Four Freedoms

a time even while calling for Fred to deal with this or that matter.

Whatever matter it was that Mert and Fred had come to talk to May

and Bea about had gone no further that night; the men went away with

a mission, to take (as Mert said) the boy in hand, and teach him a few

things; and Prosper’s world widened. Later on he’d think that May and

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

Bea must have felt abandoned by him, and must have resented if not

hated it that he’d taken up with the icehouse gang, and he’d feel shame,

but not then: too much that was new and gratifying came his way, and

more lay just beyond envisioning. He started smoking, not Mert’s

Dutch Masters or Muniemakers but the more fastidious cigarette,

though he found it hard to smoke and walk at the same time, and even-

tually mostly gave it up; he grew a mustache, a thin dark line above his

lip like Ronald Colman’s. The uncles gave him instruction in the arts

of shaking hands and looking a man in the eye, what honor required

you to do and what (they thought) it didn’t, what was owed to friends

and how to look out for Number One at the same time. They made

over his clothes: dressed him not as they themselves dressed, though

they got a tailor to make him a good suit, but as the young blades

nowadays dressed: sport coats of houndstooth or herringbone collared

like shirts rather than lapelled, pastel shirts worn with hand-painted

silk foulards or without a tie, long collar points laid over the jacket.

Trousers richly pleated and draped—Prosper’s braces disappeared

beneath them rather than poking everywhere through the fabric like a

bony beast’s joints. He studied himself in the mirror, considering how

his new pale wide fedora should lie, back like Bing’s or Hoagy’s, or

forward and nearly hiding an eye, mystery man or secret agent, pinch

the front indents to lift it to a lady. Not much could be done with his

shoes, to which the braces were bolted across the instep, but no reason

he couldn’t wear silk socks in argyle patterns or clocked with roses;

Prosper, lifting the knees of his cheviot bags to sit, could glimpse them,

pretty secrets revealed.

They kidded him too about what else they might do for him, take

him out to the suburbs to a certain place, or downtown to one, get his

cherry picked or his ashes hauled, saying it maybe only to laugh at the

face he made—wide-eyed, that grin he was given to that they couldn’t

wipe. That was just joking, but Fred, late one night with half a bottle

gone between them, gave Prosper a lot of corrective information he’d

maybe soon need to know—Fred had ascertained, interested in the

topic, that Prosper’s weakness only reached a ways above his knees, so

though it was maybe unlikely for someone like him, the Scout’s motto

was Be Prepared. But how, Prosper asked—hilariously muzzy-mouthed,

and not sure what had brought this forth—how, when his own part

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 169

rose at that specific angle so purposefully, was he supposed to get it

into a girl, whose slot or cleft (he was thinking of Canova, of Mary

Wilma) ran, well, sort of the other way or seemed to, crosswise, opening

inward and running through toward the back? Didn’t it? So how was

he supposed to, was he supposed to bend, or? No no no, Fred said, you

got it wrong, the thing you see when you look at her, the slot or slit

there, that ain’t the thing at all, no kid, that’s just what shows. The

thing you need’s down underneath, see—and here Fred lifted his own

big knees and thighs to his chest to illustrate, poking at a spot amid the

creases of his trousers. There, just ahead of the other hole, and it runs

up up up, just right, trust Mother Nature, she ain’t going to make it

hard to get into. You got that? You need another drink?

He learned just as much, or at least heard as much and remembered

it, listening to his uncles talk during the day at business as he sat at a

desk they’d rigged for him and did work they thought up for him.

“You speak to that woman on Wentworth?” Mert said. “The new

tenant, the bakery?”

“Funny story,” Fred said grinning. “Yeah, I talked to her. Single

woman. She was real jittery about the health department inspector

coming. I says, It’s nothing. You wait for him to make his inspection,

be nice, keep a ten in your hand. He might find a couple things, so you

say—I told her—you say Well all that’s going to be hard to fix, isn’t

there some other way we can handle this? And he might say no, or he

might say Well, maybe, and you say Oh swell, and you shake hands,

and the ten passes. Okay?”

Mert pushed back in his swivel chair, listening, already grinning as

though he expected what would come next.

“So she had the inspection, and I asked her how did it go, and she

says not so good. I ask her, did she do what I said? What did she tell

him? And turns out what she said was, Well this is going to be expen-

sive, isn’t there something I can do for you? Jesus, she says it took her

a half hour to get rid of the guy after that, and he was so pissed off he

wouldn’t take her ten.”

“Send her over to Bill and Eddy,” Mert said. “They’ll fix it for

her.” Bill and Eddy, attorneys-at-law, did a certain amount of work

for the icehouse gang; Mert often got his own stories from meetings

with the two.

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

“Attorney Bill,” he told them with mock gravity, “defending a man

charged with verbally molesting a woman. So Bill’s known this fellow

a while, he’s not surprised. Tells me how he’ll be in a tavern at the bar

with him, they see a nice skirt go by outside; this fellow pops out, has

a few words with the woman, she turns away, he comes back in. Did he

know her? Nah—just liked her looks. So what did he say to her? He

asked her if she’d like to have a lay with him. She said no. Bill tells me

he does that a lot. Always nice and polite, and a tip of the hat for a No.

I said no wonder he’s got in trouble—he must get his face slapped a lot

at least. Oh, Bill says, he does—and he gets laid a lot too.”

“So this time he asked the wrong dame,” said Fred. He put his hand

by his mouth: “Call for Bill and Eddy.”

“Turns out there was a beat cop twirling his nightstick just about

within earshot. Never mind. They’ll get him out of it. Told me the

lady’s already looking sorry she brought the charges. Who knows,

maybe this guy’ll get her in the end.”

The firm of Bill and Eddy (it was George Bill and Eustace Eddy,

Prosper would learn in time) set up the papers that created and dis-

solved a number of enterprises operated out of the icehouse—Prosper’s

first job there was making up stationery for a warehousing and fulfil-

ment business they’d begun. The uncles had also got into the vending

machine business, which besides a string of Vendorlators dispensing

candy and smokes and Pepsi-Cola around the West Side included a few

semilegal “payout” pinball machines as well. Prosper was sent out on

the truck that filled and serviced the machines. Mostly it was his job to

sit in the big doorless truck and see that nobody stole the cartons of

cigarettes and boxes of Collie bars and Zagnuts. Now and then he was

allowed out to have a coffee in a diner while Roy the serviceman broke

open the big machines to show their complex insides, the valves and

springs and levers, to oil them and refill the long slots.

At Honey and Joe’s Diner the cigarette machine was on the fritz, and

Roy settled in to work. Prosper stood at the counter (easier than seating

himself on the roll-around stools) and asked the redheaded woman for

a coffee. It was midafternoon, the place was empty. He’d watched her

watching him as he came in, how he took his stand, reached for a dime

for the mug of pale liquid. She waved away his money.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 171

She came to push a glass ashtray to where he sat.

“Where’s Joe?” Prosper asked, and she leaned in confidentially to

him.

“There’s no Joe,” she said. “There was, but no more.”

“Just Honey,” he said. An odd silence fell that he was conscious of

having caused. He drew out a smoke and a match, which he lit with a

snap of his thumbnail. She smiled and moved away.

“All done here,” Roy said and clapped shut the steel machine.

“Red hair,” Fred said to Prosper, back at the icehouse. “That your

type? Hot tempered, they say.”

“Fighters,” Mert said. “She and Joe used to go at it hammer and

tongs.”

“Not Prosper,” Fred said. “He’s a lover not a fighter. She’s out of

your league, my boy.”

Fred thought that any single man constituted as Prosper was needed

two things: he needed a line he could use to break the ice and then go

on with, and he needed a type that he was interested in so he could

simplify the chase. Fred’s own type depended on blond curls, chubby

cheeks, and a poitrine approaching Mae West’s; his line started off

with Scuse me, but do you happen to have a cousin named Carruthers?

No? Gosh my mistake. So anyways tell me . . . Prosper though could

not tell if he had a type, and Fred’s attempts to delimit the field weren’t

convincing to him. As for a line, he hardly needed an icebreaker—he

found himself looked at plenty and had only to say hello, and then

keep the starer from rushing off embarrassed. Beyond that he thought

he now knew what to do, though not yet when to do it.

That cigarette machine at Honey and Joe’s seemed to malfunction

with surprising regularity, a lemon maybe, though when Fred said they

ought to pull it and get it replaced, Roy said oh he’d get it going. Roy’s

difficulties weren’t with machines but numbers, he hadn’t a head for

them, and if Prosper was willing to tot up his figures and fill in his

book, Roy was happy to return him to the little diner now and then,

and go read the paper in the truck.

“So does that hurt much?” Honey asked Prosper gently. It was May,

and the air was full of the tiny blown green buds of some opening tree,

even the floor of Honey and Joe’s was littered with them. She picked

one from Prosper’s shoulder.

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

“Doesn’t hurt a bit,” Prosper said. “The other way around. I can’t

feel much.”

“Oh.”

“I mean from the knees down.”

“Oh.”

He cleaned up the last of the plate of goulash she’d put in front of

him. She had a way of looking at him that reminded him of the way the

women looked at themselves in the Mayflower’s mirrors: a kind of

dreamy questioning. He didn’t yet know how to interpret it, but he was

coming to notice it. Somehow a look to the outside and the inside at

once. No man ever had it, not that he’d seen.

“So you get around good,” she said, as though weighing his case.

“Oh sure.”

She considered him or herself some more. Her hair was not only

deep red, a color for an animal’s fur more than a woman’s hair, it was

thick, tense, it strove to burst from her hairnet: it was as though he

could feel it. She bent and pulled from under the counter a bottle of

whiskey, put down a glass before him with a bang, and poured a shot

for him. He took a taste, then a swallow.

“So, Honey,” he said then. “Can I ask you a question?”

Honey lived behind the diner, through a door in the back. She sent

Prosper to turn over the sign in the door that told people the diner was

open or closed. It was now closed. He clicked the switch that turned

off the neon sign above the door (diner), and its red glow faded. He

opened the door and waved to Roy, go on, good-bye, see you later; Roy

didn’t ask him how he’d get back to the icehouse or downtown, just

shrugged and rolled the toothpick he was never without from one side

of his grin to the other and started the truck.

“Now we’re getting someplace,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in

Henryville. “This is good.”

“Okay,” Prosper said.

“So was she a natural redhead?”

“What?”

“You know. You found out, I’m guessing.”

“Oh,” Prosper said.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 173

What Honey’d learned about Prosper was that he lived with two old

never-married aunts, had never gone to high school or taken a girl out

on a date or been to a dance. That interested her. Not that she hadn’t

known some wallflowers and some deadwood, oh she had, but Prosper

wasn’t that. He’d grown to be good-looking—calm light wide-spaced

eyes; teeth white and even, never a toothache; fine hands like a glove

model’s. Visible beneath the silk shirt he wore were the broad shoul-

ders and back he’d built by using them to walk. All that contrasting so

strangely with the sway back and the legs that had not grown as the

rest of him had. It didn’t assort: man and boy, weak and strong. Honey

liked it: it was the taste of tart and sweet together, the sensation of hot

and cold, it made you think. She mightn’t have liked it though if he

hadn’t been so open and ardent and willing—ignorant as a puppy, but

his grip strong and oddly sure. After they’d gone through the rubbers

Joe’d left behind he still wouldn’t quit, not until late in the night when

she pushed him away laughing, leave me alone, I have to start the range

in about four hours, who taught you that anyway?

But nobody had. He didn’t tell her she was the first woman he’d

been with, but he didn’t need to.

“Mind if I stay till later? I’m afraid I can’t get home from here. Not

in the middle of the night.”

“Hell yes I mind. Think I want you stumbling out of here into my

breakfast crowd? How’d that look?”

“Well.”

She touched him gently, not quite sorry for him. “You got a dollar? Go

into the front and use the phone. Call a cab. The number’s right there.”

She rolled away and pretended to sleep, thinking he wouldn’t want

her to watch him put on his equipment; he did it sitting on the floor

(she could hear it) and then apparently hoisted himself upright on his

crutches. Then she was sorry she hadn’t watched, just to see. Then she

slept, suddenly and profoundly.

Aglow, as though he could find his way in the dark by his own light,

Prosper went out of the little rooms where she lived, wanting to touch

everything he saw or sensed there, the harsh fabric of the armchair, the

cold of the mirror, ashy weightless lace of the curtains through which

the streetlight shone. Careful of the rag rug at the doorway. His arms

were trembly from his exertions, who knew they’d have so much work

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

to do, he laughed aloud as though joy bubbled up beneath his heart

and out his throat. Long afterward in another city he’d share a reefer

with a woman and only then feel again this wondrous hilarity. He did

it, he’d done it, he was made now of a different and better stuff and

ever after would be, he hadn’t known that would be so and now he did.

Ever after.

In the altogether transformed night, its odors sweet in the liquid air,

silence of the city, he leaned against the lamppost to wait. He said to

himself I will always remember this night and this moment, and he

would, though not always with the rich First Communion solemnity he

felt then, felt until the laughter rose again.

The cab was tiger yellow in the dawn, the rear door wide and the

backseat generous, excellent. The scraggy elder driving it asked Where

to, and Prosper caught him grinning in the rearview. Grinning at him.

“Takin’ French lessons, huh, kid?”

“What?” Prosper at first thought the driver had mistaken him

maybe for someone he knew. French lessons?

“I said taking French lessons?” the old fellow said more distinctly.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Prosper said, leaning forward.

“I mean, you been eatin’ pussy?” the driver practically shouted. “Be

surprised if you hadn’t! Ha! Whew! Better wash up before you get

home to Mom! My advice!”

Prosper got it then, and almost lifted his hands to his face to smell

the smell still on them and on his face and mustache, but didn’t, retired

to the back of the seat in silence as the driver laughed.

French lessons. Because why, something about the French? He’d

heard it called French kissing, that kiss with tongues entwined, imagine

what his mother with her fear of germs would have thought of that.

How had he even thought of doing it, eating or virtually eating it,

where had he got the idea, apparently not his alone anyway, so usual

that even this guy could know it and joke about it. Did it just happen to

everyone, he guessed it must, that you discovered that certain body

parts you’d known and used in one way had a set of other functions

and uses you hadn’t been told about, unexpected but just as important

and constant—mouths and tongues for more than tasting and eating,

hands for using and manipulating, the hidden excreting parts able and

even meant to go together with the other workaday parts, you might

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 175

not think so but it turned out to be so and you somehow knew to use

them so even if you hadn’t thought of it before—couldn’t have thought

of it, it was so unlikely. Like those paperback novels where you read

one story going one way and then turn the book over and upside down

to read another going the other way: as you read you might finger open

the pages that you’d discover later and see them upside down and back-

ward but they wouldn’t be when you went to read them. You’d just dive

in. And he had, and she had known why he would want to and why she

would want him to, even if at first she refused him.

And the sounds they’d made too, that she’ d made, sounds borrowed

from the other side, where they meant a different thing—Bea’s coos as

she handled a length of silk velvet, May’s high whimper at the sight of

a dead cat in the street, Mert’s grunts of satisfaction at stool, or Fred’s

as he lifted a full shot of rye to his mouth, the same.

So he knew, and he would go on knowing that this was possible,

knowing also that everybody else or almost everybody else (Bea and

May, surely not, but how could you be sure?) knew it for a thing to do,

a thing that could be done and was done. A thing you could practice

even, as the grunting discus flinger or fungo slugger practices, driven

to enact it over and over. As he would seek to do thereafter whenever

and wherever he was welcome. He’d follow that Little Man in his boat

up dark rivers into the interior, that limbless eyeless ongoing Little

Man, parting the dense vegetation and hearing cries as of great birds,

nearly forgetting over time how weird a thing it was, really.

Don’t stop they’d say, an urgent whisper, or a cold command; a

warning or plea, bashful or imperious.

Don’t stop Vi said to him in Henryville, and amid her yearning

thrashing struggle toward what she wanted to reach. Prosper had to

work not to be thrown off and uncoupled, like a caboose at the end of

a train making too much steam on a twisty roadbed, whipsnaked and

banging the track. All that kept him connected and at work was her

hands in his hair and his on her flexing haunches. Until up ahead some

kind of derailment began, unstoppable: first the crying plunging engine

escaped, gone wild and askew, and then one by one the cars, piling

happily into one another, then all into stillness, silence, seethe.

Oh they said after a time softly, oh: and Um and Haw. Ho, he said, huho.

7

War and the sex urge go together,” Pancho Notzing said.

“Is that so,” Prosper inquired.

He and Pancho and Vi, with Sal Mass on Al’s lap in the

back, had taken the car down to the Wentz Pool on the west

side of town, a famous amenity built by another of Ponca City’s brief

flaring of oil millionaires. It had just opened for the season. Pancho

took a stately dip in an ancient bathing costume that drew almost as

much attention as Al and Sal in theirs. Now Prosper watched Vi Har-

bison stretch out on a chaise, face up into the sun.

“It is certainly so,” Pancho said. He had draped a towel around his

throat and was performing a series of physical-culture exercises that

didn’t seem to inhibit his speaking one bit. “I know it from the last

war. The Girl Problem.”

“Soldiers and girls.” Prosper knew that Pancho had three nieces, a

great trial to him, restless and wild, entranced with men in uniform,

khaki-wacky as the term was. At least they’d not be rounded up and

treated as criminals and sinners like the poor girls of the last war, for

which Pancho was grateful. Still he worried.

“It’s the men themselves who are the problem,” he said. “If there is

a problem.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 177

“Well sure,” Prosper said. “If you think maybe you won’t be alive

next month or next spring. Sure.”

“Not only that, not only that,” Pancho said. He ceased his Macfad-

den program. “A lot of the women in the plant, in that town, they’ve

nothing to fear—they aren’t facing death on the battlefield. But I guar-

antee there’s no end of intrigue going on there. Married or not.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure so.”

Prosper didn’t tell him that this week Anna Bandanna was issuing a

subtle warning about VD—“Keep clean for that man who’s far away.”

