FOUR
John Crowley
FREEDOMS
F or LSB, after all
Contents
Prelude
In the fields that lie to the west of the…
1
Part One
13
1
For a time after the war began, the West Coast…
15
2
The day that Henry Van damme and his brother had…
19
3
Glaive,” said Julius.
33
4
Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive…
36
5
We weren’t where we were in those times because we…
52
6
The Teenie Weenies all live in Teenie Weenie Town, which…
63
7
Little did she know: that when the great worldwide storm…
78
8
After the first tryouts dad said to her: “You’ve played…
92
Part Two
101
1
Like the disabled and transected body of the Pax B-30…
103
2
That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured…
115
3
He’d been in the cast for four weeks, with as…
128
4
It will be different when you come out, they all…
135
5
Sometime late in that summer, Prosper made a discovery: his…
143
6
Fenix Vigaron hadn’t actually predicted it, but May later could…
160
7
War and the sex urge go together,” Pancho Notzing said.
176
8
Without his uncles’ wages and the odd bill they’d slip…
189
9
It had been a Wednesday night a couple of weeks…
201
Part Three
209
1
The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the…
211
2
For all the talk about her visual acuity and all…
229
3
They stretched the rules at the Van Damme dormitory in…
242
4
Toward the end of his shift, as he was making…
254
5
On a Friday night the Teenie Weenies bused or drove…
261
6
Vi Harbison thought it was odd how her heartbreak, like…
269
7
Oh my heavens look at you,” Connie said. “Oh I’m…
276
8
Back then, Connie had wondered at Prosper too, just as…
280
9
Connie waited another day, exhausted and immobile, and then bathed… 286
Part Four
297
1
Past midnight, and the Lucky Duck on Fourth Avenue was…
299
2
Somehow it was harder going back across the desert with…
315
3
The Bomb Bay was nothing but an extra building not…
322
4
This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
333
5
Summer 1936. Swimming was over for the afternoon and the…
340
6
You remember my friend Poindexter,” Danny said. “Bill.”
351
7
Connie went back north with Andy to bring him to…
357
8
Prosper Olander got his own white pink slip in an…
366
Recessional 379
Afterword 387
About the Author
Other Books by John Crowley
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRELUDE
In the fields that lie to the west of the Ponca City municipal airport,
there once could be seen a derelict Van Damme B-30 Pax bomber,
one of the only five hundred turned out at the plant that Van Damme
Aero built beyond the screen of oaks along Bois d’Arc Creek (Bodark
the locals call it). The Pax was only a carcass—just the fuselage, wing-
less and tail-less, like a great insect returning to its chrysalis stage from
adulthood. I mean to say it was a carcass then, in the time when (though
signs warned us away) we used to play on it and in it: examining the
mysteries of its lockboxes and fixtures, taking the pilot’s seat and tap-
ping the fogged dials, looking up to see sky through the Plexiglas win-
dows. Now all of it’s gone—plane, plant, fields, trees, and children.
There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be
taken—maybe it’s a scientific hypothesis—that the past cannot in fact
exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists only now. Things now
may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of
affairs, yes: but that’s different from saying that this former state actu-
ally somehow exists, in the form of “the past.” Even in our memory (so
neuroscientists now say, who sit at screens and watch the neurons flare
as thoughts excite them, brain regions alight first here and then there
like vast nighttime conurbations seen from the air) there is no past: no
scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states
4 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture
(but “picture” is wrong, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former
states of things: things that once were, or may have been, the case.
That B-30 was huge, even what was left of it. The lost twin fin-and-
rudder section—those two oval tails—had stood nearly forty feet high.
The hangars where it had been assembled had been huge too, some of
the biggest interior spaces constructed up to that time, millions of
square feet, and flung up in what seemed like all in a day; Van Damme
Aero had designed and built them and the government agreed to buy
them back when the war was over, though in the case of the B-30
buildings and shops there wasn’t a lot to buy back. The wide low town,
Henryville, spreading out to the southwest beyond the plant in straight
rows of identical units to house the workers, went up just as fast,
twenty or thirty units a day, about as solid as the forts and rocket ships
we’d later make of cardboard cartons with sawed-out windows and
doors. The prairie winds shook them and rattled their contents like
dice boxes. While it stood it was a wonder written about and photo-
graphed and marveled at almost as much as the Titans of the Air that
it was set up to serve; how clean, how new, how quickly raised, all
those identical short streets paved in a week, all those identical bunga-
lows, the story was told of a woman who found her own each day by
locating the ladder that workmen had left propped against the side of
it, until one day it was removed while she was gone, and when she
returned she wandered a long time amid the numbered and lettered
streets trying to orient herself, looking in windows at other people’s
stuff not much different from hers but not hers, unable to think of a
question she might ask that would set her on the way toward her own,
and the sun getting hot as it rose toward noon.
When the sun at last set on any given day (there weren’t really week-
ends in Henryville or at Van Damme Aero in those years) those on day
shift would return in the Van Damme yellow buses and be dropped off
at various central nodes, like the Community Center and the post
office; the buses would cycle around downtown Ponca too at certain
times and the workers would get off loaded down with grocery bags
from the Kroger. By eight or nine the air outside the bungalows was
cooler than the air inside, and people’d bring out kitchen chairs and
armchairs to sit in on what some people called the lawn, the strip of
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 5
pebbly dirt tufted with dry grass that ran between the street and the
front door, and open a beer or a soda pop. A Thursday night in May,
when the day shift was coming back and people were calling out the
open windows or turning their radios outward that way for the danc-
ing starting up in the still-hot street, Rollo Stallworthy brought out his
long-necked banjo and began the lengthy process of tuning it up, each
sour note stinging like a little pinprick. Rollo, foreman in Shop 128,
did this with great care and solemnity, same as he would finger your
finished control panel wiring or panel seals. Then almost when nobody
was interested at all in looking or listening to the process any longer
he’d start hammering on, a skeletal rattling of notes, and sing out stuff
that nobody’d ever heard of and that only seemed to resemble the corn-
ball music you expected. It was funnier because his expression never
changed behind the round glasses and that brush mustache like Jeff’s
in the funny papers.
“Teenie time-O
In the land of Pharaoh-Pharaoh
Come a rat trap pennywinkle hummadoodle rattlebugger
Sing song kitty wontcha time-ee-o!”
Horace Offen, called “Horse” for as long as anyone knew and for
almost as long as he himself could remember, sat at the rackety kitchen
table in the unit he shared with Rollo, his portable typewriter open
and a piece of yellow copy paper rolled in it. Horse almost never tried
to write in the heat of the frypan bungalow but on the way back from
the plant that day an idea had begun forming in his mind for a new
piece, a new kind of piece in fact, not just another press release about
how many million rivets, how many kids drank how many gallons of
milk in the nursery and how that milk came from the cows that ate the
hay that grew in the fields that went for miles beyond the plant’s perim-
eters—the “house-that-Jack-built” gimmick, a good idea you could use
only once, or once a year anyway—no this was something different,
something beyond all that, something maybe anybody could think up
(and Horse Offen knew that he tended to think up, all on his own, a lot
of good ideas that a lot of other writers had already thought up) but
which wouldn’t be easy to do really right, and was maybe beyond
6 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Horse’s powers—a thought he found at once chest-tightening and elat-
ing, like placing a bet bigger than you can afford to lose. The first lines
he had written on the yellow sheet looked brave and bold and just a
little anxious, the same as he felt:
I am Pax. Pax is my name, and in Latin my name means
Peace. I am not named for the peace that I bring, but for
the peace that I promise.
The hysterical fan on the counter waved back and forth over Horse
as he tapped the sweat-slippery keys of the typewriter. There was
nowhere, nowhere on earth he had been, as hot as this plain. Horse felt
lifeblood, precious ichor, extracted from his innermost being in the
salty drops that tickled his brows and the back of his neck.
In my belly I carry terrible weapons of war, and I will not
stint to use them against the warmakers. But with every
bomb dropped there comes a hope: that when the winds
of war on which I fly are stilled at last, there will never
again be death dropped from the air upon the cities, the
homes, and the hopes of men and women.
An awful pity took hold of Horse Offen, and a chill inhabited him.
What words could do; how rarely they did anything at all when he
employed them!
Belly was wrong. It made the bombs seem like turds. In my body.
Outside, the nightly ruckus was kicking up, Horse could hear a radio
or a gramophone and Rollo’s ridiculous banjo, the most inexpressive
musical instrument Man ever made. People calling from lawn to lawn,
bungalow to bungalow; laughter, noise. The ten thousand men and
women.
These things I know, although truthfully I have not yet
been born. When at last I come forth from the huge han-
gars where ten thousand men and women work to bring
me and the many others like me to birth, I will be the larg-
est and most powerful weapon of the air ever built, the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 7
latest child of all the thinkers and planners, the daredevil
pilots and the slide-rule engineers who made this nation’s
air industry. Yet I am a new generation. The Wright broth-
ers’ first flight was not longer than my wingspan of TK
feet. When the men and women with their hands and their
machines have given me wings, they will be so broad that
a Flying Fortress will be able to nestle beneath each one,
left and right.
Was that true? He thought it was. It would need some checking.
When he’d first started writing press releases at Van Damme and sub-
mitting copy to the Aero, the editor (little more than a layout man in
fact) had asked him what the hell this TK meant. Horse had worked
briefly for Luce (well he’d been tried out for a couple of months) and he
sighed and smiled patiently. TK means To Come. Information or fact
to come. Why T K then? Because that’s the way it’s done. The way the
big papers do it. Time. Life. Fortune.
The workers who build my growing body come from every
state in this nation, from great cities and little towns. They
come from the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Smok-
ies and the Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Green
Mountains, the White. They are men and women, Negro
and white, American Indian, Czech, Pole, Italian, Anglo-
Saxon. They are old and young, big and small, smart and
stupid
Inspiration was leaking away, and Horse was where he had been
before, writing what he had written before. But there was a place this
was meant to reach, Horse felt sure, whether he could reach it or not.
That voice speaking. Why did it seem to him female? Just because of
all those ships, those old frigates and galleons? He had almost written
to bring me and my sisters to birth.
They believe that they came here just because the work to
be done is here, because they’ve got sons or husbands at the
front, because they saw the ads in the papers and listened to
8 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
the President’s appeal, because they want this war to be
won, and most of all they want it over. And that is my
promise. But this they do not know: that it is I, Pax, who
have drawn them to me. Here to this place I drew them
before I existed, I drew them to me so that I could come to
be: and as I grew, I reached out to more and more, to every
corner of this nation, calling the ones who would rivet, and
weld, and draft, and wire, and seal, and
With a sudden cry Horse Offen yanked out from the typewriter the
yellow sheet, which parted as he pulled, leaving a tail behind. Oh God
what crap. What was he thinking? Outside the fun was rolling, sum-
moning Horse, offering a Lucky Lager, an It’s-It ice-cream bar. He
closed the lid of the typewriter and locked it shut.
A few units down, Pancho Notzing entertained the Teenie Weenies,
the ones anyway who hadn’t been moved to other shifts in the last
reshuffle of forces, which somewhat broke up that old gang o’ mine.
From an oddity of the settlement’s geometries, certain of the corner
units, like Pancho’s, had a wider spread of ground around them, so
Pancho’s was the place to wander to at day’s end. Pancho’d piled up
stones he’d found around the place left over from construction and
built a barbecue grill, topped with a rack of steel that had served some
function at the plant, airplane part, something, but that nobody seemed
to need or to miss when Pancho appropriated it. He burned branches
of blackjack oak, winter-broken and gnarly, that he picked up from the
roadsides, and lumber scavenged from the building sites. People
brought their meat rations, steaks and chickens and the odd out-of-
ration local rabbit, and Pancho slathered them with stuff he claimed
he’d learned to make on a hacienda in Old California long ago. Wear-
ing his hat and an apron over his gabardine pants, he flipped and slath-
ered and plopped the meats on platters and talked.
“Happiness,” he was saying to those waiting for meat. Cooking and
serving didn’t interfere with Pancho’s talk; nothing did. “I am a person
who knows people. I think I can say that. I’ve worked all my life. I take
man as he is: a creature of his needs and his desires. Nothing wrong
with it—I take no exception to it, even if I could. It seems to me that we
have no business telling people what they should or shouldn’t want.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 9
Happiness means meeting the desires a person has, not suppressing
them.”
“Happiness is a plate of ribs, Mr. Notzing,” said a young fellow,
raising his plate, sucking a greasy thumb.
“Have more,” said Pancho, flipping a rack and watching the happy
flames leap up. “Nobody in this present world has enough pleasure.
They feel it, too. The poor man never gets enough, and he hates the
rich man because the rich man supposedly gets his fill—but he doesn’t.
The rich are eternally afraid that the poor will take away what plea-
sures they have, they indulge themselves constantly but never feel
filled—they feel guilty. Meanwhile they hoard the wealth, more than
they can ever spend or use or eat or drink.”
“Are you saying,” Sal Mass chirped up, “Mr. Notzing, sir, are you
saying money don’t buy happiness?”
Pancho Notzing was immune to sarcasm. Those close enough to
hear her odd chirpy voice laughed. Old Sal.
Sal was the only one of the Teenie Weenies (except for her husband,
Al Mass) who really was one, and not only in the sense that she was an
actual midget. Ten years before she had played one of the little charac-
ters in a promotion for a canned food company; she’d flown, she said,
ten thousand miles and into three hundred airports, dressed as the
Lady of Fashion, her husband, Al, as the Cook, inviting people aboard
the Ford Trimotor they traveled in to look over the cans and packages
of food, the Pepper Pickles, the Chipped Beef, the Hearts of Wheat, the
Succotash, the Harvard Beets, the Soda Crackers. Handing out free
samples and little cookbooks. She knew she disappointed the children
who came, because the Teenie Weenies in the funny papers were really
teeny, no larger than your thumb, and she and Al were small but not
that small, and now and again she’d get a kick in the shins from some
kid who wanted her to be at least smaller than he was, which is what
all kids wanted she decided, though it didn’t explain why grown-ups
came and clambered into their plane and made much of them. What
Sal wanted was to fly the Ford herself, but no amount of solicitude, or
pleading, or showing off, or anything could get the pilot to do more
than laugh at her. Hell with him. Al just read the paper and smoked his
cigar and snorted. Hey, Hon, here we are in the funnies—see, this
week I try to figure out how to cut up a grape with a saw—Jesus. A
10 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
little later that food company fired them and from then on used a
couple of little kids instead for half the price. That was 1941, and Sal
and Al got hired by Van Damme Aero’s West Coast plant to work on
their A-21 Sword bombers, getting into the small spaces no one else
could get into and riveting. And their selling job went on too, as Sal
showed up again and again in company promotions, in the newsreels,
in Horse Offen’s stories, wearing her bandanna and miniature over-
alls. Al stayed just as mad as ever, midget mad—well, he was one of
those angry midgets she knew so well, he had a right, she paid no
attention. When Van Damme built this plant in the middle of nowhere
(Al’s characterization) and started on the B-30 there seemed at first no
need for midgets, the whole plane was open from end to end and no
space too small for a normal-size worker. But they accepted Sal and Al
anyway when they applied to go out to the new plant, which Sal
thought was white of them; Al just snorted.
“Well,” she said to Pancho, though not for him alone to hear, “I
guess happiness is overrated. Not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I’m no Utopian,” Pancho said. “I would never say so. I am a modest
fellow. I know better than to demand too much of this world. Noth-
ing’s perfect. You try to build the best world, the best society you can.
I am not a u topian but a best opian.”
All this time the moon had been rising into the cloudless air over
Henryville, nearly full and melon-shaped, huge and gold and then
whiter and smaller as it climbed. The sounds of the banjo, the radio
music, and the people’s voices moved with the sluggish air block to
block and reached into the bedroom where Prosper Olander sat on the
edge of Connie Wrobleski’s bed with a Lucky Lager of her husband’s
growing warm in his hand. He was listening to Connie, who was tell-
ing her story, which was in a way the story of how she happened to be
here in bed with Prosper. She’d stop often to say things like Oh jeez I
don’t know or I never expected this, that meant she was giving up
trying to explain herself, and at the same time keeping the door open
to going on, which in time after a sigh she did, only to stop again to
question herself or the world or Fate. Prosper listened—he did listen,
because what she had to say was new to him, the part that was proving
hard for her to say, and he liked her and wanted to know what she
thought—but always as he sat his eyes went to the pair of new crutches
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 11
now propped in the corner. Boy were they something beautiful, he
couldn’t get enough of an eyeful, they leaned together there gleaming
new, preening, proud. They had been built at the plant just for him by
machinists on their breaks, and they were, as far as Prosper knew, the
only pair like them in the world: slim strong light aluminum tubes with
hinged aluminum cuffs covered in leather to go around his forearms
and posts for his hands to grip, clad in hard rubber. They weighed
nothing. His poor underarms, eternally chafed from the tops of the old
wooden ones he had used for years—the parts of himself he felt most
sorry for, while everybody else felt sorry about his ski-jump spine and
marionette’s legs—the skin there was healing already.
“Oh if I don’t shut up I’m going to start crying,” Connie said. Con-
nie’s husband was in basic training a long way away, and he’d be off to
war most likely soon thereafter, and here was Prosper beside his wife
in his house, in nothing but his skivvies too; but there was no doubt in
Prosper’s mind that they two weren’t the only ones in Henryville, or
Oklahoma, or in these States, who were in similar circumstances. It
was the war, and the war work, and those circumstances wouldn’t last
forever, but just on this night Prosper seemed unable to remember or
imagine any others.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Connie.”
These crutches. Look at the slight dog-leg each one took in heading
for the ground, each different for his different legs. These crutches
were, what, they were angelic, they were spiritual in their weightless
strength and their quick helpful patience. God bless them. His own
invention. He tried not to show it, in the circumstances, but he couldn’t
help thinking that in a lot of ways he was a lucky man.
