Free Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson Page B

again for the lunch.”
    He almost fled from the table. When he thought of Hopkins, it seemed certain that he would get the job, for if Hopkins hadn’t liked him, why would he have been so friendly? But Ogden had been careful to pave the way for a letter ending the whole thing. Anyway, I met Hopkins, he thought. He seems like a nice guy pretty much like anybody else. Whatever it is that makes him worth two hundred thousand dollars a year is certainly well hidden.

8
    W HEN T OM GOT BACK to his office he found a slip of paper on his desk saying that his wife had called and that it was important for him to call her back. He put the call through immediately.
    “It’s your grandmother,” she said. “She fell and broke her thigh. At her age, Tommy, bones don’t knit. She wants to see you, and you better go out there right away. I would have gone myself, but I still feel pretty rocky, and the doctor’s with her–it’s not a real emergency.”
    “I’ll go right out,” Tom said.
    The next train to South Bay was a local one, which stopped almost every five minutes. Tom sat on a soiled green seat in the smoker staring out the window. He didn’t want to think. At first there were only the dark caverns of Grand Central Station to see, with the dim figures of tired-appearing men in overalls occasionally illuminated by naked electric-light bulbs. Then the train emerged into the bright sunlight and was surrounded by the littered streets and squalid brick tenements of Harlem. Tom had passed them twice a day for years, and usually he didn’t look at them, but now he didn’t want to think about his grandmother and he didn’t want to think about Hopkins, and the tenements absorbed his attention. There was one grimy brick building with a huge billboard showing a beautiful girl thirty feet long lying under a palm tree. “Fly to Miami,” the sign said. Directly under the girl’s head, about six feet below the edge of the billboard, was an open window, outside of which an orange crate had been tied. In the orange crate was a flowerpot with a withered geranium, and as the train passed it, an aged colored woman with sunken cheeks leaned out of the window and poured some water from a milk bottle into the flowerpot.
    “Ticket?” the conductor asked. He was a stout, red-faced man. Tom gave him his commuter’s ticket.
    “We don’t go as far as Westport,” the conductor said.
    “I’m getting off at South Bay.”
    “Westport tickets are no good on this train,” the conductor said. “You’ll have to buy a ticket to South Bay.”
    “But South Bay is on the way to Westport,” Tom objected.
    “I don’t make the rules,” the conductor said.
    Tom paid for a ticket to South Bay. The whole damn world is crazy, he thought. Grandmother is hurt and probably dying, and she brought me up, and I should be thinking only the kindest thoughts about her, and I can’t.
    She’s dying, he thought. She’s lived ninety-three years, and it’s all been a free ride. She’s never cooked a meal, or made a bed, or washed a diaper, or done a damn thing for herself or anybody else. She’s spent at least three million dollars, and her only comment has been that money is boring. She’s had a free ride for ninety-three years, and I’m damned if I’ll cry about the end of it.
    Yet to his astonishment he suddenly felt like crying. She doesn’t want to die, he thought. I’ll bet the poor old lady’s scared.
    Suddenly he remembered a night soon after his mother had died when a particularly violent thunder squall had struck the old house. Although he had been fifteen years old then, he had been afraid to stay in his room alone. He had gone to his grandmother’s room, and she had played double solitaire with him half the night. If she wants me to, I’ll stay with her, he thought. I guess Betsy can get along without me for a few days.
    As soon as the taxi let him out at the front door of the big house, old Edward opened the front door for him.