Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“Take care of him, Father,” Tom had said, and had strode across the island to rejoin his company. He had found his men lying exhausted on the ground waiting for landing craft to take them off the island. Caesar had been wounded. Seeing him being carried off in a stretcher, Tom had hurried over to him. “You’re going to be all right,” he had said, but Caesar had just turned his face away, as though the sight of Tom were painful to him.

Tom had helped get the other wounded to the hospital ship, and then had thrown himself on the ground to try to sleep. Only a fitful half-sleep had come, and he had been aware of men moving all around him. All kinds of things had happened that night. Some of the troops who arrived after the fighting had searched the tangled earth for souvenirs, making necklaces of teeth and fingernails from corpses. Pitched battles had been fought over Japanese swords, pistols, and flags. At two o’clock in the morning a Jap had been found cowering in a clump of underbrush and had been joyfully bayoneted and castrated by a company of supply troops who had thought they would have to finish out the war without meeting the enemy.

Finally an LST had picked up Tom and most of the paratroopers who were uninjured. As it backed away from the island, Tom had sat in a dark corner of its hold, thinking of Mahoney running with the grenade in mid-air, poised there forever like Keats’s lovers on a Grecian urn, Hank always young and alive, the grenade always outlined clearly against the sky, just a few feet above his shoulder.

A major, coming to squat beside him, said, “Some of these goddamn sailors got heads. They went ashore and got Jap heads, and they tried to boil them in the galley to get the skulls for souvenirs.”

Tom had shrugged and said nothing. The fact that he had been too quick to throw a hand grenade and had killed Mahoney, the fact that some young sailors had wanted skulls for souvenirs, and the fact that a few hundred men had lost their lives to take the island of Karkow — all these facts were simply incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. That, he had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind. Suddenly he had longed to go home, home to Betsy and the serenity of Grandmother’s house. “How long do you think they’ll give us before the next jump?” he had asked the major.

Now, in his office in the Schanenhauser Foundation in the year 1953, Tom wondered whether Caesar Gardella actually had gone back to Rome to marry Gina, or whether he had simply returned to New York when the war was over and tried to forget the whole thing, as Tom had. And most of all he wondered if Gardella had recognized him, and if he were still resentful of the abandonment of Maria. It was strange that there was only Maria to worry about, Tom thought — certainly Caesar wouldn’t hold the death of Mahoney against him. It had been an accident — Caesar had certainly realized that. Probably Cesar wouldn’t even remember Mahoney. But if Maria had a son or a daughter, and if Caesar told her where Tom was, that conceivably could be quite another thing. A birth usually has more consequences than a death.

Suddenly Tom’s telephone rang. It was Dick Haver calling from the office across the hall. “Tom, can you step in here a minute?” he asked.

“Sure,” Tom said. “Be glad to.”

“MR. HOPKINS TELEPHONED ME a few minutes ago,” Dick said, “and asked if I could let you start work over there next week. I take it you’ve reached a decision.”

“I was going to tell you this morning,” Tom said. “I haven’t had a chance to see you. ”

“I understand. I told Hopkins that as far as we were concerned, you could start work over there right away.”

Tom didn’t like that at all — Dick hadn’t made him sound very valuable. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “I certainly appreciate everything you’ve done for me here.”

“We don’t have to say good-by,” Dick said. “Let’s have lunch together once in a while.”

Tom went back to his office to clean out his desk. There are a few things I’ve got to get straight with myself, he thought. The fact that Caesar Gardella is running an elevator over at United Broadcasting doesn’t make any difference at all. It changes nothing. The past is just as it was, and I can’t get myself into a state of nerves every time I step into an elevator. My nerves have held out until now, and I guess they’ll keep on holding out. Whether Caesar recognizes me or not doesn’t make any difference. I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, or at least no more than I had before I knew Caesar was running an elevator. Mahoney wasn’t the first man to be killed by mistake by his own men in the heat of battle — Old Hank would understand that if anyone would. And Maria held nothing against me. We understood each other. I wonder if she had the child, he thought. I wonder if Caesar knows. If he recognized me, why didn’t he say anything?

No, Tom thought, I mustn’t go on like this. Between peace and war a clear line must be drawn. The past is something best forgotten; only in theory is it the father of the present. In practice, it is only a wildly unrelated dream, a chamber of horrors. And most of the time the present is unrelated to the future. It is a disconnected world, or it is better to believe it that way if you can, and an elevator man has no business popping up to form a connecting link. The past is gone, Tom thought, and I will not brood about it. I’ve got to be tough. I am not the type to have a nervous breakdown. I can’t afford it. I have too many responsibilities. This is a time of peace, and I will forget about the war.

It’s funny, Tom thought — it’s funny, the way the world goes. You take your children and with all honesty you teach them, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” You give them dancing lessons, and tennis lessons, and music lessons. You teach them Latin, and how to dress properly. You teach them self-respect, if you can. All these things my father must have learned when he was young, and all these things I learned, and if I can, I will teach all these things to my son. And if I can, I will also teach him to defend his country. If he has to, I hope he’ll be a tough bastard too.

“All right, men, this is a rifle. Any of you never seen a rifle before?”

Tom remembered the sergeant who had given him basic training, a hollow cheeked man with a flat voice, who had taught him back in the year 1942. The recruits had laughed when he said, “Any of you never seen a rifle before?” All sergeants in all generations talk the same, and all recruits laugh at the same jokes.

“All right. This is a rifle, and here in my other hand I’m holding a bayonet. Any of you never seen a bayonet before?”

This time, no laughter. The recruits, standing in a circle around the sergeant, had shuffled nervously.

“Now you take this bayonet and you fit it onto the barrel of your rifle like this. Shove it down until it clicks. Stand back a little. I’m going to run through this once for you now, and then you try it. There are three basic motions in the use of a bayonet. You stick it in like this, you pull it out, using your foot or knee to shove the enemy away, and then you bring the stock of your rifle down hard on his head like this, all in one smooth motion. ”

It is necessary to forget all that and everything it led to, Tom thought; it is as necessary to forget it now as it was to learn it in the first place. They ought to begin wars with a course in basic training and end them with a course in basic forgetting. The trick is to learn to believe that it’s a disconnected world, a lunatic world, where what is true now was not true then; where Thou Shalt Not Kill and the fact that one has killed a great many men mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for now is the time to raise legitimate children, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one’s wife, and admire one’s boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as what? That makes no difference, he thought — I’m just a man in a gray flannel suit. I must keep my suit neatly pressed like anyone else, for I am a very respectable young man. If Caesar recognizes me, we might go out and have a drink together, and that would be that. It doesn’t make any difference whether he recognizes me or not. It is ridiculous to live in fear of an elevator man. I will go to my new job, and I will be cheerful, and I will be industrious, and I will be matter-of-fact. I will keep my gray flannel suit spotless. I will have a sense of humor. I will have guts — I’m not the type to start crying now.