PART ONE
1
For a time after the war began, the West Coast would go dark every
night in expectation of air attacks. Who knew, now, how far the
Japs could reach, what damage they might be able to inflict? We
mounted citizen patrols that went up and down and made people
draw their shades, put out their lamps. The stores and bars along the
boardwalks and arcades that faced the ocean had to be equipped with
light traps, extra doors to keep the light inside. In cities all along the
Pacific we looked up from the darkened streets and saw for the first
time in years the stars, all unchanged. But every once in a while, star-
tled by some report or rumor, the great searchlights of the coastal bat-
teries—eight hundred million candlepower they said, whatever that
could mean—would come on and stare for a time out at the empty sea.
Then go off again.
Van Damme Aero was already in the business of building warplanes
before hostilities commenced, and after Pearl Harbor their West Coast
plant was fulfilling government contracts worth millions, with more
signed every month. A mile-square array of tethered balloons was sus-
pended just over Van Damme Aero’s ramifying works and its workers
like darkening thunderclouds, a summer storm perpetually hovering,
so that from above, from the viewpoint of a reconnaissance plane or a
bomber, the plant was effectually invisible. More than that: the sheds
16 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and yards and hangars not only seemed not to be there, they also
seemed to be something, or somewhere, else: for the topsides of all
those balloons had been painted as a landscape, soft rolling hills of
green and yellow, with here and there a silver lakelet and the brown
furrows of farmland, even (so they said down under it, who would
never see it and went on rumors) the roofs of a village, spire of a church,
red barns and a silo. A pastorale, under which round the clock the A-
21 Sword bombers were riveted and welded and fitted with engines and
wings, and the huge Robur cargo seaplanes were given birth to like
monster whales. Even when the danger of an invasion of the mainland
seemed to have passed (leaving us still jumpy and unsettled but at least
not cowering, not always looking to the sky at the whine of every Cub
or Jenny), every day the Van Damme Aero workers coming to work
dove under that landscape and it was hard not to laugh about it.
From the Van Damme shop floor where Al and Sal Mass then
worked with a thousand others you could see, if you knew where to
look, a bank of broad high dark windows behind which were the con-
ference and meeting rooms of the Van Damme directors. Guests (Army
Air Corps generals, government officials, union bosses) brought into
that wide low-ceilinged space, to look down upon the ceaseless activity
below—the windows faced the length of the shop, which seemed almost
to recede into infinite working distance—could feel superb, in com-
mand, and they would be awed as well, as they were intended to be.
On a day in the spring of 1942 the only persons assembled up in
there were the engineering and employment vice presidents and their
assistants, and Henry and Julius Van Damme. On a streamlined plinth
in the middle of the room was a model of a proposed long-range heavy
bomber that Van Damme Aero and the rest of the air industry and the
appropriate government agencies were trying to bring forth. Julius Van
Damme kept his back to the model, not wanting to be influenced
unduly by its illusory facticity, the very quality of it that kept his
brother Henry’s eyes on it. It was canted into the air, as though in the
process of taking a tight rising turn at full power. It wasn’t the largest
heavier-than-air flying thing ever conceived, but it would be the largest
built to date, if it were built, maybe excepting a few tremendous Van
Damme cargo seaplanes on the drawing boards; anyway it wasn’t a
tubby lumbering cargo plane but a long slim bomber, designed to inflict
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 17
harm anywhere in the world from bases in the continental United
States. It had been conceived even before December 1941, back when
Britain was expected to fall and there would be no forward bases any
closer to Germany than Goose Bay from which to run bombers. The
plane was designated (at the moment) XB-30, the X for experimental
or in plan. B-30 would be its model number in the complex rubric of
the American air forces. As yet it had no name. The Model Committee
was making a preliminary presentation of the latest mock-up and
specs. It was somewhat dim in the huge dark-brown room, the
brilliantly lit shop floor below giving more light than the torchères of
the office.
“In this configuration, six pusher twenty-six-cylinder R-400 Bee
air-cooled radials, each to drive a seventeen-and-a-half-foot three-
bladed propeller.” The chief of engineering made dashes at the model,
ticking off the features, his long black pencil like a sorcerer’s wand sum-
moning the B-30 into existence. “Wingspan’s increased now to 225 feet
with an area of, well, just a hair over 4,000 square feet, depending.”
“Depending on what?” Julius said, picking up a slide rule.
“I’ll be making that clear. The wing, as you see, a certain degree of
sweepback. Fuel tanks within the wings, here, here, each with a capac-
ity of 21,000 gallons. Wing roots are over seven feet thick and give
access to the engines for maintenance in flight.”
Julius unrolled the next broad blue sheet.
“Twin fin-and-rudder format, like our A-21 and the Boeing Domi-
nator now in plan, though lots bigger naturally, thirty-five-foot overall
height.” Here the engineer swallowed, as though he had told a lie, and
his eyes swept the faces of the others, Julius’s still bent over the sheets.
“Sixty-foot fuselage, circular cross section as you can see. Four bomb
bays with a maximum capacity of 40,000 pounds in this bottom
bumpout that runs nearly the length of the fuselage. Forward crew
compartment pressurized, and also the gunners’ weapons sighting
station compartment behind the bomb bay. A pressurized tube runs
over the bomb bays to connect the forward crew compartment to the
rear gunners’ compartment.”
“How big a tube?” Henry Van Damme asked.
“Just over two feet in diameter.”
Henry, who was claustrophobic, shuddered.
18 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Crew has a sort of wheeled truck they can slide on to go from one
end to the other,” said the engineer.
For a while they gazed at it, the paper version and the model still
climbing. The dome of the forward crew compartment, pierced with a
multitude of Plexiglas panels, swelled from the slim body of the fuse-
lage like a mushroom cap from its stem but smoothed away under-
neath. A snake’s head, a.
“I hate the pusher engines,” Henry said. “They make the ship look
dumb.”
“They’re necessary to get the damn thing off the ground,” Julius
said, turning back to the specs unrolled before him. “Just that little bit
more lift.”
“I know why they’re necessary,” Henry said. “I just think necessary
should be elegant as well, and if it’s not it means trouble later.”
Julius, without nameable expression, raised his eyes from the rolls
of specs to his brother.
“Might mean trouble later,” Henry said to him. “Possible trouble.
Often does.”
“Oh I don’t know,” Julius said. He sat back in his chair and felt for
the pipe in his vest pocket. “I remember Ader’s Avion back a long time
ago. That day at Satory. How elegant that was.”
“Yes,” Henry said. “The Avion.”
“Piss elegant,” said Julius. His lack of expression had not altered.
To the chief of engineering he said, “The Avion looked like a bat.
Exquisite. Even folded its wings back like one, to rest.” Julius made the
gesture. “Only trouble, it couldn’t fly.”
“Well I hate to tell you what this one looks like,” Henry said.
Julius turned then from the specs and gazed, deadpan, at the absurdly
elongated fuselage, with its swollen head and the two big ovals at its
root.
2
The day that Henry Van Damme and his brother had spoken of was
a day when Henry was twelve and Julius ten, a day in October of
1897, when following their tutor and their mother, young and
beautifully dressed and soon to die, they came out of the Gare
du Nord in Paris and got into a taxicab to be driven to a brand-new
hotel in the Rue St.-Philippe-du-Ruel (their father liked new hotels, as
he did motor cars and telephones). Waiting for them at the desk, as
they had hoped and expected, was a large stiff envelope, and the boys
insisted that their tutor immediately set up the gramophone that went
everywhere with them in its own leather box. Their mother had diffi-
culty even getting them out of their wool coats and hats before they sat
down in front of the machine. Jules was the one who cranked it up
with the slender Z-shaped crank of lacquered steel and ebony; Henry
(whose name was Hendryk in the Old World) was the one who slit the
seals of the envelope and drew out carefully the Berliner disc of cloudy
zinc. He knew he was not to touch the grooves of its surface but it
seemed a deprivation hard to bear: the pads of his fingers could sense
the raised ridges of metal as though longing for them.
Their tutor affixed the disc to the plate of the gramophone and
slipped the catch that allowed it to rotate. It was one of only a handful
in existence, though the boys’ father was confident of changing that:
20 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
he, like Berliner, could see a day not far off when communication by
discs small enough to fit in a breast pocket or slip into an envelope,
playable on machines that would become as common as telephones,
would bring the voices of loved ones (and the instructions of bosses
and officials too) anywhere in the world right to our ears, living let-
ters.
The tutor placed the stylus on the disc’s edge, and it was swept into
the grooves. “My dear boys,” they heard their father’s voice say, speak-
ing in English with his distinctive but unplaceable accent. Hendryk felt
his brother, Jules, who sat close beside him bent to the gramophone’s
horn, shiver involuntarily at the sound. “I have some good news that I
think will interest you. I’ll bet you remember a day five years ago—
Jules, my dear, you were only five—when you saw Monsieur Ader fly
his Avion, the ‘Eolus,’ at Armainvilliers. What a day that was. Well,
next week he is to make a test flight of his latest machine, the Avion III,
called ‘Zephyr.’ The flight—if the thing does fly—will be at the army’s
grounds at Satory, on the fourteenth of this month, which if my calen-
dar is correct will be three days after you hear this. It is a beautiful
machine. Monsieur Ader’s inspiration is the bat, as you know, and not
the bird. Take the earliest morning train to Versailles and a carriage
will meet you. All my love as usual. This is your father, now ceasing to
speak.” The stylus screeched against the disc’s ungrooved center, and
the tutor lifted it off.
“And what,” he asked the boys, “do we see in the name of this new
machine?”
“Avion is a thing that flies, like a bird,” said Hendryk. “Avis, a
bird.”
“Zephyr is wind,” said Jules. “Breeze.” His hands described gentle
airs. “Can we listen again?”
Henry Van Damme and his brother were Americans, born in Ohio of an
American mother, but their father—though he spent, on and off, a
decade or more in the States—was European, a Dutch businessman.
He disliked that term, which seemed to name a person different from
himself, but Dutch alternatives were worse— handelaar, zakenman—
redolent of strong cigars and evil banter and low tastes. If he could he
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 21
would have described himself as a dreamer; he wished that entrepre-
neur meant in French what it had come to mean in English, the glam-
orous suggestion of risk and romance.
His sons grew up on trains and steamships, speaking French or
Dutch or English or all three at once, a compound language they would
use for years to keep their secrets. Their education was conducted in
motion, so to speak, and staged as though by an invisible mentor-magi-
cian as a series of adventures and encounters the point of which seemed
to be to discover why they had occurred, and what each had to do with
the preceding ones. At least that’s how the boys made sense of it—they
worshiped their father, and their young British tutor amiably turned
their attempts at exegesis into standard lessons in mathematics or lan-
guage.
Eudoxe Van Damme (he had been christened Hendryk, like his son
and his father, but found the name unappealing) was a large investor in
mechanical and scientific devices and schemes, about three-quarters of
which failed or evaporated, but one or two of which had been so spec-
tacularly successful that Van Damme now seemed impervious to finan-
cial disaster. He had a quick mind and had trained it in science and
engineering; he could not only discern the value (or futility) of most
schemes presented to him but also could often make suggestions for
improvements that didn’t annoy the inventors. His son Hendryk, large
and optimistic, was like him; Jules was slighter and more melancholy,
like his mother, whom he would miss lifelong.
The Berliner discs weren’t the only sound recording device Van
Damme had taken an interest in. As a young man he had assembled a
consortium of other young men with young heads and hearts to develop
the phonautograph of Scott, the machine that produced those ghostly
scratchings on smoked films representing (or better say resulting from)
sound amplified and projected by a horn. It could even produce pic-
tures of the human voice speaking, which Scott had called logographs.
The great problem with the Scott apparatus was that although it pro-
duced what was provably a picture of sound, the sound itself could not
be recovered from the picture. Van Damme was interested in this prob-
lem—he was hardly alone in that, for problems of representation, mod-
eling, scalability, were absorbing the attention of engineers and
mathematicians worldwide just then—but he was even more interested
22 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
in the claim that the machine might be able to receive and amplify
sounds—and voices—from the other world, a claim that Van Damme
spent a good deal of time thinking how to establish, or at least investi-
gate. His money and his support did seem to have results: a revamped
phonautograph, though shut up alone in a carefully soundproofed
room, had nevertheless produced films showing the distinctive traces
of human voices. When at length the problem of retrieving from the
Scott films the sounds that had left their shadows there (a process
requiring great delicacy and never truly satisfactory) Van Damme saw
to it that these logographs from the soundproof room were also pro-
cessed: and what certainly seemed to be human voices could indeed be
heard, though far less distinctly than the ones caught in the usual way.
Van Damme told his sons that it sounded like the striving but unintel-
ligible voices of spastics.
Unfortunately the more reliable gramophones of Berliner caught
nothing in soundproof rooms but the noise of their own operation.
These enterprises took time and travel, but it was above all flight—
heavier-than-air, man-carrying flight—that most engaged Eudoxe Van
Damme’s imagination and his money in those years. Hendryk and
Jules arrived in Paris in that autumn of 1897 from England, where
with their tutor they had visited Baldwyns Park in Kent and seen
Hiram Maxim’s aircraft attempt to get off the ground. What a thing
that was, the largest contraption yet built to attempt heavier-than-air
flight, powered by steam, with a propeller that seemed the size of a
steamship screw. Old white-bearded Hiram Maxim, inventor of the
weapon still called by his name around the world, and builder of the
hugest wind tunnel in existence. That July day when the boys watched,
it actually got going so fast it broke the system of belts and wires tying
it down like Gulliver, tore up the guardrails, and with propellers beat-
ing like mad and the mean little steam engines boiling went rocketing
at a good thirty or forty miles an hour, and almost—almost!—gained
the air, old Hiram’s white beard tossed behind him and the crew
knocked about. It was impossible not to laugh in delight and terror. If
M. Ader’s delicate beings of silk and aluminum rods were rightly
named for gods of breath and wind, that one of Maxim’s should have
been called Sphinx—it was about the size of the one in Egypt and in
the end as flightless, though Maxim wouldn’t admit that and later
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 23
claimed he’d felt the euphoria of earth-leaving and flown a short dis-
tance that day.
M. Ader too would remember the day at Satory differently than
others would. Eudoxe Van Damme met his boys and their tutor at the
field at Satory, drizzly breezy October and chilly, not like the blue into
which Hiram Maxim had thrust himself. Van Damme looked as ele-
gant as always, even in a large brown ulster; his soft fedora at an angle,
waxed mustaches upright. More than once he had been mistaken in
train stations or hotel lobbies for the composer Puccini. Around the
field gathered in knots were French Army officers, M. Ader’s backers.
As Maxim did, these Frenchmen expected the chief use of “manflight,”
as Maxim called it, would be war.
“I can’t say I think much of his preparations here,” Eudoxe told his
sons as they followed after his quick determined footsteps over the
damp field. “You see the track on which the machine will run. Observe
that the track is circular— M. Ader will start with the wind at his back,
presumably, but as he rounds there and there the wind will be first
athwart, then at his head. Ah but look, do look!”
The Avion III “Zephyr” was unfolding now on its stand. Dull day-
light glowed through its silk skin as though through a moth’s wing. Its
inspiration was indeed the bat—the long spectral fingerbones on which a
bat’s wing is stretched modeled by flexing struts and complex knuckles.
Tiny wheels like bat’s claws gripped the track. Incongruous on its front
or forehead, the stacks of two compact black steam engines. “He claims
to be getting forty-two horsepower from those engines, and they weigh
less than three hundred pounds,” Eudoxe cried, hurrying toward the
craft, holding his hat, his boys trailing after him.
The attempt was a quick failure. Fast as it rolled down its track it
could not lift off. Like a running seabird its tail lifted, its wings
stretched, but it wouldn’t rise. Then those contrary winds caught it and
simply tipped it gently off its weak little wheels to settle in the damp
grass.
In the few photographs taken of the events at Satory that day,
Eudoxe Van Damme is the small figure apart from the caped military
officers, facing the disaster, back to the camera, arms akimbo to
express his disgust, and the two boys beside him, their arms extended
as though to help the Avion to rise.
24 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Now, boys,” said their father in the train compartment, “what can
we see to be the primary error of M. Ader?”
“Copying the look of flying things,” said Hendryk.
“But not . . .”
“Not their, their—not their reasons.”
Eudoxe laughed, delighted with this answer. “Their reasons!”
“He means,” Jules said, “the principles. It can’t fly just because it
looks like something that can. Leonardo thought that was so, and he
was wrong too, that if a thing has wings that look like a bird’s . . .”
“Or a bat’s . . .”
“Then they will function in the same way,” said the tutor, who
tended to get impatient and pony up the answers the boys were fishing
for.
“Very well,” said Eudoxe. “Of course just because it resembled a
bat, or a pterosaur, did not necessarily mean it would not fly. And what
other error, related to that first one, did we see?”
“It was badly made,” said Jules.
“It was very well made,” said their father. “The fabrication was
excellent. My God! The vanes of the propellers, if that was what those
fans were supposed to be—bamboo, were they, interleaved with alumi-
num and paper and . . .”
“Scale,” said Hendryk.
Eudoxe halted, mouth open, and then smiled upon his son, a foxy
smile that made them laugh.
“It’s too big, ” cried Jules.
“Ah my boys,” said Eudoxe Van Damme. “The problem of scale.”
“The giants of Galileo,” the tutor put in, with a reminding forefinger
raised. “Who could not walk without breaking their legs, unless their
legs were the size of American sequoias. We have done the equations.”
“Weight increases as the cube of the linear dimensions,” Jules said.
But that principle was a simple one, known to every bridge builder
and ironworker now; the harder concept of making models that modeled
not simply the physical relations of a larger object but also that object’s
behavior was still to be solved. Ostwald had not yet published his paper
“On Physically Similar Systems,” wherein he asked a question that would
haunt Julius Van Damme lifelong—if the entire universe were to be
shrunk to a half, or a quarter, of its present size, atoms and all, would it
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 25
be possible to tell? What would behave differently? Helmholtz’s dimen-
sionless numbers could relate the motions of small dirigibles to great
unwieldy ones such as had never been (and might never be) made. But
the small flying “bats” like those the Van Damme boys played with
worked by twisted rubber strings that turned a screw, craft that might
carry miniature people on tiny errands in toyland, always failed when
scaled up to carry actual gross fleshly people. Something was wrong.
