Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Read Online Free PDF

course.”
    “Nuts!” Betsy exclaimed that night when Tom told her about his conversation with Haver. “The old goat is just trying to hang onto you! He’ll come up with an offer of some piddling raise you should have gotten two years ago, and every time you want another one, you’ll have to threaten to quit!”
    She sipped her sparkling Burgundy reflectively a moment. “You know what you ought to do now?” she said. “You ought to go have a talk with Grandmother. After all, she told you about the job at the foundation in the first place, and she might have ways of finding out whether Haver really will have anything big for you. Anyway, she ought to know you’re thinking about leaving–she’d be hurt if she found out about it from anyone else.”
    “I guess so,” Tom said reluctantly. “I’ll take a run up to see her Saturday.”
    Early Saturday morning he drove to South Bay alone, because by that time all three of the children had chicken pox and Betsy had to stay with them. South Bay is a small town not far from Stamford. When Tom approached it, he got a curious feeling of home-coming which was still strong, despite all the years that had passed since he had lived there. The wide, elm-shaded main street had changed since the war. Brightly painted one-story houses filled the fields where Tom had hunted rabbits as a boy, and even the old nine-hole golf course had miraculously become something called “Shoreline Estates,” in spite of the fact that it was a good two miles inland. The road leading from the main street to his grandmother’s house had changed little, however. The great brick and stone mansions werenot quite so well kept as they had been when Tom had ridden his bicycle past them, but they still seemed comfortable, solid, and much more permanent then the recently built structures on the golf course, which looked as though they were quite capable of disappearing as quickly as they had come. At the end of a row of big houses, the road narrowed and started up a steep hill. The old Ford groaned as Tom shifted it into second gear. There were two sharp turns in the road made necessary by massive outcroppings of rock which gave the hill the appearance of a mountain. It was on the second of these turns that Tom’s father, Stephen Rath, had been killed thirty years ago, before Tom was old enough to remember him. Stephen Rath had been driving down the road very late one night at what must have been a vicious speed and had slammed into the rock so hard that his automobile had been completely demolished. Tom had never found why his father had been driving down that narrow road so fast at such an odd hour, and long ago he had learned to stop wondering about it. Now as he passed the rock, he glanced away from it, as he had ever since, at the age of five, he learned that it was the place where his father had been killed.
    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