Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (15 page)

At the end of the week, Tom had said good-by to her and reported back to his unit, only to be told that transportation wasn’t available yet and that he could live wherever he wanted as long as he checked in, or at least telephoned headquarters, every morning at eight o’clock. He had returned to her room, and it had been exactly as though he had returned from a long absence, the young husband coming home from the wars: they had both felt that way, they had both experienced all the happiness of a reunion, without the awkwardness which follows long absence.

He had lived in the room with her, thinking that each day was the last, thinking that tomorrow at eight o’clock the sergeant who answered the telephone would say, “Oh, yes, Captain Rath–we’ve got a plane leaving in two hours. You better get right down here.” He had kept his bags packed, and every morning at seven o’clock he had kissed her and crept out of bed and got himself fully dressed, in case it would be necessary to hurry, and each morning for seven weeks, for forty-nine days in all, the sergeant had said, “Nothing yet, Captain–the colonel asks me to tell you to be sure to check in tomorrow.”

There had been forty-nine last days, and the greatest pleasure in the world had been to walk back to her room from the restaurant where he made his telephone calls at eight o’clock in the morning, shivering a little in the dampness, and to hear her say delightedly, “Not yet?”

“Not yet!” he had said forty-nine times and, still shivering from the coldness of early morning, had jumped into the warm bed beside her.

During those forty-nine last days, they had grown old together, patient of each other’s weaknesses, and they had even acquired old family friends, men in bars who nodded to them and recognized them as a couple who belonged together, old ladies on street corners who addressed Maria as a married woman, respectable as themselves. And in particular, they had acquired one friend, almost an uncle, or perhaps a brother, a melancholy man who owned a bakery, where hot coffee was served, a wonderful place to have breakfast. The mans name had been Lapa, Louis Lapa, and he had fought with the Germans against the Americans and, a little later, with the Americans against the Germans, fighting both times well, but without enthusiasm. Finally he had been wounded and had returned to his bakery with his foot in a cast, and when Tom and Maria sat down to have breakfast in his shop, he brought hot rolls and coffee, limping badly and coughing, but always smiling. After the first few days he had often sat down to join them, drinking a cup of coffee himself, of course knowing without being told a great deal about Tom and Maria, knowing that they had just met, and that they would soon part, and feeling sad about this, but also companionable. They had come to know Louis well and on one occasion had even invited him to visit them in their room, and they had had a quiet family evening together, with Louis admiring Maria’s beauty the way a friendly brother or uncle might admire the beauty of a young wife. He had called her the most beautiful girl in Rome and had told Tom he was lucky, and Tom had replied that he was indeed lucky, and he had felt this to be true.

They had had many friends, other Americans living with Italian girls, and one of them had been Caesar Gardella, who had turned out to be intensely religious, who had tried to get an audience with the Pope, and who told everyone he was going to come back to Rome and marry his girl after the war was over. His girl’s name had been Gina–she was a cousin of Maria’s or some sort of distant relative. Tom and Caesar and Gina and Maria had sat drinking together on several evenings, and it had been almost like a suburban community, with the men all working for the same big corporation. But after seven weeks, the sergeant at headquarters had told Tom he had to hurry, transportation was available–the plane was due to leave in
three hours. After hearing that over the telephone, Tom had raced back to Maria’s room, and it had been then she had told him she thought she was pregnant, she wasn’t sure, but she thought she probably was. There had been no recriminations. She had asked nothing, and he had denied nothing. She, knowing he was married, and knowing he was flying to the Pacific to meet his grinning little man with a gun, had assumed he could do nothing much for her and had been surprised and grateful when he borrowed five hundred dollars from his friends and gave it to her, along with a jeepful of canned goods and cigarettes and chewing gum, all of which was worth a great deal.

“If you are pregnant,” he had said, “will you have the child?”