Not that he thought Pancho was being censorious. Intrigue, by which

he meant something like hanky-panky, was a Passion that needed to be

met, like any other. In the Harmonious City there would be young

women in every job, doing every task their passional nature suited

them to. Old and young, working alongside men, many different men

in the course of a day. Intrigue. Women who were Butterflies, in Pan-

cho’s terminology, and never settled on a partner; others with more

than one man for whom they cared deeply; others with but one lover

for life. Pancho thought a woman who could and would bring happi-

ness to dozens or hundreds of men did a wrong to herself as well as to

those dozens if she kept herself for only one.

“I’d agree,” said Prosper. “I believe I would.”

“Not necessarily in the present instance, though?” Pancho lifted his

chin in the direction of Vi, who just then rolled onto her stomach. Vi

was an object lesson of the general principle that Pancho’d stated, in

answer to a question of Prosper’s about Vi, a question actually not

meant to be answered ( Isn’t she something? ). Vi’s own bathing suit

was the modern kind, made of a fabric Pancho could name, whose

price he knew: a fabric that clung and stretched remarkably.

“Well. I don’t have a jealous nature, Pancho. It’s a thing I’ve learned

about myself.”

“And when did you learn this? It’s an important insight.”

Prosper was still in shirt and pants. He couldn’t swim, and since he

couldn’t, he chose not to disrobe, though Vi’d urged him try it out,

take a paddle, she’d help. “It wouldn’t do me a lot of good,” he said.

“Making claims on someone.”

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

“Ah.” Pancho sat, regarded the hot blue sky. The uproar of children

and youngsters stirring the pool like a seething pot was pleasant. “I

think I see what you mean. In a sense you don’t have the standing.”

Prosper thought about that, wondering if it was what he’d meant.

Not have the standing. Did Pancho mean that he couldn’t be expected

to fight, so his claim could be ignored? Say if he went up against a

fellow like Larry the shop steward, though he couldn’t imagine himself

and Larry at odds over a woman. Well maybe in such a circumstance

he wouldn’t fight and maybe for the reasons Pancho’d think, and maybe

not. He lit a cigarette, the match’s flame too pale to see. At the pool’s

edge, Sal and Al were doing a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo from their old act

as the crowd cheered.

“I’m a lover not a fighter,” Prosper said.

When the draft began in 1940 Prosper was twenty-one; though his

uncles (and his aunts too) said there was no call for it, Prosper went

downtown to present himself to the Selective Service board to be regis-

tered with all the other men aged twenty-one to thirty-five, a huge mob

of them as it happened, milling around the doors of city hall, laughing

or patient or annoyed at the imposition. More than one looked Prosper

over in some amalgam of expression that combined contempt and

amusement and maybe even envy (he’d safely sit out any war), though

Prosper looked away from such faces before he could really decide

what attitude they put forth. A couple of young men, definitely amused,

gave him a lift up the stairs, each holding an elbow, and set him down

within, and when it was his turn at the long table where harried men

filled out forms, those two and others waited to see what disposition

would be made of him.

“Polio?” the man he had come up before asked.

“No,” said Prosper. “Something different.”

“Tabes dorsalis?”

“Um,” said Prosper. “I can’t tell you in a word.”

“Permanent condition?”

“Seems so.”

The man had no business asking these questions anyway, he was

just curious, registering for the draft wasn’t determinative of your

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 179

status—the men had to explain that over and over, your draft status

would only be determined when you were called for a physical. Prosper

took his registration card (not the sort of document he’d made for the

Sabine Free State, too crude and inelegant) and went away hearing

laughter, not necessarily unkind, the same laughter that we laughed

after the secretary of war picked the first draft numbers out of a huge

glass bowl and the President read them out on the radio, and it was

learned that the second number he read belonged to “a one-armed

Negro banjo-picker,” a sure iv-F man like Prosper.

Through that year and the next Prosper worked for the uncles and

for Bea and May, and went to the tavern and the pictures and the ball

game when he could, and polished his commercial art and studio skills;

and now and then, rarely but not never, in circumstances that always

seemed new and not like any of the others before, he’d get a Yes to his

question. He came to think that George Bill’s client hadn’t actually just

walked up to any pretty woman he saw and lifted his hat: he must have

had some sort of Sixth Sense (Bea’s name for how we perceive what we

should be unable to perceive) as to how his proposal might be taken.

Prosper kept working on his own Sixth Sense, with instructions taken

out of The Sunny Side for envisioning a desired state of affairs and

believing in your deep perceptions, and also with information he drew

out of True Story. He made some atrocious mistakes, painful for him

and her—horror and affront suffusing her face as he tried to retreat in

confusion—but no one actually smacked him; maybe his crutches acted

as eyeglasses did or were supposed to do, and kept at least the honorable

ones from lashing out. He was a masher, one girl cried at him: And you

think anybody’d look twice at YOU? He had refutations for both these

charges but he didn’t make them, because his rule was never to pursue or

pester anyone who turned him down, which is what a masher did.

Anyway he mostly didn’t approach women in the street, partly

because he wasn’t in the street himself that much, partly because he’d

have had a hard time catching up with them: a woman in the street

with a cripple in pursuit might have all kinds of thoughts but they

weren’t likely to be favorable. Those women who responded favorably,

or at least smiled indulgently, he’d usually known for a time before put-

ting his question; and it was likely (this never rose by itself into his

consciousness, but he would see it was likely when at length Pancho

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

and then Vi pointed it out to him) that the women who said Yes had

already decided on Yes well before there was anything to say Yes to:

maybe even before Prosper decided to ask.

“It’s the one thing women can’t do,” Vi explained to him by the

now-empty pool, its water soft and still as evening came. “They can

answer, but they can’t ask.” She’d donned dark glasses; he thought she

looked like a star.

“But you asked,” he said.

“Shut up,” said Vi.

The danger he’d seen—the danger he felt himself always in those

days to be in—wasn’t that he’d get turned down; it was that he might

see something in one, suddenly, in a moment, something small and

seemingly inconsequential—nothing more than the moist glitter in an

eye corner, a momentary look of wild uncertainty, the tender hollow of

a neck—that would cause him to commit entirely to one pursuit, never

look back. He thought it could; he felt the tug once a week, once a day

in some weeks, but (it was like robbery, and yet like relief too) those

women didn’t remain as he first perceived them: they shifted into some-

thing or someone else as quickly as they had taken hold of him, or they

didn’t stand still for the hook to set, they moved on and away, and (he

supposed) maybe always would, his life flitting away with them around

that corner, up in that elevator, into that shop. What he expected in

fear (he thought of it as fear) didn’t actually happen until he met Elaine

again, after the war started.

We wouldn’t always remember, later on, how many of us didn’t

expect a big war, how little we wanted one, how we felt we owed nobody

anything on that score. President Roosevelt wanted to get us into it, we

thought, but he wanted us to do a lot of things: he sometimes seemed

like a wonderful fighting dad we wanted to please but didn’t always

want to mind. He wanted us to care about the displaced persons in for-

eign lands. He wanted us to give our dimes to charity to help him stop

infantile paralysis too, and we did if we could, poor man.

“It is glorious to have one’s birthday associated with a work like

this,” he told us over the radio in that big warm voice. “One touch of

nature makes the whole world kin.”

“What’s that mean?” Fred asked. He and Prosper stood at the bar,

looking upward at the big varnished box—Prosper wondered why

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 181

people do that, stare at a radio from which somebody’s speaking. It

was the night of the President’s Birthday Ball, 1941, and a lot of dance

bands were playing for a lot of city big shots and socialites who’d given

money for infantile paralysis. There were balls all around the country,

the excited announcer said, and the President was speaking to all of

them over a special national hookup.

“In sending a dime,” the President said, “and in dancing that others

may walk, we the people are striking a powerful blow in defense of

American freedom and human decency.”

In those days you let talk like that go by without thinking very

much about it, everything was a blow for freedom, but Prosper said,

“Hear that? You gotta dance, so I can walk.”

“Sure,” Mert said. “Rex here’ll dance. Come on, Rex.”

Mert had adopted a little dog, one of the eager lean big-eyed kind

with clicking toenails at the end of his breakable-looking legs (that’s

how Prosper felt about him). Mert was teaching him tricks. He lifted

Rex up by his front paws and they danced to “I’m in the Mood for

Love” like a hippo with a weasel.

“Keep it up,” Fred called out. “No effect so far.”

“We,” said the President. “We believe in and insist on the right of

the helpless, the right of the weak, and the right of the crippled every-

where to play their part in life—and survive.”

Prosper (who’d not get a cent from those dimes, they were for the

polios alone, though his uncles believed he could probably pass for one

at need) stood propped at the bar, listening some to the President,

laughing some at Rex, mostly considering his drink and waiting, for

nothing and everything, and feeling in danger of getting the blues. The

next time he heard the President speak he was telling us that the Japa-

nese Empire had attacked Hawaii, so like it or not, whether we were

for it or not, we were at war. That’s what Prosper, without knowing it,

had been awaiting, everything and nothing: and yet for him, for a long

while, just as many things remained the same as changed.

“So take a look at this,” Mert said. From within his jacket he extracted

a folded paper wallet, its cover decorated with a rampant eagle astride

a stars-and-stripes shield or badge. The badge shape was one Prosper

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

loved to look at and create. gas ration book it said, and on the other

side (the recto Prosper knew to call it) it said drive under 35! and

compliments of your local texaco service station. From within

this folder, Mert drew out a little pamphlet printed in red. Another

badge shape urged the bearer to buy war bonds. It was his gasoline

ration stamp book, an A, the lowest rating—four gallons a week now,

probably not even that much in the months and years to come.

“Okay,” Prosper said.

“Here’s the question,” Mert said. “With the stuff around here—the

stuff we got for you, your own stuff, the stuff, the Ditto machine there,

the inks—would it be possible—theoretically—to make one of these?”

“Make the B or the C,” Fred put in. “Twice the gas.”

Prosper eyed the thing, felt the paper, studied the letters and type.

He knew the rule, that you couldn’t use the stamps without the book—

stamps torn from the book were invalid. You’d have to make the whole

book.

“Don’t worry about that,” Mert said. “We can make just the stamps,

sell them to the gas stations. The gas stations sell them to the custom-

ers, then take ’em right back and give ’em the gas, and turn in the

stamps to the government.”

“Easy as pie,” said Fred.

“The book’s a different matter,” Mert said. “If we can make the

whole book we can sell it and clean up. Cut out the middle man.”

Prosper was still holding the book. punishments as high as ten

years’ imprisonment or $10,000 fine or both may be imposed

by united states statutes for the violation thereof.

“I can get twenty bucks a book,” Mert said.

“But you shouldn’t,” Prosper said, not knowing he would till he did.

“It won’t be many,” Mert said. “A few.”

“There’s a war on,” Prosper said. “It’s not right.”

“Listen,” Mert said. He took hold of Prosper’s shoulders. “Here’s

the real skinny, all right? There’s plenty of gas in Texas. We ain’t going

to run out. You know why they ration it? So people don’t use their

tires. It’s the rubber they don’t have. The Japs got all the rubber now.

See? Don’t give people gas, they can’t use their tires, they don’t waste

rubber. See?”

“It’s a good idea,” Fred said. “The stamps. The books too. It’ll work.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 183

“You think I’m not behind the war effort?” Mert asked Prosper. “Is

that it? You know I fought for this country? Same as your dad. I can

show you my medals. Good Conduct.”

“Ha ha,” said Fred.

“It’s not that,” Prosper said.

“You don’t think you can do it? That’s what I need to know.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t want to.”

Mert turned away to gaze out the somewhat clouded window of the

office (he liked it clouded) and put his fists on his hips. “Hell of a

note,” he said, sounding wounded. “Well. Hell with it. Let’s knock off

for the day.”

More or less in silence, they closed the office: called out good nights

and instructions to the night people, rang up the ice shed on the house

telephone (Mert cranking the magneto with what seemed fury to Pros-

per) and told them the office was locking up, finally turning the sign in

the glass of the door from open to closed.

Not much was said during the ride back to downtown. Finally Mert

threw his arm over the seat and looked back at Prosper. “You can have

it your way, son,” he said. “But I’ll just tell you something. There might

not be any other work for you around the place. If you can’t do this.”

Stony-faced. Prosper tried to cast his own face in stone.

“Just think about it,” Fred said into the rearview mirror.

“He’s thought about it,” Mert said, still regarding Prosper. “So

where can we drop you?”

“Um.” He didn’t want to go back to the Mayflower Beauty Salon,

but he didn’t want to be too far from home either. “Drop me at the

Paramount,” he said.

“Going to the movies?” Mert said. “Man of leisure?”

That required a dignified silence.

“What’s playing?” Fred asked.

“Dunno.”

They turned on Main. The theater was a ways from Bea and May’s,

but Prosper’d done it before. Late on a winter afternoon and no one

much going in. Fred let the car idle there—no one would be doing

much of that from then on. The marquee advertised No Room at the

Inn along with The Invisible Agent, newsreels and Selected Short

Subjects.

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

“You’re a good kid, Prosper,” Mert said. He pulled out a money clip

and plucked a couple of bills from it, then one more. “You do what you

think you got to.”

Prosper shook Mert’s hand, then reached over and shook Fred’s. He

got out of the car with the usual clatter of braces and crutches. Hadn’t

they themselves, his uncles, taught him what Honor required? Wasn’t

it this? And what the heck was he going to do now to make money?

The second feature was just beginning when he entered into that

soothing darkness, violet hued, lit by the shifting scenes bright and

dim. He paused at the top of the long flight of broad steps—easy

enough to manage but not if you couldn’t see them; the usher, silhou-

etted against the huge heads on the screen, was showing someone to a

seat, momentary ghost of a flashlight pointed discreetly downward.

Prosper waited for him to come back up and light his way.

But it wasn’t a him—it was an usherette, as they were called, women

and girls taking the jobs of drafted boys, solemn in her big dark uni-

form. Tumble of black curls beneath her cap. She turned on the dim

flashlight and was about to walk him down when he stepped forward,

Swing Gait, and she halted: then, surely a breach of the usher’s code,

she lifted the light right up to his face.

“Prosper?” she whispered.

Blinded, he still knew whose voice he’d heard. The soft dry burr of

it. She lowered the lamp, but he stood dazzled. She touched his arm

and turned him away from the screen and back out toward the foyer.

“Prosper,” she said again when they were in the light.

“Hi, Elaine.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She gazed upon him. “I haven’t seen you.”

“I’m around. The same place.”

“I moved out,” she said. “Things happened. I have a room.”

“Okay.”

“Who did that to your hair?”

“What? Oh.”

That face, the eyebrows lifting in a worried query that she seemed

already to know the sad answer to—Is it mortal? Will we never

return? Is all lost?—when she wasn’t actually asking anything and

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 185

wasn’t sad. “Listen,” she said. “I get off in an hour. Sit in the back.

I’ll see you then.”

As though they’d agreed to this a long time ago. That was the sign,

he was as yet unused to noticing it but he was learning: that sensation

that the future has already happened and is only bringing itself about

in staging these present moments.

He went back in and sat down. He lit a cigarette, after determining

that a little ashtray was attached to the seat in front of him: one thing

hard for him was stamping out a burning end from a seated position.

The picture was well under way now. The grandson of the original

Invisible Man had inherited his grandfather’s secret formula, and the

Nazis and the Japs were teamed up to steal it. The Invisible Agent pes-

ters and pulls funny tricks on the bad guys; the audience watched in

silence. It occurred to Prosper that the Agent must be damn cold—only

without his clothes was he altogether invisible.

Elaine went past the row where he sat, a woman and a man in tow.

An invisible woman, that would be an idea for a picture. Naked,

and you’d know it, but you’d see nothing.

He thought of Elaine, in his braces, on the floor of his aunts’ house.

Exchange of selves, his for hers, why would she have wanted that? And

why his? However many eyes there were on him every day as he did

this or that, walked a block, took a stool in a diner, went through a

door, he often felt himself to be invisible. Like the Invisible Agent:

people could see the suit and hat and gloves, and nothing of what was

inside them. No matter that they stared.

He felt her slide into the seat behind him. “I’m off,” she whispered,

leaning over. “Come with me. I have to change.”

Making as little noise as he could, he stood and left the row to

follow her; the few in adjoining rows glancing up with interest, maybe

one or two thinking he was being expelled, no cripples allowed. He

went after her into the foyer and around to the far side and through a

door that seemed to be just part of the wall. It opened to a hot shabby

corridor lit by bare bulbs. Dim hollow voices of the picture could be

heard . I pity the Devil when you Nazis start arriving in bunches!

“Here,” she said.

It was a dressing room, a couple of blank lockers, a sink, a clothes

rack of pipe where uniforms hung. Steam hissed from the radiator. She

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

turned her back to him to take out the stud from her collar, then pulled

the whole celluloid shirtfront with collar and tie attached out from her

uniform jacket and tossed it down on a bench.

“Elaine,” he said, and she turned to him; he could see that she’d

worn nothing beneath the dickie, too hot maybe. As though he’d said

much more than her name she came to him, and he knew it was time to

put his arms around her, but that was hard; propping himself with one

crutch he wrapped her in the other arm, still holding its crutch. She

somehow melted into him anyway, partly supporting him, breasts soft

against him. Then she seemed not to know what came next, forgetting

or unable to predict, and she drew away, undoing the frogs of her uni-

form coat.

“Turn around,” she said, and he did; when after a time he turned

back he found she had put on a shirtwaist dress, was barelegged in

white anklets, and he felt a piercing loss. She put on a dark thick coat

and a shapeless hat. “We’ll go out the back.”

She took him out around the back of the stage, and for a moment

Prosper could see that the great screen was actually translucent, and

the picture of two lovers projected on the front shone through to be

seen, reversed, by no one.

They came out into the alley, scaring a lean cat from a garbage pail.

She lived many blocks away, in the opposite direction from Bea and

May’s. They didn’t speak much as they walked, just enough so as not to

appear strange to each other marching in urgent silence toward what-

ever it was, but what little from their shared past they might have spoken

about ought not to be said now: that was obvious to both of them.

