“What the heck. Where was the union? They can’t do that.”
Connie explained what she’d seen, what she knew, what the papers
had said, hadn’t he seen it in the papers? Hadn’t his mom and Buster
told him?
“Goddam profiteers,” Bunce said. “Serves them right.” He aimed
this darkly right at Connie, as though she were one of them, or it was
her fault. Then, in sudden realization that time had gone on while she’d
unfolded these things before him, he said to no one or to himself: “Man
I’ve got to go, got to get to work.”
“I couldn’t figure out why,” Connie said.
“Why what? Why they closed? Cause they’re dopes. Crooks. Just
out to take from the working man.”
“No, but why? What did they do so badly?”
“What’s it have to do with you? You don’t have to worry about that
stuff.”
Connie lowered her eyes, catching up with herself. “I was just won-
dering,” she said.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 251
“So it doesn’t matter anymore,” he said, and came to kneel by her
chair, where Adolph stood to look up at her. “That’s good.”
“So I came,” she said.
“Uh.”
“I just wanted us to be together again. The three of us staying
together.”
He disengaged from their embrace. “Not here,” he said.
“Well I just thought . . .”
“Connie. Our home’s not here. When all this is over . . .”
“My mom’s watching out for the apartment. It’s all all right. I had
the gas turned off and the electricity. She can send the furniture any-
time, Railway Express, it won’t cost that much. I have the money.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have said that last part. He’d risen away from
her now with a look that made Adolph start to cry, she’d cry too if she
didn’t keep up her courage. Why’d she just blurt all that out?
“That’s swell, Connie,” he said, not loud. “That’s just swell. You
don’t ask me a damn thing, you just decide we’re not living in our own
damn house anymore, that you’re a working girl, that you— Shut up!”
He shot that at Adolph, who only cried louder, and Bunce picked him
up and held him.
“I read about this place here,” she said. “It was at your mom’s.”
Tears were leaking from her eyes, she tried to just keep on. “It seemed
so wonderful. That you could help, that you could be a help and be
useful, and still have a good life, a family life. You could have what you
needed.”
“You’re going back,” he said, his words soothing in sound for
Adolph’s sake but not in import.
“I saw the pictures of the nursery in the plant, and the part about
the free clinics, the way everything was thought of.” She thought of
telling him about Mrs. Freundlich but stopped herself. She wiped her
eyes with her wrists. “I just wanted to help.”
Bunce holding Adolph put his hand in Connie’s hair.
“Well you’re not working here,” he said, grinning as at an impossi-
bility, but not actually amused. “Honey no.”
“Oh Bunce.”
He lifted her up and by the hand and led her to the broad bamboo
chair. He sat, drawing both of them into his lap. “Connie,” he said,
252 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “Baby. You think I
want to see you every day on that floor in a pair of trousers? What are
we going to do, head out for work together every day with our tool-
boxes?”
“Women do. People do.”
He pressed his face against her neck, his sweet lips. “Sure they
work. Till they get enough money to get their fur coat. Then they quit.
Or when their man comes home from overseas. You’ll see them down
tools right in the middle of the shift. ‘My man’s home, I’m done.’ ”
“Oh Bunce.”
“You know when my dad was first hurt, Mom went to work, in that
hotel kitchen. It almost killed Dad; it was worse than his back. Him
sitting home and his wife working. My mom.”
Just as he said that, Connie’s eyes fell on a comic poking out from
under the others on the box-table. The part of the cover she could see
showed a woman, caped and booted in red, her arms extended the way
flying heroes always held them and she never did when she flew in
dreams. The woman was shooting straight down through the clouds,
toward earth presumably, and toward the bottom of the book, where
huge red letters spelled MOM.
“I gotta get to work,” he said, lifting her.
She let him go and dress, watched him and talked with Adolph: See
Daddy put on socks, put on boots and lace them up, put on his shirt
and button it up to his neck, and his jacket. She wandered the little
place, went into the bathroom, where Bunce’s razor and brush and cup
of soap stood on the back of the sink. He used a straight razor, liking
the skill it took, proud of his skill with it. A comb there too, clogged
with hair. Blond hair.
“Do you live here all alone?” she called to Bunce, and when he
couldn’t hear she came out with the comb in her hand and asked again.
“Of course not,” he said. “Couldn’t afford it. I have a fellow lives
here, that’s his room over there. Except he just got fired for some black
market stuff, stealing from the company, and he’s gone. Good riddance
to bad rubbish.”
He was done dressing, he was Bunce again, broad belt buckled and
the long end tucked in, crushed cap on—he put it on Adolf, then back
on himself as Adolph reached for the buttons on it.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 253
“What’ll I do?” Connie said. “Adolph’s going to get hungry.”
“There’s milk in the icebox,” Bunce said. “And here.” From the
table he picked up his brown pay envelope, two-fingered out the bills,
a thick wad it seemed to her, and took a five to give her. “There’s a bus
that stops at the corner, that way. It goes out to the market. They’ll tell
you where. Go buy some food.”
“Okay.”
He took her in his arms. “So no more about working,” he said.
“You make a home for us.”
“All right I’ll try,” she said—what else, in his arms, could she do?—
and it wasn’t as though she lied, or didn’t mean it; it was as in Confes-
sion, when you had a Firm Purpose of Amendment in regard to
something sinful (Bunce, the back seat of the Plymouth) and meant it
with all your might even as you heard yourself dissent deep inside, a
you that you knew you’d listen to, the you on whose side you always
really were. The priest called that a Mental Reservation.
“Good,” he said. “I love you, Connie.”
“Oh God I love you too Bunce, so much.” So rarely could he say it
to her with that kind of plain sincerity that it swept her hotly to hear it,
and she assented within herself, she’d do what he asked, all that he
asked, with only the Mental Reservation because there was no help for
that.
When he’d shut the door she looked around herself. She could
clean up.
“Daddy,” said Adolph, as you might say A storm.
“Daddy,” Connie said, nodding. “Tell him that. Daddy.”
She pushed the papers on the table into a pile, and the comic book
with the red-clad heroine on it came out, and she saw she’d got it
wrong. The girl—Mary Marvel, a windblown skirt and cascade of
chestnut curls—was flying not down but up, through the clouds to blue
sky beyond, and the real title of the book, now right side up, was
WOW.
4
Toward the end of his shift, as he was making his way up the
Assembly Building, Prosper caught sight of the woman from the
train station, Connie, and her boy, walking slowly and both
looking upward, as once he had done on first entering here. The
boy was pointing up into the fantastic tangle of beams and struts fill-
ing the spaces overhead.
He reached where they stood and looked up with them. A crane car
was now drifting with great slowness toward them, carrying an entire
assembled wing section slung below and hanging in midair.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “They’ve got it backward.”
“Oh. Oh hi.”
Connie looked where he looked: it made her heart sink toward her
stomach to watch the wings proceed down the line. They weren’t fin-
ished, they needed their final pieces on each end, she could see that, but
they had their huge engines all installed, three on each side, and yes,
she saw that they were on the wrong edge, they were on the behind
edge not the leading edge where all airplanes have their engines.
“Oh gee,” Prosper said. “This one’ll never fly.”
Was he joking? He had to be. Above the moving wing assembly she
could see the crane operator, a woman. Maybe she’d made some dread-
ful . . . But no, of course not, all the dozens of men on the floor were look-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 255
ing up too, whole teams ready to mount the rolling staircases and assist
the mating, which wasn’t different in a way from affixing the wings cross-
wise on a little balsa-wood model, the notches precut to receive the tabs.
They’d surely see if anything wasn’t right. She felt Prosper’s hand on her
elbow—looking upward she hadn’t seen him come so close as to touch
her—and he was smiling. “Nah. They told me the same thing when I
started,” he said. “They’re called pusher engines. They work fine. They
push instead of pulling. They told us how, but I couldn’t repeat it.”
Now the two parts were coming together, so slowly as to seem
unmoving. A team of men (and one tall woman) guided it down—they
seemed able to move it with a touch, vast as it was. The little people—
they seemed little now compared to it, its huge tires and struts and
expanses of silvery metal—swarmed up the ladders and made ready to
do whatever they had to do to link them.
Connie walked on. She’d begun to see, in that moment, as though
through the confusing reflection of thousands of overhead bars of light
on shiny identical parts, how it was meant to work, how it did work.
Behind the plane another middle part stood, and another crane now
turned the corner bringing in another pair of wings to be rested on it.
Who thought of this? she wondered. How long did it take to think
of? Did people just know that’s the way big airplanes had to be built, or
was it a new plan just for these? Did they argue about it, work it all out,
come to an agreement? If it didn’t work, and it was you who’d thought
of it and convinced the others, what happened to you? Did you lose
your job and have to go away in shame? Or did they spread the blame
around, and just set to work to do better? Nobody’d ever explained any
of this to her. Maybe everybody knew about it, maybe it was so univer-
sally known that nobody thought they needed to explain it to her. She
bet not, though. She bet almost nobody knew it, not all these women
and men working away, the shop stewards and the engineers unrolling
their blueprints, toolshops dispensing tools, she bet none of them knew
any more than she did. She wondered if they’d even wondered. If she
had, they must have, mustn’t they? Some of them at least. A few.
She became aware of Adolph tugging at her slacks. Somehow the
place didn’t alarm or terrify him, maybe it was just too huge to be per-
ceived, out of his ken.
“Yes, hon.”
256 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He tugged again, she was to get it. “Tired and hungry,” she said to
Prosper. “We came to see where his daddy works.” She showed him the
visitor pass she’d been given.
“Well say,” he said. “Maybe he’d like an ice cream. There’s a milk
bar just down in the far corner there, off the floor.”
“Really. Well, that’s nice. We’ll do that.”
“I’m just off,” Prosper said. “I could use a soda too. Mind if I . . .”
“No no,” Connie said. She looked down at Adolph. “Okeydokey?”
she said.
The milk bar was a long space with the wide plate-glass windows that
were everywhere here, as though no one should be hidden from anyone
else, the common job proceeding in your sight even if you weren’t doing
it, and if you were, showing you what you could do next, relax and enjoy.
It was sort of self-service, you stood in line and ordered from a long
menu, then moved away to be given what you’d ordered. The whole place
was painted in pink, pale brown, and yellow, like Neapolitan ice cream.
“Oh gee I forgot, I didn’t bring any money,” Connie said. “Oh I’m
so sorry.” They were already far up the line, and Adolph, who knew
where he was now, was reaching symbolically toward the treats being
handed out. What had she thought, that this was a date?
“I think I’ve got some,” Prosper said. “A little.”
“Oh no,” she said. “No no.”
“Sure.” Balancing on each crutch in turn, he rooted in his right then
his left pocket. He held out the coins he’d found to her in his palm, and
she counted them with a forefinger. Not much.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I mean I don’t really need.”
“No come on,” he said. “An ice cream for, for Adolph, and why
don’t we split an ice-cream soda? Would that be all right?”
“Well.” He was so, what, so willing, no standing on pride, it made
her smile. “All right.”
“Double chocolate?”
“All right.”
She got Adolph’s ice cream; she was making for a booth when she
looked back—Prosper still stood at the counter and the soda was before
him and Connie realized he’d have a hard time carrying it away, maybe
couldn’t at all, had he always had someone to help? He must need it.
Like Adolph. But never really growing all the way up.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 257
She got the soda and they sat; Adolph dug into the ice cream and
Connie and Prosper de-papered their straws and plunged them into the
dark foaming soda together; took a suck; raised their eyes to meet.
Like a kid’s first date, she thought, like one in the movies anyway.
It was that scene, displayed by the picture windows, that Vi Harbi-
son saw, just knocking off then too. Stopped even to observe for a bit,
occluded by the crowd passing outward around her: how absorbed
they were, spooning, sucking, speaking, smiling. Ain’t that grand, she
thought, and she really thought it was; almost laughed a hot dangerous
laugh at the pleasure it gave her, well well well.
They weren’t quite done, still sucking noisily at the bottom of the
glass in its silvery holder, when Bunce came by. In the great seamless
transition from shift to shift nearly everyone going out passed these
windows, this place, which is why it was where it was.
He banged in through the glass doors and was beside Connie’s
booth before she knew he’d come in.
“What are you doing, Connie?”
He shot one look at Prosper and no more, inviting no remark.
“Bunce.”
“Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?” He lifted Adolph
from his seat, who began to complain, not done yet. “Come on.”
Connie glanced once at Prosper, who’d neither moved nor spoken,
whose face was attempting to express nothing but a pleasant detach-
ment, and rose to follow Bunce out.
“So what the hell’s all that?” Bunce said, still a step ahead of her.
“I came to visit. To see if I could find you, see where you worked.”
She showed him her pass.
“And you found that guy instead.” He flicked one look her way,
then fiercely on ahead again. “You don’t know what it’s like around
here,” he said. “The men around here.”
She caught up with him, took his arm.
“Bunce,” she said with soft urgency. “Just look at him.”
Prosper was gathering himself now to leave the table, and Bunce
stopped, looked back to see him manipulate his crutches, swing his
inert legs away from the table, steady himself, and attempt to rise; fail;
try again, and succeed. Then set off.
“Yeah well,” Bunce said.
258 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“I was being nice.”
“Yeah.” He looked down at her. “Yeah well. Be careful too.”
She took his arm. Adolph was still held in his other arm. She wanted
to look back too, and see how Prosper had managed in the milk bar, if
he’d got out all right, but that only made her cling tighter to her hus-
band. “So you’ll be home for dinner,” she said. “I’ll make a Swiss
steak.”
“I can’t come home. I’ll be back late.”
“Why? Where are you going? Do you have overtime?”
“No.”
“Then what—”
“Nothing.”
“Well what—”
“Connie, you don’t ask me!” He shifted Adolph violently in his
grip. “Connie you just come down here, you bust right into my life here
without asking, and you . . . Just listen when I tell you. I’ll be back
later.”
She said nothing more, marched along beside him, didn’t shrug away
his arm when again he took hers. She’d come so far. She’d come to fight
for him, and she knew what that meant, it meant actually not fighting.
She knew what happened to the desperate weepers and beggars, the
cold schemers and the furious hair-pullers, they never won and she
wasn’t going to be one of them. You just kept your head high. You
waited and you saw it through and stayed ready and kept your head
high. The only way you could lose was if you stopped wanting to win.
In that month a directive came down from the front office, ultimately
from the War Department, that all men with deferments had to report
to their local draft boards to be reassessed. Rollo Stallworthy told the
men on his team that this did not, repeat not, mean that anyone was
necessarily going to lose his deferment. Just Our Government at Work,
he said: they want to make sure they’re using every available person to
maximum gain. Most of the men at Van Damme had registered at draft
boards far away, so arrangements were made to bus the men to the
capital, rather than burden the local Ponca City board and cause delays
in getting back to work. Chits were handed out.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 259
Prosper’s draft status was ambiguous. He’d gone down that first
time to register, before the war began. Then somehow the notice to
report for his physical never came, or had been missed. (Actually Bea
had discarded it, supposing the army must know better and it had come
in error.) Then he’d worked at The Light in the Woods, and all the
workers there who weren’t already iv-F got a provisional deferment, till
they quit or were otherwise let go; then he’d left town. So he signed up
to be sent with the others, in order to be finally rejected. On a morning
growing fearsomely hot, he mounted a bus with the skilled machinists,
tool-and-die men, draftsmen, engineers, farm laborers, Indians, and
fathers in war work (fatherhood alone wasn’t enough now), and took an
empty seat. A school trip hilarity prevailed on the bus as it set out,
except among a few men who found the exercise a waste of time (the
unions were arguing with Van Damme Aero as to whether the men
would be paid for this jaunt) or who actively feared losing their status:
not every floor sweeper or lightbulb changer or pharmacist’s helper in
the vast complex was “a man necessary to national defense” and might
see his cozy iii-A rating evaporate. We didn’t all want to be heroes.
The bus had turned out onto the highway, a hot breeze coming in
the window, when someone changing his spot sat down next to Pros-
per. Momentarily, Prosper tasted chocolate ice cream. It was Connie’s
husband. Bunce.
Prosper moved his crutches out of the way and gave Bunce a nod;
Bunce thumbed the bill of his cap in minimal greeting. He neither
spoke nor smiled, and turned away. Neither of them remarked on
Bunce’s having shifted seats. Bunce pulled from his denim coat pocket
a toothpick, and chewed delicately. Prosper felt sweat gather on his
neck and sides.
“So this is stupid,” Bunce said at last, but not as though to Prosper.
“I’ve got a war job, I’ve got a family dependent on me.” He turned then
to point a look at Prosper. “You know? A family.”
Prosper made small sympathetic facial movements, what’re you
gonna do. They rode in silence a time, looking forward, till Bunce, still
unsmiling, began to regard Prosper more deliberately, as though he
were a thing that deserved study. Prosper had been the object of hostile
scrutiny before, though not often so close to him. He thought of Lar-
ry’s instructions, how to win a fight, or not lose one.
260 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“So that’s tough,” Bunce said. He made a gesture toward Prosper’s
body.
Prosper made a different face.
“What’s the toughest thing?” Bunce said. “I mean, living that
way.”
Prosper cast his eyes upward thoughtfully, as though considering
possibilities. “Well I think,” he said, “the toughest thing is drying my
ass after I get out of the bath.”
Not the shadow of a smile from Bunce. That line always got a
laugh.
Bunce withdrew the toothpick. “I think I’m asking a serious ques-
tion.”
“Do you mean,” Prosper said, “not having the chance for a wife
and kids, a family I mean, such as yours?”
Bunce made no response.
“Well yes,” Prosper said. “Yes, I’d have to say. Not having that.
That’s hard.”
“I knew this guy,” Bunce said. “He used to go around the bars and
the Legion hall. He had no legs. He rolled on a little truck, with these
wooden blocks on his hands to push with. He made candies, and sold
them. Always smiling.”
Prosper smiled. Bunce didn’t.
“Funny thing was,” Bunce said, “if you saw him in his own neigh-
borhood, not making his rounds. I did once. He had a couple of, I
guess, wooden legs. And two canes. He was dressed in a suit. He
looked fine.”
