Four Freedoms

laughed at their momentary friendship, Vi kept thinking of Shirley. She

86 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

imagined Shirley observing her, observing her behavior in the street

and in the employment offices and out onto the street again, Shirley

noting how Vi did things that she’ d do in a different and maybe a

better way, and Vi explaining to Shirley why she did what she did.

Shirley would remain in Vi’s brain or spirit for a long time, listening to

her, approving her, surprised by her, commenting on her, as though

those hours beside her in the truck had been enough to pass something

of Shirley and her cool bravery into Vi, to see her through: like Virgil

and Dante.

The women’s hotel, when she reached it, had no room for her, and by

the look of the white-haired pince-nez ladies who ran it never would—

one glance at Vi and her shabby suitcase was all it took. They were

delighted to direct her to the YWCA, a wonderful place they were sure

would suit her. Vi set out for this place, and reached it feeling wearier

than she ever had after any day’s work on the ranch: the pavement harder

on her feet and legs than any hardpan; the constant draw of thousands

of faces passing you on the street, the constant need to look away from

them if they caught your eye, just as they looked away too; the air filled

with sounds to be listened to, radios blaring from stores, car horns urgent

but mostly meaningless, gunshot backfires, police whistles, sirens

announcing disasters that maybe she should run from but couldn’t see

(for the first time she became keenly aware that you can shut your eyes

but you can’t shut your ears). And there were no rooms at the Y.

“Nothing? I’ve walked a long way. I’ve got a job, starting tomor-

row.”

“I’m so sorry,” the woman at the desk said, and she seemed to mean

it; she was no older than Vi, and badly frazzled. “I can put you on our

list. I mean people come and go so fast here, you know, they get more

permanent places, I’m sure there’ll be something soon.”

“Well,” Vi said, not turning away, hoping she’d somehow be taken

on as a desperate case and her problem solved, even when the frazzled

woman moved off to busy herself with other things and avoid Vi’s eyes.

Vi looked around. Something calming and bounteous about the place,

a couple of oil portraits, old lady benefactors Vi guessed, the wicker

furniture and the bookshelves. They had a gymnasium, just for the

women! Vi thought she could live here forever. But she couldn’t just

hangdog it here in front of the desk, it wasn’t going to work.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 87

Turning to look for a solution she saw a woman seated in the lobby

regarding her intently, who then raised two fingers to summon her. Vi,

with a glance at the receptionist’s back, went to where the woman sat,

a pretty plump brunette Vi’s age.

“I know you need a place,” she said to Vi in a hurried undertone.

“Look, you can stay in my spot. I work the late shift, and you can have

the bed till I get back.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. They don’t like us doing that, though, so you know, mum’s

the word.”

Closer to her now, Vi saw that the girl’s eyebrows were carefully

plucked and redrawn, like a movie star’s, and her makeup done with

care.

“Okay?” she said.

“Oh. Yes,” Vi said. “Yes, sure, thanks so much. My name’s

Violet.”

“Terry,” said the girl, and held out a hand, limply ladylike, but the

nails short and what seemed to be small burns on thumb and knuckle.

“It’s 302 upstairs. Just go around and down to the gym, then up the

back stairs from there.”

“Okay.”

“See you in a bit. They won’t mind if you rest here. Read a maga-

zine, something.”

“Okay.”

She was gone. Vi watched the seams on her stockings flash: where’d

she get those? Then carelessly she drifted through the lobby, picked up

a paper, sat down out of sight of the desk. Women came and went, yak-

king and laughing and calling to one another, some in work clothes

and boots or saddle shoes, some in dresses and hats, some toting lunch

pails or toolboxes. After a while she got up and followed the sign down

to the overheated gym, which was empty except for a couple of large

women on stationary bicycles; Vi could hear the echoey splash of the

pool and smell chlorine. Then up the narrow back stairs to knock at

the door of 302.

The room was tiny, a narrow bed, a little dresser with a mirror, a

white curtain in a window that looked out at nothing. Terry was redo-

ing her makeup, getting ready to go, she said. She did her lips with a

88 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

dark lipstick, not the stick itself but a brush she wiped across the

obscene little red tip poking from the cartridge. Vi asked her what

work she did.

“Welding,” she said. She named the shipyard, famous for its speed,

a great tycoon had streamlined the works, they called him Sir Launch-

alot in the papers. Terry plucked a sheet out of a box of Lucky tissues

and pressed her lips on it. “Where you going?”

Vi took from her bag the form she’d been given and read the name.

“Hey, that one’s out on the island,” Terry said into the tiny mirror.

“You’ll have to take the ferry out.”

“That’s what they said,” Vi said.

“Why’d you pick that one?”

“Well,” Vi said, feeling Shirley in the room too, wondering too, “I

guess because they said they have a softball league. I thought I could

play.”

Terry looked at her without judgment but conveying clearly that Vi

was a greenhorn and didn’t know the basics. “They all have softball

leagues,” she said. “And bowling leagues and glee clubs and theatri-

cals. Anything you want. Anything to make you happy.”

Vi said nothing, afraid that if she asked further she’d find out she’d

made a dumb mistake.

“You play softball?” Terry said kindly. “You like it?”

“Yes.” Vi decided to make the claim for herself, not be shy. “I played

on a good team in high school. WPA built the town a diamond and

stands. We were all-state, 1935. I played at normal school too for one

year.”

“Well.” Terry looked at her and nodded, smiling, as though a child

had told her of some little accomplishment. “Real teams.”

“My brothers were stars. Baseball. It was all they cared about. They

taught me. I’m good.” She tried to say it plainly, as though she’d said

I’m tall. “Anyway it would be fun to play. I thought.”

“Sure,” Terry said, popping her lipstick into an alligator bag. “Let

me tell you how you get out there tomorrow, okay?”

How many stories she had read of people on journeys—there was

Kidnapped and there was Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio and so

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 89

many more—and in them the one who’s on the journey meets persons,

one after the other, who either help or hurt him—sometimes seeming

to offer help but then turning on him, sometimes gruff or rejecting but

then kind underneath. Some of them seem to know a secret about the

traveler, or to want something from him. That’s how the story pro-

ceeds: sometimes going from bad to good, sometimes bad to worse

before becoming good again. Her journey wasn’t turning out like that,

not that she’d expected it to. Everybody was pretty kind but mostly

preoccupied; you asked them for what you needed and sometimes they

could give it but mostly not and they passed out of your attention and

you went on. It didn’t pile up the way it did in books: it was come and

go, over and gone.

But Shirley stayed in her consciousness, speaking and questioning

and a little doubtful, or surprised and admiring; and Terry too, her

makeup and her burns. And then the three women in black leather at

the ferry’s rail.

She’d been early at the dock, making for the streetcar with the

others, standing on the open platform and clinging on, thinking in a

kind of euphoric fear that at any minute she’d be knocked off and

tumble down the impossibly steep hill that the little car trundled over,

bell clanging. The air was rich and cold and watery, nothing she’d seen

or smelled before, clouds of pale birds—gulls!—descending and aris-

ing from the sea-edge where she got off. After the crisp brassy trolley

bell the deep imperious horns, hurry up, she was carried along under

the noses of high black ships being loaded by sky-flown cranes, and

through the gate and onto the little ferryboat, cars creeping in three

lines into its belly and people crowding the decks. Then out onto the

sea, or the bay at least, black heaving water and the insubstantial city

seeming to float away behind. Vi held tight, as though she might float

away too. She saw three women, chums apparently, laughing together,

one leaning on the rail on her elbows and looking down, one beside her

hands in her pockets. The three were all dressed alike, in jackets and

trousers of what could only be black leather, heavy as hides, collars up

against the smart breeze, and high boots laced with a yard of thong.

Their hair was covered, except for one’s blond forelock escaping, in

bright bandannas knotted at the front. And on the back of each jacket

was sewn or stuck a big red V in shiny cloth, their own idea obviously.

90 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

People turned to look at them, intrigued or cheered or a little shocked,

but they didn’t notice, used to it maybe. Vi had always thought of her-

self as brave—her pa said so, her teacher, but she knew it anyway—but

she’d always thought of brave as something you did alone: being alone

in what you did and doing it anyway was what was meant by being

brave. Only when she saw those three (and she couldn’t have said it

then, couldn’t until she’d thought about it, had seen them often in her

mind, their open faces, joshing one another or looking out over water)

did she know that there could be a way of being brave together, a few

together.

The first thing she’d have to do, they told her and her class of new

hires, would be to get some good strong boots. Shipyards are just dan-

gerous places. Dungarees are good but in some jobs you’d be better off

with a pair of welder’s leathers. You’ll pay for those yourself; you might

go down to the Army-Navy store, they’ve got the stuff. You’ll have a

locker and you can keep your work clothes here if you don’t want to

wear them in the street, lot of girls don’t (Vi thought of Terry, brave

too). Now come along and we’ll start you with some basic training.

So she became an arc welder, stitching precut forms together to make

bulkhead walls and then other parts of ships (“it’s a lot like doing

embroidery,” their trainer said, as he obviously had said many times to

women before, but Vi’d never done embroidery so it was no help to

her), and on the Swing Shift she and others would pick up their rod

pot, stinger, wire brush for washing off the slag and getting that per-

fect bead, and the long lead for hooking up to power, looped over your

shoulder: watch out for somebody cutting into your lead, detaching

you at the middle and hooking themselves in, hey what the hell! Sixty

feet overhead the crane car ran on its tracks, the huge steel plates sus-

pended from it that were chunked in place with that vast noise, the

welders lowering their masks and moving in. Vi wore her ranch over-

alls and a sweatshirt of her brother’s, didn’t buy leathers for a while,

feeling somehow she had to earn them, like a varsity sweater or a jock-

ey’s silks; but the sparks from a carbon arc off a steel plate could burn

badly, right through your brassiere—Terry, shaking her head, gave Vi

cream for the burns.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 91

Off-hours she looked for a room, but it was tight. You couldn’t just

get a room in some cheap portside hotel, it looked bad, a girl in a flop-

house, but sometimes when she found a house with a sign in the

window, room for rent, she’d be told it was taken already, only to

find out later that some man had come after her and got it, tough luck

sweetheart. After a week of sneaking into Terry’s room at the Y she got

lucky, the union found her a room to share in an old mansion down-

town that had been swept into a bad neighborhood in the Depression

and never recovered, cut up into small rooms sharing the vast marbled

baths, a dusty ballroom on the third floor where the women danced

and got in trouble. Her new roommate had been sharing with her sister,

but her sister’s husband had been invalided out and she’d gone home to

care for him. She’d left behind her gloves, Vi’s now if she wanted them,

her good lunch box, and an Indian motorcycle, an ancient one-lunger

on which the two of them had got to the docks each day, now to be Sis

and Vi’s transportation, each of them in their welding gear and black

turbans, Vi up behind so tall she could see over the driver’s head: roll-

ing onto that ferry where she’d first seen that trio with the V-sign on

their backs, herself one of them now.

Pretty soon she started playing ball.

8

After the first tryouts Dad said to her: “You’ve played some.”

“Some.”

“Okay. You want to pitch.”

“If I can.”

He smiled. “You can,” he said, “if you can. You certainly may.”

Hearing that the man who’d be coaching her team (and a couple of

others too) was called Dad, she’d expected a grizzled codger, tobacco

chewer, old-timer. Dad wasn’t old; he was an engineer, with a wife and

kids, doing necessary war work. The ball teams were his relaxation. He

spoke little and smiled less, and Vi had to keep herself from staring at

him, trying to figure him out. She’d find out later that he’d noticed that.

Everyone who signed up to play was sorted randomly into the four

women’s teams the shipyard fielded—the Rinky-dinks, the Steel Ladies,

the Stingers, the Bobtails. Just about anybody was allowed to play, but

a rough order was apparent, and if you were better than the team you

were put in, Dad pushed you into a different position on another one,

where maybe you wouldn’t look good for a while, so nobody’d feel

jealous, and then he’d give you the position you could really play, and

the team would rise in the standings.

They played not out on the island where the shipyard was, but at a

little ballpark on the mainland, three diamonds laid out regulation

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 93

softball style, where there was a constant rotation as shifts began and

ended, some teams practicing, others playing. They played each other,

they played teams from the other shipyards and war plants, they played

the WAVEs from the base, they played a team from the government

offices and one from the port authority. Vi was amazed at how seri-

ously most people took it, as seriously as they took their jobs. The

Stingers (her team) had uniforms, baggy and gray but uniforms, and

Dad wouldn’t allow you to play in a game if you weren’t suited up—

sometimes Vi heading for a game straight from her rooming house had

to wear hers on the trolley out to the field, and back again sweaty and

bedraggled and feeling foolish. The whole of downtown was no larger

than a ranch, but getting around in it took forever, trolleys and buses

and on feet weary from a day’s work. It was hard, and the game the

women played was played more fiercely than Vi had ever played it, no

kindness in it, no forgiveness for errors, no encouragement yelled out

by the other team just to be nice. She loved it that way. It was great to

learn you could weld, learn you could drive a crane a hundred feet over

the shop floor, or run a drill press as big as a double bed, but playing

real ball was even better. Vi thought so.

She’d never really had a coach before, but she could tell Dad was

hardest on the players he thought were the best; they were all playing

just for fun, supposedly, but Dad played to win as if it weren’t. He caught

Vi out for being lackadaisical, for letting runners steal bases because she

didn’t check, for smiling, for giving away her pitch in the way she stood,

the way she composed her face—he said she looked one way when she

threw a fastball and a different way for a curve. She didn’t believe him,

or didn’t believe it could matter, and laughed, but his face was stony.

“Softball’s a game of thinking,” he said. “You gotta think, Vi.

Because the ball goes so slow, and can’t go far. They say baseball’s a

game of thinking too, but then along comes Ruth or Williams and it

turns out it’s a game of muscle after all. But softball’s a thinking game

all the time. And the pitcher’s the player that’s thinking the game.”

“I think.”

“You think too much. When you think. I can read you like a book.”

He made her pitch to him, hitting pitch after pitch, lightly laying

them out behind her, to right field, left field. The harder she tried the

easier it seemed for him to do it.

94 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

“Come on, girl. Fool me. Trip me up, take me out. What are you

waiting for?”

Dad could make her want to cry, but he could also make her refuse

to cry: she looked back at him, her eyes slits like his, gum clenched in

her jaw. Her arm ached. She threw as hard as she could until at last she

decided she hated him so much she didn’t care what he thought of her,

stared fiercely at him and wound up and threw a lazy slider that he

whiffed. The catcher missed it too.

“Practice over,” Dad said calmly.

Night had fallen suddenly. She, the stolid little catcher, and Dad were

the last players left. Vi was faced with a walk to the trolley and a long

ride back to the mansion. Dad put them both in his Dodge coupe.

“It’s out of your way,” Vi said.

“You don’t know what’s out of my way.”

He drove the old car top down, shifting with a sort of beautiful cau-

tion to save both transmission and rubber: they went on without speak-

ing, though Dad once looked over to Vi, conscious that she was

watching him, and smiled. He dropped off the catcher at her house on

the hill and took Vi down toward the harbor, though even Vi could tell

the other order would have been quicker.

“I’ve got to send you home,” she said at the door of her place. “House

rules.” At which he slowly nodded, knowing from the way she put it

(she knew he knew) that she wouldn’t if she didn’t have to; and halfway

down the block he turned the Dodge around and came back, and she

was still standing there on the doorstep just as though she’d known he’d

do that, though really she hadn’t, had simply stopped in midspace await-

ing something—the same thoughtless mindless not-expectant awaiting

(she’d think later) as before a kiss. They went up the stairs and she left

him in the alcove and knocked at her own door. Sis answered, she was

just dressing to go out because tonight the picture changed at the Fox,

and Vi said Okay and waved her good-bye, at which Sis closed the door

slowly and in some puzzlement. Vi took Dad’s hand and together they

went up to that ballroom on the third floor, the parquet and the spooky

peeling gold wallpaper illuminated by the streetlights coming on. Vi

wound the gramophone and put on whatever record was on the top of

the pile, just the right one of course, because by now it was evident that

this was one of those times when nothing could go wrong, even things

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 95

going wrong would be funny and sweet and right. It didn’t surprise her

that Dad was one of those men who can dance as well as they play ball,

or swim, or drive a car. After a while they knew that Sis had gone to the

movies and they went downstairs.

They left the lights off but this room too was lit by the streetlights,

the city never dark, not the way home had been. She wept a little, and

wouldn’t say why; Dad thought he knew why but he was wrong. It was

the dark V of his throat and his burned forearms in the dimness, the

long white body and its stain or smudge of black hair from breastbone

down to where his penis rose: reminding her of someone else, back

where she came from, and all that had happened between them there,

which seemed now not only far away but long ago.

“So he taught you more than ball,” Prosper said to Vi in Ponca City.

“He didn’t teach me how to play ball. I knew.”

“Well I mean.”

“Yes.”

“And he was the first man you’d been with?”

“No,” Vi said. “No, actually, Prosper, he wasn’t.”

“Ah well then who—”

“Never mind,” Vi explained.

It was practice the day of a game with the Bomberettes from the air-

craft plant, and—Vi afterward couldn’t actually remember the sequence

of events, and had to believe Dad when he told her how it happened—

the second baseman, trying to catch a runner headed for the plate,

beaned Vi square in the back of the head.

The second baseman was being comforted—she felt terrible—when

Vi came around. Dad had brought her a Coke bottle full of water from

the bubbler at the edge of the field. While she sipped, he felt within her

heavy hair for the bump beginning to grow. “She’s okay,” he said. “Just

give her room.”

They all stood around.

“All right,” Dad said, that way he had, it made you jump: they went

back to the field.

“You’re okay,” he said to Vi. “You can pitch today.”

It took Vi a while to respond. “Oh?”

96 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

“Sure.”

“And what if I’d rather stay in bed with a bottle of aspirin.”

“No no,” said Dad. “We need you. We need to win this one.”

“And why so.” She had a hard time hearing herself speak.

“Well,” he said after some thought, “one reason, there’s a lot of

money riding on tonight.”

She thought he’d said “a lot of muddy riding” and tried to make sense

of that, an image from the ranch forming in her mind. “What?” she said.