“Poor Monsieur Pénaud,” said Eudoxe Van Damme, and the boys
knew they were to hear again the tale of the day when Eudoxe Van
Damme saw the planophore and its inventor. “I was a child, your age,
Hendryk. What a day it was, a beautiful day in summer, the Jardin des
Tuileries—I could hear the music of the fair. An announcement had
been made—I don’t know where—that Monsieur Pénaud would con-
duct an experimental flight of his new device. A crowd had collected,
and we waited to see what would happen.”
Van Damme paused there, to extract a cigar from the case in his
pocket, which he examined without lighting.
“And what happened, Papa?” the boys asked, as they knew they
were supposed to.
“I saw flight,” said Eudoxe. “The first winged craft that was heavier
than air, pulled by a screw propeller, stabilized by its design, that flew
in a straight line. It flew, I don’t remember, a hundred and fifty feet.
Flight! There was only one drawback.”
The boys knew.
“It was only two feet long.”
The boys laughed anyway.
M. Pénaud had come out from a carriage that had brought him onto
the field. The crowd murmured a little as he came forth—those who
didn’t know him—because it could be seen that he was somehow dis-
abled, he walked with great difficulty using a pair of heavy canes; an
assistant came after him, carrying the planophore. M. Pénaud himself—
slight, dark, sad—turned the rubber strings as the assistant steadied the
device and counted. The strings were tightened 240 turns—that number
remained in Van Damme’s memory. When it was fully wound, M.
Pénaud—held erect by the assistant from behind, who gently put his
arms around his waist, as though in love or comradeship—lifted and
cast off the planophore, at the same time releasing the rubber strings.
26 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
The craft dipped at first, and the crowd made a low sound of awed
trepidation, but then it rose again, and so did the crowd’s general voice,
and it flew straight and true. The crowd began to cheer, though M.
Pénaud himself stood motionless and unsurprised. Eudoxe Van Damme
by his nurse’s side found himself as moved by the inventor as the inven-
tion, the flight over the earth less affecting than the crippled man just
barely able to hold himself up and keep from lying supine upon it.
Well, the world thought that M. Pénaud had invented a wonderful
toy, and so he had. But he believed he had discovered a principle and had
no interest in toys. He thought he could scale up the planophore to carry
a man, or two men. “If I’d been twenty years older, I’d have helped. I’d
have known he was right. I’d have come to his aid.” The Société Fran-
çaise de Navigation Aérienne, which had praised the planophore, gave
Pénaud no real help. He asked the great dirigibilist Henri Giffard, who
first encouraged and then ignored him. And one day in 1880 M. Pénaud
packed all of his drawings and designs and models into a wooden box
shaped, unmistakably, like a coffin, and had it delivered to M. Giffard’s
house. Then he took his life. “He was not more than thirty years old.”
The story was done. The principle was enunciated: what is small
may work, what is large may not, and not for the reasons of physics
alone, though those may underlie all others. The boys were silent.
“Oddly enough,” Eudoxe Van Damme said then, “Giffard himself
committed suicide not two years later. And still we do not fly.” He lit
his cigar with care; he seemed, to his elder son, to be standing on the
far side of a divide that Hendryk would himself one day have to cross,
because he could just now for the first time perceive it: on that far side
there was enterprise, and failure; possibility and impossibility; cigars,
power, and death. “It may be, you know,” he said to the boys, “that we
may one day solve the problem of how it is that birds fly, and bats; and
at the same time, in the same solution, prove also that we can never do
it ourselves. How tragic that would be.”
Of course the problem was solved, it did not exclude mankind, and
Eudoxe Van Damme lived to see it solved, though by then he was
largely indifferent to a success like that.
In the days after the Great War, when the Wright brothers planned
joint ventures with the Van Damme brothers, ventures that somehow
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 27
never came to fruition, the Wrights used to talk about how they had
played (“experimented” they always said, those two didn’t play) with
those rubber-string-driven bats that Hendryk and Jules were sending
aloft, at the same time, not far from the Wrights’ Ohio home. The
Wrights, though, weren’t simply marveling but trying to figure out
what caused the bats to behave so differently at different sizes. The
machines, as willful and pertinacious as living things, as liable to fail-
ure, beating aloft in the summer twilights.
It was odd how many pairs of brothers had advanced the great
quest. So often one luminous brave gay chance-taker, one careful wor-
ried pencil-and-paper one, issuing warnings, trying to keep up. The
Lilienthals, fussy Gustav and his wild brother Otto, who not long
before the Van Damme brothers watched the Avion III not fly, killed
himself in a man-bearing kite: Gustav was absent and thus had not
done the safety drill he always did. Hiram Maxim had a brother,
Hudson, who resented and plotted against him. The Voisin brothers.
The Montgolfiers, for the matter of that, back in the beginning. The
Wrights: Wilbur the daredevil, so badly hurt in a crash when careful
Orville had not been there to watch out for him. Never the same after.
And the Van Dammes.
Henry sometimes wondered if there was something about brother-
hood itself that opened the secret in the end. For what the Wrights
learned, and learned from gliders, and from M. Pénaud’s planophores
too, was that a flying machine, so far from needing to be perfectly and
completely stable, was only possible if it was continually, controllably,
un stable, like a bicycle ridden in three dimensions: an ongoing argu-
ment among yaw, pitch, roll, and lift, managed moment to moment by
a hand ready to make cooperation between the unpredictable air and
the never-finished technologies of wood, power, and wire. It was a
partnership, a brotherhood. There never was a conquest of the air. The
air would not let itself be conquered, and didn’t need to be.
Madame Van Damme, née Gertie Pilcher of Toledo, died of peritonitis
aboard the Bulgarian Express on her way to meet her husband in Con-
stantinople. The train was passing through remote country when she
was taken, and a decision had to be made whether to stop the train and
take the woman by carriage to a local hospital that would be unlikely
28 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to treat her properly even if it could be reached, or race forward as fast
as the tracks could be cleared to Philippopolis, where an ambulance
would be waiting. Her own last words, before she lapsed into fevered
nonsense, were a plea that they not put her off into the forest and the
night, and though that could be discounted, no one—the conductors,
the porters, the medical student found on board who had diagnosed
her burst appendix—felt capable of contradicting her. She died just as
the brakes were applied at the station approach, the cry of steel on steel
and the gasp of escaping steam accompanying her passing spirit. The
two boys, who had been put in another compartment after kissing
their mother’s hot wet cheeks, awoke at the sound.
It seemed somehow appropriate to them, in the years that followed,
that their education in motion stopped with their mother’s death. They
began then to be enrolled in stationary schools, where they studied the
same things every day along with other boys. There were no more Ber-
liner discs delivered to their train compartment or waiting for them at
the desks of hotels; their father’s letters became less frequent though
not less loving, as he spent more and more time resting at resorts and
spas where nothing ever happened. The boys began their studies
together, both committed to science and engineering, but soon drifted
apart; Jules the better scholar of the two, chewing through difficult
curricula at great speed and asking for more, Hendryk preferring
friendships, sports, reading parties in the mountains.
Then in 1904 Jules went to Germany to study energetics with the
great Boltzmann at the University of Vienna. Hendryk left school and
took up his father’s enterprises, trying (he understood later) to reawaken
his father’s passions by asking to be educated in his business, insofar as
it could be learned—Eudoxe Van Damme had apparently continually
flouted in his actual dealings the principles he tried to teach his son,
indeed this seemed to be the greatest lesson, but one that could only be
grasped after all the others had been learned. Still merry, still beauti-
fully appointed, Eudoxe Van Damme resisted his son’s attempts to
interest him in new adventures: his heart had died on that station plat-
form in Bulgaria and would not be awakened.
Jules worshiped Herr Professor Doktor Boltzmann, fighting to be
admitted to his classes, never missing one of his public lectures. He
wrote to Hendryk: “B. says the problem of flight will not be solved by
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 29
endless experiments, nor will it be solved by work in theoretical
mechanics—the problem’s just too hard. He says it will be solved by a
clear statement of principles, and a new formulation of what is at stake.
But that’s as far as I follow him.”
Perhaps to fend off Hendryk’s attempts to bring him back into the
world, Eudoxe Van Damme decided that his older son too needed more
mechanical and technical training, and found a place for him at the
University of Manchester. Hendryk agreed to go, if he could work in
one way or another on the problems of heavier-than-air flight. The solu-
tion to the problem—which in Hendryk’s mind would, when found, lift
his father’s heart as well as the world’s—was about to be reached in
America, in fact in the boys’ dimly remembered home state, though for
a long time Europe didn’t hear about it, and when told of it wasn’t con-
vinced. At Manchester the engineering course was both practical and
theoretical, there were both workshops and seminars, everyone talked
physics and machine tools equally, and in the summers you could go up
to the kite-flying station at Glossop on the coast and build huge kites to
sail the cold sea winds. The great topic was how to power a man-bearing
kite with an engine, and there was much discussion of the pretty little
French Gnome engine—those were the days when engines, like flying
machines, were so different from one another they went by names.
There were Americans and Germans at Glossop, flying the kites devel-
oped by the American westerner and naturalized Britisher Samuel Cody,
a kinsman (so he asserted) of Buffalo Bill. A German-speaking young
man whom Hendryk befriended flew Cody-type kites by day and
worked on the equations for a new propeller design by night. “He is
called Ludwig,” Hendryk wrote to Jules. “Though it seems his family
call him Lucky, so I do too, though it annoys him. In fact he is Austrian
not German, a family of rich Jews. He too wanted to study with
Boltzmann. He’s told me he envies you. How strange that you have gone
to Vienna to study while I befriend a Viennese here! We talk about
flight, language, mathematics—he talks and I listen. He has two broth-
ers—no—he had two brothers, who both committed suicide. Imagine.
He told me this after many glasses of beer and has not since spoken of
it. Write to me, Jules, and tell me how you are.”
That summer the Wrights brought their flier to France, and after
that there could be no longer any doubt. The great race of the nations
30 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
had been won by the least likely of them, the one whose government
and armed forces had invested next to nothing; won by two bicycle
builders without university degrees. At Glossop the students and pro-
fessors pored over the report and the photographs in L’Aérophile, but
Hendryk’s new friend Lucky seemed to lose interest in the pursuit of
further advances; Hendryk worried for him. It was as though he felt an
equation had been solved once and for all. He put aside his kite models
and his propeller design. He told Hendryk that on an impulse he had
written to Bertrand Russell at Cambridge to ask if perhaps he could
study philosophy there. If he was accepted, he said, he would be a phi-
losopher; if he proved to be an idiot, he would become an aeronaut.
Hendryk got him to apply for a patent on his propeller design, thinking
he might put some Van Damme money into its development; he shook
Lucky’s hand farewell at the train station.
What the young Austrian had seen as a conclusion, Hendryk Van
Damme knew to be a beginning: he felt that sensation of elation and
danger and glee that comes when an incoming sea wave, vast heavy
and potent, lifts you off your feet and tosses you shoreward. He had
had no letter in months from his brother, not even in response to the
Wright news; then came word at the university that the great Boltzmann
had committed suicide, no one knew why. Still no letter for Hendryk
from Jules. Hendryk left Manchester the next week, caught the boat-
train from London, thinking of the pilots of the purple twilight cross-
ing the narrow seas one day soon, surely soon now, and in Paris
boarded the express for Vienna. At the last address he had for his
brother he ran up the stairs and knocked on the door, but the concierge
below called up after him to say that the young Dutchman was gone.
Just as Lucky had never after spoken of his brothers, Henry and
Julius never after spoke of the succeeding days. How Hendryk searched
the city for his brother, growing more alarmed; sat in the Schönbrun
park fanning himself with his hat (he was already running to fat and
worried about his heart) and thinking where to look next; tracing,
from the bank his brother used and the engineering students at the
university, a way to a certain low street in the Meidling district, and a
desolate room. Jules had descended there because he had no money,
because his father had sent none, had sent none because Jules had asked
for none, because he had ceased to answer his father’s letters. Hendryk
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 31
found him shoeless and shirtless on his bed, in his cabinet only a vial
of prussic acid he was unable (he told Hendryk later that night) to
muster the energy to open and swallow.
Henry was right, that there was an industry to build; right that he would
not win his share in it without his brother by his side, to keep his craft
in trim. It wasn’t surprising that all his life from that time on Henry
Van Damme thought of suicide as the enemy, a universal force that
Freud had discovered (such was Henry’s understanding of what he’d
learned of Freud’s ideas, beginning that year in Vienna); nor that, close
as it was bound to brotherhood and to death, flight nevertheless seemed
to him to be the reply, or the counterforce: suicide was the ultimate
negation, but flight the negation of negation itself.
The doctors at the brand-new Landes-Heil und Pflegeanstalt für
Nerven- und Geisteskranke where Jules was treated would not explain
to Hendryk and Eudoxe what Jules suffered from, though they took
grave credit when it passed. Jules wouldn’t say what had occurred
between him and the doctors: he would only say that whatever had
been so wrong with him was now all gone forever. The brothers were
from then on inseparable in business, their contrary qualities making
them famous, nearly folkloric, figures in the capitalism of the new cen-
tury, its Mutt and Jeff, its Laurel and Hardy, its Paul Bunyan and
Johnny Inkslinger. Henry, so big, so ready for anything—he loved
speedboats and race cars, ate what the press always described as Lucul-
lan feasts, married three times, walked away from the crash of his first
Robur clipper singed and eyeglass-less and still grinning—was a match
made in the funny papers with unsmiling lean Julius, his eternal hard
collar and overstuffed document case, a head shorter than his brother.
When Van Damme Aero received the 1938 Collier Trophy for
achievement in aeronautics, Henry was seated at the luncheon next to
the President; he watched as the President lifted himself, or was lifted,
to a standing position to deliver a brief, witty speech in Henry’s honor.
Then an aide seated right behind the lectern, sensing that the President
was done almost before his peroration was finished, half-rose and
unobtrusively put a cane into the President’s hand, and helped him
again to his seat, slipping the locks of his braces while everyone looked
32 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
elsewhere or at the President’s radiant grin. He lifted his old-fashioned
to Henry, who raised his glass of water in response.
“Mr. President,” Henry said, “I believe you would enjoy flying.”
“I couldn’t do it,” the President said, with dismissive modesty, still
grinning.
“You sail, don’t you, Mr. President?”
“I do, and I enjoy it. Always have.”
“Well, air is a fluid. Managing a craft in the air is in many ways the
same.”
“You don’t say.”
“I assure you.”
It wasn’t really so—after all a boat skims the surface of one fluid
while passing through another that is fluid only in a different sense—
but at that moment it seemed true to Henry Van Damme. It seemed
important to say.
“The controls require a lot of foot power, as I understand,” the
President said mildly, affixing a Camel in a long cigarette holder.
“A technical detail, easily altered.”
“Well.” He tossed his head back, that way he had, delighted in him-
self, the world, his perceptions. “I shall put it to my cabinet. I’m sure
they’ll be happy to see me barnstorming come election time. You build
me a plane, Mr. Van Damme, and I will fly it.”
“Done, Mr. President.”
Henry spent some time with his engineers, designing a small light
plane, neat as an R-class racing yacht, that could be controlled entirely
by hands, and delivered it to the White House two months before Pearl
Harbor. When Henry and Julius flew to Washington in 1942 to propose
what would become the Aviation Board—the great consortium of all
the major aircraft builders to share their plants and workers and skills
and even their patents among themselves so as to build a fleet of planes
such as the world had never seen, and in record time too, as if there
were any relevant records—it seemed not the time to mention that pretty
little craft. Henry was more tempted to prescribe some remedies he
knew about for the weary and hard-breathing man who brought them
into his office and spoke with undiminished cheer to them, before turn-
ing them over to the appropriate cabinet secretary. Henry said later to
Julius in the washroom: The man’ll be dead within the year.
3
Glaive,” said Julius.
“ ‘Glaive’? ” Henry asked. “What the hell is that?”
Julius consulted the papers before him. The vice presidents
for Sales and Employment waited for the brothers’ attention to
return to the actual subject of the meeting. “It’s a kind of poleax,” he
said. “Like a sword on a stick.” He waved an imaginary one before
him, striking down an enemy.
“I don’t know,” Henry said, lacing his fingers together over his mid-
riff. “Let’s not give it a name people have to look up.”
Julius shrugged, to say he had sought out the possible names Henry
had asked for and wouldn’t dispute Henry if Henry had an idea he
liked better. All the Van Damme Aero military craft had the names of
ancient weapons: the A-21 Sword, the F-10 Spear.
“Mace,” Julius said. “Halberd.”
Henry stood; his special chair, designed by himself to accommodate
and conform to his movements, seemed to shrug him forth and then
resume its former posture. He approached the wide windows, canted like
an airship’s, that looked down on the floor where the A-21s moved in
stately procession, growing more complete at every station, though so
slowly it seemed they stood still. Even through two layers of glass he could
hear the gonglike sounds, the thuds and roars, the sizzle of arc welders.
34 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You won’t be able to build it like you build these,” he said. “It’s
too damn big. You’ll have to go back to the old way. Bring the people
to the plane, a team for each. It’ll cost more, take more time.”
The vice presidents were solemn.
“Nor can we build it here,” Henry said. He’d said that before. “Is
there land we can extend into?”
“Not contiguous to this plant.”
“How about the farms and fields?” The present plant had been built
where once a walnut orchard had stood; they’d said about it then that
the orchard had taken thirty years to grow and had come down in
thirty minutes.
“Almost all of them are producing for the armed forces now,” Julius
said. “Making a mint. If you want them you’d have to get the govern-
ment to invoke eminent domain. Could take a year.”
“Very well, you’re right, it’s a bad idea, take too long, cost too
much. We just have to find someplace new, someplace we can throw up
a lot of big buildings very quick.”
“Very quick,” Julius said. “I’m already working on it.”