“Oho,” said Prosper, not wanting to seem too familiar with this
dodge.
“He had a wife,” Bunce said.
“He did. Well.”
“Not bad looking, either.”
“How do you like that.”
The bus swung around a sharp right, entering the streets of the
capital. Bunce fell heavily against Prosper somehow without taking his
eyes from him. Then he climbed out of the seat. “Do yourself a good
turn,” he said. “Stay away from my family.”
5
On a Friday night the Teenie Weenies bused or drove into Ponca
City to watch Vi play fast-pitch softball with the Moths under
the lights. The little stadium had been built by the oil company,
but the new lights were Van Damme’s gift to Ponca City. The
game was an exhibition game against the Traveling Ladies, a touring
pro club, to promote war bonds.
“Now how are women gonna play this g-g-g-game,” Al said, imi-
tating Porky Pig, “when among the l-l-l-lot of them they haven’t got a
single b-b-b-b—”
“Shut up, Al,” said Sal.
Sal and Al had come with Prosper. The park was packed, and all
the lower bleachers full. Sal and Al liked to get a seat in the lowest row
so they didn’t have to stand on their seats like nine-year-olds just to
see. But not today. The steps were okay for climbing, and they went
high up, passing as they went Bunce, Connie, and their son, primly in
a row, Bunce for once without his cap. Prosper made himself seem too
preoccupied with going upward to acknowledge her or him or them,
and they looked out at the warm-ups on the field.
The Traveling Ladies were show-offs, in their striped schoolgirl
skirts and knee-high socks, hats like Gay ’90s ballplayers with a fuzzy
button on the top; but they played hard. They played hard and made it
262 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
look easy, making fancy catches for no reason, setting up nick-of-time
plays on purpose—you could catch them at it if you watched closely.
Whenever they cleared the bases they tossed the ball round the horn
with a little individual spin or jump or bend for each of the infielders,
the third baseman always pretending not to notice and waving to the
crowd up until the last moment, when she turned and snagged the ball
backhand and laughed. When they got well ahead they’d sometimes
pretend to be checking their makeup in little hand mirrors or exchang-
ing gossip with the first base coach and let a ball go by them and a
runner make a base she shouldn’t have—as though they were acting in
a movie about girl baseball players as much as actually being them.
The crowd loved it.
But Vi and the Moths played hard too, a little grim in the face of all
the funning, but Vi as good as anything the Ladies could show, her
fiery fastball taking their best sticks by surprise. Most softball pitchers
change their stance when they change their pitch—this way for a fast-
ball, that way for a slider—but Dad had taught Vi to stand always the
same, give nothing away, her body preternaturally still just before she
wound up and fired. And unlike most pitchers who just stoop a bit
when they throw, as though they were pitching horseshoes, Vi’s knuck-
les nearly scraped the ground, the big pill floating and dropping trick-
ily or slamming into the catcher’s glove.
Prosper’s difficulty in ballparks was that he missed most of the
exciting plays, when all around him the spectators rose to their feet to
see the ball sail over the fence or the fielder make the catch, or just in
spontaneous delight or astonishment or outrage. He couldn’t get up
fast enough and would finally be standing by the time everybody else
had cooled off and sat down again. He liked a so-so game. This wasn’t
that. This night he also wanted a clear sight of Connie and Bunce and
the boy with the unfortunate name, just down there between the heads
and hats. What he saw, as an inconclusive inning was drawing to an
end, was a blond woman, one he knew and had himself swapped wise-
cracks with, slip into their row and seat herself beside Bunce. Connie
on his other side. It seemed to Prosper that the blonde—was her name
Frances?—actually leaned around Bunce to greet Connie, which
seemed to take a lot of crust. Prosper couldn’t help but feel for Bunce in
between them.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 263
Just then, the Ladies’ right fielder, with a three-and-two count on
her, backed off a high inside pitch, and then came running out at Vi, bat
in hand, yelling that she’d been aimed at; then she turned on the umpire
who called after her, denouncing him in fury as the spectators variously
booed and cheered. The ump threatened to toss her out of the game. She
stuck out her tongue at him, a dame after all, and at that the ump did
order her out, or tried to—the Ladies instantly came off the bench in a
crowd, yelling and gesturing; when they made for Vi on the mound, the
Moths rushed the infield. A fine rhubarb, everyone pushing and shoving
and those girlie skirts flying while the men rose and roared. It was hard
not to believe they’d got into it on purpose just for the fun of it; cer-
tainly Vi, alone and superb on the mound, chewing bubble gum and
waiting for the dust to settle, seemed to think so.
Prosper had seen nothing much but backs and behinds, but when the
view cleared again he saw in some alarm that Connie, Adolph in tow,
was mounting the steps toward where he sat, and even from that dis-
tance Prosper could see grim resolve in her face, or maybe fury. By the
time she reached his pew she was smiling theatrically, not for his sake
he knew, and indicated she’d like the seat next to him, yes that one, if
Sal would scoot down a bit, yes thanks, Prosper turned his knees out-
ward so she and Adolph could work their way past him. She sat. She
still said nothing, only looked on him with a blind beatific gaze.
“Hi there,” he said.
She seemed not to notice that Adolph was tugging her arm, trying
to be released from her ferocious grip.
Play resumed, the apologetic Lady fielder kept in the game, Vi
scrunching her shoulders, gloving the ball, warming up.
“So,” Connie said icily. “Who are you rooting for?”
“Well, the Moths,” said Prosper. “Of course.”
“Well, sure.”
“But the Ladies are, well.”
“Yes, they sure are. They sure know their stuff.” The smile
unchanged, as though it was going to last forever.
He thought it would be best to face front, not engage in eye-play, no
matter how innocent. His pose was that she’d happened to desire to
change her seat, for reasons he couldn’t be expected to know, and hap-
pened to choose the one next to him, ditto. How much of this his face
264 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and body expressed to distant onlookers he couldn’t be sure. “Though
actually, I guess,” he said to the air. “I guess I’d hope they both could
win.”
“Well that’s dumb,” she said. “They can’t both.”
“I know.”
“It’s stupid.”
He chanced a glance in her direction. The smile was gone. “Maybe
better say,” he said, “I don’t want either of them to lose.”
Vi gave up a big hit then, and once again Prosper lost sight of the
field, though Connie was up as fast as anyone. When they sat, Bunce
and Francine—that was her name—down the bleachers were revealed,
and it was apparent her arm was in his, and just then she laid her head
on his shoulder. At that, Bunce’s head swiveled a bit to the rear, as
though tempted to look back up toward Connie, then changed its mind
and swiveled back.
“God damn it,” said Connie.
“Hey,” Prosper said softly. “It’s okay.” But Connie had got up again,
and lifted unsurprised Adolph to her hip, and begun pushing out of the
row. Prosper held up a hand to forestall her, gathering his crutches and
preparing to stand, as there was no way she could climb over him with-
out everybody losing their dignity, which he thought mattered.
“Now listen, Connie, you’re not, you’re not gonna . . .”
“I’m just getting out of here. I’m sorry.”
“Well hold your horses.” He wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to go
down and black his eye, or hers, kid or no kid, and he had a feeling
that the vengeance for that would be wreaked on him, not Connie.
He’d got up from his seat and stepped into the aisle, Connie after him,
and as he turned to get out of the way downward, the tip of his right
crutch landed on something, a candy wrapper maybe, something slick
that slid away, turning him halfway around; in putting out his left
crutch in haste to stabilize himself, he overshot the step and put it into
air—it went down to the next step, and he knew he was falling, stiff-
legged, face forward and one arm behind. The steps were concrete, as
he’d already noticed; he actually had a moment to consider this as they
rushed up toward him and a high shriek filled his ears, not because of
something happening on the field—out, home run, grandstand play—
but for his own disaster. Then for a while he knew nothing at all.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 265
“You look bad,” Vi said. “Very bad.”
“It’s just my face,” Prosper said. The scabs had hardened around his
chin and cheek, and the bruises at his nose, spreading under his left
eye, were the colors of a sinister sundown. Plaster bandage across his
forehead. He lay in his bed on Z Street, where Vi the morning after the
game had gone to find him. “I’m all right otherwise. Except for the
wrist.”
He held it up to her, rigid in its wad of windings. He’d “come to”
pretty quickly, though he had little memory now of what had hap-
pened before the stretcher that the ambulance men rolled him onto was
lifted to slide into the little brown van with its flashing red light. A
small crowd gathered there at the ballpark entrance to see him off.
“I can’t walk,” he said. “Not for a week or so. Not broken though.
Just a sprain.” He didn’t describe the bruises up and down his thighs
from the contact of the stone steps with the metal that encased them.
By the bed he lay in, which Pancho had pulled out into the sitting room
for him, was the wheelchair the clinic had furnished him with, an old
model with a wicker seat and wooden arms. It wouldn’t fit into the
bathroom; getting out of it and then up onto the john with only one
hand working was a process. Of course when he was without his braces
he always sat on the pot, like a girl. He kept all that to himself.
“I heard at the shop they were making you a new pair of crutches.”
“So they said.” He tried a smile. “They’re good fellows. It’s kind.”
“People like to help.”
“I’ll be up and around before they’re done.”
“Well you might still use this chair, though. Easier for getting to
work, maybe. Or church. You know.”
“Oh. Well I wouldn’t want to use it in the street.”
“Why not?”
“Oh I don’t know.” He knew: lame but upright was one thing, but
in a wheelchair he knew how he’d be regarded. Even by Vi herself,
maybe, at first sight anyway, and that would be the only sight he’d
likely get. “So who won the game?”
“They did. Ten-six.” She looked at him long and somehow appre-
ciatively. “I’m not ashamed. We came off better than you did.”
266 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Hum.” With his elbows he hoisted himself up a little on the bed,
bandaged wrist held up.
“Was this the worst one ever?” Vi’d seen him go down once before,
not badly.
“Just about. I fell a lot when I was a kid. I got used to it. But the
older I got the farther my head got from the floor. It’s a long way down
these days.”
“The way you do it,” Vi said. With her forearm she illustrated his
headlong fall, like a felled tree. “Anyway,” she said. “That was my last
game.”
“What,” said Prosper. “Season’s just starting.”
“I’m quitting, Prosper,” she said. “Not the team. Van Damme. I’m
done.”
“What do you mean?” A coldness began to grow in him, starting
from way down in, below any physical part of him. “What’s that sup-
posed to mean?”
“I’m quitting means I’m quitting,” she said. For a moment her eyes
left his, and then returned, frank and warm.
“You’re not leaving,” he said.
“Well I’m not staying here if I’m not working.” She put a hand on
him. “Listen, this is really amazing. There was a woman I met when I
first left home. Maybe you remember—I told you—I think I did . . .”
“The one in the truck.”
“Yes! You know I’ve never stopped thinking about her, I don’t know
why. Maybe because she was the first, the first war worker I met. I
don’t know. But anyway guess what.”
“What.”
“She found out I work here, and she came to see me.”
“Okay,” Prosper said, his apprehension unrelieved. “Good.”
“Guess how she found me.”
“Stop making me guess, Vi.” That coldness was growing, going far-
ther up, it was nothing he’d known before and at the same time he
knew it.
“She saw that big magazine article that Horse wrote about the team.
She knew right away.”
“Oho.”
“And so. We’ve been talking. She quit the place she was working,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 267
driving trucks, and we’re going up north together. Up to my daddy’s
place. We’re going to get it going again. We’ve decided.”
Her eyes looked down away again, as though they knew how much
they shone and were a little shy about it, but they came back, alight,
ablaze. “You want to meet her?”
“Sure. Sometime.”
“She’s outside now. Her name’s Shirley.” She rose, holding out a
hand at him that meant Stay there, which was ridiculous, and she
laughed at herself, but Prosper didn’t laugh.
“Wait, Vi.”
“Yes?”
“What about me?”
“What do you mean, what about you? You’re not aiming to come
be a cowboy, are you?” When he said nothing, she stopped. “Do you
mean,” she asked, “you and me?”
He didn’t need to answer that. She came back and sat on the edge of
the bed. She took his shoulders in her long wise hands. “Prosper. You
and me. That was good, that was such fun, it meant a lot. You’re a fine
man, the best kind. But now. It’s got to be the way it is.”
Prosper, looking up at her, thought for a horrified moment that he
might weep, for the first time since childhood. “Is that what he said? Is
that what he said to you, Vi, something like that? Is that the thing
you’re supposed to say?”
The door opened then, tentatively, at the same time as the person
entering knocked on it. A dark blonde, large-mouthed and large-eyed,
older than Vi and a bit stringy, but Prosper responded, his Sixth Sense
alerted, which made the whole thing worse, as he wanted to say to Vi
but could think of no reason to.
“This is Shirley,” Vi said.
Shirley lifted a tentative hand to Prosper, not sure how welcome she
was but smiling.
“Hi, come on in. Sorry I can’t, you know.”
She waved him still, talking with her hands, to Vi too, whose shoul-
der she patted.
“So you two,” Prosper said, still uncertain of his self-control.
“Going off to, to wherever it is. Where the buffalo roam.”
“Yep,” said Vi. “Back in the saddle again.”
268 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Yep,” Shirley said. “Rockin’ to and fro.”
They both laughed.
“The war’s not over, you know, Vi,” Prosper said, with something
like reproach. “There’s more to do.”
“Oh sure,” Vi said. “Yes. Well I’m going back into the cattle busi-
ness. Those boys in the service will soon be eating my meat.”
She leaned over him, and Shirley politely stepped back. “We’ve got
to go,” she said. “I’ll write. We’ll meet again.” She leaned to kiss his
cheek, and at the same time her hand slipped under the sheet and into
the wide slit in his pajamas. She gave him a squeeze, gentle and firm.
“So long, big fella,” she said but looking at Prosper’s eyes. “Keep your-
self busy.”
She was gone, he could hear her laughter and Shirley’s as the door
closed behind them.
He’d never felt so sorry for himself in his life.
He ought to be able to get up and pursue her, not let her go, and
here he was stuck. He thought of scrambling into that damn chair and
racing out the door, but there were two steps there he’d never get over,
and if he did he’d never be able to get back in. Cry after her.
Sad Sack.
He still felt the squeeze she’d given him; and, as though it did too,
his organ swelled. What he and Vi had done, no more of that now, all
those things. He reached beneath the sheet as she had done, she for the
last time. His bandaged hand useless even for this, he had to swap it to
his left; tears now at last running one after the other toward his ears as
he lay, his soft sorry sobs and the other sound mixing.
There was a knock on the door, which Vi had left ajar. Startled, he
struggled to tuck himself away.
“Hi?” A woman’s voice. Not Vi.
“Yes!” he cried.
Connie Wrobleski in white shorts and tennis shoes opened the door.
She had a covered dish in her hands, her face was stricken with some
wild feeling that looked to him like grief or maybe guilt, and her little
boy peeped through her bare legs at him.
6
Vi Harbison thought it was odd how her heartbreak, like Prosper’s,
had started at the movies. Like the preachers used to say: Satan’s
machine for ruining young girls.
The theater in her town had closed in the bad years and only
opened again when times got a little better; Vi graduated from high
school that summer, aiming to go on to normal school—she’d got a
scholarship. The theater was called the Odeon, and Vi knew why; she
explained the name to the new manager, the day he came to take the
padlock and chain off the double doors, and Vi happened to be pass-
ing: she watched him insert the key into the lock and turn it, and the
fat gray thing fall in two in his hands. He was new in town.
“Odeon,” she’d said. “It’s Greek for ‘a place for performances.’ ”
“Well you’re pretty bright,” he said. She couldn’t judge his age—not
old, unburned and unlined, but maybe that came from making a living
in the dark: his eyes wide and soft, not like the men of this place,
around here even the boys’ eyes were always narrowed by the sun, cor-
ners puckered in crow’s-feet. What made her speak to him that way,
offer her bit of knowledge, she didn’t know. He reached into the pocket
of his pants and took out a handful of free passes.
“Bring all your friends,” he said, giving them to her.
“I don’t have this many,” she said.
270 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
He laughed and with a forefinger pushed back his white hat. “You
can use them all yourself,” he said. “A year’s worth of pictures.”
She was there with her father and brothers the night it opened, every-
one glad, they’d not known how much they’d missed it. A rootin’ tootin’
shoot-em-up, they delighted in it, laughing appreciatively at the unreal
lives of movie cowboys. He’d got the place swept of its wind-driven dust
and the broken chairs repaired and the chandelier rewired, but it was the
same place, nothing much, just a hick-town picture show. She wanted to
know why someone like him would want to come to this town that she
only wanted to leave, and she thought that finding the answer to that
was why she came in the middle of the day when almost nobody else did,
when he ran the picture for her alone—that’s what he said, selling her a
ticket, then immediately ripping it in half and giving her the stub, which
seemed unnecessary till he explained that those stubs he kept were how
the distributors of the picture calculated how much he’d make at every
showing. That two bits of yours has a nickel in it for me, he said.
Sometimes he’d come down from up where the picture was pro-
jected through a glass window, a cone of dusty shifting heaven-light,
and sit beside her, still wearing his hat; he’d feed her Milk Duds and
speak softly to her about the picture, tall pale women bantering with
clever men, their jokes meaning more than one thing, spoken in a way
that wasn’t like anyone spoke anywhere, speech as finely made as their
shimmering dresses.
“You could learn a lot from her,” he whispered. “She could teach
you a lot. Smart as you are.”
Teach her what? She tried to soften and silken her voice, speak in
those pear-shaped tones, say what shouldn’t be said in a way that could
be: and when she did it well—not blushing even—he’d smile at her in
the same way that the dark-eyed male actors smiled down at their
clever girls: as though he’d learned more than she’d said.
Because she was still a gangly half-made girl with bitten nails whose
father ran a failing farm supply store, whose best friends were her
brothers. He knew very well what she didn’t know.