“A lot of money,” he said. “We’re doped to win. The smart bettors

have been watching you. I mean you particularly. The book is still

giving odds against us, though, and they want to get in on this before

the odds change.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Vi. She usually never

used a bad word, except around her brothers. Times change. Dad sat

down beside her, the bottle of water in his hands, and gave her a sip

now and then as he explained.

There had never been a time like that for gambling: so much money

flowing into our pockets, so little to spend it on. The horses and dogs

got record purses, and an average Sunday bettor was dropping a hun-

dred dollars at the races, but the trouble was getting to the track—we

weren’t supposed to be wasting gas traveling for amusement, and it was

said that War Resources Board agents were coming to the parking lots

and conning the license plates for cars from far away, issuing warnings,

maybe even canceling your precious B sticker so you’d stay home.

There were the endless poker games too, their pots growing, the

amount won every wild night exactly matching the amount lost, a

continuous float moving from back room to dormitory to rooming house

to basement around the war plants. We’d bet on checkers tournaments,

on ladies’ pedestrian races (a dozen dames wig-wagging along heel-and-

toe toward the tape like a flock of geese), on donkey basketball. Of

course there were bookies, it was the golden age of vigorish, their multiple

phone lines ringing one after the other (one bookie’s operation had

twenty phones crowded on a desk, a sort of homemade PBX with all the

receivers dangling from a wall of hooks). They made book on the remains

of major league baseball, where you couldn’t see DiMaggio or Williams,

who were fighting the war, but there was Stan “the Man” Musial, for

some reason exempt, and there was Pete Gray of the Browns, who had

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 97

one arm, master of the drag bunt, no surprise; the Yankees brought back

smiling old-timers like Snuffy Stirnweiss and Spurgeon “Spud” Chandler,

who doffed their caps to the ironically cheering crowds. There was the

women’s pro ball league, founded by a chewing gum magnate, playing

what was actually softball at the beginning. And there were the leagues

of the war plants, an East Coast, a Middle, a West Coast, playing for

free, their standings known only to the unions and companies that

sponsored them and to the ferrets of the betting book that laid the odds,

which went unmentioned in the Green Sheet; you had to read the plant

news releases and the back pages of small-town papers, better you had

to have seen a team play, aircraft plant against Liberty Ship builder,

welders against riveters, Bay City Bees versus Boilermakers Lodge 72

Sledges, the roster changing every week as workers were hired or quit or

were drafted. It was the women’s teams that were the ones that were

followed, oddsmakers discovering a new science in judging the tenacity,

speed, spirit of coeds and housewives and waitresses.

It had to be hush-hush or the bosses and the government would start

wondering what this had to do with winning the war, but that only

made it more attractive, a secret Rube Goldberg machine you put money

into at one end and it came out double at the other or disappeared

entirely. Like any honorable sportsmen, the coaches and managers

wouldn’t bet, and neither would the players—mostly—but the unions

and the industries wanted their teams to win: all the gifts and the time

off they gave the best players and the little kickbacks for the coaches

hotted up the atmosphere, and staying high in the standings meant get-

ting and keeping the talent, which meant figuring how to convince a

pitcher or a first baseman to quit one plant and take a job at another.

“You’re not telling me you’ve got money on this,” Vi said to Dad.

“If I did I wouldn’t say so,” Dad said. “I’d say no.”

“Are you saying no?”

“I’m saying no.”

“So big help that is.”

“Listen,” Dad said, and he helped Vi to her feet. “I want to win. I

want to see you play with the best team I can give you. I want the shop

to be proud of the team and you, so next day they can think about how

well you did when they go in to work to make ships and send them out

to fight the war. There’s the reason. Okay?”

98 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

Vi stood, feeling the world turn about her a bit, then slow, settle,

and stop. She bent to pick up her glove and the world stayed still. She

was okay. “Okay,” she said.

The Stingers won that day, beating that “point spread” that was

evolving among the West Coast bookies just at that time, a new way of

managing the rolling tide of betting money and the unknowability of

outlandish semipro and amateur teams. That was a good day, with a

special commendation from the front office read out over the loudspeak-

ers from which issued on most days the news of battles, of quotas met,

ships launched, and announcements of War Bond drives. Then with

amazing suddenness (amazing if you hadn’t lived there long enough to

witness it) the dry season ended and the rains came; every game was

washed out until they just gave up and called it a day, tossed the bats in

the musty canvas bags and pulled up the sodden bases and locked them

in the dugouts. The end. Vi and Dad and the others went back on the

line, working double shifts now and then to make up for lost time and

wages, but for the two of them also because it was easy on the Graveyard

Shift to find a place deep in the belly of a growing ship that foremen

weren’t going to wander into, one with piles of cotton wadding or insu-

lation to lie on. Reflected glow of a flashlight turned away into the dark-

ness. Echo of their noises off steel walls, walls she had maybe made

herself, how odd, but they two not the only ones to have found their way

down there, repellent litter of cigarette butts, pint bottles, used condoms,

a bulletin had had to be posted about it, Let’s Keep Our Work Spaces

Neat. Too cold anyway soon enough, always cold and damp, clouds

parting for a moment only to gather again like helpless weeping. Vi

thought she was getting athlete’s foot, not fair, since she wasn’t an ath-

lete anymore. Sis said she was getting athlete’s foot up to the knee. Vi

learned that the mere clammy difficulty of getting warm together could

kill a romance that was already chancy at best, illicit, homeless, always

needing to be arranged, willed into being. As the rains fell steadily Dad’s

six-month exemption from military service ran out. He could have got a

new exemption without difficulty, but he chose not to. It was not Vi but

his wife and kids who saw him off for basic training at the station.

A couple of months later—spring coming, blue sky visible now and

then, that smell in the air—Vi was told by the new manager of the

Stingers that she had an opportunity to go down to the Van Damme

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 99

Aero works, get a job building planes, easier work for better money.

Van Damme Aero had one of the best softball clubs in the league,

except for the pitching, which had long been weak. They were eager to

get Vi and had offered to persuade a good shortstop and one of their

top catchers—they were deep in catching—to take jobs up here in the

shipyards, if the benefits were right.

“Play all year round down there,” the manager said to Vi, though

finding it hard to look her in the eye. “Season never ends.”

So she’d gone south, and then west to Ponca when the offer came; she

played for the Van Damme teams, meeting new people. Men too. Never

anything serious. She told Prosper about one or two, dismissive, not

letting out of her locked heart the details he’d have liked to know.

“Oh well,” she’d say. “The trouble with that one was, the beginning

of the end came before the beginning.”

Prosper lifted his legs with one arm and swung them out of the bed to

put his feet on the floor, and sat up. “I know what you mean,” he said.

“Yes. ‘Love grows old, and love grows cold, and fades away like

morning dew.’ Like the song says.”

“Yeah. That’s sort of been my experience,” Prosper said.

“Oh?” Vi smiled, taking notice, her eyes soft for once, and she

spread out in the bed as though the coarse sheets were silk and she

liked the touch of them. “You got a lot of experience?”

“Some,” he said.

“Going way back?”

She was amused, apparently thought his claim was sort of funny,

extravagant or unbelievable, though he was trying to speak modestly.

“Pretty far,” he said.

“Really.” She rolled over and propped her broad cleft chin in a

hand. “You’re not that old.”

Prosper shrugged one shoulder.

“I wouldn’t have thought,” she said. “I mean, no offense, but it

wouldn’t seem you’d get around a lot. See and be seen. You know.

Some things you might not get around to doing.”

“Well not so many.”

“Uh-huh.”

100 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

There were, actually, plenty of things Prosper hadn’t ever done, and

some that he hadn’t done in years. He’d never gone to the public library

in the city where he’d grown up, never managed the long flight of stairs

up to the far-off double doors of the local one, or the even longer flight

(why “flight,” Prosper’d often wondered) to the even farther-off doors

of the central one downtown. Before his operation he’d gone on city

buses and on streetcars, when he could scoot up the stairs like a

monkey—everybody compared him to a monkey, his sloping back like

a knuckle walker’s and his long arms and big hands reaching for hand-

holds; something narrow about his pelvis too like the narrow nates of

a chimp. But by the time he reached what neither he nor anyone around

him then knew to call puberty (those gloomy films that Vi had seen in

high school—the ones shown in two versions, male and female—

weren’t shown to the special classes, as though there were no need for

Prosper and the others to have the information) he could no longer

mount the steps of a streetcar, couldn’t bend his knees when locomot-

ing, only when seated, with the locks on his braces slipped. That was

after his operation. He’d been to the movies, before that operation;

after it, getting to the pictures from his house had been the hard part,

and before his uncles Mert and Fred had taken him in hand and begun

squiring him around in the auto he’d missed a lot of good pictures.

Yes, lots of things undone, but lots of things done too, and many

(he might say “many,” though without any basis for comparison as

Pancho would put it) were of the kind Vi doubted.

“So tell me,” Vi said, still amused, seeming ready to hear something

funny, funny because it wouldn’t be what he claimed it was. She’d

know the difference. “Your turn.”

“Tell you what? You know my story.”

“These experiences, Prosper,” she said, “is what I mean.”

“You want to hear?”

“I do. It’s your turn. You tell me, and I’ll just listen.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t leave things out.”

“Okay.”

She lifted a forefinger gently to his lips, but as though to open them

rather than seal them. “Tell me,” she said.

PART TWO

1

Like the disabled and transected body of the Pax B-30 that once

lay in the long grass of the field over Hubbard Road from the

Ponca City Airport, the orthopedic hospital where Prosper Olan-

der spent two childhood years was still around long years after he

left it. It was one of those great brown-brick institutions that were built

to mark a city like Prosper’s as forward-looking, scientific, up-to-date.

Two others weren’t far away: the reform school, and the state school for

mental defectives. They had opened one after the other, starting with

the state school twenty years before Prosper was born, public ceremo-

nies and speeches from grandstands fronted with bunting, the buildings

in brown photographs looking raw and alone on their wide plots of

treeless land. They’re all gone now: the state school abandoned and der-

elict, the reform school torn down for an office building, Prosper’s hos-

pital subsumed into a medical center and unrecognizable. But such

places remained, though having changed their meaning: from works of

benevolence they became dark holes in our child society, places to which

the failed and the unlucky were remanded. You too if you put a foot

wrong. You’re gonna end up in reform school. They remain in our

dreams.

Prosper was nine years old before the curvature of his spine became

something out of the ordinary and started gaining him nicknames, and

104 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

looks, pitying or repelled or amused. The few doctors his mother took

him to (for diphtheria, when he nearly died; for tonsilitis, his tonsils

snipped with a miniature garotte; for a broken thumb) all told her that

he’d grow out of it, most kids did. He didn’t. In the fourth grade he was

sent to a special class for the first time, as much for dreamy inattention

and a kind of cheerful solipsism as for his back and his pigeon-toed

knee-rubbing walk; he’d go in and out of special classes like a relapsing

criminal as he went from school to school, when he was allowed into

school at all. His teacher that year, Mrs. Vinograd, took an interest in

him; she had ideas on posture that she thought he illustrated.

“Prosper, come here and stand before the class. Take your shirt off,

please, dear. Yes. Now stand in profile, so the class can see clearly.”

Cold pointer drawn down his naked back. “You see how Prosper’s

spine differs from the normal spine. Here it curves in where ours are

straight. This pushes the abdomen forward and causes the chest to

recede.” Taps of the pointer, front and back. Prosper loved and feared

Mrs. Vinograd, her long torso arising high and straight from her solid

hips like a hero’s statue from its pedestal, her eyes large, darkest brown

and all-seeing; and he didn’t know whether to exaggerate for her the

sticking out of his tummy, to illustrate her remarks, or to straighten

up, as she otherwise wanted him to do. “Doctors call it the Kit Bag

Stoop. As though Prosper were carrying a kit bag, that pulls his

shoulders back and down. And what is the cause of this deformity,

whose real name is lordosis?” They all knew, all called out. “Yes,

that’s right, boys and girls, the cause is Poor Posture. Prosper you may

dress again, and take your seat. Ah, ah, ah! Posteriors against our seat

backs, dears, chin high, head straight above our shoulders!” There

were those who laughed when Mrs. Vinograd said “posterior,” but she

would take notice of that, and no one wanted to follow Prosper and be

ordered to exhibit other forms of Poor Posture, the Obesity Stoop, the

Dentist’s Stoop (“from eternally bending over patients to extract

teeth, don’t you see, dears”), or the scoliosis that brings on Da Costa’s

Syndrome and Irritable Heart.

Mrs. Vinograd was sure Prosper could fully straighten himself out,

and if he could he would do better in school, and be able to pay closer

attention to what was said to him, and sleep better and awake refreshed;

distortion of the food-pipe was giving him digestive problems, she

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 105

thought (she had come to his house, right to the house where he lived, to

talk this over with his mother), and indigestion was making him logy. It

had once been believed, she said, that nervousness, irritability, bashful-

ness, torpidity, and so on were causes of Poor Posture. Now it was under-

stood that Poor Posture itself induces those conditions! Isn’t that

remarkable? Mrs. Olander, nearly as awed as Prosper was to have opened

the door and found towering Mrs. Vinograd on the step in velvet cloche

and cape, could only murmur assent and shake her head at the strange-

ness of it all, as Prosper in his seat pulled himself up, up, up.

He tried hard not to give in to the spine within him, which seemed

to want to settle, relax, soften, and give up on holding him upright.

Secretly though, unsaid even to himself, he wanted to take its side,

sorry for the continual effort he demanded of it. And since the lordosis

never got better, he guessed he had done that, somehow thus winning

and losing at once. That’s how it seemed, later on, when he examined

how he had felt then, as a kid; which was like someone looking back at

how once he’d struggled to find his way lost in the woods, just a while

before he fell off a cliff.

Prosper was a war baby; his father was a soldier, or became one the

day after Prosper was conceived. On the night before he’d left for Over

There (though actually he’d never got nearer to the front than a desk at

Fort Devens) he’d got his wife pregnant. She had a long-standing horror

of pregnancy that she could never account for and was ashamed to feel;

the next many months as Prosper grew steadily within were filled with

a dread she never spoke of and yet efficiently communicated. Not to

Prosper; but certainly to her husband, home on leave, hovering at the

bedroom door and wondering what to do, wondering if she would die,

or sicken irremediably.

Like all the women in her family Prosper’s mother-to-be was a

believer in Maternal Impression: if you witness a bloody accident while

pregnant, your child can be born with a port-wine stain; hear a piece

of dreadful news (the kind that all in a day can turn your hair to gray)

and the fetus can squirm in revulsion within you (hadn’t the women

felt this, or heard that it had happened to someone?) and at birth it

might appear wrong way around, unable to be got at. So she stayed

indoors, and wouldn’t answer the telephone for fear of what she’d hear,

and sat and felt her substance looted and applied to the new being, as

106 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

you rob clay from the big snake you’ve rolled to make the little one.

Nothing bad happened, except that she grew hugely fat with little to do

but consider her cravings and try to replace her lost insides. When he

appeared at last, held aloft by his ankles, Prosper seemed just fine, long

and blood speckled, and with a huge dark scrotum and penis (an illu-

sion or temporary engorgement that nearly put a Maternal Impression

for good on his mother’s spooked heart to see).

Kids growing up, especially the singletons, don’t consider their par-

ents to have particular natures, or characters that can be named; they

love them or fear them or struggle with them or rest in them, as though

they were the weather, or a range of mountains. When Prosper was

eight or nine, a girl who lived in the upstairs apartment described his

father as a Gloomy Gus, and Prosper, baffled at first, was astonished to

feel, as he repeated the words to himself, the great enveloping cloud of

his father shrink and coalesce into just a person, a person of a certain

kind, a small broody man in a derby and a pin-collar shirt, carrying a

sample case, eternally stooped, the Salesman’s Stoop.

Maybe he was just made that way. There was no reason for Gloomy

Gus in the funnies to be gloomy except that he was, as there was no

reason for his brother Happy Hooligan to be happy. That his father’s

gloom might have a cause was a further step in perception; but it may

not ever have occurred to Prosper at all that the cause was Prosper

himself, or—even tougher—that his father regarded him as a plenty

good reason, a source of troubles. There was the damage done to his

wife’s soul by Prosper’s tenancy of her body. Then the weakness of

Prosper’s own body, which was somehow responsible for all that had

gone wrong in those nine months, and was still wrong. Eventually the

doctor bills, and the prospect of more of the same, endlessly. The mis-

aligned boy scuffling beside him as he walked the street, every eye on

them (he believed) in curious pity. All Prosper knew was that a light-

ness would possess him when his father set out on the road, gone for

days sometimes; and a contrary melancholy sunset at the man’s return.

For that he now had a name. He even had, in the name, a justification

for wishing he’d not return: for the doing of magic in various home-

made forms to insure that he stay away, delay, be stuck in snow or in

badlands, never darken the door again. And one day he left, as usual,

and then didn’t return. Just didn’t, and wasn’t heard from ever after.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 107

This time, strangely, having left his two sample cases behind. Prosper,

awed and gratified about as much as he was guilty and stilled, would

open the closet door now and then to look at those dark leather lumps,

his father’s other body, still remaining.

For a time he watched and waited to see if his mother would hate

him for her husband’s disappearance, which she might suspect her son

had brought about by his little deals with the powers—avoiding the

cracks on the sidewalk, wishing on dandelion moons and train whis-

tles—and for a time she did regard him in something like reproachful

grief. But he was convinced she was as much better off without Gloomy

Gus as he felt himself to be; and she almost never mentioned him. She

was, as she said herself, not much of a talker. There was so much family

surrounding them, and so many of those were disconnected from

spouses or otherwise out of the ordinary (two aunts, one each of his

mother’s and his father’s sisters, who lived together; an uncle and his

wife and nearly grown kids living in a nearby house with another single

uncle in a spare room; a grampa a few blocks away cared for by a

grandniece; others whose connection to himself and one another he

had not yet worked out) that the jigsaw puzzle piece that was Prosper’s

part, though changed now in shape, still fit all right.

