Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson Page B

girl, he promised me a big coming-out party, and when the time came, he couldn’t afford it. So he borrowed the money. That’s the kind of a man he was. And he paid every cent back.”
    “It was nice of him,” Tom said, “but don’t you think that was a crazy promise to make to a little girl? Hell, when you were a little girl, you didn’t care! He was making a promise to himself.”
    “It was a lovely party,” Betsy said. “I’ll never forget it. And if I hadn’t had it, I might never have met you.”
    “Most expensive damn introduction in the world!” Tom said. “We’ve got to get that kind of stuff out of our minds.”
    “I haven’t even mentioned a coming-out party for Barbara and Janey,” Betsy said. “All I want is a decent house, without a damn-fool crack in the wall like a question mark, and without everything coming apart.”
    “We can have the wall replastered,” Tom said. “I’m going to bed.”
    He took a half tumblerful of Martinis up with him and lay for a long while sipping it in the dark. When it was finished, he went to sleep. He had no idea how much later it was when Betsy awoke him by shaking his shoulders hard. “Go away,” he said. “I’m asleep.”
    “Wake up!” she said. “I’ve got a wonderful idea!”
    She almost rolled him out of bed. The light was bright in his eyes. “Tell me in the morning!” he said.
    “No!” she said. “Now!”
    He struggled to a sitting position and rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
    “It’s only about one o’clock. Ever since you’ve been asleep, I’ve been sitting downstairs thinking, and suddenly I got it!”
    “Got what?”
    “This idea!”
    “Go to sleep.”
    “No! You’ve got to listen to me!”
    “I will if you get me a drink,” he said.
    She rushed downstairs and came back with a glass half full of gin and ice. “There’s no more vermouth,” she said, “but this ought to fix you.”
    He sipped it and made a face.
    “Now!” she said. “Will you listen?”
    “Is there a choice?”
    “What I want to do,” she said, “is to sell this house and move into Grandmother’s house. Not for good, you understand–just until we can figure out what to do with it.”
    “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Grandmother wanted us to add another wing. Do you plan to do that too?”
    “Be quiet. Now you stop and figure, Tommy. We’ve got twenty-three acres in South Bay, the only twenty-three acres with a viewanything like that. Even around here, good one-acre lots sell for as much as five thousand dollars apiece. If we divided that land up, we might get as high as a hundred thousand dollars!”
    “Sure,” he said. “But there are a few other things to consider. Things like zoning restrictions. Things like building roads, so people could get to their lots. Things like wells and sewers.”
    “Exactly,” she said. “And we couldn’t figure all that out while we were living in Westport and you were working in New York. But if I were living in Grandmother’s house, I could see the zoning board, and show contractors the place, and all the rest of it.”
    “And what if it didn’t work?”
    “We’d still be there to sell Grandmother’s place. And we’d have the money from selling this house. And we could let Edward stay with us.”
    “Let’s talk about it in the morning,” Tom said.
    “We can’t give Edward a pension–we never could afford it. And I bet he’d rather stay right in the old house.”
    “Talk about it in the morning,” Tom repeated.
    “And there are even more possibilities! Let’s say we took all our available money, from selling this place and from Grandmother’s estate and everything. Let’s say we took it all and converted Grandmother’s carriage house into a dwelling. It could be a charming place. Let’s say we did that and sold it with one acre of land for forty thousand dollars. Places like that go for at least that, and I bet we could fix the old carriage house up for twenty