Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

by Sloan Wilson

  Dazedly Tom had sat down. The sergeant had given him a cigarette and lit it for him. Tom had sat staring at the sergeant’s shoes, tremendous muddy shoes, the tops of which were still highly polished. After looking at the shoes for a long while, he had brought himself to glance at Mahoney and had seen that on Hank’s face was the sardonic grin of a dead man. The dead always have the last laugh, Hank had said. A wave of nausea had overtaken Tom, and he had been sick. For several minutes he had lain there retching. The big sergeant had put cool hands on his forehead, the way a mother holds the head of a sick child. Gradually the nausea had gone, and with it the madness. Tom had stood up slowly, and the sergeant had handed him a canteen. After taking a drink, Tom had poured water into his hands and splashed his face. “Thanks, Sergeant,” he had said.

  “Let me help you find a burial detail,” the sergeant had replied. “You look mighty tired.”

  “I’d like to find one with a chaplain.”

  The sergeant had picked Mahoney up. They had walked a long while before finding a priest with a detachment of men preparing for funeral services. The big sergeant had put Mahoney down, and the chaplain had immediately come over and had gently laid a blanket over him.

  “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.”

  13

  “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 t
his. 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.

  An hour later Tom stepped into the United Broadcasting building. The elevator operator who took him up to Ogden’s office was a thin boy not more than eighteen years old.

  14

  A SECRETARY in a tight pink sweater told Tom that Ogden couldn’t see him for another hour, but that he had asked her to show him to the office he was to occupy. Tom thanked her and followed her down the hall. The passageway ran out of carpet by the time they got to his door, but Tom was surprised at the size of his quarters. He had a room about fifteen feet square entirely to himself, and there was a small alcove where a pert brown-haired secretary sat at a small desk copying letters. “Mr. Rath, this is Miss Lawrence,” the girl in the pink sweater said. “She will be your secretary.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Miss Lawrence said. She stood up, and smiled.

  Tom’s desk was fancily shaped, much like the one behind which Walker had given him his first interview, but he had an ordinary swivel chair instead of a reclining one. He sat down in it. There were two telephones on the desk, an interoffice communication box, and a small panel with three red buttons on it. Experimentally he pushed one of the buttons. Almost immediately, the door to his office opened and a distinguished and statuesque blond girl in a dark-green blouse and expensive-looking tweed skirt came in. “You buzzed, sir?” she asked in a rather upstage Boston accent.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the office girl. I deliver the interoffice mail. Did you buzz for me?”

  “By mistake,” Tom said. “Thank you very much.”

  She left, and he sat examining the other buttons with interest. Maybe the second one’s for a redhead and the third one’s for a brunette, he thought. After a moment of hesitation, he pushed the second one. This time Miss Lawrence came in. “Yes?” she asked.

  “What’s the third button for?”

  “Nothing,” she said, grinning. “It’s for men who have two secretaries. Do you know how to use the interoffice communication system?”

  He said no, and she showed him. She also explained the telephone system and brought from her desk a stack of papers for him to sign which placed him officially on the pay roll and insured him against almost everything in the world but getting fired. Just as he finished signing them, his interoffice communication box uttered some ominous crackling sounds, like a radio in a thunderstorm. He flicked a switch on it, and Ogden’s voice suddenly shouted at him so loudly that he jumped, “Are you there, Rath?”

  Tom turned the volume down to make Ogden more polite. “Just got here,” he said.

  “Come up and see me in half an hour,” Ogden almost whispered. There were more noises like static.

  “I’ll be there,” Tom said.

  There was no reply, and he shut off the box. For a moment he busied himself looking through the drawers of his desk, inspecting with admiration a typewriter which pulled out on a special shelf. Then he turned his chair around and stared out the window. Below him, the city stretched like a map. Far away in the Hudson River a flotilla of destroyers was getting up steam. One of them was using a signal light. Tom could still read Morse Code. “Where in hell is the liberty boat?” the signalman was asking.

  Twenty minutes later Tom started toward Ogden’s office. Down the hall he took a wrong turn at a junction of corridors and wound up at the entrance to an enormous room in which about thirty clerks worked at desks in neat rows as in a schoolroom. When he found Ogden’s office it was five minutes past the time set for the appointment, but that didn’t make any difference, because Ogden kept him waiting another hour.