And the vanishing of his father (and their income with him) brought

to his house—at the instigation of those various uncles and aunts and

others, his mother wouldn’t have known to do it, though Prosper knew

nothing of all that—a caseworker from the city welfare bureau. Her

name was Mary Mack, and she wasn’t dressed in black black black but

favored tartans and a tam and was the most beautiful person Prosper

had looked upon up to that time, her bright kindly eyes and the plain

sturdy way she plunked down her mysterious buckled bag, from which

she drew out printed forms and other things. Even his mother smiled to

see her coming down the street (she and Prosper keeping watch at the

window on the appointed days), though his mother always made it

clear to him that Miss Mack’s visits were nobody’s business but theirs

and shouldn’t be mentioned anywhere in any company.

Anyway it was another society that engaged most of Prosper’s alle-

giance and concern then, the one made up of personages that grown-

ups don’t see or hardly see, as unknown to them as the society of bugs

in the weeds, only brought to notice if they sting or fly at you repul-

108 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

sively: the neighborhood’s kids. The map of their world overlay the one

they shared with their elders (the one marked with the church and the

other church and the market and the streetcar stop and the school and

the public baths and the free clinic), the same geography but with dif-

ferent landmarks: Death Valley, which was what they called a treeless

waste between the back of the bowling alley and the Odd Fellows

lodge, where treks and battles happened; the nailed-up—but by them

reopened—three-hole privy in the scruffy woods in the slough behind

the big hotel, why there, who knew, but ritual required it to be used

each time it was passed, by all, girls, boys, young, old, leaders, follow-

ers; the railroad bridge abutment where the hoboes slept, where over

scrapwood fires they cooked their beans and luckless kids’ body parts.

Prosper wasn’t the only funny-looking or oddly shaped one among

them; any neighborhood gang could show a kid, Wally Brannigan was

theirs, who illustrated with a sightless peeled-grape eyeball the inces-

sant adult warning about what happens when you play with sharp

sticks and improvised bows. Little Frankie No-last-name had had rick-

ets and walked with an invisible melon between his legs. Sharon was

hugely tall, like Olive Oyl. Only Frankie and Prosper among them

found it hard to keep up, and Frankie was younger than the others and

weepy and didn’t count, which left Prosper at the bottom of the heap,

helped along sometimes, or mocked, or nicknamed; by one or two of

the strong, actively despised. He could hit a baseball pretty well, though

sometimes a big swing caused him to lose his balance and fall in a

heap, and he rarely beat the throw to first. Then a designated runner

was assigned to him, the biggest kid on their side, who had to piggy-

back Prosper to the bag. Hit the ball, leap onto Christopher’s back, be

carried at a jouncing run, laughing and sometimes falling together in

stomach-aching hilarity halfway down the base path while the rest of

the field looked on in disgust—but sometimes bearing down with bared

teeth at full gallop, scaring off the first baseman and stamping across

the base.

It was Mary Wilma who decided it was not against the rules for

Prosper to be carried by the pinch runner, in fact she determined that

it was required. Mary Wilma was the smartest kid among them, or at

least the most decisive; if something needed to be settled, Mary Wilma

came out with a plan before anybody else had even had time to decide

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 109

what was what, and if she met disagreement she was loud and definite

in pointing out why she was right and the other was wrong, which was

usually the case.

“Mary Wilma, I don’t want to do your idea.”

“Well it’s smarter than your idea. Prove it isn’t!”

“I don’t care. I just don’t want to.”

“Tell me why you don’t, stupid bubuncle! Idioso! Come on! I’ll

believe you if you can tell me!”

She said or shouted them, her directives and her made-up insults,

with such fierce delight, her big dark eyes aflame and big mouth smil-

ing, that it was hard to hate her, though everybody at some time said

they did; and it was after all she who organized the great watermelon

theft, and the Halloween bonfire extravaganza, and the nighttime

kick-the-can eliminations. She liked to stage field days, and kept care-

ful score: she ran faster than anybody else, not that she was so fast a

runner, or longer legged, she just put so much concentrated heat into it,

more than anyone else could summon or cared to summon, her legs

scissoring and her eyes fixed on the goal.

Mary Wilma took an intense interest in Prosper, thinking up things

he had to do to keep up, ways to put him to use, ways to insult him

too.

“Here comes Prosper on his little horsie!” Meaning his odd tippety

gait, it took Prosper a while to figure that out; Mary Wilma never said

anything meaningless, though it might at first seem so. “What’s your

little horsie’s name, Prosper? Is it a hoobie horsie?”

Of course he yelled back the meanest things he could think of, which

amused her further, expert boxer or knife fighter challenged by a child;

but he stayed near her, if only because it lessened the likelihood of his

getting beaten up, chances of which went up after he started having to

wear a back brace of leather and buckles and metal. Mrs. Vinograd

made the horrible error—mortal, irreversible, to Prosper—of calling

this device a Boston girdle. Which was its name, in fact, but which

when said out loud before the class was curtains for the wearer. Mary

Wilma on the playground or in the alleys liked to name it too, at top

volume, and it was she who began then to call Prosper Coozie Modo,

which even those who hadn’t gone to see Lon Chaney tormented in the

movie (Prosper hadn’t) knew to be a killing taunt. Never mind: if he

110 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

stayed near her he wouldn’t be kicked or pelted with dingbats—those

who liked the idea of doing that were also the ones most afraid of Mary

Wilma, her needle-sharp sense of each of their weaknesses and inade-

quacies; and she didn’t allow group activities she hadn’t conceived of.

Her family had a house a few blocks from Prosper’s, a whole house

that they rented part of to others but whose basement and attic and

weedy garden and shed were all theirs, a huge domain, and she brought

Prosper there and took him all through it. She revealed its arcana to

him only slowly, watching his reaction to certain mysterious or alarm-

ing items as though he might not rise to the occasion, as though others

before him perhaps had not: in the basement ancient pickled things in

jars of murky fluid, which she claimed were babies but surely were only

pig’s feet or tongues; in the shed a black metal hook that she said had

once served her grandfather as a hand, its brutal rusted tip still sharp—

what had the old man done with it, to whom? She menaced Prosper

with it, and he didn’t flinch, though he wouldn’t touch it himself.

Anyway maybe it wasn’t what she said it was, because she was a big

liar, as Prosper told her, as everybody told her; she didn’t seem to

mind.

“Go on,” she said, pushing him from behind. They went up the

halls to the top of the house, where a rope hung that pulled down a

flight of stairs leading to the attic. “You probably never saw this

before,” she said as the staircase descended gently, treads rotating into

place. He shrugged nonchalantly, but he hadn’t. Mary Wilma had just

had her black hair bobbed, and Prosper couldn’t stop looking at the

tendons of her neck and the hollow between, like a boy’s now but not

like a boy’s. “Up we go, little Prosper,” she said. “Up up up.” When

they had gone up through the hole in the ceiling Mary Wilma pulled

up the stair behind them. It seemed to take no effort at all; Prosper

wondered why not.

There were other mysteries to be revealed in the dry dim warmth. A

harmonium whose cracked and mouse-chewed bellows could only

wheeze spooky groans like a consumptive or the ghost of one. A dress

dummy she hugged, calling out Ma, Ma. The dust on these things and

in the air, the slatted windows always open, the squeak of the gray

boards underfoot, which were so obviously the ceiling of the rooms

below.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 111

She had them play cards there on the floor with a wrinkled and dog-

eared deck. Go Fish. Slapjack. Then she taught him another one, a

good one she said, a better one. It was called Lightning. She laid out a

row of cards for herself and one for him, in complicated fashion making

piles and moving cards from one to the other.

“Now you take the bottom card of the first pile and put it on top of

the pile in the middle. No in the middle. No across-ways. That’s the

Boodle. You leave that there strictly alone. Now hold out your cards.”

She bent forward to transfer cards from his hand to hers and hers to

his. Some were laid down.

“Prosper! Not there! I told you!”

“You said before—”

“Now we have to start all over. Put down eight piles of three

cards . . .”

“It was seven before.”

She reached to grab his shirt, disordering the cards that were spread

in arcane ways over the floor between them. “You listen! Eight piles of

three!”

“You said before—”

“Do it!” she said.

He threw down his cards. “You’re just making it up. There isn’t any

game at all, just rules.”

She was laughing. “It’s fun! It’s a good game. You must do it.”

Her face was very close to his. “Stop being mean, Mary Wilma,” he

said. “Why are you so mean? Did somebody beat you with the mean

stick?”

She almost fell into him laughing, her laughter seeming to say that

he’d found out her secret or maybe that he was the funniest person in

the world, fixing him at the same time with her wide unbreakable gaze.

“Prosper!” she cried, as though he were a block away. “The mean

stick?”

“Yes!” he said, unable not to laugh too, and then she had grabbed

him again by the shirt.

“Prosper!” She’d stopped laughing, her fierce hilarity remaining

though. “Let’s take your pants off!”

He didn’t look away. “Let’s take yours off.”

She instantly did, reaching up under her dress and pulling down.

112 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

She lifted both bare legs in the air and slipped over her shoes the little

white bundle. Just as he did it himself every night. “Now you,” she

said.

Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a

mountaineer’s. As though he had just been pulled up by the hair to

look over an enclosing ridge, Prosper hung in a space of Mary Wilma’s

creating, unable then to confute or even really to perceive what she had

done: she had taken off her pants but given nothing away, yet she had

certainly gone first, leaving him to go next, fair’s fair. All that Mary

Wilma was, and did, and would be; all that he was and knew, all now

altered. He started unbuttoning.

Afterward he always said, when he would ask her (or she would say,

inviting him), Let’s go play Lightning: and a few times up in the attic

they did lay out cards in Mary Wilma’s meaningless arrangements. But

these nongames became briefer and then were forgotten even though

the name remained as the name for what they did do. Mary Wilma,

after she had played that first trick on Prosper, was as willing as he was

to reveal, whipping off her jumper with practiced celerity as Prosper

stood before her, new flesh extruding strangely but interestingly from

him. “Now what’s this, ” she would cry, her hand shooting like a bird’s

claw to snatch it, gripping as though it might fly away. “What’s this

supposed to be! Huh, Prosper? What?”

As often though she liked to play a pretend game, as though naked-

ness relieved her of the heavy responsibilities of leadership and returned

her to an earlier time in her life when the world could all be invented.

She became or played a vague helpless party, moving as though under

water or in a dream, her act for Prosper. “Oh gee”—absent, distrait—

“oh look I have forgot my pants, oh dear. Here I am outside and no

cloath-es, what will I do. Oh my oh dear they all see me, oh they see

my posterior, oh boy, my buttawks, ooh what will I do. I will sit here

and wait for the trolley.” Her head lolled, she parted her legs where she

sat on an old trunk. “Oh dear now I must pee pee, now what, oh well

oh well I guess I just will, dum de dum de dum, can’t help it, ooh

oops.” The first time the game reached this point she just pretended,

making a sissing noise as her hands feebly grasped air, and the second

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 113

time too; but the third time, she lifted her dusty knees and regarded

Prosper with a face that mixed a hot triumphant Mary Wilma chal-

lenge into the fey person she was pretending to be; then she let go,

water spraying from the cleft in the girl way, not like his own straight

stream, wetting the box and the gray floor. His face and breast hot

with amazement and elation.

What they did in the attic (that word attic ever after retaining a

shadow of secret warm shared exposure for him) didn’t change Mary

Wilma’s ways out in the world with the others, and only later on did it

occur to him what a chance she’d taken with him, how brave she’d

been, those things they did together were riskier for her than any crazy

brave thing she’d ever done, than climbing up to the railroad bridge

from the river, than letting Hoopie Morris shoot her in her winter-

coated back with his air rifle to prove it wasn’t fatal like Hoopie stu-

pidly claimed: because Prosper could have told on her. He could, as she

certainly knew; as she would certainly have told on someone if she

needed to, to maintain her place. You know what Mary Wilma does?

Yelled someday when she bossed him or mocked him, as she never

stopped doing. You know what Mary Wilma does? And she would

instantly have been toppled as leaders in the news were; her power

would have vanished. Tears of rage, he could almost see it. Why would

she take that chance?

Because (Vi Harbison told Prosper in Henryville, having heard a

brief version of this, the first anecdote or instance Prosper offered,

though not one that in Vi’s opinion counted) because she trusted Pros-

per not to.

But why did she think she could trust him, Prosper wanted to know;

and if Vi knew, or had an idea, she didn’t say.

It didn’t go on long, but it didn’t end because one or both of them

decided to quit, or chickened out, not at all, but only because (as nearly

as Prosper could figure it later) it was just at that time that he was dis-

covered by the Odd Fellows, and went away to the hospital, and all

that happened thereafter began to happen, one thing falling into the

next and the next, until at last he wasn’t even living in the same neigh-

borhood, and—though this he never knew—neither was she. What

became of them all, she and Hoopie and Wally and the others whose

names he couldn’t recall, those he had once spent all day with, in school

114 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

or after, on Saturdays and Sundays? He rarely thought about them

afterward, but they certainly were a Passionate Series as Pancho Notz-

ing would later describe it to him—lovers of power and lovers of plea-

sure, the greedy and the indifferent, the retiring and the unhesitating,

an entire spectrum of human temperaments, needs, and wants, enough

anyway to make a complete society, the only one he’d ever know him-

self to be a member of until he came to live and work among the Teenie

Weenies still far away then in time and space.

2

That orthopedic hospital, though a source of civic pride pictured

on postcards that visitors to town could buy, was not used as

much as the founders and supporters had expected: not enough

people willing to go have the clubfoot or the gimp leg they’d

lived with for years corrected, or with enough money to pay for it. So

the local chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows (whose

building, with its name at once comical and sinister, had hung over the

wasteland where Prosper’s gang had played ball) volunteered to survey

the county and learn who was in need, who could be helped, especially

among the children; and to raise the money to pay for the surgeries of

some. It was Mrs. Vinograd who brought Prosper to their attention,

Prosper and one or two others she had observed as well. Despite her

belief that Poor Posture could be overcome by will and self-control,

Mrs. Vinograd also believed in doctors and the advance of Medicine;

she believed in efficiency, in principle and in practice. She didn’t tell

Prosper or his mother what she had done, though, and when the two

moon-faced men in great double-breasted suits appeared at the Olan-

ders’ door and announced who they were and their interest in Prosper,

he assumed that they had come to claim him as one of their own: an

Odd Fellow, as they were; the lodge he was a member of.

When it became clearer what the two wide smilers actually meant

116 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

by coming there, Prosper’s mother lifted four fingers to her chin in

doubt or fear. “Oh dear,” she said.

“Get you some help, you see,” said one, gently, knowing to whom

he spoke.

“Well he’s been fine this far,” she said.

“But he could be fixed right up,” said the other Odd Fellow, and

tousled Prosper’s hair as though he were six, or a dog.

“Oh but an operation,” Prosper’s mother said. “An operation?”

“At no cost to you now or ever,” said the first, a salesman.

“But what about his schooling? That’s important too.”

“We’re just here to make sure the boy gets examined, ma’am.” He

drew out from within his capacious jacket a memorandum book and a

gold pen; and they all turned to Prosper.

Examined. To see, first, if it really was possible to fix him right up.

On a sloppy winter day Prosper and his mother took the streetcar to

the hospital, which stood on a rise above a raw new neighborhood on

the other side of the city. They had to cross a construction site on duck-

boards, then climb up a path and two flights of stairs to reach the

doors. There they made themselves known at the window, waited on a

bench in the echoey strange-smelling waiting room where hortatory

posters had been put up. His mother lifted her eyes to one after another,

patted her bosom, moaned almost inaudibly. One showed a funny man

about to sneeze, finger beneath his nose, and warned that coughing,

sneezing, spitting spread influenza! Another showed a family

man, his wife and child cowering behind him, desperately trying to

keep shut a door on the outer darkness where a vague white hideous

specter was trying to come in. Tuberculosis. Shutting the door on the

thing looked hopeless, though it wasn’t probably supposed to.

After a long time a nurse all in white, even to her shoes, called their

name and led them down wide high corridors across floors more highly

polished than any Prosper had ever seen, gleaming tile seeming to

vanish beneath his muddy feet as though he walked on water. Doors

opened on either side and he glimpsed people being ministered to, lift-

ing legs or arms with nurses’ help or playing slow games with big balls.

They were shown into a room to wait with other young people, other

culls of the Odd Fellows he supposed, some of them glad to see people

in their own case and lifting hands in salute or recognition, some who

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 117

wouldn’t meet his eyes. One a delicate pale girl with white-blond hair

carefully marcelled, her spine so out of true it seemed she had been cut

in two across the middle and the two parts put back together incor-

rectly. She shrank farther away as Prosper helplessly stared, as though

she could feel the gaze she couldn’t meet, and his mother at last pulled

his hand to make him stop.

The young doctor he was finally taken to see—hawk-faced, his hair

laid tight against his head with Wildroot oil, its odor unmistakable,

the same that Prosper’s father had used—made one judgment right

away. Prosper was to stop using the Boston girdle: it could do him no

good, the doctor said. He took it from Prosper and with thumb and

finger held it up, fouled with sweat and other things, edge-worn and

splitting, as though it were some vermin he had shot. Prosper’s heart

lifted.

Then he was taken, more wonderful still, to have an X-ray, the

nurse telling him it wouldn’t hurt and would show what the inside of

his body and his bones looked like, but Prosper knew all that, and

stepped up bared to the waist smartly and efficiently, put his breast and

then each side and his back against the glass as the doctor showed him;

it didn’t hurt, though he was sure he felt pass through him coldly the

rays without a name. Then that was all. Back through the waiting

room, still unable to make the pale girl see him, along the corridors

and through the doors and down the steps and home. Three weeks

later a letter came from the hospital saying that he was being consid-

ered as a candidate for surgical correction of spinal lordosis, and set-

ting another date for more examinations.

Prosper couldn’t know it, but even that first uneventful journey into

the hospital had nearly undone his mother. He did know that she was

someone to whom you couldn’t bring your bleeding body parts to be

bandaged, as she would faint, or say she was about to, and turn away

white-faced and trembling; also best not to tell her you’d thrown up, or

had sat on the pot with the gripes until a load of hot gravy was passed

that flecked the bowl and lid. These things were for you to know. Long

afterward, in one of those reassessments that come upon us unwilled,

like a sudden shift of perspective in a movie scene that shows the lurk-

ing villain or dropped gun that couldn’t be seen before, Prosper real-

ized that it was actually his father who had bound up his wounds,

118 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

carried him to bed in fever, washed out the white enamel basin ( Hasten

Jason bring the basin) with the horrid black chipped spots in it; and

that therefore it had certainly cost him something when his father

blew.