“God willing,” she had replied, and he had been glad, absurdly glad that in flying to meet his evil, grinning little man with the bayonet, he was leaving a child behind, even if it were to be a child with no father to care for it; a ragamuffin child dancing in the street for pennies, perhaps, but at least a child, which was better than to die and leave nothing, as though he had never been born.

But of course he hadn’t been sure about the child; it had been only a possibility. He had been sure about nothing, as he boarded the plane and sat in the hard, uncomfortable bucket seat, waiting to take off for the long flight to the Pacific. How strange to think that he might have a child, never to see, never to hold, but a child just the same! How strange that after all the long months of killing, there would be finally, perhaps, the birth of a child, and that this would be the one thing he had done in the last two years which could conceivably lead to trouble. This, of all he had done, would be the one deed which could lead to a court-martial, and stern disapproving looks on the part of commanding officers, and colonels shaking fingers in his face, and social ostracism at home, if he ever got home, and divorce, and a very bad name, instead of medals.

How strange, he had thought, as he sat in the plane: what a curious inversion, how to the despair of the chaplains is the inclination of the young soldiers to forget their job of killing and to run off and make love!

He had started to laugh as the plane took off, and above the roar of the engines Mahoney had shouted, “What the hell is funny?”

“We’re all nuts!” Tom had said, with a feeling that he had at last discovered the great fundamental truth. “We’re all nuts, every goddamn one of us–we’re all absolutely nuts!”

“You’re god-damn right!” Mahoney had replied.

“Ever hear of Karkow?” Caesar Gardella had asked an hour later.

Tom had heard of it vaguely, a small island not far from the Philippines, a very small island which the British had held for two months against strong Japanese attack at the beginning of the war, but had finally lost. “What about it?” he had replied.

“I hear,” Caesar had said above the roar of the engines, “I hear they’re going to drop us on it.”

It was just a rumor, Tom had thought, but at such times the rumors are always right. Karkow! What a curious name for a place to die!

The plane had stopped at many places, hurrying to refuel, always in a hurry to get to its destination, until finally it had deposited Tom and Mahoney in a transient officers’ camp in Hollandia, New Guinea, where there was nothing to do but lie all day on cots under mosquito netting and wait for the attack on Karkow. Lying there, drinking heavily chlorinated water or warm beer when he could get it, Tom had wondered what he would do if he were not killed at Karkow, or wherever he was going. What did one do when one had a wife in the States and a woman and maybe a child in Italy? Did one simply take one’s choice? After he had been in New Guinea about two weeks, the letters Betsy had written him almost every night had caught up with him. In the first one he opened she had said:

T
OMMY MY DARLING
,

Gosh, what a day this has been! At eight-thirty this morning–
eight-thirty
, mind you–Dotty Kimble telephoned me and wanted me to play bridge in the afternoon. It seems that Nancy Gorton had promised that she would be her partner in a tournament at the club, and at the last minute Nancy got a telegram that John was getting a week-end pass, so of course she simply took off for South Carolina. That left Dotty without a partner in this tournament which she seemed to think was awfully important–you know how seriously she takes things like that. Well, anyway, I said all right, and guess who we played in the very first game? Lillie Barton and Jessie Willis! You’d die if you saw Jessie now–she’s gained about
fifty
pounds, and she’s worried to death that she won’t be able to take it off after the baby comes. She’s due next month. Anyway, I thought I’d die when I found we were going
to play her and Lillie, because you know what sharks they are. Well, to make a long story short, you would have been proud of me, darling–I won’t even try to be modest. Dotty and I won! We each got a perfectly adorable majolica bowl for a prize. I’ve wrapped mine up and stored it with our wedding presents, and after the war, when we buy our house, I’m going to put it right in the middle of our dining-room table, and every morning you can take an orange out of it and think how smart I am!

Can’t think of anything more to say now, except I miss you like anything. If I sent all the kisses I’d like to give you, this letter would have to go parcel post!

I love you forever and forever and forever and forever!