“Lots of land out there,” Henry said, motioning eastward. “Across
the mountains. Land that’s flat. Empty. Cheap.”
Julius sighed, and made a note, or pretended to.
The vice president for Employment crossed his legs and slipped a
folder from his case, signaling his readiness to report. Henry turned to
him.
“If you’re planning a very large expansion,” he said, “we’ll have a
labor problem. It’s hard enough to collect ’em in the cities. If you head
out into the desert someplace, I don’t know.”
“Not the desert, ” said Henry mildly.
“We’re doing all right now,” the VP said, looking at his numbers.
“But it’s tight. Men with skills are the tough job. Otherwise we’re
making do, with women, the coloreds, the oldsters, the defectives, the
handicaps. We’ll soon be running out of them.”
“Go out into the highways and the byways,” Henry said. “Bring in
the lame, the halt, and the blind.”
“No place to house them if we can find them,” the VP responded.
Henry Van Damme could just at that moment see, down on the
floor many feet below, two men gesturing to each other strangely, but
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 35
not speaking. Deaf men, he realized, talking with their hands. He
remembered reading about them in the last issue of the Aero. No prob-
lem for THESE fellows communicating on a noisy shop floor!
“We’ll build them houses,” Henry said. “Houses are easy. Sell them
on the installment plan, no money down. Or rent them. Surely we can
design a little house. Or get a plan someplace. Build it cheap.”
He turned to face them all, though mostly they saw his broad sil-
houette against the windows.
“Clinics,” he said. “Free clinics. Dentists. A staffed nursery, so the
ones with kids can come work. This isn’t hard. They’ll come if you give
them what they need.”
“You’d think,” said the Employment VP, who had a son in the Army
Air Corps, “they’d come to help win the damn war. Not ask for so
much at a time like this.”
“They’re just men,” Henry said. “Men and women. No reason to
blame them. They want what they need. We’ll get it for them. We can
and we ought to.”
On the floor now a piercing horn began to blow, not urgently but
imperiously, in a steady rhythm. Henry turned back to the windows to
watch; the line was about to move. The far doors slid apart, opening
onto the falling day. The last ship on the left end of the U-shaped track
was moved out, finished; a new unfinished one was poised to move in
on the right end. All the other ships moved down one place.
“Pax,” Henry said.
“What?” Julius looked at his brother.
“The name,” Henry said. “For this new plane. Not a sword or a
spear or a hammer or any weapon.”
“And why not?” Julius asked incuriously.
“It’s not going to be for war,” Henry said. “If the war even lasts
long enough for this plane to get in it, it’ll be the last one built. You
know it.”
Julius said nothing.
“It’ll be a peacemaker, peacekeeper. Or nothing.”
“All right,” Julius said, uncapping his pen.
“Pax,” Henry said. “Remember.”
4
Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive strikes, none
greater than the fabulous Burbank pool discovered in the Osage
country. Around there in the 1940s we could still get those
comic postcards of hook-nosed Indians piling their blanket-
wrapped squaws and papooses into Pierce-Arrows bought with their
royalties. In Ponca City, oil money built the pretty Shingle Style man-
sions, the great stony castle on the hill, the Spanish Oriental movie
palace, the new high school (1927), and the straight streets of houses
that by the time the war started were beginning to look settled and
placid, tree shaded and shrubbery enclosed. Beside the proud little city
another one arose—the towered and bright-lit one of the refinery. Its
tank farm spread to the southwest, uniform gray drums picked out
with lights. All day and night the flare stacks burned off gases, some-
times blowing off a bad batch with a noise like thunder and lighting
the night, millions of cubic feet, “darkness visible,” as though the city
beyond was a nice neighborhood of Hell. By the time the Van Damme
brothers settled on the empty land outside the city for their plant and
town, the oil boomers were dead or bought out, the oil was just a
steady flow, the natural gas was firing the town’s ovens and refrigera-
tors, but the smell of crude and the wastes of the refinery lay always
over the place; locals had ceased to notice, or liked to say they had.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 37
Van Damme Aero worked out an arrangement with the Continental
Oil Company, taking up land a couple of miles to the north of the refin-
ery dotted at wide intervals with the black nodding pumps called grass-
hoppers. A hundred blue Elcar trailers came first, bringing workers and
engineers and surveyors to build the settlement that Julius jokingly called
Henryville and then wasn’t able to change, not to West Ponca or Bomber
City or Victoryburg. It was Henryville. A spur line of the Atchison,
Topeka and Santa Fe was laid to reach the Van Damme acreage, and
while huge Bucyrus steam cranes, brought in on railcars, lifted and fitted
into place the steel beams of the plant buildings, surveyors laid out the
streets, all lettered north to south and numbered east to west, with
hardly a natural feature to be got around, though Henry Van Damme
insisted that as many trees as possible be left, to breathe out healthful
ozone. Even before the sidewalks were laid or the tar of the roadways
was hard the houses started to arrive in boxcars, and the workers
offloaded them and they went up like things built in a film where magi-
cally everything takes but a second, people flit like demons, and build-
ings seem to assemble themselves. The Homasote company’s Precision
Junior was the model chosen, fifty-six of them a day sent out ready to go,
all the lumber—sills, plates, joints, rafters—cut to size and numbered
like toys to be assembled on Christmas Eve for Junior and Sis. Homasote:
a miracle building material made from compressed newspaper, heavy
and fireproof and gray, strangely cold to the touch. It took two and a
half days to set a house up on its concrete slab, then they’d tarpaper the
flat roof, hook up the water and electricity, and spray the outside walls
with paint mixed with sand to give the stucco effect. Metal-framed win-
dows that never quite fit, the wind whispered at them, woke you some-
times thinking you’d heard your name spoken.
Van Damme signed on with the Federal Public Housing Adminis-
tration to borrow the money to build the houses and public buildings,
and the FHA guaranteed the mortgages, which you could get for a
dollar down; you could own the house for $3,000, or lease it, or rent it,
or rent and sublet (there’d be guest entrances in the houses for sublet-
ters to enter by, or for others to use who might not want to bang on the
front door toward which the neighbors’ windows were turned). You
got a stove and a tub and, most wonderful, that gas refrigerator, Van
Damme’d insisted, and got them all as necessary war materials. Faint
38 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
crackle of the ice cubes in their metal trays when you opened the
door.
A couple of large dormitories (Henry Van Damme had toyed with
lodge and residence and habitation before giving in to the standard word) were put up too, one for women and one for men, this because
of the bad Ford experience at Willow Run, where a mixed-sex dormi-
tory had quickly become a mass of troubles, lots of keyed-up well-paid
workers looking to unlax, nonrationed rum flowing, parties moving
from floor to floor, high-stakes strip poker only one rumored aberra-
tion, the whole system falling into depths of vice, lost work time, and
bad press before being segregated.
The whole settlement filled fast, and even the trailers were left
there when the job was done, to put more people in—eventually most
of the colored workers were housed there, happier with their own
kind said the VP for Employment, you had to conform to local cus-
toms if you could and Oklahoma had the distinction of being the
first state in these States to establish segregated phone booths. Van
Damme Aero had addressed the workforce problem by shifting their
West Coast employees ( associates as management named them,
workers as the union went on stubbornly calling them) to the Ponca
City plant, and hiring new people for the older plant from among the
migrants always coming in. Van Damme paid a bonus to the associ-
ates who’d go east, then pretty soon raised the bonus, what the hell,
and that’s how Al and Sal Mass and Violet Harbison and Horse
Offen and so many others had been summoned (Horse Offen put it
that way in the Aero) to Oklahoma and that wind that came sweeping
down the plain, which were being celebrated at that very moment on
Broadway far away. Some of the associates were originally from
there, having left the dust bowl farms and sold-up towns to get in on
the good times on the Gold Coast, and now strangely come back
again. As more were needed and Van Damme’s recruiters went
nationwide and the word spread about the new city as foursquare
and purposeful and wealthy as the communes dreamed of by Brigham
Young or Mother Ann Lee, people began arriving from everywhere
else, shading their eyes against the gleam of it coming into view in
the salty sunlight.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 39
Prosper Olander began his journey from a northern city with its own
aircraft plant, though not one that would hire someone like himself.
He was headed for the West Coast, like so many others (when the war
was over it would be found that four million of us came out from where
we lived to the West Coast, and most never went back). On a winter
morning he stood on a street corner of that city, by the stairs that led
up to the tracks of the elevated train that could take him to the city
center where he could buy a ticket for the West; he had money enough
in the wallet tucked into the inner pocket of his houndstooth sport
coat, and another fifty that his aunt May had sewn into the coat’s
lining, which he’d promised to return if he never needed it. A woolen
scarf around his neck. Everything else he had decided to bring was
packed into an old army knapsack that was slung over his shoulders,
somewhat spoiling the lines of his jacket (he thought) and smelling a
bit musty, but necessary for someone like himself, propelled by his
arms and his wooden crutches.
He hadn’t moved from where he stood for some minutes. He was
contemplating the stairs leading up to the El, and thinking of the stairs
that would certainly lead down into the station when he reached it.
He’d never been there, had never before had a reason to go there. And
so what if he got a cab, flagged one down, spent the money, got himself
to that station—could he get himself inside it? And then the high
narrow stairs of the train coaches he’d have to mount—he’d seen them
in the movies—and all the stairs up and down from here on, as though
the way west were one long flight of them.
Alone too, it was certain now, though he hadn’t set out alone.
He turned himself away from the El as a laughing couple went by
him to go up—he didn’t care to appear as though he himself wanted
to go up and couldn’t. Across the street a small open car was parked
by a sign that said no parking! and showed a fat-faced cartoon cop
blowing an angry whistle and holding up a white-gloved hand. Lean-
ing against the fender was a small elderly man, arms folded before
him, one foot crossed over the other, looking down the street as
though in some disgust. Waiting for a tow? Prosper Olander, unwilling
40 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to think of his own dilemma, contemplated this man’s. Expecting a
woman? Stood up? Prosper had reason to consider that explanation.
The man now turned to where Prosper stood in the tiger-striped shad-
ows of the El, and seemed to ponder Prosper’s condition—but people
often did that. At length—for no real reason, maybe just to be in
motion—Prosper walked toward the man and the car. The man
seemed to come to attention at Prosper’s approach, unsurprised and
already rooting in his pocket for the coin he assumed Prosper was
about to ask him for—Prosper was familiar with the look. Prosper
pointed to the car.
“Out of gas?”
“Not quite,” said the gent. “But near enough that I have decided I
won’t go farther without a plan to get more.”
“Can’t get any, or can’t find any?”
“Both.” He looked down at the machine, an old Chrysler Zephyr,
gray and dispirited and now seeming to shrink in shame. The plates
were from a neighboring state. “You may know there’s a shortage on,
though you yourself may not have experienced it. I don’t know.”
“I’ve heard,” Prosper said.
“I was doing pretty well, what with one thing and another,” said
the man, “until on driving into this town I began to run low, and all
the gas stations I passed were all out, or so they claimed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then a gasoline truck went by me, going the other way,” he said.
“Good luck! You could tell by the way he drove—slouching around
corners—he was full. Gravid you might say. A line of cars had figured
that out and were following him. I turned around and got in line too,
but I was cut off by others on the way, and fell behind, and was further
supplanted till when the station was reached I was far in the rear. I do
not like to battle for precedence or advantage. I don’t do it.”
“You’re a lover not a fighter,” Prosper ventured.
“Well. By the time I got my heap up to the front of the line—after
every car passing by wedged itself in too, and a fight or two had broken
out—the well was dry. I had just enough left to get me this far.”
“They say the shortages are local. Farther south they have a lot.”
“The Big Inch,” said the gent.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 41
“The what?”
“The great pipeline that’ll bring oil from down there up this way.
When it’s done.”
“Oh.”
“We make do now with the Little Inch.”
“Oh.”
“In any case finding the gas wouldn’t have done me much good. I
have one stamp left, and no more till next month.”
“What kind of ration card do you have?” Prosper asked.
The fellow looked up at him as though surprised, maybe, that some-
one like him would know to ask this question, which could hardly be
of much interest to him. “The miserable A,” he said. “My employer
was unable even to get me a B. He was told salesmen could take the
train. I think not.”
Prosper said nothing. A salesman.
“And yourself?” the man said. “Alone and palely loitering?”
Not knowing why he should do so, Prosper decided not to pass this
by. “I was going to take the El downtown,” he said. “But those stairs
are a little beyond me.”
The man looked at the stairs, the iron framework of the El, as
though seeing them for the first time. “Inconvenient,” he said. He indi-
cated the knapsack. “You are prepared for a journey.”
“I was going west to look for work.”
The salesman didn’t look surprised or amused by this ambition,
though Prosper’d expected the one or the other. “So a ride downtown
wouldn’t take you far. I see that now.”
“And there’d go your gas, though I appreciate the offer.”
For a moment they stood together, Prosper and the salesman, both
feeling (they’d confess it later to each other) that there was another
remark to make, that Destiny had put them in speaking relation and
they hadn’t yet said the thing Destiny wanted them to say.
“The name’s Notzing,” said the salesman then, and put out his
hand—a little tentatively, thinking perhaps that such a one as Prosper
might not take hands, or not be able to—Prosper saw those thoughts
also, also not unfamiliar to him. “Call me Pancho.” The way he said it,
the first syllable sounded like ranch and not like launch.
42 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Prosper Olander,” Prosper returned, and took the salesman’s hand
before it retreated. Then he took from inside his coat a small paper
booklet. “This might help you out,” he said.
Pancho Notzing reached for the thing, a look of baffled wonder-
ment beginning to break on his face that he struggled to conceal. The
booklet was a C gasoline ration booklet, the most generous ranking,
reserved for doctors, ministers, railroad workers, people on whom we
all depended (that anyway was the idea). It was chock-full of coupons.
It was unsigned.
“A man could go far on this,” he said.
Prosper said nothing.
“I wonder how you came by it,” he said. “Issued to you perhaps in
error?”
“Not exactly.” The book remained in Pancho’s hand, as though still
in passage between them. “Where were you driving to, anyway?”
“I don’t really have a destination. I have my route, of course, and my
territory. But to tell you the truth I have been thinking of quitting.”
“Really.”
“I don’t suppose you’re offering those to me for sale.”
“That would be a crime,” Prosper said.
For a moment neither of them said anything more, the conclusion
evident to each of them already, only the question of who was to broach
it remaining. Barter was a thing we all in those times resorted to; Mr.
Black was a man we knew.
“I have been to the West,” Pancho said then. “The Mission country.
The land of Ramona. The hacienda at sunset. The primrose blooming
in the desert.”
“There’s a windshield sticker that goes with it,” Prosper said, reach-
ing again into his pocket. “I have that too.”
“I understand all the big plants are hiring. Everyone can do his
part.”
“They say.”
Pancho straightened, and with a final glance at the C booklet, he
put it in the breast pocket of his jacket. “You shouldn’t be made to
suffer indignities, if you’re headed out to help build ships or airplanes.
Ride with me, and we’ll make our way. I’m in the way of changing jobs
myself.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 43
“You don’t say.”
So sporting the new C sticker on the windshield, the Zephyr set off
in the direction of the sunset; when it ran out of gas just yards from
the next pump, Prosper took the wheel as the old man pushed, and
together they rolled it to the pump, Prosper pulling up gently on the
hand brake lever as instructed to bring it to a stop. The attendant, a
plump young woman in a billed cap and leather bow tie—there were
lots of women manning the pumps now, with the male pump jockeys
off at war—watched as Prosper pulled his crutches from the back seat
and got out to stand next to Pancho, who was panting with effort and
pressing a hand to his breast. They presented their C booklet, which
Pancho had signed, and the girl tore out a stamp, then expertly unlim-
bered the hose and wound the handle of the counter to put in their
allotted gas. No one spoke. The pump bell rang off the gallons. Above
them the red Flying Horse beat skyward. When she was done she
cheerfully washed the windshield with a sponge, her rump in the trou-
sers of her brown coverall moving with her motions. She took Pros-
per’s money and went to make change while the two men stood not
speaking by the car.
“All set,” she said, returning with the change.
“Thanks,” said Prosper.
“Thanks,” said Pancho.
“Oil change?” she asked. “Check those belts?”
“No, no thanks.”
The car started with a cough, dry throat needing a moment to
recover.
“Bye,” said the girl, and gave them a smart two-finger salute. “Drive
under thirty-five.”
“Bye,” said Prosper.
“Bye,” said Pancho.
The two of them didn’t speak again for some time after that, con-
scious of having done a wrong, not quite knowing whether to con-
gratulate themselves or shake their heads over the ways of the world
that had forced them to it, or just shut up; Pancho never would ask
Prosper, in all their journey together, where he had come up with those
stamps, and Prosper didn’t volunteer the information.
Pancho had a couple of last calls to make, he’d told Prosper, and
44 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
then a stop at the home office in the next city, where he’d leave his
sample cases, his last orders, and his resignation. He roomed with his
widowed sister, he said, when not on the road, which he was most of
the time; he’d wire her about his plans. Then they’d head for the south
and then the Coast.
“What was it you sell, or sold I guess?” said Prosper when the Mobil
station was far behind them and his city growing thin and passing
too.
“Fabrics,” Pancho said. “Commercial mostly. To the trade. Dam-
asks, matelassés, shantungs, broadcloths, velours. Specialty silks.
Done it for thirty years, a traveler in fabrics.”
“Why don’t you want to do it anymore?”
For a time Pancho seemed to be choosing among various answers
he might give, opening his mouth and making introductory sounds,
then shutting it again. “Ah, for one thing,” he said, “the business is
changing. I’m getting too old to keep up. All these new man-made
wonder fabrics. Nylon, rayon, spray-on, pee-on, who the hell can keep
them straight or pitch them in any way that’d be useful, well whoever
can, I can’t. Then this war, the big companies supplying the war depart-
ment are taking all the business, sucking up all the supplies, the cotton,
the silk, all of it, if you’re not selling to the government forget it.