“So what happens to the Jap? In that picture.”

“He commits Harry Carey.”

“Oh.”

Though the cold air burned his throat, he was wet with sweat

beneath his coat by the time she said “Here.” The place was heart-

sinkingly tall, a long pile of stairs with steeper than normal risers that

climbed as though up a castle wall to a front door high above. He

despaired. But Elaine then took him through a side gate (beware of

the dog) and around to the back, a short winter-dry yard where an

umbrella clothesline leaned like a blasted tree, and into a door. “Up,”

she said softly. “Don’t be loud.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 187

It was only a half-flight, though the banister was flimsy and the

steps mismatched. How her room was fitted onto or into the house in

front never came clear to him, though he tried later to draw a plan.

The door at the top of the stairs led into a minute kitchen no bigger

than a closet, and that to a bedroom. Elaine pulled a chain that lit a

green-shaded lamp above the dark bed.

She turned to him then. He was breathing hard from exertion, and

she seemed to be also, her mouth a little open and her face lifted to his.

Her eyes huge and certain. He would come to learn—he was learning

already—that these moments, different as each one was from all the

others, were all more like one another than they were like any in the

rest of his life: they were like the moment in some movies when a scene

changes in an instant from black and white into color, and everything

is the same but now this picture has become one of those rare ones that

are colored, it joins that richer life, and for a time you live in it, until

the gray real world comes back again.

Night. Negotiating in the dark the way out of her room and down the

half flight of treacherous stairs holding the splintery banister, knowing

there were things—tools, trash, boxes, a cat—he couldn’t see. He

bumped at length into the door outward, and pushed it open (beware

of that dog) and made it out to the street. He saw at the block’s end the

cigar store right where he remembered it being, where there would be a

telephone. Mert’s bills in his pocket, enough for a while, but not for

taxis every day. He felt a sudden anguish, he wanted to turn back now

and climb those stairs again, there was something left undone there or

not completed, it twisted within him painfully in the direction of her

room even as he pushed himself down the block: something he’d never

felt before, and seeming to be installed deeply now.

Why was she the way she was? Women with their clothes on could

be utterly unlike themselves when they were without them, even those

who were unwilling to take all or even most of them off, who made

him paw through the folds of fabric like an actor fumbling through a

stage curtain to come out and say something important. But none so

far had been as different as Elaine. She’d lain still as he unbuttoned her

buttons and his, mewing a little softly, a mewing that grew stronger

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

when he’d got her last garments off, hard to do with no help at all. She

lay still and naked then making that sound, as though something

dreadful were about to happen to her that she was powerless to resist;

she closed her eyes while he unbuckled his braces, she covered her eyes

even for a moment with her hands, and then remained still, tense as a

strung wire, while he attended to her. He tried to speak, tell her they

had to be you know careful, but she wouldn’t listen, drew him over

atop her, parting her legs and pressing him down. But once he had

gone in—swallowed up almost by the enveloping hot wetness—she

held him still so he wouldn’t move, made sounds of protest if he tried,

almost as though he hurt her, and herself lay unmoving too except for

small tremors that racked her, seemingly unwanted. He almost whis-

pered Hey what the heck Elaine to make her behave in some more

familiar way but actually could say nothing, and after what seemed a

very long time she lifted her legs and circled him tightly; she murmured

something as though to herself, a word or two, and he felt a sudden

sensation of being grabbed or enveloped from within as by a hand. It

was so startling and unlikely that he nearly withdrew, and did cry out,

and so did she, even as he was held and ejaculating. And at that she

began pushing him out and away, gently and then more forcefully;

when he was separated she rolled over so that she faced away from

him, and pulled the coverlet over herself.

Elaine? he’d said.

All right, she’d said, not turning back. Go away now, she’d said. I’ll

see you maybe at the theater tomorrow.

So.

He guessed that if she’d got herself knocked up today he’d have to

marry her. The cab he called rolled up to the door of the cigar store

where he stood next to a dour wooden Indian, and Prosper checked to

see if it was driven by that same old fool who’d once mocked him, but

of course it wasn’t. He’d marry her and somehow they’d live, maybe in

that tiny room. For an instant he knew it would be so and that he

wanted nothing more, and how could that be? How could it?

8

Without his uncles’ wages and the odd bill they’d slip him for

this or that ser vice, Prosper was back in the Mayflower, but

May and Bea couldn’t give him the money he needed if he

was going to be seeing Elaine: though she seemed to want

nothing from him, that only made him think she really did. So he went

to work for The Light in the Woods. They needed people. He didn’t

have much of a choice. At least it appeared he wouldn’t have to support

a wife and child: after an uneasy week (he was uneasy, she seemed

somehow bleakly indifferent) he knew that.

The Light in the Woods (Prosper’d first heard about it from Mary

Mack, and then from the teacher of his special class at school) had for

years been giving work to people with impairments who couldn’t com-

pete for jobs with other workers. They were blind or almost blind, they

were deaf or crippled or untrainable, they were spastics or aged alkies

with tremors. They were put to work making simple things like coco

matting or brushes, or they picked up and refurbished discarded cloth-

ing or toys or furniture for resale, packed boxes or did contract labor

assembling things for local factories—anything that almost anybody

could do but nobody could make a living doing. For years The Light in

the Woods had been losing work: in the Depression, standards had

changed about what jobs an able-bodied person would willingly do.

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

Supported by charitable giving, they’d kept their workers on through

those years, guaranteeing them their fifty cents a day even when there

wasn’t much to do. Now business was booming again: there were sud-

denly lots of jobs that nobody would do who could do anything else. A

new age of junk had dawned; shortages of materials for war industries

meant we were constantly urged to save them, bring them to collection

centers for reuse and reclamation—rubber and scrap metal and fats

and tin cans (wash off the labels, cut off both ends and smash them

flat). Old silk stockings could be made into parachutes; new ones soon

became unavailable. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. In

Prosper’s city the collection and sorting of discards and donated matter

was contracted out to The Light in the Woods, and the outfit opened a

larger warehouse in the industrial district to handle it all. When Pros-

per made the trip downtown to the War Mobilization Employment

Office, that’s where he was sent. All he had to do was sign up for the

special bus service that The Light in the Woods had arranged to circle

the city and bring in their people who couldn’t get there on their own.

A special bus. A special card allowing him to ride it. A right to sur-

vive.

Prosper put down Elaine’s address as the one he’d need to be picked

up at. That seemed like killing a couple of birds with one stone, though

when he told her, her face didn’t seem to agree that it was birds he’d

killed.

“I can get them to come to my house instead,” he said.

“No it’s fine.”

“I mean if you.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’ll be gone early. The bus’ll stop at the corner. It’ll still be dark.

No one’ll notice.”

“All right.”

Was she displeased? He thought he knew by now something of what

women wanted or needed, what pleased them or most of them, but

somehow with her he could never tell, and suspected he hadn’t done

enough, or done the right thing; it irritated him inside in a way he’d

never known before. He knew women often liked to tell their stories,

their True Stories, and he’d have liked to hear her story, why she was

here in this place, what had become of her in the time since they’d sat

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 191

together on the floor of his room. But no. When he asked about her life

her wary gaze began to move away, as though bad things drew close

around her at the question, and might come closer if she answered.

What’s it matter, she’d say. What’s it to you. The worst was how it

made him work all the harder to ease that dissatisfaction, to draw

down her questioning black brows, to still the turmoil that he sensed in

her being—that he even touched, he thought, when he was within her:

when she lay without moving, always, never letting him move either,

clutching at his arms to keep him still. Until her brief spasm came or

didn’t. Then she was done. Nor would she permit anything French, not

lessons or anything else. Don’t, she’d say, we shouldn’t, that’s only for

married people. Sometimes afterward she was calm for a time and

they’d lie beneath the blankets and swap silly jokes, or she’d rise and in

her ratty plaid robe she’d cook them an egg or boil coffee and they’d sit

at the table together in companionable silence.

He could only visit her after night had fallen (he never saw the

people in the house to which her rooms were attached, almost didn’t

believe there were any there, never more than one window dimly alight

when he came up the street). He’d awaken before dawn—for some

reason The Light in the Woods started work at an early hour, maybe

only to make their difference from a real business obvious—and put

his braces on and dress, wanting to creep back into the bed beside the

unmoving dark lump of her; drink a cup of cold coffee from the night

before, take the lunch he’d made, and go out into the winter darkness

and to the corner to await the bus. Then stand for a few hours at the

clothes tables in the eternal odor of mothballs and moldered wool and

sort the useless from the reclaimable, noting the missing buttons, the

stain (blood?), the decayed lining or detached sleeve, thinking of the

lives of these men and women and children, Fauntleroy suits of possi-

bly dead boys, wedding dresses of disappointed brides, chalk-striped

suits of bank tellers now in prison. The More You Sort the More You

Earn.

Salvageable things went on the cart to Repairs. Silks were reserved

for government reclaiming, whether women’s negligees or men’s fine

monogrammed shirts. Foundation garments contained rubber, wave

them aloft for laughs. Furs, no matter how moth-eaten, were set aside,

for they would be cut up to line the vests of merchant marine sailors;

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

Prosper caught in them the faint remains of perfume from their long-

ago wearers, strangely persistent, and thought of men standing watch

on night ships smelling it too, shamingly intimate and evocative.

In addition to all the stuff coming in on the trucks to be sorted and

fixed, The Light in the Woods had contracted with local war industries

to do jobs that could be done off-site. The airplane factory sent them

barrels of floor sweepings, from which dropped bolts and rivets could be

extracted and returned to the works; a number of blind people sat along

one table onto which the contents of these barrels were emptied, feeling

through the sweepings and finding the rivets; after a short time they

were able to distinguish each of the several sizes of rivets in the mix and

distribute them to separate containers. One was a young woman whose

blind eyes were pale and a little crossed, who smiled slightly and con-

tinuously at nothing, her head lifted—why should she look down? But it

made her appear strangely joyful or alight, and Prosper watched her

when he could, guiltily enjoying the fact that she couldn’t tell he looked.

In the late winter afternoon the bus went back, circling the poorer

parts of town, stopping to let off one after another, the driver getting

out to set a wooden step before the door when needed, careful now,

take your time. The Sad Sacks, Prosper called them to Elaine, not to

seem one of them himself. She made him confess what The Light in the

Woods was paying him, though he tried to put her off. She made no

reply when he told her.

Neither Bea nor May would ask him where he spent his nights

now—at least no more than to ascertain he was all right and needed

nothing they had between them to give; he was a grown man now, and

doing the things they imagined grown men did, though when either of

them began a sentence of speculation about just what that might be,

the other cut her off, not wanting to think about it. He seemed not to

be at Mert’s beck and call anyway, and that was a good sign. Bea had

volunteered to be a local War Council block leader, wearing a cute cap

with a Civilian Defense badge on it and going around her block, hand-

ing out pamphlets about reclaiming tin and rubber or growing a Vic-

tory Garden and preserving more food. Bea could talk to anybody.

May missed Prosper’s company more. To her great sadness Fenix

Vigaron had gone away. She’d informed May that the sudden vast

increase in souls coming across to her side was upsetting the economy of

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 193

heaven as nothing had before or since. So many people all over the world

dying such terrible deaths all at once, arriving so sore and shaken and

unprepared, strained the resources of solace and succor that even infinite

Love could provide. Fenix’s work was with them now: she blessed May

and wished her well (the child had become, even as many living persons

seemed to become, strangely nicer and warmer in the emergency) and

promised that someday when the docks weren’t so crowded with the lost

and vastated she’d return to May’s board and her glass and candle; she

expected, though, that it would get worse before it got better.

So it was change in all they saw and did, for them as for everyone:

but still the two women were shocked when Prosper told them he was

leaving town to find a job that paid something and, also, to do his part:

he thought there was a part he could do, and he was going to do it. Out

west anybody sitting on a park bench would be approached within an

hour by three people with offers of work. Bea and May could hardly

answer: couldn’t say no, of course, but like any parents who’ve raised a

crippled child, it was going to be hard for them, war or no war, to see

their boy go off: as hard and fearsome (though they’d never say it) as

for any mother seeing off her soldier boy.

He’d quit at The Light in the Woods a week before. Ever since he

began working there he’d been growing angrier, not a feeling he’d felt

very often, somehow new to him, as new as what Elaine made him feel,

and actually not different. Then on a Monday morning not long after

the Sad Sacks had begun their work he’d flung aside the chesterfield

overcoat with mangy collar he’d been assessing, and (hardly knowing

he was about to) he turned himself toward the desk where the area

supervisor, Mr. Fenniman, oversaw them all with his one good eye and

did his paperwork. Like Oliver Twist in the picture with his milk bowl,

he walked up past the eyes of the silent workers to the front table. The

boss took no notice of his standing there.

“Mr. Fenniman,” Prosper said. “There’s a matter I’d like to discuss

with you.”

“You may discuss anything you like with me, Prosper.” He contin-

ued to sort his papers, invoices and orders it appeared, but glanced up

to hand Prosper a brief encouraging smile.

“It’s about the, well the compensation provided here at the Light, as

over against the money that’s coming in.” Mr. Fenniman put down the

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

papers now, looked up, no smile. “Mr. Fenniman, I just don’t think I’m

getting my share of the gravy.”

Mr. Fenniman considered him. “Well now, Prosper, I believe you’re

making good money since the work here expanded.”

“Not compared to what the factories are paying.”

“You’re not at a factory, Prosper, are you?”

“I could be.”

Mr. Fenniman’s smile returned, but chilly. “I think you are making

an all right wage as a proportion of any able worker’s. All things con-

sidered.”

Now everyone was listening, at least everyone who could hear,

though many went on sorting rivets or tossing clothes as busily as

ever.

“I’m thinking I’ll go up and get myself one of those jobs,” Prosper

said. “Who’s to say I can’t.”

“I’m to say. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. The

war industries of this city have contracted with The Light in the Woods

to do work for them. We are grateful for the opportunity to do our

part.” His good eye traveled over the benches, and some—not all—

looked back down at their work.

“Well tell me this, then, Mr. Fenniman,” Prosper said, shifting his

stance, hard job standing tall after a time. “Just how much are you

taking out of what those companies are paying for our work?”

“You are an ungrateful wretch.”

“Just a question. For instance I know that the airplane company

down there is paying fifty-sixty cents an hour. An hour.”

A motion passed over the people working within earshot, a wave of

awe or restiveness. Some of them knew this fact very well, some were

just learning it.

“To able-bodied workers,” Mr. Fenniman said. “Not to the likes of

you.” He stared around himself a little wildly, as though he wished he

could take that back, at the same time daring those who now looked

frankly at him to take offense.

“Well we’ll see,” Prosper said. “For I am giving my notice.”

Mr. Fenniman’s shoulders sagged. “Now, son, don’t be foolish. Go

take your place and”—he lifted a weary hand—“the more you sort the

more you earn.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 195

“I’m quitting.” He spoke gently now, as though he’d made the point

a thousand times and was prepared to make it a thousand more.

“Son. The bus won’t even be here till five. You can’t quit. You can’t

get home.”

Now even Prosper could feel the eyes and ears of the Sad Sacks on

him. “I believe I can,” he said. “I believe I can.” He turned himself

around.

“You go out that door, Prosper, don’t you dare try to come back

through. Ever.”

Prosper, aflame within, wanted something more to say, some final,

utter thing, like in the movies. He thought of turning to the others and

saying “Anybody else had enough?” And if it were a movie, first one

and then another and more and more would rise up, the fearful trans-

formed, the oldsters with jaws set, the young alive at last. But what if

no one did? And if they did get up and follow him, a mass of them,

crippled and sightless and feeble, what would he do with them? He

said nothing, went without hurry to the coatrack; he lifted his woolen

scarf (taken from the tables) and laid it around his neck, and then his

wonderful houndstooth jacket. He clipped it with his hand to the cross-

piece of his crutch, not wanting to try struggling into it with everyone

looking on. He pushed out the doors of The Light in the Woods and,

holding the banister, he let himself down, hop, then hop, till he came

to the street. His heart was still hot. He supposed they might be watch-

ing through the big windows, and he thought he might toss them a

finger, but with the crutches and holding the jacket it was inconvenient,

and actually he felt no ill will toward them, not even toward Mr. Fen-

niman, who wasn’t the big boss and had formerly been kind to him.

The bus stop, as it happened, was right in front of The Light in the

Woods, but Prosper couldn’t feature standing there for however long,

peering down the street to see if the thing was coming, then negotiating

the steps up to get into it in view of the Sad Sacks and maybe failing. Or

refused service—it’d been made clear to him on other occasions that

was the driver’s right. So he set off down to wherever the next stop was,

not clear what the bus’s route was or how close it would get him toward

home. At least he had a dime in his pocket. As he went the workers

heading for the airplane plant were beginning to throng the street, lunch

boxes in hand and badges on their coats, he recognized them. He

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

thought maybe he would just go and see if the plant would take him

after all; but when the crowded bus lurched to a stop where he stood

with the others, and he struggled to get aboard, holding everyone up

and feeling for the first time profoundly embarrassed by his damn legs

and back, he knew he wouldn’t; and he knew what he’d do instead.

Go ahead and look, he thought, himself looking at no one there. Go

ahead, go make your money, go fight your war. If I have to look out for

Number One, I’ll look out for Number One. You don’t need me, I don’t

need you. A blond woman going out the back door glanced at him with

something that looked like pity or reproach, and a furious shame pos-

sessed him.

“You go down Main?” he called to the driver. The bus was nearly

empty now, with the industrial area behind.

“What?”

“I said. Do you. Go down. Main.”

“I cross Main.”

“Can I get out there?”

“It’s not a stop.”

“Can you just stop there? For a minute.”

No answer, dumb lump. When they reached Main he stopped and

opened the doors and gazed, indifferent, out his window as Prosper

made it out, his feet landing on the pavement with a thump he felt up

into his buttocks. It was a few long blocks down to the house where

Elaine lived. He needed to tell her, needed to recount to her what he’d

done and what he’d said, the reasons he’d been in the right, yet afraid

she’d reject his words and his action, why was it always so with her,

that he could be both sure he was right and afraid?