  “Glad you could start work today,” Ogden said when he finally had the girl in the pink sweater show him in. “Is your office all right?”

  “It’s fine,” Tom said casually.

  “About a title for you,” Ogden said. “I suppose we should give you a title. You’ll be responsible directly to me, of course, but I think we’ll call you ‘Special Assistant to Mr. Hopkins.’ There will be times when that title will be useful.”

  Ogden paused, and Tom said, “That sounds like a fine title.”

  “Just remember that it doesn’t apply to company business,” Ogden said. “You’re special assistant to Mr. Hopkins on this special project–nothing else. That will be made clear inside the company, but of course there will be no need to spell it out anywhere else.”

  “Of course,” Tom said.

  “Can you have dinner with Mr. Hopkins tonight?”

  “Yes,” Tom said, trying not to sound surprised. “I think I can arrange it.”

  “Meet us at seven-thirty at his apartment,” Ogden said, and gave a Park Avenue address, which Tom wrote down on a pad and put in his pocket.

  “Now let me give you the pitch,” Ogden continued. “There’s a . . .” Before he could go on, his telephone rang. “No,” Ogden said into the receiver. “Absolutely not.” He listened for a full minute before adding, “I’m still not convinced. Contact me on it later. Good-by.”

  He hung up and shifted his gaze to Tom. With hardly a pause, he said, “The pitch is this. There’s a big convention of medical men in Atlantic City on September 15th. Hopkins has been asked to speak, and he figures it will be a good time for him to send up a trial balloon on this whole project. He can’t mention the small group of doctors who got him interested in all this. We’ve got to help him with the speech.”

  “Does that mean you want me to write it?”

  Ogden looked at Tom with distaste. “We don’t write speeches for Mr. Hopkins,” he said. “He writes his own speeches. We just help him with the research and try to get something on paper for him to work with.”

  “I see,” Tom said, feeling he had made a strategic error.

  “Tonight we’re going to kick the speech around,” Ogden said. “You better be thinking about what he should say. He’ll want your ideas.”

  Tom didn’t have any idea in the world what the president of United Broadcasting should say to a convention of physicians about mental health. “Did the doctors suggest any topic when they invited him?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I suppose he could talk about increasing public understanding of the mental-illness problem,” Tom said tentatively. He was tired of that thought already.

  “Maybe. But keep in mind the purpose of the speech. If we achieve our purpose one hundred per cent, the audience should rise as one man when he’s through and demand that he start a national committee on mental health immediately. He
shouldn’t propose such a thing, understand–they should suggest it to him. If this is the kind of speech it should be, every newspaper in the country should have it on the front page the next morning. Requests for him to form a national committee on mental health should pour in from all over the nation.”

  “It’ll have to be quite a speech,” Tom said.

  “Perhaps we can’t expect to achieve our purpose one hundred per cent, but we ought to keep the goal clearly in mind. And we also must not forget the possibility of a one hundred per cent failure. Do you know what that would be?”

  “No response at all,” Tom said.

  “No–a negative response. If the speech went one hundred per cent wrong, the doctors would all get together to prevent the formation of a national committee on mental health. Mr. Hopkins would be accused of meddling in things he didn’t know anything about. United Broadcasting would be described as a sinister influence trying to muscle in on the doctors for mysterious reasons. People would say we want socialized medicine, or that we are reactionaries fighting co-operative health plans. Hopkins would be accused of being a publicity hound. Rumors would start that he had political ambitions. If that sort of thing happened, the whole project would of course have to be abandoned.”

  There goes my job, Tom thought. Bill Hawthorne’s already chipping away at it. He said, “I don’t think there’s much danger of that happening. After all, the doctors invited him to speak.”

  “That was arranged by a small group,” Ogden said. “If the speech backfired, they’d be the first to claim they had nothing to do with it.”

  As soon as he got back to his own office, Tom telephoned Betsy. “I’ve already started work for United Broadcasting and I won’t be home for dinner tonight,” he said. “I’m having dinner with Hopkins in his Park Avenue apartment.”