He lived at the hotel, paying his rent every day, a dollar a day, as
though he’d not want to pay in advance for a room he might not have a
use for. He had a bed in his little office at the theater too, a daybed he
called it, a davenport she said, which made him laugh.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 271
Daybed. Bed for day. Her mother told her that men only want one
thing, that they are like beasts without thought or consideration; at the
same time she told Vi that someday one would come who was good
and kind and thoughtful and would love and care for her forever. The
two things canceled out and left her with no counsel. The high school
boys now headed out to farms and ranches or out of town hadn’t much
interested her, she’d moved among them as through a shoal of fish that
parted to let her pass and then regrouped behind her. She was taller
than most of them and played ball better. She liked their horses more
than she liked them. She had no way of knowing if this man was like
other men, if he had no consideration, or was good and thoughtful, she
only knew she could make no objection to him, not even when he
paused to see if she would: she could think of no reason to. He was
more like a land she’d come into than someone to know or judge. She
had no way to go back, but she didn’t think of that: he told her not to,
not to think about the future. It was the one thing he forbade. Anyway
this country she’d come into was her too: she just hadn’t known it could
be so.
He told her he was sorry he couldn’t take her to nice places or on
moonlight drives, squire her around as she deserved, but he figured
those brothers of hers wouldn’t cotton to that, and she said he was
right, they wouldn’t; it was only because she’d started at the normal
school on the hill that her time was her own now and none of their
business. She didn’t care: inside the picture palace (that’s what he called
it in his double way of speaking) they were alone with the moviegoers.
He brought her up into the little insulated booth where the great rat-
tling projectors burned away, hot as stoves, two of them because when
the film on one ran out he turned on the other, where the next reel was
already loaded and strung up, and seamlessly the picture changed from
one to the other. He brought her to the little double-glass window in
the wall where the picture could be watched, and showed her the marks
that appear for an instant in the corner of the screen, that warned him
the reels would need to be changed in five minutes, in three, in ten sec-
onds, now: and she realized she’d seen those X s and dots forever, and
not understood them. Once, as she stood there to look out, he came
behind her, drew up her skirt and gently eased down her pants, she
lifted a leg so he could slip them off. She held herself against the padded
272 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
wall, legs wide apart for him to enter, still watching through the
window the great silvery faces come and go; sometimes the actors
looked her way, speaking as though to her, troubled or threatening or
surprised by joy, but without words, for she could hear nothing they
said, could hear nothing at all but the uncaring projectors, and the
people out there looking at the screen couldn’t hear the sounds he and
she made either: she knew they couldn’t, and still she tried to be quiet
as he rose up within her beyond what she’d thought possible. Five min-
utes till done, three minutes, ten seconds, now.
When winter came her mother began to worsen from whatever it
was that she had, that ate her away from within. Her father could
hardly speak of it; her brothers tried to go on acting in the same ways
they had always done, belligerent or jaunty or uncaring, intent on their
jobs or their games or their pecking order, and Vi could understand—it
seemed not to be in them to rise to this, which didn’t mean they weren’t
hurt inside: only she couldn’t talk to them. She had only her man in the
movie theater to talk to. He listened, too: calm and quiet and unafraid.
Until (she could tell it) he could go no further. She knew she shouldn’t
hand him something he couldn’t fix. She felt she cost him something
just by being so hurt by it, so confused and hurt, herself: she had made
herself less his, less what he wanted, she subtracted from herself some
quality or value he deserved to have. Ever after she’d have to tell herself
it wasn’t for that reason—not for that reason alone, not mostly, not at
all—that he’d moved away.
In the center of the proscenium of the old theater were plaster leaves
and flowers surrounding two masks, one of them with wide mouth
turned down in a frozen rictus of awful grief, the other in an even
worse contortion of awful laughter. No picture showing: it was the
middle of the morning but as eternally dark as ever here, the dim house
lights on. He told her he was leaving town, selling up, heading out. The
way he said it was more gentle but not otherwise so different from the
way he’d say anything, any jaunt he’d propose, any scheme to make it
big or see the world. She sat in the seat beside him in the grip of an
awful fear, that there was a right thing she might say, one thing, that
would make him retract what he’d told her and change him back into
what he had been just before, but she didn’t know what that right thing
was and wouldn’t ever know it.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 273
“Why?” she said at last: the one word, one syllable, that she could
manage without tears. She looked straight ahead.
“Couple of reasons,” he said. “There’s some gentlemen who’ve
learned about my little enterprise here, people I knew a long time ago;
they’d like to have a talk with me and I don’t believe I want to start up
that old acquaintance.”
That was language from the movies. She had to believe it contained
a truth about him. She thought of saying he could hide out at the ranch:
but that was just more movie talk. She didn’t know who he was: never
had.
“And,” he said. “Well, just time to move on. Never been happy long
in one place.” He turned to look at her, she could sense it but wouldn’t
turn herself. “Hadn’t been for you, I’d have been gone a while ago.”
She had to go, she had snatched these moments from her mother
and her family, she’d told them lies that weren’t going to last long, she
had to leave and go out into the day. She got up and pushed past him
like a moviegoer when the picture’s reached the place where she came
in. There was no one in the hot street or in the store, she could weep
and cry aloud in an agony that was like (she’d learned the word in
music class at the school) a descant on the cry of grief always in her
then for her mother and herself.
When her mother was dead and buried, though, and he was still
intent on leaving and had announced the closing of the theater, she
made a spectacle of herself; she was seen banging on his door in the
hotel and people talked and she ran from the house and her brothers
knew where she was headed and followed her, pulling at her arms as
though she were ten years old and in a tantrum, a madness possessing
her that she would deny possessed her. She’d deny even to herself that
she had to see him and then find herself looking up at the lighted
window of his office at midnight not knowing how she’d got there. Her
mother not a month in her grave.
She was waiting there loitering the day he came down from the
office with a stack of file folders and a tin money-box that he put into
that cream and gray convertible he had, and a small pistol too in a hol-
ster, belt wrapped around it, which he put in the glove compartment.
Two alligator suitcases, a little shabby, were already in there. She could
say nothing, a clear coldness all through her worse than the fiery obliv-
274 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
ion. He nodded to her as though she were a dim acquaintance he had
nothing against. When she didn’t respond in any way, he held up the
files to her.
“Like to invest in a picture palace? Steady income.”
“Stop it,” she said. “You stop it. I’ll never go to the pictures again.”
“Oh honey. You will. You’ll see. Plenty of good pictures, always more
in fact, brand-new, all-talking all-singing all-dancing. You’ll see.”
Everything he owned was in the car. He had to pass her to get to the
driver’s seat, and as he did he seemed to convince himself of some-
thing, and he turned back and took her and kissed her and touched
her. Then he got in the car and started it. She could hear the gears
engage and it moved away, leaving tracks in the dust of the road, not
seeming to grow any smaller though as it went.
Three years passed.
The train blew its whistle for a grade crossing, and Shirley in the
coach seat opposite hers awoke for a moment. “Hey,” she said, and
went back to sleep. Shirley’d been married and divorced, Vi didn’t yet
know the whole tale. Outside the train window the landscape was
growing more familiar. Vi hadn’t told Shirley about the picture show.
It hadn’t ever reopened.
She’d said to Prosper Olander that you can only get your heart
broken once. She thought of it as like a horse’s broken leg: after that
they shoot you. Whatever you are afterward isn’t as alive; you can’t be
burned, but you don’t feel the fire. She’d said to Prosper that the woman
who’d left him at the stairs to the train had broken his heart, as hers
had been broken; but something about him made her think differently.
It might be that his heart was cold from the beginning, because he was
a cripple. Weak and twisted as his body was, he seemed unbreakable
within, elastic, immune to whatever it was that pierced you and then
was never after withdrawn. If it was so he was lucky, maybe, because
how could he live otherwise? How could he risk it, falling for some-
body, with that? Even the words “fall for” still induced in Vi a kind of
panic, a vertigo that she’d once been sure she’d eventually pass beyond,
and hadn’t.
She wondered if she’d really been right about him and that married
woman. She thought most likely yes, the way he’d responded when
she’d brought it up. A married woman. With a kid, and a husband
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 275
right there at the plant where you worked too. That just took the cake,
in Vi’s mind. Not that she herself hadn’t ever. But surely it was differ-
ent if you could do it with a cold heart: if you could, it would actually
make you kinder, more careful, less likely to do stupid bad things, hang
on, wreck everything the way maddened lovers in the movies did. She
hadn’t done any of that with her married man, hadn’t thought to do it,
she’d stayed cool.
A cool heart. Not cold; not hardened with cold. She didn’t know if
Prosper had a cool heart. She’d write, and maybe learn how it turned out.
7
Oh my heavens look at you,” Connie said. “Oh I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Prosper said. “My own damn fault. Just not
watching my step. So to speak.”
She came in, pushed the door shut behind her, not taking her
eyes from the ravages that she’d inflicted on him—that’s what her face
said. She put the dish in the kitchen and came to where he lay. He
described his injuries, just as he had to Vi, and just as Vi had, she sat
down on the bed’s edge the better to study him, sat in fact perilously
close to his legs, the third included, which was only just then starting
to take it easy.
“I can help,” she said. “I’ve got time. All the time in the world. I can
run errands, I can get you things. Aspirins. Vaseline for the scabs.”
“No no.”
“I want to. I should.”
“Okay thanks.”
“My mother was a nurse.”
“Oh.”
She jumped up then, the bed bouncing painfully under Prosper, to
take a magazine from Adolph, who’d found out how easily and sweetly
it tore.
“Oh let him have it,” said Prosper.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 277
She turned to face him, still stricken. “He’s joining up,” she said.
“Who is? Joining up with what?”
“They said that he’d have to reestablish his deferment with the draft
board because his situation changed. They said they thought it might
be all right if he produced the documents, but he just said oh the heck
with it, he’s not going to, he’s going to volunteer. He leaves in a
week.”
She was weeping now, not desperately but steadily, the way women
can, he’d always marveled at it, the tears one by one tumbling out,
hovering on the lashes, as though all on their own, while the weeper
kept on making sense, sniffling now and then.
“He said his life was too damn complicated.”
“Oh.”
“That’s what he said to me.”
“Well, kind of in a way, I mean . . .”
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I drove him away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Prosper said. He pulled his hand-
kerchief from under his pillow and proffered it. She came and sat again
on the bed.
“I should never have left my home,” she said. “I should never have
come down here. I should have stayed up there.”
“Well,” Prosper said. True Story was full of accounts from women
who felt that they’d driven their man away, by withholding themselves,
by not meeting his needs, by indulging in finery or jewels or frolicking.
But you often wondered if they meant it, or really believed they deserved
what they got for it.
“I mean shouldn’t I have? Shouldn’t I have just stayed home?”
“Keep the home fires burning,” Prosper said, with what he hoped
was sincere gravity, but Connie made a face and looked away, as though
she knew better.
“Oh yes. So I’d stay home and light my little light in the window
and he could just go wherever he pleased and do whatever he pleased.”
Her eyes, dry now, roamed in a rather scary way, unseeing, or seeing
things and people not present. “Sure. Oh sure.”
“No, well.”
“That woman,” Connie said.
“Oh Francine’s okay,” Prosper said. “She means no harm, she’s . . .”
278 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
The glare she gave him stopped that line of thinking.
“So um,” he said. “The army? That’s what he’s joining?”
She seemed to come to, grow conscious of what he’d said, its mean-
ing for her. “Oh God,” she said. “I ought to go. I have to go.”
“You’re not going back north now, are you?” She hadn’t arisen from
his bed.
“No. No.”
“You’ll take a job here maybe?” he said.
“I might,” Connie said, as though Prosper might dispute this with
her. “Otherwise I’d have to live on this allotment they give you. With
my son. ” She looked toward Adolph, who, smiling, showed her the
destruction he’d wrought.
“You’ll do what you have to do,” Prosper said.
“I’ll do what I want,” Connie said. She put her hand with grave
gentleness on his cheek, looking into him with thrilling intensity. “I’m
going to come again,” she said. “I don’t care, I’m going to come every
day and help and see what you need until you’re better and up and
around again. It was my fault and his fault and I don’t care what he
thinks.”
She patted his arm, stood, and went to the kitchen, discreetly tug-
ging down the legs of her shorts. She picked up the dish she had put
down there and held it up to him, tears again maybe glittering a little
in her eyes, and gave him a big smile. “Tuna casserole,” she said.
Vi never did write—too many things, too much life happening then—
but years afterward, in a different world, she was sitting in a dentist’s
office and picked up a magazine called Remember When, and saw,
amid the articles about bottle collectors and old crafts, a collection of
memories about the Ponca City plant, with a photograph of all of the
Associates going in on the day shift; most of the people who’d sent in
anecdotes were unknown to her, but in one of the letters there was
Prosper’s name, amazing thing, and Vi thought she could guess who’d
written it. She put the magazine in her bag; read it again later at night
and thought of responding herself, even got out the typewriter, but in
the end she wrote nothing. What had happened there couldn’t be recov-
ered, because too much was happening at the same time, and how
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 279
could you express it all without wiping away all that had made it what
it was—as this Connie W. person had done in her letter?
I have so many memories of the men and women who worked
there at Van Damme Aero P.C. and when I look back it all
comes so vividly into my mind, the good things and other things.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I don’t sup-
pose that anyone who hadn’t been there could imagine what it
was really like—a lot different than you might think! The person
I remember best was a fellow whose name was Prosper, though
for the life of me I can’t remember his last name. He was handi-
capped and walked with two crutches, or two canes I think; as
I remember he worked in the print shop with an awful man who
wrote press releases and harassed everyone. Well he had a lot to
overcome (this Prosper I mean) but he was always so cheerful
and optimistic and gave everyone who knew him a boost. He
was a good friend to me after my husband went into the Army
and I went to work there as an inspector. My shop number was
128. I guess I came to know him a little more intimately than
anyone else there, and I still can’t account in my mind for what
made him the way he was, and how for all the trouble he’d had
in his life he could take the trouble to make another person just
feel all right inside.
8
Back then, Connie had wondered at Prosper too, just as Vi had:
wondered at something that seemed so impervious in him,
unbroken, undiscourageable. Lying beside his bare body in the
spare bed in her house on N Street, Connie thought it was almost
spooky: he was like one of those cheerful ghosts in the movies, who
seem to have nothing left to lose, and only goodwill toward the living
among whom they fade in and out, making things right.
He was no ghost though. She put her hand tentatively down where
his had been, and also where he’d. A little sore there. She’d always been
reluctant to touch it much, but he sure hadn’t been, so why should she
be? It was hers.
What made him so complacent about all that, sex, as though it was
easy? He of all people. Surely he couldn’t have been with many women,
not so many that it would make him so—what was the word she
wanted, so certain or steady, and yet so different from an actual ordi-
nary man. She thought of Bunce. How different it was with him. Were
there other different ways for men to be, other than those two? She’d
probably never know. With Bunce it was sometimes more like a test, or
a problem to be solved, only that was wrong because it wasn’t some-
thing you did with your head. There seemed to be rules she didn’t
know, that Bunce thought she’d know; he’d grow tense and watchful
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 281
when she did things wrong, sometimes if she did anything at all. Now
and then his intense attention would remind her of his look when he
played or practiced football and the whole of him was bent on doing
the thing right, the unsmiling intent face and the funny leather hat that
made it almost ridiculous if you weren’t doing it but watching it: in the
bed sometimes too—times when she felt like she was watching and not
doing—it was, just a little, ridiculous, since he was naked except for
his socks, and the big bobbing thing to be managed right.
She laughed or sobbed a little, and Prosper turned a little to touch
her, laughing a little too, so she went quiet.
Bunce had told her that, for a man, every time you spent, you lost a
little time off your life—she couldn’t remember if he’d said a day or a
month—and so every one cost him something, left him just a little
weaker. And that’s what it seemed like.
But oh not always. Not when, helpless and forgetful of all that at
last, he’d just. And in those times it couldn’t be said who carried who
forward, whether he’d surrendered to her or she to him. Those times it
seemed to go on forever even though it was only a few minutes, seemed
to be forever in the way they said immortal souls live outside time.
They became “one with”—Father Mulcahy said you could become one
with Jesus our Savior, one with Mary our Mother. Connie didn’t know
what that would be like but she did know, in those moments with
Bunce, what one with meant. She was one with him then. Oh Bunce.
Prosper stirred beside her, strange bones of his stranger body on
her, and a dark grief unlike any she’d known arose like something she’d
swallowed and couldn’t expel.
“What is it?” Prosper asked her softly. “Huh?”
She wouldn’t say. She wept, but he wouldn’t just let her, cheerful
himself and smiling, wanting to know, to make her feel better, as
though nothing could really be the matter, hey come on, until she rose
up and turned to him, face wet.
“What’s up?” he said.
“What’s up, what’s up?” she cried at him. “I’m cheating on my hus-
band! He’s gone to be a soldier and he’s gone for one day and I’m
cheating on him! I’m cheating on him with a cripple!”
She plunged her face into the pillow and sobbed, as much so that
she wouldn’t think of what she’d just said as to mourn or keen. After a
282 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
bit though she stopped. She wiped her face with the pillow slip and
turned her face to him, to see how terribly angry he was. He was hard
to read in the predawn, but he wasn’t looking her way; his eyes cast
down, diminished, maybe crushed.
“So,” he said softly, and she waited. “So does that mean,” not rais-
ing his eyes to her, “I mean, if you feel that way about it—well I can
understand, but does that mean you don’t want me to come back?”
Prosper hadn’t, honestly hadn’t, expected all of that to happen, uneasily
glad as he was that it had, and sorry as he’d be if it had to stop. He’d
only come to the house on N Street (identical to his own) to show that
he was truly now up and about, on his own, good as new or at least as
good as he had been before, due to her ministrations, and to bring her
a bottle of wine, Italian Swiss Colony, that he’d asked Pancho to buy
for him on his monthly trip to the wet state next door. He’d also wanted
to show her his new aluminum crutches, though he knew better than
to carry on about them, people found it off-putting and after all they
weren’t (though they might seem so to him) a new sport-model car or a
Buck Rogers rocket belt. Handy was the word he’d use.
Across her face when she opened the door to find him on the door-
step (one thing hard to get in Henryville was telephone service; you’d
have quit and moved back home before they got around to you) was
that changeful flicker of hopeful, but maybe painful, feeling that he
was getting used to. Such a small slight person, so full of emotions.