Rationing: how are you going to sell fine fabrics to manufacturers who
are cutting back every day? When the women are wearing unlined suits
and the men are leaving the pocket flaps off their jackets and the cuffs
off their trousers? You tell me.”
Prosper could not tell him.
“More than that and above it all,” Pancho said, “I violate my own
best sense of how a man should live. I have done the same work for
decades, never changing, never learning, without friends beside me,
without associates, without the refreshment of change, without
delight.” He turned to Prosper. “Not that this makes me in any way
different from millions.”
“I shouldn’t say so,” Prosper said.
“Well and you?” the salesman asked him.
“Ah. Well I was privately employed.”
“Ah.”
They said no more for a long time. Prosper studied the places they
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 45
passed, that seemed to come into being merely by his entering them, and
then to persist behind him as he and Pancho and the Zephyr made more.
Fields and farms appearing, then after a time the outskirts of a town,
sometimes announced with a proud sign (greenfield—a friendly
town) and the totem pole of the local lodges and clubs, Masons, Lions,
Odd Fellows. The last and least farms passed, then the more decrepit
and dirtier businesses, the ice-and-coal supplier and the lumberyard,
then the first paved streets of houses and neighborhood shops, maybe a
mill with its strings of joined workers’ houses like city streets displaced.
The better neighborhoods, a white church or a stone one, big houses
with wide yards and tended shrubbery, but the biggest one an undertak-
ers’. Then downtown, brick buildings of three and four stories, hero on
a plinth, the larger churches, a domed granite courthouse on Court-
house Square.
“Well take a good look,” said Pancho a little bitterly when Prosper
noted these trim towns, each different but all alike. “These places
won’t last. They’ll be drained of population. They’re the past, these old
mills. People’ll go where the work is, and that’s the big plants in the big
cities or the new cities now a-building. That’s the future.”
“I’d like to see the future,” Prosper said. “All the wonders.”
“You are a Candide,” Pancho said. “You think this is the best of all
possible worlds. Or will be.”
“I can’t be a Candide,” said Prosper.
“And why not?”
“Because I’ve read the book.”
Esso station, five-and-dime, A & P. Pancho contemned the big chain
stores, displacing local businesses, substituting standardized needs and
ways of meeting them for individual taste and satisfaction.
“They say that this new finance capitalism’s efficient. Actually it’s
inefficient, and the more the owners are divorced from the operations
of it the more inefficient it can get. They claim ‘efficiency of scale’—
they don’t know that when you scale something up it doesn’t always
work the same. It’s just as when a great corporation claims the same
right as an individual to the freedoms guaranteed by our forefathers in
1776. A nice piece of sophistry. As if Nabisco was not different from a
man running his own bakeshop here in this town.”
The bakeshop Pancho pointed to looked welcoming. It was called
46 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Mom’s and had red-and-white calico curtains in the window, and Pros-
per thought of calling a halt to buy some supplies, but Pancho hunched
over the wheel seemed unlikely to hear, and then Mom’s was gone, and
the Ball Building, and the fire station. The railroad tracks, after which
the houses grew poorer and fewer, some streets of Negroes, then
scarcer, with vacant lots and abandonment (the hard times hardly
gone) until once more fields and farms began, much like the earlier
ones but not them. Tractors plowing in contour lines like marcelled
brown hair, because spring was rushing upward toward them as they
went down.
Sometime after dark they came upon a long low establishment
roofed in Spanish tile (so Pancho said it was) with a floodlit sign in
front that commanded that they dine-dance and offered them steaks
chops chicken, though it was unlikely that it’d have much of that
these days, or much of anything to drink either, but by then the
Zephyr’d been traveling a long time; the road had been bare of other
choices, and didn’t look to be getting better.
“It’s a law of life,” Pancho said. “Turn down the pretty-good place
and you’ll wander for hours and find nothing as good, end up in a
greasy spoon just closing its doors. Trust me. Years on the road.”
Attached to this place was a cinder block motel, red-tiled too: a
string of red-painted doors, each with a wicker chair beside it and a
window with a calico curtain like Mom’s bakery. Prosper thought that
calico curtains were perhaps to be a feature of travel, and made a note
to watch for more. He had never left the city of his birth before.
“Mo-tel,” Pancho said. “Motor-hotel. A hotel, but one without
bellhops, a cigar stand, newspapers, a front desk, room service, a West-
ern Union office, or any other of the common amenities.”
“Two dollars a night,” Prosper said, pointing to a sign.
“You have an endless capacity to be pleased,” Pancho said gravely.
“That is an enviable quality in youth, and a good thing for a traveler to
have.”
The room that the key given to Pancho let them into was small and
spare, and clad in honey-colored knotty pine, a thing that Prosper had
never seen or smelled before—like living in a hollow tree, he thought.
A single lamp between the two beds was shaped to resemble a large
cactus and a sleeping Mexican. The beds were narrow and the pillows
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 47
ungenerous; there was a shower but no tub. A rag rug on the linoleum
floor nearly caught a crutch and spilled him: Prosper was opposed to
linoleum floors, and to rag rugs. But still he loved the place immedi-
ately, and would come to love all motels, with but one shallow stair up
to the little cloister that protected the doors, sometimes not even that,
out of the car and in, and there you were.
He deposited his knapsack and Pancho lugged in a suitcase and his
sample cases, washed his hands, and they went to eat in the wide build-
ing fronting the motel. Prosper had never been in one of these either,
though he knew right away what name to call it: the air of weary gaiety,
glow of the cigarette machine, couple drinking over there with another
male whose role was unguessable, blond waitress with challenging eyes
and bitter mouth— “ A roadhouse,” he said to Pancho. “Just like in
True Story.”
“Just like in what true story?” Pancho asked.
Prosper told him to never mind.
There were, amid the items crossed off on the menu, enough to
make a meal, and whiskey, a surprise. They each ordered one. Pancho,
having rapidly downed his, described to Prosper the principles of Besto-
pianism, which he claimed were in fact not different from the principles
of natural life and common sense. “This isn’t hard,” he said. “You ask:
What makes a person happy? Not one thing that will make all men
everywhere happy, but this person here and now. And next question,
How’s he going to get it? That’s all. Answer those questions. Let every
person answer the first. Society should answer the second.”
“Uh-huh,” Prosper said. “So what’s the answer?”
Pancho regarded him with a penetrating look, and for the first time
Prosper discerned the penetration might be due to a slight cast in one
of his close-set wide-open eyes. It made for a furious or accusatory
look Prosper didn’t think he meant.
“The answer,” he said, “is the wholesale reorganization of human
society so that the natural impulses of humankind are allowed free
development.”
“Aha.” It was clear to Prosper that he was not saying this for the
first time. “And what are these impulses, would you say?”
Pancho placed his hands on the table in oracular fashion. “You
know. Think a minute, you’ll be able to make a list. We are made by
48 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Nature with these desires, yet every political system and moral system
is bent on repressing or extinguishing them—either by force or by con-
vincing us our natures are evil and must be repressed. As if that were
possible. As if the industrial society could crush our desires for variety,
for pleasure, for worth, for interest, for satisfaction. As if two incom-
patible people locked in the legal institution of marriage could force
themselves to love, when their deep, true, innocent passions remain
unfulfilled.”
“You mean,” Prosper asked, “free love?”
“Free love, truly free, isn’t possible now. In a society rotten with
money values and venereal disease the idea’s laughable. But yes. In a
society correctly made, where human feelings and passions and needs
are understood and met, not repressed or denied or despised, yes. Free
love; mutuality; everyone a suitor to many; many loves for each one. A
Passionate Series in harmony. Old, young, everyone. The old in our
society suffer a loneliness that can hardly be imagined, because they
are cast out of the possibility of the love relation.”
“Everybody just going at it, then? Grandpa, Grandma, the kids?”
Prosper tried not to grin disrespectfully.
“Not at all,” said Pancho. “Not in a harmonious society, such as
you, my boy, have never experienced and perhaps cannot conceive,
which causes you to laugh at these possibilities. Of course even in the
Harmonious City to come, some will be satisfied with a brute con-
nection, and will find many who are like spirited, if they are allowed.
Some are naturally satisfied only with a lifetime devotion. Others
not; they enjoy intrigue, titillation, variety—they are like gourmets to
the plain dinner-eaters.” He sopped bread in his gravy. “Then there
are those whose spirits are the part that is most invested, who care
less for the physical, though no love relation is without the physical.
And so on.”
“Sounds complicated,” Prosper said.
“The complicated is always the true,” Pancho said. “The simple is
false and a lie.”
“I’ll remember that,” Prosper said.
When their Salisbury steaks were done and the greasy paper nap-
kins balled and tossed on the plates, Pancho said he’d retire, but Pros-
per decided to sit a while, have another drink, see if something
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 49
happened, he couldn’t say what. The bandstand remained empty, and
the few folks who arrived to take the tables or occupy the bar—a
couple of men in uniform among them—seemed to be fruitlessly await-
ing the same thing, whatever it was—intrigue, maybe, titillation—and
after a time Prosper went back across the courts to his room.
Pancho lay in his bed, pajamas buttoned up to the neck, his gray
hair upshot, reading from a small leather-bound book, a Testament
Prosper supposed.
“No,” Pancho said. “A poem, in the form of a play, by Percy Shel-
ley. Prometheus Unbound. Though it has served me in some ways as a
scripture.”
“Oh,” Prosper said. He got out of his jacket, rummaged in his knap-
sack to find his toothbrush and tooth powder, and went into the bath-
room; brushed his teeth, washed his face with a dingy cloth, and made
water, propping himself on one crutch. He flushed, and looked into the
damp-smelling shower stall, hung with a rubberized curtain. To use it
he’d have to turn it on standing, then sit to take his braces off while it
ran, then hump on his bottom over the lip and under the stream. If the
water changed temperature meantime, he was out of luck. Don’t forget
the soap: if he left it in its wire basket above, he wouldn’t be able to
reach it once he was in.
Maybe tomorrow.
He returned to his bed and sat. From now on, wherever he went, he
would have to lay plans for himself, and think of everything. He hadn’t
seen that clearly till now.
Pancho kept his eyes on his book while Prosper removed his pants,
unstrapped each of his braces in turn and with his hands pulled his legs
free. He laid the braces on the floor and managed to pull down the
coverlet and sheet and put himself within.
“Good night, my friend,” Pancho said then, and closed his book.
“Good night.”
Pancho pulled the chain of the lamp. He lay back against the pillow,
arms alongside him, gray hair upright, palms down; Prosper would
find him just that way in the morning.
Prosper lay awake in the light passing from outside through the
drawn shade and the calico. He tried to imagine all the things that he
would have to be prepared to do, to put up with, to get around or over.
50 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He tried to feel sure that they would each be accomplished or avoided
somehow, even though he would have to face them alone, without
Elaine. That would make up for Elaine’s skipping out on him at the El,
and going on without him. She had urged him that far, she had made
him be that brave, but she’d been unable to believe in him any further,
and left him there at the bottom of the stairway. But when he found her
again he’d show her that he had done it. When he found her, out there
by the sea in the sun where she’d gone and he was headed, he would be
able to tell her See? I’m here, I made it, alone. You didn’t think I could
but I did. She’d be sorry and amazed. And he’d say It’s all right: it’s all
right now.
In the late afternoon of the next day they reached the city where Pancho’s
fabrics company had offices. Looking somehow determined and stricken
at the same time, Pancho left Prosper in the double-parked car, pulled
out his sample cases from the trunk, and disappeared into a closed-
faced building; reappeared an hour later without them. Prosper had
fended off a traffic cop by showing his crutches, claiming his driver’d be
out any minute. Pancho started the car and drove for a time without
speaking. Then he said:
“Prosper, not one thing written in all the books of philosophy or
morals over the last three thousand years has made one damn bit of
difference to human beings, or added one jot to human happiness.
They say what should be: not what is. I’ve learned more about the cor-
ruptions of the human spirit in that office, in that business, where for
thirty years and more I was robbed and hoodwinked and taken, than I
could have in any book. More about human nature in a smoking car.
More about the frustrations of desire in a boardinghouse. Don’t talk to
me about philosophy.”
Prosper didn’t. They checked in that night at a downtown hotel,
one supplied with all those things Pancho had said motels didn’t have,
plus a barbershop and a shoeshine stand. As Pancho had his shock of
straw-stiff hair cut, sighing at the barber’s worn wisecracks, Prosper
read magazines. Here was one on whose cover a young woman mod-
eled a uniform that an airplane company was issuing to all its women
employees. Inside, the article was titled “Working Chic to Chic” and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 51
showed the same young woman in various situations, wearing the new
outfit, which satisfied all the requirements of the job but could be worn
anywhere. It was a deep blue (the article said blue), a pair of high-
waisted slacks and a tunic the same color, with company badges on the
shoulder and the breast pocket. All you had to do was swap the tunic
for a nice blouse or sweater and you were dressed for a date or a dance.
There were pictures of the young woman in full uniform on the wing
of a plane, gazing into the clouds; then holding an electric tool of some
kind; then, tunic-less, laughing at a bar, holding a drink, the same
slacks, and two—maybe three—servicemen around her for her to
ignore. The girl’s name was Norma Jeane.
Prosper closed the magazine. Norma Jeane on the cover stood with
her back to the camera, hand on her hip and her head turned back to
smile at Prosper, like Betty Grable in that picture. No girdle for her.
“So get this,” the barber said.
Prosper sought out the article again, flipping the big pages, unable
to locate it, pages filled with tanks and planes and advancing and
retreating armies, generals and statesmen, the united nations. Here.
Norma Jeane. He envied her; envied her soldiers, her smile. Many
suitors for each one. The plant where she worked building airplanes
with her tools was in Oklahoma. Van Damme Aero’s brand-new plant
for the making of their huge new bombers, using the most modern and
up-to-date methods and materials. A workers’ paradise, it’s said, and
workers are pouring in from all parts of the country to sign up for the
thousands of jobs. Skilled and unskilled. Old and young.
Oklahoma. If he remembered his geography right they would pass
through there on their way to the Coast. They had to.
“Say,” he said, looking up, spoiling the barber’s punch line. “I’ve an
idea.”
5
We weren’t where we were in those times because we had been
thrown or removed to there. We didn’t think so. We felt we
had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immi-
grants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who
somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled as a bird does
on a branch or a catarrh does on the lungs: those pioneers whose
grandchildren we were, now again pulling up stakes, uprooted in the
mobilization, the putting-into-motion, that began before the real war
did and continued all through it. True, in some places we stayed on
where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but
even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandpar-
ents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now
headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing
them, as by one of those comic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or
a chicken coop full of chickens or a Ford car with Gramps and Gram
inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else. Those stories always
made the papers, and the new migrant herds did too, arriving purpose-
fully, getting off trains carrying their bags and kids, pulling into town
in panting jalopies with bald tires, looking around for a place to stay.
Alarming, sometimes, to those already there and living in the homes
and going to the churches and the shops they thought were theirs.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 53
Those trains go both ways the locals would now and then say to new-
comers whose ways they didn’t like. People from elsewhere were more
different from you than they are now. They came from farther away.
Pancho Notzing with Prosper beside him reached Ponca City the
next afternoon and they were immediately caught up in the stream of
traffic headed out of the city—every Ponca spare room, hotel bed,
guesthouse, and shed held a worker or two that hadn’t got accommo-
dation in the dormitories or houses of Henryville, and the second shift
was about to begin. Yellow Van Damme buses, yellow bicycles that
Van Damme loaned out free to workers, cars of every description all
going out along roads not meant for much traffic beyond a leisurely
touring car going one way and a hay wagon going the other: tempers
could get frayed, including those of the folks on their porches by the
roadside watching.
Getting a job at Van Damme Aero Ponca City was like being drafted
by a tornado. A hundred people were involved in nothing but looking
you over, asking you questions, filling your hands with forms, examin-
ing you, putting you through tests, chivying crowds from one station
to another in a wide circle (though you couldn’t see a circle) until you
reached where you’d started from, but now with all you needed to be
an employee. Now and then as you were blown around you heard vast
noises outside the processing center, the big Bee engines starting up,
horns sounding, wide steel doors rolling open—that’s all it was, but
you didn’t know that and jumped a little each time. They sorted you
into shifts, sent some home to come back the next morning or mid-
night to begin, and some they simply put to work—especially the
skilled men, who’d arrived dressed for it, and not in a suit and a pair of
wingtips or a frock and stacked heels, and who had their own tools in
sturdy cases. If you wanted that Van Damme Aero uniform for work,
and they suggested it would be a very good thing, you got a ticket for
one and could pay it off out of your first pay envelope, or take a little
out for three weeks or four. There wasn’t a stair in the place: Van
Damme wanted every space accessible to the fleet of electric trucks that
scooted everywhere, pulling trailer-loads of materials, running
unguessable errands, tooting their little horns and flicking their lights.
Pancho and Prosper were immediately drawn apart, stepping into two
different intake lanes and swept inward in different directions. Prosper
54 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
kept up with the crowd, though he spent longer in Physical Examina-
tions than most, and at the end he got a time card, and instructions,
and a form to fill out to get a badge.
Prosper Olander had a war job. He started on the first shift, next
morning.
Pancho Notzing, also taken on, was looking pale and somewhat
asweat when Prosper found him by the car in the parking lot.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” the older man said. “I would like to
be able to refuse.”
“It seems good to me,” Prosper said. His shirt was damp at the
arms from all the walking. “Are you antiwar?”
“Well not in the usual sense maybe,” Pancho said. “I regret the stupid
waste. No one would go to war if their lives were gratifying, if their
associations gave them satisfaction, if they had pleasure and delight.
They go because they can’t think why they shouldn’t. Their leaders are
filled with rage and envy and fear, and no one laughs them down.”
“You have to defend yourself.”
“Ah yes. Well. Perhaps. In defending ourselves we may also change
ourselves, without seeing that we do, and for good too. These vast
engines of destruction. The vast System that’s needed to build them
and send them on their way. We don’t know the outcome.”
He said it as though he did know the outcome, and Prosper—not
only to forestall him from saying so—said, “Let’s get some dinner.