“Well that’s it,” Elaine said. He’d wakened her, she had the night

shift tonight. She took his side even before he finished telling her, was

instantly madder than he was. “Those, those. That’s enough. We don’t

have to, we don’t have to stand for that.” She roamed her tiny space

like a tiger, looking at nothing there, wrapped in her plaid robe, her

feet bare. “We’ll get out of here. We’ll go out west. That’s where the

jobs are, everybody says, sixty cents an hour, closed shops, they can’t

push you around.”

“I’ll get money,” Prosper said. “I know I can.”

“You get money,” she said, coming to look furiously into his face.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 197

“I’ve got a little. I’m sick of that theater. I’m sick of this town. We’ll go

together.”

All decided, no questions, whatever stood in the way of it of no

account, not her family or his, not his handicap, not distance or fear or

difficulty. Her rageful resolve had caught fire from his like a hot can-

dlewick catching fire from a lit candle brought close. She wrapped his

scarf around his throat as though arming him.

“Tell me you love me,” she said, hands pulling tight the scarf. The

last thing necessary.

“I love you, Elaine.”

She said nothing in return.

From the cigar store Prosper called the icehouse. A new voice

answered, female, blond (how could he tell?). When Mert came to the

phone Prosper said he’d been thinking and that if they still needed that

job done they’d talked about, he would probably be able to do it. If the

money was good.

“The money’s good,” Mert said.

“So when, where will I.”

“Where are you now?”

Prosper named the streets.

“Wait there,” Mert said. “Fred’ll pick you up.”

It wasn’t hard to do. The coupons themselves were crude things. The

Ditto machine in the icehouse office could be adapted to print in red

instead of its usual purple. Prosper went with Fred to a warehouse in

the city filled with paper, paper in high stacks, newsprint in rolls, dis-

count paper in fallen slides like avalanches. Fred distracted the sales-

man while Prosper took a sheet of stamps from his pocket and sought

for a paper like it. The big investment was in spirit masters for the

machine; Prosper spoiled several before he perfected a way to make a

sheetful of stamps rather than a single one. As he drew he had to press

hard enough to transfer the colored wax on the bottom sheet of the

two-ply master to the back of the sheet he was drawing on, like the

wrong-way writing that a piece of carbon paper puts on your typed

sheet if you insert the carbon backward. Then he separated the two

sheets of the master and fastened the top sheet to the drum of the Ditto.

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

As he turned the handle of the drum, a solvent with the intoxicating

smell of some sublime liquor was washed over the sheets of paper

drawn in to be printed; the solvent would dissolve just enough of the

colored wax on the master to transfer the backward image right-way-

around to the paper. It worked. Mert said it wouldn’t fool everybody

for long but it’d fool anybody long enough.

How to perforate the printed sheets was a different problem, not

put to Prosper; Mert knew a guy. Prosper’s problem was that the origi-

nal could only print fifty copies or so before it grew dim, and he’d have

to start a new master.

The C book cover was easier; it was just like making documents for

the Sabine Free State. He drew down the lamp over his desk at May

and Bea’s and worked with a magnifying glass, reproducing by hand

every letter and line of type with his pens and India ink, the red bits in

red. Eagle, badge, warning of jail time. He could do two a day, and got

three dollars apiece; the money piled up. He had finished his first one

of the day, stapled it to the coupons, all ready but the signature, when

the doorbell rang.

It was Elaine.

“Here,” she said. She handed him a shapeless lump of brown canvas.

“Let’s go.”

It was her idea: he’d said he had no way to carry a suitcase and walk

at the same time, and after she’d thought about this for a day she’d said

that he could carry a knapsack on his back, like hikers and soldiers,

she’d just seen one in a movie and then realized she knew where to get

one, the Army and Navy Store just then replete with stuff from previ-

ous war eras as useless now as flintlocks and sabers. She’d bring him

one. Here it was. It was time.

Last thing, just before he slung the lumpy kit bag over his shoulders,

filled with his clothes and belongings gathered somewhat at random,

he picked up the fresh C ration book and put it into an inside pocket of

his jacket. And Elaine fixed his hat on his head. The El stop was twenty

blocks away.

“So she left you standing there?” Vi Harbison asked Prosper in Henryville.

They were upright now and dressed, Vi ready for the Swing Shift, she

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 199

was doing double. Pancho Notzing in the parlor listening to the radio

in a straightback chair as though in church. He knew this part of Pros-

per’s story.

“We got there and I couldn’t get up the stairs,” Prosper said. “I

guess we hadn’t thought of that. I mean I think I’d thought of it, but.”

“What did she say? ‘So long, sucker’?”

“She didn’t say anything. I said I’d go around and look to see if

there was another way up. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He

could remember her face when he’d said this to her, as though now

everything that her face had always seemed to express and yet maybe

didn’t—the questions with bad answers, the dissatisfaction—it did

express now for real. “When I came back to tell her, she was gone.”

“She took that train.”

Prosper said nothing.

“So that didn’t change your mind about women?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean liking them better. Thinking they’re better. After she did

that to you, leaving you flat. Did it?”

“Well I guess not,” he said, actually never having wondered this

before, or considered that it should have changed his mind; maybe it

should have. “I guess she had her reasons. I mean it wasn’t going to be

easy.”

Vi regarded him in what seemed to Prosper a kind of tender disgust,

the look you might give a bad puppy.

“I thought,” he said, “that she’d given up on me, but that if I could

go out there and find her I could show her she didn’t need to. That she

shouldn’t have.”

“But you came here instead.”

“Well, yes, in the end.”

“You know what I think?” Vi said. “I think your heart got broken.

Right then on that day.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And you know, when your heart gets broken it can’t feel the

same way afterward.”

“Oh?”

She put her elbows on the oilcloth to look into Prosper’s eyes. Out-

side the window, troops of people were passing, headed for work,

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

marching together, some yellow bicycles moving faster than the crowd.

“I think that after your heart is broken you maybe still want to have

love affairs. Still want to make love, still want to marry even. But

people don’t stir your heart the same.”

“Oh.”

“Your heart,” she said, touching her own. “It can’t be heated up the

same as before.”

“That’s not good, I guess.”

“Depends,” Vi said. “It can keep you from being hurt again. It can

keep you from being jealous. ’Cause you don’t care so much.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t get that stab to the heart,” Vi said.

“Oh.”

“For instance me,” Vi said. “It doesn’t make me jealous that you’re

two-timing me with that blonde.”

“What?”

“Your new friend. The one you knew back home.”

“I didn’t know her. Who?”

“The one with the little boy. She likes ice-cream sodas.” Vi sang:

“The prettiest girl. I ever saw. Was sippin’ soda. Through a straw . . .”

“Oh ho,” Prosper said, as though just remembering. “Oh no. No.

That’s nothing. She’s married. I just knew her back home. Or actually

I didn’t know her.”

“You,” said Vi, aiming a finger at him like a gun, “are a terrible

liar. But it doesn’t matter. Like I just said. Who cares? If you don’t care

I don’t. And you don’t.”

Prosper sat hands folded on the table that separated them. Caught

out so unexpectedly, he’d got distracted; there was a thread there in

Vi’s story he’d intended to follow, now he’d dropped it, what was it?

Oh yes.

“Who broke your heart, Vi?” he asked.

She stuffed her hands in her overall pockets. “Maybe I’ll tell you

sometime,” she said. “I’m going to work.”

9

It had been a Wednesday night a couple of weeks before when Pros-

per Olander and Pancho Notzing went into Ponca City to see a movie

and pick up some sundries (as Prosper said). Pancho drove, the seats

filled with Teenie Weenies out to do the town, insofar as it could be

done, not something Pancho cared to do, and they’d have to make their

own way home. He let them out by the Poncan, a Spanish-style picture

palace on Grand Avenue and the best in town, and went to park the

car; he joined Prosper at the ticket booth, and they reached doors just

as a black man in a bow tie holding the hand of a small girl in lace and

ribbons did too. Pancho opened the door to let them pass in, and fol-

lowed. Prosper went in after, and a local gent too, coatless in a skim-

mer, his eyes narrowed.

“I wouldn’t open a grave for one of them,” the fellow muttered, not

exactly to Prosper; it took Prosper a minute to put together what the

man had seen, and what he meant by what he’d said—the black man

and his daughter, Pancho opening the door for them. Open a grave?

Had the fellow had that remark ready, or was it just now he’d thought

of it? It didn’t ask for a response, and he made none; the white man

lingered in the lobby, eyes fixed on the black man’s back as he mounted

the stairs to the balcony: for once Prosper felt ignored.

The theater was Cooled by Refrigeration, not necessary on this

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

spring night. A few steps to negotiate, hold up the crowd briefly, and

then in. Prosper (as he always would in movie theaters) thought of

Elaine, her uniform jacket, breasts bare beneath it. The picture show-

ing was The Human Comedy, with selected short subjects and a news-

reel. That was what Pancho’d come for, though he chiefly got from it

cues for his own pointedly expressed opinions, which earned him a lot

of shushing. Next week the bill changed: Cabin in the Sky.

Just as the picture, rather dull and uneventful, wrapped up, Prosper

whispered to Pancho that he’d meet him as agreed, and got up to go.

Crowds in aisles always made him anxious, chance of a stray foot acci-

dentally kicking his props away.

Cuzalina’s pharmacy (“Save When You’re Sick”) was a few blocks

away, and open late that year, serving the oil crews as well as the round-

the-clock workers at the Pax plant who lived in town or who poured in

after every shift to get what couldn’t be got out in Henryville, where the

clinics dispensed pills and hernia trusses and Mercurochrome but not all

the other things a person needed and could find in any real drugstore:

razor blades and Brylcreem and hairnets and lipstick, Ipana toothpaste

in its tube of ivory-yellow, the repellent color of bad teeth. And more. At

ten o’clock there was a line that snaked around the displays to reach the

counter where the clerk seemed to be in no great hurry. A couple of

people let Prosper advance, and called on others ahead to let him by,

which Prosper wished they wouldn’t do: how often had he told people

that it was no trouble for him to just stand, cost him no more than it did

them. He reached the counter and stood a moment, pressed from behind

by the many others. The clerk finally raised his eyebrows, let’s go.

“I would like to buy some rubbers,” Prosper said in what even he

could hear was a weirdly solemn murmur.

“Some what?”

“I would like,” Prosper said, a bit more brightly, “a package of rub-

bers. Condoms.”

The clerk looked him over. “And who sent you to buy them?”

“No one sent me.”

“Well then . . .”

“I need them for myself.”

A kind of delighted satisfaction settled over the fellow’s face, as

though he’d just got a small gift of a kind he liked but hadn’t expected.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 203

It was one of those big faces with a set of features tightly bunched in

the middle, seeming too small for it. “Well now. You know the use of

this product?”

“I believe I do,” Prosper said. The line behind him had got longer

and drawn tighter: he could sense it without turning to look. He

propped himself up a little straighter. “Why do you ask?”

“This product is sold for the prevention of disease only. Were you

aware of that?”

Prosper said nothing. The man’s smile had steadied, confirmed.

“Aha,” he said. “So you wouldn’t be able to certify that use. As a pur-

chaser.”

Prosper said nothing again. As though he’d hoped for more, the

clerk said grudgingly, “Well what brand would you like to purchase?”

He bent closer to Prosper and spoke lower. “Skins or rubbers? I believe

you said rubbers.”

“Yes.”

“Choice is yours. We have Sheik. Mermaid. Silver Glow. Lucky.

Co-ed. Merry Widow.”

“Lucky.”

The man shrugged, as though to say that it was up to Prosper but

maybe he should think again. “How many?”

“A dozen.”

“A dozen?” said the clerk, his little eyes widening—this was almost

too wonderful, but Prosper again would say nothing back, he’d placed

his order. “Well as it happens we don’t have ’m by the dozen. We have

’m in tins of three. Sorry. You want four of those?”

“Will you serve that customer?” said a voice from behind Prosper.

“Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Two,” said Prosper humbly, though it meant he’d have to come

back soon, maybe, probably. “Two tins.”

The clerk pulled open a drawer beneath the counter, rummaged in

it for a moment, and extracted a tin, which he tossed into the air with

one hand and caught with the other; then one more. “A couple of the

Lucky,” he said, not quietly, proffering the two as though he’d con-

jured them, and just out of Prosper’s reach. “One-fifty.”

Prosper, leaning on the counter, slipped his right crutch into his left

hand and reached out for the little square tins; he put them into his

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

trouser pocket, took money from his jacket, and paid; swapped back

his right crutch into his right hand. Then—he’d been imagining the

moment, in a vague state of alarm, for the last few minutes—he turned

himself toward the line behind, chose a face (rapt indifference, Sphinx-

like) and started out, suffering their inspection but also feeling a deep

warm glee as the tins in his pocket bounced against his hip.

Larry the shop steward was among those on line. “Lucky,” he said

as though to no one when Prosper passed. “Lucky if they don’t bust.”

Pancho said he’d parked down by the railroad station, and Prosper

was passing beneath the vast bulk of the flour mill and grain elevators

as the last of the midnight train’s passengers were dispersing from the

double doors of the station. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe ran

specials almost daily in that time, so many people coming in to get

work, so many government people come to look over the advancing

aircraft. The taxis waiting along Oklahoma charged seven cents a mile,

it had been a nickel before the war but a cabbie’s life was hard these

days—gas, tires, maintenance on the decaying cars—and everybody

seemed to have the money and didn’t mind the surcharge. As Prosper

neared the station, which was too small for the traffic that passed

through it, he noticed a woman with a child, a boy who clung to her

skirt. He picked her out, maybe because she alone was still and some-

how entranced or bewildered while everybody else was in motion—the

way, in the movie he’d just watched, the girl who would be the heroine

of the story could be picked out from the crowd around her when she

was first seen: alight and glowing, sharply drawn while the others

moving around her were dim and unclear.

Also she seemed to be in trouble.

Prosper stopped before her. Ought, he knew, to lift his hat, but that

gesture always caused more attention than he intended to draw. “Eve-

ning,” he said.

She nodded warily. Prosper knew he could alarm some people,

though he never knew which people.

“You need any directions? Can I get you a taxi?”

“Well,” she said. “Do you know if they go out to the airplane fac-

tory?”

“Oh yes, ma’am, they do. They’d love to take you out there. It’ll

cost you almost a buck.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 205

“Oh dear.”

Her little boy had detached himself from her and was looking at Pros-

per’s crutches with interest: Prosper could tell. Kids liked to watch some-

body walk in a new way, liked to ask why he had them, though their

parents shushed them and pulled them away. He remembered one boy

telling his mother Mommy get me those, as though they were a new kind

of pogo stick. He took a step toward the boy, who smiled but retreated.

“Hello little fella,” he said. The boy’s mother looked down at him,

as though just then discovering him there. “What’s your name?”

The kid didn’t answer, and Mom seemed not to want to volunteer

one. “His daddy’s working out there, at the plant,” she said, still

regarding the boy, as though it was he who needed the information.

She was a rose-gold blonde, one of those whose skin seems to have

taken its shade from her hair, her brows fading almost into invisibility

against it. For a second they stood looking, her at the boy, the boy

wide-eyed at Prosper, Prosper at her.

“Was he coming out to meet you?”

“No,” she said. “He doesn’t know we’ve come.”

“Oh. Aha. Surprise visit?”

“Well.”

“What shop’s he work in? Does he live in Henryville?”

“Where’s that?” she asked in something like despair, as though sud-

denly envisioning more journeying. She looked all in.

“Just the town around the plant. The new houses. Do you have an

address?”

She didn’t answer, as though to let him guess she knew nothing at

all and would have no answer to any further question. She watched

Prosper shift his weight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you . . .”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Listen. If you’re going out to find him, you

could come with me. My friend’s got a car. There’s room for you two.

We work out there, maybe we can give you some help finding him.”

“Oh gosh. Oh that’s so nice.”

“This way,” he said, and took a few steps under their gaze, the kid

still smiling, interested. “Or no wait. You’d have to lug the bags.

Sorry.”

“No, oh no it’s fine,” she said, reaching for what looked like a one-

ton strapped leather suitcase.

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

“No wait here,” Prosper said. “I’m to meet him right around the

corner. Wait here and I’ll go get him and we’ll drive around. Okay?

Just wait here.”

He had just turned to set off when a wheezy beebeep behind him

turned him back. Pancho pulled up to the curb, himself beeped at by

the affronted cab behind. Prosper guided his new finds to the car with

one hand. “How’s that for luck,” he said. Pancho pulled the brake and

leapt out to help with the bag, and got the mother and child stowed in

the backseat. Prosper went around and performed his get-in-the-car

act, talking away. “So how far you two come? Where’d you start out

from?”

She named the place, Prosper astonished to hear the name of his

own northern city. They had to compare neighborhoods then, families,

schools, finding no connection.

Pancho leaned over the seat, proffered his hand and gave his name,

and Prosper’s.

“Constance,” she said in reply. “Connie. This my son Adolph.”

“Well,” Pancho said, as if in commendation. “Well let’s get going.”

“This is a good thing,” Prosper said, grinning proudly as the car

rolled off. “This is a very good thing.”

Within minutes they were outside the town and in utter darkness, stars

scattered overhead. Connie Wrobleski tasted something thick and

sweetish in the air they moved through. Crude oil, said the little man at

the wheel: you’ll get used to it. He pointed a thumb back toward where

they’d come from, and Connie saw the far-off glitter of lights and a

flare like a titanic match burning. It had turned to warm spring, nearly

summer, as she’d gone south; she opened her coat. The crippled man

smiled back at her as though glad for her. And then—Connie at first

thought it was dawn rising, though it couldn’t be that late—the great

glow of the Pax plant and hangars put out the western stars.

