Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

She had seemed to be floating. He had never been a good dancer, but her feet hadn’t seemed to touch the floor at all, and he had felt suddenly graceful. Then a hand had touched him on the shoulder, and she had gone to someone else.

It’s natural, he had thought — she’s a pretty girl, and it’s her party, and everybody has to dance with her at least once. But he had been disturbed to find he was unable to be with her for more than a few minutes.

That’s when it all had started. For three years after that they had gone to movies and football games and college dances and night clubs, and performed the whole ritual of entertainment preparatory to marriage. He had played the mandolin for her — she had considered it a quaint, old-fashioned instrument. They had talked. At the time, Tom had been sure he would be rich a few years after the war was over, although he hadn’t given much thought to what he would get rich at. They had kissed. At the time, they had known much less about each other than any personnel man knows about a prospective stenographer, but almost casually, certainly without anything which could be described as thought, on the strength of a kiss, she had agreed to marry him and had not considered it strange at all.

I was lucky, Tom thought now, as he stared at the slowly revolving bottles in the center of the bar in the hotel at Atlantic City. That was one time I was lucky. At that age I could have fallen in love with any empty-headed girl with a good figure, but I was lucky — that’s one time when everything turned out all right.

How strange it is to remember, he thought. Poor Betsy, she could have married somebody with money, somebody who would be taking her to Florida every winter now, somebody who would never worry, who would smile and be cheerful while the cook cooked dinner, and the waitress served it, and Betsy sat smiling. Back in 1939, there had been several rich young men pursuing Betsy, and without thinking, apparently, she had turned them down, because they had not appealed to her at the moment, and she had chosen Tom on the strength of a kiss and had never thought about money.

How incredibly naïve we were, he thought now as he stared at the revolving pyramid of bottles. How incredibly innocent, as we parked my car and worried because we couldn’t stop making love to each other! Once while they had been parked, a policeman on a motorcycle had shone the bright beam of his flashlight on them, and Betsy had jumped as though she were burned. The policeman had grinned and said, “All right, kids, break it up!” and had gone on, patrolling his beat, his light disappearing around a bend in the road.

I wonder if she’s sorry, Tom thought. It isn’t just the money — I wonder if she wishes she had a husband who could be cheerful around the house.

It’s funny what happens to people, he thought. We were alike in those days, Betsy and I, all our experiences had been the same, and there was nothing we found impossible to explain to each other. We were confident — my God, we never worried at all! With the whole war in front of us, we never worried at all. We were sure that I would go through the war and become a hero. He remembered a mental picture he had had of himself, a clear image of himself, a soldier in a foreign land, sad and tired-looking, but clean and un-wounded, thinking of Betsy on Christmas Day, writing sad, brave letters about his friends who had died.

It wouldn’t be too bad to be a soldier, he had thought — he had seen himself sitting in some jolly French tavern, or perhaps in the corner of some romantically Spartan barracks, singing Army songs — things like “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, and Smile, Smile, Smile.” Probably he’d take his mandolin along, he had thought — it would make him popular in the Army.

The future had seemed perfectly predictable in those days. Betsy would weep in a genteel way when he sailed overseas, with his mandolin, but he would come back unhurt and march up Fifth Avenue, and she would throw herself into his arms and say, “Darling, you have come back to me!” and it would all be sad and brave and happy, like a movie of the First World War.

And the funny thing was, it had all happened, more or less; at least in the beginning, it had followed the script. He had gone off to his basic training carrying, among other things, his mandolin, and he had actually played it a few times, and several of the men had gathered around to sing. But when he had learned he was going overseas, he had shipped the mandolin home along with other surplus gear — somehow the idea of a paratrooper arriving in Europe with a mandolin had already begun to appear ridiculous. That had been the beginning of the destruction of the script, although to a surprising degree the outline had been followed. He had been a hero, all right, and had been awarded three medals to prove it. He had not been wounded. He had come home, and Betsy had met the transport at the wharf. She had run out of the crowd as he came down the gangplank, thrown her arms around him and said, “Darling, you have come back to me!”

That’s what she had said, meaning it from the heart, and it had not been her fault that the words sounded satirical to him. He had held her away from him a little, seeing that she was a woman any man would want. That day she had been wearing a new dress specially bought for the occasion, a gay red dress that closely followed the lines of her figure, a flamboyant dress which she had bought in a flamboyant mood the day she heard he was actually on his way home. She had kissed him passionately, and he had felt precisely as though a beautiful woman he had never seen before had rushed out of the crowd and begun making love to him. He had felt incredulous, awkward, abashed, and unwillingly lustful. The feeling of lust had appalled him, making him feel unfaithful to Maria, and also to Betsy as he remembered her from long ago, a young girl to be taken in love, not with the sort of feeling he would have for a pretty stranger unbelievably embracing him in the street.

“I’ve got a hotel room all reserved,” she had said. “I’m not going to take you back to Grandmother’s house tonight.”

They had gone to the hotel, and the love-making had been intense and brief and unsatisfactory, leaving him with a profound feeling of confusion and shame. When it was over, her cheerfulness had surprised him. She had poured drinks, and, sitting down in a big armchair with a cigarette in her hand, she had leaned back and said, “Do you mind talking about the war? There are all sorts of questions I’m dying to ask.”

“There’s not much to tell,” he had said. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

Betsy had never been insensitive. She had not pursued the matter, and with gratitude he had felt he would never have to tell her anything about the war, not about Maria, not about Mahoney, not about anything. It would be better that way, he had thought, far better for both of them.

She had not seemed to mind his reticence. That night she had begun to talk brightly about the future. As he listened to her, he had gradually realized that here in this pretty girl sitting across the room from him in a pair of silk pajamas was himself as of 1939. Here was a kind of antique version of himself, unchanged. Here was the casual certainty that he would get a job which would soon lead to the vice-presidency of J. H. Nottersby, Incorporated, or some firm with a name which would have to sound like that. Here was all the half-remembered optimism, the implicit belief that before long they would move into a house something like Mount Vernon, with nice old darky servants nodding and singing all the time, a place where they would grow old gracefully, not getting fat, but becoming only a little gray around the temples, a mansion where they would of course be happy, real happy for the rest of their lives.