Speaking of pleasure.”
They went back to Ponca, looking at a night spent in the car, as
there were very likely going to be no rooms for miles around. A square
meal at least they ought to be able to get, they thought, and they had to
wait long enough for that, standing listening to the chat on the line
outside the Chicken in the Rough on Grand Avenue (animated neon
sign over the door whereon an enraged rooster took a swing at a golf
ball, and was next shown with a busted club, and then again).
“Dance lessons?” they heard one man ask another in some surprise.
“Thursdays. Tuesdays I got bowling, Mondays the checkers tourna-
ment.”
“Mondays the Moths play the Hep Cats. First game of the season.
They say Henry Van Damme’s throwing out the first ball.”
Once inside they had a further wait at the counter, Ponca City’s
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 55
longtime dry laws modified to allow mild beer for the duration, and
glasses and steins crowding the length of it. Prosper worked in beside a
tall person in the Van Damme uniform, minus the tunic with badge
and name, the blue slacks and a shirt just fine for off-hours, as prom-
ised. Not Norma Jeane. Two blue barrettes held back her black hair,
done in a Sculpture Wave he guessed, though maybe it was natural. A
very tall person. She took no notice of him, looking down the bar away,
but (Prosper thought) at no one in particular.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked her.
“I don’t care if you burn.” She turned slightly toward him to let him
see her uncaring face, and she noticed the crutches under his arms.
“Oh. Sorry.”
He offered her a smoke, which she declined. “You work at Van
Damme?” he asked. The woman looked at him with kindly contempt,
who doesn’t, what a dumb line.
“I just got hired,” Prosper said.
“Is that so.”
“Doing something I’ve never done.”
“Yeah well. They have their own ideas. I was a welder when I came,
but no more.”
Prosper saw Pancho waving to him, he’d secured a couple of seats.
“Care to join us?” he asked the woman, and as all his remarks so
far had done, this one seemed to rebound gently from her without
making contact. He straightened carefully and stepped away with what
he hoped was a certain grace. As he went to where Pancho waited he
heard laughter behind him, but not, he thought, at him.
Baskets of fried chicken, laid on calico paper as though for a picnic,
and French-fried potatoes; paper napkins and the bottled “3.2” beer.
Pancho looked down at this insufficiency. One of his beliefs was that if all
people received a real competence for their labors, or simply as a birth-
right, they could just refuse poor food until it was replaced with better.
“And what did they say they’d be putting you to doing?” he asked
Prosper.
“Well they didn’t,” Prosper said. “As I was explaining, there.” He
gestured to the counter. Pancho looked over his shoulder; the woman
Prosper had spoken to passed a glance in their direction, maybe a hint
of a smile, and away again.
56 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Day Shift workers went into the Van Damme works through a bank of
glass doors, even as the Victory Shift workers exited through another
bank, looking worn and depleted. The heels of incoming workers made
a din on the tiled floor; Prosper was like a stick in a stream as they
swept around him, and he had to be careful not to get kicked and lose
his footing—they gave him space, when they saw him, but they didn’t
always see him. Prosper had washed his face in a Conoco gas station
toilet, but his cheeks were stubbly and his collar gray; he felt a cold
apprehension he hadn’t felt yesterday.
Where the entrance narrowed to stream the workers past the time
clocks, he handed the cards he’d been given to the clerk behind a
window there, who saw something on them that caused him to pick up
a phone. He flipped a switch on his PBX and waited a time, regarding
Prosper with steady indifference; he spoke a name into the phone, hung
it up, and pointed to where Prosper was to stand and wait. Pancho had
long since gone into the interior beyond. Prosper had time to fill up
with a familiar but always surprising anxiety as the workers went past
him, some glancing his way. Far more women than men, like a city
avenue where the department stores are.
“Olander?”
Prosper stepped forward. The man who’d called his name, without
actually looking for him, was a long thin S-shaped man, knobby wrists
protruding from his sleeves. He wore a tie and round horn-rims. He
motioned to Prosper to follow him along into the plant.
“Through here.”
Prosper Olander had never been in a cathedral, but now he felt
something like that, the experience of entering suddenly a space so
large, so devoted to a single purpose, that the insides of the heart are
drawn for a moment outward and into it, trying to fill it, and failing. It
wasn’t perpendicular like a cathedral, or still and echoey, it was loud
under long high banks of lights; but it was so huge, and the numbers of
people and tasks that filled it so many, that it took a moment before
Prosper’s stretched senses even perceived that what was being scram-
bled over and attended to were units, were all alike, were the bodies of
airplanes. Even then he could doubt the perception: was it really pos-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 57
sible that things this big (and still they were only parts of things that
would have to be a lot bigger, reason told you that) were meant to fly?
For a second you could feel that they were something more like brood-
ing hens, and the workers were helping them lay and hatch the actual
airplane-sized airplanes out of their vast insides.
The supervisor or foreman he followed, as he would come to know,
was Rollo Stallworthy, and a kinder man than he appeared. Prosper
followed after him as fast as he could down what would have been the
cathedral’s nave, between the plane bodies on either side, Rollo giving
no quarter. Prosper could travel fast but not for long, and eventually he
had to stop; Rollo Stallworthy after a moment’s solo progress divined
something was wrong and looked back to where Prosper panted.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Prosper said. “Just give me a minute.”
Just then a very large man consulting with others at one of the long
tables that at every station held blueprints and paper in piles caught
sight of Prosper, and signaled he’d like a word.
Prosper waited. Rollo nodded respectfully to the big man and put
his hands behind his back.
“New hire?” said the man. His face was the size of a pie and crossed
with gold-framed eyeglasses. Prosper nodded. The man pointed to his
legs and his back.
“Tabes dorsalis?” he asked.
“No,” Prosper said.
“Been to the health clinic?” the man said. Prosper thought he’d
never seen such yardage of seersucker expended on a single suit. “Got
your health card?”
“Yes.”
“Go on over. May well be something they can do for you.”
“All right,” said Prosper.
“Carry on,” the man said cheerily, and turned back to his table.
“That was him,” Rollo said as he set the pace again. He grinned
back at Prosper.
“That was who?”
“Himself. Henry the Great. Here on an inspection tour. He doesn’t
miss a thing.”
“Well say,” Prosper said.
58 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You’re fortunate he didn’t give you a pill to take,” Rollo said. “His
pockets are full of ’em.”
What Rollo had been given was the job of finding something for
Prosper to do. Rollo’d already shown himself ingenious at tasks like
this, and lay awake at night sometimes (none of his own supervisors
knew this, they just assumed Rollo could do it and so they told him to
do it) putting together his crews and subcrews so that everybody could
work just as hard and fast as they were able. The short, the strong, the
old, the weary and querulous, the whites who’d work next to blacks
and the ones that wouldn’t, the helpful and patient ones you could put
next to the stupid truculent ones and get the best out of both. He’d
been thinking about this lame young man he’d been assigned, who was
actually in worse shape (Rollo was now convinced, having studied him
without staring rudely) than he’d been described as being by Intake.
“All right,” he said, and they slowed beside a station that seemed
like other stations, beneath the long unfinished hollow body of a plane,
which was far larger to look at from beneath even than to see from the
door. Workers were riveting panels of the aluminum skin in place, one
outside with the gun and the other on the other side with the bucking
bar that turned the rivet’s end (he didn’t yet know this). Rollo began
talking in a voice so slow and deliberate it was actually hard to follow,
though intended to be easy, describing Prosper’s job, which would
involve assisting in keeping records of tools and materials used and
needed at this station, new orders filled or pending. He understood
Prosper’d not be able to take it all in right off, but a little practice
would put that right, it wasn’t a hard job but it was exacting. And
Prosper tried to listen, but his eyes were drawn up and around, to the
women in their coveralls, their caps, their heavy gloves and saddle
shoes and sloppy socks, till they began to look down at him too, and
smile and wave and welcome him. Colored women and old women and
young women of many shapes, perched on narrow footholds, handling
power tools with grace and equanimity. The repeated tzing of those
guns, like bullets fired every which way in movie cartoons.
“You’ll shadow me,” Rollo said. “Till you get familiar with them
all.”
He seemed to mean the forms and stamps he was gesturing at, which
Prosper at length looked down at. “Yes,” he said.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 59
“You’ll do fine.”
“Yes,” Prosper said. “I think I will.”
Prosper and Pancho spent that night on couches in the men’s dormitory,
and then got beds in the plain bare rooms there, but it wasn’t long
before a house on Z Street became available. Despite all of Van Damme
Aero’s efforts to attract and keep workers, the turnover rate was almost
as high as in the rest of the war industries, people getting homesick,
men’s deferments running out and not renewed, women quitting when
their men were demobilized or when they’d earned enough for a down
payment on a real house in a real place; or they just couldn’t adjust,
despite Van Damme’s psychologists, and they went back to where
people acted and thought the way they once supposed everyone every-
where did.
The Z Street family that departed sold Pancho their two beds and
the other sticks of furniture they’d acquired, they could afford better
now, and Prosper and Pancho picked up other things—Henryville was
a ceaseless rummage sale of lamps and tin flatware and radios and deal
dressers; one fringed pillow with a painted satin cover showing sunset
over Lake George migrated from bed to couch in houses from A Street
to 30th, holding up heads and tired feet, until it wouldn’t plump and
was so soiled that night had fallen on its pines. The house had two
bedrooms and a living room, and that sublessor’s door on the side, and
a yard a little bigger than the others, but otherwise (Pancho thought)
belonged on Devil’s Island for its cheerlessness and separation from all
the identical others. Wave of the future he said sadly, unless things
changed. Prosper was delighted with it. Like a motel, it had no base-
ment, no attic, no high porch with a cliff of steps, nowhere in it he
couldn’t go or couldn’t use, it was all his as much as it could be any-
body’s. He stood looking out his window at the rectangles of the house
opposite his. It was identical to his but had a carport over the minia-
ture driveway roofed in a strange ribbed translucent green material
Prosper’d never seen before. “Fiberglass,” said Pancho, somewhat bit-
terly. “It’s a fabric and a wool and a plastic. No end to its uses.”
“Nice,” said Prosper. “Keep the Zephyr dry if we had one.” Pancho
(as Prosper had hoped) turned to eye him in disgust.
60 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
It was on that day, as Prosper was making his way across the vast
parking lot from where Pancho had to park among the thousands, that
Horse Offen in his little Van Damme electric car stopped beside him to
offer a lift. Pancho had already gone on ahead, at Prosper’s urging,
don’t be late.
“Say, thanks,” Prosper said, figuring a way to climb aboard as
Horse watched with interest.
“Don’t mind if we go a roundabout way?” Horse asked.
“No not a bit. I’m early.” He tended to be, until he was sure how
long a trip like this one would take him, on average.
Horse was out with pad and camera to write up a feature for the
Aero. He’d already done the sports scores and the winning suggestion
of the week (some kind of improvement to a wing jig that Horse didn’t
quite get) and needed more. He questioned Prosper as they rode, how
long he’d needed the crutches, where he’d come from, what he’d done
before, which seemed mostly to be not much. Nothing there for Horse.
“Any hobbies?”
“Well, I don’t have many of my tools here, but I like drafting and
lettering and so on. Working with pens, commercial art.”
“But that’s not your job here.”
“No.”
“Well hey. Who knows. We can use people in my shop who can do
that kind of work. If you want to apply.”
Prosper maintained a silence, one that Horse couldn’t know resulted
from a kind of awed embarrassment, that what he most wanted would
be offered him right here and now, or the hope or suggestion of it.
“So after all this. What’s your goal?”
After a moment’s thought, or silence anyway, Prosper said: “I would
hope one day to achieve greatness.”
“Aha. In what line?”
“I don’t know that yet.”
Horse allowed himself a laugh, but thought it sort of served him
right, getting an answer like that in response to a tease—a “goal,” after
all, for someone like this gangly Plastic Man with the snappy fedora.
“Here we go,” he said. He stopped the little car and dismounted.
They were within the central building; Prosper could see the shop num-
bers receding into the distance, toward his own. “Well, my two gals
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 61
aren’t here yet,” he said looking around. “Let me take your picture.
Never know when I might use it.” Prosper lifted himself off the car, set
himself on the shop floor, and drew himself up, insofar as he could.
Horse thought of a title—“Aiming for Greatness”—and laughed again
as he looked down at Prosper on the screen of the Rolleiflex. Just then
Prosper saw behind Horse two women, a very tall one and a very short
one, both dressed for work, but headed their way.
Horse turned. “Ah say, how are you, ladies?”
It seemed to Prosper that the two women knew Horse pretty well
and treated him with a kind of impatient tolerance. “Meet our new
employee,” Horse said, indicating Prosper. The smaller woman was
definitely small, a midget Prosper supposed, not with the brawny
shoulders and big head of one or two such people he’d known. The
other, the tall one, he recognized.
She recognized him too. “We’ve met,” she said, as though she
thought something was amusing.
“That’s right, we have,” Prosper said. “I don’t think I caught your
name, though.”
“I don’t think I tossed it.”
Horse said the names—small Sal Mass and tall Violet Harbison,
been around a good while, Vi plays for the Moths, the best softball
team in the industry. As he made the introductions he conceived the
idea of lining up all three of them and taking a picture and running it
with some kind of joke about a sideshow or something, “So Where’s
the Fat Lady?” but of course that was stupid. The two women, though,
went together naturally: they worked in the same shop. No forced
humor there. They just happened to be the shortest and the tallest. And
Vi was a stunner in a kind of unsettling way. They both wore the flying
“E” badges awarded for effort, and that, of course, would be the lead,
but he still planned to call the story “The Long and the Short of It,” all
in good fun.
Prosper watched Horse set up his shot, clicking off a surprising
number, this way, that way. He got Sal to climb a stepladder and sit, to
bring their two heads together. Finally he asked Vi to maybe hoist Sal
on her shoulder, or hold her in her arms like (he didn’t add) a ventrilo-
quist’s dummy, or something cute. They looked at each other and then
at him, and shook their heads.
62 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
During all that time, all that posing, Vi Harbison, untouched it
seemed however Horse tried to catch her soul with his camera and his
wisecracks, kept glancing toward Prosper Olander as though she’d like
to ask a question, or make a remark, that couldn’t or oughtn’t be asked
or made here and now, when shift was starting, both for him and for
her; and Prosper noticed that, and his eyes answered hers as they some-
times put it in the issues of True Story magazine he’d read, and he
thought he knew where he stood. Both she and Sal waved as Prosper
was carried off with Horse.
“Tough broad,” Horse said to Prosper as he negotiated the crowded
pathways through the building. “A ballbuster, frankly. In my humble
opinion.”
“The tall one? Violet?”
“Her,” Horse said. “But the midget’s no honeydrop either.”
6
The Teenie Weenies all live in Teenie Weenie Town, which is hidden
under a rosebush in a backyard not so very far away from you or
me. The path through the town leads past the sauce dish which is
the Teenie Weenies’ swimming pool, and the syrup can that is
their schoolhouse, and the teapot where the Chinaman lives. A glass
fruit jar is a greenhouse, a coffee can a workshop. Several Teenie Weenies
live together in a house made from a shoe. The trail leads on to the
garden and to the Big People’s house, where the Teenie Weenies some-
times go, to find things the Big People no longer want or won’t miss.
Today the Teenie Weenies have come upon a toy that a Big People
child has lost. It is an aeroplane! It is made of “balsa” wood and is very
light, though not to the Teenie Weenies. The aeroplane works by a
rubber band, which is wound up tightly and then released to turn the
propeller. Some of the bravest of the Teenie Weenies have decided to
see if the plane can fly! Perhaps they will use it to fly to other places,
where there are other Teenie Weenies they don’t know. The Lady of
Fashion has been offered the first trip, but has declined, and left the
experiment to the Policeman, the Admiral, and the Cowboy. The Scots-
man and the Carpenter are at work thinking of a way to turn the
rubber band that gives the power.
“The worst idea they’ve had yet,” Al Mass had said when the Sunday
64 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
paper showed this panel. “If they can get that thing wound up and let it
go, good-bye Cowboy, good-bye Admiral, good-bye Policeman. I won’t
miss them three. They always were a pain in the keister.”
It was this panel of The Teenie Weenies that had long ago given the
workers at Shop 128 their name: the picture of the long fuselage, the
graceful wings, the delicate wheels in the tall grasses (tall to the Teenie
Weenies), and the crowd of people around it and on it, laboring to
make it go: the Cook and the Dunce and the Lady of Fashion, Tommy
Atkins and Buddy Guff, the Clown, the Indian, Mr. Lover and Mrs.
Lover holding hands, Paddy Pinn the Irish giant all of four inches high.
There had been a Jap once, but he was gone now, though the clever
Chinaman remained. So they themselves, Shop 128, varied and unique,
with different souls and different skills and Passions, none interchange-
able with any of the others (as Pancho Notzing insisted), not fungible
no matter what the bosses or the government or the union thought.
They even had an Indian, though his black-satin hair was cut short as
a scrub brush and he wore the same work clothes as everybody.
Shop 128 was one of twenty stations where the fuselages were put
together with their wings. Fuselages entered the Assembly Building
from the Fuselage Building, and finished wings—all but their wingtip
sections—were lifted out of the Empennage Building by overhead crane
cars and carried into Assembly. When the wing section was hovering
suspended over the fuselage, a select team, all men but one (Vi Harbi-
son), guided it as it was lowered into place. Then the remaining Teenie
Weenies climbed the rolling ladders and scrambled upon the assembly
to rivet it and connect all those wires and snaking tubes. Al and Sal
Mass, and others not so small as those two, were the riveting team on
that narrow pressurized tunnel that ran from the forward compart-
ment to the rear. Sal on the inside loaded her gun with a rivet, drove it
into the predrilled hole, and on the other side it met the bucking bar—a
piece of steel the size of a blackboard eraser, curved to lie flat against
the aluminum surface—held in place by Sal’s bucker, Marcie. The rivet
struck the bucking bar and was flattened, making a seal; if the seal
looked good to Marcie, she tapped once on the aluminum; if she
wanted Sal to give it another hit she tapped twice. It was so loud all
around that Sal had to listen hard for those taps. It was (she said) like
dancing with a guy you couldn’t see or touch. Sal was the only riveter
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 65
on the team willing to work with a colored woman when they were
both new on the job (“What do you think I care?” Sal’d said), and now
they were the best team in the shop, maybe the floor, and everybody
wanted Marcie, but she and Sal wouldn’t part.
