Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

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.

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.”