He would think then: There are thoughts you never think until, for

the first time, you do think them. And he would remember his father

telling his jokes, salesman’s patter, even as he cleaned the boy that

Prosper had been.

It wasn’t that his mother neglected cleanliness, health, and the body.

They were ever present to her mind, a threat and a promise she could

never get working together. She had been raised on medicine as though

on food: Wendigo Microbe Killer, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Hamlin’s

Wizard Oil liniment, Doctor Flint’s Quaker Bitters, cod-liver oil in the

winter and sulphured molasses in the spring. After her only child was

born she felt she deserved Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound to

reverse the bad effects; she sucked Smith Brothers cough drops (which

she fed to Prosper too) and was a user of Hadacol, which she found lots

better for her headaches than Coca-Cola. And as within, so without:

Prosper’s earliest memory was of hearing the enormous Hoover start-

ing up somewhere in the house, brand-new then possibly, anyway

unknown to him, an inexplicable noise at once roar and shriek and

coming closer; moving away; closer again, and evidently seeking him

out where he lay in bed. Then to find the great gray floor-sucker thing

entering his room, manipulated by his grim-faced mother, therefore

not dangerous at all, maybe.

His mother feared germs; her own earliest memory was watching

her bedroom stripped of its bedclothes, curtains, and toys, to be burned

in the alley after her scarlet fever. The Hoover was her defense, or her

offensive, against germs, that and lye soap, naphtha flakes, carbolic,

Old Dutch cleanser with the furious punitive bonneted figure on the

can that Prosper took as the image of his mother’s spirit, and scrub

brushes boiled weekly. Prosper, already afflicted by troubles that

seemed to get worse as he grew, caused her endless worry, she almost

feared to touch him, not only because of what he had inside him but

because of what he might have touched in the filthy world outside.

Once he brought home a stray dog, sick too, half-carrying it into the

house and supposing he might be able to keep it. His mother blocked

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 119

him and it with a broom from entering, prodding them away desper-

ately and calling on the deities. After that when she was sunk in her

cleaning he could sometimes hear her mutter the dog, that dog.

So if it had been up to her, Prosper likely wouldn’t have gone into

that hospital or under that knife, and what would have happened

instead was unknowable, and still is. It was Miss Mary Mack, her eyes

and eyelashes glittering as though frosted and her cheeks red from the

cold, who came to fetch him and bring him back there, which for all he

then knew she did out of kindness only: kind too to his helpless inert

mother fretting on the kitchen chair with two aprons on. Held his hand

when they mounted to the streetcar. Prosper found a certain satisfac-

tion, on his return, in telling his mother how blood had been taken

from him, right from the crook of his arm where this gauze was now

wrapped, and how he watched it rush out to fill the glass needle, thick

and dark as beet soup.

Just before he went into the hospital for the surgery, the Odd Fel-

lows held a little ceremony where the check for the costs was presented

to the hospital. The Odd Fellows ranged on the steps of the hospital

with the director and a doctor (who had to be persuaded to don his

white coat for the picture). Of the children who were to benefit from

the lodge’s efforts, Prosper and the pale blond girl were chosen to par-

ticipate in the event, Prosper with a tie of his father’s on and the girl in

white with a white hair bow so huge that it seemed she might be able to

flap it and fly away—and she looked as though she wanted to, stricken,

eyes alert as though to danger or downcast in shame. Prosper talked to

her. Her name was Prudence, and he laughed a little at that, mostly

from fellow-feeling with someone else not named Joe or Nancy, but she

only lowered her eyes again as though he’d mocked her. Still he stood

protectively by her while the pictures were taken and the man from the

newspapers asked their names. “Her name is Prudence. My name is

Prosper. P-r-o-s-p-e-r. Will the picture be in the paper?”

It was. It appeared the morning he was to go with his mother to be

admitted, a little suitcase packed with clean skivvies and socks and a

toothbrush and a dictionary (his mother’s choice) and some tonics and

vegetable pills (likewise). He studied the picture with her. There he was

with a big smile that made his mother shake her head, and Pru, her

great eyes looking up as though out of a burrow.

120 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

“Don’t let it turn your head,” his mother said, and it was the last

thing he clearly remembered her saying to him, though no doubt she

said more than that, taking him to the hospital and getting him onto

his white bed in the big ward and kissing him good-bye. Maybe because

he’d never heard the phrase before, and had to puzzle out its meaning.

Once, when months had passed, awake in the night in his plaster jacket

immobile in that ward, he thought what she had done was to warn

him: don’t let them turn your head. And unwittingly he had done that,

he had let them turn his head, and all that resulted was his own fault.

He’d imagined, for no good reason, that Pru would be given the bed next

to his, but in fact she wasn’t even in the long room of parallel beds, she

was in the ward below, for girls—he learned that when both their

wards and others joined in the great sunroom for marching each morn-

ing to a Victrola. Three mornings: he saw her each time, and spoke to

her, and at last she smiled to see him, her only friend (so her smile

seemed to say). Around and around they went as the oompah music

played, stopped, and began again, some of them on crutches, others

pushing themselves along on rolling frames or staggering rhythmless

on legs of different lengths. Pru walked as though always in the process

of falling over to her left, as her spine went, but she never did; she held

her hands curled up to the breast, as though she held an invisible plumb

line there, to see how far from true she bent, and to try and

straighten.

“Did you see your picture?” he asked her.

She looked away.

“You looked pretty,” Prosper said.

She looked into the distance, as though searching the halting shuf-

fling crowd for someone she knew.

“Do you talk?” Prosper said smiling. “Cat got your tongue?”

He thought the shadow of a smile crossed her face but still she

wouldn’t speak. The music stopped, skritched, resumed.

On the fourth morning they began to build Prosper’s cast, and there

was no more morning marching for him.

He had two nurses attendant on him for this, one kindly and calm,

the other brisk and dismissive of fears; the one lean and snaggletoothed,

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 121

the other plump and soft-armed. They had him follow them out of the

ward (observed by everyone) and down the hall to a bright room where

there was a table covered in rubber sheeting and piles of other things.

Talking, talking, first one then the other, they pulled off his nightshirt,

which they called a johnny for some reason, and hoisted him onto the

table to lie facedown, a little pad for his cheek, the horrid cold rubber

under his nakedness. He knew you were not supposed to mind if nurses

or doctors saw your posterior.

“He’ll be a brave little fella,” said Nurse Kind.

“He better be,” said Nurse Brisk. “This’s the easy part.”

They had sheets of black felt and a big scissors, and cut pieces out

and laid them on his back from neck to knees, patting and stretching

them into place. Then they ran water at a sink and did other things he

couldn’t see while they talked to each other about this and that, Hoover,

the talkies, Rudolph Valentino and Rudy Vallee—for a long time Pros-

per thought these were the same person, one the nickname of the

other.

“Okay dearie, this is going to get a little damp,” said Nurse Kind.

“Move a muscle and I’ll brain you,” said Nurse Brisk, which made

Nurse Kind laugh dismissively. Something wet and heavy was laid on

him, at his neck, and the nurses ceased their chatter, only murmuring

to each other as they worked the wet plaster bandages to fit him before

they hardened. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before and the desire to

wriggle out of it, clamber up and get out, was nearly irresistible, the

nurses must have known it and kept their hands on his legs and head to

keep him still while the clock on the wall ticked away.

When they were done, they removed the hardening cast, turned him

over and made the front the same way, right down to his groin, leaving

a space for him to make water. The back side had a hole too, neatly

edged in rubber. They showed it to him when it had all dried and been

trimmed and lined with felted cloth and fitted with straps and toothed

buckles; it was the last time he’d see the backside till it came off, long

after.

Laid in this cast like a turtle—the plastron part could be unbuckled

and removed, now and then, but he was told never to get out of the

back part—he should not even allow himself to think about getting

out. He didn’t have to lie flat on his back, the bed itself had a crank

122 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

that could move it up and bring the world into view and his head in

right relation to it, gratifying.

In the next bed a boy was looking at him, or seemed to be looking

at him, though his head and face were hard to assess, because he

seemed to be in the grip of some invisible opponent he wrestled with,

straining every muscle. He made sounds that might have been lan-

guage.

“Did he say something?” Prosper asked the nurse.

“May have,” the nurse said, not looking at the fellow. “Sometimes

he does. He’s a spastic and we don’t know what else.”

Prosper looked over at the boy in the bed. He was definitely study-

ing Prosper, though with what intentions or thoughts Prosper couldn’t

tell—not dull or idiotic he was pretty sure. “Hello,” he said.

The other seemed gratified to be greeted, and said something back.

“Try harder, Charlie,” said the nurse, not looking at him. “Or be

quiet. Nobody can guess what you mean.”

Charlie rose up in his bed, as though lifting himself by puppet

strings, and seemed ready to fling himself out, his mouth working. The

nurse turned to him and, hand on his chest and her face close to his,

pushed him back. “I’ve told you about this, Charlie. You lie still and be

a good boy. It’s for your own safety. Don’t make me get the straps.”

At this Charlie sank back and stopped talking, though he went on

moving; if you watched you could tell that the muscles he gave orders

to were constantly revolting or refusing, and he had to continually

change the orders, so that he was never quite still. When the nurse had

passed to the next bed, Charlie spoke again to Prosper.

“Sheeez a caution. Ain she.”

“I’ll say,” Prosper answered.

“Oooh shth. Shthink she. Is. Muscle Eenie?”

It wasn’t hard to understand once you listened. Prosper got it and

laughed, and Charlie laughed too. Nurse Muscle Eenie turned to look

back at them—like all powerful persons, she had a keen sense of when

she was being mocked—but that only made them laugh the more.

Prosper, spending long hours beside Charlie, got good at under-

standing what he said, and sometimes translated what he said for the

nurses, who seemed to have very little patience with him and to assume

most of the time that he was muttering nonsense, and would talk back

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 123

to him as though he were a baby. “He’s not stupid,” he explained to

one of the nurses as Charlie listened. “He’s just spastic. If you listen

he’s not stupid.”

“He’s not a spastic,” said this nurse. “He’s an athetoid. There’s a

difference.”

Prosper actually thought Charlie was the wittiest kid on the ward,

his jokes all the funnier for being unexpected or hard to decode—it

really was hard to tell when Charlie was trying to be funny, though

Prosper got that too at last.

The other person who understood Charlie fine was his father, who

came often to see him, once bringing Charlie’s mother and three small

sisters, though all these visitors were too uproarious and Nurse Muscle

Eenie made it clear that from now on they were to come one at a time

and not upset the routine as she said. So it was mostly his father who

came, and sat by his bed; his presence seemed to still Charlie’s mus-

cles, at least to lower the spasms from a boil to a simmer. It was Char-

lie’s father who explained to Prosper that Charlie’s muscles weren’t

weak, they just wouldn’t listen to his brain. They were plenty strong:

in fact Charlie was here to get a couple of them released—they’d been

holding parts of Charlie tight since he was a baby, and didn’t know

how to let go.

“So he’s gotta go under the knife,” said Charlie’s father smiling a

little sadly. “Right, son?”

“That’ll show ’em,” Charlie said. He held up his left hand, which

curled backward toward his wrist, and made a face at it that was sup-

posed to be tough and uncompromising.

Prosper’s mother came too, once, though she had a great reluctance

to come too close to where Prosper lay in his cast; she stood a ways off,

her hands clasped, as though the left were keeping the right from touch-

ing anything around her. Prosper could tell she suffered, though not

what she suffered from, and tried to ask her about life out beyond the

hospital; he told her about Prudence and about Charlie and his mus-

cles, but she seemed not even to want to open her mouth much and

swallow the air in there.

“I’m going under the knife,” Prosper said. “Any day.”

“Oh Prosper,” she said. “Oh Prosper.”

Soon the nurse came close: visiting hours were over, ambassadors

124 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

from the world beyond were to depart. Prosper’s mother kissed her

son. The ward returned to the state it ought to have, just the children

and their noises and cries, the circulation of the nurses, like horses in

their sweaty hardworking domineering presence, great rumps and

thighs beneath their white cottons or lean hard shins and the crack of

their heels against the ward floor. They caught boys out of bed and

heaved them back in like grain sacks, threatened and chastened and

stilled them with a look as Miss Vinograd had done, though they were

gentle with the ones who moved less or not at all, teaming up to move

them from their beds to the rolling carts that took them to hydrother-

apy or elsewhere, who knew where, and back again. On three, lift.

Prosper’s turn at last, after the nurse had rung the curtains around

his bed and washed him with some awful carbolic. A long black razor

on the tray, opened, and a bowl of soapy water—they shaved his back

and buttocks right down into the crack, why, when there wasn’t any

hair there. Charlie’d said they would: Doan ledm slice your GNUTS

opff, he’d cried.

They put a mask over his face, and told him to count backward from

ten, and that’s all he knew of that afternoon, until he knew himself to

be back in the ward again, his head at least afloat above a body that

seemed not to be his. Nurse Muscle Eenie told him that while he lay

there neither in nor out of the world his mother had come to visit him.

Charlie confirmed it—a lady came and sat and stood by him; Charlie

tried to imitate how she had hovered, how she had wrung her hands.

Prosper felt, when they said these things, that yes, she had been there,

had looked down on him, but in his remembrance she’d worn a white

dress and a white veil, like nurses in pictures during the War, maybe

even a cross on her breast, and that couldn’t be; the picture persisted,

though, and when he was older he’d still be able to summon it up, and

question why he’d got it in his mind—maybe he’d mixed it up with a

nurse who’d also leaned over him, but the nurses there weren’t wearing

those angel outfits any longer; maybe he’d got it from a movie, but

which one? Anyway he’d somehow missed her, this nonsensical scrap

all he had, and she didn’t come again. She’d got sick, the nurses told

him. She’d sent a message. She was thinking of him, but too sick right

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 125

then to visit. For days Prosper himself was too sick to think of any-

thing; and when he was no longer sick he was so changed he didn’t

know how to think of her or where he had come from. He’d been put

to sleep in the hospital, and when he awoke fully—when the spell was

lifted—he was still there, only now it was where he lived, and always

had been.

The next thing he would remember with any clarity was the doctor,

his white coat collared like a priest’s, who came to hover over him,

read his chart and tell him what had happened to him in that limbo.

The operation on his back had gone well, the doctor said. He would

stand straighter than he had before. He wouldn’t be able to bend over

quite as well, but he hadn’t been able to bend very well before, except

at the waist, wasn’t that true? It was true. Prosper hadn’t yet tried

bending over with his new back so he didn’t know what the difference

would be.

“Better than that,” the doctor said. “It won’t get worse now. If we’d

done nothing it would have got worse.”

Prosper couldn’t respond to that. They’d told him often, the doctor

and the nurses, that he’d get worse and worse if he didn’t have the

operation, but he hadn’t felt himself to be in bad shape, and didn’t

know what “worse” would mean.

“All right,” he said.

“So.” The doctor smiled, ready to move on.

“But can you tell me,” Prosper said, “how come I can’t move any-

thing.” He made to move a leg, to show him it couldn’t.

“Temporary,” the doctor said. “You’ll get over that.”

Maybe it was temporary, though everything that happened in those

days was so new and unknown, any transformation or decline or wast-

ing or empowerment possible, that even transitory states seemed to be

forever, no matter what the nurses said; Prosper poked at his unresist-

ing thighs, as cold-skinned as a chicken leg and seemingly no more

his.

Each day a nurse removed the front of his brace and washed him.

Then the brace was buckled back together, and two nurses lifted him

in his brace and with great care and much instructing of each other

they turned him over, and let him lie facedown for a time. It was like

turning over in sleep, except that it took a very long time, and two

126 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

other people. After a week, it was different when the nurse came to

wash him. He was different. He could feel it: the warm water, the

smooth soap, the rough cloth. Not the way he had before, but as though

he were awaking with the sun and hearing confused noises not yet

resolved into birdsong and kitchen clamor. He could feel it and held his

breath. His penis when the nurse lifted and swiped it, swiped under his

testicles, suddenly rose and swelled, as though also startled awake. She

cleaned his inner thighs and reached deep down between his legs. Pros-

per thought of looking at the ceiling, or closing his eyes, but couldn’t.

Without looking away from her job the nurse said, “Feeling a little

better, huh?” and at the same time flicked at his crotch with the middle

finger of her free hand, the way you do when you want to send some-

thing—a spitball, a bug—a good distance; her nail struck sharply

against the tender underside of the pink head that was peeking boldly

out, Prosper yelped, and the whole collapsed and shrank.

Feeling better. Still his legs remained cold, as though asleep, below

the middle of his thighs. In a few days the doctor came again, and

lifted Prosper’s legs, and laid them down again. He talked to the nurse

about Prosper’s back, his legs, the healing of his wound (they called it

a wound, as though they had done it by accident), and he went away

again, with a wink at Prosper that made him wonder.

After a month he came back, and this time drew up a chair by

Prosper’s bed to have a talk.

“So the operation was a success, and your back is doing well,” he

said. “But it didn’t go as well in another way.”

Prosper grew momentarily conscious of the cast he lay buckled in.

The doctor was regarding him, maybe with truth and frankness in his

steady gaze, but it seemed sinister to Prosper, the intense stare of people

in the movies who are about to reveal crimes, or accuse others of them,

or change people into monsters.

“The side effects of an operation like this can’t be predicted,” he

said. “It hasn’t been done in this way for very long. In the future we

will . . . well. In your own case. There’s a lot of complex innervation

running up that spine of yours. Well up everybody’s. And placing the

instrumentation can have unintended consequences.”

He put a hand strongly but gently on Prosper’s leg. Prosper could

feel the warmth.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 127

“You’ve had a certain amount of paralysis.”

