Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (14 page)

After dark, Tom and Hank Mahoney had crawled out of the wrecked tank and had begun the long, circuitous journey back to their own lines. Skirting the tank depot, they had returned to the woods. In the darkness they had tried to head west, but they had soon become confused and after about two hours had realized that they were retracing their steps.

“In a few minutes the moon will be up, and we can see better,” Hank had said. “Let’s sit down for a breather.”

They had continued to walk until they found a tree trunk to sit upon. Through naked branches they had seen the moon climbing above the crest of a distant hill. Gradually the darkness had dissolved. They had just started to walk again when Tom noticed the two bodies they had left there that morning and realized that they had come full circle. The bodies had been lying just as they had left them, except that their faces had acquired the sardonic grin of death.

“I guess they have the last laugh,” Hank had said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of here. The dead always have the last laugh.”

“Come on,” Tom had replied. “We’ve got to try.”

Together they had resumed their journey, making better progress in the moonlight. At about midnight they had come to the field where they had landed. It was still strewn with equipment, and the dead. Stealing from body to body, they had collected six boxes of K-rations and five full canteens of water. After eating and drinking their fill, they had pressed on. Just before dawn exhaustion and the continuous cold had combined to make them lightheaded, and they had staggered along, holding each other up like drunks returning from a party. There had been no more woods–only fields affording little protection. “Before it gets any lighter, we’ve got to find a place to hide out,” Tom had said. At sunrise they had found a crater gouged in the earth by a crashing plane. Eagerly they had slid into the
tangle of wreckage within it, only to be greeted by a fearful stench. “I can’t stand this,” Mahoney had said. “Let’s keep going.”

“No,” Tom had said, nodding toward the endless fields which lay in front of them. “We’d be picked up sure. You’ll get used to the smell.”

Mahoney had gagged.

“Anyway, it’s going to be a nice day,” Tom had said. “We’re better off than if it were raining, and we’ve got plenty to eat and drink. Look at those clouds over there–they look warm. It’s a nice morning.”

He had paused, suddenly and incongruously remembering the lines of verse carved on the bench in his grandmother’s garden so far away: “The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn: God’s in his heaven–all’s right with the world.” He had started to laugh. Collapsing into the mud at the bottom of the hole, he had given himself over to almost maniacal laughter.

“You nuts?” Mahoney had said.

“No. I just thought of something–something I can’t explain,” Tom had replied. Mahoney had been too tired to question him further. They had curled up in the mud at the bottom of the crater full of wreckage and immediately had slept, not awakening until dusk. The sun had warmed them, and they had both felt refreshed and rested. “I think we’re going to make it,” Tom had said. “For the first time, I really think we’re going to make it.”

They had made it all right, six days later, and upon rejoining their company had been looked upon as heroes by the young recruits who replaced the men who didn’t come back. There had been one young corporal who had been in the army only a few months, a thin boy of Italian ancestry, who had wanted to buy the German jacket, and Tom had given it to him. Gardella, the corporal’s name had been–“Caesar” Gardella, the boys had called him. He had had a deep voice. Now, Tom suddenly froze at his desk in the offices of the Schanen-hauser Foundation. Caesar Gardella! That was the elevator man at the United Broadcasting building! It was Caesar Gardella, grown fat and with a mustache! And the leather jacket wouldn’t be all he’d remember; he’d remember everything that had happened after that–the jump on the island of Karkow and, before that, Rome and Maria. Tom found he was gripping his thigh and sweating.

Maria.

It is not my fault, he thought; it was not my fault; it was nobody’s fault at all. It happened a long while ago.

Maria.

I have forgotten her, he thought. I haven’t thought about her for a long time; I really haven’t thought about her; she never entered my head for a long time.

It really wasn’t my fault, he thought. It was no one’s fault. I am not to blame.

How curious it was to find that apparently nothing was ever really forgotten, that the past was never really gone, that it was always lurking, ready to destroy the present, or at least to make the present seem absurd, or if not that, to make Tom himself seem absurd, the perpetuator of an endless and rather hideous masquerade.