Three days before she’d set out with these bags and Adolph, nearly

two years old, her good suit on but flats because she knew what lay

ahead. She couldn’t face the Elevated with the bags and Adolph, and

her purse felt heavy with money from the war job she’d had, so she

called a cab.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 207

“Leaving home?” the taxi driver said, loading the bags in the

trunk—greasy Mediterranean type Connie had always mistrusted—

and in a sudden rush of careless energy she said “None of your busi-

ness,” smiled, and slammed the door with a satisfying thud; and they

went to the station in silence.

The station was packed, like the first day of a giveaway at the

department store, Connie had known it would be, the newspaper was

full of stories, people in motion. The noise of all of them as she came in

holding Adolph’s hand seemed to rise up toward the ceiling and rain

back down on them, the voices, the announcements over the loud-

speakers, the click of heels. The station was a new one, built only a few

years ago by the WPA; over the doors were stern blocky stone eagles,

and above the row of ticket windows where people patient or impatient

worked out their trips or made demands or pleas, there ran a broad

paneled painting, the history of the city and the region done in forms

of travel: Indians with those things they drag, not trapezes, and pig-

tailed men with oxcarts, larky boatmen on canal boats, a stagecoach

and an old puffer-belly locomotive, all of it pressed up together in the

picture as though it had happened all at once, as crowded with con-

trary people pushing and tugging as the station below it. Around her as

she moved slowly forward men were working the line, offering Pull-

man tickets to the South, where Connie was headed; they were asking

ten or twenty dollars above the standard price for these tickets, which

were (they said) all sold out at the window. Everybody wanted to go

south now, old people to Florida, women to the training camps where

their men were stationed. Right by the ticket window as Connie reached

it was a sign that said is this trip necessary? in stark black letters.

Like an old aunt or nun, the government making sure you weren’t

doing anything just for fun, and she wasn’t, if the government were to

ask her she could say Yes this trip is necessary.

“Ponca City, Oklahoma,” she said, or cried aloud in the din. “Coach

class. Myself and a baby, is all. One way.”

PART THREE

1

The week after Christmas Bunce Wrobleski came home from the

Bull aircraft plant with newspapers that were full of ads for

workers with skills like his—ads for workers of any kind, actu-

ally, columns and columns of them after the deserts of last

decade’s employment pages, jobs in this city and jobs far away. Situa-

tions Available. Bunce wanted a new situation. Well, that was pretty

obvious. He stood in the lamplight at midnight (couldn’t even get off

Swing Shift at this damn plant, he’d said), a Lucky dangling from his

plump sweet lower lip, his collar turned up and his cap still on at a

rakish angle with its bill sharply curled, its buttons on it—his union

button, Blue Team button, plant admission button with his picture on

it wearing the same cap the button was pinned to; and Connie’d

thought, What a beautiful man, as she never could help thinking,

despite that foxy or wolfish cunning that was sometimes in his lashy

eyes, as it was then. He pulled off the cap and tossed it and tousled his

thick hair. The job listing he had shown her was in an aircraft plant

miles away.

The rule now was that if a man quit his war-work job to go look for

something better, or if he took some job that wasn’t war work, then his

deferment could end, even fathers wouldn’t be exempt for long. Basi-

cally he was tied to his job. That was the rule. He was the same as a

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

soldier, in a way; no different. At the kitchen table he had laid it out for

Connie, moving the salt and pepper shakers and the ashtray gently

around the oilcloth in relation to one another, as though they were the

elements of the contract he had accepted. Constance watched his

broken-nailed hands as he explained. His eyes weren’t meeting hers.

The salt and pepper shakers were little bisque figures of a hen and a

rooster; the rooster was the pepper.

But—Bunce explained, moving away the ashtray, opening a path

for the rooster across the flowery field of the oilcloth—but if you could

locate a different job in some other war industry plant, a job that was

rated higher than the one you had, and you had the qualifications for

it, then you could quit the one and be in no danger from the draft if

you went and took the other. The job he had here was no good. He

could do better.

“You know why I got stuck here,” he said, and only now did he

raise his eyes to Connie—she being the other piece of the rebus, she

and Adolph asleep in the next room. Sure she knew, and she wasn’t

going to look down or away from him. He could have used a safe that

night in the back of the Plymouth and they wouldn’t be stuck, but then

there’d be no Adolph either, and she wasn’t going to think that would

be a good thing.

For a time after Bunce went across the country to the new job, a

kind of stasis settled over her; it was like waiting for him to get home

from the shift but it went on all day long, and was there at night when

Adolph woke her, the sensation of Bunce not there and nothing to do

or to be until he came in, which he wasn’t going to do. She was careful

to keep herself up, for no one. She put on her makeup and a pair of the

nylons that Bunce had bought from a guy who suddenly had a lot of

pairs. She went to the hairdresser and with a ration stamp got her

bangs curled high on her head and the length in back curled too like

the bottom of a waterfall striking its pool. She did all that and at the

same time felt a strange temptation, a yen or tug, not to do it, to stop

altogether and live in the house and the bed the way Adolph did, with-

out caring or thinking.

For a few weeks the postal orders came regularly from Bunce, for

different amounts, sometimes more, sometimes less. Then a week went

by without one: it was like the sudden stopping of her heart, when it

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 213

takes that gulp of nothing, then rolls over somehow and starts again,

thumping hard and fast for a moment as though to catch up. Just that

same way a postal order came the next week, bigger than ever. But

then weeks started to pass without them.

She wrote a postcard to Bunce at the last address she had for him

and heard nothing for a while; then a letter came, with some bills

folded small and tucked into the small sheets, a five, two tens, some

ones.

Honey I’m sorry I didn’t send more lately but you can’t believe

how expensive it is out here Food costs more and every cheap

diner charges fifty cents for a plate of stew The rents are worse

when you can even get a place I was rooming with some fellows

and we got into a wrangle I’m sorry to say and I had to leave I

am doing all right now but they aren’t going to forward mail if

you wrote any, they never do from rooming houses. I hope to

come home for a while soon with any luck but you know how

the trains are. Kiss my boy for me.

So that was the rent for the month plus the five she was shy for last

month, and some food money, which wasn’t so cheap here either in

spite of all the controls they talked about. The next three weeks went

by with nothing from Bunce.

Connie Wrobleski was twenty years old and hadn’t ever faced the

prospect of nothing, no support, no surrounding provider. Kids she

knew at school had to drop out because their fathers lost their jobs, but

she hadn’t worried because her father was a bus driver for the city and

the union was good. Not even finding out she was pregnant had felt

like facing nothing, because Bunce (after he had banged on the steering

wheel of the Plymouth so long and hard she thought it would break,

making a noise behind his clenched teeth like a bad dog) promised her

it was okay and he’d never leave her, he wasn’t that kind of guy. And

anyway so many of the girls in her class at Holy Name were in the

same condition by the night of the Senior Ball, some of them showing

already and proudly wearing their rings even though the Father Super-

intendent said they were forbidden to—well if all of them were in the

same boat, and if Bunce was going to be good and already had a good

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

job, then it felt more like the good scary beginning of something larger

than she had ever known, something that would just go on and on and

show her what it was as it happened, like that scene in movies where

at the start you fly over hills and down roads and up to a house in a

town and through a door that opens as you come to it and into the

kitchen where a family is in the middle of their lives. This, though—

the drying up of those letters, the little flight of them failing—this felt

like having and knowing nothing at all. Adolph looked up at her and

she down into the huge pools of his eyes, and he was sure of more than

she was.

Late on the last Saturday of the month—suddenly remembering

the task with a grip to her heart—Connie got Adolph wrapped in the

red-and-white woolens and cap her mother had knitted for him, and

lifted him into the huge blue-black baby carriage for which he was

already too big, and from which he seemed likely to fling himself out

like a movie gangster from a speeding sedan. She walked the carriage

backward down the steep steps before her house (Adolph laughing at

every bump). The house was a double one, each half the mirror image

of the other, to which it was joined like a Siamese twin, two apart-

ments per house. She turned rightward up the street. Leftward went

down under the viaduct and past the millworkers’ houses and the coal

and ice dealer’s to where you caught a bus that went along the train

yards out to where the Bull plant was, the great brick buildings marked

with big numbers, Number 3 where Bunce had worked. Rightward

the street went up for a while, the heavy carriage bouncing sedately

over the seams in the sidewalk, past the blackened and forbidding

Methodist church and then down, past the IGA and into a neighbor-

hood of single houses, to cross the avenue where the brown-brick

grammar school stood on its pillow of earth. On this day the ration

books for the month were given out there. You went around back,

where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym wait-

ing for their mothers; Connie could feel their cold skinned knees and

barked knuckles—Bunce always said that imagining pain and discom-

fort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it

almost never did.

She went in the back door to the strangeness of an empty echoey

school smelling of kids and old lunches, to the cafeteria where the volun-

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 215

teers were handing out booklets and checking names. Most of the volun-

teers were teachers at the school, and since Connie didn’t have a child at

the school they didn’t know her. She carried Adolph in her arms, he was

scared to get down and walk, and of course all the women wanted a

look at him and smiled and asked Connie what his name was.

“Adolph?” said a man behind her in line. “There’s a heck of a name

to lay on a kid.”

“It’s his grandfather’s name,” Connie said, looking straight ahead,

thinking maybe that made it worse.

“Is he a German?”

“It’s a fine name,” said the woman behind the scarred table. A

wooden box filled with stamp books was beside her.

“It was a fine name a couple of years ago,” Connie said. “When he

got it.”

“Well sure. Like Adolphe Menjou.” Connie handed her the ragged

and empty remains of the old book—you couldn’t get a new one with-

out handing in the old—and was given her book of rough gray paper

and a sheet of printed reminders and notices for the month, which she

would sit down later and try to master.

At the door where the people who had been given their books went

out, a man in a sleeveless sweater and a bedraggled bow tie stood by a

folding table. A sandwich board was open beside it. It showed four

women’s faces in profile, almost identical but receding into the dis-

tance; their eyes were lifted toward the horizon or the sky, and their

hair was rolled in fat curls like Connie’s. A wide red band ran across

the middle of the picture as though someone had rushed up and slapped

it on. It said american women—they can do it!

Connie had seen this poster and other posters like it before, in the

movies and in the papers, the newsreel stories about women trooping

off to work in their overalls and bandannas, moving huge machines

and handling tools with big smiles on their faces and then touching up

their makeup after work with a different kind of smile. But just then on

that Saturday the picture struck her as somehow about her in a way

the others before had not. The man in the bow tie looked at her, smil-

ing in an appraising sort of way, but she felt no constraint at his look,

his hands were clasped harmlessly behind him like a minister or a

floorwalker, someone ready to do you good.

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

“Hello,” she said. She let Adolph slip from her and settle to the

ground, where with great care he crept under the tentlike sandwich

board and sat, hands on his knees.

“Cute little fella,” the man said. “His dad in the service?”

Connie raised her eyes to him but said nothing, not evasive though,

feeling her face to be like the faces of the women in the poster, frank

and farsighted and at the same time containing a secret about them-

selves.

“Best thing you could do for him is go down to city hall and fill out

an application for work,” he said then, raising a definite forefinger.

“Everybody can help.”

“I couldn’t, because of,” Connie said, and reached a hand toward

Adolph.

“Lot of girls think that,” the man said. “They find a way.” He

picked up one each of the papers in piles on the table and gave them to

her. “You go on down. You’ll see. Everybody can do something. City

hall. There’s a poster just outside, tells you what to do next. You just

go on from there.”

In the apartment again Connie turned on all the lights to banish the

growing dark. They seemed pale and ineffectual for a long time until

the dark came fully down and they grew strong and yellow and warm.

Bunce hated to have more than just the one bulb burning you needed to

see what you were doing at the moment; when he was with her she

hadn’t minded the little pools of light and the dark rooms around, but

now she did.

“Okay, honey?” she said to Adolph, who sat on the little painted

potty chair in the bathroom, pants down and waiting, hands clasped

together before him like a little old man or a schoolmarm. “Can you

push?” She grunted for him, give him the idea, and he watched her with

interest but wouldn’t imitate. Sometimes she wondered if he was all

there, Adolph. So mild and good and quiet. His eyes now searching her

face, untroubled and interested. “Okay, you sit a while and see. Okay?”

She went out into the kitchen, stepping backward so that he could see

she was still there, still smiling. Then she sat at the table with her book

of stamps and the announcements that had been given out with it.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 217

G, H and J blue stamps, worth a total of forty-eight points a

person, become valid tomorrow, January 24, and are good

throughout the month of February. D, E and F blue stamps, in

use since December 25, expire January 31. Thus there will be an

overlap period of one week in which all six stamps will be valid.

These stamps cover canned, bottled and frozen fruits and vege-

tables and their juices, dry beans, peas, lentils, etc., and processed

foods such as soups, baby foods, baked beans, catsup and chili

sauce.

A bottle of ketchup cost a whopping fifteen points and Bunce

couldn’t live without it. Connie got more points than she could use,

now that it was just her and Adolph. Dolph. Adi. Addo. There just

wasn’t a nickname. Her father-in-law was called Buster by everyone

and always had been.

She had plenty of stamps but not a lot of money. Her purse, soft and

with a crossbones catch like a miniature carpetbag, hung inside her

handbag, attached by a ribbon—meant to keep it from getting lost, she

guessed, unless the whole bag was. She emptied it on the table, the

coins clinking and rolling away merrily on the oilcloth till she caught

them. There weren’t many bills, and only a couple of tens in the tin

candy box on the top shelf.

When Bunce got into the union her father had solemnly taken his

shoulder and Connie’s and said that he was glad, glad to know now

they would never be in want. Want: never to want for anything. Free-

dom from Want was one of the Four Freedoms the President had said

everyone should have, the whole world. The pale ghost children in

newsreels, refugees, eating their bowls of soup but still alert and afraid.

She turned back to the bathroom. If Adolph inclined his head he could

see her in the kitchen, and she could see his little blond head around

the door’s corner.

“Okay? Anything coming?”

He smiled as though at a joke.

There just wasn’t a way to be sure enough money would be coming

in, no way to guarantee it. Every week there might be or there might

not. And every week that there wasn’t would press you further down

till you had gone too far to come back. Of course they weren’t going to

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

starve, her parents and Bunce’s wouldn’t let that happen, but that

didn’t make her feel safe. She thought that now maybe she wouldn’t

ever feel safe again in the way that she once had, and that this moment

of understanding had lain deep within the whole life she had led, at

home and in school and in church, in the movie theater, with the Sodal-

ity girls, in the Plymouth and the big lumpy bed with Bunce. She had

never been safe at all, and she hadn’t known it, and now she did.

“Ine done, Mommy.”

“Okay, sweet. That was a good try.” He pulled up his pants as he

walked, a cute trick he wouldn’t be able to do so well forever, like a

guy hurrying out of a girl’s room before he was caught with her.

City hall, that’s where the man had said to go. Where she’d got her

marriage license, never having been in it before, the tall corridors lined

with gold-numbered wooden doors. A poster outside, to tell you what

to do.

Freedom from Fear. That was another of the four.

On Tuesday (it took a couple of days to make a decision, and she made

it only on the grounds that going downtown and inquiring committed

her to nothing) Connie lined up in the corridor outside the doors of the

United States Employment Agency with a crowd mostly female and of

all ages, far too many to fit into the little waiting room (Connie could

glimpse into it, crowded with people, when the secretary opened the

door to let someone out or call someone in). She’d taken a long time to

dress, not knowing what would look right for someone applying to

work in a factory, where she imagined the jobs would mostly be, and

then—annoyed at herself for trying to make people think she was who

they wanted, when she didn’t know if she even wanted them to think

so—she put on a tartan skirt, a sweater, flats but with a pair of Bunce’s

stockings, her old cloth coat, and a beret. She thought she looked like

anybody.

“Just don’t tell them you can type,” said an older woman behind

her to a friend, a pale and ill-looking blonde. “If they know you can

type you’ll be typing till Tojo’s dead.”

The blonde said nothing. Connie thought the girl was planning to

say that she typed, and Connie wished she could too. She’d taken

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 219

Modern Homemaking instead of typing. In a magazine story she’d

recently looked at, jobs in factories were compared to housework. Run-

ning a drill press, it said, was no different from operating a mangle.

Washing engine parts in chemicals was like washing dishes—gray-

haired women were shown doing it, rubber gloves on their hands, smil-

ing, unafraid.

A crowd of people, hands full of forms, were let out from the

employment office. Connie was in the next group called in. In the office

she got into one of the lines before the counter. All around in every seat

and leaning against the wall women and some men too filled out the

same forms. The room smelled of unemptied ashtrays and overheated

people. The woman at the counter, astonishingly placid amid all this,

with two pencils stuck in her bun, gave Connie a form, even while she

answered what even Connie could tell were stupid questions from

applicants and form fillers. It seemed to Connie that women like this,

with gray buns and patient smiles, were really conducting the life of

the nation while the generals and the statesmen busied themselves with

their important things.

The form was easy to fill out. All the answers were No. Typing?

Shorthand? Experience with Hollerith card sorter? PBX? Chauffeur’s

license? She assumed that if she didn’t understand a question she could

answer No or None. Physical handicap? Color-blind? Hard of hearing?

College degree? Own car? Married? She almost checked No for that

too, going rapidly down the row of boxes.

The lady with the gray bun seemed delighted with her application.

“Unskilled,” she said, as though it were to Connie’s credit. And then,

oblivious of the mob beating against her counter like waves on a rock

face, she engaged Connie in a conversation about where she could

work, what sort of work it would be (“dirty work, sometimes really

dirty,” and she brushed imaginary or symbolic dirt from her own

hands). They talked about Adolph, about what shift Connie might be

able to take, part-time, full-time. Connie could see, through the Vene-

tian blinds, the men on telephones in the back office, checking long

banners of paper; as soon as they hung up one phone they picked up

another. “There,” the woman said, writing words on a card. “Right

near by you. You g’down there tomorrow, eight a.m., and they’ll do the

intake.”

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

Her kindly attention had already slipped away from Connie. Connie

took the card, thinking that she didn’t know exactly when she’d agreed

to do this, and was elbowed gently out of the way by the typist and her

friend. Not until she was back out in the day did she realize where

she’d been sent: to the same factory that was building Bull fighter

planes, where Bunce had worked before he left.