B
ETSY

Her other letters had been much the same. They had contained descriptions of movies she had seen, and dreams of the future, when he would have a job with J. H. Nottingsby, Incorporated, or some firm with a name which would have to sound like that. Along with the easy optimism, the cheerfulness, and long, involved jokes, Betsy had sent him pictures of herself, snapshots of a slender, fresh-faced girl, hearty, healthy, and smiling, a girl he had seen someplace sometime, long ago, a real beauty.

Perhaps I shall go back to Italy, if I go anywhere at all, he had thought. If I go back to Italy I shall betray one person, but if I go home to Betsy, perhaps I shall betray two. It had been strange to lie on the narrow canvas cot in New Guinea and think of a son, perhaps, the grandson of “The Major,” his own son, the great-grandson of “The Senator,” the likeness of himself, dancing for pennies in the streets of Rome. If he did not go back to Rome, what would happen to such a son? He would go wandering barefoot, begging for chew-chew gum, a child without a father, the son of a harlot grown ugly and bitter. That’s my boy, he had thought while lying on the hard canvas cot in New Guinea; that’s my boy. If I get it on Karkow, that will be the only part of me I’ll leave behind.

He had decided that if he survived the war he would go back to Italy, at least to see how Maria was making out, and he envied Caesar Gardella, who got long letters in Italian from his girl in Rome, and who considered himself formally engaged and talked constantly about getting married after the war. Maria had never written Tom at
all. It had been her kind of faithfulness not to write, to allow herself to be forgotten. But apparently Gina had written something to Caesar about her, for Caesar’s attitude toward Tom had changed–he had become reserved and disapproving, and with an edge to his voice, he had for the first time begun to call Tom “Sir.”

Now in his office at the Schanenhauser Foundation, Tom got up and stared out the window at the city below. He had not thought of Karkow for years. If Karkow had not cauterized his mind, he might not have forgotten Maria so easily, and things might have been different between him and Caesar. How had it started? He had first heard the name Karkow as a rumor, while flying from Europe. After he had lain for weeks in a transient officers’ camp in New Guinea, the rumor had grown until it was substantiated by a colonel who had called Tom and Mahoney and many other officers into his matter-of-fact office, with a matter-of-fact map on the wall, to brief them.

Karkow was a small, jagged island, with steep rocky cliffs on all but one side. The Japs, like the British before them, had had many guns trained on the gravel beach on that one side, waiting for an invasion, and they had honeycombed the island with tunnels and caves. The island lay in the mouth of a large bay, and it had to be taken–no one had doubted that. The plan for taking it was simple, the colonel had explained in his matter-of-fact way: three thousand paratroopers would be dropped on it.

“Damn it to hell!” Mahoney had said that night after the colonel had explained the plan. “Don’t they know anything about how paratroopers work? You don’t jump on top of the god-damn enemy! You don’t throw three thousand men right down on top of nests of antiaircraft artillery and machine guns and thousands of armed men, ready and waiting!”

“Well, this time I guess they do,” Caesar had said bitterly. “The colonel’s sure the Navy will have blasted every gun off the island before we get there. Didn’t you hear him?”

“I wonder,” Tom had said, “how many of us will even hit the goddamn island? It’s pretty small. I bet they dump half of us in the water.”

The idea had been to take off for the jump at four o’clock in the morning and to start landing troops on the island with the first light of dawn. The plan had been for the Navy to start shelling the place
two days beforehand and to have landing craft approach to make the Japs think the invasion was coming from the sea.

I will be sensible, Tom had thought late on the afternoon before the invasion. I will be sensible and go to bed early, and get a good rest. He had lain down on his cot and tried hard to think of nothing, to make his mind a complete blank. He had not wanted to think of the small island, Karkow, lying now under shellfire from the Navy, with the Japs in their caves. He had not wanted to think of Betsy, and he had not wanted to think of Maria. How painful had been the memory of a kiss or of anything good he would never have again! He had lain still, pretending to be asleep when Mahoney came in and stretched out on the cot near him.