Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Read Online Free PDF Page B

voice as she read: “The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn: God’s in his heaven–all’s right with the world!”
    He looked quickly away from the bench which had become sostrangely surrounded by bushes, and continued along the driveway. It led to the top of the hill, on the highest point of which was the old mansion itself, a tall Victorian structure with a tower at one end that had been designed to appear even larger and more grandiose than it was. The wind that almost always blew there seemed full of voices.
    “It’s a dwarfed castle,” he remembered his mother saying bitterly the year before she died of pneumonia, when he was fifteen years old. “When your father first took me here before we were engaged, he joked about dwarfs in armor behind the parapets at the top of the tower. . . .”
    “Here, it’s for you!” he remembered another voice saying, the voice of his grandmother. She had been holding a beautifully polished, old-fashioned, deep-bellied mandolin out to him–he couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old at the time. “Your father used to play it,” she had said. “Maybe you’d like to learn.”
    Now Tom paused at the top of the hill. There was a breath-taking view of Long Island Sound, with the bright water mottled by the shadows of clouds. The grass on both sides of the driveway had grown long. Looking at it, Tom remembered the days when it had been kept as carefully as a putting green and felt the first pang of the rising annoyance he feared every time he went there, the rage at his grandmother’s refusal to sell the place, and her calm willingness to pour into it what little was left of the money she had inherited from her husband and father.
    “I love this place, and I’ll keep it as long as I can pay the taxes on it,” she had said when, shortly after the war, Tom had suggested that she move.
    He left his car by the front door. Edward, a tall old man who long ago had served as her butler and now acted as a man of all work, let him in. “Good morning, Mr. Rath,” he said deferentially. “Mrs. Rath is waiting for you in the sunroom.”
    Tom found his grandmother seated in an armchair, dressed in a long white gown. In her hand was a gnarled black walnut cane which looked almost like an extension of her withered fingers. She was ninety-three years old.
    “Tommy!” she said when she saw him, and leaned eagerly forward in her chair.
    “Don’t get up, Grandmother,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
    The old lady peered at him sharply. He was shocked at how much she had aged during the past two months, or perhaps it was just that he persisted in remembering her as a younger woman and was surprised now, each time he saw her. And she in turn was shocked to see Tom, whom she remembered as a young boy. She continued to stare at him, her old eyes bright and disarmingly kind.
    “You look tired, Tommy,” she said suddenly.
    “I feel fine.”
    “You’re getting a little stout,” she said bluntly.
    “I’m getting older, Grandmother.”
    “You ought to go riding more,” she said. “The Senator always said riding is the best exercise. He used to ride for an hour almost every morning.”
    There it was, her terrible projection of the past into the present, which was more a deliberate refusal to face change than a passive acquiescence to senility. And there too was her elaborate myth about the Rath family’s accomplishments. “The Senator” was the phrase she always used for her dead husband, Tom’s grandfather, who had served one term as a State Senator in Hartford during his early youth, and who had spent most of the rest of his life doing absolutely nothing.
    “I’ve got a few things I want to talk over with you,” Tom began, trying to change the subject.
    “You mustn’t get stout,” the old lady went on relentlessly. “Your father never got stout. Stephen was always slender.”
    “Yes, Grandmother,” he said. Sometimes he imagined that she