Wednesday was colder. Connie’s mother had come the day before, a

little doubtful, speaking in the small voice that Connie knew meant

she didn’t approve—or rather didn’t know whether to approve or not,

but thought not. Like the annuity her husband had invested his money

in, or Eleanor Roosevelt’s gadding, or Connie’s first pair of saddle

shoes. Anyway she was glad to see her grandson, and Adolph gave her

the wholehearted face of wondering joy—how could you resist it?

Connie already had her coat on and was tying her kerchief under her

chin. She wore a pair of slacks (the working women in the newsreels all

wore them, Connie didn’t have to explain) and those same saddle

shoes, their white parts scuffed and dingy.

“There’s a can of tomato soup,” she said to her mother. For a

moment she couldn’t find the card given to her the day before, no here

it was in the coat’s inside pocket. “And some Velveeta cheese you can

put in it.” Her mother said nothing, and would do as she saw fit, but

Connie needed to show her that she’d thought about this and was pre-

pared. She hugged Adolph with a strange sudden passion, as though it

might be a long time till she returned, and went out and down the

steep steps into the unwelcoming day. She turned left not right at the

sidewalk. In this direction there had never been anything of much use

to her. The sidewalk tilted downward, its squares cracked and buckled,

and in a few blocks Connie passed under the black railroad viaduct

that crossed all that industrial bottom. A train was chugging toward

the crossing over her head—she’d heard its approaching wail as she left

her house—and just as Connie walked under, it did cross, thudding

and still screaming. The damp sky turned away the ashy yellow smoke,

the hollow of earth drew it down and it covered Connie like a dropped

curtain, bitter and stinging; for a moment she couldn’t see anything at

all, but then she parted the curtain and came out on the other side; the

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 221

train had passed. Farther on was the green wooden shelter where the

bus stopped.

Why should she feel ashamed, when no one knew or could guess

she was here not because she wanted to help and be a good person but

because she was afraid—more afraid of not having enough than she

was afraid to go farther on, on this side where she had not before

belonged? The shelter, and the bus when it came, was full of women

and men talking and complaining and kidding one another, and some

others like her seemingly here for the first time and looking around

themselves boldly or uncertainly, peach-faced teenagers too skinny to

be soldiers, women her mother’s age, one in a fox fur piece. Together.

Connie clung to the enameled pole, rocked with all of them.

At a farther stop a problem of some kind arose—Connie in the

dense middle of the bus couldn’t see it directly, only hear the exchange

between the driver and someone having trouble getting on. Listen

mister I am under no obligation. Reserve the right I mean. Other voices

entered in, either taking the driver’s side that whoever it was couldn’t

be accommodated, or arguing with the driver and the others to let the

guy on, give him a hand for Chrissake, what’s it to ya, let’s get this

wagon rolling. One of the voices must have been the fellow trying to

get on, but Connie couldn’t tell which. Then she could see a couple of

people had joined in to help him despite the driver and the others, and

a long crutch was handed up and then another, and after them a lanky

body, a man in a fedora and a houndstooth jacket. He was lifted up

into the bus like someone pulled from a well, looking startled and wary

and maybe grateful, while the complainers still went on about moving

along, voices from Connie’s back of the bus calling out impatiently

now also. The gears of the bus ground horribly. Everybody seemed to

have an opinion about the matter, but nobody spoke to the young man

himself as far as she could tell; she could see his hat bobbing a little

between some of their heads.

At the various plant and shop gates the workers got off—Connie

could see, out the rear window, another bus just behind hers, carrying

more—until the Bull plant was reached. Once, Connie had brought

Bunce his lunch pail here when he’d forgot it, and he’d told her never to

come again. There was an aluminum model of the Bull fighter plane in

front, looking unlikely or imaginary, but the buildings of the plant

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

behind were just factory buildings, three big brick buildings that had

once made something else and were now combined. 1. 2. 3. Connie got

out the rear door with some others; she glanced back once at the crip-

pled man now seated and holding his crutches by the middle hand-bar,

like a man holding a trombone. She could see his back was severely

swayed.

“If that was me I’d kill myself,” a man walking beside her said. He

was hatless and wore a badge like Bunce’s pinned to his jacket. Connie

said nothing; she shrank from people who offered opinions like that

out loud in public to no one. The man had a black dead look, as though

he might just kill himself anyway. They all walked toward the gates of

Number 3, just then sliding open on their tracks.

She did no work that day, but still she was there the whole of the shift.

With the other new employees she was set on a broad yellow stripe

painted on the concrete floor and already flaking away, and told to

follow it to the different places she needed to go. Far off the huge

nameless noises of the plant could be heard. She hadn’t thought she’d

just arrive and take her place in line and begin doing one of the things

shown in the magazines, but she hadn’t had a different picture of what

would happen either. The first place the yellow stripe led to was a long

room with a paper sign on the door that said Induction. Inside were a

number of booths and stations labeled with arrows to show you how

to proceed. At Requisition she handed in her card from the govern-

ment employment agency but had to go through the same information

again, with variations, as the clerk filled in things without lifting his

eyes; he handed her forms and asked, still not looking up, if she had

any questions, and after a moment of being unable to produce a

thought of any kind she said no. Then at the next station she had to

show her birth certificate, and here it is, with two infant footprints,

but it’s the wrong thing—this is a hospital notice of live birth and not

a legal birth certificate like the others have, an engrossed document

with seals. The clerk shrugged wearily. Connie thought of offering her

grown-up feet for comparison, but the clerk just handed it back to her

without looking up and pointed the way to the next booth. She folded

up the little feet. The Clock Clerk (that’s who the sign said the next

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 223

person was) gave her an employee number and a time card and told

her how to use it. Her starting rate of pay was fifty cents an hour for

base-rate production and a bonus prorated on work done above the

base. Any questions? Connie said no. Probably it would all be obvious

what to do and how to do it if she actually started. Behind her the line

of new employees shuffled forward. She had her fingerprints taken, by

a man who grasped her fingers and thumbs like tools, pressed them

firmly on the somehow loathsome leaking purple pad and rolled them

expertly onto the spaces on a paper form. Her employee number was

written on the top. Herself and none other. She was photographed,

asked curtly to take off her hat, no time to check her hair or choose an

expression. Bunce had looked in his photograph like John Garfield in

a picture they’d post outside a theater, he always looked splendid in

pictures. Next she and a group of others were read the Espionage Act

at a mile a minute. By Order of the President of the United States.

Connie had already decided that she would figure out some way to tell

them she couldn’t do this, she’d made a mistake and couldn’t come

back, she was sorry sorry sorry. She would write a letter maybe. But

meanwhile there was no way to turn back, she could only follow the

yellow band with the others pressing behind her; she went down a

strange-smelling hall to Physical Examinations. Just looking in at the

door into the room, where screens had been set up to roughly divide

the men from the women, she felt shamed and exposed and wondered

why she’d ever thought she was brave enough to do this. What you

imagine something is going to be like before you jump into it is never

what it will be, it’s just the feeling you have at the time, made into a

picture, like that picture of the three women looking into the sky and

the future.

She had a chest X-ray, the remarkably ugly and bewigged nurse

pushing Connie into place before the glass of the machine and pulling

her arms back, as though she meant to handcuff her; then she took

Connie’s blood pressure and murmured through a list of questions so

fast Connie hardly had time to think of an answer. The nurse did the

things they always did at physicals without explanation, learning facts

they wouldn’t or didn’t have time to divulge. Nothing so bad as to keep

her from working here: her form was stamped and the stamp signed

across by the nurse, who capped her pen and was eyeing the next in

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

line even as she handed the sheet to Connie to add to the others she had

been given.

After that she was herded into a group cut out from the mass of

applicants and sent with them into a room full of benches, where they

were each seated before a big square magnifying glass in a frame. A tin

box of tiny gears was under the glass. A man at the center of the room

in a gray cloth coat waited till they were all seated, then started talking

loudly and distinctly, telling them what they were to do. It was a

Manual Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test. You were to Pick Up a Single

Pinion with Thumb and Forefinger. Turn the Pinion Clockwise between

the Two Fingers. Look to See if the Teeth of the Pinion are All of the

Same Width. When you have Assessed the Pinion, place it either in the

Left Box, Accepted, or the Right Box, Rejected. Work as Fast and

Accurately as you Can. You have Five Minutes. He lifted his finger,

pressed a button on the big watch he held, and said Begin. Just then a

woman next to Connie piped up: Were the airplanes really going to use

these little things if we-all accept them? The man smiled and laughed

and said Goodness no, it was just a test, there were good ones and bad

ones in the box and you just try to tell which are which, and everybody

laughed a little and he raised his finger again and said Begin.

Connie picked up one of the little things with thumb and forefinger.

It took a moment to adjust her vision to the hugely enlarged fingertips

she saw, their uncared-for nails, she’d meant to give herself a manicure,

and the toothed wheel; she moved it back and forth until it came clear.

But as soon as it did she saw that one of the teeth was wider, or had a

slight burr or something on it. She put it in the right box, and picked

up another. Around her she was aware of the voices of the other appli-

cants, complaining or marveling at the task, laughing when they

dropped or fumbled the pinions, but almost immediately all the noise

sank away and she picked up the pinions one after another; for a

moment she doubted herself—would she really see a difference, and

was it a big enough difference? But she felt the differences so dis-

tinctly—she always knew when she saw one—that she decided just to

trust herself. Before the five minutes were up she had emptied her box,

sorted left and right, and the man glanced up from his watch at her

doubtfully or with a little smile that seemed to say Oh you think so?

Then he said Stop. They were each to leave the proper form (pink) next

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 225

to their work, which would be returned to them later. Then they were

sent out a farther door as another group came in behind.

It was time for lunch.

She wasn’t the only one whose husband had worked here, though almost

all the ones who spoke up said their husbands had been drafted or

joined up, and that was the reason they applied. One said her husband

would kill her if he found out. She needed the money, she said, and

when no one responded to that, shrugged one shoulder and went back

to her sandwich. Connie wanted to ask her more, since she had no idea

what Bunce would think about her taking a job, though whenever she

thought about telling him, or him finding out, a kind of dread came up

under her heart. But he’d have to understand. He was a good man;

everybody who knew him said so. And when that dread arose there

was Adolph too, as in one of those dreams where you leave your child

for a minute to do something, and that leads to something else, and

you remember the kid finally but by then the whole world’s changed

and there’s no way to get back to him.

She was thinking those things when her shoulder was touched, and

she leapt slightly—it was easy to startle her, Bunce liked that about her,

and was pleased that he knew it. The man behind her, stepping back at

her response, was the one in the gray cloth coat who had given them

the Manual Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test.

“Mind if I see your card?” he said.

She stood, picked up the pile of colored papers small and large she’d

been collecting all day, and began looking through them. The man saw

what he wanted and neatly two-fingered it out of the pile, looked at it

back and front. “Mrs. Constance Wrobleski.” He compared the card

to the pink sheet he had.

“Yes.” She had a sudden thought that he had discerned she wanted

to get out without signing up for a job, and was here to send her home.

No, how dumb.

“I wanted to ask,” he said. “Have you ever done any work like this

before? I mean like the little job you did there?” He pointed his head in

the direction of the test room.

“Um no,” Connie said.

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

“I don’t mean a job, but for instance anything like retouching

photos, or similar?”

Connie said nothing, not even sure what that was. She was getting

a little restive at having to answer No to questions about what she

could do or had done.

“Ever do fine needlework?”

“No. Never.”

The man looked again at the sheet in his hand. “Well, I must say

you have remarkable visual acuity. You scored near a hundred percent

on that task. And you did it in near record time.”

He looked up now and gave her a big smile, as though he had been

conscious all along that he was being unsettling but that the joke was

over. “Really?” she said.

“Yes.” He grinned more broadly. “You surprise yourself?”

“Well I don’t know. I mean I didn’t think.”

“All right, well listen now. We’d here like to encourage you to come

and take another test or so. We think somebody like you could be of

some real service. The tests’ll take an hour or so, not more.”

Connie regarded him in amazement, and said nothing.

“It might mean a better pay rate,” the man said, as though in confi-

dence.

“Okay,” Connie said.

“You finished up your lunch?”

She looked back at the deflated bag, and at the women at the table,

who had all turned to her, like the faces of girls at school when one of

them was called out by a nun for some special purpose: was it good or

bad? Good for them, bad for her? Or the opposite? “All done,” Connie

said. The man motioned to her place at the table, and Connie first

thought he meant she ought to pick up her leavings, then saw he wanted

her to take her coat and follow him, and she did.

Her revised pay rate would be sixty cents an hour, a sum she kept mul-

tiplying all the way home in various combinations, by the day, the

minute, the week, the month. Above that base rate she would get a half

a cent more for every ten pieces completed, and the man who put her

through her tests (which included loading tiny ball bearings into a

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 227

wheel, moving through a series of meaningless tasks in the most effi-

cient way, reading eye charts through elaborate goggles) said she was

sure to do well with that, and in not too long a time she would be

moving up into Quality Control and make just a little more, if she

chose to stay, which he hoped she would—nodding at her in an affir-

mative way that made it hard for her to resist nodding back. She was

amazed to find she was good at something she’d never known about

before, not good at a task or good at sticking to it or any of those

qualities, but good at it in herself, in her being, her body: eyes and fin-

gers and senses. She tried to remember instances where she had used

those abilities without noticing them, in homemaking class, in making

birthday cards or Spiritual Bouquets, finding lost things, picking up

pins, but nothing struck her. Hand-Eye Coordination. That was the

talent really, plus the Visual Acuity. She had excellent visual acuity. She

said it out loud as she went up the hill under the viaduct toward her

street: excellent visual acuity. She looked steadily and intently to where

her own house was just then coming into view, and by somehow not

straining but relaxing—not pointing her vision toward the place but

opening her eyes to receive the incoming pictures—she could clearly

see someone standing on the porch. It was the woman in the top apart-

ment of the right-hand house, a long-armed bony square-jawed woman

named Mrs. Freundlich. She had lived there with her grown son, who

for some reason had not been drafted for a long time; maybe he was

too fat, though that didn’t seem to keep others out. When he finally did

get his notice and went away the mother was left; she seemed never to

come out of her apartment, and Connie would have felt sorry for her,

except that she seemed to forbid sympathy. She was standing on the

steps of the building, hands under her apron, a coat over it, seeming

lost in thought, maybe waiting for someone (the mailman?). Connie,

exalted somehow by her day at the Bull plant, waved and smiled at the

woman as she came closer, and got an idea at the same moment. It was

only a matter of thinking how to put it.

“How is your son, Mrs. Freundlich? How is he doing?”

“Got a postal card t’other day,” the woman said, leaving it at that.

“Does that leave you a lot of time?” Connie asked. “Him not being

here, I mean?” A look of incomprehension grew across the old lady’s

face, and Connie hurried on. She got through the basic proposal, and

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

said that she’d be making good money at the plant and could pay what-

ever Mrs. Freundlich thought was fair, to all of which Mrs. Freundlich

listened without response, when she suddenly said, “Does he mind?”

Connie tried out a couple of possible meanings for this and then

said “Oh sure. Yes. He’s a good boy.”

“I won’t have him if he won’t mind.”

Connie almost told her to go talk to Adolph’s grandmother, who

was upstairs with him right now, but instead she just let the idea sink

in a little; and after a strange silent moment Mrs. Freundlich seemed to

collect herself and began to ask sensible questions and offer arrange-

ments and even praised Connie brusquely for doing war work.

So that was done. What a piece of luck. Adolph would be right in

the building, and her mother could go home. And Connie Wrobleski,

without husband or child, would spend all day doing what? Something

she had never done before. The world was no longer the same as it was:

everyone said so.

2

For all the talk about her visual acuity and all that, the job Connie

was given without explanation or apology was running a huge

electric welder that formed U-shaped pieces of steel into frame

parts, and mostly involved turning it on and off at the right times.

She fed in the half-circle of steel, along with a steel cylinder, which was

the sleeve for a driving pinion (that’s what she was told it was), shut the

machine door, and threw a switch to turn on the juice. At intervals she

had to press big buttons to govern the process, but the machine had a

revolving guard that prevented her pressing any but the right one at the

right instant; as long as she could move her arm she couldn’t go wrong.

It seemed amazing, fearsome, to her, but the engineer who taught her

about it treated it like it was an antique, a buggy, a cider press, smack-

ing it with his hand now and then and talking to it or about it, Come

on old horse, aw now don’t go doing that, y’old rattletrap. When it

seized up for one reason or another he had to come back, de couple the

power cords, open the side panels, and do things she couldn’t under-

stand while she stood arms crossed nearby trying to look ready to help.

Why was he so angry? She felt she had descended into another kind of

world, where everything had grown huge, or she had grown small.

Noises here were vast: there was a continuous ringing of metal, a sledge

dropped onto steel flooring plates made a noise huger than she had

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

known was possible just from somebody dropping something. The

power cords that the annoyed engineer coupled and decoupled from

the rank of outlets on the wall were thicker than her arm, the couplings

like buckets, things unrelated to lamp cords or plugs or the twisted

wires of electric fans—when he signaled her to pull the start-up switch

again, the power seemed to hit the machine with a ringing blow,

making it shudder.

The whole place was also dirty and messy, which surprised her.

Piles of stuff in process covered with dust and overlaid with other stuff,

as though somebody had bought the wrong things and just left them

sitting. There was something wrong here: some people, like her super-

visor, worked constantly, and others seemed not to work at all, they

jawed and laughed, sorted through machine parts idly and knocked off

for lunch before the horn sounded; far off amid the noise of machinery

she could hear human rows too. Maybe it was always like this, factory

work, as full of loose ends and cross-purposes as home, though she

was surprised to think it was so; in the movies work always proceeded

through the stages of production purposefully, white molten metal

poured into rods, rods shaped into this or that, a product taking shape

as farsighted men gave directions to great machines and the assembly

line crawled forward. Had she learned better? Or was it just this place?