Prosper nodded, not knowing what the word meant exactly though

it was one spoken around the ward. Infantile Paralysis. “The nurse

said it would get better,” he said. “It already has.” He almost told

about how he had felt the nurse washing him, the effect it had had and

what she’d done, but stopped before he did. “She does the massage

every day. I couldn’t feel it, now I do.”

“Well that’s fine,” the doctor said without a smile. “But in the long

term. You’re going to need some help walking.”

Prosper pictured two nurses, the nice one, the other, by his side

always, helping him along.

“We’re going to teach you all about that. How to use some crutches

to get along. You’ll do fine when you get used to them. Everybody

does.” He rose. “You’ll need a little bracing to keep these legs straight

and strong for that. Braces and the crutches. You’ll get along fine.”

“Okay,” Prosper said. The two of them, Prosper on the bed and the

doctor above, with everything and nothing to say. “So maybe I’ll still

get over it someday.”

“Sure thing,” the doctor said. “Maybe you will.”

3

He’d been in the cast for four weeks, with as much at least left to

go, when he got a visitor again. His own visitor, not like the

actress or the ballplayer who visited everybody, going from bed

to bed followed by reporters and helpers and the doctor, smiling

and kissing one or two while the flashbulbs went urgently off.

Two visitors in fact: his aunts, Bea and May. Bea was the older

sister of his mother, and May the younger sister of his father. Bea was

taller and blonder, with heavy curls that seemed to burden her head,

and May was small and dark, her hair cut short when it became all

right to do that, and unchanged since. He had never seen them apart,

so it was also like having one visitor.

“Hello, Prosper,” Aunt Bea said. “You remember me. And here’s

May too.”

“Hello, Aunt Bea. Hello, Aunt May. Sorry I can’t stand up.”

“Oh, now, Prosper,” said May. The nurse pushed over an extra

chair by the bed so they could sit, both on their chair’s edge, both

clutching their purses. “So what now’s all this they’re doing to you? Is

all this proper?”

“They have to tug him straight,” said Bea confidentially to her.

“Well, I must say,” May said, “you’re quite the brave fellow, putting

up with all this. I never could.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 129

“It’s fine,” Prosper said. “I’ll be doing fine. I might need a little help

in walking.”

“Oh. Oh.”

Charlie in the next bed now stirred, and Prosper—somehow the

two kind outspoken ladies made him want to be punctilious and cor-

rect—indicated him. “Aunt May, Aunt Bea,” he said, “I’d like you to

meet my friend Charlie,” and here he realized he’d never heard or didn’t

remember Charlie’s last name. Charlie’d come out of his own plaster

cast in that week, and his muscles, released from long confinement,

were going crazy, having forgotten all that Charlie had tried to teach

them or just wild with freedom; he put on quite a show lifting himself

in the bed to greet the two ladies, sheets astir and pajamas twisted,

head tugged sidewise and mouth working as though he were catching

flies around him. But he said “Pleased to meetcha” pretty well, and

then said it again, happy with the success of it. The two ladies smiled

and nodded, interested, and Bea took from her large bag a small stack

of cookies, which she handed around.

“How’s my ma?” Prosper asked, eating. “Is she coming?”

Bea and May shared a look—it was a thing they did, that Prosper

would become accustomed to, their heads turning together like con-

nected gears to lock in place, and the knowledge, or the unease, or the

wonderment or puzzlement passing between their wide eyes and big

long ears, you could almost see it in transit. Then both together back.

“She’s not been well,” said May.

“She’s been poor,” said Aunt Bea. “She’s getting better.”

They added nothing to that, and Prosper didn’t know what further

to ask. Bea cried Well and from her bag began to take out more things,

books and puzzle magazines, Lucky bars, the bag was like a magician’s

fathomless top hat; finally half a cake cut in slices. The ward around

them, at least those that were mobile, began to be drawn to Prosper’s

bed like a school of fish to fish food until they were all around and the

aunts were handing around cake.

“Prosper, what do you think,” May said. “When you’re all better

and out of this contraption. Would you like to come and stay with us

for a while?”

Prosper’s mouth was full, so he couldn’t say anything, and had a

moment to think. He liked the women. Once he’d spent a night at their

130 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

house while his mother went away to another city to visit a practitioner

of some sort, he couldn’t remember for what illness, and Bea and May

had entertained him royally, ice cream in three flavors, games of Snap

and Crazy Eights, dancing to late-night bands on the radio, the two of

them laughing and pulling his leg and smoking Turkish cigarettes in

holders. He thought they liked him too, something he was never sure

about with his parents.

But he said: “I’d have to go home first. To be with my ma.”

“Well sure,” May said, and looked away smiling to the crowd of

hungry jostling boys around her. Bea was helping Charlie with his slice,

gazing with admiration at how he wielded his fork and made it to his

face with almost every bite, and didn’t turn to Prosper, as though she’d

heard none of that. May remarked that when Prosper was out the two

might get together, he and Charlie, and she wrote down for Charlie her

own telephone number, which Prosper thought was remarkable.

Before they left, the aunts brought out one last present they had for

him, a long box of dark wood with a brass catch, beautiful and rich,

and inside, richer still, laid into the grooves of the paper liner, a spec-

trum of colored pencils: all in rainbow order, but shading subtly from

blue to blue-green to green-blue to green, orange to red-orange, crim-

son, scarlet. They had all been pointed, not by penknife but by machine,

flawlessly. He could hardly imagine disturbing them in their perfec-

tion, almost wanted to assure the two women that he never would,

never spoil this thing that opened like a promise before him. Later they

wondered if maybe he hadn’t liked the gift: so quiet. But oh my: the

poor kid had so much to think about, didn’t he.

The nurses rigged up a table or desk surface hanging upside down

from a frame over Prosper’s bed and clipped his papers to it, so that

even mostly prone he could use his pencils to draw. He started by

simply edging his papers with great care in bands of color, thicker and

thinner, as though making a larger and larger frame for a picture that

he never drew. Then he began making letter shapes, copying from

newspaper headlines the strange forms full of barbs and hooks and

thick and thin lines, making up the letters that he couldn’t find. He

made name signs for the beds of the other boys, each of them putting

in his own requests as to shape and color and nickname. “We know

their names,” Nurse Muscle Eenie said, and removed these distrac-

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 131

tions. He started making only one name, planting the dry sticks of it as

though in a garden, where it grew strange buds and blossoms in red,

violet, aquamarine, and sienna: the name was prudence. He’d send

them with one of the nurses to deliver to her on her ward, and get back

her thanks or none, and draw another.

His aunts came now and then to see him, though never his mother.

On one occasion it wasn’t they but two uncles, whom he knew by sight

but had rarely spoken to before—Uncle Mert and Uncle Fred, bearing

a box of chocolates, keeping their hats and coats on. They didn’t have

much to say. Mert extracted a cigar from his pocket and bit off the tip,

was about to light it too as the children stared in glee, too bad the

nurse just then told him no. Mert called her Sister. Say, Sister, when’s

the boy gonna be up and at ’em. Say, Prosper, you look like a turtle in

that shell, naw, you look swell, kid. They didn’t stay long, though Pros-

per shone briefly afterward in the ward in their reflected raffish glare;

he made up some stories about who they were and what they’d done.

It took four months for Prosper to be broken out of his plaster shell,

his skin flaking and gray and the cast itself loathsome as the grave, but

himself alive. Two further months to regain the strength in his hips

and the long muscles of his thighs that still functioned, and to find out

which those were, and make them move. More months to cast his legs

and have the steel braces made that from then on he would need to

stand and to walk; to learn to put them on and take them off by him-

self, and lift himself up like a stiff flagpole erected, himself the flagpole

sitter, wobbling high atop them, swept by vertigo—awful to know that

if he fell, his locked knees would stay locked and he’d go down straight

and headlong. To learn to walk with them, first in the parallel bars of

the exercise rooms (the very rooms that he had peeked into on his first

visit to this place, rooms that he now seemed to have been born and

raised in) and after that with wooden crutches under his arms. The

Swing Gait: put both crutches out in front of you and then fling your

body forward on them, advance the crutches quick enough so you don’t

fall forward. The more approved Four Point Gait: left crutch tip, right

foot, right crutch tip, left foot, like a parody of a man free-walking.

When he got good at it he was allowed to compete in the unofficial

crutch-racing meets on the ward. On the lower floor he joined the

marching again, singing and walking at the same time, a good trick.

132 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

He was walking with Prudence (who still rarely spoke but seemed glad,

even proud, to have him by her, all he’d wanted) when far off Miss

Mary Mack came onto the floor—several of the children were her

responsibility, and they sang out in greeting:

“Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack

All dressed in Black Black Black

With the silver Buttons Buttons Buttons

All down her Back Back Back.”

Which more than one of the children really did have, under their

skin, including Prosper and Prudence, they’d have known it if anyone

had explained to them what the doctors had done. When the elephant

jumped the fence in the song and didn’t come down till the Fourth of

July Prudence suddenly sang out all by herself in a high piercing chal-

lenging voice Prosper would not have thought she had, that stilled the

tall-shoe clumpers and spastics and cripples:

“July can’t Walk Walk Walk

July can’t Talk Talk Talk

July can’t Eat Eat Eat

With a knife and Fawk Fawk Fawk.”

In all that time Prosper turned ten and then eleven. He passed from

fifth grade into sixth, or would have if he’d gone to school; the teachers

who volunteered on the ward never tried too hard to find out who

needed to learn what and who already knew it well enough—Amerigo

Vespucci, i before e except after c, 160 square rods to the acre. He grew two inches taller, though from now on he would grow taller more

slowly. The stock market crash took all of the family money Nurse

Muscle Eenie’d put into the Blue Ridge Corporation. Some of the sick-

est boys vanished from the ward, usually at night, and no notice was

taken of their absence, not by the nurses, not by the patients; they

weren’t spoken of again. Charlie went home, a little less knotted up

than before. Let’s go, son, his father said, grappling him and lifting

him down from the bed. Prudence went home, in the same white dress

and bow she’d worn to have her picture taken long ago; straighter now

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 133

but not all straighter, seeming to handle herself delicately, a tall stack

of wobbly saucers that might slump and fall. She smiled for him,

though, and showed him that she was taking all the versions of her

name he had made home with her. She seemed happier, he thought. He

never saw her again.

At the end of the year, his uncles appeared again, without the

chocolates this time, but with something to impart that they seemed

to have been ordered to tell him but couldn’t. Each in turn glanced

now and then behind himself, as though the unspoken thing were

right behind them, nudging. In the end they only asked several times

how he was doing, made a joke or two, and hurried away, saying

they’d be back. It was Aunt Bea and Aunt May who, a day after and

in the wake of his uncles’ failure, had to come to tell him that while

he had been in the hospital all this time, his mother had lost ground;

had worsened; weakened—they took turns supplying words—and

failed. She had died just about the time (Prosper later figured out)

he’d first put on his braces.

Whatever else Prosper would remember of that day, the thing that

would cause his own heart to fill with some kind of fearsome rain

when it occurred to him, the thing that for him would always stand for

human grief unbearable and rich, were the tears that stood in his aunts’

eyes as they talked to him then, the tremble in their voices. He had

never seen grown-ups in the grip of sorrow, and though they came

close and put each a hand on him he couldn’t conceive of it as being on

his behalf; it was their own, and he would have given anything to have

been able to say to them It’s all right, don’t cry.

“My God,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in Henryville, or to the world and

the air around.

“What,” said Prosper.

“You went in with the bent back and came out and you couldn’t

walk?”

“I can walk,” Prosper said.

“You know what I mean. And then just while you were getting

better they told you your mother died?”

“They didn’t want to tell me till I was getting out. So I’d have some

134 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

relatives, you know, around. They thought it would be tough if I had to

learn it and then be in the hospital alone.”

“What did she die of?”

“I don’t know. No one said.”

“My God.” Vi’s own mother had passed with her sons and daughter

around her, her last labored breath; they’d seen her put into her box

and into the earth and the dirt covering her. She knew. “And by this

time your father was gone who knew where?”

“Yes.”

“My God. You were alone. I can’t imagine.”

“No I wasn’t actually. There was Bea and May. My aunts. Two

uncles too.”

“Aunts and uncles aren’t parents. I mean they can try to do their

best, but.”

“Well. I don’t know. It was different.”

“Well it can’t have been better.”

“You didn’t know my mother and father,” Prosper said. “You didn’t

know Bea and May.”

4

It will be different when you come out, they all said—Mert and Fred,

Bea and May, with different faces at the different times when they

said it—and he had pondered that as best he could, but it wasn’t easy

to think through what that meant, different; when he looked for-

ward he saw a world that was all changed but actually all the same,

because he couldn’t imagine it changed. Once he dreamed of it, all dif-

ferent, but what was different about it was what was gone: his city, the

streets, his house and the vacant lots around it and the buildings that

had looked down on it. What was in their place he couldn’t see.

It was that way, all changed and the same. Mert and Fred came to

get him. He could walk out and down the hall and out the door on his

own, and all the nurses, even Nurse Muscle Eenie, came out of the

wards and offices to say good-bye and watch him go: first using the

respectable Four Point, then the faster Swing Gait, an uncle on each

side of him, one carrying the bag with his things, their hands at the

ready and making for him nervously now and then as though he were

an unsteady and valuable piece of furniture they were moving. “Doing

fine, son,” said a doctor who passed them. He was doing fine.

The long stairway to the street where Fred had double-parked the

car was a different matter. Prosper halted at the top, looking down like

a mountaineer about to rappel. Then Mert picked him up without a

136 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

word, and as though stealing him he took the steps at a good pace,

Fred after him. Prosper, pressed against his uncle, could smell Mert’s

seersucker and even his cigar case; Mert’s breath whinnied faintly up

his throat.

They tried to hustle him into the car by main strength, but his rigid

legs posed a packing problem that they argued silently over until Pros-

per made them stop. They stood back and watched as he unclipped the

locks at the knees of his braces and let them down and tucked his legs

into the car.

“Easy as pie,” said Fred.

“Shut up, start the car,” said Mert. A couple of passers-by had stopped

on the street to gawk at the operation, which Mert wanted to get over

with. “Rubes,” he said. Fred got the car going. Prosper in the back seat

laid his head against the leather humps of the upholstery and watched the

city go past, not the familiar streetcar route but another way, chosen—

though Prosper couldn’t know it—to bypass his old house.

“Take Main,” said Mert.

“Main?”

“Main. Take Main and turn on Pearl.”

“Why Pearl?”

“Just do it,” Mert said.

The world was rich and huge. That’s what was different. It poured

in on him as though it had just come into being, or was coming into

being as the car drove through it: huge sky, air full of odors, streets full

of newborn people in new-made coats and hats, ding of a bicycle bell

like struck crystal. Even the parts of the journey he recognized, streets

and corners and buildings, come upon sideways or at the wrong end,

seemed newer, sharper, bigger.

Then they pulled up before a house he knew, though not, at first,

what house it was. Fred set the brake but let the motor run, and Mert

leapt out and came to get Prosper; manhandled him out of the car as he

had into it, and set him up like a department-store dummy on the side-

walk before the house, which had by now become the house where Bea

and May lived, a house Prosper couldn’t help thinking used to be some-

where else.

Fred had got out of the car now and come to stand by Prosper. Mert

brushed his hair with a hand, and Fred set down his bag of things

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 137

beside him and stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket. Then the

two of them looked at each other, came to a silent agreement, and with

a quick good-bye, good-bye they climbed hastily back into the impa-

tiently muttering auto and went off. As in an old comedy, the door

before Prosper opened at the same moment as the car behind him

pulled away. His two aunts appeared.

“Prosper!” Bea said, as though amazed, delighted too.

“They’re gone,” said May.

He had been turned over by the two uncles to the two aunts, who

came out to claim him, one gentle hand each on his shoulders, faces

with calming smiles bent to look into his.

“Hello, Aunt May. Hello, Aunt Bea.”

“Why hello, Prosper. We’re glad you’re here.”

“May,” said Bea, “how’s he going to get into the house?”

There were two low steps up to the narrow porch and another into

the house. If he’d been asked before this day if his aunts’ front door had

steps up to it, and how many, he wouldn’t have been able to say. There

was a little bannister for the porch steps, made of coupled plumber’s

pipes, like those of the practice stairs where Prosper spent many hours.

He stepped out from the shelter of their hands, swapped his right crutch

into his left hand, grasped the bannister, and with it and the left crutch

hoisted himself so that his feet landed on the first step. He steadied

himself, feeling his aunts’ and the street’s and the world’s eyes on him,

marveling or doubtful. He did it again. Then again, but this time the

toes of his shoes caught under the lip of the step. He fell back to start

over with a bigger stronger push, swinging his feet back and then over

the lip to land on the porch. A large cat that had just put its head out

the open door turned and fled from the sight of him. Prosper turned to

face his aunts, who looked at each other and then at him in wonder-

ment. How do you like that. Easy as pie.

Flushed with success, he lifted himself over the threshold and stood

in the hall. There was a smell of fusty rug, baked bread, the cat, a

potent odor he didn’t know was incense, Bea’s Fatima cigarettes,

window box geraniums. Sun came in through the open lace-curtained

windows of the parlor beyond, falling on a dark velvet hassock and its

armchair. Far door into a yellow kitchen. Later on, when a sudden

memory of his standing that morning in the hall of Bea and May’s

138 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

house would arise in him, Prosper would sometimes feel his breast fill

with a sob, though it hadn’t done so then; and he never could say just

what was gathered so densely into that moment as to cause it. Escape;

refuge; exile too. Relief he couldn’t have accounted for, and grief he

was not yet even able to measure. His aunts’ true kindness, and every-

thing that kindness couldn’t assuage. Pride that he had come into their

house under his own power. New world. Lost life and strength. Maybe

more than anything it was his memory of that boy’s ignorance, igno-

rance of the years he would live in the rooms he could see from where

he stood, and of all that would befall him there: that boon ignorance.

Bea and May had lived together all of Prosper’s life. Prosper had never

had much sense of how old they were; he guessed that May was younger

than Bea, but he was wrong about that. They were the age of his par-

ents, but in their knockabout freedom they seemed younger, in their

fearlessness in the world they seemed older. Bea was dizzier, but May

had done crazier things in her life—Prosper would hear her say this

was so, but he was left to imagine what the crazy things might have

been. She seemed to have come to rest in Bea, and was not tempted

now, though Prosper would have liked to see an outburst or breakout

of some kind, to know what May might be capable of.

