Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

It was about fifteen minutes before Betsy came in. She was pale and suddenly seemed to him to be as fragile as a girl in her teens. He realized he had scared her. Getting to his feet with clumsy politeness, he said, “I don’t want you to be frightened,” and immediately realized that those were hardly the words to reassure her.

“Why are you being so mysterious?”

“I don’t know if I should talk to you about this. I don’t know what else to do. It isn’t just the money — I don’t like to do things behind your back.”

“Behind my back?”

“It was all such a long time ago,” he said helplessly.

“What was?”

He had an impulse simply to give her Maria’s letter and the photograph, but decided that would be cruel. There was an awkward silence which he realized must be painful to her.

“There was a child,” he began.

“A child?”

“During the war. In Rome.”

“What child?”

“A child of mine.”

“You had a child?”

“Yes.”

She said nothing. He had the strange feeling that he had not spoken, that the secret was still his. “I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know for sure until I got this letter.”

“A letter?”

He gave her the letter. Her face was pale but expressionless as she read it. Then she took the photograph out of the envelope and stared at it.

“Was this the woman?”

“Yes.”

“Did you love her?”

“I can’t explain it. You can’t possibly have any idea what the war was like.”

“We’ve never talked about it.”

“I can’t. Do you want me to tell you horrors? I wouldn’t have brought this up at all if it weren’t. ”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m going to support this child,” he said. “I’ve thought it over, and I’m going to send him a hundred dollars a month. I guess what I want is your blessing.”

“My blessing! ” she said, her voice rising suddenly.

“Betsy, do you want me to apologize for this child? So much happened during the war! It’s strange I should have to apologize for this. I killed seventeen men. I cut the throat of a German boy eighteen years old, and I killed Hank Mahoney, my best friend, because I threw a hand grenade too fast. I’m not ashamed of it, but for having a child I feel terrible. What do you want me to tell you?”

“All of it,” she said. “I want you to tell me all of it. You can’t just come and tell me you had a child in Italy, and that’s that. If you don’t tell me now, I’ll wonder about it the rest of my life. Where did you meet the girl in that photograph?”

“In Rome.”

“ Where in Rome?”

“In a bar.”

“Was it a formal introduction, or did you just pick her up?”

“Goddamn it,” he said. “Don’t let’s make this any harder than it has to be.”

“I’m not making it harder than it has to be! Was she just an ordinary pickup? Were you drunk, Tommy?”

“I wasn’t drunk. I was scared. And so was she. She was eighteen years old. Her parents had been burned to death before her eyes. She was broke and hungry. Now let this thing alone.”

“No,” she said. “I want to know. How many times did you sleep with her?”

“I lived with her,” he said. “I lived with her for two months.”

“When?”

“In 1944.”

“When in 1944?”

“December and part of January of the next year.”

“The turn of the year,” she said. “You know something, Tommy? I almost went crazy worrying about you those months. I suppose that’s rather funny. You didn’t write. It was the first time I’d gone that long without letters. I didn’t hear from you for three months. I’ll never forget that. I was so worried that I got your grandmother to try to pull some strings in Washington and find out where you were. It didn’t work — we couldn’t find out a thing. I used to jump every time the telephone or doorbell rang, for fear it was a telegram for me from the War Department. I can remember trying to write you letters during those months. It isn’t easy to write letters when you’re not getting any, and when you’re sure in your heart that the man you’re writing is dead. There wasn’t much for me to write about. I can remember trying to be cheerful, not to let you know I was worried. What did you do with my letters when you were living with her? Did the two of you lie in bed and read them together for laughs?”

“Don’t,” he said.

“No, I want to know. What did you do with my letters when you were living with her?”

“I don’t think I got them until I got to New Guinea. The mail was pretty mixed up for us while we were on the move.”

“Was she pretty, Tommy?”

“Not as pretty as you. Look at the picture and see for yourself.”

“Was she better in bed than I am?”

“Stop it.”

“Did she have a good figure? Were her breasts better than mine?”

“Why do you torture yourself?”

“I want an answer.”

“I did not love her as much as I love you.”

“You’re lying a little, aren’t you? Do you catch yourself wishing for her when you’re making love to me?”

“Try to be adult about this,” he said. “I’m not the only man to leave a child behind during the war. There are hundreds of thousands of war children in Japan and Italy and Germany. There are more in France and England and Australia. Anywhere the men were sent out to fight, quite a few ended up becoming fathers. Call it a practical joke of nature. The human race goes on, in spite of itself. That’s a dirty thing, I suppose. Wars are full of dirt.”

“You sound almost righteous when you talk about it.”

“I find it hard to be really ashamed. When I met Maria I thought I was never going to see you again. Do you know what it’s like to be scared right down to the bottom of your guts? Do you know what it’s like to be sure beyond the shadow of a doubt that you’ll be killed on the next jump, or the jump after that? And do you know what it’s like to be half afraid of yourself, to know in your heart that the last man you killed was killed with pleasure? Do you know how a corpse grins? When you see enough of that grin, everything decent in the world seems a joke. The dead always have the last laugh — Mahoney, a man I killed, told me that once when we were in Germany together. The dead always have the last laugh. I’m not trying to shock you, Betsy, but you’ve got to understand that having a child doesn’t seem to me to be so bad. Maybe I’ve got everything twisted backward. Ever since the war, it’s been as though I were trying to figure something out. I’ve never been able to get it quite clear in my mind, but I keep feeling just the way I did when I was about to make a jump and knew a lot of us were going to get killed. I keep having the same feeling I had when I killed Hank Mahoney, the feeling that the world is nuts, that the whole world is absolutely insane.”

“And now you’ve done your bit to straighten things out,” Betsy said. “A few more illegitimate children, and everything will be fine.”

“All right — I don’t make sense. But love, even when it’s three quarters lust, does not seem to me to be as bad as lots of things I’ve seen. I don’t love Maria any more — you don’t have to worry about that. But she was with me when I didn’t have a hope in the world. She was the only good thing that happened to me in the whole war, and we had a child. Dirty or not, that still seems a kind of miracle to me. What do you want me to do, forget it? Maria hasn’t got any legal hold on me. I can just tell her to go to hell. Probably if worst came to worst and she sued me, I could prove she was a prostitute. Would that make you feel any cleaner? I can write her now and tell her I don’t believe this child is mine. One more act of brutality wouldn’t change the world. But I’m not going to do it. I can’t do anything about the state of the world, but I can put my own life in order. The only really dirty part about an illegitimate child is that usually the father doesn’t support it. This is one decent thing I’m going to do, if I never do anything else, and I hope you’ll help me.”