Anyway all she said was Hello, and asked him in.
He’d asked her how had it gone the day before, at the train station.
Well fine, except that that woman (she’d never ever say Francine’s name
out loud) had the crust to show up too, all dolled up and wearing a veil
and carrying on like some mourner at Valentino’s grave—as though
she had a right! And Bunce himself, carrying the little bag Connie’d
packed for him, had walked away with her down the platform, leaving
his wife and son standing there. Just standing there! And after she’d
gone away and Bunce had returned to Connie, well it was hard to wait
for the train with him and say good-bye as she should, with all her
heart, but she’d done it, she had. Was the wine for her? Oh that’s so
kind, she’d never had wine like this before.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 283
He sat at her kitchen table while she gave her son a glass of milk,
speaking softly to him and he to her. The boy’s big brown eye fell on
Prosper now and again, maybe as Connie’s had on Francine—no,
surely a little kid wouldn’t know enough to be jealous of a man in his
house. Connie ran a bath and dunked Adolph in it, talking on and on
to him and to Prosper, who listened in a strange state of elevation,
peaceful amid a family he could imagine might be like one he could
have, while knowing it was Bunce’s, who’d take it out on him if he ever
learned of Prosper’s sitting here at Bunce’s table eating a piece of
Bunce’s own farewell cake and sipping pink wine from a tumbler.
Then after a quiet half hour spent alone with Adolph in the bed-
room, while Prosper read a comic book he found there, Connie’d come
out and shut the door softly behind her.
Prosper had intended to leave then, but of course he hadn’t, and she
hadn’t wanted him to, that seemed evident, and they talked—she talked
and he listened—and she tried the wine and said she liked it. The short
night came down, and brought a lick of breeze—she called it a lick,
tugging at the throat of her thin dress for it to enter there. Funny how,
when the air cools, the sweat starts on your brow and lip, or maybe it
was the wine. Could you put an ice cube in it? They decided you could
if you wanted.
She made him tell her about himself, and he watched what he told her
reflected in her features. He told funny stories and odd ones and she
laughed and marveled, but through all these, in her eyes and in the part-
ing of her lips and the tender double crease that came and went in the
space between her pale brows, he saw an underlying something, a hurt
for him, even when the stories were about what he was proudest of.
Then the wine was gone and they told secrets.
She asked him if she could ask him a question, and he said sure she
could, and she asked if you were, well, with a man who you loved, in
the bed, and if that person couldn’t, you know, complete what you
were doing or even get started because he couldn’t—well did that mean
he didn’t love you, did it mean he hated you, or did it not mean that?
What did it mean? And Prosper said he didn’t know because it hadn’t
happened to him, and she said it hadn’t happened to her either, she just
wondered. And she wept a little. He came to touch her.
Still he could say that he hadn’t meant to stay, hadn’t meant to be
284 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
still awake with her when the sky began to lighten again. Throughout
she was as tentative, and yet as determined, as he was: they took turns.
She never said, and he never said, No we can’t. They just could and
they did.
She was so slim and pale, breasts no bigger than apples, and yet
between her legs golden fur thick as a beast’s. Fascinating, but not to
be remarked on, he knew that much. It crept up toward her navel and
down her thighs, and seeing it and feeling it he noticed (as he hadn’t
before) the light down on her upper lip, the soft hair of her cheeks by
her ears, and the drape of hairs over her forearms like a monkey’s.
They’d been there all along and still he’d expected a body smooth as a
statue; now he knew better. What she’d expected of him she didn’t say:
he was always unexpected, he knew, and he made no remark on that,
either, though she seemed surprised by the willingness of him and of
his eager part, as though maybe she’d expected that to be attenuated or
wasted too, like his legs. Wouldn’t have been the first time for that
either.
But he really hadn’t expected all that or counted on it, and the
proof was he’d not brought any of his Lucky brand condoms, still a
couple left. When he said something to Connie that he hoped might
make that clear— we shouldn’t, we should be careful because, you
know—she’d slipped out of the bed (near naked and aglow, as though
she drew all the small light in the house into herself) and gone to the
bathroom and then returned, a strange sweet odor about her, and just
picked up where they’d left off.
What was it? he asked, afterward, and she whispered into his ear in
the deep dark: Zonitor. What’s that? You put it, you know, up there,
and you don’t get pregnant. She’d used it for a year with Bunce and
never told him. Never told him.
A while after that they started again.
Then they’d come to the time at dawn where she’d wept about it,
how she was cheating on Bunce with a cripple, and before she could
answer his question to her (but he guessed the answer anyway because
of the way she gasped in laughter at it, at his nerve), Adolph could be
heard crying, then bawling: and in furious haste, as though the cops
were at the door, she leapt up and struggled into her dress.
He got himself together and went home. That dawn walk back. He
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 285
thought that, when and if it ever came time to assemble in memory all
the most blessed moments in his past, then these dawns when a woman
who had just allowed him into her life, maybe her heart, put him out
because she had to return to her child, her work, her self, reluctantly
from a warm bed or sometimes not so reluctantly—they would all be
among the ones he would choose, though he couldn’t say why.
9
Connie waited another day, exhausted and immobile, and then
bathed and dressed and went to get a job at Van Damme.
First thing was to bring Adolph to the nursery and get him
signed up and settled in. The nursery was in the same building
as the huge cafeteria, occupying the whole sunny southern side, the
curving spaces she’d seen in the magazine enclosing an inner space
open to the sky, a playground with flowers and a little garden where
the kids could grow their own vegetables (as she walked, Connie was
reading from the little handout they’d given her). The principle the
whole nursery and its kindergarten and classrooms went on was Learn-
ing by Doing. Prepare the child for successful adaptation to the school,
the plant, the office, and the community. Good citizenship begins in
cooperation, respect for others, and a sense of accomplishment.
It seemed a little more chaotic than that when she opened the glass
doors and a wave of child and teacher voices hit her, a storm of babble,
tears, cries of excitement. They gave you an hour or so on the clock to
stay with your child so he wouldn’t get a complex from being aban-
doned, but you didn’t have to use it if you thought everything would go
all right. Adolph clung to her as though to a rock-ribbed shore against
the breakers.
“Well hello there, little fella,” said the receptionist, bending over him,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 287
grandmotherly and gray; she reminded Connie of the woman at the
United States Employment Office who had started her on this journey.
“What’s your name?”
Adolph made no answer, though he let go of Connie and smiled.
Mrs. Freundlich somehow hadn’t left him with a terror of strangers,
thank goodness.
“His name’s Adolph,” Connie said.
The woman lifted her brows, regarding Connie over her Ben Frank-
lin glasses.
“Well his name’s Adolph really,” Connie said. “But we always call
him Andy.”
“Andy,” said the woman, whose own name was Blanche. It said so
on her badge. She filled out some forms, asked if Connie would like to
have the cost deducted from her pay when she got a position, and
whether her son had any medical problems. No he didn’t, he was fine.
“Well then, come on in, Andy, and we’ll make you a card with your
name, and get you all settled in.” Blanche set off unafraid into the pan-
demonium beyond, sure-footed and broad-beamed, and Connie and
Adolph went after her, his new name awaiting him, everything await-
ing him, everything.
At Intake, they spurned Connie’s little test paper with a smile, and
nobody asked her for a birth certificate, though she’d brought it, which
made her wonder why they ever had up north. It was as though the
grimy and outworn Bull plant and its offices were located in some
former age, as though she’d been transported into a grown-up world
from a messy playroom. Next day she dropped Adolph, Andy, at the
nursery and watched him totter off, as ready for this as she was. She
started on the line, turning bolts with a driver, but as soon as she could
she began looking at the training courses that you could take, get a
better pay rate, do more interesting work. There were classes in Draft-
ing, Engine Setup, Metal Lathe Operation, Blueprints, Calibrations.
There were so many of them offered at so many different hours for dif-
ferent lengths of time that Rollo Stallworthy had made up his own
computer to keep them straight, a piece of cardboard with wheels of
cardboard pinned to it and little isinglass windows that lined up to
show the date and the times and the rooms and who had signed up for
which.
288 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
One of Henry Van Damme’s ideas that his brother and his partners
had rejected was a plan for training all new employees not just in one
operation but successively in several—riveting, welding, engines, gun-
nery calibration, subassembly, anything—so that eventually in the
course of a single shift a person could take a break from one job and
do another for a couple of hours, and then another. It’d keep you alert,
he argued, keep boredom from setting in (he feared boredom intensely
himself), make for happier workers. Variety is the spice of life. The
engineers and efficiency experts reacted with horror. The constant
traffic of people from workstation to workstation would cost time, so
would the training; most of the workers coming in were barely capable
of learning one simple job, let alone five or six—this wasn’t like down
on the farm, where you milk cows in the morning and hoe corn in the
afternoon. Very well, Van Damme at last said: but you’d better be
ready for high turnover, and plenty of new trainees, and that’s time
and trouble too. If you haven’t ever done it before, industrial labor is
an awful shock, one or two simple motions performed every couple of
minutes for forty-eight hours a week, plus overtime—plenty can’t take
it, and that didn’t surprise Henry Van Damme any. Without bringing it
up again he continued to brood on the matter and work up plans for
how it could be done. The papers are in his archives today.
Connie signed up for Billing and Comptometry. When she was
given a job, she was also sent to study Wiring Procedures. She’d be an
inspector when she’d mastered those, a white band around her left arm
with that word written on it, and the power—the duty—to make the
workers whose work she inspected do it over if it wasn’t done right.
The first time she did that, and the woman whose work had failed
inspection looked up wan and lost and hurt, Connie had smiled at her
in a buck-up way and then gone off to the john and cried. Never again,
though. Among the inspectors in her shop she was the most detested,
particularly by the men: but she’d learned something about men, at the
Bull plant and then here. Men—not all men but a lot, maybe most—
didn’t know everything that they acted as though they knew, and
weren’t as good at things as they let you think, tools and machinery
and the tasks that those things were used for.
“They pat you on the head,” Connie said to Prosper while Adolph
got his supper, “or they look like they would if they could. Like you’re
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 289
a child. You ask them a question, they get all annoyed, as though sure,
they’ve got it all under control. Then you look at what they did and it’s
not right. It’s just not right.”
Prosper—glad not to be one of the they she described, nobody could
say he’d ever lorded it over man or mouse—shook his head in sympa-
thy. He was all in favor of her, himself. He admired her for the hard
skilled work she did, and the courses she studied for in her spare time,
and the way in which, despite all that, she cared for her son with what
seemed single-minded intensity. What he wondered was if she also
undertook those many things so as to be too busy to have to decide to
go to bed with him. He hadn’t had a lot of welcome that way, quick as
he was to pick up on any that he got. Sunday she’d take the church bus
to St. Mary’s in Ponca City, in her nicest dress and a hat; Sunday was
his only day off, and hers. When Adolph’s, no Andy’s, supper was done
she planned (she told him) to take a long bath and wash her hair and go
to bed, and he understood her, the way she said it, very clearly. Not
that she didn’t want him there: she seemed to need him, greeted him
with ardent hugs as soon as he’d got inside and away from neighbors’
eyes. He’d stay till he wasn’t wanted, then head home alone; come back
another day, to knock on the subletter’s door after night had fallen.
“I just can’t help thinking all the time how jealous Bunce would be
if he found out,” she said to him when once he pressed her. “He’d go
crazy. Thinking of that makes me feel, well, not so much like loving.”
She sat at the kitchen table, where she was filling in a Suggestions
form. Ever since she became an inspector she seemed to notice a lot of
things that could be done better. Her Suggestions were growing longer.
Sometimes they needed two pages.
“He is jealous,” Prosper said thoughtfully. “I don’t know how he can
be so jealous when he . . . The things he’s done. It’s not exactly fair.”
“All men are jealous,” Connie said. “They just are.”
“Well,” Prosper said. “I’m not.”
“No?” She looked up from the paper and twiddled her pencil. “Not
jealous?”
“I’m not,” he said. “But I can be envious.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well,” he said. The distinction was one he’d read about in an article
called “Obstacles to Your Complete Happiness” in The Sunny Side long
290 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
ago. “The jealous person wants what he has all to himself. The envious
person wants what he wants, but he doesn’t mind if other people have it
too.”
“So you can share,” Connie said smiling. “Adolph’s learning to
share, in the nursery.”
“Good.”
“That doesn’t sound like envy.”
“It is if you don’t get what you want that someone else has,” Pros-
per said. “Or if another person gets more. It can drive you nuts.”
Connie looked down at the form she’d been working on. “He is my
husband,” she said.
When she was done with her bath that night she let him just lie with
her on the bed, the other bed from hers and Bunce’s, maybe just too
weary to resist him, and he embraced her from behind and reached
around to touch her. He pushed down her damp pajamas, his hand
searching in the fastness of her thick hair. She lay against him as still as
a doll or a corpse (he’d never lain with either of those), but he did as Vi
had taught him, wondering if maybe it only worked with Vi no matter
what Vi said, but she seemed to melt against him, small adjustments of
her into him, until he felt her breath quicken as though unwillingly,
and hot with hope, as well as with the sound and feel of her, he’d kept
on until she tensed suddenly with an animal’s grrr, shook, and then
softened; and slept. That was all. Every week a letter came for her from
Bunce, somewhere in basic training: Prosper saw the envelopes. The
number of glass Zonitor capsules in Connie’s box, stoppered with
white rubber, ceased going down.
Early in June the Allied armies landed in France. Even people who never
cared to follow the battles, who didn’t take out their atlases when the
President suggested they should in order to understand his radio chats,
now gathered at the radio and opened the papers, or listened to others
who read from theirs aloud. Women with men in the services, sons and
brothers and husbands; boys waiting for a call-up; older men remem-
bering France in 1918. Connie in the hot night, hoarse from shouting
all day over the plant noise, sat on the step of Pancho and Prosper’s
house and listened to Rollo read Ernie Pyle’s column about what the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 291
beach in Normandy had looked like after those days, when the battle
had gone on into the interior and it was silent there. Prosper lay asleep
on his bed, and Adolph, who often as not was now Andy even to his
mother, lay asleep next to him. Rollo read about the vast wastage Ernie
Pyle had seen, the scores of trucks and tanks gone under the waters
and lost, landing craft upended on the shore, the big derricks on tracks
stuck in the sand or wounded and inoperable, the half-tracks hit by
shells, spilling supplies and ammunition and office equipment, type-
writers and telephones and filing cabinets all smashed and useless.
Great spools of wire and rifles rusting and the corners of dozens of
jeeps buried in the sand poking out. And Ernie said it didn’t matter,
that unlike the young men buried too in the sand or being collected for
burial, that stuff didn’t count, there was so much more where that
came from, replacements a hundred and a thousand times over, you
couldn’t imagine how much more, a steady stream pouring ashore from
that great flotilla of ships standing off to sea. Two young German pris-
oners staring out at it all in dull amazement.
Even in this yard at the far edge of Henryville the sound of B-30
engines being tested, starting, winding down, starting.
Connie asked Rollo: “Why can’t they do that without a war?”
Rollo looked up from the paper, shook it, out of habit, but didn’t
look back down at it; waited for Connie to explain what she meant.
“I mean why can’t we just do this all the time, the way we’re doing,
that we’ve got so good at. Not to provide for war but just to provide for
everyone. The way everyone’s provided for here. Not just the pay, but
everything.”
“Well for one thing,” Rollo said, “because the government had to
borrow the money for all that. The country’s going into debt making
this vast amount of stuff that when the war is over no one will want
anymore—guns and bombs and bullets and tanks. And they’ll still
have to pay back what they borrowed.”
“But why can’t we just turn around and order the same system, the
one big system, to make things that people do want. Like those refrig-
erators we all have here, or new cars, or better houses, or anything.
Then people would be making a lot of money making the things and
also be able to spend it, because the things they’d be making would be
things people want.”
292 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“But who’d decide what people want?” Rollo had come to like
Connie, and respect her too, and when his health wouldn’t permit him
to work, which wouldn’t be long from now, he intended to put in her
name to replace him as foreman, or forelady he guessed she’d be called.
It wasn’t unheard of. “Now it’s the government and the army that
decide, and sometimes they’re wrong. What if they’ve built the B-30
for nothing, what if it’s not the airplane that’s needed? Well, who’d
care, if the war got won? Waste wouldn’t matter, like the paper here
says. But after the war that wouldn’t work—lots of things made that
nobody wants to pay for, and the government not there to borrow
money to buy it. It’d just go unsold. Businesses would go under. Jobs
lost. Depression.”
He put aside the paper and picked up his Roy Smeck model banjo.
Connie didn’t know how he could be so sure about this. Maybe there
was a way to know. A science of knowing what people want. Their
Passions, like old Mr. Notzing talked about. Not all people all the
time, but enough. And not just the necessary things but silly things
they’d want to buy that are fun and amusing for a while. Fashions. Sex
appeal. But would there be any way to know enough about all people,
each individual, so the system could work? You couldn’t just order
them all to go to Bethlehem to be taxed. They’d somehow have to do it
themselves, associate themselves countrywide and maybe worldwide
with their Passional Series of like-minded or like-feeling people, and be
able to know hour by hour what all of them were doing and wanting
and getting or not getting. Not even a worldwide telephone tree would
be able to do that. Nothing could.
She looked at the radium dial of the new wristwatch on her wrist,
which she’d bought out of her last paycheck, which had gone right into
the Van Damme bank, she’d never seen it at all.
“Time to go,” she said.
Connie’s wristwatch and the big black-and-white clocks high up on the
walls of the Assembly Building agreed that it was lunchtime, and bleat-
ing horns announced it for those deep in the guts of a Pax where they
couldn’t see. Connie’d been going over the wiring with a girl whose
badge said her name was Diane, who watched Connie and listened to
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 293
her in a kind of beautiful lazy way. She didn’t fidget or get annoyed
when Connie kept her there after the horn sounded, let’s just get this
done, though her dark eyes withdrew a little.
Just finishing up when she saw Prosper coming toward her, as he
did now every day almost at this hour. Her friend Prosper.
“Okay,” she said to Diane, the noise in this shop ceasing.