Bea sold cosmetics at a department store downtown, spraying

women with little spurts of My Sin or L’Heure Bleue and talking to

them about their coloration. She had a wide-eyed soft-spoken cheer

that seemed like total honesty, and she was honest, believed that she

could suit a woman to a product that would benefit her, and took a

dollar for a jar of lettuce oil or patent vanishing cream with a feeling of

having done a good deed all around. May worked as office manager in

a firm that sold business supplies and furniture wholesale, leather-

topped desks and swivel chairs and gooseneck lamps and filing cabi-

nets, as well as typewriters, time clocks, and adding machines. She

never regarded her job as her calling, as Bea did hers. She complained

about the time it took from her real life, which was lived in the realm

of the spirit: her delicate, years-long negotiation with a disembodied

child who communicated with May by various means. The child—

whose name was Fenix Vigaron—taught May a lot, but also lied to her

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 139

atrociously, apparently just for the fun of it, and had another friend

among the living somewhere in Servia or Montenegro, a friend who

got different help, maybe better help (the child hinted with casual cru-

elty) than she was willing to give to May. No one in her office knew

about May’s other life; but there, with her journal and ledger and her

in-box and out-box, no matter how fast she moved May seemed to

herself to be standing still, whereas sitting in stillness awaiting the

dead child’s touch she seemed always to be moving, however slowly,

toward something.

Bea was always glad to get whatever advice Fenix Vigaron had for

her, but May was shy about revealing her experiences to others; too

many of them believed in things that May didn’t believe in for her to

talk to them about Fenix. They would go on about how their mothers

and lovers and babies had called out to them as they sat holding hands

in darkened rooms with paid mediums, but—May wanted to know—

how could the only dead souls who mattered to you be just the ones

your medium’s spirit guide could introduce you to? Wouldn’t it be more

likely that they wouldn’t be acquainted with them, among so many, the

Great Majority? It was like running into someone who hails from a

distant city where you yourself know one person, and asking, Say do

you know Joe Blow, he’s from there—and of course he doesn’t. May’s

little angel or devil couldn’t give May news of her brother, Prosper’s

father; she couldn’t say if he was actually among them over there now

(as May believed), and didn’t seem to care either; nor did she ever come

to know Prosper’s mother, so as to bring any comforting words from

her. May told Prosper anyway: your mother’s happy now; nothing can

hurt her now; I know it’s so. Prosper nodded, solemn, as it seemed he

should do. Prosper knew nothing then about Fenix Vigaron, though

Fenix knew all about him.

The two women had taken on the orphaned Prosper (they’d agreed

to regard him as an orphan, though Bea had her doubts) because they

could, and because there was no one else not already consumed with

their own children, or with the care of some other displaced or incom-

petent relative, or who wasn’t just unsuitable, like Mert and Fred, into

whose families (if they could be called that) you wouldn’t want to insert

any growing innocent.

But how to meet his needs, practical and spiritual, a male child,

140 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

they themselves not so young and flexible as once they were? He’d have

to have a room of his own, and (it took a while for them to grasp this)

not at the top of the stairs, where theirs and a little spare room were.

The only choice was the downstairs room the women called the parlor,

though it was small and dim and they rarely used it, preferring the big

bright room that ought to have been for dining. Thank goodness the

bathroom was downstairs.

So they sent Mert and Fred a note telling them that their next task

was to empty this room of its horsehair sofa and mirrored sideboard

and grandfather clock and glass-shaded lamps and store them safely

somewhere, then bring in instead a boy-size bed, a dresser and a ward-

robe where he could put away his clothes and his, well, his things,

snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails. A desk May provided from

work, and a steel lamp to put on it. (This oaken thing, with a hidden

typewriter table that pulled out and sprang into rigidity with a snap, a

secret cash drawer within a drawer—it was the first item of furniture

Prosper recognized as his own, as in fact him in another mode; it

appeared in his dreams for years, altered as he was himself.)

Mert and Fred didn’t appear for this job themselves (they disdained

and shrank from the women as much as the women did from them),

but eventually a couple of fellows in derbies and collarless shirts arrived

in a horse-drawn van and unloaded a cheap and vulgar but serviceable

and brand-new set of furniture of the right type, don’t ask how

acquired, and swapped it for Bea’s and May’s parents’ old moveables,

which they carted away without a word.

“Why don’t you like Uncle Mert and Uncle Fred?” Prosper asked

them as he ate the egg they cooked him every morning, themselves

taking nothing but coffee.

The two turned toward each other, that wide-eyed how-shall-we-

respond look he’d seen before, then to Prosper again.

“First of all,” May said, “they aren’t really your uncles. Mert’s your

mother’s cousin, and I don’t even know what Fred is.”

Prosper didn’t know why that would exclude them from the wom-

en’s world, and spooned the orange yolk from his egg. Now and then

when he’d walked out with his father, he’d been taken into a diner or a

garage to meet the two men, and those three had smoked a cigar

together and talked of matters Prosper didn’t understand, his father

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 141

laughing with them and at the same time somehow shy and cautious,

as though in their debt. He wondered now.

“They hang around down with that icehouse gang,” May said.

“You don’t want to know.”

But he did. Icehouse?

“They’re not bad, ” Bea said, always ameliorative. “It’s not that we

don’t like them. It’s just.”

“They have their uses,” May said regally, and she and Bea laughed

together.

Their place was too small to fit a wheelchair in, even if they could

have afforded one, but May had a wheeled office chair, a model 404D,

the Steno Deluxe, sent over from the business, and Prosper got good at

navigating the space of the downstairs in it, moving quickly hand over

hand from chair back to door frame to dresser like Tarzan sailing

through the jungle on his vines. The women had to roll up and put

away the rug, the beautiful Chinese rug, for him. Prosper only later

understood how many such things they did, how many little costs they

bore, all willingly paid. He had set them a problem, and they would

solve it: for a time, they had to think up something new almost every

day, and Prosper would try it, and at day’s end they’d congratulate

themselves and Prosper that that was done—Prosper had taken a bath

and got out by himself, Prosper had been taken to the hospital for the

sores on his feet, Prosper was going to go to school—and the next day

face another.

They got him to school with the help of Mary Mack, who knocked

one day at the door, appearing like the Marines (May said), face shin-

ing, having lost track of her client when he left the hospital—no one

had told her! She invited May and Bea to share her astonishment at

this, though they knew (and knew Miss Mack knew) that it was they

themselves who had told no one that Prosper had got out—but well!

Back again now, offering help, kidding Prosper (mute with bliss to be

in her radiance again) about playing hooky. Yes of course he’d go to

school. A few years back the progressives on the school board had

passed a resolution, and the city an ordinance, stating that every child

capable of being educated in the public schools ought to be, and accom-

modations must be made in the school, or at home for those unable to

reach the school. And Miss Mack knew that the school to which Pros-

142 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

per would now be going had set up a special classroom that the cripples

and wheelchair-bound children could reach. There was a sort of ramp,

she said, such as wheelbarrows or hand trucks might use, and once

inside there were no stairs to climb. Prosper had kept up with his les-

sons while in the hospital, hadn’t he? Well his teachers would decide

when he got there whether to advance him or keep him back. And how

(May and Bea almost in unison asked) was he to get to and from this

school? Miss Mack drew from her belted black leather satchel the

papers for May or Bea to sign, Prosper’s guardians as they now were or

would become, so that Prosper could ride the special bus that would go

around the district for the children who could not walk to school.

“I could walk,” Prosper said with offhand certainty.

“It’s a long way,” said Mary Mack. She looked long into Prosper’s

eyes, and he looked into hers, deep dark blue and larger than seemed

possible, somehow in his gazing absorbing her divinity unmediated.

“Maybe you should save your strength.”

“All right,” Prosper said, unreleased.

“At first, anyway,” said Mary Mack.

“All right,” Prosper said.

So when September came, there Prosper would go, and what would

come of that the women tried to imagine—how he would be regarded,

whether kindly or disdainfully, and how he would get on included with

a classful of children in his own case or maybe worse—but they couldn’t

imagine, really, and Fenix all that summer was dull or hostile, unre-

sponsive, maybe jealous of the new child in the family.

Bea and May usually spent their week’s vacation at a modest resort

in the mountains, eating vegetarian meals and doing exercises under

the instruction of a swami, but this year they saw that they’d have to be

right there in their own hot house, which they hoped wasn’t a sign of

things to come for them. They played Hearts and cribbage and they

listened to the radio and brought home books for Prosper from the

library. Carefully, one of them on each side of him, they took walks

around the block, returning in a sweat and feeling as though they’d

walked every step of the way in his braces themselves. Once in the

humid night May wept in Bea’s arms, and couldn’t say why: at the

change in their lives that would be forever, at that poor child’s losses,

at his heartbreaking good cheer, at everything.

5

Sometime late in that summer, Prosper made a discovery: his mother

and father were kept in the house, in the big closet under the stair.

Curious and aimless in the hot afternoon, he’d started open-

ing doors and peeking into drawers, learning the place, and this

one last: that smaller-than-normal door, the door with the angular top,

many a house he’d live in afterward would have one, and he’d always

find them sinister. And in there in the dusty shadows, amid the boxes

and a fur coat and a busted umbrella, stood or sat the great gray

Hoover vacuum cleaner his mother had pushed and pulled all morning

twice a week. It was the same one: there was the scar mended with

thread where once the bag had caught on a protruding banister nail

and torn. And close beside it, matrimonially close, his father’s two

leather sample cases, still shut up, buckled and strapped, just as they

had been in the closet beneath the stair in his old home.

Prosper slid from his rolling chair to the floor and crept into the

closet, just far enough so that he could snag one of the cases; he dragged

it out, feeling as though it might have grabbed him instead and pulled

him in. It was heavier than he would have thought, too heavy almost to

carry, and his father had carried both, at least from cab to train sta-

tion, station to hotel, up the stairs of businesses where he talked to

prospects. Prosper knew about that. But somehow he had never known

144 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

just what it was his father had sold. The story about selling, about car-

rying and talking and traveling, didn’t include that; or if it had, it

hadn’t been anything he could speculate about, objects or matter only

usable in the grown-up world, in business, none of his business though.

He tugged at the straps, which had first to be pulled tighter in order to

be released; when they were undone the catch on the top could be

unsnapped, and then the case fell into two, all revealed. In the pockets

and holders and clips were paints in lead tubes, and brushes in gradu-

ated sizes, beautiful pencils not yellow but emerald green, tucked into

a looped belt like cartridges. In other compartments or layers, small

pads and sheets of differing papers coarse to smooth. A case of pen

nibs, all different, from hairstreak-fine to broad as chisels. Other pens

whose use he couldn’t grasp, elaborate heavy compasses, a dozen tools

even more obscure. A thick catalog that showed all those things and

also drafting tables, T squares, cyclostyle machines, airbrushes, gray

pictures of gravely smiling men in bow ties using them.

Commercial Artist’s Supplies was what he sold. The name of the

company and his father’s were on the cards tucked into a special holder

at the case’s top. Prosper could feel the raised lettering on the card

under his finger, as though the words were made of black paint drib-

bled on with supernal precision. Cable COMARTSCO. The second

case, when in a state of strange excitement he extracted and opened it

too, contained more and different things, including three boxes of col-

ored pencils of the kind Bea and May had given him, each full of pen-

cils in more exquisitely graduated colors. For an instant he heard his

father’s voice.

He restored the contents as carefully as he could, shut them up, and

pushed them back beneath the stair beside the Hoover. For a couple of

days he said nothing, at once elated and oppressed by his discovery;

but then, at dinner, he slyly turned the topic to his father and his work,

those big cases he used to carry, what were those? And his aunts both

jumped up at once, went to pull the cases out, glad for him, glad he had

thought of them, glad he wanted to look into them, go ahead! Bea

pulled out from one of the nested compartments a paper book called

Teach Yourself Commercial Art & Studio Skills, and Prosper accepted

it from her with a turn of his heart and a warmth in his throat he

hadn’t known before.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 145

So the great cases went into his room. Bea and May said that the

company’d asked for them back but Prosper’s mother’d never got to it,

and it seemed they’d sent an angry letter while she was in the hospital,

and then they’d quietly gone out of business themselves. If Prosper

wanted a T square and a board they’d have to find them elsewhere.

Meanwhile the women had to return to work, and it was just too

hard to bear thinking of him all alone in the house, for he couldn’t be

a latchkey child, couldn’t run to the park or hop on the streetcar to the

natatorium (they were sure of that). So they asked around the neigh-

borhood for someone who might be induced to come and visit him,

play Parcheesi in the cool of the darkened house, draw and paint, sit on

the porch and drink Coca-Cola; and because they were the persons

they were they didn’t think not to accept when a neighbor lady in pity

assigned her daughter, a year and more older than Prosper, to do this

service. And because Prosper was coming to be the person he was, he

made no objection.

Her name was Elaine, dark and soft; strangely slow and languid she

seemed to Prosper, her fingers moving more tentatively or cautiously to

do any task than his would: he would watch fascinated as she opened a

box of crackers or brought forward her skirt from behind her as she sat.

“What happened to you?” she asked when the grown-ups had all

left them. He had got on his braces to meet her.

“I fell out of an airplane,” Prosper said. He’d had no idea he would

say that until he heard it. “I’ll probably get better.”

She seemed not to hear it anyway. She went on looking at the steel

bars that came out from Prosper’s pant legs and went underneath his

shoes.

“Would you like a soda pop?” he asked. He couldn’t perceive that

she heard this either. Prosper, who was stared at a lot by different

people in different ways, was learning methods of distracting their

gaze, bringing it up to his face, even throwing it off him. Elaine’s he

seemed not to be able even to pull up. It wasn’t one of the usual faces

Prosper knew (but as yet had no name for, couldn’t say he knew): it

wasn’t the cheerful I-see-nothing-out-of-the-way one, or the repelled-

but-fascinated one, or the poor-animal-in-trouble one (head tilted, eyes

big with pity). Elaine just looked, and went on looking. After a time

she arose, in her unwilled way, and came to where he stood. He was

146 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

unsure what she intended; should he step away? Was she headed for

another room, the door out, did she mean to bean him? He’d never

seen such an unknowable face. She stopped before him and squatted.

He stood still. She lifted up the cuff of his trouser to see the shaft of the

brace.

“How high up do they go?”

“Here.” He touched his thigh. She looked up to where he touched,

then at his face, and then, as though snapping out of something, she

stood, turned, and walked away, and proposed a game, and said the

African violets needed watering, and that she herself would be entering

the eighth grade come September, and so went on talking for much of

the day in a steady soft uncrossable stream.

The next day when she came he was sitting in his office chair. He

hadn’t been able to remember, when he woke, what she looked like,

but now he could see that what made her face confusing was the way

her eyebrows were made, lifting up from their outer edges toward the

middle, as though she were perpetually asking a question.

“Why aren’t you wearing those things?”

“The braces? They’re hot. This is easier. Would you like a soda

pop?”

She stood regarding him without responding, listening maybe to

her own thoughts. Looking around in her slow absent-watchful way

she saw his braces, propped against his bed in the parlor he occupied.

She went in, and he followed on the chair. She squatted before the

braces as she had before Prosper, and examined with her slow fingers

the leather straps, the metal bars, the pad that covered his knee.

“Do they hurt?” she said.

“No. They make you sweat. You have to wear long socks. Stocki-

nette.”

“Stockinette,” she said, as though she liked the word. “Are they

hard to put on?”

“Not for me.”

“Let me see.”

“Okay,” he said. Who would have thought someone would ask him

that? But he didn’t mind; it was about his only trick. He slid from the

wheeled chair and to the floor. “I have to take my trousers off,” he said.

Without getting up, Elaine turned herself around. Prosper worked

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 147

off his pants where he sat, and took the long tubes of stockinette from

the bed where he’d tossed them. Elaine, who had been peeking around

to see, now turned, too fascinated not to. Prosper worked the long

stockings up over his legs, then took one of the two frames, lifted his

leg with his hands and fitted it inside. Then the other. He worked his

feet into the Buster Browns that were attached at the bottoms. He

wished it didn’t take so long, he’d like to speed through it like charac-

ters in movie cartoons can do, a momentary blur of activity and it’s

done. He began the buckling, and Elaine came closer.

“Do they have to be tight?”

“Oh yes,” he said. When his shoes were tied he said, “Now watch

this.” He reached out for a crutch, also propped there by the bed, rolled

himself to his side, and with a hand on the floor pushed himself up,

then pulled up farther on the crutch’s crossbar till he was standing up.

“See? Easy.”

“You didn’t put your pants on.”

“Oh. I usually do.” He laughed, but she didn’t; once again she

seemed to remember herself, rose and left the room, and when he had

got the braces off and his pants on again he found her primly seated in

the window seat with a magazine.

Since she evidently liked him better when his braces were on, he

was careful to wear them for her visits, but it somehow didn’t seem to

win her, and he wanted to win her, trying various blandishments that

she seemed to have little interest in, or scorned as childish. She was

restless, bored, irritable, he knew it but couldn’t fix it. On an after-

noon hotter than any before, hottest in history but probably not as hot

as tomorrow or the next day would be, she was staring at him in some

dissatisfaction where he stood.

“Let’s pretend,” she said. “Let’s pretend that it’s me who needs

them and you don’t.”

“What?”

“The braces. Let’s pretend.”

He didn’t play let’s-pretend any longer, and not only because he’d

had no one to play with. Somehow that mode or way of being had been

left behind, in the world before the hospital, where he was not now.

“Why do you want to do that?”

“Let’s just,” she said.

148 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

Her unsad sadness. It was those strange eyebrows, maybe, surely.

“Okay,” he said.

“Take them off.”

“Okay.”