Bunce always griped about it, said it was a shambles. She was sorry

that in her part of the plant she didn’t even see the airplanes taking

shape; that was in another of the three buildings that were combined

into the Bull works.

“It’s crazy,” a woman said to her in the lunchroom, lifting a sand-

wich to her mouth with hands not quite cleaned of metal dust, in her

nails and the ridges of her knuckles. “They build the planes here but

there’s nowhere to fly ’em, you know, test ’em out. So when they’re all

built they take them apart, put the pieces on a train, and take ’em out

to a field out there somewheres, and put the pieces together again to fly

the things.” She chewed, seeming delighted with the craziness of it. “I

guess they know best.”

Though the work itself didn’t seem hard, it was continuous, unre-

lenting, in a way nothing she’d ever done before was; the only thing it

resembled was the couple of days in the late summer when her dad

went out to the country and bought bushel baskets of peaches, and she

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 231

and her mother and her mother’s and father’s sisters all canned peaches,

skinning and cutting and scalding the fruit, heating the huge black

kettles, lowering the pale green Ball jars in their racks into the boiling

water; then filling the jars, pouring the melted paraffin over each top to

seal it, over and over, never done, her father carrying the filled jars to

the basement, climbing up again, weary and persistent. Like that, but

every day, endlessly, and without the steady accumulation of good

things to eat in the sweet steam. At evening she made it to the bus and

walked back up the hill feeling made out of sticks and stones, watching

her building come into view with a longing so fervent it was as though

she’d never make it.

“Was he good?” she asked Mrs. Freundlich, who seemed to watch

from her window to see Connie approaching and was always there to

throw open the door before she reached it, displaying Adolph ready

to go.

“Well,” Mrs. Freundlich said, looking down at Adolph as though

trying to make a decision.

He was dressed and clean, in fact his little cheeks shone like a car-

toon kid’s, one of the Campbell’s soup kids, and his hair was combed

and wet on his head. He looked up at his mother with that huge happy

but questioning look, and—unable to answer it—Connie swept him

up, and he held tight to her, smelling of something like Florida water

and his own good smell; and she thanked Mrs. Freundlich briefly and

took him away, since she’d learned that the woman found it a chore to

describe what she and Adolph had done all day. It was all right was

about as explicit as she got. Connie wondered if she even spoke to

him.

Holding him on her hip with one arm she fingered a letter from

Bunce from her mailbox. She glimpsed Mrs. Freundlich, half-hidden

behind her unclosed door, studying her through the door’s window.

Honey, Well I have changed jobs again and am working for Van

Damme Aero in their big plant here. The moneys better and the

place is swell, all new built, the best of everything. They even

have a bank right here in the plant! Mostly women work here I

have to say they don’t know much tho they would learn faster if

somebody took an interest in them. They are ready for anything.

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

Say this is the place to be, out west, I doubt I’ll be able to live in

that smoky old town again. Bye for now, Bunce.

There was a postal money order for twenty dollars in the envelope.

The postmark on the envelope said Ponca City, but the letters signify-

ing the state were smeared and there wasn’t any return address on it.

You should always put that on, so that letters can find their way back

to you if they are misdirected. Always.

She folded the letter back up along the folds he had made and

thought she would quit her job. She felt certain she’d done something

to make him not want to come home, and all she could think of was

that she’d gone out and taken a job and not told him, and it was as

though her having done that had been somehow communicated to him

over the spaces between them, between here and the West, maybe in

the war news they all shared, no matter that it was crazy to think

that.

Why hadn’t she pleaded with him to stay, back then when he had

decided to quit? She saw as though arrayed across the nation those

smiling willing women of the magazine covers and the newsreels,

marching to work to stand all day beside a helpful man, rising on tiptoe

to nail this or screw that, his hot eyes on her, cap lifted in admiration.

He wasn’t coming back. He was just going to go on farther into the

war, and when it was over he would be where he was, he’d go on from

there rather than turning back.

That night she woke in the deep dark, startled out of sleep by her

own cry. Something she had dreamed or learned, she couldn’t remem-

ber what. She thought of that letter from Bunce and all that it had left

unsaid, the thing that had been going on all along and that she hadn’t

really known and now she did. She lay entirely still, feeling that she

was on the point of dissolution, that she would fall to pieces, not just

as a way of talking but actually: that what made up her would dissoci-

ate and shrivel away like ash. He would never come back. She knew it,

it had been what was going to happen from the beginning, like a dealt

hand of cards. If she could go back now to before he left, she’d hold

him tight and promise him anything.

Night went on unrelieved. She was aware of the ticking of the clock,

warning her with disinterested compassion of the time passing, that

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 233

before the light was full she would have to get up to get to work. She

began a rosary: not wanting to move to get her beads from where they

hung on the dresser mirror, afraid that if she moved she’d come apart

somehow, she counted on her fingers. Pray for us sinners now and at

the hour of our deaths. When the alarm went off at last it woke her,

though she had no memory of having slept again.

The day after that was her day off, and she went to visit Bunce’s par-

ents, as she had promised Bunce she would do, to bring Adolph for

them to see. She took a city bus to the station and the interurban to the

neighborhood they lived in, in a square plain house covered in some-

thing meant to look like bricks. For some reason it was a hard house to

be glad to go into—stern or forbidding—but once inside it was nice,

and Bunce’s parents were as warm as little stoves. Like her, Bunce was

an only child.

“Oh my gosh, how he’s grown! Dad, come see!”

Bunce’s father had been a machinist too, but he’d been in an acci-

dent at work long before, bones crushed in the overturning of a

mechanical bin, Connie had never been able to picture it exactly,

though she could a little better now, the Bull plant seemed like it was

made to cause awful accidents, she saw two or three nearly happen

every day. He lived on a workmen’s compensation pension and was in

pain a lot, though rosy-cheeked and always smiling. He grabbed for his

cane and got up with effort from his chair, though Connie tried to

keep him there.

“Well hello, little fella,” he said, tottering above Adolph. “Say you’re

doing a wonderful job with him, Connie, we’re so proud of you, bear-

ing up. If there’s anything we can do, we wantcha to let us know.”

She hadn’t told them she was working, and she’d warned her mother

not to tell them; her mother had anyway known not to.

They gathered around the table, and Mom Wrobleski put out a

cake, which had an epic tale behind it to tell, how it had come to be, as

every cake did that year—the sugar, the raisins, the eggs. They took

turns holding Adolph and feeding him cake. Connie had dressed him

in his little brown suit like a soldier’s with the tie attached—Mom said

he looked like Herbert Hoover, but Buster said John Bunny. And all

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

the time the hollow of absence and guilt and fear opened and shrank,

opened and shrank again inside Connie.

His parents too had had letters from Bunce, and they brought them

out to read while the percolator burbled comically. His letters to them

were more detailed, less jaunty. He described the work he did to his

father; he complained more expansively to his mother, who shook her

head in sympathy and made that noise with tongue and teeth that has

no name. And he gave them, carefully and thoroughly, the addresses

where they could write back to him. Gosh I miss you old folks at

home.

“I had a letter just yesterday,” Connie said. They turned toward

her, leaned in even, smiling and eager. The cake-matter turned in her

stomach. “Well he’s doing fine,” she said. The coffeepot burped power-

fully, not only throwing coffee up into the little glass bulb at the top

but also lifting the lid to emit a puff of steam; Adolph laughed and

made the noise too, and they all laughed together. Connie could go on.

“He’s moved on to a new plant,” she said. “Everything’s wonderful

there. It’s all new. He just went. They needed people.”

“I’ll be,” said Mom. “Where did you say?”

“Ponca City,” Connie said. “Van Damme Aero.”

Buster clambered from his chair, making noises, going from chair-

back to chair-back to his own big mauve armchair with the antimacas-

sars on the arms and back, where he spent most of his day. Beside it

there was a maple magazine holder, and from it he pulled a big picture

magazine. “Here,” he said. “For gosh sakes it must be here.”

They laid it on the table amid them. The cover showed a vast semi-

circle that you could only tell was a building because workers were

streaming into it, tiny figures, maybe one of them Bunce. Harsh sun-

light cast their black shadows on the macadam. building the great

warbird in indian country, it said.

Buster flipped through the pages, past the ads for whiskey and

cleaners and radio tubes and life insurance, every one telling how they

were helping win the war. “Here it is,” Mom said.

In the great hangar the wingless bodies were lined up one behind

the other, each one with its crowd of workers around it. Married

couples worked on the factory floor together, it said: one couple were

midgets. In another part of the plant drafting tables went on farther

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 235

than you could make them out, men and some women too bent over

them and the fluorescent strip lighting overhead matching their white

tables. Women who carried messages through the vast spaces to the

designers and engineers went on roller skates!

“ ‘The cafeteria is larger than a city block,’ ” Mom read. “ ‘Seven-

teen hundred people can be served at a time.’ ” You could see them, six

lines of workers in their uniforms, trays in hand, passing the steam

tables. Mom looked again among them for Bunce, but Buster said they

would have taken these pictures long ago, before the boy got there, use

your head. The white walls, gleaming as though wet, were all made of

tile.

“ ‘Each worker receives a health code number and a card, listing job

capability and description and any health conditions,’ ” Mom read.

“ ‘Three clinics serve the plant, and a full hospital is being built in the

city nearby.’ Imagine.” There was a picture of a large man in a double-

breasted suit, meeting with a delegation of Indians: Henry Van Damme.

The health cards were his idea. He’d even thought of having a psy-

chologist in the clinics. For instance to talk to, if someone lost someone

in the war.

“Oh look,” said Mom. A picture showed the nursery: you seemed

to be looking in through wide high plate-glass windows at a bright

indoors. In playrooms protected from plant traffic trained nurses cared

for workers’ children, hundreds of them, Mexican, Indian, black and

white children all together. Cost was seventy-five cents a day, a dollar

and a quarter for two kids. “Why that’s not more than I—” Connie

said, then stopped, but she hadn’t been heard or understood. “Oh pre-

cious,” she said: a boy in rompers, a smiling nurse bent down to hear

him. “ ‘Fresh fruits and vegetables are abundant, grown in the huge

Victory Gardens in surrounding fields.’ ”

They each turned the magazine to themselves to look, and passed it

on. The sweep of the corn rows was like the curving sweep of the win-

dowed nursery wall, like the sweep of the drafting tables under their

banks of lights. They read every word. “If the world could be like this,”

Buster said.

When it was growing dark, Connie and his grandmother wrapped

Adolph up again in his warm suit as he looked from one face to the

other. Sometimes doing this Connie thought she could remember what

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

it had been like to be handled this way, by big loving smiling people

who did everything for you.

It was so clear outside you could see stars, though the sky was pale

and green at the horizon, the thin bare trees and the buildings and the

metal trellis of the overpass as though drawn in ink with fearful preci-

sion. Adolph lay against her, put to sleep by her motion. Bunce had

said that ages ago, when we all were living in the woods, you had to

keep quiet as you traveled so the wolves and such wouldn’t hear you,

which means it’s natural that babies would fall asleep when their moth-

ers walk. It makes sense.

You have to fight for him. Your man. She heard herself say it to her-

self. You have to not let him go, you have to fight, you can fight and

you have to. The hard heels of her shoes struck the pavement. You have

to go and fight for your man. It was part of what you had to do, and

she knew she would.

The next day at the plant it was evident that something big was wrong.

Lines had stopped moving that were always going when she got there;

some of the ever-present racket was stilled, which made the place seem

somehow bigger, empty and expectant. Before noon Connie ran out of

parts to shape, and the little electric truck didn’t roll by with more.

Sometimes that had happened before, but she’d never had to wait more

than a few minutes before it came, driven too fast by the man with one

built-up shoe on his short leg. Connie looked around for the supervi-

sor, but he wasn’t where he usually was. There was nothing to do but

stand by her machine, ready to go. She felt conspicuous even though no

one was looking her way, except the man at the next machine whom

she distrusted, who left his place with a foxy grin her way, took a seat

on some boxes and lit a forbidden smoke.

Just then the noon horn sounded, though it wasn’t nearly lunch-

time. Everyone stopped working; some people downed tools and drifted

toward the lunchroom and then came back again. Connie saw coming

down the line a number of men, her own supervisor and some others in

shirtsleeves, and three or four men grim-faced in overcoats and hats

whom she had seen roving through the plant lately asking questions

and making notes. They stopped at each station and said a few words

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 237

to the workers and went on. The man next down from Connie listened

and then tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it with his heel in

disgust.

“The plant’s closing, sweetheart,” said the man who reached her

first. She could see that a badge was clipped to his lapel beneath the

overcoat. “Everybody’s going to be let go. Pack your gear and go down

to payroll for severance.”

She had no gear. He had moved on before she could speak. The

union man, looking harried and put-upon—his wiry hair springing in

exasperation from his temples—gave her a numbered chit and told her

to hand it in with her time card. Connie opened her mouth to speak.

“Bankruptcy,” said the union man. “Receivership. The jig’s up. Go

home. Apply tomorrow at the union office for unemployment compen-

sation forms.” One of the other men took his arm and drew him along.

Workers were leaving their places and falling in behind them. The

union man began walking backward like an usher at the movies, trying

to answer questions. Connie could hear the big thuds of electric motors

being shut down.

She followed the crowd. She thought it was a good thing that the

union steward stood between the workers and the officers and manag-

ers who strode forward carrying their news; some of the people were

angry and shouting, women were crying; some seemed unsurprised,

they’d known it all along, mismanagement, big shots, profiteers. It felt

like a march, a protest. At the juncture where you turned off to the

cafeteria and the coatrooms and the exit, the crowd parted, some to go

out and others, querulous or angry, still in pursuit of the closed-faced

officers.

Connie turned back against the traffic.

She went, begging pardon, through the people and back down the

now near-empty factory. A glimmer of dust that seemed to have been

stirred up by the upheaval stood in the haloes of the big overhead lights.

Connie went down the stairs and along the passage to the Number 3

building, where she had first been examined and tested. Once there—

after a wrong turn into a wing of offices where more harried people

were emptying file drawers and piling up folders, who looked up in

suspicion to see her—she found the yellow line painted on the floor

and followed it back toward the intake rooms. At first there seemed no

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

one there at all, the nurse’s station closed and the X-ray machine

hooded in black, but in the room where tests were given she found the

gray man in the gray cloth coat who had administered the Manual

Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test. He was sitting on a table, a coffee

mug beside him, swinging his legs like a child.

“Hello,” she said.

He looked up, weary, maybe sad. She suddenly felt sorry for him.

“I wonder,” she said. “If I could get back my test.”

He said nothing; lifting his eyebrows seemed all he had the strength

to do.

“I took a test when I came here. A month ago, or really five weeks.

I . . . You said I did well. Visual Acuity. My name is Constance

Wrobleski. I would like to have that test. Or a copy if you have one.”

He seemed to remember, or maybe not, but he let himself down

gingerly off the table—his socks fallen around his white ankles were

dispiriting—and motioning to Connie to follow him he went back the

way Connie had come. She wanted to say something, that she was

sorry about the plant and the Bull, and would it be opening again later,

and what would become of him now, but all these seemed like the

wrong thing. At a turning he led her into those offices where she had

earlier found herself by mistake. Now a woman had lowered her head

onto her desk and apparently was weeping; no one paid attention to

her, only kept on with what they were doing, which seemed at once

pointless and urgent to Connie.

The man she followed was oblivious to all this, only went on stooped

and purposeful as though this were a day like any other, moving along

a rank of tall filing cabinets until he found the drawer he wanted;

clicked its catch and slid it open on its greased tracks; fingered through

the papers within, by their upstanding tabs; stopped, went back a few,

and pulled out a paper, which he looked at up and down to make sure

it was what he thought it was. It was a plain white form with the name

of the test on it and her name and employee number. It listed the tests

she’d taken, with a blue check next to each, and at the bottom a row of

boxes to check, labeled Below Normal, Normal, Above Normal, Supe-

rior. Hers was checked in the Superior box.

“All yours,” he said.

“You sure you don’t need it?” she asked.

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 239

He laughed gently. “I certainly don’t,” he said. “You take that and

go on. Find something else. You can help. You ought to.”

It was after two by the time Connie got off one of the crowded buses

that were carrying away all the laid-off Bull workers. She’d been given

ten days’ severance pay but she hadn’t worked long enough to get any

unemployment compensation; there was, she was told, always welfare.

The no-strike agreement the unions had all made with the government

meant they wouldn’t or couldn’t stand up for the workers and get any

better deal; things just had to go on as fast as they could, everybody

dispersed to look for work elsewhere. Maybe the Bull works would be

reorganized and reopen, maybe not, but you couldn’t wait.

When she got to her building she realized that at this hour Mrs.

Freundlich wouldn’t be waiting for her with Adolph; she pressed the

electric doorbell, but it didn’t seem to be working, and she opened the

door and went up. Just as she reached the apartment door it was flung

open, Mrs. Freundlich red-faced and with an expression Connie

couldn’t name, shock or fear or guilt or.

“I’m off early,” Connie said. She didn’t feel like explaining. “I’ll

take Adolph now, all right?”

The woman glanced behind herself, as though she’d heard some-

thing that way. And back at Connie.

“You’ll get the whole day’s pay,” Connie said.

Mrs. Freundlich turned from the door and marched away with a

heavy tread that Connie realized she’d often heard without knowing

what it was. She followed, across the worn Turkey carpet and the hulk-

ing mahogany table and sideboard—who brought such stuff into an

apartment?—and into a bedroom. Adolph wasn’t there, but on the

steam radiator a pair of his pants was laid to dry.

“Oh dear,” said Connie. “Oh no.”

Without a word—she hadn’t spoken one yet—Mrs. Freundlich

opened the closet door. At first Connie couldn’t see into the dark space,

or was so unready for what was in there that she misread it. Adolph.

Adolph had been put there, in the dark, amid the old lady’s coats and

dresses and shoes, on a little stool, and shut in. He looked like a culprit,

eyes wide, holding his hands together as he did when he was frightened.

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

“Wouldn’t mind,” said Mrs. Freundlich. “I warned him. Warned

you too.”