I am a good man, he thought, and I have never done anything of which I am truly ashamed. Curiously, he seemed to be mimicking himself. “I am a good man,” he seemed to be saying in a high, effeminate, prissy voice, “and I have never done anything of which I am truly ashamed.” A gust of ghostly and derisive laughter seemed to ring out in reply.

It’s the way things happen, he thought, and if I were to go through it all again, they would happen the same way.

It’s funny, but I can think about it now, he thought–I can see what happened, after all these years, I can finally see what happened, and it’s absurd to be ashamed.

Maria. The time was December 1944. The place, Rome. And everything was different. Now, as he sat behind his desk at the Schanenhauser Foundation in the year 1953, Tom felt again the blind helpless fury that had started it all, back in December 1944, when, after fighting one war and getting it almost won, he and Mahoney and Caesar Gardella and all the rest of them had got orders to go to the Pacific, without even a day of leave in the States between wars. The whole company had got those orders, after having made two combat jumps in France and two in Italy. Someone had got the idea that the way to save lives in the invasion of the islands of the Pacific was to use more paratroopers. Take the islands from the air instead of going in on the beaches, somebody had said–send us more jump boys; we want to get this thing over in a hurry and all go home.

“Another day, another war,” Mahoney had said when he heard it.

Tom had said nothing. I got through one war, he had thought. I
won’t get through another. The odds build up against you. They throw you in once, and you fight your way out. You do it twice, you can do it three times. But sooner or later the odds catch up with you. Its like throwing dice–sooner or later you get snake eyes. If they’re going to send me out to the Pacific, I won’t come back.

He had had a clear picture then, as soon as he heard where he was going, of a Japanese soldier, a caricature of one, with a small evil face, grinning, and holding a bayonet poised. That’s my boy, he had thought. That’s the one who’s waiting for me. I’ve had the Germans and I’ve had the Italians, and now the Japs are going to have me.

“Anyway,” Hank had said, “they say they’re going to give us a week here before we go, and it won’t even be counted as leave.”

“A week?” Tom had said.

“Sure! How much money you got?”

“I’m broke,” Tom had said. His allotment to Betsy had never left him much. Since the beginning of the war, he had allotted her two thirds of his salary, and she had put it all into a savings bank, so that they could buy a house after the war. He had never minded being broke before.

“Don’t worry,” Hank had said. “I’m loaded. I got six hundred bucks I won in a crap game, and I’ll give you half. This will be a week to remember!”

Betsy, Tom had thought, but somehow she had dissolved into nothing more than an ironic and rather painful memory, something to be kept out of his mind. I’ve got a week, he had thought, a week in Rome, a week on the town. And to Mahoney he had said, “Okay, Hank, let’s go.”

It had been a week to remember, all right. They had started in a small bar in the basement of a cheap hotel. In the corner there had been a piano painted white, with a thin, bald, blind man playing old American jazz very badly. It had been there he had met Maria. She had come into the bar hesitantly with painfully obvious intention, and every man in the room had glanced up and looked at her, a pretty girl, eighteen years old, in a worn black dress and a coat that had once belonged to a soldier. She had walked over to the bar meekly and ordered a glass of vermouth. She had sat on a stool in front of the bar and had taken off her coat, which had been clumsily retailored to fit her, and she had laid it across her lap while she sipped her vermouth slowly to make it last a long time. Tom had looked at
her coldly. Young, with a good figure, and a face which, if it were relaxed, could be beautiful–it might as well be this one as any other. When you’ve only got a week, you can’t look around forever. He had walked over and sat down beside her. “Can I buy you a drink?” he had asked.

It had been real romantic. She had glanced up at him with a forced smile on her lips. “Thank you,” she had said in a strong Italian accent. Her voice had been soft and timid.

“Well, I see you’re fixed up,” Hank had said, coming over and leaning on the bar beside Tom. “I’m going to shove on–there’s nothing else around here. Let’s meet here tomorrow morning.”

“All right,” Tom had said.