Then Diane saw the inspector’s face alter, and something flew into
it because of something that she saw. Diane turned to see what it was.
The inspector was already climbing down from the platform, danger-
ously fast. At first Diane thought it was the crippled man coming this
way with a smile on his face, but then that man looked behind him, as
though he too understood Connie had seen something big. And Diane
watched her rush past that fellow to a man in uniform now coming
down the floor fast, snatching the cap from his dark curls and opening
his arms to her.
“So. He’s back, I guess.”
The crippled man had come to Diane’s station, and seemed to be
hiding behind the scaffolding of the platform.
“Who’s back?”
“That inspector’s husband. I mean I guess he’s her husband.”
“Her name’s Connie,” Diane said, thinking the guy surely knew
that. “Looks like she’s not gonna come back and finish this.” Connie
and her serviceman were wrapped in each other, oblivious, drinking
each other in. Workers went by them, some smiling. Diane climbed
down.
“Were you,” the man with the crutches asked her, “headed for
lunch?”
“Well. Yes.”
“Walk with me,” he said, a little urgently.
He steered them not toward the cafeteria but toward a lunch wagon,
one of many that served far parts of the plant, that was drawing up not
far down the floor. It was a little trying, she found, walking with him;
not only did she have to walk with an unnatural slowness to keep from
getting ahead of him, but she also felt her body tense, as though she
needed to lend him encouragement, the way you bend and make a face
to force a pool ball to go right.
“So she was glad to see him, I guess,” he said, looking straight ahead.
294 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Well heck yes. Sure. Who wouldn’t be. You could just see it in her
eyes.”
He said nothing.
“That uniform too,” Diane said, guiltily pleased to be able to tease
him a little. “They come home in that uniform, it does something to a
girl. I can tell you.”
“Well.” He seemed to pick up the pace a little, flinging his puppet’s
feet forward. “He was gone a while, I guess. I mean not long as these
things go these days.”
“No.”
“I mean not actually gone at all, really, not yet. It’s not like he’s
back from fighting the Nazis for years.”
Diane laughed at that extravagance and at the grim face he’d pulled.
“So actually you’re a friend of hers.”
“I’d say so.”
“A special friend.”
“Well she’s got it tough,” he said. “With a kid and all and her man
gone.”
“A kid? Jeez.” Diane said nothing more for a time. “My guy’s in the
service,” she said then. “My husband.”
He looked her way, to read the face she’d said that with: it was a
sentence you heard a lot, said in different ways, with different faces.
“Army?”
“Navy. He’s a fighter pilot.” She was always shy to say it, as though
it might sound like bragging; plenty of women didn’t mind bragging,
good reason or not, she’d heard them.
“So,” he said. He’d stopped to rest, she could understand why. “My
name’s Prosper.”
“Diane.” She put out her hand, man-style, to shake.
They reached the lunch wagon, a Humphrey Pennyworth contrap-
tion with a motorbike front end and a driver in white with a billed cap
like a milkman. They got in the line. The word up ahead was that It’s-
It bars—which Henry Van Damme had ordered to be shipped out every
month from the Coast in refrigerated trucks—were now available, and
the line got a little impacted with eagerness.
“It is hard,” Prosper said, to her and not to her. “It is hard.”
She’d rushed right past him unseeing, Connie had: seeing only the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 295
thing she aimed for. Bang into Bunce, as though he were her other half,
found again at last. He had glanced back at them and he knew. For
Bunce alone the lamps of her eyes were lit.
For that guy. For him.
Could it be that women really liked it that a man was jealous of
them? Did they like jealous men better than those like himself who
weren’t? The furies that such men were capable of in True Story, the
jealousy, it was always terrible and unwarranted and a man always had
to surrender it before the woman would once again be his. But maybe
that wasn’t true of them, only they didn’t like to admit it: maybe they
could love a man who was mean to them and cheated on them, as long
as he was deeply jealous, as long as he wanted them for himself alone.
He didn’t know and didn’t want to think so. But he felt pretty sure
that for one reason or another no woman was ever going to look at him
the way Connie had looked at Bunce as he approached, all her heart in
her face; or take hold of him as she had Bunce, her man.
“They’ve got ham sandwiches and cheese sandwiches,” Diane said,
startling him.
“Ah. Um. One of each,” he said, and she fetched them. “Thank you.”
For some reason Diane kept running into this guy Prosper on the floor
in the following days, or saw him passing by in the little Aero car with
the reporter fellow, or in the cafeteria. Of course he was pretty visible,
once you’d noticed him. They had a brief conversation now and then
that never seemed quite to come to an end, one more thing to say that
he didn’t say.
Then she found a note in her little mail cubby at the dormitory. It
was addressed just Diane, with a beautiful question mark after it of a
kind she didn’t think ordinary writers made. She unfolded it and it was
all written in the same kind of beautiful script that only appeared in
magazines.
Hello Diane, I got your name off your name tag the other day
and I’m guessing this is you. It seemed to me if you don’t mind
my saying so that you were looking a little down lately, and I
just wanted to remind you that over in the Bomb Bay tonight
296 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
there’s a real band playing, not just records, and I thought you
might like to go listen, and dance—not that I’m claiming any
ability to dance! Anyway I thought it might be fun, and it starts
at 8 P.M. Your friend, Prosper Olander.
Sweet, she thought. She fanned herself with it; the day had already
grown hot, too hot for the time of year. It was going to be awful in that
plant.
Why shouldn’t she go, anyway. What harm was there in it? She
could maybe cheer him up too, a nice fellow, that funny crush he’d had
on a married woman, married to a GI. She’d go: it wasn’t like you were
exactly stepping out with an actual fellow anyway.
A real band. She remembered the noise of the big band in the Lucky
Duck, the mob on the dance floor, the sweet smell of the 7-and-7s on
the table: it hadn’t been much more than a year ago, but it seemed
more than long ago, it was as though those weren’t memories of her
grown-up life but scenes from her childhood, or from the life of a kid
sister she’d never had, a crazy kid sister she’d left back there and would
never see again.
PART FOUR
1
Past midnight, and the Lucky Duck on Fourth Avenue was full to
overflowing, as a continuous wash of people entering through
two sets of double doors arose into the bars and restaurants and
seemed to displace another bunch that spilled back out into the
street and streamed away toward the lesser venues or toward the street-
cars and the late shifts, the naval bases and the ships.
Harold Weintraub’s Lucky Duck—that was the full name of the
place, the name the maître d’s spoke with unctuous exactness on answer-
ing the phones, the name printed on all the huge menus and the little
drinks cards, that was written in neon and lightbulbs across the facade,
the double name casting a backward glow and lighting the rooftop
garden along with the Chinese lanterns and palm-shaped torchères—
was stomping. It was the night that the band playing in the big
second-floor ballroom changed, and the new band (their pictures
inserted in the holders by the doors, the featured players tilting into the
picture frame as though coming out to get you with their gleaming
instruments and hair) was one everybody wanted to hear. The doormen
were overcome by the people moving in on them, many of them men in
uniform who of course got to go in, but what about the girls they claimed
were sisters and cousins too, leaning on their arms, and the couples in
evening clothes and opera capes who would certainly be buying a steak
300 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
dinner and a bottle of champagne, and—the hell, why not everybody,
even the unescorted dames you were supposed to be selective about.
Before the war the Lucky Duck had been a big and rather gloomy
Chinese restaurant, and still now there were bead curtains in the doors
to the cocktail bars and those big obscure plaques that were Chinese
good-luck signs (someone always claimed to know this); there was still
chow mein and chop suey and egg foo yung on the menus and little
cruets of inky soya sauce on the tables. People ate a lot there, but the
food wasn’t the draw; when Harold Weintraub, whom nobody had
ever heard of, decided to turn himself into Dave Chasen or Sherman
Billingsley, he bought the huge place and added an upper storey and
took over the five-and-dime next door too—nobody needed pots and
pans and clothespins and washboards for now, not around here anyway,
but they did need more room to have fun. “I want our uniformed ser-
vicemen to have a place where they can have fun,” Harold (a strangely
joyless and beaky fellow in drooping evening clothes) said to the papers
on opening night 1942. The new lights spelling out his name were
sadly unlit because of the blackout then in force. Harold was more suc-
cessful than he could have imagined, probably, and as the population
of the city almost doubled with war workers and servicemen the fun
got so intense that he spent his own time just trying to keep a lid on the
roiling pot so the authorities—the military police, city hall, the vice
squads, and the DAR—didn’t shut him down in favor of something
more wholesome, and quieter.
That amazing rolling thunder a big band could make when it started
a song with the thudding of the bass drum all alone, like a fast train
suddenly coming around a bend and into your ear: a kind of awed
moan would take over the crowd when they did that, and then all the
growling brass would stand and come in, like the same train picking
up speed and rushing closer, and the couples would pour onto the floor,
the drumming of their feet audible in the more bon ton nightclub
downstairs, where the crooner raised his eyes to the trembling chande-
lier in delight or dismay. Diane and the four girls she had quickly allied
with at the door (easier to pour in past the hulking guy in epaulettes in
a crowd) were swept out of their seats by a raiding party, three sailors,
a Navy pilot with that nice tan blouse and tie they wore, and a sad sack
soldier seeming no older than themselves. The girls couldn’t turn them
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 301
down, not with that surging rhythm sucking them all in, but they
tried—it was part of the game to say No a couple of times, they all
played it that way, even Diane knew that.
“Diane,” she’d said to the other girls as they shook hands over the
unbused table they’d claimed, giggling in glee about the dope at the
door and their rush upstairs. She recognized a couple of them, she
thought, probably from somewhere else on Fourth Avenue or Fifth
where they all came together and floated, waiting to see where they
could sneak in or who might come out and notice them. This was the
first time she’d tried the Duck (that’s what the other girls called it), and
she was filled now with a kind of buzzing brimming triumph that she
tried to hide under an above-it-all kind of smiling inattention.
Her Navy guy wasn’t much of a dancer. He pushed her around in a
halfhearted Lindy but mostly talked.
“You been here a lot?”
“Some.”
“My first time. You know they can fit five thousand people in this
place? What I hear.”
“And they all want to use the washrooms at once,” Diane said. It
was a crack somebody else had made and she was proud she remem-
bered it.
“What’s your name?”
“Diane.” She perceived he was talking in order to bend his cheek
nearer hers, to make himself heard over the band.
“Danny,” he said. “We both got a D and an N.”
“And an A, ” Diane said. Her name wasn’t Diane, it was Geraldine,
the most American name her parents could come up with. She’d been
staring at it one day, written on a school paper, and suddenly saw the
other name contained within it, the letters even in the right order, most
of them. It seemed like a gift, even a sign. She knew how to be Ameri-
can better than they ever would. She told Danny that she’d graduated
from high school the June before, but that wasn’t so either. She had a
year to go, and more than that if things went on the way they were
going, but she didn’t care, she just couldn’t see it, why it was important
now; she knew how much it meant to her parents, who told her all the
time that she represented her people and her community and had a
responsibility. Her brother’d got a beating when their father caught him
302 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
trying to get out of the house in a pair of pegged pants and a broad
fedora, watch chain swinging, the long collar points of his Hawaiian
shirt spread over his jacket lapels— pachuquismo, their father yelled
at him, you got a knife somewhere you punk you, but now he’d quit
school and joined the Army and what was he doing, picking tomatoes
on a government contract farm just like the braceros, so if that was
representing the family, Diane didn’t care: and the world was upside
down now and crazy and people just didn’t care and she was part of it.
Because nobody cared, it was easy to get into the Fourth Avenue bars
and get a Coke and then make it a Cuba libre, nobody cared, the bar-
tenders and the soldiers and the older girls watched you and they were
interested and you could see they liked it that you didn’t care either,
that you didn’t give a hoot, you could see it in their warm eyes and
smiles.
“You can meet some strange people in here,” Danny said. “You can
meet about anybody.”
“I guess.”
“I heard you could meet a morphodite in one bar. They come
here.”
“A what?”
“A morphodite. That’s a woman that’s half a man.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I swear. You’d never know, to look at her. Him. It.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Diane said.
He let her go at the song’s end with a little mock bow, and she
slipped from his attention to get back to the girls; though it seemed the
wrong way to proceed, she knew it was the way it was done.
“He really likes me,” one of them was saying. Her hair fell over her
eye the way Veronica Lake’s did, or anyway you were supposed to
think that. “I know he does.”
“Oh sure,” another, a blonde, replied. “Khaki-wacky,” she said to
Diane, but for the other girl to hear.
“Don’t you tell me,” the other said. “You’re no better. You’re more
khaki-wacky than I’ll ever be.”
“You clap your trap.”
“Lucy Loose-pants.”
The others were laughing and half rising from their seats to cover
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 303
their friends and keep them from being heard. The khaki-wacky one
looked over to where the sailors sat together and gave them a little
brave wave, mostly for her friends’ sake, just to show them that what-
ever she was, she was going to be it unashamed. Diane stayed in her
seat. The girls were all about her age but seemed to her skilled hunt-
resses, chasing uniforms with a single-minded intensity that seemed
hot and cold at the same time.
“I’m getting a button tonight,” the Veronica Lake one said as they
pulled her back into her seat. “No bout adout it.”
“Oooh, hotsy-totsy.” The blonde blew and shook her hand, as
though the matter were too hot to touch. The other looked away, cold-
eyed, exploring the ice in her drink with the straw. Diane listened, a
little afraid they might start questioning her. She knew they were after
buttons, and had heard what getting one was supposed to mean, what
you had to do. I’ll do it but you have to give me one thing. She’d heard
that the fiercest girls carried nail scissors in their bags just to get them
with. The band started up again, a slow sweet number. Though she
hadn’t seen him come up behind her, she felt Danny the pilot lean close
to her shoulder.
“Hey, sport model.”
She turned to him a little coolly. It was rude to make reference to a
person’s height or weight or.
“I’m better at this kind of tune,” he said. He really was cute. He
offered her a hand.
“Ding-dong,” she heard the blond girl say as they went away.
The Duck finally evacuated near dawn, and the crowds that were let out
into the streets deliquesced, some walking away under their own
power, the taxi fleet bearing away the incompetent and their support-
ers. Others remained to mill, unsatisfied even yet. Smash of a dropped
bottle, girl-cries at a sudden thrown punch. One thing to do after such
a night was to go out to the broad divided avenue that led to the park—
Danny and Diane and the khaki-wacky girl, who’d snagged a soldier,
did that—and wander down amid the flowers in the center plaza; over-
head the royal palms lifted their shaggy heads on impossibly slim
stalks, black against the dawn sky growing green.
304 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You know,” Danny said to her, “down the other way, I mean back
that way, there’s some places where you can get a room. A nice room.
They say. You don’t have to stay all night.”
“Go on,” she said.
“True.”
She kept walking, looking straight on, head held up.
“I mean,” Danny said, by way of withdrawing what hadn’t quite
been a suggestion. They walked on, around them others, the last of the
last, until they came to the big gates of the park, and inside everything
was green and shadowed, and you could see (but you didn’t look too
closely) couples on the benches and on the grass, the tip of a cigarette
maybe alight. Star-scattered on the grass. You went on till you got to
the zoo, because the idea was—Diane acting as though she’d long
known it, though this was the first time, the first time she’d been out all
night with the others, and Danny not paying attention yet, not being
from around here, not knowing—the idea was to come down at dawn
after a night at the Lucky Duck or the Bomber or Bimbo’s or places
without famous names like those, to listen to the animals waking up.
Diane and Danny fell out of the line, like weary soldiers hors de
combat and giving up; they found a stone bench. For a while they
talked—neither of them was much of a drinker, though they tried to
be, and tired as they were from the night and the dancing they weren’t
comatose like so many. He told her about where he had come from, far
corner of the nation from hers. He was just out of flight training and
would ship out for Pearl next week. Then who knows. Shouldn’t even
have said that much. Diane felt an instant of huge grief, and then
warmth, then something like relief, then it didn’t matter: there were so
many gone and coming back and going out again, you wanted to care
but you couldn’t care. Then they kissed, blending each into the other in
a way that surprised Diane, because she’d kissed some boys but she’d
never had this before, when what you felt moved to do was just what
somebody else wanted to do, you were sure of it, like you couldn’t be
wrong and didn’t need to worry. She pushed his hands away, but when
obediently he withdrew them, she pulled them toward her again. The
lions, awakened, started to greet the Sun their father; startled birds
arose from the trees around them. Danny looked up, as though the
wild sound came from above.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 305
“What the hay?” he said, but she drew him back. Other animals
began to make noises, animals you didn’t recognize and couldn’t imag-
ine, grunting and hollering; the big cats screamed, the baboons too but
differently; the macaws and great crested exotics shrieked and hooted
as day came on. Some of the humans joined in, in mockery or just
catching the spirit. The Shore Patrol was coming through the park,
fanning out, looking for their own.
They would get called V-girls in the papers and the comic magazines, in
cartoons about willing girls with flipping skirts and lost undies amid
wide-eyed delighted soldiers, and everybody could figure out that the V
didn’t just stand for Victory, though the jokes about doing her part
and all that were constant, and the girls would sometimes even deploy
them against one another—they could be cruel to their competition in
ways that would have surprised the boys they competed for. But they
weren’t asking for money, or at any rate never considered those who
did ask for money as belonging in the same sorority as themselves.
Which made no difference to the civil and military authorities, since a
girl could give a soldier a dose for free as easily as she could charge him
for it (as the little booklets and the big posters filled with variants of
the same cartoons kept telling him), and keeping the men off sick list
and out of the infirmary was the big concern.
