Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Read online

  The hotel had been crowded when he came in–it was a big party, he had seen at a glance. He had pushed through the groups of young people in evening clothes who crowded around the entrance to the ballroom and made his way to the long table in an adjoining room, where the champagne was being served. It had been good, imported champagne. Sipping his drink, Tom had stood just inside the door to the ballroom surveying the dancers in a mildly predatory way. At the time, he had considered himself an expert on women; he had thought he could just glance at them and tell which ones were passionate, which were cold, which would expect a lot of money to be spent on them, and which would not. His eye had skipped over Nina Henderson, who already had become a professional beauty, pictured on a magazine cover as the debutante of the year, a girl who later, as things turned out, married the fat orchestra leader who played at most of the dances that year and bore him a son before divorcing him. Tom’s eye had also passed over the plain girls sitting on the side lines or dancing with their brothers. His glance had traveled across the floor until he saw Betsy.

  How strangely comforting it was to look back now and realize that the enchantment he had felt that night at the first sight of her had been, after all, as unsentimentally real and factual as any ugly emotion or truth he could recall. And it was also comforting to reflect that what he had felt that night still defied analysis. Sure, Betsy’s figure had never been calculated to calm a young man’s pulse, but certainly there had been other girls in the room as admirable in measurement. The grace with which Betsy moved, the way her sparkling white dress had accentuated the warm colors of her skin and hair, the curve of her cheek, the flash of her smile–of course, all these things had had their effect, but there had been more, much more which could never have been caught by a camera, even if it used all the technicolor in the world. The moment he had seen her he wanted to marry her, a fact which sounded so banal when he told it to her months later that they both had laughed, feeling suddenly ridiculous. But it was a true fact, and that night he had felt so bewildered by it that he stood for a long while watching her dance with others before mustering the courage to make his way across the dance floor and cut in on her.

  “Who are you?” he had asked.

  “Betsy Donner.”

  “The lady of the evening!” he had replied, hoping that his voice sounded light and sophisticated. “It’s a nice party.”

  “It’s a beautiful party!” she had said. “I suppose I shouldn’t say that, but it is.”

  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.

  The trouble hadn’t been only that he didn’t believe in the dream any more; it was that he didn’t even find it interesting or sad in its improbability. Like an old man, he had been preoccupied with the past, not the future. He had changed, and she had not.

  That night he had listened to her almost paternally. “I don’t know what I want to do,” he had said when she asked if he had any definite ideas about a job. “We’ll have to figure that out.”

  “I know you’ll succeed, no matter what you do,” she had said, her whole happy dream of the future hanging almost palpably in front of her, like the pictures of dreams people have in cartoons.

  But of course her dream had not come true–that seemed sad to him now for her sake. Instead of getting the house like Mount Vernon, they had moved into the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, and Betsy had become pregnant, and he had thrown the vase against the wall, and the washing machine had broken down. And Grandmother had died and left her house to somebody, and instead of being made vice-president of J. H. Nottersby, Incorporated, he had finally arrived at a job where he tested mattresses, was uneasy when his boss said he wanted to see him without explaining why, and lived in fear of an elevator operator.

  I hope Betsy isn’t sorry, he thought. If I lose this job and have to take whatever I can get, I hope she still won’t be sorry. I hope she never has to learn about Maria.

  “Hello,” someone said.

  He turned and saw a pretty, dark-haired girl in a copper-colored evening gown sitting at the bar next to him. “You look preoccupied,” she said.

  He smiled. “I was thinking,” he replied.

  “Bad practice,” the girl said. “Very bad practice. My name’s Marie. Want to come to our party?”

  “Thank you,” he said hastily. “No, I can’t.” He got up and walked out of the room, feeling oddly perturbed.

  25

  AFTER DINNER THAT NIGHT, Tom went to his room in the hotel and lay down. It isn’t fair to Betsy, he thought, to keep remembering the weeks with Maria as the happiest of my life. It wasn’t the difference between two women–it was simply the difference in circumstance. When he and Betsy had first met back in 1939, they had been children, and their happiness had been the pale, fragile happiness of children, full of little anxieties about getting home on time, and doing the proper thing. And after the war, there hadn’t really been time for happiness–there had been budgets and bills from obstetricians and frantic planning for the future. That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there never had been any present at all.