The growing ship then moved up the floor, gaining new things, aile-
rons and wingtips and tables and chairs and lights. When the whole
ship was furnished and complete, the vast central doors opened on
mechanical tracks—it took some time—and a fleet of three little trac-
tors came to draw it out onto the tarmac, everybody not busy doing
something else standing to watch and clap as the impossible thing,
wings drooping slightly like an albatross, ghostly in the purity of its
yet unlettered unmarked duralumin, Plexiglas ports still blinded with
black paper, crept into the sun. It took so long to move into place beside
its sisters on the field that everyone soon went back to work.
The three buildings were actually one building, the walls between
them formed by two lines of offices, machine shops, tool distribution,
production control, big glass windows through which the workers on
the floor could see the supervisors and designers and computers inside,
all of them just as busy as they were in their white shirts and ties.
Henry Van Damme had wanted those glass windows. He was also the
one who chose the new fluorescent lighting for those offices, which
also hung high over the shop floor in vast rectangular banks, the first
building this size lit solely by the cool magic-wand bulbs that many
workers had never seen before they arrived here, that made it bright as
day but somehow unearthly. Along that row of offices was the Press
and Publicity Office where Horse Offen turned out the Aero. Henry
particularly wanted that office open to the shop. He read the Aero with
great interest, cover to cover each week: Horse Offen knew it, and
knew that suggestions reaching him from higher up might well be
coming from the Mountain Man himself.
Horse’s office contained the mimeo machines and a little Harris
Automatic photo-offset printer, with a man and an assistant to run it,
real IPPAU printers, who stamped the International Printing Pressmen
and Assistants Union bug on the last page of every issue of the Aero.
They also printed reports, spec handbooks, notices, calendars, and
every other thing that the incoming workers were handed or saw or
read or were advised and counseled and warned by through the day and
66 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
night. Just today Prosper Olander was working on lettering the new
series of Upp ’n’ Adam cartoons that would appear large-size around
the shop floor and in the toilets and lunchroom, and small-size in the
Aero. At least one idea for an Upp ’n’ Adam had definitely come from
Van Damme himself, who thought the two clowns were funny and
instructive, a big fat one and a little skinny one, always grinning even
when stepping on abandoned tools, shocking themselves with worn
wiring, wasting rivets, sleeping on the job as the drill press went hay-
wire (Hey Upp! Get Your Sleep in Bed—Not on the Job!! ) or making
other messes that wags could alter with a crayon into the vulgar or
obscene—Horse marveled at the human male’s capacity for inventive
crudity. The art was done off-site and mailed in, but Prosper did the
words with his lettering pens, making clusters of exclamation marks
like cock feathers. He did Anna Bandanna too, whose posters con-
veyed more sober remarks, and longer ones, directed at female work-
ers. He’d just finished one of those and it lay on his table ready for
photography.
“ ‘Don’t let that time of the month keep you from doing your best,
girls!’” Horse read, looking over Prosper’s shoulder. “ ‘Get the straight
story, not the old myths—Ask for Pamphlet 1.1 at the Nurse’s Station!’ ”
“What’s the straight story?” Prosper wondered.
“Straight story is, Buckle this pad on it and get back to work.”
Anna Bandanna posters were easier because the picture never
changed, it was only she, bust of a great broadly grinning woman in a
polka-dot bandanna, the straps of her overalls visible on her shoulders;
red wet mouth, maybe fat, eyes alight. Prosper’d heard her referred to
as that damn Aunt Jemima, and there was a resemblance, if only the
strength and joy and white teeth. He got very used to looking into that
receptive but frozen face.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Horse said, “but I had a dream
last night about that woman.”
“Really?”
“Really. I dreamed she and I. Well.”
“I dreamed about President Roosevelt,” Prosper said.
“Swell,” said Horse. “He running for a fourth term?”
“Well we talked about that. I gave him my advice.”
“Oh good. You had a high-level meeting.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 67
“No no,” Prosper said, remembering it. “It didn’t seem that way. We
were at a picnic. A few others around. Then he and I went for a walk, up
into the woods. Talking about this and that. Just ordinary matters.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” It had seemed morning, the sun and the path; they talked
about nothing in that easy way that friends do, friends who gain suste-
nance from the mere exchange of true words. His to the President, the
President’s to him. It felt good to be able to help him.
“So he was walking?” Horse asked pointedly, as though he had a
surprise for Prosper.
“Yes.”
“He can’t.”
“Well, no. I guess he has trouble with it anyway. But he was. So
was I.”
“You didn’t think anything of it?”
“I usually walk all right in dreams. Run up stairs, you know. Like
everybody. I bet so does he.”
“In your dreams you can walk,” Horse said, and for a moment a
kind of wondering pity seemed to invade a face not really suited for a
feeling like that. “Man oh man that’s . . .” But he couldn’t or didn’t say
what it was. He returned to his typewriter, shaking his head.
Prosper, yes, could walk in his dreams, run too; that same morning
he’d awakened in the warmth of one, where he’d been running, running
across an open field under the sky, readying himself to launch from his
hands a great weightless paper-and-wood model airplane, like the one
the Teenie Weenies found; almost aloft himself, he’d lifted it to the sky
like a heartful of hope.
At four o’clock the Day Shift changes to the Swing Shift. The Day Shift
workers down tools, pack their toolboxes, head for the lockers; the
women fill their dressing rooms, yakking and laughing or weary and
silent, showering and changing into their actual clothes and hanging
their boiler suits and overalls and standard-issue uniforms in their
lockers, tossing in their scuffed shoes and limp socks, but some don’t
care and after a swift hand wash and a reapplication of lipstick are out
the door, only a hop to their houses anyway and, for many, no husband
68 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
there to keep up standards for. Marlene, a new inside riveter, said good
night to her team, and “Good night, see you tomorrow,” to Marcie,
who waved back. Then on the way out of the plant it occurred to Mar-
lene that that was the first time she’d ever said Good night, see you
tomorrow to a colored person.
Other Day Shift workers go right from the floor to the cafeteria,
and get their big meal there now, when the evening has cooled the
place. They often skip lunch, it’s too damn hot to eat at the set hour in
that plant all made of metal—it’s like one of those fold-up aluminum
picnic ovens they sell that are guaranteed to cook just by heating up in
the sun. Today a lot of people just took a Popsicle or an ice-cream bar
from the snack trucks that circulated around the floor as break time
moved, the frosty insides revealed when a lid was opened, the momen-
tary cold breath heavenly. Now they were ready for dinner (or supper,
depending on where you came from in these States and how you learned
to name your daily meals) in the Main Dining Commons as you were
supposed to call the cafeteria, though no one did.
The cafeteria’s the source of some of Horse Offen’s best statistics—
five hundred pies an hour coming out of the ovens, three automatic
potato peelers peeling fifty pounds a minute and slicers slicing and
dumpers dumping them into batteries of French fryers over which a mist
of hot oil continuously stands. The thousands of Associates served every
hour. The specially designed dishes of unbreakable Melamine, washed
by the largest washing machines allowed under wartime regulations.
There’s a stage at the far end for shows and War Bond promotions, and
at the entrance, before the food service area, Henry Van Damme decreed
a fountain—white porcelain, round, a wide-lipped gutter surrounding a
column from whose many chromed faucets or pipe-mouths thin streams
of warm water pour when the foot treadle is stepped on. Not everybody
but almost everybody pauses there to wash, as the large sign urges them
to do, before they enter the serving lines beyond.
“He’s not a normal person,” Prosper Olander was telling the Teenie
Weenies around him, which included Francine, who might be the Lady
of Fashion, though dressed now like everybody in bandanna and over-
alls. “You should see him. Not even the photographs show you how big
he is. I mean he looks big in them but in the flesh he just takes up more
room. He’s a behemoth.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 69
“Well be he moth or be he man,” Francine said, with a Mae West
shrug to one shoulder, “he can put his shoes under my bed any time.”
The other women at the table—they were all women—laughed at that;
they said things like that around Prosper they wouldn’t have around
other men.
At the next long table some of the women were reading from an
article in Liberty magazine about the new world to come after the war,
and how men and women and even children will have been tested in
that fire, and how they’ll deserve the bounties of peace that the end of
the war will bring, when our enormous war power will be turned to
other uses.
“Well I don’t know,” a dark and somewhat saturnine woman said. “I
sorta can’t see it that way. I can’t see that this’ll come out right for us.”
“Who’s this us?” the reader wanted to know.
“Us who are getting these jobs, putting in these hours, earning this
overtime. Us here in this country, where we never were bombed, just
Pearl Harbor, nowhere in the States, and we’re not going to be. And
over there people starving and getting killed—I don’t mean soldiers,
everybody’s soldiers die and get wounded, I mean people who don’t
fight. People like us.”
“Hey we’ve made a sacrifice. Every one of us.”
“Yeah? Seems to me we’re actually doing pretty well. Seems to me.”
The women around her were variously dismissive, or scandalized,
or affronted. Some wanted to respond, wanted to tell her to shut up,
they were all doing what they could, but they didn’t say any of that.
“We’re doing too well out of this war,” she said at last, but more to
herself than to the rest. “It’s not right.”
She looked around herself then. No one who’d heard her was look-
ing her way.
“Well what do I know,” she said, returning to her meat loaf. “I’m
just a clog in the machine.”
Elsewhere, Larry the union shop steward was holding court, as
Pancho Notzing described it, at a table near to the one where Pancho sat
today. Pancho turned now and then to glare at him. Larry is something
of a bully, which many workers think is an all right thing, since he’s their
bully, and he’s won something or wangled something or mitigated some-
thing for a lot of them. Most of those at his table were men.
70 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Loud enough so that Larry was sure to hear it, Pancho himself
expatiated. “You know what they want to do,” he said. “They want
to put the whole population under the control of the government.
They want a labor draft—manpower to be shifted to whatever task
the military deems necessary. Conscription of free labor! Male and
female!”
“A crank case,” Larry said to his chums. He thumbed secretly over
his shoulder, indicating Pancho.
“A what?” one of them asked
“Yeah. One of those crank cases who comes along with some big
homemade idea about how people should live, how the society ought
to change, all out of his own brain.”
His chum was still regarding him puzzled. “Crank case?”
“Crank. Nut case,” Larry said testily. “Jeez.”
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt thinks this regimentation should simply con-
tinue after the war,” Pancho said. “And very likely it will. The monop-
olies, the government, the army, and the unions will share out the
world, and we’ll be forced into a single mold, no more different from
one another than gingerbread men.”
“Why don’t you shut up, old man,” Larry said, turning his chair
suddenly with a scrape. “Nobody wants to hear your guff. This union’s
fought the company and the government for workers’ rights, and—”
“You just wait till this war’s over,” Pancho exclaimed, still facing
the crowd at his own table, who were now curious to see what would
happen next. “You’ll see. The unions, the government, the military, the
corporations, they’ll all knit together”—here he interlaced his own fin-
gers—“into one big grinding machine to grind our faces. We’ll all be
rich as Dives and miserable as worms.” He dabbed his lips with a paper
napkin. “The union, ” he said, as though that were all that needed to be
said about that, and tossed the napkin down.
Larry was out of his seat now, and still Pancho, nose lifted, declined
to notice him.
“You damn fool, you can keep your opinions to yourself, or I might
just jam ’em down your throat!”
Pancho arose and said something to his table about those without
reasons, who used blows instead. Larry threw a chair out of the way to
get at Pancho and now around him people were getting to their feet
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 71
and yelling Hey hey and other cries to quell argument. Pancho in a
graceful rapid move pushed up both his sleeves even as he took an old-
fashioned boxer’s stance, the backs of his fists to Larry. Larry appeared
startled at Pancho’s ready-Eddy defense and jutting chin, and backed
away, kicking the chair instead. “Ah go sit down, y’old dope. Who
needs your advice.”
Pancho maintained his posture for a moment more, then sat again,
dusting his hands.
That seemed to those at the tables a forbearance on Larry’s part, as
he was known to be a brawler not only practiced but ruthless—he’d
told how as a younger man he’d carried a set of brass knuckles, and
he’d won fights by slipping them on in his pocket while he and the
other man Stepped Outside, then he’d clip the other guy with a dis-
abling punch before the mutt knew what was happening, and slip off
the knuckles before he was caught with them: a history he seemed
proud of. He was smart enough, though—he said now, glaring at Pan-
cho’s back—not to start a fight in the damn cafeteria.
“Oh, he’s one smart fella,” Pancho said. “Oh yes.”
“One smart fella, he felt smart,” said Al Mass across from him.
“Two smart fellas, they felt smart—”
“Shut up, Al,” said Sal.
At midnight the Swing Shift ended and what longtime factory workers
always called the Graveyard Shift but now throughout the war indus-
try was called the Victory Shift began, special commendation and
maybe a couple of cents more an hour for those who took it on and
worked through the dark toward dawn: a contingent of Teenie Weenies
including the Indian and the Doctor (of veterinary medicine, he hadn’t
practiced in the years since he took up the bottle). Somehow the still-
ness of the deep midnight, or the ceasing of certain jobs done only in
the daytime, made the shift quieter: maybe it just seemed so. Conversa-
tion seemed possible. At three in the morning they had begun talking
about people in the news who could or couldn’t sing.
“Norman Thomas had a fine voice,” Vilma said. “I stood once in a
crowd that all sang the ‘Internationale’ with him. I could hear him
loud and clear. A fine tenor voice.”
72 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“ ‘Arise you prisoners of starvation,’ ” a union man who’d overheard
sang out, hymnlike. “ ‘Arise you wretched of the earth.’ ”
“How long till lunch break, anyway?” said Lucille the spot welder.
“You know who couldn’t sing,” somebody else said. “Huey Long. I
saw him in the newsreel singing ‘Every Man a King.’ He waved his
finger like this but couldn’t keep the time. He looked like a spastic.”
“I’ll bet the President has a fine voice.”
“I know his favorite hymn is ‘Our God Our Help in Ages Past.’ He
sang it on that ship, the time he met Churchill. They had a Sunday ser-
vice right on the ship. They both sang.”
The Doctor hearing this began to sing:
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.”
Somebody else took it up, as though unable not to, the way some
people can’t help blessing someone who sneezes, no matter how far off
the sneezer, how unheard the blessing.
“Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.”
It was harder to hear it now, amid the noise of the place, but it was
clear the song was being passed on, sometimes a couple of people stop-
ping what they were doing to sing a verse; and some of those who sang
or listened to the old words heard them anew, here on the Victory Shift
gathered around the wingless Pax like ants around their queen:
“A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 73
And farther aft, where the pop of rivet guns punctured it:
“Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”
Coming back around like a little circling breeze to where Vi, Lucille,
and the fuselage team worked. A colored man strapping wire within
the fuselage could be heard taking it up, a light sweet tenor like Norman
Thomas’s, you wouldn’t have thought it from such a large man, it was
so surprising that some around him stopped work to notice, while
others shook their heads and didn’t:
“Like flowery fields the nations stand
Pleased with the morning light;
The flowers, beneath the mower’s hand,
Lie withering ere ’tis night.”
Those who knew the hymn well recognized this as the last awful
verse, and they could begin again on the chorus, comforted or not, in
agreement or not, or simply able to remember a hundred Sundays in a
different world:
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.”
But now it’s morning, and Vi Harbison sits on the bed with Prosper in his
bedroom in the house on Z Street, trimming his nails with a pair of
little scissors. Pancho Notzing’s on the Day Shift but Prosper on this
day has been moved to Swing Shift, so the house is theirs. The sensa-
tion of having his nails cut is one that Prosper can’t decide if he
enjoys or not: it recalls his mother, who used to do it, grasping each
finger tightly in turn; seeing the dead matter cut away, something
74 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that should be painful but was only forceful. And the feeling of
pressing the exposed fingertips into his palms. Vi’s doing it because
Prosper scratched her as he put a finger, then two, far up inside her.
She wasn’t going to have that. There was a lot this young man needed
to learn.
“There.”
And since she’s naked there on the bed, because she’d stopped him
from going farther before she performed that operation, Prosper
reaches out and circles the globes of her breasts with his hands, the
newly sensitized fingertips, like a safecracker’s sanded ones, assaying
the yielding curve of flesh.
“Okay?” he asked.
What he loved to see, had loved ever since he was ten and it had
been Mary Wilma’s step-ins and jumper: the pile of a woman’s dis-
carded clothes on the floor, his own too, the astonishment of naked-
ness. They went down together. Time passed.
“Okay so,” she said.
They lay face-to-face. She held his eyes with hers, but not as though
she saw him; she was looking, with a gaze of some other sort, down
into where he went; her face was like that of a blind woman he’d known
back when he worked for The Light in the Woods doing piecework:
how she’d sorted rivets into bins by touch, looking with her fingers,
eyes on nothing.
“That,” she said.
“This?”
“No. Ah. That.”
Now he too was looking within, looking with a clipped finger’s end.
It lay under a soft fold falling just below where the brushy mountain
ran out and the bare cleft began. It too was soft but soft differently,
satin not velvet. Now he’d lost it again. Found it. It seemed to grow or
peep out at his touch.
“Everybody has this?” Except for his own finger’s movements they
were both still.
“Every woman does. Ah.”
He examined it, tiny movements so that he, his little searching self,
didn’t get lost. It did seem to remind him of an arrangement or com-
plexity he’d encountered before but hadn’t actually perceived, not as a
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 75
separate thing or part that needed a name. The Little Man in the Boat,
she’d said. Here was the boat, the covering fold. Here the man. The
slick moisture made it seem to roll beneath his finger like an oiled ball
bearing in its socket. She moved then, earthquakelike, to lie on her
back, and he had to begin the search again, in a new land. “Little
man,” he said. “Why a little man, why not a little woman?”
