Read Online Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

children, get Mrs. Manter, and go into New York to have lunch with the president of the United Broadcasting Corporation. He was dismayed to find that no freshly pressed suit was in his closet, and that the one shirt in his drawer which didn’t have a frayed collar lacked two buttons.
    “Betsy!” he said. “I can’t go in to see Hopkins looking like a bum!”
    “I forgot!” Betsy replied. “I was supposed to pick up your things at the cleaners the day before yesterday. So much has been going on!”
    “What will I do?”
    “Go down and get breakfast,” Betsy said. “I’ll be pressing your gray flannel suit and sewing on buttons.”
    “Are you strong enough?”
    Betsy struggled out of bed. “You don’t have to be very strong to lift a button,” she said.
    Dressed only in his shoes, socks, and underpants, Tom went to the kitchen and fried eggs. The children, feeling much better in spite of the fact that their faces had not yet healed, insisted on having breakfast in the kitchen, instead of in bed. Tom remembered the formal breakfasts his grandmother’s butler had served during his own childhood, with silver covers on dishes of eggs and sausage, and, seeing himself in his underwear serving his children, he thought, Things sure are different for them–one thing they won’t have to get over is gracious living.
    By the time he was dressed, Tom found himself surprisingly nervous at the prospect of meeting Hopkins. He felt almost the way he had before combat jumps during the war. “Wish me luck,” he said to Betsy, after he had delivered Mrs. Manter and was leaving to catch his train.
    “You’ll get the job,” Betsy said confidently.
    That was the way she always was. During the war, he was sure, she had never worried about him–she was perfectly confident that he’d come back unhurt. Her confident letters, which sometimes had arrived when he was certain he would never survive the next jump, had made him acutely lonely, and he felt the same way now as he bent over and kissed her.
    There’s no damn reason in the world to be nervous, he thought, later in the morning, as he walked toward the United Broadcasting building. After all I’ve been through, why should I be nervous now? He wondered what Hopkins was like. What did a man have to be like to make so damn much money? It’s never just luck that lets them make it, he thought, and it isn’t just who they know–I won’t let myself fall into the trap of thinking that. Hopkins has got something, something special, or he wouldn’t be making two hundred thousand a year. What is it?
    All I have to do is be myself, he thought. Just treat him like anybody else. I wonder what it’s like to have all that money? I wonder what it’s like never to have to worry about frayed shirt collars, andcracks in the living-room wall, and holes in the kitchen linoleum, and how to pay a woman to take care of your children when your wife is sick? I wonder what it’s like to know there’s plenty of money to send your kids to college? What’s it like to be a success?
    Buck fever, he thought–I’ve got buck fever. I’ve got my sights on the guy, and my hands are beginning to shake. The son of a bitch. Why shouldn’t he like me? He may be tough all right, but I wish he’d been along with me a few years ago; I would like to have seen how tough he was when the sergeant opened the door of the airplane two thousand feet up and said, “Guess we’re getting close, sir. Are you ready?”
    I’ll bet old Hopkins has fought battles, Tom thought, but his battles paid off. Suddenly the ridiculous old resentment rose in him, the crazy anger he had felt so many times when he’d been scared and seen some poor inoffensive colonel who never had to jump sitting behind a desk, drinking coffee maybe, and wisecracking with a sergeant about when they were going to get their next leave. When he’d seen something like that, especially when he’d seen it a few hours before he knew he had to take