  But with Maria it had been different; they had both been reconciled to having no future, and the past had been something which had to be forgotten. With Maria there had been only the moment at hand, completely unshadowed, unexpected, something to be grateful for. Perhaps, Tom thought, it’s a matter of expectations–he and Betsy had always expected so much! Everything would be perfect for them, they had expected from the beginning. They would be rich, they would be healthy, and they would do no wrong. Any deviation from perfection had seemed a blight which ruined the whole. But he and Maria had expected nothing; they had started with hopelessness and had been astonished to learn that for a few weeks they could be happy.

  Lying there in his hotel room, Tom suddenly remembered the day of the picnic with Maria, and he smiled–even the distant memory made him smile. It had been a ridiculous day from the beginning. After having wangled the use of a jeep, he and Maria had started from Rome at nine o’clock in the morning, with a large basket full of groceries and a bottle of wine. The sky had been gray, with feathery wisps of white cloud blowing across darker, blacker clouds billowing up from the horizon, and it had been cold–the mud puddles beside the road had been crusted with ice. At nine-thirty, just as they got outside the city, it had begun to rain. It had been a ridiculous day for a picnic, but the thought of going back had not even occurred to them. He had stopped, and she had helped him to put the side curtains on the jeep, and it had been snug and warm inside, with the world appearing eerie through the dripping windshield. They had headed south and driven aimlessly–there had been a delicious sense of freedom in coming to a crossroad and turning to the left or right completely at random, without caring at all where they were going. Maria had turned up the collar of her old soldier’s overcoat, but she had not worn a hat, and her dark glossy hair had got wet while they were putting the side curtains up and had stayed damp all day. She had looked contented sitting there on the hard un-comfortable seat of the jeep. She had not smiled–her face had so often been serious–but she had hummed a song almost inaudibly under her breath, and he had kept glancing at her, receiving enormous satisfaction from the sight of her sitting there beside him so serenely.

  “What are you singing?” he had asked. “Sing louder, so I can hear.”

  She had shaken her head modestly. “I can’t sing,” she had said. “I know no music.”

  “I do,” he had said. “You happen to be sitting beside the star baritone and mandolin virtuoso of the entire United States. Want to hear me?”

  “Yes.” She had laughed.

  “You’ll have to imagine the mandolin in the background,” he had replied. “Pling, pling, pling–does that set the proper mood?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right!” At the top of his lungs he had sung “Old Man River” and the “Saint Louis Blues,” both of which had seemed absurdly doleful. Her laughter had formed a sort of accompaniment to the songs, and he had gone on to sing, “Way down upon the Swanee River, far, far away–there’s where my heart is turning ever, there’s where the old folks stay. . . .” He had been briefly conscious of the irony of the fact that at the moment he wasn’t worrying much about the old folks at home, but he had brushed that thought away. He had sung all the songs whose words he knew that day while they drove aimlessly around in the rain. She had not tried to sing with him–she had just sat there and from time to time had put her hand on his knee with curious hesitation, almost as though it were dark and she were trying to make sure he was still there. Once, when he stopped at a crossroad, sh
e had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth with almost painful intensity. That had been a curious and wonderful thing about her that he had understood only gradually: her almost constant eagerness to make love. At first, he had been surprised, and then he had thought that she was simply an ideal and probably practiced soldier’s girl, and he had been a little cynical about her ardor. But after he had known her a few days he had realized that physical love was the only form of reassurance she knew, and that she was completely happy and sure of him only when she was caressing him and giving him pleasure, and that it was chiefly this that caused her constantly to entice him. She was scared, just as scared as he was, he had realized. On that day while they were driving in the rain she had told him a little about her past. The village in which she had lived with her parents had been one of the first hit by the invasion. The Germans had made a brief stand there, and the planes had dropped bombs of white phosphorus. Her parents had refused to go to a bomb shelter for fear that their house would be looted if left empty, but they had forced her to go. Crawling up from the shelter after a bomb had burst near by, she had seen her house in flames, seen her father stagger out carrying her mother, both their bodies enveloped in flames. The other people from the bomb shelter had not let her run to them. Her father had fallen after taking only a few steps, and she had seen the bodies of her parents lying at right angles to each other, burning like a fiery cross. As she told Tom about this, she had been objective, almost matter-of-fact. The tears had not come until he had impulsively stopped the jeep and put his arms around her, feeling in himself an overpowering need to try to comfort her, in spite of the knowledge that for such things there is no solace. She had cried hard for about ten minutes, and her sobs had been all the more agonizing because they came silently through clenched teeth and taut lips. After regaining control of herself, she had taken from her battered handbag a cheap imitation gold compact, opened it, and put powder on her face. For several seconds she had stared at herself in the tiny, clouded mirror. “Do you think I am beautiful?” she had asked.