“Hush.”
“Why not though.”
“Because ah. Because it’s ah, a little man. That’s the name. Ah. My
little man.”
Another seismic heave and she turned another quarter turn over so
that her back was to him. He pressed close against her and she took his
arm and drew it around her and directed his hand again downward,
her own now atop it, lightly, reminding him (when he thought about it
later) of his aunt May’s hand resting on the planchette of the Ouija
board and waiting for its subtle movements. She lifted her outside or
upper leg a little. “There,” she said. But soon she grew restless, or dis-
satisfied, or encouraged—Prosper tried to gauge her feelings—and
rolled again, now onto her stomach, and her legs opened as though
grateful to be able to, and they lifted Vi up a bit. This was a challenge
for Prosper, he’d learned, since his own legs weren’t up to the power
requirements, but Vi had a way of hooking her lower legs over his to
keep him steady and in place, and she could help too in getting him or
it in past the gatekeepers and on into the interior, which she now did,
with a seemingly pitiful small cry.
“Now you be careful,” she gasped into the pillow. “Prosper. You be
careful. You know?”
“I know.”
This being the second time that morning he thought he could do
all right, in fact it felt a bit wooden and abused after having gone on
in, but she again drew his hand around and onto her to go find that
Little Man he’d met, which now he could easily do, not nearly so
little this way, why hadn’t he identified it before; and with every-
thing then set and going, the round and round along with the in and
out, like rubbing your stomach while patting your head, the train
left the station, picking up speed wonderfully, amazingly: even as he
began making sounds of his own he was able to marvel at it.
76 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“So how do you know these things,” Prosper said later. The bed was
mussed and suffering, not really meant for two if one of them was Vi.
“Who taught you?”
If you lay still in that dry air, as the heat rose you could feel the
sweat pass off you even as it was produced. They lay still. They had
stopped touching.
“You just know,” Vi said. “It’s part of me. I know about it.”
“But those names,” Prosper said. She knew names for what she had
and what he had, what they did, what came of it, some of them useful,
some funny.
“Oh. I learned. From somebody.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“Tell me,” Prosper said.
“Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you? All these things are educational.” He put his
hand on the rise of her thigh. He thought how soon you can get used to
being naked alongside someone naked, so that the two of you can con-
verse just as though you were dressed, and how that ought to be odd
but somehow isn’t, which is odd in itself. “Isn’t that so?”
“You might be asking out of jealousy. People can be jealous of
people’s old lovers. Former lovers. They pretend to ask just out of curi-
osity but it’s a nagging thing, they’re jealous even if they don’t know it.
They think they just want to learn something about someone, but it
poisons them to hear it.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s like bad earth.” She rolled away from him and looked
upward at the ceiling, which seemed to be hammocking ever so
slightly downward. “Poisoned through the ear. And they asked for it
too.”
“No. I just wanted to know. About you. What you did, what you
thought, before. I’d like to know.”
She turned her head toward him, and he could see that she was con-
sidering him. Her eyebrows rose, asking something, more of herself
than of him: but she smiled.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 77
“Tell me,” he said, smiling too.
“Tell you. Tell you what.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“So start in the middle. Like True Story.”
“Like what?”
“The stories in True Story always start in the middle. ‘Little did I
know when I saw the dawn come that day that by nightfall I’d be locked
up in jail.’ You know.”
“You read True Story? It’s for women.”
“I used to.”
“Little did I know I’d find myself in bed with a ninny.” She reached
down to pluck the crumpled and somewhat soggy pack of Luckies from
the pocket of her shirt, where like a man she kept them. “Okay,” she
said. “Here goes.”
7
Little did she know: that when the great worldwide storm rolled
over at last, after hovering so long undecided, it would leave the
land remade by its passing, the way spring storms and the sun
following them can change the brown prairie to green almost
overnight or overday: that it would move her farther than she had ever
thought to move, though not as far as she had once dreamed of moving.
She’d gone out to the Pacific Northwest first, looking for work, coming
down after a long trip into a port city along swarming roads filled with
others also ready to go to work if they could find someplace to stay.
There were ten shipyards slung out into the bay and a ship was being
launched every month, soon it would be every twenty days, and it was
easy to find out how to get to the employment offices, as easy as fol-
lowing the crowd funneling into a ballpark, and after you signed up at
one—whichever you came to first, you couldn’t know which was the
better place to work but the work was all the same and you had lots of
company no matter which one you picked—they told you about places
to look for a room or at least a bed, and where not to look if you were
a young single girl in a summer dress and a thin sweater carrying an
old suitcase tied up with a length of twine. Not even if you were a girl
just a little short of six feet, wide-shouldered and big-handed with a
touch-me-not coolness in your long narrow eyes.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 79
It was less than a week since she’d left the ranch and her father’s
house. Six weeks since her youngest brother had left for the army
induction center, following his older brothers. Ten since the bulldozer
had covered with dirt the corpses of the last sick cattle shot by the gov-
ernment agents and her father had shut the door on those agents as
though he’d never open it again for anyone.
Bad earth they’d called it, stretches of prairie that were somehow
naturally poisonous, whose poisons could be drawn up into plants
that stock would eat. Maybe for a long time eating the plants hadn’t
hurt them, maybe not for years, but then there’d be a change in the
groundwater, or some new plant would start growing there and take
hold—a kind of vetch, they said, was one—and it could suck up so
much of the poison it could kill. Kill a sheep in an hour, a heifer in a
day; leave cattle with the blind staggers or their hooves softening
and sloughing off, too weak to feed, had to be shot, so poisoned they
couldn’t be sold for slaughter even if they lived. Government gave
you a penny on the pound. She herself had to sell the horses; they
were smarter than the cattle and stayed away from the garlicky smell
of the bad-earth weed, but there was no way now for them to earn
their keep. Without them the ranch seemed to her to be, and always
to have really been, a hostile stretch of nowhere, no friend to her.
Her father was planning (if you could call it a plan) to hole up with
the government payment till his two sons came home and they could
start again, fence off the bad earth. Vi wouldn’t stay just to keep his
house for him and wait. She thought—she knew—she could have
done what was necessary to get going again, the bank loans, the
inspections, meat prices were soaring, but she wasn’t going to talk
him into letting her. Wouldn’t and couldn’t. Even a woman could
make $2,600 a year as a welder, and she planned to send most of her
pay home.
He’d driven her out to the county road where the bus stopped once
a day and never said a word. She wondered if he’d go home and put a
shotgun to his head the way his uncle had done in the dust-storm days.
Just when the bus appeared far off raising its own cloud he took a
crushed roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a ten and some
ones, and she thanked him meekly, but she’d already taken more than
that out of the bank, where she’d had an account ever since she turned
80 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
twenty, three years before. She hadn’t told him or anyone, not knowing
then what the money was for. It was for this.
“Bye, Daddy. Take care of yourself.”
“So long, Vi.”
“I’ll see you when the war’s over,” she said, but he didn’t smile.
The bus was filled with soldiers, only a few country people in among
them, and they stirred as one when Vi climbed the stair; one leapt up to
help her lift her bag into the netting overhead, a little ferrety fellow, she
let him think he’d helped. She took the seat they competed to offer her,
and for a time tried to make conversation, which she’d never been much
good at, especially the kind that had no purpose, or rather had one
hidden in the commonplaces. She gave them a word picture of the cattle
dying and stinking in the sun, how she’d pulled the ropes to help the
tractor drag them into the pits, sometimes pulling apart the longer-
lying bodies, all the time followed by the crows: and they mostly fell
silent, some because they knew what she meant and what it had been
like, some because they didn’t. A day and a night passed.
In the dark and the dawn she expected to be anxious and afraid.
But her heart felt cool. She passed through towns she’d never seen, the
trucks at the feed store, the tavern and the post office and the bank like
the ones in her town, the school and the churches, but not the same
ones, and beginning to grow different as she went west: why different
she couldn’t say. She couldn’t sleep even when the darkness outside the
window was so total she could see only the dim ghost of her own face,
a person who’d left home to find war work. Now and then what she
was doing came back to her in the middle of some bland string of
thought and her heart seemed to collapse into her stomach and her
breasts to shrink, the feeling of diving into water from a high rock. But
it only lasted a second, and she wasn’t even sure it wasn’t a good feel-
ing, in its way.
By the next night Vi was done with bus travel. She was filthy, she
felt limp and wound up at the same time, and the trip went on forever,
since the bus was forbidden by company policy to go faster than thirty-
five miles an hour to save gas and rubber, and even when the driver
picked it up a little, it did no good, because the stops were calculated at
the set speed, and you simply waited longer at stops. In any big town
she could have got off and found the train station, but she had paid for
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 81
the trip, and anyway in the fusty odor and noise of the bus, amid the
changeful crowd, she felt cocooned, waiting to come forth but not yet
ready.
That night they came to a broad crossroads, two great stripes of
highway at right angles, that had collected gas stations and bars and a
long diner around itself. Vi could see, as the bus downshifted and
slowed, a line of military vehicles, two-ton trucks, bigger trucks,
smaller ones, strung out just off the road, thirty or forty or more. When
the bus turned in to let out its passengers to eat and drink and use the
toilets, it passed a crowd, apparently the drivers of the vehicles, going
to or coming from the diner, gathering to talk or smoke a cigarette
before starting out again west where the vehicles were pointed—that’s
the thought that occurred to Vi. Over at the big garage behind the
diner, which came into view as the bus drew up to park, two of the
hulking brown trucks had their hoods open and were being worked on
under lights on tall poles. It was also clear now in the lights of the
parking lot that all the drivers in their jackets and caps were women.
Not soldiers but women, some in skirts, most in trousers. Vi getting off
heard their laughter.
There were several in the diner, waiting maybe for the disabled
vehicles to be fixed, crowded into the booths or seated on the stools.
They were all ages, some as young as Vi, some as old as her mother had
been, some as old as her mother would now be. The soldiers from the
bus who banged into the diner looked around in awe, no place they’d
expected to find themselves, an army of the opposing sex. They couldn’t
help but engage one another, though some of the boys were over-
whelmed and some of the women shy, maybe about the bandannas
turbanning their heads or their lipstick worn away or not even applied
that day, the ends of their dungarees rolled high.
They were drivers for a plant building military vehicles, in convoy
to deliver the trucks to the port where they’d be put aboard ships (the
women assumed) and sent out. Why not put them on flatcars, send
them by train? The women laughed, asked each other why not, but no
one knew for sure, maybe the trains were so busy now and the trucks
were needed quick.
They moved aside, pushed over, let the newcomers share their
booths, take their places at the counters, sit with them at their burdened
82 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
tables that two harried waiters and a colored busboy tried to manage.
Vi sat down next to a woman with her hair in a swept-up Betty Hutton
do, a cap perched on it so small and far back as to announce its useless-
ness, point out that its wearer wasn’t really a cap-wearer at all. But her
nails were short and darkened at the moons.
“Where you headed?”
Vi named the city on the sea, the same to which the convoy was
going.
“Whatcha doing there? That’s a long ways from home. Trying for a
job?”
“Right. Welding. I read about it.”
The woman, whose name was Shirley, looked Vi over in some admi-
ration. Vi thought to drop her gaze, thought she ought to, but Shirley
held it. Vi wondered how old she was: ten years older than she? “You’ll
do all right,” she said. “You going alone?”
“Yep.”
“You ever do anything like that? Welding?”
“Well on the ranch. A little acetylene torch, fixing hay rakes and
things. My brother was better.”
“This’ll be different,” Shirley said. She laughed. “When I got a job at
this plant, I was working in the yard, they came and asked, You ever
drive a truck? And I said Sure. I mean I’d driven a pickup, you know, how
hard could it be? So I was signed up. They took me out and showed me
this thing. I couldn’t even see how to get into it. Then there’s four forward
gears and an overdrive. Two reverse. I said Huh? They said Oh there’s a
chart right there on the floor. All the slots are numbered. Easy.”
“Was it?”
“Well let’s see. It took me a half an hour to get the motor running
without stalling. Another half an hour to figure out how to back up
without stalling.”
“How much training did you get?”
“Training? That was the training. We left next morning.”
Shirley enjoyed Vi’s face for a moment, then put out her wet-lipped
cigarette in the dregs of her coffee. “Listen,” she said. “Long as we’re
headed for the same place, why don’t you ride along with me?”
Vi, who’d told herself to be ready for anything, wasn’t ready for
this, didn’t have a name for the feeling the offer wakened in her.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 83
“I paid for a bus ticket all the way,” she said.
“So what?” Shirley said laughing. “I’m not going to charge you. And
I’ll get you there faster.” She bent toward Vi. “I’d like the company,” she
said. “Gets lonely in the dark. You can keep me from falling asleep too.”
So Vi went and woke the bus driver asleep in his seat and told him
she wasn’t going any farther; he looked at her like he’d not heard, then
nodded slowly without speaking. She got her bag from the overhead
rack and dragged it away down the bus steps and only then heard the
driver call after her, but not what he said. Shirley was waiting for her
and they went together out to where the trucks were starting their
engines, turning on their great lights.
“So this isn’t against the rules?” Vi asked. “What if they kick me
off?”
“There’s no they,” Shirley said. “There’s just us.”
It was hard to get into, no running board, only a sort of rung, you
stood on that and pulled the door open, then took a jump to another
step and in.
And it was hard to get the big thing going. Shirley pulled the choke,
feathered the clutch, worked the long gearshifter into the wrong then
the right slots, all the while letting out what in an old book Vi’d read
was called “a string of oaths” and then doing better after she calmed
herself, and crossed herself.
The trucks moved out into the empty night highway. Vi could see the
vehicles far ahead pulling one by one into line like a great glittering snake
whipping sidewise very slowly. Then Shirley’s, with a judder and a roar. Vi
was on the move now for sure: later she would remember it as the moment
when she was put into motion not away but for the first time toward,
toward whatever the world was bringing into being, everything ahead.
They picked up speed. High up off the road Vi bounced in her hard
seat as though she might lose it and end up on the floor—she thought
of the miles ahead and wondered if she would regret her impulse to
climb in with Shirley, who was gripping the steering wheel hard but at
least no longer bent forward as though impelling the 10-ton all by her-
self. Vi’s job was to help keep an eye on the truck ahead, watch for its
dim brake lights. If something happened far up the line, if the lead
truck had to stop, then the following trucks would have to stop in turn,
but the gap between a braking truck and the still-moving truck behind
84 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
it would shorten as the stop went down the line, till the trucks far back
would have to stop fast, so you needed all the time you could get.
“It’s why we’re driving through the night,” Shirley said. “We got a
truck this afternoon had to go off the road to keep from hitting the one
ahead. Just like a train derailing. The one truck turned out so’s not to
hit the one ahead, and the one behind that one had to turn out not to
hit her and got bent and went into the slough there, and altogether it
took some hours to get us all out and going again.”
Night went on. Vi tried to watch the truck in front, hypnotized by
its swaying. She only realized she’d fallen asleep when she felt a sharp
smack on her arm.
“Hey,” Shirley said. “You’re supposed to be keeping me awake.”
“Oh,” Vi said. “Oh sorry.”
“So talk to me,” Shirley said, turning back to the road. “Tell me
your story. What do you love, what do you want, what makes you
laugh, who’d you leave behind. All like that. Make it exciting.”
Vi laughed and suddenly wished she could do that, but the story she
could tell—all that she was willing to tell—was more likely to put a
hearer to sleep than keep one awake. She told Shirley about how her
mother had died when Vi was eighteen, a cancer, and her father had
moved his kids out to the ranch where his own mother still lived alone.
Vi’d just graduated from high school in the town they lived in then—not
a big town, not a real city, but it had had a picture show and a couple of
restaurants and a normal school that Vi had enrolled in, hoping she could
figure a way to get to the state college—she was smart and knew it, and
had done well in school, her favorite teacher was working to help her. She
spent a year attending the normal school, but in the end she’d gone out to
the ranch with her father and brothers. “The boys were young,” she said.
“I couldn’t let Daddy go it alone. Grandma wasn’t well either.”
“Sure,” said Shirley.
“Anyway,” Vi said, and then no more.
“So this was what, four, five years ago?”
“Yes.”
“Great time to go ranching. Or farming. Around there where you
were.”
“Yeah well. We didn’t do so hot.”
There came a pause then in the cab, a brief mournful or memorial
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 85
moment: everybody remembered, times on the farm that had been so
bad you didn’t need to say anything, only a fool would feel the need to
say something, and the worst was all over now—but you didn’t say
that either, it wasn’t good luck or good sense to say so. But Vi had to at
least finish the story, which in her own case or her family’s didn’t get
better. Bad earth, failure, war and her brothers enlisting, things stay-
ing so bad it was almost laughable, like some pileup of disasters in a
comedy picture.
“So no regrets about leaving,” Shirley said, reaching for the pack of
smokes on the truck’s dash. “That’s good.”
Vi wouldn’t say yes or no.
“A fella you left behind? Not even that?”
“No,” Vi said, looking ahead. “No fella.”
“No cowboy serenading you with a git-tar?”
Vi laughed. Another reason to leave town and school and go out to
the empty places: that’s what her father thought, and Vi for her own
reasons, but concerning the same matters, had guessed it was advis-
able: what she went away from, which didn’t count now, not right now
anyway, beside Shirley in the truck. “I got a nice smile from Gene
Autry once when he came to the opera house in the next town,” she
said. “But he didn’t follow up.”
They laughed together, and went on into the night, which was at
last beginning to pass, the ragged edge of the mountains that they were
to cross now distinguishable from the greening sky; they sang some of
Gene’s hit songs, everybody knew them.
“Sometimes I live in the country
And sometimes I live in the town
Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown.”
Somehow, all the next day after she climbed at last down from the
10-ton in the port district where the trucks lined up to be loaded onto
ships, and she and Shirley’d said good-bye amid the stink of the
exhausts and the shouts of the dispatchers, after they’d hugged and
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