Okay: so that’s what they did, that day and each hot day after that:

she would sit on the floor of his room, take off her shoes and stockings,

push up her skirt, pull on the stockings he used, and buckle on his

braces. She was older than he but about the same height, and her legs

were not much longer than his. He buckled them for her at first but she

said he never did it tight enough. Then they sat together and played

Parcheesi or drew with the art supplies and ate crackers until she went

home. She never tried standing. He never learned what it was she

wanted from them, and she said nothing more, but when she wore

them she seemed at once content and turbulent, and within the circle of

her swarming feelings he felt that too. It all stopped one day when May

came home ill from work, and found Elaine with Prosper’s braces on,

her skirt hiked up to her waist (she liked to look down at them often as

she read or played), and Prosper without his pants on (for he’d taken

them off to surrender the braces to her). May was generous about many

things, a taker of the Long View, but this fit nowhere in her picture of

life, and Elaine never came back again. Nothing was said to Prosper. A

week later, school started.

The bus that made its rounds through his part of town picking up the

students of the special health class arrived at the school building a little

after all the other students were beginning their classes—Prosper and

the others walking or rolling in could hear them reciting in unison

somewhere—and it returned for them just before three o’clock, was

awaiting them just beyond the ramp, engine running, when they were

dismissed: they’d begun climbing or being lifted aboard by the driver

and his husky helper even as the bell of the school exploded like a giant

alarm clock and the kids inside poured shrieking out. Some of those

aboard the bus looked out longingly at the games forming up on the

playground, one perhaps naming a child out there among the capture-

the-flag or pitch-penny gangs who had once said something pleasant to

him or to her; Prosper wouldn’t do that. He was he, they were they.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 149

Back home again he went to his room and took up his work where

the day before he had left off.

He’d learned a lot from his book of Commercial Art and Studio

Skills, and what of it he couldn’t understand he made his own sense

of. He used all the tools and the inks and the papers, the French

Curve, the Mat Knife, but what he loved best were the Ruling Pens,

which made the perfect even lines he saw in columns of type and

bordering newspaper ads, squared at each end as though trimmed by

scissors. He’d later learn that his method of using them was all his

own—like a man who learns to play a guitar the wrong way around—

but he got good at it. You turned a little dial atop the nib to narrow

or broaden the stripe it scribed. He still never tried to make pictures,

or copy nature, or draw faces. He created the letterheads of imagi-

nary companies (ACME with beautiful winged A). But most of his

time was spent producing, with great care and increasing realism, the

documents—tax stamps, stock certificates, bank checks (he’d studied

forms for these in sample books that May in puzzlement brought

home for him)—of a nonexistent country. Once it had been a real

place, he’d found its name in a ragged set of books on the shelf called

the People’s Cyclopedia: the Sabine Free State. At some past time it

had been part of the territory of Louisiana. The Sabine Free State had

been the home of the Redbone people, though no more, and no one

knew where the Redbones who had once lived there had come from,

or where they had gone. As he drew and lettered and crosshatched

with precision he could see in his imagination the places and people

of the Sabine Free State, the streets of the capital, the white-hatted

men and white-dressed women like those in magazine pictures of hot

places; the brown rivers and the cone of an extinct volcano, Bea’s

postcards of Mexico showed him those; the files of dark Redbone

women bearing baskets of fruit on their heads. He saw all that, but

what he drew were only the visas, permits, railroad shares, docu-

ments headed with the crest of the state: wings, and a badge, and a

curling banner with the unintelligible motto that all such things

seemed to have, Ars Gratia Artis, E Pluribus Unum. The motto of

the Sabine Free State he took from what May and Bea had first spelled

out on the Ouija board that guided their meditations: Fenix

Vigaron.

150 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

Prosper went to the special class in the school for two years. Bea and

May gave him valuable advice on how to pay attention and please

those in authority without yielding up your Inner Self to them. He

was among the most able in that class, as he was among the least in

his old school, which somehow didn’t seem to add up to an advan-

tage, but it gave him a certain standing with the girls. In the boys’

toilet he learned what he would learn of the vocabulary employed in

what Bea called the gutter, trying to work out the meaning of each

new term without admitting he didn’t have it down already, and fall-

ing for some common jokes ( ’D you suck my dick if I washed it? No?

Dirty cocksucker! ). Then in the next year there was no city or state

money for it any longer, no money for anything, and certainly not for

a special health bus and a special class; tax revenues had evaporated

just as the welfare services were overwhelmed with desperate need,

more every day, husbands deserting families to go try to find work

somewhere and just disappearing, children living on coffee and crack-

ers and pickles, pitiable older men in nice suits with upright bearing

and faces of suppressed dismay as though unable to believe they’d

come to ask the city for food and shelter. May saw her pay cut; there

was not a big call to furnish new offices. Bea’s commission on per-

fumes and oils went down.

What would the two aunts do with him now? Miss Mack had

shaken her head wordlessly when Bea brought up the State School as a

possibility. But she did tell them (with some reluctance, it was easy to

see) about a Home in another part of town, and May one hot day,

without telling Bea, took a trolley out. Just to look at it. She’d never

been inside such a place, had only seen them in the movies or read

about them in novels, where orphans and crippled children were helped

by warmhearted baseball-playing priests, tough hurt boys who learned

and grew. The place itself when she reached it was smaller than she’d

expected, just a plain brick building amid old streets in a featureless

neighborhood. The first thing she noticed was that the windows were

barred: even the wide balconies that might have been nice places to sit

were fenced with wire barriers. Alarm made her tongue-tied, and she

asked the wrong questions of the torpid caretaker, and was refused a

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 151

look around, though she could hear a faint uproar. She’d have to make

an application, she was told. Couldn’t she just meet some of the chil-

dren? Perhaps if she came on visiting day. Bea was feeling faint with

sorrow, as though the walls were soaked with it. She seemed to smell

cat piss, though there were no cats here.

She wandered, trying to peer down bleak corridors and into rooms.

She got a glimpse of a line of girls being taken from a classroom, she

thought, to somewhere else. The girls were dressed alike in gray jump-

ers washed a thousand times, their hair cut short, for lice maybe.

Coldly strict as their teacher was she couldn’t get them to march

straight. So many different things were wrong with them May couldn’t

distinguish. One looked back at May, dull drawn face, wide-set eyes: a

mongoloid, perhaps, but surely a soul, what would become of her.

May went home in the awful heat and never spoke of her trip. She

convinced Bea it’d be all right, that Prosper was old enough to stay

home alone; they’d get lessons from the school if they could, and do the

best they could when they could.

By then Prosper was almost fourteen, and should have been going

into high school, even if the actual grades he’d passed through didn’t

add up to that. The high school had never had provision for special

cases like his; if he reached the eighth grade he was considered to have

received as much benefit from education as he was ever likely to use—

enough to get a job if he could hold one, and if he couldn’t, more than

he needed.

So he was on his own. With Bea and May he worked out a schedule,

which May typed up at work—Prosper’s name at the top of the sheet

all in capitals, entrancing somehow. From eight to nine, he was to clean

his room and as much of the rest of the house as he could manage;

from nine to ten, physical exercise, as prescribed by the hospital,

including stretching a big rubber band as far and in as many directions

as he could. Ten till noon, reading and similar pursuits. Lunch, and so

on. In the afternoon, practice his art skills; walk to the corner store if

the weather was all right, carrying the string bag, and bring back

necessities for dinner. May started instructing him in cooking, and

within a few months he was regularly making dinner for them, maca-

roni, cutlets, potatoes with Lucky corned beef from a can, an apron

around his middle and spoon in his hand. When they tired of his

152 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

menus, May taught him something new out of the greasy and spine-

broken cookbook.

Prosper thought getting on with his education would be a simple

matter. The People’s Cyclopedia, with many pearly illustrations that he

liked to look at and even touch—the Holy Land, Thomas Edison in his

laboratory, the Russian Fleet at Port Arthur, the Three Graces by

Canova. He’d just start with volume I and read through to the end. The

three naked Graces, holding one another in languid arms and touching

as though comforting or merely enjoying one another, were in C, for

Canova, the sculptor. Halfway through that first volume ( Bulbul, Bul-

garia) he gave up. There was a Bible on the same shelf, and since it at

least was only one volume he decided to start on that instead. No one in

his family had cared much about church, though Prosper’d been told to

answer Protestant when asked what religion he was. There was supposed

to be a minister among the ancestors on one side of the family, and at

least one Jew on the other, and they seemed to cancel out, at once fulfill-

ing the family’s religious obligations and nullifying them. Prosper asked

Bea, as he was beginning his new enterprise, if she believed in God.

“Of course I do,” she said. She was cleaning the polish from her

nails. “What do you take me for?”

“Jesus too?”

“Sure.” She hadn’t looked up from her nails. As an answer to his

question this seemed definite but not definitive, and he couldn’t think

of another. He went on reading, turning the crinkly translucent pages,

but grew increasingly mystified after the first familiar stories (familiar

but not quite identical to the ones he knew or would have said he

knew). He made his way through the rules of Deuteronomy, wondering

if anyone had ever really followed them all and what kind of people

those would be; and he came upon this:

When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the

Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou

hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beauti-

ful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have

her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house,

and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall

put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 153

thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month:

and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and

she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in

her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt

not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of

her, because thou hast humbled her.

He was alone in the house, winter coming on and the lone lightbulb

that May allowed to be lit dull and somehow melancholy in its inade-

quacy. Prosper thought: I wouldn’t put her out. He’d explain the rule,

that she had to shave her head and take off her clothes, but it wasn’t his

rule, just the rule. He supposed he couldn’t tell her he was sorry about

destroying her city and killing her people, since the Lord said to do it,

and it had to be all right. But he wouldn’t put her out, not if she was

that beautiful to begin with. I won’t put you out, he’d say to her. You

can stay as long as you want. She’d have to and she’d want to, he was

sure. She’d stay with him in his tent, naked inside with him, and she’d

get over her grief.

He closed the perfumey-smelling Bible and went to get the first

volume of the Cyclopedia, to look up C for Canova.

Meanwhile things just kept getting worse, although (as the Presi-

dent had said, standing in his top hat high up on the Capitol steps) the

worst thing about it sometimes was just the fear, the fear that you’d

lose your grip on the rung you’d got to and go down not only into pov-

erty but also shame. The women worried for Prosper, how he’d ever

make out, and they were right to worry, because the margin for him

was thin, and in that time there were many whose thin margins, the

thinnest of margins, just evaporated. It happened every day.

It might be that May and Bea conceived that Charlie Coutts would

never want or need to use that telephone number that May’d given

him, not that she was being insincere or hypocritical when she did so,

it had just been one of those moments of sudden fellow-feeling that are

forgotten about as soon as made. And she had forgotten it when the

’phone rang in the house and May tried to figure out who was on the

line, which was hard because that person—it was Charlie’s father—

didn’t have either of the women’s names, which Charlie hadn’t remem-

bered, though he’d kept hold of the number.

154 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

When they’d straightened that out, Mr. Coutts said that Charlie

had been thinking of Prosper (he said “Proctor” at first) and had always

been grateful for how Prosper had befriended him in the hospital, and

wanted to ask if Prosper could come visit someday, at his convenience.

In a rush—maybe making up for her initial coldness to someone she’d

thought was a stranger or maybe a crank caller—May said sure, of

course, and even issued a counter-invitation, maybe Charlie could

come and visit at Prosper’s house: an invitation Mr. Coutts quickly and

with what seemed profound gratitude accepted, somewhat surprising

May, who didn’t try to take it back though. Charlie and his father lived

in a far part of town, and May—in for a penny, in for a pound—said

that Charlie was welcome to stay the night if that was more conve-

nient; and she hung up in a state of apprehension and gratified benevo-

lence.

Prosper felt a little the same. “Swell,” he said when Bea told him.

“When’s he coming?”

“Next Saturday,” Bea said.

“Swell.”

“Don’t say swell, Prosper. It’s so vulgar.”

His father brought Charlie in an old heap of a car, which drove past

the house and then, as though becoming only slowly conscious of the

address it had passed, cycled back to park against the far curb. Char-

lie’s father, in a windbreaker jacket and hat, cigarette between his lips,

got out and went around to the passenger side to get Charlie out. Bea,

May, and Prosper watched from the house. Prosper remembered the

hospital, more clearly than he had before, when Charlie’s father lifted

him up with that careful love and both arms around him. He set him

down on the pavement. Then with a small grip in one hand and the

other on his son’s shoulder to keep him steady, he aimed Charlie at the

house. The three inside watched him come toward them, Charlie

resembling a man walking under water, seeming to spoon the air with

lifted arms to help push his knees up against some invisible pressure,

uncertain feet falling where they had to. His father bent down and said

something to him around the cigarette, and Charlie hearing it laughed,

head wagging in glee.

They came out onto the porch to greet Charlie, his father guiding

though not aiding him up the stairs. Only when he’d seen the boy to

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 155

the top did he take off his hat and greet the ladies and Prosper. He was

grateful for the invitation. Bea said that Charlie surely had grown, and

certainly he looked to her both larger and more hazardous than she’d

thought he’d be. May invited them both in, but Charlie’s father with a

quiet apology said he couldn’t: he was starting a new job, Swing Shift

at a plant, and didn’t dare take a chance of being late. The women

understood.

“Good-bye, son. Behave yourself.”

“Byda.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Charlie liked that joke.

“Charlie!” Prosper said. “Come in and see my art supplies.”

Charlie’s father with a last touch on his son’s shoulder turned to go,

and May stepped down off the porch with him.

“Now, Mr. Coutts, is there anything at all we should know, I mean

what is it we should, you know.”

“Oh he’s fine,” said the man, discarding the remnant of his ciga-

rette in the gutter. “He’ll not give any trouble. You might tuck a big

napkin in his shirt collar at dinner.” He smiled at May. “I’ll be back

tomorrow morning.”

Charlie’d gone into the house with a hand on Prosper’s shoulder.

Bea following after the two of them was made to think how large the

world is, and how little of it we see most of the time. When Prosper’d

got Charlie to his room and seated him on the bed, Bea put her head

around the corner and with a motion drew Prosper out.

“Won’t he need help?” she said. “You should offer him help.”

“No, Aunt Bea. He doesn’t need help. He can do everything fine.

He just has to go slow.”

“Well.” Bea glanced back into the room where Charlie sat, rocking

as though he heard a strange music, or as though now and then some

small invisible being poked him. “If he needs any help you just call.”

“All right.”

“And you give him any help he needs.”

“I will.”

“Don’t wait to be asked.”

“I won’t.”

The women left the boys alone.

156 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

They looked over Prosper’s art supplies, but Prosper, realizing they

weren’t much use to Charlie, shut them up again, and from the drawer

where they were kept brought out games, cribbage, checkers, that he’d

seen Charlie manage in the hospital. They talked about the hospital,

and all that they had shared then, the bedpans, the crutch racing, Nurse

Muscle Eenie—Charlie laughing as Prosper remembered him doing

back then, laughter that seemed to run riot throughout him, tugging

him this way and that so that Prosper watching him laughed harder

too even as he tried to pull out of Charlie’s orbit the game board or cup

of coffee that Charlie’s limbs threatened. Upstairs May and Bea lis-

tened to the hilarity and the banging of the braces and the furniture,

taking turns rising up in alarm and starting off to go see, till pulled

back by the other.

It actually fascinated Prosper how Charlie did things, as though he

were badly adapted to do many common tasks but had figured out by

long practice how to get them done. Once in the hospital a man had

come to entertain the children, a small man in a dress suit with a little

dog. The dog could do things you wouldn’t think his paws and teeth

could manage. While the man would pretend to be about to do a magic

trick or juggle some balls, the little dog would run behind him and pull

out the hidden scarves or cards from his pockets, nose open the secret

drawers of trick boxes when the man wasn’t looking, paw out the doves

from the man’s tall hat—he could do anything, so deft and alert to

select the moment when the man’s back was turned to spoil his tricks

(though of course that was the trick), looking up with wide eyes as the

man scolded him, then doing it again, so busy and satisfied and inno-

cent. That’s how it was watching Charlie sugar his coffee, or rub his

chin questioningly, or mark his cribbage score with a pencil.

When long after dinner May called down the stairs to order them to

turn off the radio and go to bed, Charlie went to the little grip his

father had brought, worked open its catches, and pulled out a pair of

gray cotton pajamas. He got into these, and Prosper into his, each using

his own method and each making fun of the other for his contrivances.

Prosper noted the knotted muscle in Charlie’s rump and the big testi-

cles too. In the bathroom they washed their faces and brushed their

teeth, Prosper in his office chair and Charlie gripping the sink and

wrestling with the brush as though it were a small animal that had got

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 157

him. Laughing more, they climbed together into the bed, and Prosper

pulled the string he had rigged up so he could shut off the light hanging

from the ceiling.

“So good night,” Prosper said.

“Ood nigh,” said Charlie. “Own ledda bebbugs buy.”

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Okay, Charlie.”

“Oh gay.”

“Anything else you need?” May’d told him not to wait to be asked.

“Anything else I can help you with?”

“Oh well,” Charlie said, and began a series of twitches that might

have been shy or apologetic, and his knees pushed the bedclothes

sharply up. “I woont mine few could hep me yerp aw.”

“What?”

Charlie was laughing, in embarrassment or maybe not—that’s what

this spiraling was. “I wool like you. To hep me. YERP AW.”

Prosper thought a moment, and got it. “Charlie! What?”

“Cmaw,” Charlie said sweetly. “Gme a hand.”

Now they were both laughing, but Charlie didn’t stop. It was appar-

ent that he meant it, and asked it as a favor. He’d kicked away the cov-

erlet, purposefully it now seemed. “Ow bowdid? Hey?”

“Well,” Prosper said. “Well all right.”

“Oh gay,” said Charlie. He now became a mass of excited ungov-

erned activity from head to foot; Prosper had to help him get his bot-

toms down. Charlie’s penis was already big, and bigger than Prosper

had expected, bigger than his own, which had got up in sympathy,

though Prosper kept his own pants on. It took a minute to figure how

to grasp the thing from a point out in front rather than behind where

he’d always been before, like trying to do something while looking

only in a mirror, they struggled this way and that before they hit a

rhythm, which Prosper now divined would be the hard part for Charlie

when alone, especially as they got going and like a caught piglet Char-

lie’s body underwent an alarming series of thrashes and wriggles at

once urgent and random, Prosper pursuing him across the bed to keep

at it. Charlie’s noises were getting louder too, though it was clear he

was trying to suppress them. His hand flew up, maybe trying to pitch

in and help, and caught Prosper a smack in the ear so that Prosper too

cried out. May from upstairs could be heard demanding quiet from the

158 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

boys just as Prosper felt Charlie swell farther, and great lashings of

stuff flew from him and across the bedsheets, Charlie nearly thrown

off the bed onto the floor by his heavings.