He had sat beside Maria sipping his sweet vermouth, the picture of the grinning little man with the bayonet still in his mind. “You’ll be all right,” Betsy had written him in her last letter. “I’m absolutely sure you’ll come home to me all right.”

Pretty Betsy, he had thought, as he sat sipping the sweet vermouth. Pretty Betsy, with the pretty shoulders and the soft skin tanned by the summer sun. I will not think of Betsy.

I have a week, he had thought, seven days and seven nights, the amount of time the world was created in. He had glanced then at Maria, who also had been sitting sipping her vermouth and looking down thoughtfully, and he had seen that she was prettier than he had thought, that her face, when in repose, was still the face of a young girl, and that her body was as beautiful as the body of any woman, and much more beautiful than most.

“Do you speak English?”

“A little,” she had replied in her strong accent. “My father spoke English. Sometimes he used to be a guide for tourists.”

“My name’s Bill Brown,” Tom had said, “William T. Brown from Kansas City, Iowa. What’s your name?”

She had shrugged. “Maria,” she had said.

“How about a meal, Maria? Let’s get out of here and get a real dinner! You like champagne?”

“Yes.”

They had gone to a big restaurant with white table linen and waiters in dinner coats, as though there had never been a war at all. For an enormous price they had eaten roast chicken and fried potatoes and pastries, and they had had champagne, all right, champagne
which the Germans had brought to Rome from France. She had eaten greedily and drunk little. When the meal was over, and the waiter paid, she had quietly asked him to go to her room with her; he hadn’t even had to hint at all. They had got into a taxi and ridden a long way, down dimly lit streets, with the silhouettes of tall buildings ruined by time rather than war black and jagged against the moonlit sky. They had not talked. In the taxi he had kissed her once, finding that her lips were unbelievably soft and that he had forgotten what a kiss was like. The despair, the fury of having to fly to another war, and the cold loneliness that had been sitting in his stomach so many months, through so many battles and the intervals between battles, had left him, and somehow the sense of cheapness and sordidness had gone, and he had felt relaxed and completely happy for the first time in two years, for the first time since he had got aboard the slate-gray troopship which had carried him from New York into the fog of the North Atlantic an endless number of months ago.

“You are beautiful,” he had said.

The taxi had stopped in front of a tenement house. An old woman had leaned out a window and watched them with open curiosity. After paying the driver, Tom had followed the girl through a courtyard jammed with debris, into a dark hall. There had been no light. The girl had taken his hand and led him up five winding flights of stairs, littered with cardboard boxes and bottles. Moonlight had streamed through the window at each landing. The pitch-darkness of the stairs between landings had not been like the darkness of a battlefield, an impenetrable wall concealing only danger and death. It had been a protecting darkness, friendly, warm, almost soft and caressing. She had led him to her room, and he had snapped a light switch, but no light had come on, and she had lit a candle, bending over it seriously as the flame from the match in her cupped hands grew, first showing her silhouette, and then her face, with shadows flickering in the candlelight. He had kissed her again, and with the tips of her fingers she had caressed the back of his head, and his neck and his shoulders, very gently, hardly touching him at all, and when the kiss was over, she had smiled, and the look of strain had gone from her face, and it hadn’t been sordid any more. She had taken off her clothes and stood there golden in the candlelight, incredibly beautiful.

He hadn’t gone to meet Mahoney in the bar in the morning. He had lived with Maria for a week, shunning everyone he knew, and in that week he and Maria had built a small, temporary world for themselves, full of delights and confidences, a completely self-sufficient world, packed with private jokes, and memories, a whole lifetime with silver and golden anniversaries, Christmases and birthdays, fifty years compressed into a week. They had kept no secrets from each other. He had told her his real name. Lying on the bed naked, taking great pleasure in nakedness even when their passion was spent, they had talked endlessly, discussing all troubles, all angers, all fears, and for that week, nothing had seemed very bad any more, even the inevitable prospect of the grinning little man with the bayonet, whom he introduced to her, and whom she acknowledged sadly, as a person she knew well. They had understood each other, the three of them, Tom and Maria and the caricature of the man waiting with a gun.