“Oh my God my baby!” Connie reached with both hands into the

closet and lifted Adolph out. Now he was crying, crying Mommy into

her ear in awful gladness and clinging hard around her neck. “How

long has he been in there?” Connie said to Mrs. Freundlich. “How

could you do that, how could you,” she cried, even as she bore the

child out of the bedroom and out of the apartment as though from a

fire. “You awful woman!”

“Serves him right,” said Mrs. Freundlich, tramping after her, still

red-faced and defiant. “All’s I can say.”

Connie pushed past her and out the door.

“You’ll want his trousers,” the old woman called after her.

Back in her own kitchen Connie decided that the best thing to do

was never to speak to Adolph about what had happened in that place,

never, and just love her son and teach him he was a good good boy and

he didn’t need to be afraid of anybody or anything. She told him so

now, even as she tried to get him to loosen his hold on her; she could

feel his heart beating against her.

“You’re a good boy,” she said. “A good boy.”

In another part of her heart and mind she was making calculations,

counting money she had and money she could get. She kept thinking

and counting while Adolph napped in the bed beside her—unwilling to

let her go, his big blond head buried in her side. When he awoke and

after he ate, Connie pulled out his potty from where it was kept behind

the bathroom door.

“I don’t want to, Mommy,” he said, regarding it with something

like alarm, its white basin, its decals of rabbit and kitty.

“It’s okay,” Connie said. “Just try.”

He hung back. Connie at last knelt before him, bringing her face

right before his. “Okay, honey,” she said. “Listen. We have to go on a

trip. You and me. Okay? On a train. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’re going to go find your daddy. Okay?”

“Okay.”

It occurred to Connie that sons had to love their fathers, but that if

you were two years old and had never lived a human life before, you

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 241

might not think it was strange to have your father leave. You wouldn’t

think anything was strange; you wouldn’t know. You’d know well

enough what you wanted and what you didn’t, though.

“So you have to learn,” she said, holding his shoulders in her hands.

“To go in the potty. So we can travel, ride on the train. Okay?”

Of this he was less sure. He said nothing.

“Two weeks,” Connie said. It would take her that long to close up

the apartment, tell her parents and Bunce’s parents, a hot wave of

shame and foreboding at that thought, but this first, nothing without

this. She held up a V of fingers before him. “That’s how long you have,

till we leave. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay!”

He was laughing now, and she started to laugh too. It was true and

it was urgent, but it was funny too. “Two. Weeks,” she said again.

“You bunny.”

3

They stretched the rules at the Van Damme dormitory in Henryville

to let her have a space, because no children were allowed; it didn’t

seem to Connie that it was the first time the women at the desk

had stretched the rules, or that the rules were all that important

to them. They only needed to know that Adolph was toilet trained, and

Connie could say Yes. Not a single accident since far to the north on the

Katy Line, too late a warning, too long a line at the smelly toilet. Actu-

ally he’d got used to facilities of several kinds—rows of station toilets

with clanging steel doors, overused toilets like squalid privies in crowded

coaches; old Negro porters helped him, soldiers too, hey give the little

kid a break. Once in a train so filled with soldiers and sailors it was

impossible to move, they’d passed him hand to hand over the heads of

the passengers till the far end of the coach was reached—he’d been game

even for that, seeming to get braver and more ready for things with

every mile. Now and then he’d whined and wept, and once worked up a

nice tantrum, as though the new self coming out hurt like teething: but

Connie’d have worried for him if he hadn’t had one at least.

So the dormitory people tucked a little roller cot into the room she

was allotted, best they could do, and after she’d whispered a story into

his ear about trains and planes and cars, he slept. Exhausted as she

was, she couldn’t: not even his soft automatic breathing could seduce

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 243

her into sleep. The small room was meant for four, two bunk beds,

their ticking-covered mattresses rolled up, only her bed made. Like the

first girl in a summer-camp cabin. The sheets were rough and clean.

For a moment she wanted not to wonder at any of it, or think of it, just

lie and look and feel. She was nowhere she’d ever thought to be.

Those two men who’d given her a ride out here hadn’t been able to

think of a way to find Bunce: the plant and its processes went on around

the clock, but offices where inessential paperwork was done closed

sometimes, and the union office was closed too when they tried to call

there from the desk of the dormitory.

That crippled fellow: looking around the dormitory lounge where

the women sat or played cards or table tennis or just came and went.

The expression on his face. Never been inside here, he’d said. Connie

wanted to tell him to withdraw a bit; he looked like a kid in a toy store,

watching the electric train go around. Maybe that’s why she tugged his

coat, made him turn to face her, thanked him and kissed his cheek

with gratitude. She thought about him, his handicap, what that would

be like. She thought of the first day she’d gone to work at the Bull

plant. It had taken all her strength to act on what she’d known she had

to do—to get here with Adolph—and she didn’t know what she’d do

now, or what would come of it. She slept.

That night a hundred miles and more to the north of Ponca City, Muriel

Gunderson headed out on the dirt road from town to Little Tom Field

and the weather station there. Muriel was on rotation with three other

FAA weather observers, and while two shared the day and evening

shifts, Muriel would be all by herself on the 0000 to 0008 shift. The

drive out to the station was twenty miles—she got extra stamps—and

while she didn’t mind the night she got lonely and fretful sometimes, so

she brought her old dog Tootie along with her for the company.

She let herself into the weather station, a small gray building and a

shed between the two hangars that Little Tom Field offered. A couple

of Jennys and an old retired Kaydet were tied up by their noses out on

the field. She lit the lights and checked the instrument array, the ther-

mometer, the wet bulb, and then the anemometer, which was at the top

of a pole on the roof. She had to climb up the outside stair and then up

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

a staggered row of iron footholds, detach the machine, take it down

into the station, and record the wind speed—not much at all this still

night—and then climb back up the pole to replace it while Tootie

barked at her from below. She was always nervous about climbing the

pole, not because she was afraid of heights—she wasn’t, and was glad

she’d wiped the grin off the face of the chief observer when he first told

her she’d have to climb it. No, she was afraid that if a rusted step broke

off or was wet or icy and she fell, there’d be no one who’d know about

it for hours, except Tootie, and he was no Rex the Wonder Dog who’d

go for help. Tootie’d bark and bark and then quit while she just lay

there and died.

She made coffee on the hot plate and plotted her observations on

the weather map, the part of the job she liked the best. At 0002 she

went out to the shed to launch the balloon. It was cold now and she

pulled on gloves—the helium tanks could be icy to the touch and the

connections could take a long time to get right, especially for a single

observer on a night shift. The empty balloon was slick and sticky like

peeled skin when you took it from the box and you had to get it

unfolded right and connected to the tank, and then you had to inflate

it enough to get it aloft but not so much that it would burst from the

decreasing pressure before it reached the cloud ceiling, which was high

tonight. Muriel had set up the theodolite on its tripod to track it as it

rose. When the limp balloon had started filling and swelling and lifting

itself—there were always jokes about what it reminded you of, you

couldn’t make them around the unmarried girls—Muriel prepared the

little candle in a paper lantern that it would carry upward. During the

day you could just track the balloon itself against the sky until it disap-

peared, but at night you needed that light. Muriel thought: better to

light one candle than to curse the darkness. She thought that once on

every night shift: better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

She got tired of herself, sometimes, alone.

This night she got the balloon off all right, it rose lightly and confi-

dently, there was no wind to snatch it out of her hand (take her hand

too and maybe herself upward with it) and the candle stayed lit, and

Muriel followed it with the scope of the theodolite, racking it upward

steadily, losing the little dot of light and finding it again. Until at last it

came to the cloud layer and dimmed and was gone. It always seemed

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 245

brave to her, that little flickerer, like the light of an old Columbus sail-

ing ship going off into the unknown.

She clamped the theodolite and took the reading down. She was

returning to the station to phone in her report—Little Tom Field was

too little even to have a Teletype, it was just a few acres of prairie out-

lined in lights—when she began to feel something. Later she’d say “hear

something,” but in that first moment it seemed to be something she felt.

Tootie felt it too, and barked at it, whatever or wherever it was.

Muriel was used to some strange weather. She’d been knocked over

by a fireball rolling through the station, and ached for a week; when a

downpour followed hard on a dust storm, she called in a report of

“flying mud balls,” which they didn’t like but which she was just then

seeing smack the windows as though thrown by bad boys. So what was

this coming?

Not weather, no. A sound: now it was certainly a sound, a big sound

aloft, and she could start to think it was likely an aircraft of some kind

though no lights were visible yet. It sometimes happened that lost air-

craft would come in to Little Tom Field, or planes would land that

didn’t like the weather—once even a DC-2, the pilot had wanted to fly

under the cloud cover (he told her), but company rules wouldn’t let him

fly that low. There was a dit-da transmitter in the station that sent out

a signal all the time, just an International Code “A” for identification,

but you could ride in on it if you had to, a little footpath in the sky.

Bigger than a DC-2. The high cloud cover was shredding as she

expected it to and a full moon overhead glowed through. Whatever it

was came closer, the felt sound growing into an awful, awesome noise.

It was coming in way too low for its size and coming in fast. She felt

like running away, but which way? Then there it was, good Christ,

blotting out a huge swath of sky, its running lights out but streams of

flame trailing out behind its wings. She’d never seen anything that big

aloft. It lowered itself toward the field, which was almost smaller than

itself, and it seemed just then to realize how hopeless a hope it was, this

field it had come upon in its troubles, and it leveled off, not rising

though but skimming between the earth and the clouds. It had six

engines she could now see, and three of them were on fire and two of

the other props were revolving in a halting hopeless way and they were

all attached to the wrong side of the wing. It was passing overhead, lit

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

by the field’s lights, vast belly passing right over her and causing her,

foolishly, to duck.

What was it, was this prairie under attack from some new Jap or

German war machine we’d brought down? It had gone beyond the

field’s lights, but she could still feel its roar and still see, like the candle

of the weather balloon, the sparkle of the fires coming from those

engines. Out there where it went there were only low hills and woods.

She waited, looking into that darkness, almost knowing what she

would see, and yet seized with a huge shudder when not two minutes

later she saw it, a bloom of flame-light that reflected from the clouds;

then the dull thunder following after. Muriel was already headed for

the shack and the telephone.

At about the same hour by the clock (though two hours later by the

sun) Henry Van Damme was awakened in his bedroom that looked out

to the Pacific over the city. It was his brother, who alone knew this

telephone number. The silken body beside Henry in the wide bed

stirred also at the sound, and Henry got up, bringing the phone with

him on its long cord, and pulled on a dressing gown while he listened.

“I’m securing the site,” Julius said. “The weather observer who saw

it asked if it was an enemy bomber, she’d never seen the like.”

“Crew?” Henry asked.

“Lost. Ship had lost power and they were too low to ditch when the

fires started.”

“Oh dear.”

“It’s the cylinder heads overheating,” Julius said. “The cowl flaps

need to be shortened. Ship was on its way to the coast for the modifica-

tions.”

“Won’t be enough,” Henry said. “My guess.”

Julius said nothing. They both knew the problem: that the B-30 was

being designed, prototyped, tested, debugged, retested, built, and deployed

all at the same time, and by ten or fifteen different companies, suppliers,

builders, their old competitors, the government. How could it not keep

going wrong in little ways, little ways that added up to big ways.

“Get everybody together as soon as we can,” Henry said, though of

course Julius would have already begun doing that.

“We’ll ground the ships that are coming off the line now,” Julius

said. “Till we know what modifications work.”

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 247

On the bejeweled map of the city outside Henry’s wide plate-glass

windows, lines of light like airstrips, not so bright as before the war,

ran toward the sea, yellow, bluish, white. In the dark room a clock

glowed, and beside its face a little window showed the date, white tiles

that turned every twenty-four hours with a soft clack. The fourteenth

of April 1944. No one would forget it.

“I’ll call the families,” Henry said. “Get me the names.”

In the morning Connie and her son got breakfast in the dorm cafeteria,

the women gathering around to see a child and touch him and marvel

at him spooning oatmeal into his mouth with a big spoon. The desk

found out where Bunce was, a house in Henryville, not far they said,

and the shop roster said he was on the Swing Shift, so he might be

there now.

Now.

The address they gave her didn’t seem even to look like one—8–19-

N? What did it mean? But they pointed her the way and she set out into

the little town, vanishing and gray in the morning light, down the wide

street (wasn’t it too wide, and the houses too low, she thought for a

minute it wasn’t real, like those fake towns you heard were built above

factories to hide them from bombers). Adolph walked a little, then had

to be picked up and carried. Day came on, sweet and cool, the gray

burned off, the town was real, people came out of some houses and

waved to her and smiled. Each of the houses bore a number like the

one written on her paper. At last she came upon a woman watering a

window box of geraniums with a coffeepot and hailed her.

“Howdy,” the woman answered. Connie didn’t think people who

weren’t in the movies or in radio comedies really said Howdy, but the

woman seemed to mean it. She had a huge paper or silk geranium, or

maybe it was a rose, in her curled hair.

“Oh sure,” she said when Connie showed her paper. “That’s number

eight on block nineteen of N Street. This-here’s J Street, block fifteen,

so y’all’s got four blocks to go down and K, L, M, to go over, left. All

right?”

“Yes, all right, thanks.” They regarded each other for a moment.

“Pretty flowers.”

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

The woman touched the one in her hair, and turned back to her

watering. For some reason Connie found her unsettling, her good

cheer, her strange speech, her being at home here. She kept on, feeling

excluded. When she approached the right block, Adolph had grown

insupportably heavy, like baby Jesus in the Saint Christopher story,

and her armpits were damp. That would be it. No it wasn’t: a small

plump woman, a bottle blonde, just then came out of it, turned to wave

good-bye to someone inside, then closed the door behind her and set

out, smiling and pulling straight her girdle. Was it across the street?

Odd numbers on one side, even on the other. The last house was 9. His

was 8. Connie went on to the next block. Some blocks had no number

or letter signs, never put up or fallen off.

“Mommy.”

“Yes, bunny.”

“Mommy I’m hot.”

“Okay, hon.”

She turned back. The houses were so identical. It must be that one,

but wasn’t that the one the blond woman had come out of? Now she

wasn’t sure. But it had to be it. She went up the path, just a couple of

feet, and knocked at the door, thinking nothing now but that she wanted

to be somewhere inside where she could put Adolph down, and almost

instantly, as though he’d been standing just behind it, Bunce opened it.

“Hello,” she said.

He said nothing. He was in his underwear, a singlet and wrinkled

shorts. Just seeing him a torrent of warm gratitude filled her, her son

grew lighter, she knew she’d done the right thing, it’d been hard and

she’d never been sure and now she was. “Here’s Adolph,” she said.

“Connie, what the hell.” He looked from her to his son as though

trying to remember them and then suddenly remembering. A great grin

broke over his face, he took the boy from her and lifted him high.

Adolph squealed in delight at Bunce’s delight and at the heave Bunce

had given him, but looked away, toward nothing or for something. His

father lifting him in his big hands, his hands.

“I didn’t write to tell you,” she said. “I thought you’d tell me not to come.”

There was almost nothing in the house, an unmade bed, a kitchen

F O U R F R E E D O M S / 249

table and chairs, another smaller bare bed in another room; a new

refrigerator; a big bamboo chair, with a floor lamp beside it; and some

kind of box or crate with rope handles used for a table, covered with

stuff, an apple core, a root beer bottle, papers and comic books. Bunce

liked comic books.

“Why would I tell you not to come?” He wasn’t looking at her but

at Adolph, who was trying to balance standing on Bunce’s thighs where

he sat in the bamboo chair. Their eyes were locked together, as though

a current passed between them. “Who wouldn’t want a visit from his

wife? His son?”

Connie sat on a straight-backed kitchen chair. She hadn’t taken her

coat off. “Well, I guess,” she said. “Sure.”

“Daddy,” said Bunce. “Daddy. Say Daddy.”

Adolph laughed in that funny way he had, as though he didn’t actu-

ally believe you, but he said nothing.

“So how,” Bunce said. “How’d you, I mean, the train and all. I

mean I’ve sent you what I could.”

“I bought the tickets. One way.”

Bunce still smiling turned to her. “With what?”

“I had the money.” This had gone a way she’d known she’d have to

go, but faster than she’d been ready for. “Well,” she said again. “You

won’t believe it. I got a job.”

Now Bunce pulled Adolph’s exploring hands away from his face. “A

job? Connie.”

“You know everybody’s working now. I thought I could help.”

“Did you ask me whether I thought you ought to get a job? Did you

even tell me you had this in mind?”

He’d put Adolph down and stood, looming over her a little. She

knew better than to answer right off, that these weren’t actual ques-

tions but statements to be listened to without expression.

“Jesus, Connie. What the hell.”

“Bunce,” she cautioned him in a whisper, pointing to Adolph. He

turned away from both of them and seemed suddenly to realize he

wasn’t dressed. He went into the bedroom and from the floor picked

up a pair of trousers and began furiously pulling them on. Why was

this house such a mess? He hated mess.

“So where was this job?” he said. “By the way.”

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

“Well that’s the crazy part,” Connie said, willing a big smile. “It

was at the Bull plant. That’s where I was sent. How do you like that.”

So that was said, and he didn’t blow up, just went into the bath-

room and stood for a minute looking in the little mirror over the sink,

then turned on both faucets, cupped his hands, splashed water on his

face and neck, and took a towel from a hook to rub himself. Then he

stood looking into the mirror a long time.

“You know you made a liar out of me, Connie?” he said.

“What?” she said, feeling a stab of panic.

“Maybe a criminal too,” he said, still looking only in the mirror. “My

draft registration. It says I do necessary war work, and that I’m the sole

support of my family.” He turned to her at last. “You think of that?”

“Well you could have maybe changed it,” she said softly.

“Sure. And lost my deferment maybe too,” he said. He tossed away

the towel. “Okay. You’re gonna quit.”

“I don’t need to quit,” she said. “That’s the next crazy part. They

went out of business.”

“What?”

“The whole plant. There were marshals and everything. They threw

us all out.”