“Okay?” Prosper whispered, after Charlie’d grown comparatively

still.

“Oh gay,” Charlie said. “Anks a bunch.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Ooh nigh.”

“Good night, Charlie.”

Prosper telling the tale of those days to Vi in Henryville left out about

Charlie Coutts. He didn’t recount that early time with Elaine, either,

for he didn’t think these stories and what happened would count with

her. He didn’t really know why he was himself tempted to think that

indeed they did count: couldn’t have said what in them was part of that

secret tissue that had no name, only instances. Can you say you’ve

learned something if you don’t know what it is you’ve learned?

Twice or three times more Charlie came to visit ( Prosper you can’t

let Charlie drink Coca-Cola in bed. He spills, and it leaves stains on

the sheets. Brown stains. You hear? ) though somehow May and Bea

hadn’t the heart to organize a journey to Charlie’s house, a failing

they’d remember later with a little shame; and then once when Mr.

Coutts came to pick up his son, a raw November day despite which the

boys sat on the porch together (they were trying to memorize every

make and model of car there was, outguessing each other and then

arguing over which that one was, a Lincoln or a Packard), he announced

that Charlie probably wouldn’t be able to come back. Not anytime

soon anyway.

May and Bea had come out to see him—they’d taken to the quiet

man—and asked what had happened, they enjoyed Charlie’s company,

what was the matter? Well it was nothing about that; only Mr. Coutts

had at length decided it was best if Charlie went to be taken care of in

an institution, a school Mr. Coutts had learned about, in another city.

A school or home for young people like himself. It was a charity, and

there’d be no charge.

He sat down on the step beside his son.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 159

“Plymouth Roadking,” said Prosper.

“O,” said Charlie. “Chrysle a-felow.”

“No, nope son. Wasn’t a Chrysler Airflow. It was the Plymouth.”

Charlie roused, indignant, but said nothing more. No one said any-

thing for a moment. Prosper knew about it already: Charlie’d told him.

Far: that’s all he knew. He’d get training there, but he didn’t know

what kind, or for what. Prosper tried to imagine him without his gentle

father near him, and couldn’t.

“Jobs the way they are, and his mother with other kids at home,”

Mr. Coutts said, and no more.

“Well we’ll miss you, Charlie,” said May. “We’ve got used to you.”

Charlie smiled. “I’ll sen you a poscar.”

His father helped him stand, and they said good-byes all around.

Prosper wanted to do something but couldn’t think what it should be.

He had given Charlie the only thing from his father’s cases that Charlie

could manage the use of: it was a thin paper book, Drawing the Nude.

I’ll be pobular, Charlie’d said, and tucked it in his shirt.

They got into the car and Mr. Coutts fixed Charlie’s cap on his

head. Charlie flung up a hand by way of a parting wave; to them on the

porch it looked at once triumphant and desperate, but they knew it was

just his muscles.

“He’s just not made for this world,” Bea said.

“Hmp,” May said. “What’s for sure is, this world’s not made for

him.”

“Well, it’s for the best, I’m sure,” said Bea. “I’m sure it’s the best

thing.”

“Oh hush, Bea,” May said, and turned away, an awful catch in her

throat that Prosper had never heard before. “For God’s sake just

hush.”

6

Fenix Vigaron hadn’t actually predicted it, but May later could look

back over their conversations and see it figured there: just when

things seemed like they were going to get a little better—and

things had by then already got a lot better for some of us—May’s

office-supply business went quack. The owner, who’d kept it going

through the worst years of the Depression by various impostures and

financial shenanigans that caught up with him at last, shot himself in

the private washroom behind his office. May was out of a job, with no

prospect at her age of another. Turn around, turn back, said Fenix,

and one hopeless night when Bea was washing May’s hair, they both

seemed to hit on the idea at the same moment.

What they always called the side room—maybe it had once been a

sunporch or a summer kitchen but for as long as the two of them had

owned the place it had gone unused except for boxes and things wait-

ing to be fixed or thrown away—was about big enough and with work

could be made into a cozy place. It had its own door to the alley, though

nailed shut now. They’d have to invest most of their savings in plumb-

ing and carpentry and supplies; they’d start with a single chair, or two.

Bea already had a sort of following from the store, women who trusted

her advice and might take a chance on her. May’d have a lot to learn,

but she knew business and the keeping of books.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 161

So the uncles were called again—May on the phone and Bea hover-

ing nearby making urgent but ambiguous hand gestures that May

waved off like pestering flies—and in turn Mert and Fred summoned

from the dark pool of their connections a carpenter, a plumber, and a

painter, each appearing without warning at dawn or dusk, needing

instruction, slow mammals or needy and fearful, what debt were they

working off? One a former chemist, another with a college degree, but

it wasn’t hard in those years to find such persons displaced from their

rightful spots into whatever employment they could get. The women

followed the for-sale ads in the paper and went to bankruptcy and

going-out-of-business sales, conscious of the irony, and bought a big

hair dryer and the sinks and mirrors and other things they needed,

deciding after long thought not to acquire a used permanent-wave

machine, a gorgon arrangement of electric rods and springs and wires

such as you’d use to make the bride of Frankenstein, and anyway too

prone to disastrous mishandling, as in a dozen comic movies. They’d

offer waving and cutting, bleaching and dyeing, “consultations,” and

manicures, for the fashion now was for long long nails painted in the

deepest reds, fire engine, blood, though toenails were still done in pale

pinks or clear. Meanwhile May enrolled in a beauty school night class

to get some basics, and in the rather squalid and hopeless studio, amid

girls half her age she practiced pin waving and finger waving, the

Straight Back (and variations), the Bias Wave, the Swirl, the Saucer

Wave, the Sculpture Wave, the Windblown, and for the big night out,

the Wet Mae Murray, a tricky finger wave that May mastered, making

an effort out of fellow-feeling with poor Mae, the Hollywood castoff.

“You can teach this old dog new tricks,” she said.

Prosper was a part of this plan, the other important part, it was the

hope of solving two problems at once that had given Bea and May the

energy to carry it out. He was eighteen; without any high school and

his physical limitations, work at home was the best he could just now

aim for (“just now” was Bea’s addition to this judgment, the future

ever unknowable but dimly bright to Bea). He’d been making some-

thing with his artwork, engrossing documents and signs that said con-

gratulations or welcome home or other things, lettering price

cards for the butcher whose meat he bought; and of course he’d kept

house for the absent women, a job that now didn’t need doing.

162 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

So he’d go into business with them. He began by making the posters

to be put up on the telephone poles around the neighborhood, and the

little ad they placed after much thought in the evening paper—“Bring

out your BEST and do it for LESS.” He made their sign too—an old

cupboard door lovingly enameled and varnished.

“May, look at this! This boy’s a genius! So artistic!”

The Mayflower was the name they had chosen, arching over a some-

what emblematic flower and its visiting bee, a notion of Fenix Vigaron’s.

Beauty Salon with a dot between each letter and the next, elongating

the phrase elegantly, and an arrow pointing down to the door in the

alley, opened now and painted.

“Our shingle,” May said and laughed. They hung it up on the house

corner, and toasted it and themselves with a ruby glass of schnapps.

The shop began to do business, but only after a month or so of wait-

ing, Bea and May dressed and ready every morning like hosts in that

anxious hour when it seems no guests at all will show up. There were a

couple of early mistakes, money refunded, free services offered in com-

pensation and indignantly refused—Bea and May in the withering gaze

of an enraged matron, Bea offering soothe and May ready to give the

old bat an earful but smiling on. Bea’s skills and generous approbation

brought women back and back, and others were drawn in by May’s

hints of her connections beyond this plane of existence (she tried hard

not to make too much of this, but the stories she heard as women soaked

their nails in soapy water or sat beneath the penitential dryer were too

intriguing not to report to her spirit guide; May delivered Fenix’s gnomic

responses to the women but refused to explicate them, which only made

May seem the more privy to secret wisdom). Things got pretty busy.

“Prosper,” Bea said to him as she cleaned the shop at day’s end.

“Yes.” He looked up from the old copy of The Sunny Side he was

reading. The Sunny Side was the official publication of the American

Optimists Association. Bea took the magazine, read it faithfully, and

they piled old copies here for clients. Bea was an Optimist.

“We’re thinking,” Bea said, “that you can be more help in the

shop.”

“Sure,” Prosper said. He closed the picture-less little magazine. The

motto of the AOA, printed beneath the title, was Every day, in every

way, I’m getting better and better. Émile Coué.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 163

“There’s things you can’t do,” Bea said, standing tiptoe to lower

and lock the transom. “But also things you can.”

“Sure,” said Prosper. He straightened up, ready for his orders. What

could he do? Well, he could answer the phone and keep the appoint-

ments book, he could greet the customers as they arrived, keep things

orderly, just anything. Maybe—who knew—he could learn a bit of the

business, washing hair or similar. Lots of men did such work, the best

paid were men in fact, she could tell him.

“But now I have to tell you,” Bea said, tidying and fussing with her

back to him for so long that Prosper understood it was easier to say her

piece without facing him. “You’ll have to look nice. A nice clean shirt

and a tie. You’ll have to shave, you know, every day, and maybe a little

talcum. Tooth powder. I know the bath’s not easy for you, but.” Now

at last she did turn to him, beaming. “We’ll be so proud to have you!

Really!”

He could only beam back. He was possessed by the ticklish feeling of

having been seen, of understanding that he could be seen by others, who

passed certain judgments or came to certain opinions about him because

they saw not the inside of himself that he saw but the outside, where the

face he couldn’t see and the smells of himself and the smuts and the

wrinkles on him (that he inside could always account for or discount)

came first, first and foremost. He remembered his father at the nightly

labor of polishing his narrow shoes, instructing Prosper that one day

he’d know how important it was, and why. Bring out your best.

“All right,” he said.

From that day forward he did take an interest in himself, studying

the image in the mirror, not only the plastered hair and knotted tie (the

knot his own invention, as there was no one to instruct him in the

four-in-hand) but also the odd attraction in his own green eyes, a ques-

tion with no answer passing back and forth from him to it. Every day,

in every way, I’m getting better and better, he’d say softly. Bea was

astonished at the change, his going from indifference to punctilious

attention, but it was only that he hadn’t known, no one had explained

to him you could take yourself in hand this way, as though you were a

pot to be polished or a garden to be weeded.

He delighted in the shop, the women who came and went; he greeted

each by name and made some remark pertinent to her, asked about her

164 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

poodle or her daughter in business school or her ailing husband. They

lost one or two customers repelled by Prosper’s clattering around the

shop still painfully bent, but he won the loyalty of others. His lacks

and inabilities made them want to mother him, no surprise really, espe-

cially when they learned he had no real mother, was actually an

Orphan: but the same lacks and inabilities somehow allowed them to

be themselves in his presence, as they were in the shop with May and

Bea but weren’t with other men (he saw how they could change when,

as now and then happened, a husband poked his head into the shop to

pick one of them up—they’d switch in a moment to a guarded, prac-

ticed manner, even if it was a seemingly childish or dizzy one. And

only he knew). He listened to their stories just as Bea and May did, and

listened to the wisdom his aunts dispensed. He saw tears, more than

once; overheard a shocking cynicism too. He gets nothing from me in

that bed but once a month. And he’d better make it worth my while,

I’m telling you.

He supplemented what he learned with his reading, after May began

stocking old copies of True Story magazine she got from a younger

cousin. When the shop was quiet and his tasks done, Prosper sat by the

extension phone and read them. I Married a Dictator. Aren’t there

limits to what a woman will stand, even for such a mad infatuation as

hers? The big pulp pages were a cyclopedia of female life, from which

he learned of the whelming strength of women’s fears and desires, the

immensity of their sacrifices, the crimes they were capable of. They ran

away from tyrannical preacher fathers, abased themselves in dime-a-

dance halls and speakeasies, took awful vengeance on betraying lovers

or pertinacious rivals, and always despite repression and abuse their

honest need and goodness shone through. They went out on their own

when Father died and the pension stopped, they worked hard amid dan-

gers and pestering men, they fell for one night of passion with a man

who seemed so clean and kind, only to find he’s fronting for a sex

exchange club! They escaped, they hid out, they made their own way,

they met a man not like other men, they found love or at least wisdom.

Sadder but wiser, or happy at last. He learned a lot from the ads too,

about the clever counterfeits of underwear and makeup, and also the

unnameable ills and pains that perhaps his mother had suffered, that

any woman might and men never did. For those special women’s

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 165

hygiene needs—be SURE with ZONITOR, whatever that was, the

woman’s lined brow and worried eyes erased and smooth again.

The men in the stories were good but simple, or they were ignoble

clods, or if they were smart they were only smart about cheating and

lying; unlike the women they had desires and schemes and pride and

even sturdy sense but no insides. No wonder the women lost them or

lost faith in them or settled for them when they knew in their hearts it

was wrong. If she confided EVERYTHING in him, would he still love

her? How could she be sure? It seemed that the way to win the esteem

of women was to become as like one as he could: as trusting, as unsoiled

deep down, as wholehearted.

“Ha,” Vi said to Prosper in Henryville. “I don’t know how you

could think that way about women. You were around them so much.

Anybody who’s around them that much’d have to find out pretty soon

they’re no better than men in most ways, and some ways worse.”

“I don’t know,” Prosper said. “I just preferred them.”

Vi shook her head over him. “It was those nice old Lizzies you lived

with,” she said. “You got the wrong idea.”

“That’s what my uncles thought,” Prosper said.

“Prosper,” said May to him one evening when the shop had closed, “it

seems to me your hair’s getting a little shaggy. Maybe it’s time to give

you a trim.”

“Really?” said Prosper.

When he was a boy Bea and May had gone with him once to the

barbershop down on the avenue, and at the door had sent him inside

with two bits in his hand, but the vast glossy chairs and the row of

white-coated unwelcoming men had defeated him—he’d have to ask

for help to get into a chair, and then to get down again, and the barbers

seemed unlikely to offer that help, though since he didn’t dare to ask,

he’d never know: anyway he turned around and came back out again,

and went home with Bea and May, and they’d made do thereafter with

scissors.

Now, though, they had a little more expertise.

“Maybe,” Bea said, teasing, her hand pushing Prosper’s hair this

way and that, as though he were any client, “maybe you need a little

166 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

something. You’re a good-looking fellow, you know. You could look

better.”

Prosper laughed, embarrassed and alert, pleased too.

“Sure,” May said. “Why not. Just a little soft wave. You know, like

Rudy Vallee. Or who’s that English fellow, Leslie Howard.” With a

motion of her hand she indicated that nice shy way his blond curls fell

over his forehead, the way he pushed them back and they fell again.

“Sure. Bea, fire up the dryer.”

They wrapped a towel around him, laid his head back in the basin,

and when the water was warm May washed his hair, delightful submis-

sion-inducing sensation of her strong fingers in his scalp. The two

women argued over which of them would do the cut and wave, and

finally took turns, each criticizing the other’s work and laughing at

Prosper’s fatuous and ceaseless grin. They had him all pinned and ready

to be put under the great bonnet of the dryer when there was a loud rap

at the door, more like the cops than any belated client; they all started.

Parting the little curtain that hung over the window of the door,

May murmured “Oh my stars,” and opened the door. Mert came in,

more as though exiting a familiar house and stepping into a cold and

dangerous street than the reverse. “Hi, May, hi, I,” he said, and

stopped, catching sight of Prosper. Fred, coming in behind him, looked

in over his shoulder.

“Hi, Uncle Mert,” Prosper said.

“Jeez, May, what the hell,” Mert said.

“Now, Mert,” Bea said.

“What are you doing to this boy?”

“We’re making him look nice. Anybody can look nice.”

“Almost anybody,” May said coldly, narrowing her eyes at Mert.

“Man oh man,” said grinning Fred. “Will you get a load of this.”

“Shut up,” Mert said without ceasing to study Prosper. “This is just

what I was afraid of. You two trying to raise a man.”

“You button your lip,” May said. She crossed her arms before her.

“As if you could have done it.”

“Well just look at him,” Mert said. “Jeez.” He came closer to where

Prosper sat unmoving, still grinning like Joe E. Brown but now from a

different impulse. “Just because he’s a cripple he don’t have to be a

sissy.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 167

“And where’ve you been the last seven years?” May said. Her foot

was tapping the floor, her arms still crossed.

“Well starting now,” Mert said. “He just needs a chance.”

“Well then,” Bea said gently, “you might start by saying hello.”

And Prosper saw his uncle’s face suffused with a dramatic blush that

rose from thick neck to forehead, the first adult he’d ever seen so taken,

which was a thing of great interest; and then he put a big hand out to

Prosper, who had to fumble his own right hand from under the towel

to take it.

“Anyway we ought to finish up,” Bea said. “Before those pins come

loose.”

The icehouse, where the disreputables that Bea and May had refused to

describe to Prosper gathered, was over on the West Side, past the rail-

road tracks and in fact in another township, which made an important

legal difference, even though no one much remembered the fact or even

the name of that vanished village. It was close enough to what had

once upon a time been a lake in the woods that ice could be cut and

sledded there easily. Now the ice was made on the spot in a long shed

where the big Westinghouse electric engines ran the belts of an ammo-

nia condenser, but it was stored, covered in straw, down in the same

old brick underground, breathing cold breath like a cave’s mouth out

to the office and the street. Since the way down into it had been built

when oxen were used to slide the ice in and out in great blocks, it went

sloping at a shallow angle: Prosper loved to walk down that way into

the cool silence.

The front offices where Mert and Fred ran the ice business, and sold

coal and fuel oil as well when and if they could spare the time from

other enterprises, were a rich habitation—tin ceilings darkened with

cigar smoke, girlie calendars, spiked orders growing yellow with age,

freshly cracked decks of cards, ringing phones Mert talked into two at