The Button Babes (as they called themselves to themselves) did get a
lot of money spent on them, which wasn’t the same thing. And anyway
they were usually ready to spend it too if necessary, on their boys;
except that you learned quickly that the offer didn’t have the right
effect most of the time, maybe only late at night when nothing mat-
tered, when it was like shooting fish in a barrel and not much more fun
(that’s what Diane thought). No, the shiff-shiff of rubbed bills and
clink of dollars and smaller coins had to go only one way, had to be
shown and seen and then spent, the BBs didn’t ask why, or why the
transactions did what they did, raised the temperature, rolled the ball
faster. Cigar lifted in his grinning teeth as he peeled bills happily from
a roll. Presents could go both ways, though: Kewpie dolls and snap-
shots and locks of hair and things brought back from Hawaii or claimed
to have been. Though that stuff wasn’t what the BBs meant when they
306 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
said a present. It’s okay, you’d say when some other girl marveled at
how far you’d gone, the chance you’d taken, true story or not— It’s
okay, I bought him a you know, a present. That foil-wrapped packet
you could get for a quarter from the machine in the men’s toilet while
another BB kept watch for you ( get one for me too, well heck just in
case) or buy from a pharmacy unless the guy behind the counter was a
fuddy-duddy and wouldn’t sell them to a female, even one with a gold
ring on. All the servicemen got issued their hygiene packets, but most
didn’t bring one along. So it was hard, but they were really scared of
the clap, and even more scared of a good-bye baby, and the boys some-
times didn’t remember or didn’t care, and most of the girls didn’t
believe that the vinegar douche would work (or the one with Coke that
the tougher girls claimed to use, all six ounces, warm, capped with a
thumb while shaken, inserted), and anyway who was going to jump
out of bed and into the john just at that moment, that precious moment,
if you were even somewhere that had a john, or a bed.
All theoretical to Diane, whose greatest fear was negotiating her
absences from the house on the Heights just to get to be on the BB
periphery, where she remained for a long time: till she proved to have
something not all of them had, not even the wised-up ones, the slick
chicks; a thing that some learned to envy and some to despise in her—
it took Diane a long time herself to know it. Come summer she con-
vinced her family to let her go with other students from her school to
work weekends at Van Damme Aero outside the city, maybe a night
shift sometimes if it was really called for, and then during the week too
when school was over. To do her part. Her mother weeping in some
nameless mix of shame and pride to see her in her overalls and ban-
danna. If sometimes the hours she said she worked didn’t match the
money in her pay envelope, well they didn’t need to count it, she was
like a soldier now she said (clapping her lunch pail closed), and they
had to trust her. Watchful as he was, her father always slept as deeply
and lifelessly as his truck with the ignition off, the more soundly the
later it grew (years afterward, alone in that house, he was going to die
in a fire, awaking too late), and so he didn’t know what time she came
in. What her mother heard she didn’t say.
Out with the BBs she wore the same sloppy socks and big sweaters
they did, sweaters that slipped almost from your shoulder, so that you
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 307
had to tug it back in place slowly now and then as if not thinking about
it, as if wholly absorbed in the flyboy’s face that you were holding with
your eyes, except that his eyes didn’t stay with your eyes, but stayed
with you yes. It was flyboys that were the prized ones. They got just as
crazy as the other boys, who were crazy enough; but they seemed to
like girls who weren’t silly and who didn’t talk all the time, who could
just let a moment like that (eyes, sweater, silence) come and stay. That
was what Diane learned to do (by accident, sort of, at first just tongue-
tied and keeping erect and still out of shy fear) and got good at: and
when she did it and knew it worked she felt a dark sweet sensation that
spread like a stain from its starting point, that point below, and spread
all through her, and that he seemed to share. Just being seen and look-
ing back, unblinking like women in the movies, like Rita Hayworth.
The BBs wore thin silk scarves at their throats, and only they knew
what the colors meant, what achievements or conquests—pink, white,
blue, orange—but there was no color for causing that: it was unname-
able, unclaimable, and the only one she counted. The BBs saw her do it
without showing that they were watching her.
Fliers, because fliers could die. Of course any of them in uniform
could die, except the clerks and the janitors and the orderlies, but the
flyboys seemed closer to it, and more liable to die. As though surviving
or fighting or marching or other things were the jobs of others, and
dying, or taking that chance on dying, was theirs. It melted your heart:
she’d always heard people say that, and now she knew that it was a real
feeling you could have. But you heard of women, not V-girls and way
on past girls who asked for money, who married fliers because of the
government life insurance, $10,000 they said; and the flier was the one
to go for, because you had the best chance of collecting quickly. Diane
decided there was no truth to that.
Danny was a flyboy, but only in a way. He was back from his stint
at Pearl now and training pilots at the Naval Air Station, going up with
the student pilots in an old Bull fighter plane that he seemed to both
cherish and hold in contempt, like a feckless older brother. So nobody
was going to shoot Danny down, and he got a lot of leave, and pretty
soon he was the only one Diane went with to the Duck and other
places. He didn’t realize she’d chosen him and forgone all others, and
she didn’t tell him; and because she thought the BBs might reveal it—
308 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
she knew which ones, and why they would, that cruelty that shot
through their solidarity, it could catch you like a pin left in a satin
dress—she started to draw him away from the places that that crowd
went to and toward others. And maybe it was because they were alone
together away from the BBs and the soldiers they followed, but their
feelings, hers and Danny’s, intensified in ways that surprised Diane,
she hadn’t expected it, becoming something not so much like a game
anymore, and when he talked again about those rooms you could get
she asked him whether he was pretending, just to tease her, or whether
there really were such places and what they were like, nice or nasty. He
told her, and he told the truth, and he never insisted; he pretended
along with her that they were just considering a funny thing that existed
in the world, places that others, people who weren’t he and she, might
use or go to. But once they were actually there in one of them (not nice,
exactly, not nasty but bare and cheerless certainly, she made him leave
the light off so as not to see, the only light falling on them then the red
glow of the neon hotel sign that ran up the building’s front), he
refused the present she had brought, which one of the BBs had given
her long before as a joke or a tease. I want to feel you baby not a
sheep’s gut. She felt his fluid absorbed not just into those parts but
seeping, staining, proceeding—what was the word in chemistry for
how it happened, it sounded like the thing it meant—into the whole of
her, her heart and breast and throat. Rather than draining away like
any other flooding would, the feeling went on increasing, and in not
too long a time she knew why. She told him as they sat at dawn on their
bench in the park. He held her a long time very gently and she said she
felt a little icky-sicky now at morning. And without letting her go he
told her that he was shipping out again in a week, to go fly real fighters,
Hellcats, far away. He’d put in for the duty, wangled it, it’s what he’d
always wanted.
It didn’t seem to be a disaster, none of it; it was lifted up with
everything else that was being lifted up all around them, all around
the world, as by a tornado, lifted and swung around to mean some-
thing it hadn’t before. When they had been quiet a long time he lifted
his head suddenly and clipped his hands together and shook them, in
prayer or triumph, and she saw in the dimness the glow of his eyes
looking into hers.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 309
There was a lot to get straight between them, and it wasn’t easy; faced
with it she lost some of that lightness and carelessness she’d learned,
she faltered and felt her eyes fill and then her heart grow small and
cold. First she had to tell him she wasn’t nineteen, had lied about her
birthday, she had actually just turned eighteen, had been seventeen in
fact when they. And he told her he’d guessed she wasn’t as old as she
said, he didn’t know why he knew. She told him her real name too:
wrote it on a paper and gave it to him, solemnly, and waited for his
response.
“Geraldine,” he said, and shrugged, having no preference and
thinking it was funny she did. “Noo-nez? What kind of a name is
that?”
Another reason she’d withdrawn from the BBs when she and Danny
had got serious. They were always dropping hints about her when
Danny was in earshot, telling her she ought to get up and dance to
“South of the Border,” passing her the chili sauce, things like that,
though Danny had never picked up the hints.
“So it’s okay for you to marry a regular white person? It’s legal?”
“Yes it’s legal. Silly.”
“Hey, I don’t know. There’s laws in other states.”
She didn’t respond. He was studying her in a way that made her
shrink, or swell—somehow both at once. She was glad there had been
no Mexicans or anybody but palefaces where he’d come from—he said
it that way himself. Nothing for him to think about except a funny
name and some dumb songs. She told him her parents couldn’t know,
that if her brother knew he’d start trouble. She’d tell them after, when
they were happy and everything had to be the way it was, and they’d be
happy too.
He had nothing to tell her, was exactly what he seemed, all one
piece from front to back. She loved him, the one single thing he was,
and feared for him, and for herself; but she knew she could tell him she
was afraid, and it wouldn’t harm him or change him or pollute him.
The tornado was carrying her on upward away from the city and her
life and her family and all of it, shedding consequences, futureless,
awake.
310 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
They had only a week till he was gone. There was another flier in
his squad who was going to get married too, a fellow who had grown
up just outside the city and had a car still parked in his parents’ drive-
way. He was marrying his high school sweetheart, who was no older
than Diane and whose parents would never allow it, so they were
eloping, Danny said, as though the word itself were funny and sexy
and good. The four of them could get out of the state and across the
desert to where the wedding chapels were tying the knot for soldiers
and sailors by the dozen, they all four knew about them, there weren’t
the laws in that state there were here, you could get the license and get
married all in an afternoon. They could get back the next day.
They would leave early in the morning so they could get to the cha-
pels in time to choose one. They had to have the Wassermann test, but
the people at the chapel would do all the rest and by evening they could
have the ceremony, which only took a minute, like the sudden wed-
dings in old movies—Diane saw in her mind the comic judge or JP
with wide whiskers, his fat wife playing the harmonium, the couple (as
happy as any couple marrying anywhere) turning to each other in shy
delight and expectation. You may kiss the bride.
Danny’s friend picked them up before dawn downtown near the
park, Diane wrapped in Danny’s uniform blouse (she had started shiv-
ering violently in the chilly darkness). The friend was named Poindex-
ter, but Danny told her to call him Bill, and his girl was Sylvia, big and
blond and asleep beside Bill almost as soon as they started out. The car
was ten years old, smelly and noisy, with a spare tire tied on the side
that didn’t look any worse than the four poor things on the car (that’s
what Danny said, laughing, unalarmed). In the trunk were tossed a
dozen big bottles and a couple of empty jerry cans, which they’d fill
with water somewhere as they came down into the desert, as much for
the car to have as for themselves; and in there too was Sylvia’s patent
leather suitcase and now Diane’s round hatbox and case.
Morning city, pale and unpopulated, they were all quiet putt-put-
ting through the streets and out of the suburbs. At the edges of the
wide farmlands, the low buildings where the picker families lived. Men
and women and children, awake early, were climbing into the backs of
trucks. Sylvia said it was an awful life but those people were grateful
for the chance, they’d never had anything better. What Danny won-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 311
dered was how they knew people would want that many artichokes:
he’d never eaten one in his life.
They rose up gradually into pine mountains littered with sinister
boulders as big as cottages, rose until they came to a place where a tower
of crossed timbers was built topped by a lookout shack high up, you
could climb up it if you wanted, but they had no time. From that last
height they could see far into the brown lands they had to cross, and
effortlessly the old car fell down over the folds of earth that turned at
length into wind-combed dunes, as though any minute they would reach
the sea. Bill and Danny joked about life in the service and told stories
full of acronyms and abbreviations that the girls couldn’t understand,
but they laughed too. When the road stretched and straightened there
was a big government sign warning travelers that the desert ahead was
dangerous, that they shouldn’t attempt it unprepared, that there would
be little in the way of help for them: and on top of the sign a big black
bird perched. “A vulture,” Sylvia said in horror, but it wasn’t really.
They stopped at a gas station building so low and flat it seemed to
have been stepped on by God. It had a big warning sign too about the
road ahead, handmade, with a skull and crossbones on it; the place
claimed it was the last stop for water and gas until the city on the other
side was reached. They filled the tank, and bought water.
“Gwaranteed alkali-free,” said the dried old hank of a man work-
ing the pump.
“Alkali will kill you,” said Bill.
Actually in a few miles there was another place that said it was
really the last, and had rattlesnakes and lizards in cages to look at; and
then another place farther on, the same. “The last last place’ll be just
when we get there,” said Bill.
As the day reached noon Sylvia dropped her joking about vultures
and mirages and Indians and who painted the Painted Desert; Bill
drove the straight road with one finger on the wheel. Diane curled her-
self against Danny in the back, feeling suspended, shaken by the car
but not in motion at all: becalmed, like a ship. She started awake (when
had she fallen asleep? She didn’t remember) and felt she was still in the
same place. Danny’s head against the seat back, eyes closed, mouth
slightly open: he seemed not to breathe. For an instant she couldn’t
recognize him, a large stranger close to her.
312 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Then there was a sudden band of green, as though drawn by a
crayon, and a river to cross, they’d known it was to come but it seemed
to slice across their journey with both a greeting and a warning. After
that it was easy enough to see where they were supposed to go. Almost
as soon as the iron bridge was crossed there were signs for competing
places, billboards with pictures of linked rings, doves, hearts. It seemed
not to matter which one you picked, but she and Sylvia rejected the
first one that Bill tried to pull into, not feeling they had to give a reason,
and the boys didn’t argue. The next was worse, but the next, a white
cottage under tall slim gray-leaved trees, a little pretend steeple on top
and a picket fence, looked cheerful. It had a pretty rose-covered arcade
to enter by and a discreet sign in front that was welcoming and mild
and helpful and didn’t say Cut-Rate like the others.
“Here,” Diane said, and tugged Danny’s sleeve.
Later on, a long time after, when maybe she told the story of those days
to someone younger, Diane would try to think about having missed so
much that was so important to so many people, things that she too had
always thought, when she was a child, or a kid in school, would be
important. Getting married, after a long courtship; a proposal, and a
little plush box opened before her to show the ring and its promise
inside, to put on her finger forever; and the church, with the smiling
priest and the people and even the flowers seeming eager and impatient
and glad for her in her hampering white dress coming slowly, slowly up
to where he stood. Wedding night, and the gift of her innocence; hon-
eymoon; house. How could she tell them that it never seemed to her to
be a loss, or to be full of loss: not as it happened, and not as she looked
back on it. Because what was important then, in that time, was not so
much what you got as what you escaped. Escaping the worst was like
joy. It was joy. It was freedom, it was freedom from, and just then
that’s what freedom meant. She thought she had been lucky. She knew
she had been.
The two big hotels downtown were full and the others didn’t look
nice; at one a bellhop steered them to a place out of town that he said
would do right by them, he’d call up on the phone, and Danny gave
him four bits. They had some drinks and a steak dinner and it was
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 313
deep dark when they reached the place, Desert Courts. The sign said
modern comfort. telephone. flush toilets.
“That’s good to know,” said Sylvia coldly. Then, laughing: “Hear
about these Okies coming in from Arkansas or someplace, they’ve never
seen a flush toilet but think it’s mighty nice for washing your feet. Push
down the little handle and you get clean water for tother foot!”
Yes, everyone had heard that, and because everyone had heard it
Diane thought it probably had never happened. They turned in at the
gate. The tourist cabins were low and heavy, made of adobe; a long
trellis or breezeway sheltered their fronts and joined them like a happy
family, and vines grew up from big red pots to clamber over them, and
tall cacti too in bigger pots, fat and prickly. In the hot white moonlight
it looked like the land Krazy Kat lived in. The motherly lady at the
desk gave them keys and smiled on them all; Diane knew she was Mex-
ican but didn’t know if the others did: there was a cross on the wall
behind her desk wrapped in last Easter’s plaited palms. She and Danny
parted from Bill and Sylvia in a sort of hilarity of embarrassment, a
joke about getting some shut-eye, and then their door closed and she
was alone with her husband.
He turned on the little fan at the window and watched its propeller
whip the air. He was smiling as though at some secret thing.
“Danny.”
“So you promised,” he said, turning to her. “You’ll go to tell your
parents, as soon as we get back.”
“Yes. I will.”
She sat on the bed, on the broad red Indian blanket that covered it.
He came and sat by her. “Show ’em that picture of me,” he said. “The
one I gave you. They’ll like to see that.”
“Yes.”
“What were their names again?”
“Joe and Maria.”
“Oh right. And your brother’s . . .”
“Paul. He’s in the Army.”
“I’ll be glad to meet ’em all. Uncles and cousins too.”
She knew what she should say to that but she didn’t say it. She lay
back on the pillows and he turned to lie and nuzzle her, his arm across
her. She took his wrist to stop him.
314 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Hey,” he said. “What.”
“I don’t know, Danny, please. It might hurt the baby.”
“What?”
“I mean if we.”
“Why? Who says?”
“It’s what I heard.”
“Aw no,” he said. “My kid’s bound to be tough.”
“Danny really.”
He put his hands beneath her white skirt. “Maybe we can give him
a little brother,” he said smiling. “Come out as twins.”
“Jeez, Danny. My God.” The bed was as though afloat, about to lift
and exit out the window into the desert night with them aboard; she
lay still to keep it still, but his hands kept on, and everything within
her flowed toward him.
“There’s things we can do,” he said. “Now that we’re married.”
“Oh Danny.”
“Baby I love you.”
“Just go gentle, Danny, you have to be very gentle.”
“I’ll sneak in. Just up beside him. Won’t even wake him. I promise.”
“How can you talk that way,” she said, but he stopped her with a
kiss, and stopped talking himself.
2
Somehow it was harder going back across the desert with the sun
at their backs, not an adventure now but only drab miles to
cover. It was cold till the sun rose high and Bill kept the win-
dows rolled up and drove stolidly on, leaning over the steering
wheel. Sylvia wasn’t telling them what she knew about the world and
people; once, pressed against Bill’s arm, she wept, Diane thought:
they’d soon be parted, and who knew what might happen then. Diane
didn’t weep: she felt herself to be living on a higher plane than Sylvia,
where not weeping was required no matter what you felt, a duty to
your man, your ser
viceman. Danny slept—she’d begun to think he
could sleep anywhere, that he did it out of boredom, like a cat with
nothing to mouse after.
For herself she was feeling sick, conscious of her insides in a way
that was new, of a queasy fullness that was in her stomach and not in
her stomach. She ignored it, or when she couldn’t, she tried to stay
calm and will it to pass by. But then, not rising or whelming but stab-
bing suddenly, she felt a new bad feeling, a real and distinct pain, not
just in her middle but along a line she could trace from here to there.
She shivered and made a sound, and Danny’s eyes opened.
What if she’d been right, and they shouldn’t have done what they
did the night before? For a moment she was sure, just sure, they
316 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
shouldn’t have, and an awful premonition filled her from her bottom to
her heart. Then when the pain passed it passed too. She said nothing.
