Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Come ahead,” Bernstein said. “I’ll be expecting you.” He hung up and tried to concentrate on the tax form he was completing for a client. Tom’s call troubled him. He had had many people telephone to ask immediate help on “a very personal problem,” and the approaching trip Tom mentioned was also a bad sign. To Bernstein it all sounded like the usual preliminaries to a divorce case. Divorce cases always saddened Bernstein, and the thought of Betsy and Tom Rath dissolving their marriage especially bothered him. He liked them and he thought that with three young children they had no business splitting up. I wonder what I might do to talk them out of it, he thought, and felt a few warning twinges of pain in his stomach.

Ten minutes later when Tom walked into his office, Bernstein was surprised to see that for a man presumably on the verge of divorce, he appeared indecently cheerful. “Good morning!” Tom boomed heartily. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Bernstein said uneasily. “What can I do for you?”

“Mind if we go into your inner office?” Tom asked, glancing at Bernstein’s secretary.

“No,” Bernstein said. “Go right ahead.” His stomach began to ache quite badly now. People who wanted to go to the inner office even before naming the nature of their business quite often wanted to discuss divorce. He followed Tom into the small book-lined room, and they both sat down.

“I came to you with this because it would be a little embarrassing to discuss with strangers, and I’m sure you’ll understand,” Tom began.

“I hope so,” Bernstein said dubiously.

“The situation is simply this. During the war I had an illegitimate child in Italy. He’s been on my mind a lot, but I haven’t been absolutely sure of his existence until recently. Now I want to send his mother a hundred dollars a month for his support — they’re in real need. When this housing project of ours goes through, I’m going to establish a trust fund, but right now I want to take it out of income. I think it would be less awkward for everyone concerned if we set up some mechanism for having the checks sent regularly by a bank, or perhaps you could do it.”

“Are you trying to make this an anonymous gift?” Bernstein asked somewhat guardedly.

“For the sake of propriety I don’t want it talked about all over town, and I don’t particularly trust the discretion of the local bank, but the person who will get the money will know who it’s from. There’s no need to keep anything a secret from her.”

Bernstein cleared his throat. “You intend this to be a permanent arrangement?” he asked.

“Certainly. At least until the boy has finished his education.”

“It might be possible for you to receive considerable tax benefits by having the child legally declared a dependent,” Bernstein said. “You ought to look into that if you plan anything permanent.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Tom replied. “Fix it up for me if you can, will you? Might as well get all the tax benefits I can.”

“It might be necessary for you to admit paternity,” Bernstein said. “That might leave you open to further claims by the child’s mother, and it might pose certain problems for you in filling out your tax returns.”

“I’m not worried about further claims. What would the difficulty be with the tax returns?”

“It might be hard to keep the matter a complete secret here,” Bernstein said somewhat embarrassedly. “Especially if you file joint tax returns which your wife has to sign.”

“Betsy already knows all about it,” Tom said. “She and I are doing this together.”

“You are?” Bernstein said, unable to preserve his professional air of detachment any longer.

“I know this must sound a little odd to you,” Tom said, “but I met a girl in Italy during the war, and I’ve told Betsy all about it. The child the girl had needs help, and Betsy and I are going to send it. I suppose that may be a little unconventional, but to us it seems like simple justice.”

For a moment Bernstein didn’t say anything. Misinterpreting his silence as censure, Tom said a little stiffly, “This is a matter of conscience with me, and I don’t intend to try to justify it to anyone. Betsy and I are driving up to Vermont this afternoon, and I would appreciate it if you could arrange to have the checks sent. In this envelope I’ve brought the money for three months and the name and address I want it sent to. What will you charge me for handling the matter?”

“Nothing,” Bernstein said.

“What?”

“No charge.”

“Why not?”

Bernstein smiled. “I like what you call ‘simple justice,’ ” he said. “The kind I generally deal with is so complex.”

“Thanks,” Tom said. Suddenly the air was charged with emotion. Bernstein got up and Tom grabbed his hand. “Thanks!” he said again. “I’ve got to be running. Betsy’s been shopping, but she’s probably waiting outside for me now. We’re heading up to Vermont!”

He dashed out the door. Bernstein’s stomach wasn’t aching any more. He walked slowly to the window of his office and stood looking down at the street. Betsy, with her arms full of bundles, was just coming down the sidewalk. Bernstein watched as Tom hurried toward her. He saw them bow gravely toward each other as she transferred the bundles to Tom’s arms. Then Tom straightened up and apparently said something to her, for suddenly she smiled radiantly. Bernstein smiled too.

Twenty-eight years, almost a full generation as such things are counted, have gone by since I finished writing The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit. I remember the excitement of the last rewrite, which had to be done in the middle of the night because my job as a public relations man at the University of Buffalo kept me so busy during the days. I was trying to beat a deadline set by my wonderfully enthusiastic publisher, Richard L. Simon, and I was just starting to make a final copy of the last chapter when the “e” flew off the typestick of my only typewriter and bounced onto my desk like a dying insect. It was easy to fit it back onto the machine, but it flew off again as soon as I touched the key. In despair I tried a page with spaces left for the “e”, which I filled in by hand, but that’s the most used letter in the alphabet, and the result looked terrible.

Staring out the window of the bedroom I used as a study, I saw that the lights in the house of my neighbor, Allen Tauber, were still on, and the sounds of a late party could be heard. Allen had a lot of tools in a cellar workshop, I knew, and he was expert at fixing things. Hurrying to his door, I interrupted a song fest with my unusual problem. Putting down his glass, Allen got a soldering iron from his workbench and his pretty wife, Jeannie, held a flashlight on my typewriter while he firmly attached the “e” to it.

Both Allen and his pretty wife are dead now, as are so many old friends, but by some miracle, the man in the gray flannel suit himself seems to go on and on, never aging any more than my photograph on the original dust jacket does, or the image of Gregory Peck in the movie version of the book, which still appears on late, late shows. Tom Rath, the name of my hero, seems to have discovered the fountain of youth.

The book itself has had a rather odd history. While I was writing it, I like many beginning novelists fancied that I was rivaling War and Peace . The very first reviews disabused me of this notion by calling the book rankly sentimental, but then Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review and Orville Prescott of the New York Times came to my rescue with columns which did not quite compare me to Leo Tolstoy but which said I had a good story to tell about the problems which my generation faced when we came home from World War II. To my surprise, my novel, which I had regarded as largely autobiographical, was taken by some serious thinkers as a protest against conformity and the rigors of suburban life. The novel rose up on bestseller lists and was translated into some twenty-six foreign languages. Europeans apparently considered it an accurate reflection of American life; it was banned in Russia.