Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Read Free Page A

Tom saw that the front lawn needed cutting. Janey, followed by his son, Pete, ran to meet him as he opened the front door. “Barbara’s got the chicken pox, and we’re all going to get it!” she said delightedly. “Mother says so!”
    Lucy Hitchcock, who lived next door and who had been staying with the children while Betsy drove to the station, was sitting in the living room watching a puppet show on television. She got up to go, and while Tom was thanking her, Janey saw the parcel he was holding in his hand. “What’s that?” she demanded.
    “A present for Barbara because she’s sick.”
    “Did you bring anything for me?”
    “No. You’re not sick yet.”
    “That’s not fair! ” Janey said, and began to howl. Without making any inquiries, Pete began to howl too.
    “Barbara’s sick! ” Tom said.
    “You always bring her presents and you never bring me any,” Janey retorted.
    “That’s not true,” Tom said.
    “No television!” Betsy said. “If you children don’t stop this nonsense immediately, no television for a week.”
    “Not fair! ” Janey said.
    “This is your last chance!” Betsy said. “Be quiet.”
    “. . . fair,” Janey murmured.
    “All right, that does it,” Betsy said. “No television for a week!”
    Redoubled howls came from Janey and Pete, until Betsy relented on condition that they both be quiet for the rest of the evening. Mournfully the children followed Tom upstairs. He found Barbara in bed, with her small face already a mass of sores. “Did you bring me a present?” she asked eagerly.
    He gave her the parcel. “A lamb!” she said delightedly when she unwrapped it. “Another lamb!”
    “I didn’t want another lamb anyway,” Janey said. “Lambs are silly.”
    “They’re not silly!”
    “Quiet! Not another word!” Betsy said, coming into the room with a glass of water and medicine for Barbara.
    Tom went downstairs and mixed a Martini for Betsy and himself. When Betsy came down, they sat in the kitchen, sipping their drinks gratefully while the children played in the living room and watched television. The linoleum on the kitchen floor was beginning to wrinkle. Originally it had been what the builder described as a “bright, basket-weave pattern,” but now it was scuffed, and by the sink it was worn through to the wood underneath. “We ought to get some new linoleum,” Betsy said. “We could lay it ourselves.”
    “I heard about a new job today,” Tom said. “Public relations. United Broadcasting Corporation.”
    “How much does it pay?”
    “Probably a good deal more than I’m getting now.”
    There was an instant of silence before she said, “Are you going to try for it?”
    “I might.”
    Betsy finished her drink and poured herself another. “I’ve never thought of you as a public-relations man,” she said soberly. “Would you like it?”
    “I’d like the money.”
    Betsy sighed. “It would be wonderful to get out of this house,” she said.

3
    T HE NEXT MORNING , Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn’t matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. “The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful,” Betsy had written him. “The money doesn’t matter.”
    The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we’ve been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no