Danny slept again.
Back in the city the two flyboys had to make a run for the embarka-
tion point, their car stuck in traffic, quick kisses and hugs and tugs
away, Poindexter turning back just at the last minute to toss Sylvia the
keys to the car before he and Danny were lost in the crowds. Sylvia got
into the driver’s seat, now overwhelmed with something that might
have been grief but that had also begun to seem like it might be regret.
Diane gave her a hug and lifted Sylvia’s chin the way men tenderly
lifted the chins of weeping girls in the movies, be brave, but Sylvia
wasn’t having it, so Diane wished her luck and all the happiness in the
world, took her case and hatbox from the back and headed through the
throng to the pier where the immense aircraft carrier was tied up. After
a long time the crew and the fliers and everyone on board came crowd-
ing the rail, a vast distance above the people who waved and called,
moms and dads and girlfriends and wives. A band played, its music
coming and going with the breeze. She saw Danny, amazed that it was
possible to identify him, it was as certain as anything, and she waved
wildly and he waved back to her, and then there was nothing left to do
but wait—even when it began to move, the carrier was going to take
forever to be gone. When Danny had to leave the high deck from which
he had looked down on her, not waving but smiling and holding her
eyes—she could tell that he was looking right at her—Diane didn’t
turn away; she sat down on her case and watched the ship, which could
now definitely be seen to be moving off, its tugs busy around it (Danny
wanted her to call the ship she but Diane couldn’t, it was silly). Its
escort, too, oilers and other ships visible now standing out to sea,
creeping out from other berths to be beside it.
The ship went on growing smaller very slowly. The crowd around
her melted away. She remembered from school a teacher saying that
you can tell the world is round because ships sailing away from shore
sink over the curve of it and disappear, first their big bodies, then the
funnels and the tiptops of their masts. Good-bye. Good-bye. She
couldn’t see that, though, because the haze out at sea erased the ship
long before it could go beyond the horizon, drawing after it the other
ships. Diane felt the thread of connection between her and Danny
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 317
drawn out infinitely thin, until it broke with a hurt to her heart she’d
known she’d have to feel, but worse than she thought it would be.
It was late in the afternoon now. She got up and took the suitcase
and the other bag and started walking toward the streetcars; took the
car to Union Station, where she checked her two bags, seeming as
heavy as gold by now. Van Damme Aero ran their own bus service
from the station around to the plant; she’d taken the bus often, bright
yellow like a school bus, Van Damme’s slim cartoon plane painted on
its side, as though pushing the roly-poly bus along on its own curling
speed line. Tomorrow first thing she’d go out there. In her handbag
were her marriage license and birth certificate. She’d worked there
before, on the Sword bomber, and she thought they’d give her a full-
time job in a minute, the wife of an airman. For a time she’d leave out
the part about being pregnant.
When her mother was eighteen and just enrolled in nursing school,
first in her family to go that far, she’d found out she was pregnant,
with Pablo as he would come to be, and she’d dropped out to marry
and have her baby and take care of her man. And no matter that
Pablito was everything to her, sun around which her planet turned,
face always to him, she would still press her hand to her heart in grief
and hurt when she thought of the degree she could have got, the white
cap she’d have worn, the doctors’ offices and hospitals she could have
worked in. Diane in her senior year had won the scholarship to St.
Anne’s College for Women, the letter was there at home on the mantel
next to the photo of Pablo in uniform. So Diane couldn’t go home, tell
them that all of that was for nothing, that she’d got a baby, been mar-
ried by a JP, was going to be an Allotment Annie and sit on her culo
just getting bigger and cashing her fifty dollars a month. When she
had the job she’d get a room, somewhere. Her mother never came
downtown, her friends wouldn’t tell. It was as far as her thinking had
reached.
She ate a hot dog at the station buffet, thinking she needed some-
thing, some nutrition, the baby too, but almost before she finished it
she knew it had been a bad idea, and she spent some time in the ladies’
lounge till it was all expelled. She wiped her lips with the stiff toilet
paper and drank water from a paper cup. The attendant, small and
dark as a troll, watched her with hostile eyes, proffering a towel, but
318 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
that would mean a tip. She left the toilets and sat in a broad leather
armchair in the lounge and for a while knew nothing.
When she woke she somehow knew, even in that place without win-
dows, that darkness had come.
Where would she go now? Everyone knew that every place you
might look for somewhere to stay was overwhelmed with applicants,
that every shed and backhouse had a tenant in it, people were sleeping
on the cement floors of garages and in the basements of unfinished
houses roofed over with tar paper; hotels were impossible, even if
Diane had dared to check into one all by herself; the YWCA was full
every day. She could stay right here, in this chair that had seemed to
become her friend, but she felt sure that the attendant would put her
out before dawn. She got to her feet.
She could walk for a while. Something could turn up. She did walk,
one second per step, wearing away an hour and another hour. Evening
was soothing, the dark blue sky reminding her of childhood and trips
downtown to the movies. Even as she thought this she saw ahead a
movie theater, its great marquee projecting over the street, its tall sign
rising with the name vista and the lines of lights chasing themselves
around the edges. A lot of people milling around out front, a lot of them
kids it looked like. Diane didn’t notice the title of the show playing; she
was only drawn to the booth where tickets were sold, as though to the
gatekeeper of a realm of safety and refuge. Twenty cents. She passed
inside. More children, coming out of the curtained entrance to the audi-
torium, going in again, sitting on the steps to the balcony looking weary
or dejected, or running wildly. An usherette in pursuit like a comic cop.
Diane went into the darkness and found a seat; the feature was just
starting. It was called No Room at the Inn. Diane knew the names of
the young people who would play the main parts but hadn’t seen them
in a picture before. The music covered her and filled her at once, like a
kind of warm nourishing syrup, and she sank lower in her seat. Snow
was falling in a dark city, people hurrying through the streets. The two
young people had just arrived from somewhere else, they had an old car
that was almost out of gas; she wore a white kerchief tied under her
chin that seemed both humble and rich; he was unshaven and his pale
eyes were worried. He had a job at a war plant and they were going to
do all right but they couldn’t find a place to live. The landladies and old
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 319
men in carpet slippers who opened the door to them were mean and
tight-lipped, or kindly but helpless. The girl was pregnant! They needed
someplace safe and warm. The car busted an old tire and ran out of gas
at the same time, which was funny and was supposed to be funny, you
could tell, and it made you think everything would actually come out
all right. They started walking in the snow and he was worried and
gentle and she carried a little suitcase. They went to a sinister motel
where a single light burned and you could hear laughter of the wrong
kind, and a night clerk (Diane recognized the greasy-faced actor from a
dozen pictures) got the wrong idea about the girl and the guy, and asked
if they wanted to stay the whole night, and they were so nice they didn’t
even get what was going on or where they were, which was funny too
for a minute and then horrid, you wanted them to get out of there. They
went on through the snow and the hurrying crowds. Diane fell asleep.
When she woke up, the man and his wife had somehow found a place to
stay, only it was almost a barn, a shed with a donkey looking in the
window, and it was funny again but sweetly serious too: something
about the light or the music told you. The old man with a foreign accent
who rented the space to them and helped them out talked to them about
freedom and decency in a world gone wrong, his white hair like a halo.
It was Christmas. Kids came caroling down the streets, singing about
Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men. As though you were a visitor, some-
one come to call or to investigate, you went into the yard and through
the gate and up to the little shed, and there in a corner in a made-up bed
of blankets is the young woman, and glowing in her arms, revealed to
you as though you’d crept up to take a peek, the baby. Just before that—
just as the carollers came in to see—Diane all of a sudden got the idea
of the picture, no room at the inn, which she hadn’t got all along because
it had made her think only of herself and Danny and where she’d go and
what she’d do. Her heart heaved and she started to sob, that awful won-
derful sobbing that can happen in this darkness, where with all these
people you were alone and spoken to.
The usherette of the Vista—the only one on duty late—was having a
hell of a night. She’d come to believe that all the human beings in the
city without a house of their own were sleeping in the movies. Or they
320 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
just left their kids there to watch the show, and told them Mommy’d be
back later when her shift was done, just stay there. Damn shame.
Shame of the nation, she thought, these were war workers, doing what
needed to be done, and no place for them or their families to go. Kids
falling asleep in heaps on the stairs, picking butts out of the ashtrays to
try out. When the owl show let out and the place finally turned its
lights out at 2 a.m., the kids would still be there, and she’d have to put
them out and line them up on the curb to wait. Then there were the
older ones, “teenagers” they got called nowadays, in the back rows
necking or worse, she’d seen some rather striking things and not been
very descriptive about them when talking to the manager, who thought
it was swell management to leave the whole thing to her for these last
hours of the night. Every hour on the hour it was required of her to
check each of the four thermostats in the theater, see that they all read
right. One was up on the wall behind the last row of seats, and that’s
where she damn well went, flashlight aglow so they saw her coming,
and still they said awful things to her. Just doing my job, said under
her breath because after all the damn picture was playing, not that
these types cared.
And where did they get the bottles they smuggled in, the smell of
booze was distinct in the auditorium, floating here to there in the stale
air like a wandering cloud. It wasn’t her affair, except when the boys
got into fights she had to stop or she had to hold some retching girl’s
head over the toilet, too young to drink, too young to be here, without
anywhere else to go. If she kicked them out, what would become of
them? Churches should stay open, maybe that’d help.
She’d already had it when in the littered and foul-smelling ladies’
she heard some kind of moaning from a closed stall. What now? She
knocked on the door with her flashlight, a harsh sound, and from
inside came a startled cry. Then no more.
Something really wrong.
“All right in there?”
No answer, and she looked down at the tiles and could see what
was certainly blood on the floor of the stall, which the someone inside
had tried to wipe up and failed, oh Lord.
“What is it? Open the door. I can help.” She could? Help by doing
what, exactly, for who, a murdered girl, attacked, raped? The small
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 321
sounds came again, but the door wasn’t opened. She waited. There was
some movement, and the latch was lifted but no more. The usherette
pushed it open.
“Oh my Lord.”
“I’m sorry.”
Blood everywhere, all over her lap, her legs, the toilet, a pile of tis-
sues reddened. The woman, child, girl, was gray, as though all that
colored her had drained away.
“It came out, all this blood,” she said.
“I got to call an ambulance,” said the usherette. “You wait. Don’t
move.” In the movies they always said that, for the first time she knew
why.
“Don’t,” said Diane. “Please don’t. It’s over. I think it is.”
“Dear, you could die. I know so. Don’t move and I’ll come back.
The phone’s right there.”
Diane looked up at the usherette, whose great breasts strained the
uniform she wore, little pillbox hat absurd on her wide wings of hair.
Horror and pity in her face.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Please.”
3
The Bomb Bay was nothing but an extra building not far from the
main assembly plant that had lost its use as more and more Pax
components were being built in other plants in other places. It was
square, low, and window-less, with a makeshift stage hung with
bunting; it was decorated as though for a high school cotillion in crepe
paper streamers and silver and gold moons sprinkled with shiny stuff
(actually duralumin dust, produced when Pax parts were cut or drilled,
but it glittered prettily in the light of a mirrored ball that turned overhead
and reflected the lights). The main reason for the Bomb Bay’s existence
was that it was big enough to hold a crowd, bigger than any place in the
city, and you could drink there. The Oklahoma dry laws came and went
and came again in Ponca City, but the Bomb Bay had been established as
a private club of which all the employees of Van Damme Aero were auto-
matically members—just show your badge at the door, when there was
somebody there to check—and the church ladies and dour legislators
could go hang. The trucks rolled in from the Coast bringing the Lucky
Lager, the unrationed tequila came from south of the border, and the rest
of the array behind the long bar when and if. Waiters were in short supply;
best get your drink from the bar and carry it to a paper-covered table.
“I’d like,” Diane said—her cheeks flushed and eyes alight as though
she’d already consumed it—“a Cuba libre, please.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 323
“I’ll have the same,” Prosper said, not quite sure what it was. The
volunteer barman filled two glasses with ice and snapped the tops from
two bottles of Coca-Cola. He added a shot of clear rum to each glass,
and then the Coke.
“Wha,” said Prosper.
“Should have a lemon,” the barman said, “but we’re fresh out.”
Diane picked up the glasses—both his and hers, without hesitation
or inquiry, which endeared her to him immediately, and brought them
to a table.
“Why Cuba libre?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder fetchingly. She was a different person here
than in the plant. “It means Free Cuba,” she said. “Maybe from that
war?”
“Remember the Maine, ” Prosper said and lifted his glass to her.
The band was just setting up on the stage, the drummer tapping
and tightening his drumheads. There was a trio of lady singers, like the
Andrews Sisters, going over sheet music.
Diane told him (he asked, he wanted to know) about Danny, her
guy, flying a Hellcat in the Pacific. She got V-mail from him, not often:
little funny notes about coconuts and palm trees and grass skirts, not
what you really wanted to know, because of course he couldn’t say. She
lifted her dark drink from another war, and looked at nothing.
“So he,” Prosper began, just a nudge, he had nothing to say; and
though it didn’t draw her eyes to him she told him more, remembering
more. The Lucky Duck. The journey across the desert. At last the lost
baby.
“Aw,” he said. “Aw Diane.”
She shrugged again, a different kind. “I really only knew him a
couple of weeks. Not even a month, and I wasn’t with him unless he
could get a pass.”
“Testing, testing,” said the bandleader into the microphone.
“I can almost not remember what he looks like. Sometimes I dream
of him, but it’s never him. It’s like different actors playing him.”
“Hello hello,” said the bandleader. “Hello and welcome.”
Diane downed her drink as though Coke was all it was, and
crunched an ice cube in her small white teeth. “We weren’t even really
married,” she said. “Not by what the Catholic Church says.”
324 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Oh?”
“That’s what my mother thinks. Didn’t count.”
“Oh.”
She smiled at him, her funny life. Around them men and women
were taking the tables. Prosper lifted a hand to people he knew: press-
men from the office, engineers who’d appeared in the Aero, Shop 128
women. More women than men.
The bandleader, shoe-blacking hair and boutonniere, at last turned
to his men and women—half the horns and clarinets were women—
and with his little wand beat out the rhythm. All at once the place
changed, filled with that clamor, always so much louder than it was on
the radio.
“Like a school dance,” Diane said. “The girls dance with the girls
till the boys get brave.” She’d begun to move in her seat as though
dancing sitting down, and then without apology or hesitation she got
up, twiddled a good-bye to Prosper, and went to the floor, where in a
moment another woman was with her, jitterbugging tentatively. Pros-
per, new to all this except as it could be seen in the movies, felt that
dancing itself must be a female endeavor or art, the men diminished
and graceless where in other realms of life they were the sure ones.
Not that guy in the flowered shirt, though, shined shoes twinkling.
The three women singers, their identically coiffed heads together,
sang in brassy harmony, reading from their sheet music, they hadn’t
yet got this one under their belts, about the Atchison, Topeka, and
Santa Fe.
Big cheers for the local road, and the atmosphere intensified, but
when the song was done Diane met Prosper over at the bar to which
he’d repaired.
“Wowser,” she said. “It seems so long.”
“Since when?”
“Since I was dancing last.” She touched his elbow. “Thanks.”
So they had another Cuba libre, which seemed stronger than the
first, and they sat again and drank. Whenever the right song was played
Diane would pat his hand and flash him a smile and head for the floor,
and Prosper could see that she moved differently from the others, at
once forceful and supple, a snap to her waist and behind that no one
else had; the men were taking her away from the women now and
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 325
doing their best, but when the bandleader yelled “Ay-yi-yi!” and started
a rhumba they fell away, all but the guy in the flowered shirt.
Whenever she came back to sit with Prosper, though, she’d take his
hand under the table and hold it. Surprised at first, he thought he was
supposed to figure out what she meant by this, if it was a secret signal,
but soon decided it didn’t mean anything, her face never turned to his
to share any secret, she just did it: maybe it just meant that she’d dance
with him if he could, or that she was dancing with him there as they
sat. And it wasn’t late when she yawned and said she’d had enough,
really. He walked with her back across the still-warm tarmac, around
the ever-burning main buildings, to the women’s dorm.
“So have you seen your friend the inspector?” she asked as they
walked.
“Oh. No. Not really. I mean she.” Since Bunce had come and then
gone again, Connie had seemed to lift herself above the plane where he
and the rest of the world lived, her eyes somehow looking far off,
toward where he’d gone, from where he’d return. “She’s working over-
time, I guess.”
“Well.” She turned to him at the door past which at this hour he
could not go. “That was fun.”
“I liked it. We’ll do it again.”
She aimed an imaginary pistol at him, one eye closed, and fired:
you’re on.
In her bed in her familiar room again she lay thinking, listening to
her roommate’s breathing in the other bed.
She thought what a nice fellow that was, how modest and funny
and honest, seeming to be honest anyway, without any designs on her
as the nuns used to say, easy enough to spot those.
She thought about Danny far away, trying to say a prayer for him,
trying to remember in more than a dreamlike way his face, his laughter
at his own jokes, his touch. She should write to him.
She thought about V-mail. About her mother fetching the little
forms from the post office so that she could write one to Danny to tell
him that she’d lost the baby. How many sheets she’d begun before she
could say it plainly. His answer back, a month later, the dread with
which she’d opened it, afraid of his grief, disappointment, anger even,
though that was crazy to think, at her failure somehow. And his answer
326 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
when it came not any of those things, just telling her it was okay, he’d
come home and they’d make a dozen babies together, look ahead not
back. She thought maybe you couldn’t go to war, couldn’t fly a flimsy
little plane over an ocean, unless you could keep your head and your
smile like that. The little shrunken gray V-mail letter, like a voice heard
speaking at a distance.
She got up quietly from her bed and went to the window, having
thought now too much. The sky seemed to have been heated to glow-
ing by the plant and its lights. When she was well enough after the
miscarriage to go to work again at Van Damme, they were offering
jobs out here, and Diane signed on. She’d make more money and be far
from that town, those places, from the movie-land hope that any day
he’d come flying in again. Far from her mother’s great sad reproachful
pitying eyes, big enough to drown in. But now and then she wished,
well she didn’t know what she wished. Ay mamí. She put her hot cheek
against the cool of the glass and waited for it all to pass.
