Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

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!”