Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Stone posts topped by iron urns three feet high marked the entrance to the driveway of his grandmother’s house. Beyond them were the carriage house, which itself was bigger than Tom’s home in Westport, and the rock garden in which his mother and he had spent so many sunny mornings long ago. In the corner of the rock garden stood a heavy stone bench, now almost entirely surrounded by bushes which once had been kept neatly trimmed. At the sight of it, Tom was beset by the same old mixture of emotions from which he always suffered when he visited the place, as though each object there were possessed of a special ghost which leaped out at him as soon as he passed through the gates. His mother had spent countless afternoons sitting on that bench and watching him as he played. Once, when he was about seven years old, he had noticed two lines of verse carved in bold script across the back of the bench. With his forefinger he had traced out the letters grooved in the warm stone and had asked his mother what they meant. Now, almost thirty years later, he could still remember the bitterness in her voice as she read: “The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn: God’s in his heaven — all’s right with the world!”

He looked quickly away from the bench which had become so strangely surrounded by bushes, and continued along the driveway. It led to the top of the hill, on the highest point of which was the old mansion itself, a tall Victorian structure with a tower at one end that had been designed to appear even larger and more grandiose than it was. The wind that almost always blew there seemed full of voices.

“It’s a dwarfed castle,” he remembered his mother saying bitterly the year before she died of pneumonia, when he was fifteen years old. “When your father first took me here before we were engaged, he joked about dwarfs in armor behind the parapets at the top of the tower. ”

“Here, it’s for you!” he remembered another voice saying, the voice of his grandmother. She had been holding a beautifully polished, old-fashioned, deep-bellied mandolin out to him — he couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old at the time. “Your father used to play it,” she had said. “Maybe you’d like to learn.”

Now Tom paused at the top of the hill. There was a breath-taking view of Long Island Sound, with the bright water mottled by the shadows of clouds. The grass on both sides of the driveway had grown long. Looking at it, Tom remembered the days when it had been kept as carefully as a putting green and felt the first pang of the rising annoyance he feared every time he went there, the rage at his grandmother’s refusal to sell the place, and her calm willingness to pour into it what little was left of the money she had inherited from her husband and father.

“I love this place, and I’ll keep it as long as I can pay the taxes on it,” she had said when, shortly after the war, Tom had suggested that she move.

He left his car by the front door. Edward, a tall old man who long ago had served as her butler and now acted as a man of all work, let him in. “Good morning, Mr. Rath,” he said deferentially. “Mrs. Rath is waiting for you in the sunroom.”

Tom found his grandmother seated in an armchair, dressed in a long white gown. In her hand was a gnarled black walnut cane which looked almost like an extension of her withered fingers. She was ninety-three years old.

“Tommy!” she said when she saw him, and leaned eagerly forward in her chair.

“Don’t get up, Grandmother,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

The old lady peered at him sharply. He was shocked at how much she had aged during the past two months, or perhaps it was just that he persisted in remembering her as a younger woman and was surprised now, each time he saw her. And she in turn was shocked to see Tom, whom she remembered as a young boy. She continued to stare at him, her old eyes bright and disarmingly kind.

“You look tired, Tommy,” she said suddenly.

“I feel fine.”

“You’re getting a little stout,” she said bluntly.

“I’m getting older, Grandmother.”

“You ought to go riding more,” she said. “The Senator always said riding is the best exercise. He used to ride for an hour almost every morning.”

There it was, her terrible projection of the past into the present, which was more a deliberate refusal to face change than a passive acquiescence to senility. And there too was her elaborate myth about the Rath family’s accomplishments. “The Senator” was the phrase she always used for her dead husband, Tom’s grandfather, who had served one term as a State Senator in Hartford during his early youth, and who had spent most of the rest of his life doing absolutely nothing.

“I’ve got a few things I want to talk over with you,” Tom began, trying to change the subject.

“You mustn’t get stout,” the old lady went on relentlessly. “Your father never got stout. Stephen was always slender.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” he said. Sometimes he imagined that she deliberately dwelt upon painful subjects, for she enjoyed talking about his father with him, presenting a caricature of a hero, elaborated by all kinds of distorted facts, hidden among which Tom often caught glimpses of what he suspected were unpleasant truths. What were the facts about his father? Tom had had to piece them together from trifles. “I don’t know why, but Stephen never played the mandolin after the war,” the old lady had told him once long ago. “At college he was in the Mandolin Club, and even as a boy he played beautifully, but after the war he never did it any more.”

His father had been a second lieutenant during the First World War. He had been sent home from France several weeks before the Armistice for unexplained reasons and had for a while worked with a large investment firm in New York. As far as Tom could make out from the dim echoes of rumor which survived, Stephen Rath had either quit work or been fired about two years before he died, and during his remaining days had simply lived a life of leisure in the big house with his wife, mother, and son. Presumably he had not been happy; he had never played the mandolin any more. Tom suspected that there must have been quite a chain of events leading up to the night when Stephen had backed his Packard out of the carriage house and careened down the road to the waiting rocks at the turn. But of all this Tom could learn nothing from his grandmother’s conversation. According to the old lady, Stephen had been a great military hero, and over the years she had advanced him by her own automatic laws of seniority to the rank of major.

“I hear you’re getting ahead very well at the foundation,” the old lady was saying now.

“I think I may leave the foundation, Grandmother,” he said. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Leave? Why?”

How difficult it was to explain to an old lady who had never earned a penny in her life, and who had never even bothered to conserve what she had inherited, that he needed more money! He said, “I may have an opportunity offered me that’s too good to turn down.”

“I was telling Mrs. Gliden the other day how well you’re doing at the foundation,” the old lady said. “I told her it might not be long before you were chosen as director. I hear that man Haver may be leaving.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I don’t remember,” the old lady said. “There is a rumor. ”

That was the trouble — he never could be sure whether his grandmother was simply ensnaring him in her dreams of family glory, or whether the old connections with prominent people which she treasured so carefully actually resulted in useful information. But on the face of it, the thought that he might be chosen to head the Schanenhauser Foundation was ridiculous, regardless of whether Haver was leaving or not. There were at least twenty people who would be chosen first.