Drawn through the nation, and passing somewhere near Ponca City, is
that line below which everyone’s glad to see furious summer depart
and the cooler weather come. Autumn nights the height of felicity,
sweet as June up north.
Pancho Notzing on such a night approached the Van Damme Aero
Community Center, which formed the middle box of a big plain build-
ing; the box on the left was the men’s dormitory, the one on the right
the women’s. Both used the Center, entering from their own wings:
Pancho was reminded of the great meetinghouses of the Shakers, to
which men and women came by different ways, to meet and dance and
praise God in ecstasies.
He carried his jacket, neatly folded, over one arm. There were many
on the path with him, coming from the houses of Henryville, from
their suppers at the Dining Commons, from the far town, in groups
and twos and threes, going in by the double doors, which gave out
breaths of music when they opened and then closed again. Within,
there were not all those satisfactions and challenges and innocent
delights for the flesh and the spirit that would be offered, expected,
assumed in the true Harmonious City: but there were more of them
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 327
than Pancho had known in any human institution he had ever been
part of. Pancho Notzing believed, though he dared not say it aloud
until it began to come true—if it ever in his lifetime even began to
come true—that enough human gratification could actually change the
world, the weather, and the earth. Make the crops more abundant,
fruits sweeter; the tundra bloom with grains. The days more provident.
The nights and the air like this.
Well maybe it could begin. Maybe—Pancho’s heart dilated at the
thought—maybe it already had. Could it be that the heedless extrava-
gances of war funding had combined with the genius of a single man,
Henry Van Damme, to enact, to produce in concrete block and glass
brick and Homasote and organization charts, what he, Pancho Notz-
ing, had only been able to dream of and plan and think about? Pancho’d
planned, down to the minutiae, for human happiness and its provision,
because it was in the minutiae that Harmony existed or did not. Henry
Van Damme had planned likewise, and planned well: Pancho simply
could not deny it, however many faults he could find. For a moment,
the first in his life, Pancho felt an impulse to hero worship. Henry Van
Damme might be a Bestopian greater than himself.
But perhaps he was only induced to think so because of the present
happiness he felt.
He came to the doors of the Community Center and entered in.
The walls of the wide entrance were covered with announcements
printed and lettered, stenciled and handwritten. Tonight the Pax Play-
ers were doing scenes from Shakespeare; tickets were free, but the pur-
chase of a War Savings Stamp was urged. The debate team was
practicing tonight for its upcoming meet with Panhandle A&M, the
thesis being “Farmers Should Not Be Draft Exempt.” The course in
Small Engine Repair was canceled for lack of interest. The Photogra-
phy Club expedition to Osage Country was tomorrow. The movie
tonight was The Arizona Kid with Roy Rogers.
While people turned off to this or that door or stair leading to vari-
ous activities, Pancho kept on until he heard the echoey piano, already
beginning. He came to the studio door and opened it. No it was no
credit to Henry Van Damme that he had brought into this unlovely
state so many people, mixed their multiple passions together in combi-
nations too many to calculate. But here (he thought) they were, and
328 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
what their freedom and Association could body forth was up to them.
To us, he thought.
The piano had begun a waltz, but the instructor halted the piano
player while she sorted her class into couples. She turned to Pancho,
entering with solemn tread as into a church, and waved to him. He’d
thought, when first he’d seen her here, that she was not someone who
merely closely resembled the divine Clara Bow, It girl, freedom embod-
ied, but the movie star herself: it was absurd, impossible, but heart
lifting for a moment. And the real person who took his hand and wel-
comed him in had the advantage over Clara—Clara, his great secret
impossible love, his Dulcinea—because she was after all a warm, living
woman actually present to him.
“Hi there, Mr. Notzing,” she said in Clara’s own insinuating gay
whine. “We’re making up partners, but we’ve an odd number tonight,
so I’ll be yours, all right? We’re going to start with a waltz, all right,
and then we’re going to try guess what?”
He smiled and went to her and didn’t try to guess.
Over at the Bomb Bay meanwhile, Prosper and Diane were at their
table, gossiping happily about the plant and people each of them knew,
he certainly was a talker, he was like Danny in that respect though
Danny was more dismissive of things that girls noticed. So it seemed.
Danny’d listen but pretty quickly his eyes would go away. Why was she
thinking about Danny anyway? She got up to get herself another Cuba
libre, and one for Prosper too.
After a while the band finished what Diane thought was a pretty
short set of numbers and claimed they’d be back. Cigarette smoke and
the day’s heat hung in the air. A smell of petroleum prevailed through-
out.
“Know what would be great?” she said.
“What?”
“A drive. A night drive. Cool. Did you know there’s a river just over
there a ways?”
“I didn’t.”
“You don’t explore. Did you know there’s Indians very close by?”
“Yes I knew that.”
“I’d like a drive,” she said.
At that moment Prosper in amazement saw Pancho Notzing come
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 329
onto the floor, with a blond woman taller than himself on his arm, a
woman dressed for dancing.
“I don’t drive, myself,” he said. He intended to make it sound like a
choice.
“Well I do,” she said. “Where I come from, everybody does.” She
regarded him with solemn certitude. “Every body.”
Prosper made no answer to that but said, “Well if you want to take
a walk, maybe we can get a car.”
“Swell,” she said. “One more drink.”
“Really?”
“Oh Prosper,” she said rising. “Don’t be a better-notter.”
The band was playing a waltz as Prosper and Diane went out, and
the three women were singing mournfully about love and loss, and
Pancho and his friend were turning each other with regal care.
The moon looked huge, the plant was far behind, the river—there was a
river—was a trickle at the end of a dirt road, they’d almost slid off the
bank and into it. Prosper’s heart had turned cold when they’d discov-
ered the key of Pancho’s Zephyr actually already in the ignition; he’d
supposed without much thought that they wouldn’t be able to find it,
and the plan could be given up. She’d driven just fine, though, mostly;
she never could discern the switch for the headlights, but the night was
almost bright as day.
It was cooler, truly: a little wind in the oaks, night birds and bugs
he didn’t know. From where they were the great illuminated refinery
didn’t look like an industrial installation close at hand but like a huge
city far away. A flare of orange gas burned in the air, beneath the moon.
Prosper and Diane sat close together, she leaning on him, he against
the door.
“Well,” she said. “Well well well.”
He’d been telling her something about himself, the places he’d gone
(not many) and the people he’d known. Also, because she wanted to
know, about the women who had taken up with him, short time or
longer. She listened with care.
“It almost sounds,” she said, “like they picked you out.”
He shrugged.
330 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“I mean, you. I think you attract a special type.”
“Like some women like soldiers. Or airmen.”
That made her laugh, unashamed. He knew she wanted more, but
he kept mum, suggesting it wouldn’t be chivalrous: she could think
there was nothing to tell if she wanted, or that there was.
Maybe to show she was ready to hear anything, she began to tell
him about the Button Babes, and how they’d go after their prizes, the
things they were willing to do to get them. She put her faintly bobbing
head close to his to tell him: “You wouldn’t bleeve what they did. Some
of them.”
“Well you tell me.”
She considered this invitation. He was now her sole support; if he’d
been able to slip out the door she would have slid down across the seat
like a bag of meal. “Okay,” she said. “Have you ever heard of people
doing this?”
She whispered hotly in his ear, not quite intelligibly, her lashes flick-
ing his brow, laughter distorting her words as much as drink and
embarrassment.
“I’ve never heard of that,” he said. He was lying, and that was
wrong, and he knew it, but he did it anyway. “Never.”
“Never? See?”
“What did they call that?”
“It doesn’t have a name. It has a number.” She drew it on his chest.
“How exactly would you do it?”
“Well see I don’t know because I wasn’t like that, but they said they
did and they even said it was fun.”
“They did.”
She reared back a little, as though he was doubting her. “Wull
yes.”
“I mean I guess, but personally I’d have to see,” he said, and she
seemed just drunk enough not to guess where he was carrying this, or
maybe he was all wet and she knew just where they were headed. His
usual cunning was also a little blunted by those Cuba libres. He turned
to put his arm across her lap.
“They did everything,” she said thoughtfully. “But just to not get a
baby.”
“There’s other ways not to get a baby.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 331
“I know,” she said, as though well of course she did. And for a
moment she regarded him with goofy bliss, and for all he knew he did
the same. He’d put before her a choice between the safe but unlikely
and the regular but risky, and then taken away the risk of the regular,
so it was not a choice but a banquet. Rather, he’d got her to put it
before him: him, poor starveling who’d never partaken, as she was
probably imagining. But he’d only think all that later. Now they kissed,
her mouth tasting of the Coke and the rum and her own flavor. After a
time she put her cheek against his with great tenderness and with one
hand began unbuttoning his pants.
This was a first for him, as it happened, and she somehow seemed
to know it; she was tender and tentative and didn’t have the hang of it,
no surprise, and he was tempted to help, but no, he just lay cheek to
cheek with her as she did her best: she gasped or cried a small cry as
she at length achieved it, maybe surprised. Confused then as to how to
tidy up, the stuff had gone everywhere, like a comic movie where the
more you wipe it the farther it spreads, never mind, they laughed and
then she slept against him as he sat awake and watched clouds eat the
moon and restore it again. She woke, deflated a little, not ashamed he
hoped, and started the car—bad moment when it coughed and humped
once and then failed, but she got it going as he looked on helplessly. At
the dark house on Z Street she parked the car askew and said she was
coming in to wash up, if that was all right.
What was marvelous to him then was that, when they were drawn
to his bedroom by the force of some logic obvious to them both, she
wanted to help him take off his pants and divest him of his braces,
which she unbuckled slowly and unhandily as he sat on the bed. She
raised her eyes to him now and then as she worked, with an angel-of-
mercy smile from which he could not look away; he wondered if she
thought that he needed her helping hand, as he had in the car by the
river, and was willing to give it; this act seemed even more generous,
unnecessary as it was. When that was done, though, he drew her to
him with strong arms that perhaps she didn’t expect, and divested her
with quick skill, which also maybe she didn’t expect.
When she awoke again he was deep asleep. She washed again and
dressed. Now how had that happened, she’d like to know, but gave
herself no answer. At least he’d known the use of the present as the BBs
332 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
used to call it, oh so long ago that was, which was good because she’d
never. She felt a strange trickle down her leg, reminding her of then,
and she stopped, overcome with something like utter weariness. She
guessed she’d drunk a lot. What must he think of her. She walked
around the little dark house, so unlike a house, and found another bed.
She’d have to think about this, and about Danny, and about every-
thing: she’d have to think. She’d have to remember. Remember who he
was; remember—she sort of laughed—who she was.
When Pancho came home after the Bomb Bay closed, he noticed
that the Zephyr had somehow misaligned itself with the curb, odd, and
when he went into his bedroom he found Diane in her blue dress asleep
there like Goldilocks, one white-socked foot hanging off the bed, an
unbuckled shoe falling from the foot, which just at that moment
dropped off and woke her. She rose to see Pancho in the doorway. He
stood aside as she walked past him with a nod and a smile, head lifted,
and went out into the night.
4
This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“I don’t understand. I mean we did everything right.” Dimly
Prosper remembered Larry the shop steward, grinning at him in the
pharmacy: Lucky if they don’t break. “Are you sure?”
“They did that test with the rabbit.”
“Oh.”
“I guess I’m just real fruitful,” Diane said, blowing her wet nose.
“Oh Jesus what’ll we do.”
They sat perfectly still in the Aero office, talking to but facing away
from each other, as though those passing by or working, who could
look in, might discern what they talked about.
“Maybe it’ll just go away, like the other one.”
“I don’t think you can count on that,” Prosper said.
“I can’t go home again. Not again. This time with a baby. Some-
body else’s.”
Nothing more for a time but the periodic clang of work proceeding.
“You can stay here,” Prosper said, drawing himself up. “Stay in the
house with us, Pancho and me, and don’t tell your husband. And then
I can raise the. The child. Raise it myself. When the war’s over and you
go back, to, to.”
He still hadn’t looked her way while he made this huge statement,
334 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
actually unable to, but when he’d said it he turned, and she was look-
ing at him as though he had spoken in some foreign tongue, or mut-
tered madness. Then she put her chin in her hands and gazed into the
distance, just as if he’d said nothing at all. “This is the worst thing
that’s ever happened to me,” she said, once more. “The worst.”
He thought of saying to her that after all it couldn’t be the only time
in the war something like this had happened, it was sort of under-
standable, forgivable even, maybe, surely: but he hadn’t said any of
that, luckily, before he had the further thought of not saying it. She
pulled from the pocket of her overalls a small sheet of paper, one of a
kind he’d seen before. “He’s here,” she said.
“Here?”
“Well I mean in this country, not way out there at sea. He was I
guess a hero out there somehow and he got hurt, he says not bad, and
he’s been getting better in a hospital in San Francisco.” She was read-
ing the little shiny gray V-mail. “He’s going back tomorrow, no the day
after. They gave him leave, a couple of days. He wishes I could be there
with him. That’s what he says.” She proffered the letter, but Prosper
didn’t think he should take it.
“A couple of days?”
“I couldn’t even if I could,” she said, tears now again brightening
her eyes. “I mean can you imagine. What would I tell him? I couldn’t
even say hello.” She folded the little paper on its folds and put it away.
“So it’s good I guess, that I can’t get there.”
She tried a smile then, for Prosper’s sake he knew, but he couldn’t
respond, and just then there came the beeping of an electric car, Horse
Offen’s, just outside the office; Horse was standing up in the car waving
to him urgently.
“I gotta go,” Prosper said.
“Me too,” she said. She took the hankie from her sleeve and dabbed
her eyes, he got into his crutches and rose. Horse had his hat on, so
Prosper grabbed his.
“Diane. This’ll be, this’ll . . .”
“Don’t,” she said softly. “Just don’t.”
“This is going to be great,” said Horse, turning the electric car out of
the shop and heading for the exit to the airfield. “I’ve never had a warn-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 335
ing before, that they’re coming, but this time I happened—I just hap-
pened—to be up in the control tower when they radio’d in. We’ll get
them arriving.”
Prosper, gripping the rail of the car with one hand and his hat with
the other, asked no questions.
“You do the camera,” Horse said. He preferred to ask the questions
himself on these occasions, Prosper used up too much attention him-
self and wasn’t nosy enough. He had a good eye, though, Horse
thought.
Prosper looked up, as Horse was now doing, his driving erratic. A
plane was nearing, Prosper couldn’t tell what kind, not large. “So
who,” he said.
“Crew coming in to ferry a Pax to the coast,” Horse said. “A crew
of wasps.”
“Oh right.” Not wasps but WASPs—Women Air Service Pilots.
He’d admired them in the magazines—studying hard at their naviga-
tion, suited up for flying, relaxing in the sun, crowding the sinks at
morning in their primitive barracks somewhere in a desert state. He
began to feel anticipation too. Their planes had touched down here
before, just long enough to let out crews, male crews, that would fly the
finished B-30s to the coasts or farther, or the test pilots who’d bring
them right back here. Prosper’d never seen a WASP in person. Now,
Horse said, they were bringing in a crew all of women to train on the
six-engine plane, after which they’d fly it themselves to wherever it was
to go, at least within the States.
“There they come,” Horse cried, seeing the plane bank and begin to
descend toward the field. He gunned the little vehicle—it basically had
one speed, and it wasn’t fast—to where he had guessed the plane would
touch down, then veering when it went where he hadn’t. They were
there, though, when it alighted, a single-engine biplane that seemed
misbuilt somehow.
“Beech Staggerwing,” Horse cried. “Fine little craft. Famous women
won a famous air race in one, six-eight years ago, we’ll look it up.”
Prosper, doing his best to match Horse’s urgency, climbed from the
car and swing-gaited toward the plane as fast as he could, the Rollei-
flex bouncing on his chest. The propeller ceased, kicked back once,
and was still. Prosper had the plane in focus as the door opened and
336 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
the pilot came out, then one two three other women, all smiles, waving
to Horse and Prosper in what Prosper could only feel was an ironic
sort of way, yes it’s us again.
“Hi, hi!” Horse called out, waving grandly. He glanced back at
Prosper to assure himself that shots were being taken and the film
being rolled forward, and it was, Prosper watching and framing them,
and they in the frame seeming to be some ancient painting in the Cyclo-
pedia, stacked like strong goddesses on the step, the door, the ground,
looking this way and that, all the same and all unique. They wore
brown leather flying jackets and fatigues amazingly rumpled; each
came out carrying her parachute and a kit. Warm boots in the unheated
plane, cold aloft these days. How beautiful they were. How grateful he
felt to be there then, and always would, there on that day of all days.
“How was the flight?” Horse asked, pad and pencil already out.
“You ladies going to fly the Pax, is that right? Say, that’s one monster
plane, isn’t it! Well you’ve flown, what, B-25s, B-17s, and yes what? B-
29s? Well well well, Superfortress! Say, for my little paper here, can I
just get some names? Martha, the pilot, okay Kathleen, Jo Ellen,
Honora, that’s h-o-n-o-r-a? Okeydokey!”
Prosper’d never seen Horse in such a lather, the four women just
marching along, actually in step, answering what they were asked but
very obviously on duty here, and tired. They each glanced at Prosper,
their faces making no comment. He caught up with Martha, a dark-
browed wide-mouthed woman who reminded him a little of Elaine.
Seeing that he’d like to speak but was using all his breath to walk, she
slowed down.
“Say,” she said.
“Martha,” Prosper asked, and she nodded confirmingly. “How long
will you be here?”
“Just tonight. Fly out tomorrow for, lessee, San Francisco. 0500
hours.”
“Where’ll you stay?”
“They have this dorm here?”
“Yes.”
“There.”
“So you’ll have the evening. I was just wondering . . .”
She looked again at him, as though he’d appeared from nowhere
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 337
just at that moment, or had in that moment turned into something or
someone he hadn’t been before. He knew the look.
“All I want,” she said, “is a drink and a steak. If I don’t fall asleep
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Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги