothes swept into the bar and sat down at tables near Tom. “I don’t really believe you, Harry,” a young girl not more than twenty said to her escort, “but I thank you just the same.”

The sight of the young couples and the sound of the dance music made Tom feel suddenly old. He looked at the couple nearest him. They’re not more than twenty, or at the most twenty-one, he thought. My God, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, they couldn’t have been more than ten years old! And when Betsy and I met, back in 1939, they were seven years old!

The band in the next room began to play a waltz. It had been in a hotel that Tom had met Betsy, a hotel in Boston with a big bar and a dance band and crowds of young people in evening clothes. It had been in the fall of 1939, just a few weeks before the Christmas holidays, in the best hotel in Boston, in the grand ballroom of which Betsy had had her coming-out party.

“When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls. ” That had been the song that year. He had never liked it much at the time and could never have expected that his mind would choose it as one of the things to remember, probably for the rest of his life.

Nineteen thirty-nine! My God, the world has changed since then, he thought — it’s enough to make a man feel a million years old! In the fall of 1939, Hitler had just invaded Poland. The experts had been saying that the Polish Lancers and General Mud would stop him, but by the time Betsy had had her coming-out party, Poland had fallen, and the experts had turned to saying that now France would stop Hitler, the French Army was the finest in the world. The experts had also been saying that the United States would not get into this war. It had been then Tom had started to acquire a permanent disrespect for all experts and to equate pessimism with wisdom. Almost ever since he could remember, he himself had been sure there would be a war, and that the United States would get into it. At Covington Academy, way back in 1935, the boys had even had an organization called “The Veterans of Future Wars” which had demanded soldiers’ bonuses before death instead of after. The pacifists had been printing pictures in magazines showing a wounded soldier, and the caption had said, “Hello Sucker!” But the boys had not been confused. They had known for a long while that regardless of what anyone said, war was coming. They had been offended by the picture of the wounded soldier with the caption calling him a sucker, and they had also been horrified at a picture book in the library with, the grim and then prophetic title, “The First World War,” but they had not talked about it much. They had played football and baseball, they had organized a mandolin club and gone to see Ginger Rogers in the movies, and they had waited without any confusion at all. Only the experts had been confused.

But the night Tom had gone to Betsy’s coming-out party he hadn’t been worried about the war. He had received the formally engraved invitation about three weeks before. “Mr. and Mrs. Mathew A. Donner cordially invite you to a dance in honor of their daughter, Miss Elizabeth A. Donner,” it had begun, and he had answered, “Mr. Thomas R. Rath cordially accepts. ” Dozens of such invitations had arrived every month during those years at college, because his name had been on the right lists — old Florence Rath had seen to that.

He had never met Betsy when he got the invitation and never had heard of the Donners. The afternoon before the party he had made up his mind not to go, because he had too much studying to do, but along about eight o’clock he had grown bored with his history book and, throwing it down in disgust, had put on his dinner coat and driven his second-hand car into Boston. “Might as well get some free champagne,” he had said to his roommate.

The hotel had been crowded when he came in — it was a big party, he had seen at a glance. He had pushed through the groups of young people in evening clothes who crowded around the entrance to the ballroom and made his way to the long table in an adjoining room, where the champagne was being served. It had been good, imported champagne. Sipping his drink, Tom had stood just inside the door to the ballroom surveying the dancers in a mildly predatory way. At the time, he had considered himself an expert on women; he had thought he could just glance at them and tell which ones were passionate, which were cold, which would expect a lot of money to be spent on them, and which would not. His eye had skipped over Nina Henderson, who already had become a professional beauty, pictured on a magazine cover as the debutante of the year, a girl who later, as things turned out, married the fat orchestra leader who played at most of the dances that year and bore him a son before divorcing him. Tom’s eye had also passed over the plain girls sitting on the side lines or dancing with their brothers. His glance had traveled across the floor until he saw Betsy.

How strangely comforting it was to look back now and realize that the enchantment he had felt that night at the first sight of her had been, after all, as unsentimentally real and factual as any ugly emotion or truth he could recall. And it was also comforting to reflect that what he had felt that night still defied analysis. Sure, Betsy’s figure had never been calculated to calm a young man’s pulse, but certainly there had been other girls in the room as admirable in measurement. The grace with which Betsy moved, the way her sparkling white dress had accentuated the warm colors of her skin and hair, the curve of her cheek, the flash of her smile — of course, all these things had had their effect, but there had been more, much more which could never have been caught by a camera, even if it used all the technicolor in the world. The moment he had seen her he wanted to marry her, a fact which sounded so banal when he told it to her months later that they both had laughed, feeling suddenly ridiculous. But it was a true fact, and that night he had felt so bewildered by it that he stood for a long while watching her dance with others before mustering the courage to make his way across the dance floor and cut in on her.

“Who are you?” he had asked.

“Betsy Donner.”

“The lady of the evening!” he had replied, hoping that his voice sounded light and sophisticated. “It’s a nice party.”

“It’s a beautiful party!” she had said. “I suppose I shouldn’t say that, but it is.”